Great piece, thanks. Very creative and interesting approach.
I'd be curious to hear more about what you see evolutionary psychology adding to the analysis or clarifying beyond what historical sociological analysis could provide. I say this as someone who is interested in the application of evolution to culture and aesthetics and thinks this is a very useful direction to pursue. But there often ends up being a certain circularity: evolutionary ideas illustrate principles that we could (and do) extract from the text or from sociology or history without the evolutionary theory. (The same is true, IMO, with cognitive literary studies.) It's made more difficult because evolutionary psychology is still really in its infancy. How do you avoid that? Or am I thinking about this wrong, and just proving that the two are in alignment is an end in itself? What do you think is the way forward for this kind of research?
An anecdote was once passed onto me by Steven Pinker about a promising literary scholar who applied insights from evolutionary psychology to understand the Iliad. He became a pariah and was expelled from the profession.
One of the key inspirations for my thesis (which I might have to totally redo and make about modernism and art instead) was a piece by Brian Boyd called "Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature." This looked like the foundation of what Boyd called "Literary Darwinism", but this seems to have been met with such outcry from the likes of Terry Eagleton that Boyd decided to re-term it "Evocriticism", before abandoning the project more recently to write biographies on Nabokov. (If Boyd ends up reading this, I am happy to be corrected.)
From my point of view, the fact the brain is a very complicated subject does not imply that evolutionary psychology is in its infancy. In effect, the internet and archaeogenetics mean we have more data than ever to conclude certain things about human beings; I favour a hylomorphic approach, treating people as simultaneously autonomous and embodied. But not everyone does. Some are militant about autonoesis, or the self-construction of the self and mind as a real option.
To use an example from archaeology, just because we now have a very famous paper by Volker Heyd called "Kossinna's Smile" from 2017 suggesting that Gustaf Kossinna was right about the Bell Beaker people being an ethnic group--based on the analysis of aDNA--does not mean university students will be taught any less about the cultural relativism of Franz Boaz. That paper also has a gigantic appendix to distinguish its findings from Kossinna's Culture-Historical approach, even as it proves it to be correct.
In short, a great proportion of the humanities still want to believe in Rousseau's blank slate humans, whether or not there is any evidence of their existence.
If any new form of Evocriticism manages to sneak out into the public sphere, it will probably do so outside the academy or at weird experimental institutions like the University of Austin, not that I am entirely convinced that place will succeed where others haven't.
You write "(It should be noted that men always cheat more than women do.)". But this is arithmetically impossible! In a heterosexual world any cheating takes one man and one woman. Sum them up and you'll get an identical total.
The problem with this is it assumes that homogamy, or marrying your male or female "sexual equal", is the historical norm. There is a very good address that Prof. Roy Baumeister gave to the American Psychological Association back in 2007; it's hilariously titled "Is there Anything Good About Men?" In it, he states: "Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men./ I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced."
Some of this can be attributed to the fact that the Y-Chromosome is unstable relative to the XX pairing that women have, causing male "genetic quality" to vary far more. But the issue is multifaceted.
Really enjoyed this terrific essay. It's relevant to a novel I'm working on about an already married couple who have differing ideas of "success."
In the 21st century, women have more cards to play than in Jane Austen's world., including career and divorce. That puts more pressure on the man who is paternally attractive but lacks or has lost the spark of the "rake."
The spark is key -and seems to be something socialised rather than purely genetic. There's a question as to whether the rake actually survived No Fault Divorce and mass democracy; Andrew Tate is the stereotype of something already redundant by the 1950s, it seems to me, just as The Trad Wife is based on the cargo cult of post-war natalist propaganda.
There are serial monogamists who marry many times. The ideal is to provide both security and spark to your partner. Not impossible but it's a high degree of difficulty and luck.
Love this! But I do think that Northanger Abbey's Henry Tilney is notable in his absence here! He seems to play both roles. He's charming, handsome, sweeps naive Catherine off her feet--and then turns out to be a good man and a good husband, too.
Henry Tilney is the ideal man who is both attractive to many women and willing to commit monogamously. Perhaps he would be more of a "player" in another period, yet both his own character and the social norms of the Regency mean that Catherine gets to enjoy having him locked down; in other circumstances this might not be the case (https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article-abstract/22/2/345/207946?redirectedFrom=fulltext).
Also notice Isabella and John Thorpe are both dishonest, flirtatious r-types who live chaotically, and smash up their friends carelessly; Weininger, although an anachronism, would indicate that these are male and female manifestations of the same reproductive strategy inherited from their parents.
The main reason I didn't talk as much about Northanger, or for that matter Persuasion (where the gallant Captain Wentworth serves as another father/lover) is because I want to deal with them at a later date. Whilst Tilney might be considered a very well mastered product of Austen's youthful idealism, the fact Wentworth eventually defeats Mr. William Elliot in Persuasion is significant because it represents the triumph of the middle class military man over the landed aristocrat not previously possible in Pride and Prejudice. This has a lot to do both with Austen's experience of the careers of her brothers Frank and Charles in the navy, and social history generally. The emergence of international British oligarchies like the East India Company increased the number of eligible upstarts on the dating market and arguably displaced the landed gentry who did not wish to prove their manhood at sea in the fantasies of many a female reader.
Will be interested to read what you write about these two novels! Had not considered the social dynamics you mention here. Reminds me of Fanny Price's brother in Mansfield Park, as well, whose naval career allows a man of good character to rise above his original station.
Yes, character obviously plays a role in Tilney's decision making regarding Catherine. And societal norms too. Another interesting foil is his brother Frederick. I've always been curious about how Austen's (fictional) parents shape or do not shape the characters of their children. The siblings in her books so often have diametrically opposed views of acceptable social behavior (rather than simply having distinct personalities). Or extremely sub-par parents manage to produce excellent children. Etc.
I recently had a very interesting interaction with my girlfriend in relation to this: we were watching Keira Knightley's P & P and when it finished she confessed she hated it.
"But why?"
"Because Elizabeth is the only intelligent woman in her whole family and the standard type is Lydia, who is exactly like her mother. Mr. Darcy marrying Elizabeth means that his child will be in all likelihood closer to a silly idiot than it would have been otherwise."
An interpretation of P & P as a deliberate attack against the idea of blood aristocracy, as endorsed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, would be extremely interesting to see.
Yeah there's definitely something there. Like, who are these intelligent young heroines going to grow up to be? Positive models are sparse. Doesn't ruin Jane Austen for me at all, but I understand being bothered by it!
A very interesting take. It applies to an Alan Ayckbourn play I'm directing for an amateur group. The titular and unseen character is the rake with three women dangling. Two have already left him for more solid men and one is tempted to spite the rake she married.
I'm also reminded of David Lodge's take on Austen through the lens of his fictional professor, Morris Zapp, who noted that Austen was a fan of Eros as well as Agape. Functioning people in functioning societies need both.
Fascinating stuff in here. A former colleague of mine did work on rakes in *Sense and Sensibility* and *Mansfield Park*, and I always enjoy a nice meditation on rakishness.
The great actress Brenda Blethyn who played Mrs. Bennet in the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice has some interesting thoughts about Mrs. Bennet's happy willingness to marry off her daughters to the wrong men.
"When I would tell people I was hoping to play this part, they'd say, oh, she's a wonderful cartoon, an over-the-top character. I'd say, no, she's not! She's the only one taking the problem seriously, and it's a real problem. The money goes down the male line. There's no problem as long as Mr. Bennet's alive, so he wasn't too concerned. But (Mrs. Bennet) keeps reminding him."
Mrs. Bennet, perhaps more astutely than her husband or cleverer daughters, sees that the rakes will get off easy, economically as well as socially.
If I remember correctly, Mrs. Bennet was from a lower social class than Mr. Bennet. So it's hardly surprising she is so attuned to the privilege enjoyed by even the worst of the upper class.
Great piece, thanks. Very creative and interesting approach.
I'd be curious to hear more about what you see evolutionary psychology adding to the analysis or clarifying beyond what historical sociological analysis could provide. I say this as someone who is interested in the application of evolution to culture and aesthetics and thinks this is a very useful direction to pursue. But there often ends up being a certain circularity: evolutionary ideas illustrate principles that we could (and do) extract from the text or from sociology or history without the evolutionary theory. (The same is true, IMO, with cognitive literary studies.) It's made more difficult because evolutionary psychology is still really in its infancy. How do you avoid that? Or am I thinking about this wrong, and just proving that the two are in alignment is an end in itself? What do you think is the way forward for this kind of research?
Great question.
An anecdote was once passed onto me by Steven Pinker about a promising literary scholar who applied insights from evolutionary psychology to understand the Iliad. He became a pariah and was expelled from the profession.
One of the key inspirations for my thesis (which I might have to totally redo and make about modernism and art instead) was a piece by Brian Boyd called "Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature." This looked like the foundation of what Boyd called "Literary Darwinism", but this seems to have been met with such outcry from the likes of Terry Eagleton that Boyd decided to re-term it "Evocriticism", before abandoning the project more recently to write biographies on Nabokov. (If Boyd ends up reading this, I am happy to be corrected.)
From my point of view, the fact the brain is a very complicated subject does not imply that evolutionary psychology is in its infancy. In effect, the internet and archaeogenetics mean we have more data than ever to conclude certain things about human beings; I favour a hylomorphic approach, treating people as simultaneously autonomous and embodied. But not everyone does. Some are militant about autonoesis, or the self-construction of the self and mind as a real option.
To use an example from archaeology, just because we now have a very famous paper by Volker Heyd called "Kossinna's Smile" from 2017 suggesting that Gustaf Kossinna was right about the Bell Beaker people being an ethnic group--based on the analysis of aDNA--does not mean university students will be taught any less about the cultural relativism of Franz Boaz. That paper also has a gigantic appendix to distinguish its findings from Kossinna's Culture-Historical approach, even as it proves it to be correct.
In short, a great proportion of the humanities still want to believe in Rousseau's blank slate humans, whether or not there is any evidence of their existence.
If any new form of Evocriticism manages to sneak out into the public sphere, it will probably do so outside the academy or at weird experimental institutions like the University of Austin, not that I am entirely convinced that place will succeed where others haven't.
Thanks again for the exposure, Henry!
Your editing skills are unparalleled.
Not at all it’s a fascinating argument!
Why wouldn’t Wentworth and Darcy count as both erotically and parentally attractive? Seems to me they do.
You write "(It should be noted that men always cheat more than women do.)". But this is arithmetically impossible! In a heterosexual world any cheating takes one man and one woman. Sum them up and you'll get an identical total.
I take him to be claiming that married men cheat more than married women
Also one man can cheat with many women who only cheat once
The problem with this is it assumes that homogamy, or marrying your male or female "sexual equal", is the historical norm. There is a very good address that Prof. Roy Baumeister gave to the American Psychological Association back in 2007; it's hilariously titled "Is there Anything Good About Men?" In it, he states: "Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men./ I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced."
Some of this can be attributed to the fact that the Y-Chromosome is unstable relative to the XX pairing that women have, causing male "genetic quality" to vary far more. But the issue is multifaceted.
Here's the speech if you don't believe me (he's also got a wonderful book out of the same name): https://medium.com/cregox/is-there-anything-good-about-men-by-roy-f-baumeister-d111ba407de3
Really enjoyed this terrific essay. It's relevant to a novel I'm working on about an already married couple who have differing ideas of "success."
In the 21st century, women have more cards to play than in Jane Austen's world., including career and divorce. That puts more pressure on the man who is paternally attractive but lacks or has lost the spark of the "rake."
The spark is key -and seems to be something socialised rather than purely genetic. There's a question as to whether the rake actually survived No Fault Divorce and mass democracy; Andrew Tate is the stereotype of something already redundant by the 1950s, it seems to me, just as The Trad Wife is based on the cargo cult of post-war natalist propaganda.
Has the rake become the serial monogamist?
He's Andrew Huberman.
There are serial monogamists who marry many times. The ideal is to provide both security and spark to your partner. Not impossible but it's a high degree of difficulty and luck.
Isn’t it fascinating? That sounds very interesting you’ll have to lmk when you’ve written it!
Love this! But I do think that Northanger Abbey's Henry Tilney is notable in his absence here! He seems to play both roles. He's charming, handsome, sweeps naive Catherine off her feet--and then turns out to be a good man and a good husband, too.
Excellent point.
Henry Tilney is the ideal man who is both attractive to many women and willing to commit monogamously. Perhaps he would be more of a "player" in another period, yet both his own character and the social norms of the Regency mean that Catherine gets to enjoy having him locked down; in other circumstances this might not be the case (https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article-abstract/22/2/345/207946?redirectedFrom=fulltext).
Also notice Isabella and John Thorpe are both dishonest, flirtatious r-types who live chaotically, and smash up their friends carelessly; Weininger, although an anachronism, would indicate that these are male and female manifestations of the same reproductive strategy inherited from their parents.
The main reason I didn't talk as much about Northanger, or for that matter Persuasion (where the gallant Captain Wentworth serves as another father/lover) is because I want to deal with them at a later date. Whilst Tilney might be considered a very well mastered product of Austen's youthful idealism, the fact Wentworth eventually defeats Mr. William Elliot in Persuasion is significant because it represents the triumph of the middle class military man over the landed aristocrat not previously possible in Pride and Prejudice. This has a lot to do both with Austen's experience of the careers of her brothers Frank and Charles in the navy, and social history generally. The emergence of international British oligarchies like the East India Company increased the number of eligible upstarts on the dating market and arguably displaced the landed gentry who did not wish to prove their manhood at sea in the fantasies of many a female reader.
Will be interested to read what you write about these two novels! Had not considered the social dynamics you mention here. Reminds me of Fanny Price's brother in Mansfield Park, as well, whose naval career allows a man of good character to rise above his original station.
Yes, character obviously plays a role in Tilney's decision making regarding Catherine. And societal norms too. Another interesting foil is his brother Frederick. I've always been curious about how Austen's (fictional) parents shape or do not shape the characters of their children. The siblings in her books so often have diametrically opposed views of acceptable social behavior (rather than simply having distinct personalities). Or extremely sub-par parents manage to produce excellent children. Etc.
I recently had a very interesting interaction with my girlfriend in relation to this: we were watching Keira Knightley's P & P and when it finished she confessed she hated it.
"But why?"
"Because Elizabeth is the only intelligent woman in her whole family and the standard type is Lydia, who is exactly like her mother. Mr. Darcy marrying Elizabeth means that his child will be in all likelihood closer to a silly idiot than it would have been otherwise."
An interpretation of P & P as a deliberate attack against the idea of blood aristocracy, as endorsed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, would be extremely interesting to see.
Yeah there's definitely something there. Like, who are these intelligent young heroines going to grow up to be? Positive models are sparse. Doesn't ruin Jane Austen for me at all, but I understand being bothered by it!
A delightful read. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone wrote a compare-and-contrast for Jane Austen’s and Jilly Cooper’s rakes?
A very interesting take. It applies to an Alan Ayckbourn play I'm directing for an amateur group. The titular and unseen character is the rake with three women dangling. Two have already left him for more solid men and one is tempted to spite the rake she married.
I'm also reminded of David Lodge's take on Austen through the lens of his fictional professor, Morris Zapp, who noted that Austen was a fan of Eros as well as Agape. Functioning people in functioning societies need both.
Fascinating stuff in here. A former colleague of mine did work on rakes in *Sense and Sensibility* and *Mansfield Park*, and I always enjoy a nice meditation on rakishness.
The great actress Brenda Blethyn who played Mrs. Bennet in the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice has some interesting thoughts about Mrs. Bennet's happy willingness to marry off her daughters to the wrong men.
"When I would tell people I was hoping to play this part, they'd say, oh, she's a wonderful cartoon, an over-the-top character. I'd say, no, she's not! She's the only one taking the problem seriously, and it's a real problem. The money goes down the male line. There's no problem as long as Mr. Bennet's alive, so he wasn't too concerned. But (Mrs. Bennet) keeps reminding him."
Mrs. Bennet, perhaps more astutely than her husband or cleverer daughters, sees that the rakes will get off easy, economically as well as socially.
If I remember correctly, Mrs. Bennet was from a lower social class than Mr. Bennet. So it's hardly surprising she is so attuned to the privilege enjoyed by even the worst of the upper class.
Less about biology and more about Marx.