Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature - Softcover

Barash, David P.; Barash, Nanelle R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440241847 ISBN 13: 9780440241843

Publisher: Dell, 2008

Synopsis

What can elephant seals tell us about Homer’s Iliad?

How do gorillas illuminate the works of Shakespeare?

What do bloodsucking bats have to do with John Steinbeck?

Madame Bovary's Ovaries

A Darwinian Look at Literature

According to evolutionary psychologist David Barash and his daughter Nanelle, the answers lie in the most important word in biology: evolution. Just like every animal from mites to monkeys, our day-to-day behavior has been shaped by millions of years of natural selection. So it should be no surprise to learn that the natural forces that drive animals in general and Homo sapiens in particular are clearly visible in the creatures of literature, from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones all the way to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones. Seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, the witty repartee of Jane Austen’s courting couples, Othello’s tragic rage, the griping of Holden Caulfield, and the scandalous indiscretions of Madame Bovary herself all make a fresh and exciting kind of sense.

The ways we fall in—and out—of love, stand by our friends, compete against our enemies, and squabble with our families have their roots in biological imperatives we share not only with other primates but with an amazing array of other creatures. The result is a new way to read, a novel approach to novels (and plays) that reveals how human nature underlies literature, from the great to the not-so-great.

Using the cutting-edge ideas of contemporary Darwinism, the authors show how the heroes and heroines of our favorite stories have been molded as much by evolution as by the genius of their creators, revealing a gallery of characters from Agamemnon to Alexander Portnoy, who have more in common with birds, fish, and other mammals than we could ever have imagined.

As engaging and informative as a good story, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries is both an accessible introduction to a fascinating area of science and a provocatively sideways look at our cherished literary heritage. Most of all, it shows in a delightfully enteraining way how science and literature shed light on each other.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author

David Barash is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the author of two dozen books, including The Myth of Monogamy, written with his wife, psychiatrist Judith Lipton.

Nanelle Barash is currently studying biology and literature at Swarthmore College.
From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
The Human Nature of Stories

A Quick Hit of Bio-Lit-Crit

Othello isn't just a story about a jealous guy. Huckleberry Finn isn't just a rebellious, headstrong kid. Madame Bovary isn't just a horny married woman. As students, we are told about various ways to understand fiction: that Othello may also teach us about deceit and loyalty (among other things), how Huck will tell us about the American national character, that Madame Bovary will help reveal the meaning of social transgression. In addition, those who get deep and sophisticated enough may be urged to examine what they read from various perspectives: those of Marx, Freud, Jung, or maybe the French literary theorists Derrida or Foucault, not to omit feminist and "queer studies," socioeconomic analyses, and the historical facts of each author's personal biography. The list is nearly endless: New Criticism, old criticism, new historicism, old historicism, critical theory, and sometimes crackpot theory.

It's all fine, up to a point. No one has a monopoly on how to read what others have written. There is much to be said for examining literature as a reflection of class struggle (Marx), unconscious drives (Freud), power relations (Foucault), social mores, sexual repression, historical forces, or even—as postmodernists often insist—of "texts" that signify nothing more than themselves. But in fact, Othello is a story about a jealous guy. Huck Finn is a rebellious, headstrong boy. And Madame Bovary is a horny married woman.

The reason Othello is still being read and performed five hundred years after Shakespeare wrote it is because this play tells us something timeless and universal ...not so much about a fellow named Othello but about ourselves. It speaks to the Othellos within everyone: our shared human nature. Othello the play is about a jealous guy, and, as we shall see, jealousy is a particularly potent and widespread human emotion, one to which men are especially vulnerable. That's precisely why it's okay to talk about Othello or Madame Bovary or Huckleberry Finn in the present tense: they live on, at least in part, because they have distinctly human characteristics that transcend the artistry by which they were depicted. Their tribulations, responses, loves and hates, fears and delights are in some way recognizable to all readers, to marvel at, agree or disagree with, learn from, or be shocked by.

It may be startling to some—especially those who have not kept up with recent advances in biological science—but the evidence is now undeniable that much of human life is not socially constructed. In short, even though learning and cultural traditions exert a powerful influence, there also exists an underlying human nature, universally valid and characteristic of all Homo sapiens. People live in many different places, following many different traditions and cultural trajectories, but beneath this wonderful diversity there is something else that is equally wonderful, and maybe even more so: a common thread of recognizable humanity, woven of human DNA and shared by everyone who reads and writes (as well as those who don't). Othello's jealousy, Huck's rebelliousness, and Emma's urges are just three examples of that common thread.

In his advice to the traveling players, Hamlet suggested that the role of the artist is to hold a mirror up to nature—not, as some theorists would have it, to hold a mirror up to another mirror and thereby reflect only the infinite emptiness of mirrors. The "nature" at issue here isn't wild animals, pretty landscapes, or magnificent wilderness, but human nature. And human nature isn't like a
unicorn or some other mythical beast. It exists. It does so because human genes exist and have produced a different kind of creature than horse genes or hyacinth genes have. "Read deeply," writes Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why, "...not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads."

As Bloom intuits, connecting literature and human nature isn't really all that new. Until recently, in fact, our most enduring images of human nature have resided in literature. Where better to find it? Psychology, for instance, didn't even exist until scarcely a hundred years ago, and during most of the twentieth century, it was torn between two equally unhelpful poles: the semimystical mythologizing of Freud and the sterile behaviorism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner. Anyone wanting to get a sense of human nature in, say, the Bronze Age can do no better than to excavate among the words of Homer, or for the Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare.

Universal human nature was perceived thousands of years ago by our greatest storytellers, from the early authors of the Hindu Mahabharata, the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to Virgil's Aeneid and the writings of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. It wasn't until Charles Darwin, however, that the scientific basis for human nature was identified. Actually, some of the most important breakthroughs didn't occur until a century and more after Darwin, when the genetic basis of evolution by natural selection was discovered and its implications for human behavior were made clear.

These breakthroughs haven't had much direct effect on the conscious creation of literature, but we hope to show that they can be immensely useful in its interpretation, since they help the reader to see what was always there, albeit generally unacknowledged by writers and readers alike. Roland Barthes's celebrated essay "The Death of the Author" proclaimed that the intentions of an author do not matter in interpreting his or her text. We agree, to a point. It doesn't matter, for example, whether authors are intentionally presenting a biologically accurate view of human beings. In fact, it is even more telling if they have no such aim and yet end up doing just that; nature whispers within their work nonetheless. Just as it did among the ancients, biology continues to flourish inside the best of our modern writers.

The key concept is that human beings, like all other living things, are biological critters, products of evolution by natural selection. As a result, people are strongly inclined to behave in ways that enhance their fitness. Not physical fitness, although being strong, smart, and healthy can certainly help. Rather, fitness is the fundamental evolutionary bottom line: a measure of success in projecting genes into the future. If living things seek food when hungry, sleep when tired, have sex when horny, if they scratch when they itch, do a good job of pumping their blood, and learn to keep their heads down when predators are about, it is because those who do so have been more successful in promoting genes for eating, sleeping, mating, scratching, pumping, hiding, and so forth. Such individuals are, in short, more fit than other individuals whose ancestors were less adroit (or, to be more accurate, whose genes were). This means that whatever else they may be--artful manipulators of language and symbol, composers of symphonies, splitters of atoms no less than of logs—human beings are concatenations of genes that have evolved to do their best at copying themselves and then kicking those copies into the future.

This does not mean that everyone is desperately seeking to have as many children as possible, or even necessarily to survive. But since we have inherited the genes of men and women who did reproduce and survive, we unconsciously behave in ways designed to enhance our success in doing so, that is, to benefit what biologists call our fitness. These behaviors are the stubborn, indelible core of human nature. To be sure, human beings have also been blessed, or cursed, with unique self-consciousness and the ability to say no (at least on occasion) to their biological inclinations. Breathing, too, is part of our human, and animal, nature. So is digesting. We cannot say no to them. By contrast, people are not absolutely obliged to have children or even to have sex, not to mention engage in the other, more arcane activities we shall shortly explore. Human beings can and sometimes do say no to many of the fitness-enhancing tendencies that make up human nature. But this doesn't mean that those tendencies aren't there. Indeed, even the occasional decision to say no, and the conscious effort it requires, is testimony to the existence of those deep, internal yearnings in the first place; otherwise, there would be nothing to rebel against. All of this means that people, whether they acknowledge it or not, are fitness-focused creatures. And that isn't all. As we shall explore in chapters ahead, an evolutionary view of human nature goes beyond simply identifying the importance of fitness itself to make specific predictions as to how human beings are likely to behave depending on whether, for example, they are men, women, children, parents, someone's friend, or someone else's enemy.

Although evolutionary biology is so new that it deserves in many ways to be called "revolutionary biology," the idea that great literature reflects certain human universals is actually as old as literary analysis itself, having been foreshadowed in the first organized attempt to make sense of fiction, Aristotle's Poetics. "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history," wrote the great Greek himself, "since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." By "poetry," Aristotle meant creative fiction, not just poetry in the narrow sense but also theater (novels were unknown in his day). His point is that the power of poetry lies in its ability to capture fundamental truths about the human condition, including, most notably, the way people act . . . which, in turn, derives from the nat...

About this edition

• Publisher: Dell
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0440241847
• ISBN 13: 9780440241843
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384