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Darwin and “The Natural History of Doctresses”: The Sex War Between Howells, Phelps, Jewett, and James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Bert Bender
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Two years after charles darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex(1871) ignited a great debate about race, culture, and sexual difference, Dr. Edward H. Clarke drew the lines in what soon became a literary war in America over the supposed differences between the sexes. In his highly appreciative review of Clarke's Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, William Dean Howells(?) wrote that “the subject is a very delicate one to handle,” not only because it involves certain embarrassing physiological details, such as “periodicity,” but because woman is the weaker vessel in many ways, and does not always care to be reminded of it. Yet the facts of anatomy and physiology are at the bottom of many differences in the capabilities and adaptations of the two sexes for the various offices of life. The female's muscles are weaker than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much bodily work. The female's brain is five or six ounces lighter, on the average, than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much “cerebration” as he can do. The special relation of the female to humanity that is to be, involves many disturbances, habitual and occasional, which handicap her, often very heavily, in the race of life.

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Research Article
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Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 81 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

1. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, chapter 7 in Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E. H. Clarke's ‘Sex in Education,’ ed. Howe, Julia Ward (1874; rept. New York: Arno, 1972), p. 129.Google Scholar

2. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. in 1 (1871; rept. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically by volume number and page number.

3. Gillian Beer provides an exceptional account of “the debate about race and culture sparked off by The Descent of Man” in her Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 206Google Scholar. Beer's is one of several fine books on Darwin's influence in British fiction. It is a notable failure in American literary history that we have only a single brief pamphlet on our writers' responses to Darwin — Jones, Arthur E. Jr.'s Darwinism and Its Relationship to Realism and Naturalism in American Fiction, Drew University Studies 1 (Madison, N.J.: Drew University, 1950)Google Scholar. Until Cummings, Sherwood's Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, there was virtually no discussion of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in American literary history; the few remarks about Darwin comment only — and in a very general way — on the Origin of Species. Even Cummings's work, however, fails to discuss Darwin's theory of sexual selection. As I suggest below, the theory of sexual selection exerted a powerful and long-lasting influence on our writers — more powerful than the theory of natural selection.

4. Atlantic 32 (12 1873): 737Google Scholar. As was the practice during Howells's editorship, reviews were unsigned, but since Howells was doing most of the reviewing at this time, since this was a subject he was very much interested in, and since, as Edwin Cady remarks, he “must have reviewed more than 500 books” during his years at the Atlantic, it seems reasonable to attribute this review to Howells (see Cady, Edwin H., W. D. Howells as Critic [London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973], p. xiii).Google Scholar

5. Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 2Google Scholar. Even more than Russett's earlier book, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1965–1912 (San Francisco: Freman, 1976)Google Scholar, Sexual Science is an invaluable resource for students of late-19th-Century American literature. In addition to Clarke's Sex in Education another early and perhaps even more influential work in this field (from the point of view of the American reading public) was Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology. First published serially in Popular Science Monthly (beginning in May 1872), this work contained chapters on the role of biology and psychology in modern sociology, one part of which dealt with “the comparative psychology of the sexes.” Here Spencer draws explicitly (but without mentioning Darwin's name) on Darwin's theory of sexual selection to conclude that the female's psychological weaknesses — for example, her “admiration for power,” her need “to please” her husband, her “vivid imagination” — are “secondary differences” that have evolved in order to assure that she satisfy her “maternal duties” (The Study of Sociology [1873; rept. New York: Appleton, 1896], pp. 344, 343, 346, 341).Google Scholar

6. Quoted by Stovall, Floyd, “The Decline of Romantic Idealism, 1855–1871,” in Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Clark, Harry Hayden (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), p. 361.Google Scholar

7. Atlantic 32 (12 1873): 739.Google Scholar

8. Mosedale, Susan Sleeth, “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider ‘The Woman Question,’” Journal of the History of Biology 11 (Spring 1978): 1–55Google Scholar. The quotes here are from pages 8 and 11. Another notable recent study of the abuse of Victorian science, in addition to Russett's Sexual Science, is Gould, Stephen Jay's The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).Google Scholar

9. Howells, William Dean, Dr. Breen's Practice (St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly, Press, 1970), p. 144Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically.

10. Atlantic 40 (07 1877): 104.Google Scholar

11. Habegger, Alfred, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 54–55.Google Scholar

12. Atlantic 32 (12 1873): 739–40.Google Scholar

13. Howells (?) reviewed The Origin of Civilization and Primitive Condition of Man, Mental and Social Condition of Savages in the Atlantic 27 (01 1871)Google Scholar. Idus L. Murphree uses the term “evolutionary anthropologists” in his “The Evolutionary Anthropologists: The Progress of Mankind, the Concepts of Progress and Culture in the Thought of John Lubbock, Edward B. Tylor, and Lewis H. Morgan,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105 (06 1961): 265–300.Google Scholar

14. Russett, , Sexual Science, p. 11.Google Scholar

15. In this respect, the women in Dr. Breen's Practice (especially the idealistic feminist, Miss Gleason) are like “Clara Kingsbury [in A Modern Instance], whom Howells made more ridiculous each time he introduced her,” as Gail Thain Parker remarks in “William Dean Howells: Realism and Feminism,” in Uses of Literature, ed. Engel, Monroe, Harvard English Studies, no. 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 133–161Google Scholar (quotation on page 159).

16. In the first of these seemingly hysterical outbursts, Grace insists that she is not giving up her practice because she is “unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not” (p. 219). Dr. Mulbridge allows that this “might” be the case, but if so, she would be “an exceptional woman,” and he regards her as a typical woman. Judging from the pattern of Howells's remarks about Grace throughout the novel, he concurs with Mulbridge's assessment: “You would fail because you are a woman” or at least “because your patients are women” who distrust other women — “it's all one” (p. 222). By putting his case against women most baldly in the words of Dr. Mulbridge (whom Grace rejects as a suitor), Howells could pretend that he didn't feel that way, but he obviously didn't fool Phelps or Jewett

17. Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, American edition 134 (07 1871): 119.Google Scholar

18. In his next and perhaps greatest novel (A Modern Instance), however, Marcia's and Bartley's motives in sexual selection have little to do with “love”; that this is so contributes profoundly to the dissolution of their marriage. It is worth noting that neither Marcia nor Bartley can claim to be among the most highly civilized or evolved members of the genteel society.

19. Quoted (from a letter by Howells to Phelps, dated October 28, 1881) in Masteller, Jean Carwile, “The Women Doctors of Howells, Phelps, and Jewett: The Conflict of Marriage and Career,” in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Nagel, Gwen L. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), pp. 135–47Google Scholar (quotation on page 135). As Masteller explains here, there were other stories of women doctors during this period, as well.

20. Quoted in Masteller, , “Women Doctors,” p. 135Google Scholar; “theory for theory” is from her 1874 response to Dr. Clarke's Sex in Education (see note 1).

21. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, Dr. Zay (1882; rept. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), p. 200.Google Scholar

22. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, The Story of Avis (1877; rept. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 180, 192, 77, 154–55Google Scholar. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

23. Phelps, , Story of Avis, p. 107Google Scholar; and Mivart, St. George, On the Genesis of Species (New YorK: Appleton, 1871), p. 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Peckham, Morse, “Darwinism and Darwinisticism,” Victorian Studies 3 (1959): 3–40.Google Scholar

25. Susan Sleeth Mosedale coins this term in her “Science Corrupted” (p. 38); see note 6.

26. These are not the only examples of Phelps's phallic imagery in Dr. Zay, and, as part of her analysis of sex they are all more than mere “risque” observations, as Michael Startisky remarks (in note 79 of his “Afterword” to Dr. Zay, p. 319).Google Scholar

27. Jewett, Sarah Orne, A Country Doctor (1884; rept. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House/Gregg, 1970), pp. 186, 320, 334, 302, 236, 341.Google Scholar

28. Darwin, Charles, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, 2 vols. (1868; rept. New York: Appleton, 1896), vol. I, p. 445Google Scholar. Subsequent references to these volumes are cited parenthetically.

29. Russett, , Sexual Science, pp. 65–66.Google Scholar

30. Russett, , Sexual Science, p. 102.Google Scholar

31. In chapter 5 (“Captain Littlepage”) of The Country of the Pointed Firs.

32. Howells, , A Foregone Conclusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), p. 135Google Scholar; Dr. Breen's Practice, p. 5Google Scholar; and Mrs. Farrell (New York: Harper, 1921), p. 69.Google Scholar

33. James, , The Portrait of a Lady (1881)Google Scholar, chapters 18 and 55. In his revision for the New York edition, James sharpened the image of Isabel as shipwrecked, writing that she felt like “those wrecked and under water … before they sink.”

34. The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Matthiessen, F. O. and Murdock, Kenneth B. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 46–47.Google Scholar

35. Habegger, Alfred, Henry James and the “Woman Business,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically.

36. Edel, Leon, Henry James: 1870–1881 The Conquest of London (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), p. 169.Google Scholar

37. Letter dated March 9, 1868, quoted in Perry, Ralph Barton, The Thought and Character of William James, Briefer Version (New York: Harper, 1964), p. 102.Google Scholar

38. In his “Charles Robert Darwin: A Reminiscence of Mr. Darwin” (Harper's Monthly Magazine 69 [October 1884]), C. D. Hague recalled that in his visit to Darwin shortly after the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin spoke “with particular interest of Mark Twain, from whose writings he had evidently derived much entertainment” (p. 760). It is worth noting also that in this meeting Darwin told Hague (in response to Hague's compliments for the reception his new book was receiving) that, “according to Mr. Punch, while the men seem to accept it without dissent, the women are inclined to protest.”

39. James, , The Bostonians (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 49Google Scholar. Regarding James's relative disinterest in science, see, for example, Perry's remark that “it is quite clear that literature was more to William than was science or Philosophy” (p. 147); or Charles Peirce's remark to William about Henry: “He isn't as fond of turning over questions as I am, but likes to settle them and have done with them” (quoted in Perry, Thought and Character, p. 130). However, such remarks should be weighed against William's own assessment of Henry's literary thinking: referring to Roderick Hudson, he wrote his younger brother, “I am again struck unfavorably by the tendency of the personages to reflect on themselves and give an acute critical scientific introspective classification of their own natures and states of mind, a la G. Sand. Take warning once more!” (quoted in Perry, , Thought and Character, p. 143).Google Scholar

40. Sinclair, Andrew, The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 234.Google Scholar

41. James, , Notebooks, pp. 46–47.Google Scholar

42. James, , Notebooks, p. 47.Google Scholar

43. This anonymous article first appeared in the British Quarterly of Science and was reprinted in The Popular Science Monthly 14 (1878–1879), 201–13Google Scholar; the quotations are from pages 209 and 213. It seems to have reignited the furor caused by Clarke's earlier Sex in Education; that Jewett read it, for example, is suggested by her references to the dissecting room (as I remark below) and the author's related remark that he (?) doesn't seek to “debar [particular women, “anomalies”] from working at the oar,” and so on: Jewett makes her point by arranging for Nan Prince to be such a strong rower in the boating scene with Gerry. A subsequent article in the Popular Science Monthly, the often-mentioned “Science and the Woman Question,” was even more irritating to many women because it was written by a woman, Miss M. A. Hardaker ([March 1882]: 577–84).

44. Jewett, , Country Doctor, p. 279.Google Scholar

45. James, , pp. 67, 391Google Scholar. The remark on “periodicity” is from Howells's summary of Dr. Clarke's book in his Atlantic review (32 [12 1873]: 738).Google Scholar

46. Phelps, , Dr. Zay, p. 63.Google Scholar

47. James, , Bostonians, pp. 242, 379, 380Google Scholar. It is worth noting that James's emphasis on a woman's “use” is part of his elaborate rebuttal of his women competitors' points, here of Jewett's extensive theorizing about Nan Prince's “usefulness”; there are far too many such subtle remarks in The Bostonians to detail here.

48. For a discussion of actual Southerners James knew, Eugene Norcom and L. Q. C. Lamar, who might have contributed to his portrait of Ransom, see Charles R. Anderson's “Introduction” to the present (Penguin) edition of The Bostonians (pp. 23–24).

49. See Howells's (?) review of SirLubbock, John's The Origin of Civilization and Primitive Condition of Man (1870)Google Scholar in the Atlantic 27 ([01 1871]: 140–42)Google Scholar. Darwin incorporated his friend Lubbock's ideas in The Descent of Man, along with similar ones by other anthropologists like J. F. McLennan (whose Primitive Marriage [1865]Google Scholar James acquired at some point). James's friend at a later period, Percy Lubbock, was Sir John's nephew. Darwin remarks at one point in The Descent of Man that “it is hardly possible to read Mr. McLennan's work and not admit that almost all civilized nations still retain some traces of such rude habits as the forcible capture of wives” (I, p. 182).

50. Although this is not the place to develop the point, James's psychological insights in such matters — like Howells's and, as is more widely recognized, his brother William's — are historically parallel with Freud's effort to create a modern psychology that built upon Darwin's theory of evolution. For recent studies of Darwin's influence on Freud, see Sulloway, Frank J., Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytical Legend (New York: Basic, 1979)Google Scholar; and Ritvo, Lucille B., Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Jewett, , Country Doctor, p. 152.Google Scholar

52. James, , Bostonians, p. 358Google Scholar. Among the many indications in The Bostonians that James's point of view blurs into his hero's, none is clearer than at this moment, in Ransom's remark on the way he had read Verena's nature. According to James's narrative voice just two chapters earlier, “it was in [Verena's] nature to be easily submissive, to like being overborne” (p. 322).

53. Darwin, , Descent of Man, vol. I, p. 256Google Scholar; and Phelps, , Story of Avis, p. 45Google Scholar. In this scene in Avis, the young naturalist, Ostrander, finds Avis and rescues her from an incoming tide when she is stranded on a reef. When he grasps her, “her most definite thought was a perfectly new conception of the power of the human hand.” Later in the novel, as in Dr. Zay, the woman will display “her own strong hand” (p. 199).

54. James, , Bostonians, p. 378Google Scholar. Concerning Basil's odd behavior of sitting on fences, it is interesting to note that in his brother William's Darwinian analysis of instinct, “climbing on trees, fences, furniture, banisters, etc., is a well-marked instinctive propensity which ripens after the fourth year” (James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961], p. 1026Google Scholar). For an informative discussion of William James's interest in Darwin — my source for the observation above (and of the role of Darwinism in the American social thought, in general)—see Degler, Carl, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Degler's reference to the fence-climbing instinct is on page 33.

55. Eliot, T. S., “On Henry James,” in The Question of Henry James, ed. Dupee, F. W. (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), p. 110Google Scholar. Eliot first published this memorial essay in the August 1918 issue of the Little Review. Eliot remarks of James that “he was a critic who preyed not upon ideas” (p. 109).

56. Darwin, , Descent of Man, vol. II, p. 335.Google Scholar

57. Taking up Darwin's analysis of the function of beauty and ornamentation in sexual selection, James includes brief references to Verena's and other women's (especially Mrs. Luna's) attractive hair and ornamental dress — as Howells, Phelps, and Jewett had done. But his design in The Bostonians requires his emphasis on the sexual power of music.

58. Although my conclusion here is in accord with Alfred Habegger's in his section titled, “Stopping Their Mouths,” my emphasis on Darwin is quite different from his on James's father (Henry James and the “Woman Business,” pp. 41–47.Google Scholar

59. James, , Bostonians, p. 85Google Scholar. James's remark that the “necessity of [Verena's] nature” was “to please” is a clear example of his having taken up Herbert Spencer's way of analyzing “the comparative psychology of the sexes” (see note 4). According to Spencer's analysis, of the “several mental traits” that women have acquired through “heredity by sex,” the “first” is “the ability to please, and the concomitant love of approbation” (Study of Sociology, pp. 344, 343).Google Scholar

60. Constance F. Woolson's phrase in a letter to James, quoted in Habegger's Henry James and the “Woman Business” (p. 255).

61. Edel, Leon, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 685–89.Google Scholar