Chapter 3 - The Utopian (R)Evolutionism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde

Summary

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.