On the train to Tecumseh, Indiana, where she will contest her divorce,
Marcia Hubbard sees a newlywed couple's "loving rapture," and Howells
remarks that this "spectacle . . . must have recalled the blissful abandon of
her own wedding journey" ( A Modern Instance425). Penning this in 1882,
Howells was certainly aware of the great change in his own thoughts on
courtship and marriage since he had begun Their Wedding Journey late in
1870. The difference is perhaps most evident in the wilderness scenes that
had become a stock element in his novels. Whereas at first he had projected
a benign view of the Darwinian reality wherein two faintly animalistic
lovers were innocently attracted to each other, often in entangled gardens
or near the sea, now, in the story of Bartley and Marcia (which contains
Howells's first open references--in fiction--to Darwin and "Darwinism"
[106, 33]), the corresponding wilderness scene depicts the lovers as they
drive through an ominous landscape: frozen, "darkly wooded," and like a
stormy "white sea" (53-54). "It was all wild and lonesome" in this scene of
"siege" and "struggle" that ends in figurative shipwreck, when the lovers'
carriage or "light boat leaping over a swift current" meets the "cutter" or
"old ark" that carries Hannah Morrison (54, 56). Instead of providing the
male with a single, idealized lover (as was invariably the case in the earlier
novels), Howells's wilderness scene emphasizes the struggle of sexual selec-
tion by providing the male with a choice of mates and implying his pro-
miscuous desire.

My underlying thesis in the following discussion of A Modern In-
stance is that, in a milieu of "competing Social Darwinisms," when virtually
everyone was an evolutionist and to some extent a "Darwinist," Howells

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