Darwin matters: Modernism and mate choice in Wharton, Joyce, and Hurston (Charles Darwin, Edith Wharton, Ireland, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston)

This dissertation argues that Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection, as put forth in The Descent of Man of 1871, influenced literary modernism in significant and to date unacknowledged ways. Bridging the fields of literature, the natural sciences, and contemporary critical theory, it examines early twentieth-century scientific debates over biological inheritance and analyzes the ways that three modern novelists responded to Darwin's theory of mate choice and the role it plays in the evolution of the human species.; In addition to Darwin's The Descent of Man, the major texts this study considers are Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Summer, and Twilight Sleep; James Joyce's Ulysses; and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Each of these novels represents the socio-political factors that limit or preclude mate selection according to Darwin's model of male competition and female choice. Wharton's The House of Mirth and Summer consciously invoke Darwinian plots to represent the ways in which the female role in mate choice was overly restricted by early twentieth century American social mores; these limitations have tragic implications for the heroines of her early novels. In her more stylistically experimental postwar novels of the 1920s, such as Twilight Sleep, Wharton moved from considerations of individual suffering to satires of an emerging American consumer society that treats marriage as any other product to be thrown away when its utility declines. Joyce's Ulysses portrays a disconnected symbolic Dublin family whose political disenfranchisement under British rule exacerbates its members' inability to take direct action in matters of sexual selection. Their reunification, like most of their sexual selections, takes place in fantasy, a limited but important space for much modern literature. Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God juxtaposes Janie Crawford's teenage vision of “natural” male-female relationships with the often brutal realities of her three marriages. Like Wharton and Joyce, Hurston shows that both physical and cultural environments shape consciousness, and that aesthetic tastes can be passed on through fiction.; By considering the novels of authors who represent different movements within modernism—Edith Wharton and psychological realism, James Joyce and high modernism, and Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance—this project aims to demonstrate that a shared concern with sexual choice and its physical and political ramifications constitutes an important characteristic of modern literature. It concludes by challenging contemporary scholars to undertake a major reconsideration of Darwin's contributions to literary modernism and to contemporary critical theories of race and gender.