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(2012) Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Like fossil bones stellating a cliff, Edith Wharton's keen interest in evolution appears throughout her works. Critics often note her debt to Darwin and place her in the context of literary naturalism.1 Her narrative patterns, tropes, and even titles like "The Descent of Man" or "The Greater Inclination"2 come from her reading among the evolutionists—not only Darwin but Spencer, Huxley, Haeckel, and George Romanes, among many others. Near the end of her life, Wharton wrote that it was "hopeless to convey to a younger generation the first overwhelming sense of cosmic vastnesses which such "magic casements' let into our little geocentric universe" (Backward 94). Wharton had little trouble with the concept that humans were animal-descendents instead of special acts of creation, or that the mind evolved like the body through material processes. Instead of describing this philosophical shift as a diminution, she writes of wonder, magic, and cosmic vastnesses in the plural, magnifying the sense of expansion. This enlargement refers to more than new knowledge. It shows Wharton's grasp of how naturalistic evolution could redefine an individual's prospects for transcendence.
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Kim, S. (2012). The dark flash: epiphany and heredity in the house of mirth, in Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87-108.
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