| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Evolution and "the Sex Problem": American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism. By Bert Bender. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004. xvi, 389 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-87338-809-7.)

Bert Bender studies fourteen American novelists from Frank Norris to John Steinbeck with a view to showing that the "eclipse of Darwinism," which accepted evolution but challenged natural selection as its mechanism, did not take Darwinism out of the novel. It led American novelists, whom Bender takes to be surprisingly well informed about evolutionary controversies, to emphasize Charles Darwin's different theory of sexual selection, which The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) says is the motor of specifically human evolution. This transformed the traditional courtship novel by treating the Darwinian themes of female choice and compulsive male competition as explanatory. Bender's proof involves culling from the texts recurring terms and images that hark back to Darwin's works, such as tangle (as in Darwin's tangled bank), and powerful male hands, a Darwinian secondary sexual characteristic.

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