It’s Alive! Or not. Just because a highly intriguing, informative and amusing book — in its Darwinian take on fiction — merges science and literature, doesn’t mean that biologists analyzing belles-lettres has led to the creation of a literary Frankenstein. Neither are evolutionary biologists, sociobiologists, behavioral ecologists, Darwinian anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists — like angry villagers raising reading lights aloft and storming University English Department ivory towers — going to be demanding the replacement of Derrida texts with DNA tests in their efforts to explore the nature of human nature.
“Our intent,” notes authors David P. Barash and his daughter Nanelle R. Barash of Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look At Literature, "is not to sweep away any current literary theories in favor of science,” but to provide “a useful tool to add to each reader’s kit.” In a twofold manner, they extend the concept that people are biological creatures sharing a universal, evolved nature - and add to this premise the principle that evolutionary psychology, in discovering a wealth of information about human behavior, offers much in the way of gratifying and worthy insights into the world of fiction as well as fact.
In their accessible, conversational style and straightforward approach to a new and, as they admit, a controversial study, the Barashes’ aim is to describe some key ideas in modern Darwinian behavioral biology and explain how they apply to and thrive in literature. Furthermore, main chapter topics on such writers, titles and characters as Othello, Jane Austen, Gone With The Wind, Madame Bovary, The Godfather, Cinderella, The Three Musketeers, Catcher In The Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Of Mice and Men are used as springboards to segue into similar and other relevant subjects — creating a diverse and widely-encompassing work.
In illustration of this branching-out, the examination of sexual selection, or choice of mates, starts off centering on Jane Austen, “poet laureate of female choice,” whose novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, explore “universally acknowledged” truths about single men in want of a wife and the jockeying of social and material positioning that goes on in the name of hypergamy, or “marrying up.” The Barashes maintain that the young ladies in Austen’s novels look for a husband with much the same criteria as female animals do in their seeking of a mate. “Call them,” the authors state, “the three goods: good genes, good behavior, and good stuff. In other words, looks, personality, and money, although not necessarily in that order.”
Article comments
1 - Purple Tigress
This depends too heavily on familiar European and American literature to be able to make any claims about biology and evolution.
Also, it is limited to knowledge of European culture and an emphasis of Judeo-Christian traditions. If 1/5 of the world population is Chinese and another 1/5 is Muslim, and we haven't begun to talk about the rest of Africa and Asia...how good can these claims be?
I read this book and found the inclusion of the daughter a bit opportunistic and lacking in a real academic reason.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
3 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Thank you Natalie.
4 - Bliffle
Tigress: but can you show that "Dream Of The Red Chamber" or "Golden Lotus" would lead one to any different conclusion?
5 - Purple Tigress
The first novel was The Tale of Genji. This would not align very well. It was written by a woman who did marry unlike Austen.
As for the reference to Chinese literature, from what I know of the practices of that time, women did NOT choose the men and so the three goods wouldn't work very well. Not with a concubine/slavery system unless you'd like to suggest that slaves, including those in the Confederate South, had a choice?
Further, the madonna/whore complex is a Judeo-Christian problem. Not a Buddhist concept. Probably not a Hindu concept either from what little I know of that religion. So I'm guessing a lot of that would fail in Hindu literature. It would fail in some Persian-Arab literature as well.
One hardly should judge the whole human race without looking at African culture, Arab culture, Muslim culture, Hindu culture, Buddhist culture and Asian culture. It is surprising that one should visit social Darwinism in this age without touching upon race. It's as if the past was...whitewashed?
So even within the European-American traditions, the authors have ignored people like James Baldwin and stayed with an undeniably white cast of authors to make pronouncements about Americans and Europeans.
The topic of gender as a social construct versus gender as a biological construct is an interesting topic. There is also a field of cross-cultural studies in literature. That is why when I read this book, I knew neither were well-qualified to make such claims.
This is popular literature and just like popular psychology, good for the masses, but of little real value