1. Reynolds, Guy, Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (London: Macmillan, 1996), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. O'Brien, Sharon, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89, 107Google Scholar; cited hereafter as EV.

3. Woodress, James, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 60Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., 60–62.

5. Ibid., 61; and Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance, in Edith Wharton, Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (New York: Library of America, 1990), 856Google Scholar. For a discussion of Wharton's interest in science and her special interest in Darwin's theory of sexual selection, see Bender, Bert, The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 314–40Google Scholar; cited hereafter as DL.

6. Woodress, , Willa Cather, 62Google Scholar.

7. In The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1983–1902, 2 vols., ed. Curtin, William M. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 137, 141Google Scholar; cited hereafter as WP.

8. As I go on with this approach to Cather and Darwin, arguing that she, like many other novelists for at least half a century after the Origin of Species, was consciously responding to his and competing theories of evolution, as part of our culture's continuing efforts to come to terms with Darwin's theory of common descent, readers will note that my approach is related to, but different from, recent work in literary studies like Carroll, Joseph's Evolution in Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995)Google ScholarPubMed, for example, or Boyd, Brian's “Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature,” Literature and Philosophy 22 (04 1998): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carroll's and Boyd's impressive work shows how evolutionary theory illuminates our understanding of any product of the literary imagination, including work by authors who could not have been aware of Darwin (like Jane Austen, in Boyd's essay). By contrast, I am interested in the ways Cather and other writers participated in the larger cultural debate that arose in the wake of Darwinian theory.

9. Frederic, Harold, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896; rept. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1960), 228Google Scholar.

10. For a brief discussion of this kind of flower imagery in Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin (as in her character, Calixta), and Zora Neale Hurston, see DL, 228, 392–93 n. 9).

11. The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 74–75Google Scholar; cited hereafter as SL.

12. Aside from the questions of the evolution of sex, itself, and of the separation of the sexes, Darwin sought to explain the evolution of sexual difference in the “secondary sexual characters” such as the male's larger size (in most species) and his “special organs of prehension so as to hold [the female] securely.” Noting that such “modifications acquired through sexual selection are often so strongly pronounced that the two sexes have frequently been ranked as distinct species,” he proceeded on the assumption that “such strongly-marked differences must be in some manner highly important.” These quotes are from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (1871; rept. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1981), 1: 253; 2: 399)Google Scholar.

13. Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

14. Quirk, Tom, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 124, 138, 122Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 128, 132, 127.

16. Ibid., 128.

17. See, for example, Wasserman, Loretta's point in “The Music of Time: Henri Bergson and Willa Cather” (American Literature 57 [01 1985]: 226–39)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: that “Bergson was an important influence on Cather's thinking, and that his philosophical speculations concerning the nature of time and the dynamics of memory are given strikingly parallel expression in Cather's fiction” (227). Wasserman develops her point through an analysis of My Ántonia.

18. Bergson takes up and then sets aside three “present forms of evolutionism,” not only Darwinism or neo-Darwinism (the first he addresses), but Gustav Heinrich Theodor Eimer's theory of orthogenesis or evolution wherein “variations of different characters continue from generation to generation in definite directions,” and neo-Lamarckism, “the only [recent form of evolutionism] capable of admitting an internal and psychological principle of development” (Creative Evolution [New York: Henry Holt, 1911], 85, 86, 77)Google Scholar; cited hereafter as CE. Discussions of these and other competing forms of “anti-Darwinian evolution theories” are indexed in Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism.

19. Quirk, , Bergson and American Culture, 55, 82Google Scholar (quoting Woodbridge Riley and T. E. Hulme); and CE, 182, 271.

20. Hale, Nathan G. Jr, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 243Google Scholar; cited hereafter as Hale.

21. Quirk, , Bergson and American Culture, 122Google Scholar.

22. For analyses of Darwinian elements in the first five of these, see DL.

23. Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892–1912, ed. Bennett, Mildred R. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 547, 552–53Google Scholar; cited hereafter as CSF.

24. In chapter 13 of The Awakening Edna Pontellier awakens from a nap in the island home of a woman who “had squatted and waddled there … gathering legends of the Baratrarians and the sea,” and she remarks to her lover, Robert, that “the whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics.” And at a musical performance in chapter 9, Edna responds to the sexual power of music that Darwin had explained it in The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. For a discussion of this musical scene, see DL, 222–23.

25. Gelfant, Blanche H., “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia” (originally in American Literature [03 1971]), in Critical Essays on Willa Cather, ed. Murphy, John J. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 147–64Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 161, 148, 147.

27. Quirk, , Bergson and American Culture, 33Google Scholar.

28. Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! (1913; rept. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 309Google Scholar; cited hereafter as OP!.

29. Discussions of various novelists' portraiture of male prehensile power are indexed under “male” in DL.

30. Darwin, , Descent of Man, 1: 179Google Scholar. Brief discussions of this concept of the American west are indexed in DL.

31. This kind of ritual bathing is also significant in the life of Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark, except that Thea exhibits nothing of Alexandra's sense of sexual guilt. The pattern of Thea's bathing begins in part 4, “The Ancient People,” when her baths in the stream at the Indian ruins in Panther Canyon “came to have a ceremonial gravity. The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic” (SL, 304); the pattern continues later in her career (as on 427 and 471). It is worth noting, as well, that when John Steinbeck recreates this kind of bathing scene in the life of Eliza in his story “The Chrysanthemums,” it is a indicative of her neurosis of sexual repression, rather than as Cather construes it: as a scene of cleansing in preparation for the transcendent state.

32. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, Dr. Zay (1882; rept. New York: Feminist, 1987), 256Google Scholar.

33. O'Brien, Sharon, “Introduction” to Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (New York: Signet, 1991), xii, viGoogle Scholar.

34. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. Brill, A. A. (New York: Modern Library 1938), 592–93Google Scholar; cited hereafter as BW.

35. Cather, Willa, Willa Cather on Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 42Google Scholar; and Bohlke, L. Brent, ed., Willa Cather in Person (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 1986), 58Google Scholar.

36. Cather certainly wasn't the only writer at the turn of the century to conclude that the sexual impulse should be repressed. As I have argued elsewhere, this had been Frank Norris's approach to the sex problem in The Pit (Bender, Bert, “Frank Norris on the Evolution and Repression of the Sexual Instinct,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 [06 1999], 73–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

37. Lippman, Edward, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 246–47Google Scholar.

38. Ibid., 270, 275–80, 283, 319. Similar discussions of Darwin and Gurney are indexed in Bujic, Bojan, ed., Music in European Thought 1851–1912 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in Budd, Malcolm, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a sense of how Darwin's theory of the origin of music retained its currency throughout Cather's life, see Diserens, Charles M., The Influence of Music on Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927)Google Scholar; and Diserens, and Fine, Harry, A Psychology of Music: The Influence of Music on Behavior (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1939)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this later volume, for example, Darwin's theory is frequently discussed and qualified, as in a reference to Jules Combarieu's “work on the Evolution of Music” and Combarieu's belief that Darwin's theory does not include “all musical origins” and his belief “that the Sex impulse should be understood in a wider sense as something like the Libido of the psychoanalyst or the vital urge of Jung and Bergson” (35). My thanks to Friedemann Ehrenforth, who informed me of Darwin's influence in the theory of music. Part of Ehrenhforth's own work on late-19th-century literature and the aesthetics of music is available in his “Music, Religion, and Darwinian Science in The Damnation of Theron Ware,” Amerikastudien /American Studies 44 (1999): 497–517Google Scholar.

39. Giannone, Richard, Music in Willa Cather's Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

40. Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton, 1924), 217Google Scholar.

41. Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound (1880; rept. New York: Basic, 1966), 119Google Scholar. Gurney is quoting Descent of Man.

42. Ibid., 120, 315, 316.

43. Ibid., 361. Wagner's view on this question seems reflected in The Song of the Lark in Wunsch's remarks to Thea (on her thirteenth birthday) about “the beginning of all things; der Geist, die Phantasie. It must be in the baby, when it makes its first cry” (SL, 78).

44. Ibid., 381–83.

45. Ibid., 383, 399.

46. Ibid., 399.

47. Hall, Gertrude, The Wagnerian Romances (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 386Google Scholar.

48. Ibid., 386, emphasis added.

49. Haeckel, Ernst, Thomson, J. Arthur, Weismann, August, and others, Evolution in Modern Thought (New York: Boni and Liveright [Modern Library], [1917])Google Scholar; cited hereafter as EMT.