The period 1890–1920 saw the rise of the "New Woman": educated, sexually aware, and often hostile to traditional marriage. Darwin’s theory of female choice gave such characters a scientific rationale. But it also trapped them. If women were biologically driven to select the strongest, handsomest, or most dominant males, then was their emancipation merely a new form of bondage?
When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he ignited a firestorm that would consume Victorian theology and natural history. But it was his follow-up, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), that proved far more unsettling—not because it argued for common ancestry, but because it dared to explain beauty, desire, and love itself as products of a ruthless, blind process. Darwin proposed that the brilliant plumage of the peacock, the song of the nightingale, and even the moral sensibilities of humankind evolved through "sexual selection": a competition for mates driven by aesthetic choice and reproductive advantage.
Authors used evolutionary theory to justify women’s increasing autonomy, framing their choices as vital to the progress of the "race" or society. 3. Essential Authors and Works William Dean Howells: Often focused on the "economy of courtship." In works like The Rise of Silas Lapham The period 1890–1920 saw the rise of the
Writers like Henry
By the 1920s, Darwinian sexual selection had become so pervasive that it was no longer a hidden subtext but a blatant theme. The trauma of World War I led to a widespread belief that civilization was a thin veneer over primal urges. American modernists, many of them expatriates in Paris, began writing love stories that were openly, almost gleefully, Darwinian. If women were biologically driven to select the
The Great Gatsby (1925) is the quintessential novel of sexual selection in the Jazz Age. Jay Gatsby is a self-created male, a "peacock" who throws extravagant displays (the parties, the shirts, the car) to attract Daisy Buchanan, the female whose choice he has coveted since youth. Tom Buchanan, his rival, is a brutish former athlete—a classic "dominant male" who has won Daisy through wealth and physical prowess but cannot hold her affection. The novel’s tragedy is that Daisy makes the safe, conservative Darwinian choice: she stays with Tom, the alpha male of her social class, rather than the romantic upstart. Gatsby’s death, floating in his pool like a discarded exotic bird, is Fitzgerald’s commentary on the cruelty of female selection.
: Discusses the history of Darwinian thought in American literary criticism since 1950. Why It Matters Darwin proposed that the brilliant plumage of the
American novelists seized upon this with anxiety and fascination. , a voracious reader of scientific naturalism, crafted heroines who embodied Darwinian choosiness. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Isabel Archer is not merely a young woman seeking independence; she is a selective agent whose aesthetic and moral preferences determine the fate of those around her. When she rejects the brutal industrialist Caspar Goodwood and chooses the effete aesthete Gilbert Osmond, she makes a catastrophic choice—one that echoes Darwin’s warning that sexual selection can lead to maladaptive beauty. Osmond is a peacock’s tail: beautiful, useless, and ultimately predatory.
Further Reading:
: Focuses on the "new woman" and more explicit naturalistic treatments of sex and attraction.
However, Darwin noticed anomalies that this theory couldn't explain. Why did male birds often possess extravagant plumage, like the peacock’s tail, which seemed to offer no survival advantage and actually made them more vulnerable to predators? Darwin concluded that these traits evolved not for survival, but for seduction. If a female peacock preferred a larger, brighter tail, her offspring would inherit that trait, eventually shifting the entire species' morphology.