Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

Maximal Diversity Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in Realist and Naturalist Fiction, 1895-1910

“Maximal Diversity” examines the influence of applied evolutionary theory on American literary realism and naturalism.  Arguing against the tradition of literary critics who, following Richard Hofstadter, consider “social Darwinism” the ascendant evolutionary influence on fin de siècle literary and popular culture, I demonstrate how the continued presence of non-Darwinian evolutionary theories informed popular opinion about evolution and manifests in the works of writers traditionally interpreted in light of Darwinian notions like “survival of the fittest.”  Writers like Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Silas Weir Mitchell have long been thought to traffic in the deterministic evolutionism Hofstadter presented in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944).  Intended to justify interventionist New Deal social policy, Hofstadter’s account of the influence of applied Darwinism ignores what Stephen Jay Gould calls the period’s “maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories”: Edward Drinker Cope’s kinetogenesis, Theodor Eimer’s orthogenesis, and James Mark Baldwin’s organic selection may be forgotten today, but as the twentieth century began, their Lamarckian accounts of development were as, if not more, reputable than their Darwinian counterparts.  Whig historians of the Darwinian Revolution, publishing after the establishment of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, applied to the development of Darwinian theory the very thing the theory itself denies: a teleological and linear progressivism.  Literary scholars followed suit.  In 1957, Sherwood Cummings could approvingly cite Hofstadter as an authority, as he did in “Mark Twain’s Social Darwinism.”  When historians like Richard Bannister and Peter Bowler began revealing Hofstadter’s selection bias in the 1980s, literary scholars should again have followed suit.  They did not.  Journals as prestigious as American Literature continue print articles asserting “for a long cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spencerian notion of social Darwinism held a special charm.”

It was at the half, then, and not the turn of the century that social Darwinism held a special charm.  The blame for this confusion lay on Herbert Spencer and his popular expositors.  In Principles of Biology (1864), Spencer proves unsympathetic to the Darwinian theory of natural selection; however, in its pages he coins the phrase that branded him Darwinian bellwether, “the survival of the fittest.”  When one of his American champions, Harvard’s William Graham Sumner, taught the first sociology course in American history, his textbook was Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1873); however, Sumner omitted sections extolling the virtue of “rational altruism,” thus creating the impression of Spencer as a critic of altruism in toto, and not of what he called “unqualified” or “irrational altruism.”  Considering how well-known Spencer’s own definition of evolution is—that “from the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists,” as he argues in Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857)—the degree to which his name and thought are conflated with Darwin’s, and the manner in which both are appended to a caricature of “Nature red in tooth and claw,” distorts not only the historical record, but accounts of the literature of the period.  “Maximal Diversity” unearths the actual evolutionary theories influencing the literature of the period and demonstrates how they functioned as a vehicle for more than the laissez faire ideology with which Darwinism is regularly considered complicit.

Chapter One, “The Ambivalent Naturalist: The Authority of Evolutionary Rhetoric in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Descent of Man’ and The House of Mirth,” contends that Wharton’s fictions struggle against a singular evolutionary theory—the pessimistic environmental determinism Donald Pizer and Carol Miller claim is operative in The House of Mirth (1905).  Wharton identifies Darwin and Spencer as formative influences.  As evidenced in her short story “The Angel at the Grave,” her careful study of their work allowed her to clear what she calls “that old metaphysical lumber” from her mental landscape.  Like many of her contemporaries, Wharton’s metaphysical unmooring forced her to turn to science for answers to social questions previously provided by religion and tradition; unlike many of her contemporaries, however, she thought herself unequipped to adjudicate between competing evolutionary claims.  In “The Descent of Man,” she not only details the dangers of extrapolating from one school of evolutionary thought for the moral benefit of a popular audience, she also demonstrates the extent to which scientific discourse was speculative.  To those who sought her advice, she would recommend Vernon Kellogg’s notoriously equivocal Darwinism Today (1907), which aimed to familiarize “the student and general reader wishing to understand and compare the general characteristics and significance of the various new theories of species-forming with whose names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty, he occasionally meets in his general reading.”  Familiar with—but unable to determine the comparative validity of—these various evolutionary theories, Wharton chose to dramatize their competing claims in The House of Mirth: Lily Bart is presented as a tableau upon which the other characters in the novel can speculate as to the nature of the forces acting upon her.  No final determination as to the evolutionary cause of Lily Bart’s demise can be established because the scientific community had not (and would not for another forty years) reach a consensus as to the mechanism of evolution.  She offers the plight of Lily Bart not to illustrate the validity of a particular evolutionary theory, but as an experiment in evolutionary speculation in which documenting the dismal niceties of American high society will provide evidence for future social anthropologists who know what she and her contemporaries could not: which evolutionism would prove scientifically valid.

Chapter Two, “Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Before Adam,” details the profound confusion attendant upon those who lacked Wharton’s restraint.  Scholars like Lawrence Berkove have long contended that London wrote under the thrall of what appear to be mutually incompatible master narratives: socialism and social Darwinism.  Instead of dramatizing the competition between theories of evolutionary and social development like Wharton, London forged an idiosyncratic amalgam from theories he had adopted and discarded with casual cruelty his entire adult life.  He held colloquy with Nietzsche, Spencer, Darwin, Marx, Tyndall, and Haeckel; but his core commitment was to an unsophisticated theory of progress to which the thought of these philosophers and scientists could be appended.  Whether this progress bespeaks the inevitable rise of the proletariat or the continued perfecting of the human species matters little, because London did not adopt Marxist or Darwinian thought so much as adapt the useful elements of those theories to his philosophically unsophisticated presumptions.  He embraced two aspects of Lamarckian evolution critical to Spencer’s account of social development.  The first is the classic Lamarckian mechanism: the preservation of favorable characteristics via use or disuse, i.e. the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  The second, more powerful, mechanism Lamarck called “the complexifying force.”  Long considered anathema by naturalists, this teleological drive continued to exert influence in the form of Spencer’s dictum that “organic progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.”  As evidenced in “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity,” London believed progress inevitable, but that it could be retarded by forces acting upon the body social.  Industrial capitalism prevents what, in The Iron Heel, London calls “the orderly procedure of social evolution.”  A body acclimating itself to industrial labor is a body whose form perpetuates the oppression acted upon it.  London’s conviction that evolution could be harnessed for the betterment of humanity entails a process outlined by (and named for) the sociologist James Mark Baldwin.  The Baldwin effect describes how individuals, by dint of their own cleverness, can alter the conditions of competition both for their offspring and the general population.  Baldwin assumes that certain individuals would possess what are now called “mental modules” more adaptable than those of their contemporaries.  Because of the greater plasticity of their mental modules, they are better able to recognize a good idea when they encounter one and, more importantly, reshape their mental modules in accordance with it.  He believes this plasticity was heritable and distributed evenly throughout the human race.  His theory presupposes that when a great leader with a genuinely great idea challenges the prevailing ideology, the people who follow that leader will have more plastic mental modules than those who do not.  And since that genuinely great idea would increase the evolutionary fitness of those who followed it, the next generation of the human race would, on the whole, have more people with more plastic mental modules.  Within the course of two generations, a people psychologically distinct from their forebears could be created.  The Baldwin Effect underpins the narratives of development in both The Iron Heel and Before Adam: in the former, it is pivotal to the art of deception practiced by members of the opposition party; in the latter, it accounts for the presence of the ancestral memory of a higher primate in a modern human.

Chapter Three, “Novel Form: The Expression of Character in Silas Weir Mitchell’s Revolutionary Romances,” turns to another popular novelist who embraced a Lamarckian vision of social evolution, the neurologist and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell.  Unlike London, who found points of agreement with sundry evolutionary schools, Mitchell held a Lamarckian position unsophisticated enough to compel him to speak against higher education for women on biological grounds: “I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother.”  Implicit in this bald Lamarckism is a theory of social development: history is guided not only by the implicit and explicit mores of a society, but also by the biological consequences of them.  In the United States, Mitchell observed that changes brought about by the toils of industrial life had a deleterious effect on national character and attempted to ameliorate these through the writing of historical romances set in a period of healthier living: the Revolutionary Era.  Mitchell identified this period as the one that shaped the character he feared was atrophying, and saw his contemporary’s increasingly imperialist politics a means by which to restore it.  While not openly advocating war with Spain, Mitchell chose this moment to celebrate the refining fires of the Revolution in the novel Hugh Wynne, about a soldier in George Washington’s army, and a fictional autobiography of Washington himself, The Youth of Washington.  Both works evince a poetic vision of history Mitchell appropriated from the theory of Joshua Reynolds and the practice of John Keats; this theory suggest an author wishing to improve the moral character of his audience appeal to an inaccurate, but plausible, historical moment and take advantage of its attendant nostalgia.  For Mitchell, this moment was the Revolutionary War, the nostalgia for which was palpable at the turn of the last century; and, if effective, the moral improvement of American character would establish the biological supremacy of the American people for generations to come.

Comments

[SEK]

Well, the limerick repeats the abstract's mistake: it puts the emphasis on the intellectual history before the literature. It would need to open:

Wharton, London, and Twain,

Had Lamarck on the brain.

Because the Nineteenth

Evolved theories labyrinth,

And applied them to all without shame.

Or something or other. I'm not a poet.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Oh, all right. Here's a not-a-limerick:

Wharton, London, Mitchell, and Twain
Wrote about people who changed under strain
Was it Social Darwinism in American thought?
Not with so many other theories. It was not.
Warton couldn't judge between claims
London took whatever matched his aims
Mitchell thought knowledge left women undone
And Twain's chapter has not yet been begun
It was Lamark that boggled the brains
Of Wharton, London, Mitchell, and Twain

Note: I am not claiming "I am a poet" on the basis of the above.

[Ahistoricality]

Naturalism
Evolution theories
London, Wharton, Twain

Or, if you prefer the longer Tanka,

Twain, London, Wharton
used evolution in prose
which seemed natural
but Social Darwinism?
Not the only game in town.

[Sisyphus]

The comments here point to what I think is a structural problem with my dissertation: my "introduction" currently consists of the intellectual history you see in the first two paragraphs. It shouldn't. That should be my first chapter and -- I can't believe I'm writing this -- I need to produce another introduction, one which, as you all advise above, demonstrates how the shift from social Darwinism to what I call "evolutionisms" impacts literary naturalism and realism.

Don't forget: there's the dissertation and then there's the book. Think hard about whether you can save that for the book, or if it absolutely _has_ to go in the diss.

(That's the question I ask for every single statement that comes out of my adivsor's mouth when she goes over my chapters: ok, is this plan for the diss or for the book?)

[Dr T]

I just floated in from another site and thought I'd toss in my two cents.

First. The intro seems heavy, a bit jargon rich. This is something that varies from school to school and department to department. For my taste, it is heavy on verbosity at the cost of clarity and content. (Again, some places love it like that)

Second. My intro was somewhat less than two pages. I was told to keep it short simple and to give a general overview rather than get bogged down in specifics.

Third. The real factor is a balance between what your adviser wants (as they dispense wisdom from on high) and what will get you a job. Look at DIA and find out what other abstracts that are similar look like. Despite claims to the contrary, it seems most departments want conformity, not innovation.

Best of luck

[Dr Lee]

I just saw this, so I'm late off the dime. Everything else aside, that is a LONG abstract. Having just finished my dissertation and abstract, I can only say that my abstract was 250 words; the university I attend limits it to 300.

Brevity is the soul of wit?

[SEK]

That's the beauty of open comments, Dr. Lee. You can always pipe in, and I'll always see them. But yes, too long, and will be revised once I finish revising the rest. I'll post the revised edition ... whenever it's done.