Tumultuous nineteenth-century political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male–male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists, who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism, and fiction writers, who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from social Darwinism to feminist theory, and propose a more fluid understanding of sex and gender that supersedes the earlier two-sex model.

Chapter four traces the nebulous narrative of degeneration theory in Zola’s La curée, (The Kill) from its origins in medicine to its influence in fiction, and then back to case studies of hermaphrodism. This trajectory reveals how the degeneration diagnosis fundamentally shifted doctor-patient relationships. The French fin-de-siècle natality crisis elevated the stakes of hermaphrodism and non-reproductive sexuality, illustrating how social anxiety can fundamentally alter scientific findings, and how science can, in turn, influence lived experience in fundamental ways. Zola’s obsession with androgyny is merely a partial reflection of what became widespread cultural terror inflected in the writings of numerous authors and doctors, from the well-known Rachilde and Huysmans to the more obscure Armand Dubarry and Dr. Laupts. In La curée, hermaphrodism becomes a scary confluence of scientific, moral, and social anxiety that prefigures its treatment in later nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexology. At the same time, however, Zola’s use of androgyny in La curée unexpectedly subverts his normalizing use of science. By portraying unstable gender identities, La curée undermines the seemingly inexorable calculus of degenerate heredity inherited from medicine and recasts literary naturalism in a new light—less as a derivative of science than as a critic of it.

This chapter explores the close, if often vexed, relationship between the novel and the Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the dominant aesthetic of prose fiction in this period, naturalism, framed itself as an ally of democracy – most directly with its expansion of the novel’s horizons to include, and do justice to, the experience, idiom, and political claims of the working classes. The political use of the naturalist novel as a critical document of social life resided, as Émile Zola saw it, precisely in its declared objectivity. But the form of naturalist fiction produced more contradictions than its theory allowed. This chapter returns the evolution of the naturalist novel to its political context, while tracking the rise of its rival forms (Symbolist and Decadent literature; the psychological novel), which often repudiated those central tenets of the Republic: positivism, scientism, democracy, anti-clericalism. Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget scrutinised the academic and intellectual principles of a generation schooled by the Third Republic, in ways which offered an alternative pedagogy. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the novel had become a prime vehicle for conflicting ideological visions of a nation that was increasingly divided against itself.

Chapter 1: This chapter starts by tracing the development of objectivity in both science and theatre through classical and early modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealizations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. Although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous by the extent to which they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter goes on to show that the emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the antitheatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century ‘objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos, and indeterminacy.