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The affinities between the passage Beer cites and the work I investigate frame Wharton’s interest in an American citizenry’s gradual acquisition of “mental power and capacity,” and a resultant cultural capital that might curb contingent evolutionary processes. Beer mentions The House of Mirth’s “condensation of sang-froid and violence, private and public [ . . ] where the highly polished surface of Lily Bart’s milieu is crazed with dirt” (Open Fields 281), and she recounts “[a]n engrossing question” explored in Darwin’s Plots that asks “what happens when unforeseen readers appropriate terms and texts” (1).

But to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other” (5). qxp 30 4/17/2006 4:48 PM Page 30 Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” for Wharton’s sensitivity to the presence of social evolution implicit in the hereditary system of values she notes in Balzac is the fact that “she had immersed herself in the skeptical sciences, especially in evolutionary Darwinism, and she understood both manners and morals to be evolved products of slowly altering social and ethical conventions” (Tuttleton “The Fruit of the Tree” 165).

Flashes of reminiscence are the sudden awakening [ . . ] of something we have in our blood; [ . . ’” (60–61). Wharton’s analysis of social and biological heredity represents social change within the terminological framework of Darwinism. Consequently, ideology becomes visible as the medium of cultural transmission and is analogous to the claim of early twentieth-century science that “germ plasm” functioned as the medium of physical heredity. Wharton’s application of theories from the physical sciences to a sociological domain considers social change to proceed from a biological base.