cleanliness.” In the midst of his most important statement on human evolution, Darwin narrated his break with Wallace as a disagreement over the origins and purposes of body hair: where Wallace saw divine determination, Darwin saw individual choice.
“CHOICE” FOR DARWIN did not necessarily involve anything one might now consider deliberation or calculation on the part of the chooser. “As far as sexual selection is concerned,” Darwin wrote, “all that is required is that choice should be exerted.”21 Even if the individual member of a species does not intend to produce consequences on the bodies of his remote descendants, consequences there will be. As Darwin put it, “[A]n effect would be produced, independently of any wish or expectation on the part of the men who preferred certain women to others.”22 He repeated this point for emphasis: “[U]nconscious selection would come into action.”23 The potential for unconscious selection is key, since, again, the theory was developed to account for those features, such as hairlessness, which were, in Darwin’s words, “of no service” to animals “in their ordinary habits of life.”24 Man’s “partial loss of hair,” Darwin argued, is thus one of those “innumerable strange characters . . . modified through sexual selection.” It is not hard to believe, he assured, that a characteristic as injurious as hairlessness had been acquired in this way; for “we know that this is the case with the plumes of some birds, and with the horns of some stags.” Although unwieldy horns and plumes might obstruct key activities such as eating or escaping predators, females might find them attractive enough that, over time, an aberrant trait might eventually become widespread.25
But herein lies the problem. Quite unlike the fancy horns of the Irish elk or the resplendent plumage of the Bower-bird, human hairlessness is, according to Darwin’s own examples, a cultivated characteristic, the product of meticulous care. “[M]en of the beardless races,” Darwin himself wrote, “take infinite pains in eradicating every hair from their faces, as something odious, whilst the men of the bearded races feel the greatest pride in their beards,” and care for them accordingly.26 While sexual selection might well explain characteristics that seem to confer no other evolutionary advantage, the question remains as to exactly how one confers the effects of ornamental grooming on one’s offspring.
So how did early humans lose their hairy covering, if not through the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the very principle, proposed by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that Darwin is generally credited with refuting? At this key juncture of the Descent of Man, Darwin skirted the Lamarckian implications of his explanation by employing the passive voice:
As far as the extreme intricacy of the subject permits us to judge, it appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex, and transmitted them to man as he now exists. The females apparently were first denuded of hair in like manner as a sexual ornament.27
How that “first denudation” happened, occurring as it did when denudation was of no particular service, remains murky.
THE MURKINESS OF this narrative did not elude critics. One particularly witty 1871 satire by Richard Grant White—Shakespeare scholar, journalist, and father of the architect Stanford White—highlighted the problems posed by Darwin’s account of the great denudation by retelling the story of man’s descent from the point of view of gorillas (figure 3.1).28
The story of The Fall of Man, the gorilla narrator tells us, began “[l]ong ago,” when, through a “deplorable freak of nature,” one male gorilla was born deformed, almost entirely without hair. But the gorilla was not shunned; rather, many of the young female gorillas, showing the “unaccountable caprice of their sex,” developed “a hankering after this young fellow.” He declared himself “not a marrying gorilla” and announced to his crowd of yearning females that “until he found one whose coat was even softer and slighter than his own, he [w]ould remain a bachelor.”29 A particularly lovesick female gorilla grew determined to win his favor. Day and night, she fretted over how to rid herself of her “disgusting coat of coarse hair.”30
One fateful day the lonely, lovesick gorilla sat down against a tree to muse on her problems, without realizing that the tree was coated with thick, half-dried gum. While she sat there pining, “[t]he hair on the outside of her arm [became] imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast.”31 As there were no other gorillas nearby to help free her, the young female decided that she had no option other than to rip herself free: “Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.”32 Once her pain passed, the gorilla worried that she might now be even more repulsive to the object of her affection, given the raw, bare patch on her arm. But before long, the gorilla narrator continues,
Figure 3.1. Richard Grant White satirizes Darwin’s explanation of the relative hairlessness of “man” (1871).
[S]he was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason. . . . [S]he thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, . . . therefore (but who of us can tell what therefore means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all.33
THUS SHE BEGAN. She remained hidden in seclusion as she returned to the gum tree week after week, until she had denuded her entire body with this “new depilatory.” When her “sacrificial transformation” was finally complete and she revealed herself to the male gorilla, he was totally enamored by the smooth limbs that “all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight.”34 She continued her self-treatments with the gum tree, and also continued to conceal the “artifice [to which] she owed her hairless skin.”35 When she later gave birth to a relatively hairless boy, the narrative concludes, the baby “inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, ‘therefore’ and ‘I am ashamed.’”36
The Fall of Man made comically explicit what Darwin, Wallace, and Stebbing left implicit: stories about body hair reveal larger assumptions about suffering, choice, and what ultimately separates “man” from other animals. Whether a “superior intelligence” plucked the hair from savage men to drive them to tailoring and brick-laying, or whether some early ape determined the course of this “sacrificial transformation,” explications of humans’ relative hairlessness conveyed implicit social values.
AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS, WELL aware of the profound implications of Darwin’s ideas, largely ignored or outright rejected the claims made in Descent through much of the century. But already by the mid-1870s, American botanists, geologists, and ethnologists were adopting evolutionary frameworks and applying them to their work. Coinciding with sociologists’ interest in the historical implications of competitive forces, Darwinian ideas were absorbed into American thought more broadly.37
The influence of evolutionary vocabularies is manifest in post-Descent representations of extraordinarily hairy people, many of whom were displayed in nineteenth-century circuses and freak shows as “dog-faced men” or “bearded ladies.”38 The celebrated midcentury performer Julia Pastrana provides a case in point (figure 3.2). Prior to the Civil War, exhibition handbills characterized the famously hairy Pastrana as a “hybrid” of woman and “Ourang-Outang,” a member of a “race of savages” from Mexico, or the offspring of an Indian and a bear. Said to possess exquisite moral and temperamental faculties, Pastrana allegedly represented that point “where man’s bestial attributes terminate and . . . those that are Divine
