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Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism

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Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Kelly A. Masterson August 2018 © 2018 Kelly A. Masterson. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism by KELLY A. MASTERSON has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Paul C. Jones Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT MASTERSON, KELLY A, Ph.D., August 2018, English Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism Director of Dissertation: Paul C. Jones “Beyond Darwin: Race, Sex, and Hereditarian Science in American Literary Naturalism” explores the intersections among science, race, and sex in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary naturalism. The project traces a cultural history of heredity—the means by which individual traits are acquired and passed to offspring— through turn-of-the-century literature. I contend that scientific and cultural debates surrounding heredity gave African American and women naturalists in particular a new conceptual framework with which to understand the effects of racism and sexism on raced and gendered bodies as well as to explore the extent of individual agency in the face of race- and gender-based oppression. Writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline E. Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Edith Summers Kelley deploy concepts drawn from the science of heredity to show the lasting impact of racism and sexism on the body and on the psyche. These writers also challenge heredity as a deterministic force by refusing to reduce their characters to sex- or race-based biological traits and revealing that it is the use of these scientific theories in service of discrimination circumscribes their agency. I argue that a more rigorous examination of how writers engaged with hereditarian science yields a more nuanced discussion of determinism in naturalism and reworks the naturalist canon by recovering the centrality of women and African American writers. 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer my deep gratitude to Paul C. Jones, Marilyn Atlas, Amritjit Singh, and Myrna Perez Sheldon for their guidance on this project. Our conversations and their feedback have shaped my thinking not only on the texts I study here but also on my scholarship more generally. My director, Paul C. Jones, deserves particular recognition and thanks for his unfailing encouragement and faith in the project and in my work, which have been truly invaluable over the course of the past five years. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Introduction: Toward a New Naturalism .......................................................... 7 “Injustice ... Added to Inequality”: Hereditarian Theories of Race and Sex .............. 22 Naturalism’s Engagement with Heredity, Race, and Sex ........................................... 34 Chapter 2: “There is a Great Deal in Heredity”: Neo-Lamarckism, Determinism, and Agency in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods .............................................. 41 Turn-of-the-Century Neo-Lamarckism, Environmental Influence, and the Viability of Reform ........................................................................................................................ 45 “All the Evil of His Nature Flourished”: Environment, Racism, and Biological Decline in The Sport of the Gods ................................................................................ 53 Women’s Agency, Women’s Work, and Anatomical Degeneration .......................... 77 Chapter 3: “Civilization against Primitive Instinct”: The Subversion of Neo-Darwinian Heredity in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Doll” and Stephen Crane’s The Monster ............... 86 “Not Really Men”: Neo-Darwinist Theories of Race at the Turn of the Century ...... 90 The Loss of Agency through Science in The Monster ................................................ 94 The Triumph of “Love ... over Hate” in Chesnutt’s “The Doll” and The Marrow of Tradition ................................................................................................................... 104 Chapter 3: “God and Science Helping me, I Will Give Her ... Wifehood and Maternity and Perfect Health”: Reproduction, Bodily Autonomy, and Racial Uplift in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood ................................................................................................. 123 “Women, Awake to Your Responsibilities and Privileges”: Reproductive Agency and Heredity in the Early Twentieth Century .................................................................. 131 Linking the Racial Past with the Biological Present ................................................. 141 Reproduction, Uplift, and Bodily Autonomy ........................................................... 152 Hopkins, Stein, and Medical Determinism ............................................................... 163 Chapter 4: “A Long Torture to Bear”: Motherhood, Heredity, and Eugenics in Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds ............................................................................................... 172 Heredity, Evolutionary Progress, and Reproduction: Another Naturalistic Representation ........................................................................................................... 178 Birth Control and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth-Century United States ............. 187 “A Tool No More ... Of Nature’s Cunning:” Determinism, Agency, and Reproductive Autonomy ................................................................................................................. 193 6 Degeneration, Heredity, and the Rural Community ................................................. 204 Chapter 5: The failed New Woman in Evelyn Scott’s the Narrow House ..................... 212 Naturalism’s Ambivalence toward the New Woman ............................................... 215 “A Threat to the Human Race”: The New Woman in the Cultural Imagination ...... 221 Maternity, Medical Authority, and Bodily Autonomy in The Narrow House .......... 229 “A Bird Alive in a Snake’s Body”: Naturalistic Deconstructions of the (Nonmaternal) New Woman ............................................................................................................. 241 Chapter 6: Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 250 References ....................................................................................................................... 259 Appendix A: Hereditarian Science: Major Theorists and Impacts ................................. 274 Appendix B: Texts and contexts ..................................................................................... 278 7 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A NEW NATURALISM In his 1902 book The Negro in Africa and America, Joseph Alexander Tillinghast explains that human character is “the product of two fundamental factors, i.e., heredity and environment. The endowment of each generation at birth is dictated by heredity, but all that it acquires subsequently is the gift of environment. Matured character, then, is a subtle compound of the two elements” (407). A mere half-page after this recognition of the dual ability of heredity and environment to shape this character, Tillinghast stresses the ascendancy of heredity in determining human fate, since heredity is a nearly immutable force, immune from influence by man: “...[m]en cannot manipulate heredity. From generation to generation this mysterious force operates in isolated independence, and we cannot touch it” (408). Tillinghast’s explanation for the differences in human behavior and character as being rooted primarily in biological difference captures the scientific and cultural conversation surrounding heredity and destiny in the decades surrounding 1900. Sparked in large part by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and its theory of evolution through natural selection, as well as by influential works such as Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) and Cesare Lombroso’s Crime: Its Causes and Its Remedies (1899), scientists and the public alike in the 1890s through the 1920s became increasingly interested in heredity and the extent to which it could explain human traits and behaviors. For scientists, writers, lawmakers, and the general public, this interest was spurred in part by heredity’s promise for addressing some of the era’s most pressing concerns, including immigration, race relations, changing roles and rights for women, and crime. By attempting to explain behavior, especially 8 criminal behavior, as well as to find “evidence” for women’s and racial minorities’ supposed physical and intellectual inferiority, scientific theories of heredity could be wielded as powerful tools for oppression due to their ability to offer seemingly incontrovertible proof that discrimination was not only justified, but necessary to maintain national health and power. American literary naturalism is well
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