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QUESTIONING THE FATHER: FROM DARWIN TO ZOLA, IBSEN, STRINDBERG, AND HARDY. By Ross Shideler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 226. $45
It has become commonplace, if not a cliche, for book reviewers to conclude their assessments of literary scholarship with the claim that the work in question constitutes "a valuable contribution" to a given field of study. Rarely is this claim more true than in the case at hand. Ross Shideler's study of Darwinism and its impact on major literary works of the late nineteenth century not only examines these works in a new light, but also forces us to rethink our readings of them and, in some instances (particularly that of Strindberg), forwards a new resolution to some of the contradictions in the authorship.
Questioning the Father concentrates on issues of patriarchalism and authority in light of Darwin's (as the author terms it) biocentrism, as Shideler connects Darwin's tacit displacement of the divine father by the notion of nature's self-generation. As the book charts the breakdown of the nuclear, bourgeois family during this period, its methodology also relies heavily (and absolutely appropriately) on feminist and family theory and on Lacan's concept of the "Name-of-the-Father." Ultimately Shideler argues for a correlation between the displacement of God and the undermining of masculine authority for which this period and these works give ample evidence.
The first chapter briefly outlines the antitheses in Darwin's thought, its impulse both towards change and away from it, as he upholds both evolution by natural selection and also (as we less frequently recollect) the inherent superiority of white males over a "purer," idealized woman as well as over the "lesser" races. By decentering "man" in the body of thought with which he is most identified, Darwin restores "man to his kinship with all other forms of life" (p. 25), thereby extending the "family of man" to nature, a notion that displaces God as the ultimate source of male...