From Cultural Inheritance to Hereditarian Determinism

Abstract

This chapter examines the impact of hereditarian determinism on early twentieth-century American literature, tracing the entanglement of scientific discourse and cultural imagination as writers grappled with the moral, political, and aesthetic consequences of biological determinism. Building on the scientific foundations of Francis Galton and Mendelian genetics, the study identifies three interrelated literary strands: the prophetic phase of the 1910s, in which authors celebrated eugenic marriage and the careful cultivation of heredity; the hauntological phase of the 1920s, reflecting anxieties over racial degeneration and national decline in the works of Faulkner, Willa Cather, and others; and the skeptical phase of the 1920–1930s, in which writers including George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman interrogated the scientific and ideological premises of hereditarian thought. By mapping these explorations, the chapter demonstrates how literature functioned as a site for testing, contesting, and reimagining the consequences of hereditarian ideology, revealing both its fascination and its limits, and illuminating the lingering influence of eugenic assumptions on American cultural understandings of identity, race, and human worth.