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c h a p t e r f i v e Endangered Daughters Sex, Mating, and Power in Darwinian Feminist Perspective In her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut. Pat Barker Now here we see the beauty and the great value of the novel. Philosophy , religion, science, they are all of them busy nailing things down, to get a stable equilibrium. . . . But the novel, no. The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance. . . . If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. D. H. Lawrence The Emergence of Darwinian Literary Criticism Evolutionary literary criticism has a rather different recent history from ecocriticism or cognitive approaches to literature. Whereas studies in literature and the environment grew out of the ecology movement initially, and whereas, over several decades, cognitive approaches developed out of the commitment to bring together cognitive research and literary study, evolutionary literary criticism was at first a response to the pervasive antihumanism of the poststructuralist hegemony . Once assertions grounded in French philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic thought—about the instability of language and meaning and about the constructed nature of nearly everything, including identity, sexuality, gender, and human nature—had become commonplace in the 1980s, humanists generally inhabited the discursive subjectivities that Michel Foucault still held in reserve for the deliquesced individual.1 The other option, responding to the heart of poststructuralist claims, not just its radically skeptical epistemology but its strong 218 A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation constructionist impact, was a rather taller order than most literary scholars were willing to take on, and it is hardly surprising that many so readily succumbed to the suddenly unyielding power of the institutional state apparatuses.2 Like all repressive ideologies, however, poststructuralist constructionism, born of “a mood of antinomian rebellion and self-indulgence” though it most assuredly was, had sown the seeds of vigorous discontent.3 Thus, in 1993 and 1996, respectively, Joseph Carroll and Robert Storey published two books that sought to rebut Theory’s reigning skepticism and constructionism by demonstrating that many of its claims were no longer supportable in light of contemporary evolutionary social science, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields. Although Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory and Storey’s Mimesis and the Human Animal : On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation ultimately make very different sorts of connections between our evolved nature and literature, the fundamental thrust of these two seminal texts is the same. Both seek to demonstrate (as Storey’s title makes explicit) that literary representation rests on biogenetic foundations, and both scholars go about this task by presenting evidence that certain features of what we commonly refer to as human nature have a biologically defined character and are not subject to choice or cultural construction. In their wide-ranging use of research across scientific subdisciplines, Carroll and Storey were the first scholars in the literary humanities to display a mastery of current research on human evolution, and in so doing they broke new ground for interdisciplinary research in literary studies. Nevertheless, because of both authors’ unabashed criticism of poststructuralism, and because of the general misconceptions about Darwinian evolution prevailing in the humanities well into the mid-nineties, evolutionary approaches to literature were poorly received until at least the turn of the twenty-first century. (Earlier attempts to establish the evolutionary foundations of the arts, of course, extend back to Darwin’s time.) Now evolutionary approaches are growing in number, although the field’s diversity at present is somewhat masked by the still-predominant thematic emphasis on sex-differential mating strategies and pair bonding. Even though in this chapter I focus on this very topic (as well as the generally ignored, but intimately related , issue of power struggles that arise from differential strategies), it should be clear at the outset that in my view, an evolutionary literary theory approaching Darwinian comprehensiveness would include all of the topics covered in this book and many others besides. In sum, while in this chapter I acknowledges sex and mating as central topics for evolutionary approaches, in the book as a whole I stake a claim for the broader scope and significance of the field. Because Carroll’s goal was to transmute his extended, erudite challenge to [18.221.165.246...

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