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8 / The Plot Thickens The Political Economic Dimensions of Biological Stories S t o r i e s a r e i m p o r t a n t t o h e r e d i t a r i a n t h o u g h t because they animate a succession of events into a coherent and dynamic framework. Peter Brooks suggests that plots of stories “are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal oriented and forward moving.”1 For my purposes, the analysis of plot elements allows me to see the ways that biological and literary sense relied on similar conceptions of temporal sequences. Thus I adopt a definition of plot much like that used by Paul Ricoeur: plot is “the operation that draws a configuration from a simple succession.”2 What were the specific plot events in recapitulation and how were they organized to establish an ordered universe? By investigating this question, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of exactly who was favored in recapitulation stories as a function of the way many people used stories to order the world. My task of identifying common plot elements in recapitulation stories is made easier by the homogeneity of sequence found in most recapitulation stories. Since the major premise of recapitulation is that the development of the individual reflects the development of the species, it should not surprise us that these narratives unabashedly ordered the stages of evolution by the predominant categories of late nineteenth-century life. The single most important characteristics 1 7 2 for ordering recapitulation narratives were the types of labor required by turnof -the-twentieth-century economic enterprises. Take the following diagram of social hierarchies “before” and “after” eugenic reform as constructed by F. H. Hankins, Professor of Statistics and Political Economy at Clark University, and published in the Journal of Heredity in 1914 (see figure 8.1). This illustration uses a single scale of industrially defined categories to rank the possible worth of different occupations in society. This illustration clearly identifies an important sequence used by many thinkers to rank the social worth of society’s members—a ladder of occupational worth beginning with “defectives ” and “unskilled manual laborers” and culminating with “business promoters .” How the populace fits within this ranking, however, is premised on a simple narrative of change over time, which suggests how eugenic reform could move many in society up the ladder of social worth. According to Hankins, a “more ideal social arrangement will be that in which the number of children is so related to economic status of the family that individual ambition will not be killed by the enervating effects of luxury on the one hand or the demoralizing effects of poverty on the other.”3 For my purposes, the organization of the hierarchy is more interesting than T H E P L O T T H I C K E N S / 1 7 3 Figure 8.1. Hankins’s depiction of the value of eugenic reform to society. Note the categories used to measure social improvement and the linear hierarchical arrangement of the categories. IIU!>INlSS PIIOMOnRS ~

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