Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

In the late nineteenth century, Richard Hofstadter observes, the American public was gripped by an "overwhelming interest in scientific developments and the new rationalism" (24). A young Edith Wharton was among them, and the careful notes, markings, and annotations that Wharton made to her voluminous library of scientific texts speak to her depth of interest in the subject. Wharton's library collection, the remainder of which (roughly 2,700 volumes) is housed today at The Mount estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, retains the works of Darwin, Haeckel, Spencer, and Huxley, as well as those written by prominent scientific thinkers of her day. This latter group includes researchers like Vernon L. Kellogg, H. Drinkwater, William Kingdon Clifford, and Edmond Kelly—figures that are perhaps not well remembered now but who enjoyed mild popularity in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Wharton's interest in scientific study, however, was not compelled by formalized instruction (she never attended school in her life); rather, she was encouraged to read these works of fin de siècle science by her friend and associate, Egerton Winthrop. Wharton met Winthrop, who was twenty-three years her senior, for the first time in 1893, and he later served as a kind of literary and [End Page 137] educational adviser to her, issuing book recommendations and overseeing some of her reading via correspondence. The majority of scientific volumes in Wharton's library collection date from that first year of their meeting; and Winthrop later went on to issue a stern list of directives for the young Edith, about which she commented, "My new friend directed and systematized my reading, and filled some of the worse [sic] gaps in my education" (qtd. in Lee 70). A lone surviving communiqué from Winthrop details that systematizing influence:

Darwinism, etc. Suggestions.Read slowly, marking important parts in the margins with pencil.Re-read marked parts after finishing a chapter, and all back marked parts before beginning a new chapter.If a passage is not understood after two readings, mark an X in the margin, and wait till book is finished before trying again. …Learn each definition of as many scientific words & terms as possible and write them in the book, as indicated. Most people's idea of what a word means is "à peu près"!… Learn a few definitions, like that of evolution for instance, "by heart,"—while your hair is being done!… Don't forget that this sort of thing will make you able to do everything better.

(qtd. in Benstock 483, emphasis in original)

Yet the question that we must ask is why, aside from her attachment to and respect for Winthrop, was Wharton so interested in contemporary scientific inquiry? Wharton was, by all estimates, an intelligent woman: she spoke more than four languages and, even as a teenager, had read widely in those languages; yet training in the natural sciences was not viewed as an integral part of educational curricula during this era for anyone, let alone a woman of the upper classes. What stakes, then, underscore Wharton's reading of these works (reading that Winthrop's correspondence makes easier to decode)? [End Page 138]

In this essay, I offer a few answers to these questions, arguing for a nuanced understanding of Wharton's engagement with a set of interlinking questions concerning sex, gender, and science. Wharton's self-directed studies in science and evolutionary theory, I claim, were in part prompted by her impatience at scientists' insistence on seeing women as cognitively distinct from, and inferior to, men. What's more, her engagement with these scientific texts enabled her covert entrance into a series of debates regarding women's cognitive abilities, debates that she reenacts in some of her earliest fiction. Focusing on Wharton's first two published story collections, The Greater Inclination (1899) and The Descent of Man (1903), I highlight the connections between her autodidactic pursuit of science and her literary agenda. Wharton takes both of her titles for these two short story collections from scientific (or scientifically situated) works that she read in the 1890s, a...