The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative

The Problem of Romantic Love: Shakespeare and Evolutionary Psychology

The Problem of Romantic Love: Shakespeare and Evolutionary Psychology Marcus Nordlund What is the nature of love? This is an ambitious question, and one that has inspired innumerable literary works. Perhaps for this reason the philosopher Jon Elster thinks we can learn more about an emotion like romantic love “from moralists , novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology.”1 But here we encounter a major obstacle since most of the academic experts on literature that might elucidate these insights have so far lacked a theoretical framework of corresponding dignity. For example, the otherwise eminent Shakespearean critic Richard Levin gives voice to a broad consensus among literary critics with his assertion that “what is called romantic love cannot be universal , natural, or essential because it is socially constructed, and we know this because it is constructed differently in different societies.”2 To someone who is versed in modern evolutionary theory, this position is bound to appear misguided since it revives an obsolete dichotomy between nature and culture and assumes that cultural variation in a trait or behavior is sufficient evidence that it is “cultural ” rather than “natural.” So whether or not we can learn “more” from literary works than from scientific psychology, it seems likely that our analysis of the former will benefit from some awareness of the latter. In what follows, I will be making two claims. First, I will suggest that love, and more specifically romantic love, is not a social construction in any useful or meaningful sense of the word. This assumption will be supported with evidence from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Together with modern research into psychosexual dimorphism, the proposed universality of love will then underpin my second objective, which is to give a very brief example of the interaction between an evolved human nature, a specific historical environment, and literary genre in two plays by William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well.3 107 Is Love a Social Construction? In 1995, Anne Beall and Robert Sternberg argued in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that love is a “social construction that reflects its time period because it serves an important function in a culture.” The authors address the question of love’s potential universality by means of four theoretical hypotheses, choosing to side with the following view: “Love is not a universal experience. It changes according to its cultural milieu and is viewed differently in numerous cultures.” This claim is based on a broad, but necessarily rhapsodic, account of historical and cultural differences. They show how love can vary in terms of its object as well as function in a society, and they rightly point out that “an essential part of one’s experience of love is one’s conceptualization of it.”4 The latter point is also supported by means of a brief but exemplary discussion of the cognitive component in love; that is, how our beliefs and expectations affect our experience. Let me first outline some points of agreement between Beall and Sternberg’s argument and the Darwinian perspective I adopt here. Human beings are cultural beings whose emotional experience is at least partly shaped and channeled by the governing assumptions of their societies. Beall and Sternberg also respect the fact that it is difficult to understand human beings or societies merely “from outside” since we must also take their own self-understanding and governing beliefs into account. But then we get to the central premise that “love is a social construction” because it is not everywhere the same. In itself, the perception of cultural and historical variation is a truism that can, at best, serve as the starting point for a deeper and more sophisticated analysis. Indeed, Beall and Sternberg do not appear to consider a rather obvious rejoinder to their argument: that the very notion of love as something that is experienced and conceptualized differently in various cultures necessarily presupposes that it is precisely a single phenomenon (rather than a random set of phenomena that happen to have been grouped together). This is not a mere play on words. So far as I can tell, Beall and Sternberg can respond to this complaint in two different ways. One is to emphasize the aspect of difference even further, so that different cultures and forms of love are seen as truly incommensurate. But in that case they should really...