It's Like the Night Before Christmas, but with Evolution

Twas the day before class and all through the house, not a creature was stirring because no one was home and my cat was asleep. After attending my first conference and presenting a paper using Literary Darwinism on a panel of the same focus, I sat down to read while visions of Darwinian fitness tests danced in my head. Okay, so it's nothing like "A Visit from St. Nicholas," but I thought I would try since it officially becomes Christmastime after Halloween. I really did present a paper, and I really couldn't shake those Darwinian thoughts. This inability to clear my mind probably explains why I was drawn to two specific characteristics of authorship that seemed to dissuade early American men from picking up the pen. It struck me as interesting that two of the major reasons why the role of the early American male author was shunned dealt with ideas of reproduction and survival.

Based on my reading of my reading of David Leverenz's chapter, "Men Writing in the Early Republic," male authorship was seen as an obstacle to sexual reproduction. Leverenz discusses Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne as examples of that view that male authorship impedes the propagation of one's genetic material: "Irving ... felt a lifelong lack of manliness because he had not married and established a family .... Hawthorne spent twelve years writing solitary tales about the dangers of being a solitary man" (Leverenz 354). A Darwinian reading of those two statements could spawn a nice little paper about the evolutionary role of art as developing cultural values and whatnot, but I'll refrain from going off on a tangent (mostly because it is way too big of an egg to crack for the purposes of this blog and my intellect). An unsuccessful male author (I use the words successful and unsuccessful here as indicators of financial stability) was unable to fulfill his genetic "destiny" so to speak; not only did he spend too much time writing and not copulating, but if the male author did manage to father offspring, he couldn't earn enough money to properly provide for his family. Even if a male author was successful, he still spent too much time writing and not enough time expanding the gene pool or participating in maintaining the physical welfare of society.

Despite these evolutionary tendencies, it should be noted that men still tried to become authors. Authorship must have had some important (dare I say instinctual?) role in human society that must be fulfilled. We all have our reasons for why art is vital, and I would be the last person to say that any one of these reasons is invalid, but the question remains: Why? Why keep pursuing this profession if it goes against one's own thoughts, beliefs, and tendencies? We've discussed this question (or at least a version of it in class), and I am still curious to get closer to the root of the developing role of authorship in the Early Republic. Yeah, I'm sorry for the title. I lured you in with visions of sugar-plums and I gave you an adjective noun of adjective plural noun. Boom! This post just got META! Thanks John Barth!