¹ In 1894 William Schuyler wrote that in the middle 80S, “the subjects which attracted her the most were almost entirely scientific, the departments of Biology and Anthropology having special interest for her. The works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer were her daily companions; for the study of the human species … has always been her constant delight” (in Seyersted, Per, ed., A Kate Chopin Miscellany [Natchitoches, Louisiana: Northwestern State University Press, 1979], 117).Google Scholar Of all of Chopin's critics, Per Seyersted has done the most with her interest in Darwin, but even he has never examined the question at length. See for example his Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 90.Google Scholar And Chopin's interest in Darwin has been increasingly ignored by more recent scholars. To judge from the latest (and certainly the fullest and most informative) biography, one might conclude that Chopin never read The Descent of Man much less that it influenced her portrayal of womanhood. Yet this biographer, who has “been working on Kate Chopin's literary career longer than she did,” began her work on Chopin in order to answer the “gnawing” questions, “How had Kate Chopin known all that in 1899. What impelled her to write such pointed observations about women and men?” (Toth, Emily, Kate Chopin [New York: Morrow, 1990], 9).Google Scholar

² Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. as I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1:256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Unless otherwise noted, further references to The Descent are from this edition (the first, 1871) and this text, and are cited parenthetically by volume and page.

³ Darwin discusses “the law of battle” at many points in The Descent; for Darwin's comments on the human male's having gained the power of selection, see The Descent, II, 371Google Scholar (according to his analysis, among most animals, particularly birds, the females select the victorious or the more attractive males, e.g. those with more elegant plumage); and for his comments on the male's superiority, see, for example, his remark that “man is more powerful in body and mind than woman” (The Descent, II, 371).Google Scholar

⁴ The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed., Seyersted, Per, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 353.Google Scholar Subsequent references to Chopin's fiction will be to this text, cited parenthetically by page (pages are numbered consecutively in the two volumes).

⁵ Readers familiar with Arthur Schopenhauer's chapter, “The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes,” in The World as Will and Idea (first available in the U.S.A in translation in 1888) will note many ways in which Schopenhauer's critique of “the sexual impulse we call love” anticipated The Descent of Man. That Chopin also read Schopenhauer is nowhere more evident than in Ch. 38 of The Awakening, when Dr. Mandelet and Edna discuss Nature's “decoy to secure mothers for the race” (Schopenhauer had written of the “illusion” whereby a lover becomes the “dupe of the will of the species”; and Edna feels that it is better to have awakened “than to remain a dupe to illusion all one's life”). It would seem that for Chopin, as for Maupassant and Nietzsche, for example, Darwin both verified Schopenhauer's speculations and in a sense rendered them irrelevant. As David Asher saw on the eve of The Descent's appearance, “what Schopenhauer called ‘the metaphysics of sexual love,’ he might, had he been acquainted with Darwin's theory, have designated by the opposite name,” his speculations now having been “proved to be well grounded and to have a thoroughly physical, or quite natural basis” (“Schopenhauer and Darwinism,” The Journal of Anthropology, 3 [1871], 329).Google Scholar

⁶ For an analysis of these scenes and of Chopin's response to Darwin in The Awakening, see Bender, Bert, “The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man” American Literature, 63 (1991), 459–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The first of these scenes, the musical performance in Ch. 9, serves as a prelude to Edna's developing desire for Robert, and in it Chopin clearly follows Darwin's analysis of the “wonderful power” of music, the means by which our “half-human ancestors aroused each other's ardent passions” (Descent, II, 337Google Scholar). Chopin's description of Edna's response to the music – the “keen tremor” that runs down her “spinal column” and her passionate tears – parallels Darwin's description of such responses to music in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. In the second scene (Ch. 26), one of several in which Chopin uses the word “select” in clear reference to Darwin's sexual selection, Edna tells Mlle. Reisz that women do not “select” lovers because of their “presidential possibilities” or wealth (as Darwin would have it); had Mlle. Reisz ever “been in love,” she might have known why Edna is drawn to Robert – because, “happy to be alive,” she likes his “hair,” “lips,” “nose,” etc. And in a third, more indirect reference to Darwin, Chopin dwells on Edna's decision to move out of her husband's home into her own “pigeon house.” Here, apparently, her strategy is to out-Darwin Darwin, undercutting his presentation of civilized women by recalling his own rather extensive remarks about female pigeons. Darwin found it remarkable that female pigeons will often reject the males chosen for them by breeders. If imprisoned with a male she doesn't “fancy,” the female will sulk, starve herself, or drive him away; and some are so “profligate” that they “prefer almost any stranger to their own mate[s]” (Descent, II, 119).Google Scholar

⁷ The best discussion of Chopin's racial views is Taylor's, HelenGender, Race and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).Google Scholar But Taylor's discussion of the “unconsciously racist elements” in Chopin's work does not examine the relationship between these elements and Darwinian thought.

⁸ Darwin added this explanation to the second edition of The Descent in 1874: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn. (New York: Wheeler, n.d.), 119.Google Scholar

⁹ Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 5, 203Google Scholar; further references to Russett are cited parenthetically.

¹⁰ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a factor in Social Evolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 41.Google Scholar Also see Oilman's synopsis of the evolution of sex, p. 29. Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically by page.

¹¹ A Kate Chopin Miscellany, 167.Google Scholar

¹² For a different understanding of Chopin's view of men, one that does not consider her close reading of Darwin, see Dyer's, Joyce C. “Kate Chopin's Sleeping Bruties” and her “Gouvernail, Kate Chopin's Sensitive Bachelor”;Google Scholar both essays are collected in Bloom, Harold, ed., Kate Chopin (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).Google Scholar

¹³ Darwin, Charles, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (London: Murray, 1877), 354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)Google Scholar, Dr. Ledsmar studies monoecious and dioecious plants (i.e. those with male and female flowers on the same plant, and those with male and female flowers on separate plants, respectively) in order “to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms” (Frederic, Harold, The Damnation of Theron Ware [Cambridge: Belknap, 1960], 228)Google Scholar; and in Women and Economics, Gilman discusses “the evolution of the processes of reproduction,” whereby “it was ascertained by nature's slow but sure experiments that the establishment of two sexes in separate organisms, and their differentiation, was to the advantage of the species” (p. 29).