http://katyprice.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/late-darwin/

Questions arose about gender, about language and its inhibiting capacities, about form and structure as in themselves defining thought, about ‘lateness’ as an artistic category, about the degree to which prejudice has become bound into the evolutionary process itself (a dark and challenging thought). To give a little more context for what I’m up to: in the much longer version of the essay, mentioned by Alexandra Lewis, I show how a number of contemporaneous women writers such as Emily Pfeiffer, Constance Naden and Mathilde Blind engaged with the Descent and pursued its implications, sometimes in directions averse to Darwin’s own (and specifically through the brilliance of their contributions!). The present essay is part of work I’m doing on Darwin’s later writing and its relation to the early Notebooks, and on the significance of the arts in his creativity. I’m concerned with the troubles he has left for us, that at the time of the Origin don’t seem particularly to trouble him: extinction as inevitable, forgetfulness as fundamental. Emotion, beauty, consciousness gather theoretical importance for him in the 1870s, but they have also been thrilling topics for his imagination in the private Notebooks.

Late Darwin, like the snake with its tail in its mouth, is often early Darwin. From about 1867 he turns back to topics that were broached with extraordinary intensity in the notebooks of the late 1830s: animal behaviour, the prevalence of consciousness in organic life beyond the human, what emotion is and what it means, the significance of gesture, expression and gait, the primal appetite for art across species, the relations between instinct and intent, the choice-making capacities, even the aesthetics, of humble life-forms such as worms. And he feels delight in thought and touch, sound and weather, worms and babies, and in the detail of sustained observation and the sinew of developed argument.

‘Consciousness is sensation no 2 with memory added to it…Evidence of consciousness, movements/?/ anterior to any direct sensation, in order to avoid it. – beetles feigning death on seeing object, – are Planariae conscious – [Planariae are non-parasitic flatworms]

Consciousness bears same relation to time & memory (Barrett, 125)

In working on Darwin it is hard not to become too fond of him, to seek to absolve him from the Victorian prejudices he shared. He is not all sweetness and light, nor does he especially love us. He shares his generation’s assumptions about racial hierarchy even while he persistently reminds himself when studying other life forms not to say higher or lower and even though he was a convinced monogenist, and anti-slavery. He is obdurate in his recognition that humankind is not exempt, or central, or necessary to the universe. But at the same time he is a man (and specifically gendered as such in his historical circumstances), speaking to other people. Language thus becomes the register of this fundamental human kinship, and a form of fundamental autobiography, though even here he warns himself in the Notebooks not to exaggerate its exclusivity.

The distinction /as often said / of language in man is very great from all animals – but do not overrate – animals communicate to each other. Lonsdale’s story of Snails, Fox of cows, & many of insects – they likewise must understand each other’s expressions, sounds, and signal movements – some say dogs understand expression of man’s face. – How far they communicate not easy to know, -but this capability of understanding language is considerable. Thus carthorses and dogs – birds many cries, monkeys communicate much to each other.- ( Barrett, p.23-4)

This alertness to the variety of communicative powers among the range of organic life might seem to open the way for him to find a language that would distinguish gender from sex, though in the event he doesn’t quite manage it. By this I mean that gender is the performance of sexual difference in the terms created by the particular culture and period inhabited.(Stefan Helmreich very helpfully gives a list of references to books on the questions of gender and sex that lie behind my argument here.) Equally, as was pointed out by Cannon Schmitt, Darwin recognises that there is no single standard or criterion of beauty among human cultures, and music that is pleasing to some is jarring to others. In the Descent he insists on the importance of dialects of bird-song and on the way in which song is learnt within the terms of local habits. That perception is an important corrective for his seeming assumption in the Descent of fixed differences between human sexes since it implies the possibility of change over time as well as from place to place. It implies the fluidity of culture, among human beings, as among birds.

Cannon Schmitt observes that sexual selection ‘destabilises the natural/artificial distinction’. This might, as he suggests, produce collision between mutually exclusive possibilities, but it might also produce , as Stefan Helmreich proposes, ‘unsteady relations between form and fluctuation’ in biological transformation. And that might lead on not only to fresh creative possibilities but equally, or more, as Ash Amin reluctantly proposes, to ‘an evolutionary knot that maintains inequality in rather obdurate and hidden ways’. So we are confronted with the possibility that language, that ‘half art, half instinct’, as Darwin twice calls it in the Descent is so implicated in evolutionary process (as indeed he argues) that it cannot offer us an independent resource, indeed, traps us in repetition of ‘old frameworks’, escaped from by means of ‘swerves of focus and eruptions in tone’, as Vanessa Smith suggests. And Alice Jenkins wonders why Darwin seems so unconcerned with the issues of ‘mannish women’ and crossing of gender–roles that became prominent in the late nineteenth century: perhaps he was a bit early for the full eagerness of that debate, but, then, he must have come across it in his and Emma’s daily sessions of novel-reading: intriguing that he took it in his stride without pursuing its possible theoretical potential .

Yet Darwin did manage to reach new ideas, ideas now fundamental to our experience, which is why they are worth studying in their ellipses and their difficulties as well as their successes. Sambudha Sen indeed puts the question in a different context: may it be that this is not a question predominantly of language but that Darwin, like other scientific writers, allows himself ‘only limited access to the domain where women’s lives play themselves out as actual events’. There is a paradox here, since Darwin was deeply immersed in family life, a devoted and appreciative husband, an observant father, a friend of distinguished women like Harriet Martineau. Moreover, his daughter Henrietta was his invited critic and editor while he was writing the Descent. Sandra Herbert mentions his brother Erasmus’s support for women’s higher education in the 1870s and Darwin himself was one of the first contributors to a fund for a biological laboratory for women students at Newnham and Girton at Cambridge in 1881. So in the practice of his life he was, perhaps unusually, open to the company of women and appreciative of their concerns, living his life as a scientist in the daily midst of a growing family. Was there something in the practice of contemporary science and social science that told against recognition of the value of such experience? In the Expression of the Emotions he cites without embarrassment his children’s doings alongside statistical and scientific writing. And in that next book the congruences between the human and other animals are explored with greater resilience and humour than he is able to sustain in the Descent. But it is the case that he has recourse in his evidence to a great number of anthropological writers of the period who describe, one may say ‘prescribe’, the cultural differences between diverse groups of human beings. Indeed, a problem for Darwin intellectually at the end of the 1860s is that he has been reading at large among ethnographers who have themselves been profoundly influenced by his theories, so that what appear to be separate strands of evidence are often in fact caught into an evidential loop.

What most frees Darwin personally in his late writing, later than the Descent perhaps, as David Amigoni perceives, are the ways in which age and death have become part of his natural history, but, it’s also important to note, without driving out sex. In an essay I wrote many years ago on ‘The Death of the Sun: Solar Physics and Solar Myth’ (1989) I ended with a reading of the worms essay which emphasised Darwin’s respect for these constant and powerful unseen workers with their delicate tastes and their Saturnian survival, out of the sun’s rays. But in the ‘Autobiography’, in the same period, he expresses for the first time a recognition that there may be universal death without survival, cataclysmic death for all the inhabitants of some future time as the sun cools :

the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

In that passage he stoically refuses the comforts of the ‘after-life’, holding to the full implications of his emphasis on benignity and ‘improvement’ in his conception of natural selection. ‘All sentient beings’ are still at one, even in this vision of extinction: that emphasis is the ground of his theory and his life. Perhaps that abiding emphasis on a horizontal map of life helps to explain his comparatively tepid concern with racial and gender human hierarchies. The discussion Darwin has generated again here has been anything but tepid and I thank all the participants for their learned and suggestive contributions.

Notes

• Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin, transcribed and annotated Paul H. Barrett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
• ‘The Death of the Sun: Solar Physics and Solar Myth’, in J. B. Bullen (ed.), The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, edited Francis Darwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1958) p.65

In addition to reiterating Vanessa’s appreciation of the way Gillian has drawn out nuanced historical tensions here, I would like to pose a question about the way the ‘rush of social assumptions’ gathering behind Darwin’s statements concerning ‘Man’ in Descent are continued – or might they be seen to be calibrated? – in that offshoot work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. It is striking that Darwin, in the chapter on ‘Surprise – Astonishment – Fear – Horror’, appears to approach an emotion central to the evolutionary process (fear, and the impulse to fight or flight) in universal terms, with emphasis placed on ‘individual’ and ‘person’, and observations regarding the physiological responses of frightened men and women used interchangeably. This is intriguing given Darwin’s emphasis on male courage, energy and perseverance in Descent. Notably, the earlier chapter in Expression in which Darwin moves away from explicit discussion of the expanded family of man and animal to consider the ‘Special Expressions of Man: Suffering and Weeping’ produces, in distinction, an explanation informed by socially conditioned ideas of men’s and women’s behavioural roles. Darwin demonstrates an awareness of the artificiality of gendered norms even as he reinforces them here: if weeping expresses physical pain in children more so than in adults, ‘especially of the male sex’, this ‘may be accounted for by its being thought weak and unmanly by men, both of civilized and barbarous races, to exhibit bodily pain by any outward sign’ (ed. Paul Ekman, OUP, 1998, p.156). A curious exception is offered which would appear to attest to the highly-developed sensitivity of so-called ‘savages’, and a further telling distinction is drawn between men of the Continent and Englishmen; ‘the insane’ present a different case again, where disproportionate weeping is said to occur (here Darwin cites Dr J. Crichton Browne) regardless of sex: that is, in the absence of (gendered) self-control.

As Gillian beautifully illustrated in a recent public lecture on ‘Darwin and the Descent of Woman’ (Cambridge, 2 June 2010), the responses of a number of Darwin’s female correspondents and contemporary female poets such as Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890) resonate with the questions we might ask him today, given the chance. There is, indeed, the troubling way in which the gender inscriptions that seem to inhere in Darwin’s theory of evolution prevent an otherwise ‘wholesome and enfranchising’ framework from revealing the possible extent of future social change. As Gillian observed, Pfeiffer’s powerful sonnets ‘To Nature’ show, too, how the image of ‘Mother Nature’ in a conventional nurturing role did not fit with the implications of Darwin’s theory: although ‘of old we loved to see / A nursing mother’, Pfeiffer exposes instead a ‘matricide’, a ‘Dread Force […] / Churning the Universe with mindless motion’ (from Sonnets, 1886).

No such mindless motion in this forum – I look forward to reading further comments posted here and Gillian’s response.

Like Sandra Herbert, I look forward to further discussion of Gillian’s point that Darwin lacked a vocabulary with which to discriminate between sex and gender. In passages about how traits can be transferred between the sexes in non-human creatures, Darwin uses ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ alongside ‘male’ and ‘female’, for example, when he describes ‘the female’ of one species of painted snipe as having ‘acquired an eminently masculine character’ (533). But he does not seem to share some of his contemporary non-scientific writers’ fascination with failures in the alignment of sex and gender in humans. (I am thinking particularly of highly-charged discussions of ‘masculine women’ and ‘feminine’ or ‘effeminate’ men in periodical literature of the 1860s.) Was it partly the sense of oxymoronic parody or unnaturalness which typically colours the idea of the fluidity of gender across sex boundaries in non-scientific writing of the period that made the distinction between human sex and gender problematic for Darwin’s purposes?

Reference
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, second edition , 1879, introduction James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004)

First , your essay made me aware of a strong underlying feature in Darwin’s method : his insistence on inserting humans together with other animals within an equalising zoological discourse. What this method achieves is to insulate the subject of inquiry from the messy swirl of those human activities played out in the social domain . Thus, Darwin focuses most often on taxonomies, systems, male and female ( rather than man and woman) families ( in the zoological rather than in the social sense). We can recognise this privileging of structures over the actual playing out of events as typically “scientific”; and its strengths are obvious from the range and quality of the explanations that Darwin’s work has produced.

But there are occasions when Darwin does have to make quick forays into social and cultural domains. It is on these occasions that we become aware just how much he is prepared to arrest the complicated internal dynamics of social existence, in the interests of retaining the stability of some structural argument that he is developing. For example , he does not hesitate to equate the flaunting of colour and song among birds and animals with the delight that humans take in beauty, in order to sustain one of the founding premises of his argument : that there is a continuity between the behaviour of animals and humans.
The trouble with this analogy is of course that it ties down aesthetic pleasure to mating rituals and , in the process, cuts out the very wide range of other human activities across which aesthetic pleasure in fact unfolds. Is it a disinclination to deal with the range, complexity , and unpredictability that enters into human behaviour once we move from the taxonomical to the social, from the male to the man, that is responsible for the limitedness of Darwin’s judgements on women and they are capable of ? As you say, even Darwin can’t get away from the fact that, unlike animals and birds, humans take into account factors such as “social position and wealth” while choosing a sexual partner. But in order to get a better understanding of how these factors operate would Darwin be prepared to study Jane Austen’s simulations of human behaviour?

The question I’m asking is this: Do you attribute Darwin’s inaccurate judgements on the relative abilities of men and women to his times – to his lack, as you put it, “ of a vocabulary that would allow him to discriminate between sex and gender” ? Or do his pronouncements on women flow from a method that will allow itself only limited access to the domain where women’s lives play themselves out as actual events? Like you , I’m in complete sympathy with Darwin’s move away from human exceptionalism , especially when we consider the atrocities we’ve perpetuated on each other and on nature under the flag of “Humanism” . But does Darwin’s story , as you’ve told it , also show the limits of the scientific method?

Thanks very much for asking me to respond to this essay. It was an honour and a pleasure, and I learned a huge amount from it.

Gillian Beer’s essay is, as ever, a subtly stimulating reflection on the way in which Darwin’s late work, in The Descent of Man, displaced the human from the centre of nature. Thus, the view of the human as the one species, hierarchically at the pinnacle of God’s divine design and fashioned in his image, is displaced by Darwin’s ‘diplomatic’ refusal to discus the human in the Origin; a refusal which, as Gillian points out, binds the human into a new sense of oneness – oneness as a kinship of descent among an incessant division of branching life forms, originating from ‘one’ primordial being. Gillian’s focus on Darwin’s writings, his language, is a close encounter with the historical ways in which scientific thought, frameworks of philosophical speculation and historically exchanged social meanings produce new openings for exploration which complicate what seem to be ‘a wholesome and enfranchising belief.’ For Darwin’s argument about the oneness of kinship immerses him in new divisions and multiplicities as he addresses the mechanisms of sexual reproduction and selection that have shaped the human niche within nature’s one great kinship network: as Gillian observes in an important insight into the overlaying of categories, Darwin’s dealings with the division between male and female as a sexual division of function is complicated when he focuses on humans. For engagement with the human brings Darwin into contact with the additional, and socially and culturally freighted, division between men and women. As she notes in her observations about the place of ‘improvement’ in Darwin’s argument: ‘in the Descent… [the oneness represented by kinship] often seems to have congealed into the assertion that analogies between species debar social change.’ Always generous to Darwin’s sympathetic range, intellectual powers, and the blockages that his thought sought to overcome, Gillian’s argument critically interrogates gender as a factor in his contribution to the history of evolutionary thought. Her approach presents an important corrective to the reductive caricature that is inclined to be pulled off the peg as ‘social constructivism’.

Did Darwin move beyond the blockages in thought that he inherited from his culture? To speculatively answer this I would like to explore an aspect of Gillian’s title: she refers to ‘late Darwin’. Now, in one sense, this is descriptive and refers to one of Darwin’s later works: the Descent was clearly written as Darwin entered into what would be the last complete decade of his life. However, even in this context, ‘late’ has become another freighted term in arts and humanities scholarship, and one might wonder about its purchase, if any, in the field of scientific writing. It was Adorno who first presented musicologists with the idea of ‘late Beethoven’, approaching finality though a burst of anguished artistic experimentation. The idea rolls out to include, for instance, ‘late’ Turner in the field of visual art, and of course the ‘late’ Shakespeare of The Tempest. The category of ‘late’ creativity and intellectual ferment brings, of course, its own framework of untested presumption that should be approached with care. But let’s assume, for a moment, that we can read a ‘late’ tendency through Darwin’s works: perhaps Darwin, as a writer of science, did have a ‘late’ period that we can trace from, say, The Descent of Man through to The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms (1881). In one sense, Darwin’s early life as geologist, speculative life scientist and ethnographer was immersed, as Gillian observes, in the materials that speak of finality: extinct life forms, ghosted vestiges from the past, all of which perhaps stimulate the thoughts that have come to be associated with ‘lateness’. So, what is distinctive about Darwin after 1870? To what extent did sexuality and death play a creatively troubling role in Darwin’s late thought? To what extent did these late works manifest openings that might liquefy ‘congealed’ thinking about gender? Adam Phillips’s Darwin’s Worms (Faber 1999) could be said to be a reading of Darwin’s late style, natural history informed by death and old age; as Philips suggests, The Formation of Vegetable Mould is obsessed by burial, yet it is also a counter-elegiac hymn to the secular afterlife. Worms could also be said, perhaps, to provide Darwin with a way out of the re-instated binaries, divisions and hierarchical relations between ‘men and women’ that his work on the human sexual economy seems to draw him back into. His last work is, notably, about a hermaphrodite; yet, hermaphrodites, for Darwin, would still fertilise through pairings in order to maximise the chance of reproductive success and improvement: ‘The two sexes are united in the same individual, but two individuals pair together.’ (Formation, p.19). The individual worm is thus without the sexual divisions of function that characterise humans; a culturally disabling division of function that draws Darwin back into one-dimensional thinking about ‘men and women’ and which perhaps prompt his thinking to ‘congeal’ in The Descent of Man. Worms are agents of a burial which is never final, but always being renewed: they are, moreover intelligent creatures, unifying sexual divisions in one individual, yet pairing to produce ‘improvement’. Science propels Darwin to this conclusion, of course: but it is conceivable that the ‘late’ phase of his life in which this thought takes shape played something of a role.

While I admire many of Darwin’s argument in “Descent,” I have always preferred the early Darwin writing on the intersection of political and scientific matters. The early Darwin was the adent opponent of slavery. The later Darwin entertained eugenical ideas and what were then quite traditionalist views on the proper role of women in society. Darwin’s views on race in “Descent” are also often quite disconcerting.

Fortunately knowing the circumstances in which Darwin was writing helps us to place his views in context. For example, I find it quite reassuring to know that Charles’s brother Erasmus was an effective advocate for the admission of women to university in the 1870s.

I apologize for any typographical errors in my comment. My small traveling laptop doesn’t allow me to proofread very well.

The essay can be productively read in conjunction with another of Gillian’s that describes Darwin’s tenuous resolution of a similar set of issues: the question of the human, the consolations of gender difference, the cultural particularities that inform human subjects’ relationships to the aesthetic. Focusing on a scene from Darwin’s Beagle voyage, that earlier essay may even disclose a moment in which the conundrum that provoked Darwin’s ‘diplomatic’ turn away from the question of the human was enacted.

In ‘Four Bodies on the Beagle’ Gillian looks at a passage from a letter to his old schoolmate Charles Whitley, written on the Beagle, in which Darwin describes his ‘first sight of a Savage’:
It was a naked Fuegian his long hair blowing about, his face besmeared with paint. There is in their countenances, an expression, which I believe to those who have not seen it must be inconceivably wild. Standing on a rock he uttered tones & made gesticulations than which, the crys of domestic animals are far more intelligible.
Immediately after this, Darwin writes:
When I return to England you must take me in hand with respect to the fine arts. I recollect there was a man called Raffaelle Sanctus. How delightful it will be once again to see in the FitzWilliam, Titian’s Venus; how much more delightful to go to some good concert or fine opera. These recollections will not do. (23)
As Gillian notes, ‘Darwin communicates a sense of fascinated helplessness at finding himself unable to interpret the profound difference of the other man’, who returns his gaze, and whose difference therefore at the same time constitutes a mirror image. She suggests that for Darwin ‘the dismay of seeing his own male body figured in so dissimilar a guise, given back to him through observation, estranged, immediately produces […] a counter-image of the naked body. This time it is one from Western culture. And it is that of a woman’ (26). There are ambiguous consolations in this shift of focus from the confronting return gaze of the Fuegian to the averted gaze and displayed feminine nakedness of the Venus. Against the obvious comfort offered the male viewer by the display of a voluptuous female, we must factor in the compensatory effort of the task that Darwin sets himself. In order to feel fully at home with the image, and its established iconographies and implied hierarchies, work must be done. Darwin’s disconcerting encounter with ‘savage’ humanity reminds him that his own aesthetic development has lapsed, and requires taking in hand. In other words, he recognizes that he needs to work actively at reestablishing the distinction between his cultured self and the uncultured other that has been dissolved in the exchange of gazes.

So too, in this new essay, Gillian alerts us to the ways in which struggles between new thoughts and old frameworks are registered in swerves of focus and eruptions in tone. In the Descent, looking at the woman question discomfits the older Darwin, and his ‘exasperation’ with ideas of gender equality in turn ‘attracts our attention, disconcertingly so’, continuing to provoke the kinds of questions we’d like to be able to ask face to face. Both essays demonstrate Gillian’s consummate gift for drawing out the tensions within formulations that seem ideologically transparent and accessible to hindsight; for exposing the human features of paradigm shift.

Beer, Gillian, ‘Four Bodies on the Beagle: Touch, Sight and Writing in a Darwin Letter’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Oxford: OUP, 1996

This is a superb short essay that covers an immense expanse in a lucid and perceptive way, leaving us keen to know more about one fundamental question: the mechanisms at work when males and females become men and women. If there is an equal transmission of characters to both sexes, how is it that Darwin allows himself to aver that ‘man has become unltimately superior to women’? The same kind of question can be asked of race and racism.

Of course, over the last century, we have come to think that gender and racial inequality are culturally reproduced, or at best, the product of nature and nurture entangled. In my own work on race, disturbed by the ensurances of race, I have begun to ask if there is indeed a kind of aversive impulse or instinct among humans that becomes so deeply racially coded (and perhaps also gender-coded)in the course of history that it repeats as an inherited trait. In other words, racial hierarchy comes to repeated AS THOUGH it possessed genetic force – culture imprinted on chromosome by virtue of historical habit.

This is a deeply disturbing thought, because it implies that the transfer of characters between the races and genders and forcings in any given societal time to rebalance the distortions of culture from sexism to Apartheid) will not be enough. It implies that an evolutionary knot that maintains inequality in rather oburate and hidden ways needs to be undone in ways that allow another instinct of receiving difference to come to the fore as a pre-cognitive spark to action, and repeatedly so. I hope, of course, that I am wrong in taking the discusssion down this perilous path, but if not, what would it take to unlock Bergsonian excess, Darwinian proliferation in ways that come to be understood by humanity as just that – necessary, inevitable, fine.

Gillian, a thought on the dark ground between the mechanisms that ensure the equal transfer of characters between men and women (or the so-called races) and human struggle to combat inequality (and to insitutionalise the gains) would be much appreciated!

Ash Amin
28 June 2010

Her answer is sex/gender — or, rather, the unavailability of this analytic to Darwin. Her analysis dovetails nicely with earlier feminist scholarship suggesting that Darwin’s account replayed Victorian middle-class ideas about gender hierarchy in the key of evolutionary theory (Coward 1983, Fedigan 1986, Haraway 1989, Browne 2002). Preserved in Darwin’s model, too, was what Carole Pateman (1988) has called “the sexual contract,” the natural male sex-right over women assumed in theories of the social contract, from Locke to Rousseau, which take women as the conjugal property of men and as conduits for male reproduction — as vectors for the reproduction of a patriarchy that is founded on the safeguarding of paternity (see Delaney 1986). Darwin, in Origin’s few comments on sexual selection, is explicit about the status of females as property; sexual selection depends “not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for the possession of the females” (1859: 88). Human males live in the public sphere of natural and intrasexual selection while human females are cordoned off into a private sphere created by histories of male choice — an arrangement that leaves females as passive pawns in the game of evolution [1]. The title of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s 1981 book, The Woman That Never Evolved, names the implication here [2].

This was an implication about which Darwin worried, as Beer points out, and he suggested in The Descent of Man that, “It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen” (1871, Vol. II: 328-329). Linda Marie Fedigan summarizes the logic at work: “traits are selected for in males and women evolve by clinging to the men’s ‘coat-tails’ (1986: 28). Women evolve, but only as a side effect of sex.

What is revelatory about Gillian Beer’s analysis of Darwin’s model of sexual selection is her attention to the _form_ of his confusion. It is not only that the content of his thinking about women and men is inflected by Victorian common sense — and that he, like many of his contemporaries has an ambivalence about female choice (in, say, marriage [cf. Shanley 1989]) — but that the particular linguistic slippage between “male,” “men,” and “Man” in his writing actually does a huge share of the work of bewildering him. In mixing up what we would now call the “biological” and the “social,” the slippage deforms what Beer calls “the uninterrupted continuum between human experience and that of other life forms,” inviting in “a rush of social assumptions.”

Beer also points out that Darwin was in fact ambivalent about the once-and-for-allness of male-female difference in humans. If Darwin’s argument about sexual selection is famously circular — assuming precisely those differences it purports to explain — Darwin, argues Beer, seems at some level to have known this. As Beer puts it, “He is torn by the difficulty of descrying what is temporary and what eternal in the evolutionary process.” This is a difficulty, I submit, in how “form” operates for Darwin in his attempt to track how life forms change over time. He knows that form is mutable, but he must freeze it analytically to make claims about its modification.

A lovely phrase of Beer’s — “the ghosting presence of past life forms” — gives me my intuition here. The question for Darwin is one of how to think about the presence — and present — of form in evolution. The forms of secondary sex characteristics for him always work on the horizon of legibility. Richard Doyle has suggested that we might read Darwin not so much as vexed by sexual selection, but as in some sense captivated by the evanescence of form it suggests. Taking a close look at Darwin’s examination of ocelli, iridescent eye-like spots on the feathers of peacocks, Doyle writes that “Darwin’s intense and exquisite study of the mechanisms of sexual selection … continually focused on tactics for inducing the dissolution of boundaries, a sudden fluctuation of figure and ground” (2007: 79). That dissolution, of course, carries not only across “sexes,” but also across species, even, kingdoms, as witness bees and flowers. The unsteady relations between form and fluctuation haunt Darwin’s accounts of biological transformation.

The elegant form of Beer’s argument, guiding us to see the form of Darwin’s double vision about sex and gender, itself opens up questions of how we in the early twenty-first century should read the form of Darwin’s plots (Beer 2009: xxiv), how we should read the Wittgensteinian “forms of life” — systems of speaking about and acting the world — that animate Darwin’s writing. What does it mean for us to discern “the ghosting presence” of past forms of life, past forms of sex and gender, through the lens of our own concepts? Beyond demonstrating that a dash of judiciously applied presentism can be empirically and analytically enlightening, I think Gillian Beer’s arresting analysis shows us that it means that we share with Darwin the puzzle of reading forms of life over and across time.

Notes

[1] Insofar as there is any female choice in this model, choices are constrained; not only will females select a male, demonstrating that the sexual contract is really the heterosexual contract (see Wittig 1991), but they will also, as in Locke’s account of the subjection of women, enter into a relation of subordination. Social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) gave this dynamic a social, rather than natural, reading. According to Rosalind Coward, Gilman “argues that the two elements of Darwin’s theory are distinct; natural selection develops race characteristics, sexual selection develops sexual characteristics. Sexual selection is the means by which reproduction, and therefore variation, occurs. But women, she argues, have been cut off from the real environment, the economic world of work, and have been forced to develop sexual characteristics alone. Because of the enforced dependency of women on men, man becomes the economic environment of women” (1983: 86).

[2] Darwin had human females as looking more like juveniles than their male mates: “Throughout the animal kingdom, when the sexes differ from each other in external appearance, it is the male which, with rare exceptions, has been chiefly modified; for the female still remains more like the young of her own species” (1871, Vol. I: 271-272).

References

Beer, Gillian
2009 Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, third edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Browne, Janet
2002 Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Volume 2. London: Jonathan Cape.

Coward, Rosalind
1983 Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Darwin, Charles
1859 On the Origin of Species, A Facsimile of the First Edition, Introduction Ernst Mayr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Darwin, Charles
1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Photoreproduction of the 1871 edition published by J. Murray, London, Introduction by John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Delaney, Carol
1986 The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate. Man 21:494-513.

Doyle, Richard
2007 The Transgenic Involution. In Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond. Eduardo Kac, ed. pp. 69-82. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fedigan, Linda Marie
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