Evolution and American Fiction: Three Paradigmatic Novels

There has been a great deal written about the impact of evolutionary ideas on late nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American and British fiction, with much of this criticism falling within one or another three general categories. Many critics are concerned with how specific novelists used specific Darwinian ideas in specific novels. So, for example, Bert Bender has examined in detail the ways that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection appears in various forms in a group of late nineteenth-century American novels,¹ and I have studied how Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology beliefs (themselves derived from an evolutionary conception of human brain development) deeply affected Frank Norris’ early fiction.² A second kind of criticism, one devoted principally to British fiction, has concentrated on what has come to be known as the Darwinian plot. For such critics as Gillian Beer and George Levine³ the shift from a plot of extraordinary behavior and the frequent operation of chance to one of slow, fully explainable, and progressive change (in other words, from the romantic to the realistic plot) is attributable to the absorption of a Darwinian mind-set by post-Darwinian novelists, a mind-set in which their fictional accounts of events over a lifetime in effect mimic Darwin’s account of biological events over eons. Finally, and more recently, in a movement resembling that of evolutionary psychology, a group of critics, with Joseph Carroll a leading voice,⁴ has insisted that it is necessary in interpreting fiction to apply the root evolutionary insight that all human behavior is adaptive. In addition, Carroll and others hold that discussions of the novel must reflect an awareness of the history of the biological development of the brain, since all art stems from the distinctive cognitive abilities of the human animal.

All of these methodologies have been productive, though the scientific knowledge required for the pursuit of the last has hindered its widespread practice and acceptance. In this essay, I would like to adopt a different critical tack than these familiar approaches, one in which I study the ways in which three turn-of-the-century American novels published within two years of each other reflect the deep and widespread influence of Darwinism on the thinking and expression of the period. My point will not be that these novels show any similarity in their response to Darwinism, but rather just the opposite—that each reveals a different reflection of the impact of Darwinian ideas. It is this range of difference, however, both in the nature of the Darwinian ideas they contain and in the fictional means used to express them, that constitutes their interest as a body of work reflecting evolutionary beliefs.

The three works I will discuss are James Lane Allen’s The Reign of Law (1900), Frank Norris’ The Octopus (1901), and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Allen’s novel was moderately successful on publication but is now almost entirely unknown, while Norris’ and Dreiser’s are canonical works in American literary history. The Darwinism of all three works has received attention,⁵ but never in the comparative way that I am here adopting. In addition, there has been little effort to discuss the relationship in each work between the kind of Darwinian ideas it reflects and the fictional methods used for that purpose. In brief, I will be suggesting through this comparative study a kind of paradigm for the late-nineteenth-century fictional response to Darwinian ideas by American novelists. This paradigm will range from Allen’s use of the subject matter of Darwinism to dramatize the conventional theme of a conflict between religious faith and doubt in a traditionally shaped novel to Norris’ adaptation of a specific evolutionary idea into a grandiose fictional structure expressive of that idea to Dreiser’s absorption of a Darwinian perspective into a radical reading of human character and action within a reconceived Bildungsroman form.

David, the protagonist of The Reign of Law, is raised during the 1850s and ’60s in the Kentucky hemp country (the novel is subtitled A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields) under frontier conditions of...