, never one to hide his influences, made sexual selection the engine of The Sun Also Rises (1926). The novel’s famous wound—Jake Barnes’s impotence—is a literal failure of male fitness. He cannot compete in the mating game, and he must watch as Brett Ashley, the ultimate selective female, moves from the virile but violent Romero to the wealthy but passive Cohn. Hemingway’s cold, reportorial style mimics a field biologist’s notes: Brett’s desire for Romero is described as a purely animal response to his "good legs" and "confidence." Love, here, has fully descended into sexual selection, stripped of illusion.
, he looks at how social selection mirrors natural selection. Edith Wharton: Her novels, such as The House of Mirth , never one to hide his influences, made
The professor’s new assistant, Julian Croft, arrived from Baltimore with a freshly printed degree and a habit of leaning too close when Clara pointed out the covert barbs on a male tanager. He was handsome in a way that seemed almost performative—wide shoulders, a voice that resonated like a tuning fork, and eyes the color of well-worn mahogany. The other women in the boardinghouse whispered about him. Clara measured him the way she measured everything: by deviation from the mean. He was handsome in a way that seemed