Endless Forms : Heredity in American Literature, 1890–1931

Close attention to theatrical form reveals how these American writers encountered determinist models of heredity at close range and, in their own neglected works, reoriented evolutionary thinking.

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, one claim proved especially unsettling: traits acquired through learning or habit could not be passed from one generation to the next. Long before this view was scientifically confirmed, the possibility that heredity might be random, contingent, and resistant to improvement sent shockwaves through scientific and cultural life. Focusing on four major American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—Henry James, Elizabeth Robins, Edith Wharton, and W. E. B. Du Bois—Endless Forms argues that theatre was a primary cultural site in which ideas about heredity were rigorously worked through. Rather than look at the genres by which these authors are best known, Endless Forms approaches James as a “failed” playwright, Wharton as an only recently discovered one, and Du Bois as an aspiring one. All three were authors who made their mark in narrative forms yet were drawn to the theatre. Robins, conversely, is known first and foremost as an actress and playwright, yet she also wrote prodigiously and successfully in fictional forms, notably novels. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book recovers these writers’ critically neglected dramatic works and situates them within a transnational theatrical culture shaped by realist and naturalist drama by figures such as Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw. Close attention to theatrical form reveals how these American writers encountered determinist models of heredity at close range and, in their own neglected works, reoriented evolutionary thinking. Endless Forms shows that modern drama was not peripheral to literary modernism but formative of it, shaping prose fiction’s movement from inherited character to self-fashioning, from biological descent to environment, and from narratives of progress or decline to open-ended, contingent evolution.