Evolution Locution

Courtship ritual: Darwin attracted novelists with his ideas about sex and the mind

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening told the story of a woman’s extramarital affair and created a storm of controversy when it was published in 1899. During the second wave of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s, the novel was resurrected as an example of women’s search for self-fulfillment. Almost a century after The Awakening was originally published, Bert Bender identified the source of many of Chopin’s scenes.

Bender is a professor of English at Arizona State University. He had just finished his first book, Sea-Brothers, when he happened to re-read The Awakening.

“Having read a lot of Darwin in the course of writing on sea fiction, I saw immediately what no one had ever seen—that Chopin was creating many scenes which drew directly on passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.”

Bender’s articles on this discovery, which later became chapters in his second book, The Descent of Love, are landmarks in Kate Chopin studies.

For example, Bender found evidence in the scene where a musical performance arouses Edna Pontellier, the main character. Chopin uses some of Darwin’s language from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as well as from The Descent of Man, to describe Edna’s emotional and sexual response to music.

Chopin wrote that the first note “sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column…[T]he very passions themselves were aroused within her soul. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her.”

By comparison, Darwin wrote about the “thrill or slight shiver which runs down the backbone and limbs of many persons when they are powerfully affected by music” and the experience of a “trembling of the body” and “a slight suffusion of tears” in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin connects this response to how “our early progenitors courted each other by the aid of vocal tones.”

In further research, Bender learned that Chopin’s biographers had reported she was an avid reader of Darwin, as was novelist Edith Wharton and many other American writers. “No one had ever taken it seriously and imagined that their interest in Darwin would be reflected in how they told their stories and imagined their female characters,” Bender says.

The clues are especially clear in the language they use to handle courtship and marriage. In many scenes, the female characters select the male.

“Some of Edith Wharton’s female characters are very powerful because they can select and then maybe reject for superior males,” Bender says. As they marry up, the women acquire wealth and position in a male-dominated society.

For example, the main character in Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country is Undine Spragg. She exploits her instinct for self-preservation by relying on sex.

“She works her way up in society by using her power to select the wealthiest and most powerful males,” Bender says. “She is an impressive but not admirable woman, in Wharton’s view; the strongest measure of her selfishness is that, in her quest for social wealth, she abandons her own child.”

Male characters in early 1900s American novels also show Darwinian traits.

“In many courtship scenes, males display their sexual nature, as Darwin defined it, in being possessive and aggressive sexually,” Bender says. The male characters often use their hands to grasp and hold the female characters. “In Darwin’s analysis of sex, that is one of the main ‘secondary sexual characters’ of the male—his prehensile ability to capture and possess the female.”

Other examples of Darwin’s influence are found in the sexual liberation of female characters, such as Chopin’s Edna Pontellier and Ernest Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Even more than Edna, Brett exercises her power to select not only one, but several lovers.

Evidence that it was natural for women to have sexual desires beyond the constraints of marriage could be found in, for instance, Darwin’s studies of birds, Bender says.

“This enabled Kate Chopin’s famous character, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, to have lovers outside of marriage. Chopin’s argument was that Edna’s sexual awakening is only natural and in a way innocent, although it is extremely troublesome to her husband.”

Bender has studied the American literary response to Darwin for more than 14 years. At the beginning, he had to convince scholars about Darwin’s influence on American fiction. His book The Descent of Love was the first to explain “how powerfully the theory of sexual selection appealed to the literary imagination.” Now, several other scholars are also working in this field.

In the preface to his third book, Evolution and “the Sex Problem,” Bender writes, “We are a bit freer to examine how our novelists have contributed to our culture’s long and continuing struggle to realize the meaning of our common descent.”

In this forthcoming book, Bender examines how 15 writers, including Willa Cather and John Steinbeck, explored sexual reality in the context of evolutionary theories. Bender looks at a period of about 60 years during what has been called the eclipse or denial of Darwinism, from the turn of the century to the 1950s.

“The writers engaged the problems Darwin put on the table with his theory of evolution. They tried to negotiate their way through those problems, sometimes by embracing an anti-Darwinian theory of evolution, such as Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution,” Bender says.

“They realized that you couldn’t write a novel about human nature and development outside of evolutionary theory. The question was, what kind of evolution?” —Melissa D. Olson