Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

More serious attempts to incorporate evolution thematically into plays were taking place, and many of these hinge on the relationship of people to their environments. Downing Cless has argued that by the mid-Victorian period, with the development of domestic drama, settings move indoors: “Nature does not disappear, . . . but it is distanced—what’s outside the window or what’s down the stream.”¹ While appealing in its simplicity, there are significant exceptions to this claim. Henrik Ibsen’s plays do feature people talking intensely in rooms, but they also emphasize and indeed rely on their natural settings (Ghosts with its ceaseless rain and remote fjord just outside the big picture window, the mountainside setting of Little Eyolf, the apocalyptic avalanches of John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken). As will be shown in chapter 3 in my discussion of Ibsen’s engagement with evolution, these environments directly shape the action; they are not just “down the stream.” One of the playwrights who exemplifies this emphasis on environment is James A. Herne, who, influenced by Ibsen, brought nature even more directly on stage, often in astonishing ways.

Shore Acres (1893)—“the play that made a million dollars”2—requires a live horse on stage and (though not simultaneously) a raging storm that takes up the entire third act and presents a challenge to the set designer: “At intervals waves dash against the window” of a lighthouse on stage, “the thunder crashes, the sea roars, the lightning flashes,” and the scene moves to the exterior of the lighthouse and “an expanse of wild, storm-tossed waves, with the lighthouse . . . rising from the rocky coast.”³ The scene immediately following opens with heavily falling snow and howling wind. These scenic demands are striking and show nature as inherently dramatic: it is center stage, not merely a backdrop.

What distinguishes Ibsen’s and Herne’s treatment of nature from earlier natural spectacle is the prominent framing of their plays within evolutionary discourses. Herne was steeped in Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, particularly a watered-down version of the latter, a vaguely defined sense of man’s eternal struggle with his environment being the determining factor in his life, and an insistently progressive view of human evolution. These evolutionary interests were shaped by Hamlin Garland, one of the founders of American realism, who quoted Darwin and Spencer in his notebooks, showing a particular interest in Darwin’s comments on the brute nature of man, our “animal origin,” and Spencer’s comments in First Principles on evolution as “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion.”4 Herne was also influenced by Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton and would tirelessly discuss “the constitution of matter [a possible nod to Haeckel’s monism] and Spencer’s theories of evolution” with Garland.⁵ In short, evolutionary theory permeates his work, though sometimes it seems “squeezed through the Darwin-Spencer wringer.”⁶ It also came from Helen Hamilton Gardener, the southern suffragist novelist and activist whose comments on the “missing link” I quoted in chapter 1. An early Herne biographer describes her as “one of the most fiery radicals in the country, the friend of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the eminent alienist Spitzka,” renowned for her “sensational writing and lecturing on such subjects as women’s rights, atheism, heredity, and insanity.” For many years, Gardener was “Katharine’s [Herne’s] closest friend.”⁷ She lectured widely on heredity and evolution, showing particular concern for women’s place in society and in relation to nature. Her lectures were published in magazines and collected in book form, and one of her most popular was “Sex in Brain,” in which she challenged the assumption of female brains being inferior because they are smaller than men’s. She also questioned the notion that woman’s role is to bear unlimited children, anticipating Eugène Brieux’s dramatization of this concern a decade or so later.⁸

A recent assessment questions how “fiery,” radical, or “sensational” Hamilton was, pointing out that she actually belonged to the less-strident militant strand of early American feminism, “quietly” lobbying Congress and meeting with President Woodrow Wilson.⁹ This would be consistent with the tendency of many militant suffragists to distance themselves from biological issues such as reproduction to avoid alienating the public from the main objective of their cause, which was to get the vote. Yet she was hardly reticent on such subjects, and her friendship with Katharine Herne, who so directly shaped not only the role of Margaret Fleming but also all of Herne’s other plays, is a vital link that has hardly begun to be fully explored. Katharine had a striking “intellectual enthusiasm,” wrote Garland, never happier than when discussing “the nebular hypothesis . . . atomic theory . . . the inconceivability of matter . . . Flammarion’s super-sensuous world of force, Mr. George’s theory of land-holding, or Spencer’s law of progress.”¹⁰ She also followed “the latest scientific theories of child raising.”¹¹ One can only speculate about the intellectual rapport she had with Gardener, but it is highly probable that their ideas fed on one another and, in turn, exerted an influence on Herne’s plays, particularly his elastic conception of parental and sexual roles.

In Shore Acres, for example, Helen, described as “the modern girl,” is already aware that the books she reads are “going to get me into trouble. . . . [amused] Why, the other day I was trying to tell Father something about evolution and ‘The Descent of Man,’ but he got mad and wouldn’t listen.”12 Her religious and traditional New England farmer father, Martin, opposes Helen’s love for Sam Warren, a free-thinking doctor who also reads Darwin and Spencer, which Martin derides, offended at the idea (reiterated several times) that “my grandfathers was monkeys.”¹³ When Martin rejects “interference from . . . Darwin” and confronts Sam about his religious beliefs, Sam tries to explain: “Do you hear those insects singing? . . . Well, that’s their religion, and I reckon mine’s just about the same thing.”¹⁴ Before we even meet Sam, he is described as studying “frogs an’ bugs an’ things,” liable to sit in the middle of the road “watchin’ a lot of ants runnin’ in an’ out of a hole,” and lecturing in the schoolhouse on “evolution as he called it.”¹⁵ Evolutionary theory is not merely paid lip service, as in Robert Buchanan’s The Charlatan, but takes center stage from the start of the play, though one reviewer wished for “much less dissertation on Darwin.”¹⁶ By making the anti-Darwinian character so unpleasant and narrow-minded, Herne steers audience empathy firmly toward the attractive and open-minded young Darwinians.

Shore Acres shows an overarching interest in the issue of adaptation and reverses the standard practice of naturalist plays that show humans beings defeated by the harsh conditions around them. Rather than struggle to fit in and survive in a hostile environment, Sam and Helen elope and go west, where they prosper. Far from being crushed by their circumstances, they seek new ones and flourish, and this is emphasized repeatedly by the stage directions regarding Sam’s new “big warmhearted manner.”¹⁷ The play lives out the myth of the regenerative American West, but rather than disappear into it, the couple brings its constructive forces back east to effect a transformation in that negative environment. Though only seventeen, Helen successfully asserts her “Spencerian individuality and right to live independently of social mores.”¹⁸ Martin also changes in the end through his meeting with the next generation, his granddaughter, who turns his manner from dour and resentful to mild and gentle. His apology to Sam is met with another repeated idea: “You didn’t quite understand me, that’s all,” “You folks around here didn’t understand fellows like me, that’s all.”¹⁹

Spencer’s popularity with Victorian dramatists indicates how dominant a role he played in bringing evolution to people’s consciousness, how accessible his version of it was. During the so-called eclipse of Darwinism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Spencer’s star was at its highest, coasting a combined wave of social Darwinism and eugenics. Dramatists—especially those with a moralizing bent—found this appealing and easy to translate into theatrical material. As Donald Pizer has noted, Spencer was attractive because his ideas were so adaptable; Spencerian evolutionary theory was “like a large apple shared by several boys,” who each take “a bite here, another there, but no one swallows it whole.”20 Political and literary reformists alike found Spencer a means of challenging the existing order. Social Darwinists needed “to show that the social order in some way mirrored the natural order.”²¹ Yet, what was the natural order? One constant in all the permutations and varieties of social Darwinism was the view of “the laws of nature as both beneficent and malign, as something to be emulated and as a force to be feared, as both a model and a threat.”²²

From the age of eighteen, exactly at the time when he first started going to the theatre, Henry Arthur Jones began reading Spencer.²³ This was around 1871, when Darwin’s The Descent of Man was published. In 1878, Jones confides: “I am still reading hard; all my spare time in the day and sometimes half the night. I am now approaching the end of Herbert Spencer’s system of philosophy. It has been a hard nut to crack, but I wanted first of all to get a good groundwork of the latest science to build upon. And Herbert Spencer must not merely be read; he must be learned.”²⁴ For all his insistence on its importance, Jones never says exactly what is so significant in Spencer’s philosophy. Concrete clues, however, may be found in his play The Dancing Girl.²⁵

Drusilla Ives is a dancer who has fled her stultifying Quaker life on an island off the southwest coast of England for a career dancing in London, where she is the mistress of the Duke of Guisebury. He owns the land on the fictitious island of Endellion where Drusilla’s village is founded; its citizens are his tenants. She returns in disguise to visit the village, and he follows her there. He discovers that he has neglected the land and the community so badly that a group of its men has joined a voyage to the Antarctic in desperation to find a better life for their families; the boat is now believed lost. Meanwhile, some of those left behind are trying in vain to erect a breakwater against the imminent flooding that will no doubt destroy their village. The duke sees all of this, repents his wasted life of luxury in London, and secretly resolves to kill himself after giving a final farewell feast for all his friends in honor of Drusilla so she will be deemed respectable and can continue to teach dancing in their homes after he is gone.

Sybil Crake, a lame young woman who is the daughter of the duke’s steward and land agent and whom he rescued many years ago from an accident in which she was crushed beneath a horse, finds out his plan of suicide and manages to intercept him just as he is about to drink the vial of poison. Sybil is a kind of Jenny Wren figure—like Jenny, the lame young doll maker in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, she hobbles about acting as raisonneuse to the other characters who confide in her, and she is full of wisdom and sage advice.

The final act, set two years later, shows the duke a broken man, prematurely aged, who now devotes himself to building the breakwater for the village. We learn that Drusilla has died of a fever in New Orleans, where her dancing had won her the adoration of the public. To the very end, she continued to flout the wishes of her stern Quaker father, but he forgives her posthumously at the urging of Sybil. The duke joins forces with Sybil, whom he realizes he loves. Meanwhile, the boat from Antarctica miraculously returns with all men safely on board, and Drusilla’s angelic sister Faith has married local boy John (who had once passionately loved Drusilla) and they now have a baby—establishing the new generation and the hope for the future.

Theatre censorship laws meant that all plays intended for production had to be submitted for licensing to the Lord Chamberlain. Frequently, they were refused licenses, or he would wield his “blue pencil” and delete references that were deemed objectionable, usually of a sexual, moral, or political nature.26 Jones refers to Spencer twice in the original version of The Dancing Girl. This licensing copy of the play, held in the Lord Chamberlain Collection of Plays in the British Library, contains the following lines in the fourth and final act:

Such direct interaction between a playwright and an evolutionist is rare. Again, though, there is little indication here of what exactly it was in Spencer’s thought that appealed to Jones and that he might have put in his plays; was it just the “survival of the fittest” idea? Adapt to one’s environment or be crushed? This was hardly new and hardly identified solely with Spencer. The Dancing Girl also refers explicitly to the “principle of selection.” In act 3, when the aristocrats are visiting Guisebury for his last supper, Lady B complains: “I’m not squeamish, Guise, but really society is getting too mixed!” and Guise responds: “It is mixed, but so it will be bye and bye . . . whatever principle of selection is adopted.”³⁰ This is intriguing: What exactly are the different principles of selection Jones is alluding to, and is he allowing for natural selection, at a time of much skepticism and hostility to it? The play at least suggests such a possibility through its multiple versions of the “adapt-or-perish” theme—not only Drusilla’s story but also the depiction of the encroaching sea. This story beneath the fallen woman narrative is arguably far more interesting and has much more contemporary relevance for us now, showing the fight to save the coastal village, to defend itself against the sea, and the voyage to Antarctica. In this last regard, Jones must be responding to the feverish race to explore Arctic regions that gripped so many nations in this period and is bound with imperialism—Britain and Norway in particular leading the races to the Poles.³¹

The Dancing Girl kills off the “fallen woman,” the standard procedure for plays featuring this scandalous female type, and it demonstrates the impossibility of women’s position in society by showing how few options there are for anyone wishing to deviate from the norm of getting married and having children. The highly talented dancer who openly renounces marriage, children, and religion must die. Yet the play also features Regy, a man literally on the run from exaggeratedly calculating society matriarchs and their daughters pursuing him for the “trap” of marriage. So, while on the one hand Jones depicts in negative terms the woman stalking her prey, on the other he deplores the woman who turns away from that role. What, then, should women do? What shall they be? As in William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Princess Ida, the answer is to maintain their traditional roles as wives and mothers; anything else would be absurd. In his play The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), produced at the height of the “new woman” craze, Jones broaches (and rejects) the idea that the two-sex state of human evolution is flawed. Elaine states that she and her fellow feminists will correct nature, leading Sir Richard Kato to ask how they will do that: “By changing your sex? Is that what you ladies want? You are evidently dissatisfied with being a woman. You cannot wish to be anything so brutal and disgusting as a man and unfortunately there is no neuter sex in the human species.”32

There is another reason why it is instructive to compare the licensing version of The Dancing Girl with its published version. In the former, Faith, Drusilla’s sexually pure, pointedly named younger sister, reinforces the natural role of woman. Toward the end of the play, when she has become a mother, Faith declares that birth is “such a miracle. I think and think for hours, and the more I ponder, the more I cannot understand how such a thing can be. . . . I wonder if other mothers have the same thoughts that I have—I suppose they have—and yet it seems as if nobody but me could have such a sweet secret.”33 This episode was cut from the published version, which thus offers no answer to the question of what is the viable role for women. It also suggests that Jones may well have been more attuned to the discourse and debate on issues like biological determinism and gender essentialism than he let on since he removed this pointed reference to women’s natural role as mothers. This would indeed present a more complex side to him than we have previously seen. By his own admission, Jones was a champion of “what is called bourgeois morality,” an anachronistic sentiment at a time when most of his contemporaries in the theatre were attempting to chip away at that.³⁴ The scholarly consensus is that Jones was always hampered by his stuffiness, though given what we know about his intellectual interests it is going too far to say that “he failed to introduce any deep thought [into the theatre] . . . , for deep thought was beyond him.” The very attempt to create a play around an idea—even if Jones’s idea of evolution was so simplified—gave impetus to the stage to shake off “the innocuous and stupid farces which hitherto had been the rage.”³⁵

Much as he emphasized “origins,” one of the things that Darwin, and for that matter Charles Lyell, Thomas Malthus, and evolutionary thinkers generally, brought home with great force was the reality of life ending, and not only the deaths of individuals or whole groups, but also of the sun and hence all life. As Cyril D. Darlington put it in 1969, echoing Darwin to the same effect in Origin, “The ultimate destiny of man . . . is probably extinction.”³⁶ Georges Cuvier in 1796 had argued that past catastrophic events had obliterated whole species. Lord (George Gordon) Byron’s Cain (1821) dramatizes this concept, referring directly to the fierce debate between the Cuvier catastrophists and the gradualists. The sense of “deep time” brought about by findings in geology lent greater force and reality to the idea of extinction and gave it a fascination that no longer exists; what was, for Darwin in the Origin, a natural phenomenon to be “marvelled” at is now, for us, a sad catastrophe too often of our own making.³⁷ This fascination with extinction is bound with the Victorian interest in seeing living fossils and transitional forms on display, a pastime that simultaneously highlighted the robustness and the fragility of species. Darwin argued that extinction “has played an important part in defining and widening the intervals between the several groups in each class. We may thus account for the distinctness of whole classes from each other—for instance, of birds from all other vertebrate animals—by the belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost.”³⁸

Darwin’s views on extinction changed, however. By the time of his autobiography, he is bemoaning the finality of extinction and finding, as Bernard Shaw would do, a cruel paradox in the thought that ever-improving humankind is “doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.”39 Such terms as complete annihilation (Darwin, Autobiography) and a universal winter (Thomas H. Huxley’s phrase) abound in the writings of Darwin and his contemporaries, presaging a bleak Beckettian view of the world as obliterated, entropied, with humankind at its last moments before extinction. The phrase universal winter signals as well a convergence of key scientific ideas of the nineteenth century: evolution and entropy, biology and physics.

But extinction could furnish dramatic material. Dramatists seize on the idea of extinction as a current event, happening in real theatrical time, showing the last of the species at its end point (for example, in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, discussed in chapter 7). They can thus focus on the drama (and trauma) of “sudden” extinction, and in fact, they create this counter-evolutionary idea for the stage; dinosaurs apart, most extinctions happen over a long and gradual process, a slow death. Dramatists convert it into something over which we have some power, rather than the passive Darwinian sense of organisms (and hence entire species) being at the mercy of genetic and environmental factors beyond their control, thus having no say in whether they go on or go extinct.

One of the ways in which extinction plays out on stage in the nineteenth century is through the idea of the end of the family line. Henry James, François de Curel, and St. John Hankin all depict this, and it is often tied to broader concerns about the national stock and a dwindling birth rate.⁴⁰ De Curel’s play Les Fossiles (1892) deals with extinction, although it was more notorious for its depiction of incest.⁴¹ The “fossils” of the title are the outmoded, decadent, and corrupt nobility. In the climactic scene in act 3 between father and son (and with sister Claire listening outside the door), the duke admits he slept with Robert’s wife at Chantemelle before she married Robert—but the audience has already heard this shocking revelation from Helen’s own lips, earlier in act 3, when she tells Robert that for two years his father essentially had his way with her.⁴² The duke says that he has engineered Robert and Helen’s marriage to perpetuate the family line. The weak and ill Robert dies, and the final scene of the play takes place in the family morgue, where, gathered around his body, they read out his will and learn his express wishes that the future Duke of Chantemelle, his son, be a modern man in the most profound sense of the word: someone capable of dying for his ideas and not a fossil facing backward and steeped in the Revolution, the age of the guillotine.⁴³ It is also revealed that sister Claire has promised Robert never to marry and to remain forever with Helen and the baby.

In one of the play’s key speeches, Robert draws on the metaphor of two distinct, competing natural environments to point to the human condition. The forests and the sea hold equal attractions for Robert, who loves them both, and sees in each two vastly different “pictures of humanity.” Will we “advance in unison like the waves,” rushing together toward the shore “without clashing”? Or will we be like trees that grow so massive they “strangle everything”?44 The unusually long monologue allows the extended metaphor to develop, working out the intricacies of the forest versus sea motif and its implications with regard to class, nobility, attitudes, inherited beliefs, and so on. The metaphor remains, however, solely verbal, simply an elaborate description, whereas this same contrast between forest and coast would in Susan Glaspell’s hands be strikingly enacted through the staging of her one-act play The Outside (1917).

Strictly speaking, there is no guarantee that the family line of “fossils” will die out in de Curel’s play, but extinction is used more symbolically than literally and it suffuses the play; Robert invokes the ideas of his forebears, the need to die among those ideas and the memories of his youth, surrounded by the honor and the name of his ancient family. It all sounds a lot like memes and replicators rather than genetics and heredity. This fits with Ibsen’s sense of heredity, which commentators like Max Nordau and Max Beerbohm derided for its lack of medical accuracy. In fact, Ghosts was produced at the same theatre by Antoine at almost exactly the same time as Les Fossiles, and the two plays do share the theme of incest, the promiscuous father overflowing with joie de vivre and the son doomed to die by disease. But Ibsen is not concerned with the dying out of an aristocratic family line; in fact, the implication is that mating with Regina would bring welcome “new blood” into the Alving family. This shows the distance between Ibsen’s more contemporary evolutionary vision and that of de Curel and, for that matter, one of Ibsen’s great admirers who also treats extinction: Henry James.

The idea of “fanatical attachment to the nobility of race; the necessity of its life and strength by every and any means”⁴⁵ is also a concern of James’s Guy Domville, which addresses celibacy and its annihilating consequences.

Guy has “an ancient name”; the Domville family is “one of the two or three oldest in the kingdom!”46 One of the lines in the play (repeated twice), “I am the last, my lord, of the Domvilles,” is famous in literary history for having elicited from an audience member the retort “I bloody well hope so!” The play was such a resounding failure that it put James off playwriting for good. Yet considering this neglected work in light of evolutionary motifs gives it new meaning. In Guy Domville, the extinction of the line is, in a sense, enacted for the audience. Guy’s decision to enter the priesthood, in full knowledge of his status as the last in his family line and that celibacy will therefore spell its extinction, is the hinge for all the action of the play. It is also deeply anti-Darwinian given what Darwin writes in The Descent of Man about celibacy as a “senseless” practice valued by the ultra-civilized for the quality of self-control that it requires.⁴⁷

Extinction is not, in fact, an immediate threat in Guy Domville due to the revelation of illegitimate children, just as in Les Fossiles. This is presented as wholly positive in Les Fossiles, but in Guy Domville, these offspring are of a lower class and therefore unacceptable, despite perpetuating the family genes. The “numerous progeny” left by Guy’s recently deceased and unmarried relative are dismissed by his friend and self-appointed adviser Lord Devenish as “not worth speaking of” and “a pack of village bastards,” even though Guy immediately refers to them as “my family.”⁴⁸ Technically, they do not exist, and Guy is informed that he is the next in the line of succession to the family home: “the heir of your kinsman, the last of your name,” a phrase that will of course be echoed in the last moments of the play.⁴⁹ Lord Devenish tells Guy he must not enter the priesthood because he has a duty to “your position—to your dignity—to your race.” Guy evidently absorbs this rhetoric because he then ignores the existence of the “village bastards,” saying a few moments later in conversation with Mrs. Peverel: “My cousin is dead—there are no other kin—and I’m sole heir to the old estate. . . . I’m sole of all our line, I’m sole of all our name.”⁵⁰ Not only does this contradict what he and the audience have just learned, but from a scientific point of view it is nonsense; the Domvilles themselves are hardly in danger of extinction, only their aristocratic name. Interestingly, none of the reviews of the play acknowledges the existence of these illegitimate offspring.

In fact, James’s idea of extinction harks back to an earlier usage, more in keeping with Cuvier than with Darwin, when in Britain the term “was mainly linked to the history of landed families: a line becomes extinct and with it the family name and the succession of property and practices,” as Gillian Beer observes. In the history of science, the implications of extinction were at first familial; in eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, “the term ‘extinction’ was mainly linked to the history of landed families: a line becomes extinct and with it the family name and the succession of property and practices.”51 Beer notes that in Origin of Species Darwin expanded the idea of family away from the exclusiveness of “pedigrees and armorial bearings” to embrace all “the past and present inhabitants of the world.” This meant that “instead of ‘special creations’ all organic beings are now ‘lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch.’ He turns the metaphor of the great family around in a way that dignifies all species: all are members of the oldest of all families,” so that they seemed to Darwin to become “ennobled,” thus radically redefining the concept of “nobility” through biology: “For Darwin this inclusiveness and continuity is the ‘grand fact’ he has uncovered: ‘The grand fact that all extinct organic beings belong to the same system with recent beings, falling either into the same or into intermediate groups, follows from the living and the extinct being the offspring of common parents.’”⁵²

Guy Domville and Les Fossiles reflect this shift in thinking about kinship and nobility, as well as being about extinction (abstractly and symbolically more than literally). The fact that James’s play is set in 1790 might have obscured this direct link by making it feel remote and irrelevant compared with the contemporary society dramas then in vogue on the London stage, such as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Similarly, de Curel depicts a family line that is six hundred years old (how Robert hates the sight of the moldy old house, “la façade rébarbative de Chantemelle”).⁵³ In addition, James’s focus on religion—linking extinction with the enforced celibacy of the Catholic priesthood—further removes the play from an overtly biological context.

Yet the biological language of the play places evolutionary concerns up front, despite the religious theme. This is hardly surprising, since throughout his career James mined evolution for metaphors; his appreciation of Ibsen as “evolved,” for example, and the geological imagery with which he recalled the impact of stage adaptations of Dickens “in the soft clay of our generation,” like “the wash of the waves of time.”54 Guy Domville’s treatment of extinction can be read as part of a wider discourse on evolution. James sets up the situation so that Guy explicitly chooses extinction, despite the full possibility of continuing his line. Lord Devenish applies eugenic pressure: Guy must remember that he is a gentleman, and that character is a “treasure” that his philandering kinsman soiled.⁵⁵ James depicts Lord Devenish as a threatening, mysterious agent of change that redirects an entire life course. Guy asks him, “Who are you, what are you, my lord . . . ?” and likewise asks Mrs. Peverel: “Who is he, Madam—what is he, that he comes here to draw me off?”⁵⁶ It is like the enigmatic power of the Rat Wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, a play of the same year as Guy Domville by a contemporary playwright James deeply admired. Indeed, like Eyolf, Guy seems passive, too easily led. He veers from feeling in act 2 an obligation to breed (“to do my duty to my line”) to utterly rejecting by the end of act 3 this sense of reproductive duty.⁵⁷ Guy’s final speech in act 3 makes no evolutionary sense: he loves Mrs. Peverel, and she loves him; he knows that he could happily produce more little Domvilles with her; yet he says he must renounce everything and enter the Church. He will thwart sexual selection (Mrs. Peverel has clearly chosen him as her mate). Guy is deliberately non-adaptive, and as Darwin shows, failure to adapt leads to extinction not only of the individual but also of the species.

But set this behavior in the context of Huxley’s statement in Evolution and Ethics:

The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.⁵⁸

Guy’s altruism (sacrificing his own love to help his rival elope), his celibacy (“the rigid rule of [my] life, is to abstain” from marriage/sex),⁵⁹ and his willed extinction all go against Darwinian principles. Yet in every respect, Guy’s behavior matches Huxley’s description, and it begins to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint that includes a moral dimension. The play maps Guy’s necessary progress toward the fact that even if he does not keep the line going he still plays an evolutionary role, just as the very fact of extinction plays a role in the perpetuation of life.

Critical responses to Guy Domville were generally attuned to the Jamesian voice but puzzled over the theme and dramaturgy. However, the reviews are not at all as damning as theatre legend would suggest. Shaw opined that the play was not bad, just out of fashion, and he praised its “rare charm of speech.”60 Arnold Bennett wrote that although sometimes “tedious,” the play contained some excellent scenes and beautiful writing. The first act was the best, he felt, “natural, impressive, and studded with gems of dialogue—gems, however, of too modest and serene a beauty to suit the taste of an audience accustomed to the scintillating gauds of Mr. Oscar Wilde and Mr. H. A. Jones.”⁶¹ H. G. Wells found the whole thing too “delicate” to get across the footlights unscathed; one needs bold, broad brush strokes. He also found the second act tedious. He mentions that we need to see more clearly “Guy’s growing disgust with life . . . a disgust that forms the key to the third act.”⁶² Perhaps this links to the fact that, as John Stokes shows, 1895 was still more or less the peak of the “suicide craze” and the fashionable “tired of life” ennui of Decadence.⁶³

Victorian thinkers grappled with a fundamental problem articulated here by Huxley: where morality fit into the new picture of the natural order. This had also dogged Malthus, one of the great inspirations for Darwin. As a later edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1890) points out, the response to the first edition of the book (published anonymously in 1798) prompted Malthus to “soften some of the harshest conclusions” for the next edition. “He not only introduced his new idea of moral restraint and postponement of marriage till it could be afforded, but he showed that, on the whole, civilization was capable of alleviating the pressure of population, and had done so sensibly in modern times.”⁶⁴ Both Malthus and Darwin found they had to spell out the moral implications of work that stood perfectly well without that, simply because it was deemed too bleak. This continued throughout the responses to evolution. Leslie Stephen argued that in human evolution it was not individual modifications but social transformations that constituted adaptive change, and moral evolution reflected this fact.⁶⁵ Both Huxley and Stephen “wished to present human evolution as a story of moral progress, while remaining haunted by the implications of the naturalistic process that had made this evolution possible—selection.”⁶⁶

Putting Darwinian ideas to moral use meant taking a step toward not only Spencer but also eugenics; taking it upon themselves, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus puts it, to “help the herd thin itself out” in the service of a higher humanity. Fortunately, “we now understand that just because a gene is selfish it doesn’t follow that a person should be.”67 The Struggle for Life, Buchanan and Frederick Horner’s adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s La Lutte pour l’existence, though written well before the findings of Gregor Mendel came to light and modern genetics was developed, takes just this line, reductively equating Darwinian evolution with pure selfishness. Recent studies are arguing the idea of cooperation as the driving force of evolution rather than competition, just as Peter Kropotkin had done in his seminal work Mutual Aid (1903). At the heart of cooperation and altruism lies the capacity for empathy and identification. This in turn is central to the art of acting. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss briefly how evolutionary thought relates to the theory and practice of acting, beginning with the actor’s main tool: the body.

The science of acting has received a great deal of scholarly attention, much of it linked to cognitive processes and the larger context of evolutionary theory, and a full exploration of this connection lies beyond the scope of this study. The discovery of mirror neurons has had particular relevance to theatre and performance studies.⁶⁸ In addition, the growing field of biosemiotics links biology to theatre through their shared status as sign systems. Here, my concern is with how nineteenth-century understandings of acting hinge on the performer’s body and what it came to signify in light of knowledge about human evolution. Jane Goodall writes that the body is the most visible site of the realization of Darwinian ideas, not plays that reflect them: “An evolutionary view of the human was one that foregrounded embodiment, and the performing arts have in common the body as their primary instrument of communication, so that physiognomy, sexuality, energy, expression and mobility—important theoretical concerns for the evolutionist—are integral components of the performer’s work.”⁶⁹

Acting could even be seen as embodied recapitulation: actors as representatives of humanity in growth and development, enacting universal stages. This challenges the idea that one cannot represent evolution on stage because there is not enough time. Joseph Roach likewise refers to the human body as “an evolutionary text” and to the plays of the New Dramatists like Ibsen and Shaw as, “like the palimpsest of the Darwinian body, revelatory of motivation and desire in deep subtextual layers, demanding of the actors a corresponding density of psychological impulse.”70 By the late nineteenth century, the actor’s body is no longer under a rigid and closed system à la Denis Diderot and eighteenth-century acting theory but is, like evolution, unpredictable, a “tangled bank” of emotions and gestures that cannot be codified and systematically deployed. For many, that body is also an avatar bearing the stamp of all evolution in its form and features, and actors from Henry Irving to the cabaret performer Loie Fuller exploit this. Irving created the role of Mathias in The Bells in 1871, the same year as The Descent of Man and a year before Expression of the Emotions was published, and the role was linked instantly to contemporary science in its suggestion of both atavism and mesmerism.⁷¹ Darwin’s investigations suggested the presence of atavistic traces in the actor—a mere facial expression (perhaps Irving’s wildness is an example of this) could suggest the animalistic essence that lurks beneath the most advanced human, showing “the survival of this evolutionary past in the present.”⁷² Since Irving revived this role repeatedly for the next thirty years, its link to Darwin would have been accentuated further.

Along with the impact of other factors such as the rise of psychology, Darwin’s ideas inspired the newly physical emphasis in acting well before Constantin Stanislavski and psychological realism. Studies of the development of naturalistic acting by Roach, Rose Whyman, Lynn Voskuil, and others have sparked debates about how far Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals revolutionized the actor’s art.73 Using subjects from the margins of civilized society (the insane and the racially different, and also infants), Darwin’s investigations sought to “strip the face of its civilized mask of convention and reveal a language of expression that derived from the struggle for survival and various forms of adaptation to environmental or physical forces.”⁷⁴ In effect, the experimental emphasis shifted from studying the norm (the object of traditional physiognomy, which sought to establish an ideal) to “a science of deviant faces.”⁷⁵ Darwin showed not only that the lines between the normal and the abnormal are blurred when it comes to emotions, but that the expressions of our emotions are organic processes, universal (innate, not learned) and brought about through evolution.⁷⁶ In addition, Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes—which revealed that “the individual’s behaviour is a constant series of interactions with the environment”—gained currency in Stanislavski’s lifetime.⁷⁷

The idea of a universal language of expression was of course prevalent in the theatre, for instance in the commedia dell’arte in Europe, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Rules for Actors, and in the eighteenth-century English theatre with its acting manuals demonstrating codified gestures. It penetrates well into the twentieth century as a code that playwrights and actors sometimes used and that audiences recognized; a stage direction in James M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows (1908), for example, simply indicates that the Comtesse “assumes the pose of her sex in melodrama”—actors and audiences alike would have known what this meant.⁷⁸ Jerome K. Jerome pokes fun at this in his book Stage-land. Goodall warns against overstating the impact of Expression of the Emotions on theories or practice of acting at the time, questioning the idea that it single-handedly triggered “a paradigm shift in the theory of acting,” as the complexities warrant further exploration.⁷⁹ Bruce McConachie, for instance, argues that Stanislavski drew not so much on Darwin as early behaviorist ideas “that have long since been abandoned.”⁸⁰ Whatever the finer points of the debate, Darwin’s book did show the similarities between human and animal gesture and facial expression, suggesting that “grimaces and extravagant gestures are particularly clear vestiges of our animal past.”⁸¹ The significance for the actor is clear: acting is linked to an “instinct to imitate,” an involuntary mimicry.⁸²

The type of mimicry in nature that we know most about is visual: “mimetic resemblance,” or camouflage. Mimicry was discovered shortly after Origin was published. It was a particularly elegant illustration of adaptation, and it shows how natural selection favors mimetic patterns across the board (in both artificial and natural kinds of environments). There is both conspicuous mimicry (bright colors) and the more subtle kind (blending in). Occasionally, mimicry can lead to the development of a new species, as when a butterfly species that was red becomes blue and white.83 But mimicry does not simply mean simulation or imitation. In nature, it is “the parasitic or mutualistic exploitation of a communication channel. More plainly, the term describes the situation in which one organism gets the better of another organism (known as the dupe) by looking, smelling, sounding, or feeling like something else.”⁸⁴ Here, science draws explicitly on the language of Renaissance theatre with its easily fooled dupes and gulls, but these direct theatrical analogies are not flattering; they make theatricality synonymous with trickery, echoing Darwin’s aforementioned allusion to the “tricks of the stage.”

In essence, the mechanism of mimicry raised a key question: How could one be natural while being artificial if all nature was a form of performance? George Henry Lewes memorably observed that natural acting (as opposed to the stylized systems of representation that had gone before) was an attempt “to catch nature in the act.” He also characterized human beings as innately theatrical: “We are all spectators of ourselves.”⁸⁵ This tension between the artificial and the natural is captured in the work of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse, one of the great interpreters of Ibsen. Duse specialized in “pain and the representation of pain,” and she expressed the painful emotions of embarrassment and shame by famously blushing at will.⁸⁶ Shaw, for example, makes a big deal of the blush in his review of both Duse and Sarah Bernhardt’s performances as Hermann Sudermann’s Magda.⁸⁷ Blushing is usually associated with emotion rather than physical pain, and this deepens the mystery surrounding her uncanny ability, noticed by contemporary critics, to manufacture a blush (and to reverse the process, going suddenly pale).

Duse’s apparent ability to blush and pale at will goes directly against Darwin’s claim in Expression of the Emotions that “we cannot cause a blush . . . by any physical means,—that is by any action on the body,” as blushing comes entirely from the mind. “Blushing is not only involuntary,” he goes on, “but the wish to restrain it, by leading to self-attention, actually increases the tendency.”88 Blushing at will appears frequently in stage directions of contemporaneous plays; Hauptmann calls for three different actresses to blush spontaneously several times in his play Lonely People (1891), when Miss Mahr twice “changes colour,” when Kitty goes “red,” and when Mrs. Vockerat’s “colour changes.”⁸⁹ Maeterlinck, who began his playwriting career in the 1890s, asks for blushing in his play Betrothal (1921): the silent white-shrouded woman’s “colour comes and goes,” and there are also several references to her spouse blushing and paling.⁹⁰

Shaw put it into his plays as well. He calls for Gloria “blushing unendurably” at the end of act 2 of You Never Can Tell (1897), but “she covers her face with her hands and turns away,” giving the actress an easy way out of the physiological challenge. In Man and Superman, Octavius produces “an eloquent blush” and then immediately runs off.⁹¹ As with so many of Shaw’s excessively discursive stage directions, the instruction to blush seems to serve a narrative purpose; it may be more for the reader than for the actor. But, given his admiration for Duse’s blush, we may fairly surmise that his playwriting draws directly on what he has witnessed an actor do on stage and deeply admired. Roach notes that the fastidious Shaw was “clearly embarrassed” by Duse’s body but “couldn’t stop writing about it.” This is why his assessment of her “equivocates between zoocentrism and extreme idealism—the divine special creation of womankind.”⁹² Shaw describes Duse as “ambidextrous and supple, like a gymnast or a panther,” yet distinct from the animals by that “high quality” of the human, eschewing “explosion of those passions which are common to man and brute”; behind every gesture is “a distinctively human idea.”⁹³ But this is more than just the “asexual’s ambivalence about the animal body. Shaw wants to separate women from beasts as well as mind from body.”⁹⁴ Susan Bassnett writes that it was precisely this defiance of categorization—Was she a new kind of female? Was she beast or human? Was she natural or artificial?—that entranced critics, who noted how she “portrayed inner struggle, how she rejected make-up and corsets and tinted hair in favour of natural physical decay and change, how she emphasized the pause and the infinitesimal movement rather than the wide gesture. . . . [they all seem to suggest that] Duse was insisting on representing a femininity that had nothing to do with artifice . . . [or] with feminism.”⁹⁵ Not until the “third phase” of her career, after about 1909, did Duse espouse feminism, beginning to play women “who celebrate their Otherness and who impose their will upon the world around them. Woman may still suffer, but she survives and is a source of life and energy.”⁹⁶

Women’s bodies on stage carried atavistic connotations, signifying the primordial and the hidden: the emotions on display might only scratch the surface of a deep inner life. And this possibility of concealment of what Roach calls the “iceberg” beneath the merest look or gesture gave a new kind of power to the actress. Sos Eltis points out that from the 1890s onward, actresses increasingly show emotion through its suppression, acting crying by suppressing it rather than sobbing hysterically. Mrs. Patrick Campbell was famous for blowing her nose instead of crying.97 Firsthand accounts of Duse playing Nora Helmer note this lack of emotional ostention: when “the misfortune happens [Duse] makes no desperate attempt to resist it, she gives no hysterical cry of fear, as a meaner soul would do in the struggle for life,” this last phrase echoing Spencer and Darwin. “Duse’s Nora hastily suppresses the first suggestion of fear.”⁹⁸ Elizabeth Robins’s unpublished play The Mirkwater has Felicia utter an “inarticulate cry.”⁹⁹ Gerhart Hauptmann has Mrs. Vockerat “forcibly repressing her excessive emotion” in Lonely People.¹⁰⁰ In act 1 of Hedda Gabler, finally alone on stage, Hedda crosses to the window, raises her clenched fists “as if in rage”, and yanks open the curtains, wordlessly conveying her deep frustration. Which comes first, these gestures of suppression by actresses, or playwrights inscribing them into their plays? And how do these instances relate to the broader discourse on human evolution?

Duse’s acting hinged on restraint; she used “more contained gestures” rather than grand ones.¹⁰¹ She emphasized separate parts of the body rather than giving a notion of wholeness as in the grand gesture style of acting.¹⁰² Luigi Rasi, a fellow actor, thought that the basis for Duse’s acting was creating la faccia convulsiva (the distorted face), normally associated with mental illness.¹⁰³ This resonates with the distorted faces of the mentally ill subjects in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions and the empty, forward-facing stare that accompanied Robins’s “autistic gesture” as Hedda Gabler. Duse likewise used her eyes to speak: “Her tormented eyes screamed at us in silence.”¹⁰⁴

Rhonda Blair, in her study of acting and cognitive science, mentions Duse’s blush as evidence of an actor using what Sanford Meisner calls “true emotion.” For Meisner, Duse’s blush in her performance as Magda was “‘the epitome of living truthfully under imaginary circumstance, which is my definition of good acting.’”105 It is surprising that in a book whose starting point is the biological basis of the actor’s art there is no attempt to understand how Duse achieved this feat. One possible route might be through a hypnosis-like “suggestible state” in which “stimuli contrary to an impulse or command are ignored,” and consciousness functions as normal but without the inhibiting element of self-doubt: in other words, the subject under hypnosis can “blush on command because she doesn’t doubt that she can. She tells her brain that she has received some stimulus that demands a blush, and the brain sends the appropriate signals to the body, regardless of whether or not the stimulus exists.”¹⁰⁶ It is a kind of neurological trickery.

Darwin was evidently fascinated by the phenomenon of the blush; he devotes an entire chapter of Expression of the Emotions to “Self-Attention, Shame, Shyness, Modesty: Blushing,” and it begins with the statement that “blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush.”¹⁰⁷ He also claimed that blushing was exclusive to humans, although on his voyage with the Beagle he observed the changing color of an octopus and likened it to blushing.¹⁰⁸ After extensive discussion, Darwin concludes that it is attention to personal appearance rather than one’s moral conduct that causes blushing.¹⁰⁹ He seems conscious not only of the paradox of performed concealment associated with shame but also of its fruitfulness for the artistic imagination. And, although blushing does not necessarily depend on an audience—humans can blush in solitude or even in the dark—it is still due to the thought of what others think of us, projecting ourselves performing “acts” in front of others.¹¹⁰ Long before mirror neurons were discovered that would help to explain this phenomenon scientifically, Darwin concludes from this that it is other people’s “close attention” to our bodies, in particular our faces, that triggers blushing.

Earlier studies posited that blushing was God’s way of encouraging sympathy between people. Thomas Burgess, in The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (1839), wrote that “such adaptation and harmony of arrangement as here evinced, could never be the effect of chance; on the contrary, in every link of the chain which combines all the organs engaged in the production of [blushing], there is a palpable evidence of Design.”111 Darwin uses the blush as evidence against creationism, since it makes little sense: “Those who believe in design, will find it difficult to account for shyness being the most frequent and efficient of all the causes of blushing, as it makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them.”¹¹² Nor would this account for the universality of blushing, regardless of race, which Darwin discusses at some length, and for the fact that “almost every strong emotion, such as anger or great joy, acts on the heart, and causes the face to redden.”¹¹³

Darwin describes the underlying physiological changes that happen during emotions associated with blushing: the heart beats rapidly and breathing is disturbed, which “can hardly fail to affect the circulation of the blood within the brain.”¹¹⁴ Bassnett suggests that Duse was able to recognize, simulate, and successfully manipulate such physical states within her own body and could manufacture the blush through a “simple technical device of holding her breath and keeping the tension in the chest which would cause a rush of blood to the face and head.”¹¹⁵ The apparent ease and speed with which she could change color belies the difficulty of controlling such complex physiological and emotional processes. One critic described how Duse’s “cheeks went from blush to pallor with incredible rapidity,” and others commented on her suddenly going pale as Nora in the tarantella dance (surely a feat, given the frenzy of physical activity that dance demands).¹¹⁶ Again, Darwin’s observations are pertinent, suggesting that “in some rare cases paleness instead of redness is caused under conditions which would naturally induce a blush. For instance, a young lady told me that in a large and crowded party she caught her hair so firmly on the button of a passing servant, that it took some time before she could be extricated; from her sensations she imagined that she had blushed crimson; but was assured by a friend that she had turned extremely pale.”¹¹⁷ In this case, the young lady’s mortification stemmed from her being publicly embarrassed and was registered on her face in a way that even she herself was not aware of, or had misunderstood, showing the strong causal link between blushing or paling and the perception of the self as performer.

Duse’s controlled blushing and paling seems to defy science even while it harnesses it, and with such extreme control that she could distinguish different mechanisms for these two physiological effects based on mental power and concentration. She developed this organic technique when there are other, easier ways to express shame (the most common emotion associated with blushing, and with the fallen woman, as Magda is); as Darwin points out, people more often avert their heads or look downward, their “eyes wavering or turned askant,” than show a change of skin color when ashamed or embarrassed.118 These are actions redolent of acting manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no doubt still found in melodramas in Duse’s time; it is significant that she avoids them. Darwin devotes several paragraphs to “movements and gestures which accompany blushing.”¹¹⁹ He notes “the strong desire for concealment” that accompanies shame, which is paradoxical for an actor in full public view, yet is completely consistent with the trend toward showing emotion by its suppression.

Duse’s blush was thus a potent signifier for its knowing audience—this one gesture showed the desire for concealment due to public shame, the evidence of guilt, but also the feat of the actress who after all in a realistic play is pretending to be unaware of an audience watching her—bypassing, or even hijacking, the normal trigger for a blush (“close attention”) to induce it herself. This was part of her overall, ongoing experimentation with how to show emotion nonverbally and through the attempt to suppress it.

James Agate describes Duse’s Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea in 1923 as “pure passion divorced from the body yet expressed in terms of the body.”¹²⁰ How is this Cartesian paradox achieved? Duse illustrates how acting at this time is in transition from more stylized nineteenth-century modes to deep psychological realism; her acting embodies this transition, and the key point is that audiences hold these two seemingly opposed styles in their horizon of expectations at the same time.¹²¹ Duse’s acting was “based on fluidity, on a physicalizing of dynamic internal processes”; Luigi Pirandello noted how Duse’s technique was “a technique of movement. A constant, gentle flowing that has neither time nor possibility of stopping, and certainly not of crystallizing itself into predetermined behaviour.”¹²² The link to evolution here is pronounced: the strong Bergsonian overtones in this description of Duse’s “fluidity” and “flowing,” signaling a new concept of time in acting, combine with the Darwinian emphasis of showing the body’s “dynamic internal processes.”