“Because We Are Too Menny”

Abstract

This chapter investigates what happens to the novel at a notably post-Darwinian moment. It examines The Odd Women, New Grub Street, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure novels — which explicitly mark their main characters as disposable lives. Telling tales of blocked generational mobility, depleted vital instinct, and failed procreation, these late-Victorian texts dealt a forceful blow to the reproductive future that fiction had once promised. In turning to the 1880s and 1890s and to the novels of Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, the chapter looks beyond the collapse of the marriage plot to a more absolute break with the projected future that marriage had once pledged. Glancing at Gissing's and Hardy's novels, the chapter reveals how unsustainable the marriage plot had become by the 1890s. Ultimately, it illustrates how Hardy's and Gissing's novels at once rely on and resist two contemporaneous discourses: Emile Durkheim's sociology of anomie and August Weismann's germ plasm theory of heredity.