Abstract
This study situates Henry Havelock Ellis’s sexological research within the nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, especially the discussion over sexual selection’s applicability to humanity. For example, Ellis’s monograph on sexual behavior, Sexual Inversion (1897), treated inborn homosexuality as a natural variation of evolutionary mechanisms. This book was situated within a longer study of human sexuality in relation to evolutionary selection. His later works dealt even more directly with Charles Darwin’s concept of selection, such as Sexual Selection in Man (1905). Through Sexual Selection in Man, Ellis asserted that sexual attraction stemmed from a physical cause rather than an innate aesthetic sense. I argue that Ellis’s best-known historical publications, including his work on sexual inversion, were intended to intervene in the contemporary evolutionary debates. This analysis also identifies a specific point where evolutionary theory informed the foundation of sexology as a scientific discipline.
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Notes
The term “eclipse of Darwinism” was originally coined by the evolutionist Julian Huxley. For more on the periodization of the “eclipse,” see Mayr and Provine (1998). Historian Peter Bowler has also written about this period, including a book (1983) and a follow-up article (2005). However, like many historians of evolution, Bowler does not address sexual selection to any significant degree. See recent articles, such as Milam’s (2010), for more on sexual selection during this period.
Ellis’s interest in sex and evolution far predates his interest in homosexuality. He wrote about this explicitly: “Homosexuality was an aspect of sex which up to a few years before had interested me less than any, and I had known very little about it” (Ellis 1939, pp. 349–350).
Ulrichs also made space for other same-sex attractions, such as what we would consider today as bisexuality and circumstantial homosexuality.
It is my hope that this brief overview will contextualize the Darwinian debates for colleagues who do not specialize in this history of evolutionary theories, provide a little on Ellis’s background for colleagues who do not study Ellis, and show how influential Darwin’s work on sexual selection was to Ellis himself.
Ellis read a number of popular books that captured his interest, including Nature Displayed, Harry and Lucy, and various manuals on “natural philosophy, chemistry, and geology; [and chiefly] botany...” (Ellis 1939, p. 59). Also, like Darwin himself, young Ellis voyaged around the world, where he was introduced to natural history by the ship’s well-educated, German steward (Ellis 1939, p. 99).
Ellis was not alone in this melding of science and aesthetics during this period. Of note, the novelist—and fellow evolutionist—Grant Allen preceded Ellis in the combination of art and science, especially through his 1877 book, Physiological aesthetics. Ellis’s marginalia demonstrate the extent to which Grant’s influenced Ellis’s work. Like Ellis, Grant also published on eugenics and sexual selection, among a diverse number of scientific topics, around this time.
Ellis (1939, p. 153) eloquently communicated this sentiment: “I am not a poet, but a dreamer who is also a naturalist and a realist [...] however vast the bounds I delight in, I can only achieve them by planting my feet firmly upon the solid earth.”
Whether or not Ellis decided to become a doctor immediately after reading this passage about Hinton, he marks this occasion as one of the only times he did not hesitate or compulsively weigh his options and instead instantly resolved to become a physician (Ellis 1939, p. 169).
Medicine often allowed a student to study natural history and biology. For example, Darwin’s closest associates, T.H. Huxley and Joseph Hooker, were medically trained evolutionists.
It is my opinion that Ellis’s shyness and his duties as editor of a scientific series—rather than any artistic temperament or disinterest—contributed to his failure to secure a qualification in the London Colleges.
The disagreement between Darwin and Wallace regarding sexual selection is nicely elaborated in Richard’s monograph (2017).
Evelleen Richards (2017, pp. 355–359) has pointed out the embryological and ornithological (i.e. plumage) evidence that Darwin used to establish sexual selection in On the Origin of Species.
Richards (2017, pp. 372–376) has contextualized this disagreement within the social tensions between the “ungentlemanly” Anthropological Society and the Ethnological Society, which was controlled by Darwin and his cohort, and the difference of social positions between Darwin and Wallace.
Darwin and Wallace often focused on different aspects of sexual selection and the causes of sexual dimorphism, especially where female protective coloration was concerned. Though their views did not exactly conflict, they often caused friction with one another. See Richards (2017, pp. 410–416), especially p. 414, for more about the differences between Darwin’s and Wallace’s conceptions and concerns regarding sexual selection. Thierry Hoquet and Michael Levandowsky (2015) also investigate the divergence between Darwin’s aesthetic view of sexual selection and Wallace’s utilitarian view of beauty.
Darwin’s argument about the inherent aesthetic senses of females also served multiple purposes, including connecting human moral and aesthetic abilities to primitive versions exhibited by lower animals. For some, this argument ran against religious sentiment, since it implied that God had not imbued humans with unique, distinguishing qualities that set them apart from other animals. See Jonathan Smith (2006) for more on this topic. However, I focus on an aspect of this debate that did not actively concern itself with this implication, since it did not seem particularly troublesome for Ellis and his theories.
Simon Frankel has pointed to a number of critiques related to sexual selection in animals before the turn of the century, especially the work of Edward Poulton. See Frankel (1994, pp. 162–164) for an assessment of contemporary critiques against sexual selection before 1900. While this article will focus primarily on the application of sexual selection to humanity, Frankel’s chapter provides a useful context for the “eclipse of sexual selection” around 1900.
Wallace increased his resistance to Darwin’s conception of sexual selection by 1865 (Richards 2017, pp. 390–399).
For more on the division between Wallace and Darwin’s views regarding human evolution, leading up to the Descent of Man, see Schwartz (1984).
As a third important event, Ellis had recently married Edith Lees the previous year.
Havelock Ellis to J. A Symonds, 1 July 1892. In MSS 6.8: Letters, Havelock Ellis Collection 1875–1955. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas (hereafter, HRC).
Havelock Ellis to J. A. Symonds, 18 June 1892. In MSS 6.8: Letters, Havelock Ellis Collection 1875–1955, HRC. It should be noted that Ellis gained his case studies of homosexuality from his friends and loved ones, not from a psychiatric institution (Crozier 2000).
Ellis also had to navigate obscenity laws that affected his publications. For more on this, see Bristow (1998).
Havelock Ellis to J. A. Symonds, 1 July 1892. In MSS 6.8: Letters, Havelock Ellis Collection 1875–1955, HRC.
The predominant assumption of female biological inferiority, especially without scientific evidence, chafed Ellis. His analysis of sexual differences between men and women has a definite political undertone. For more on the prevalent use of biological assumptions to justify female inferiority, see Cynthia Eagle Russett (1991).
Alternatively, Margaret Jackson (1994, p. 110) has argued that Ellis’s primary reason for focusing on evolution and tumescence in his study of the sexual impulse was to provide biological justification for patriarchal control of women and their bodies. This argument was subsequently countered by Chiara Beccalossi (2012).
For a short, biographical treatment on Edith Lees and her sexuality in relation to Havelock Ellis, see the chapter “Marriage to Edith” in Brome (1979).
Ellis (1939, p. 162) admitted that his medical training seeped into his writing style, choice of words, and his thoughts on beauty itself, “I supplemented my already acquired tendency—doubtless the outcome of my medical training—to use technical and precise words by a complementary tendency to use also simple and figurative words from vulgar speech, and my imagery became more homely.”
Ellis applied this principle of aesthetic universality to both his scientific and literary work. Other scholars have noted Ellis’s use of sensation in literature. For example, Hugh Davis (2004) noted the assimilation of Ellis’ work on scents as secondary sexual characteristics into James Joyce’s depiction of the Ulysses character Nausicaa.
From these tables, he was able to group colors by their representative literary subjects. For example, if blue and green were the predominant color, the poet was most likely writing about nature since these were the colors of vegetation, the sky, and the ocean. He also attempted to draw general conclusions about the likely disuse of blue and green in some cultures.
“The Colour-Sense in Literature,” MSS 1.6: Havelock Ellis Collection 1875–1955, HRC.
Hekma (1996, p. 234) has argued that the creation of a third-sex identity by Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld emasculated most same-sex-attracted individuals. The new identity did not threaten the virility of “normal” men and, therefore, third-sex identity gained popularity. Crozier (2008c) confirms that this was the case in England before Ellis.
Ellis here refers to a blending of male and female traits reminiscent of Darwin’s blending of gemmules, or hereditary particles that determine an organism’s traits: “In other words, inversion is bound up with a modification of the secondary sexual characters.”
Please note that Ellis’s focus on physiological mechanisms for evolution is distinct from the physical actions that altered a species’s morphological traits as proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the neo-Lamarckians at the time. In Ellis’s case, he proposed that sexual selection was dependent on the physiological process of sexual tumescence. Morphological traits are still important here, of course, but they are not the site for selection itself, which has been relocated to the physiology of sexual excitation instead.
Ellis here provides multiple case studies of inverts with predominantly “masculine” traits, such as Case I, “a manual worker, and also of exceptionally fine physique.” This case shows how an individual who predominantly possesses secondary sexual characteristics of their sex (i.e., a fine physique, etc.) may still be sexually inverted. It is not the fundamentally feminine quality of the individual that makes them a sexual invert, simply the blending of one sex with the opposite sex’s selective impulse.
See for example, Global History of Sexual Science (Fuechtner 2018).
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Alaniz, R.J. Havelock Ellis, Sexology, and Sexual Selection in Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology. J Hist Biol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-024-09760-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-024-09760-0