Evolutionary psychologists and (some of) the Victorians

After spending a good while lost on the new Wuthering Heights minisite, we had better take a look around other news today.

For one thing, the Victorians are all-important today. Both the Guardian and the Telegraph carry similar articles on a theory several 'evolutionary psychologists' have developed:

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.
Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.
The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.
They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.
The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. "By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group," they write.
Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. "Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours," he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.
A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.
Stoker's Dracula and many of George Eliot's characters were more black and white. "Dracula is a nobleman and represents aristocracy at its most brutal. He's not just asserting prestige, he's actually taking people over and absorbing their life blood," he said.
The researchers believe that novels have the same effect on society as oral cautionary tales of old. "Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues," said Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the Unversity of Southern California. "They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life." (Our bold) (Ian Sample for the Guardian)

Our only quibbles are, of course, that Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Mr Darcy aren't Victorian at all, not by any stretch of the imagination. And Heathcliff, judging by the timeline of the novel isn't either, and its creator, Emily Brontë was only a Victorian for 11 years of her life, during which time she wrote Wuthering Heights, that is true.

John Sutherland, who knows his Victorian era much better, writes for the Guardian as well about Bill Stone, one of the United Kingdom's last Victorians (he was born four months before Queen Victoria died in January 1901). He comments on the afore-mentioned theory, wisely leaving Mr Darcy out of it:

An article in the New Scientist argues that Victorian delusion gave Britain an evolutionary advantage. The authors have done a multi-factor analysis on characters from classic Victorian fiction such as Dorothea Brooke, Heathcliff and Dorian Gray and uncover the kinds of interlocking ideological beliefs that create cohesion, collective effort, and self-denial for the greater good.

On another news: it's beginning. The run-up to Valentine's Day has already started. And According to PC Magazine, Apple is not overlooking the day:

Available through the iTunes Store, the special Valentine’s applications for the iPod touch are an original and tech-savvy way to show someone you love them. Available for free or at a small fee, these loving and lovable applications make one-of-a-kind surprises for your loved ones. [...]
Love Stories brings a brilliant collection of most adored books on women in love including many classic gems from Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and Henry James. This application offers the gift of joyful reading on love and relationships. (Irish Amabel Capati)

Well, there's no need for such an application. A good old paperback does the same trick actually, you know.

The Telegraph and Argus publishes a stunning aerial picture of Thornton, the Brontë birthplace, taken in 1969. If you know the area - or with some help from the accompanying text - you may spot the house where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were born.

As for blogs, both Artesanato and Blog da Mulher write about Jane Eyre 2006 in Portuguese. Mujeres Online posts briefly about the Brontës in Spanish. And I Love Retro Things posts a couple of pictures of a 'retro' (undated) illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights.

Finally, Chris from Book-a-rama has alerted us to the following on Girlebooks:

To coincide with this premiere [Wuthering Heights on PBS], we’re offering a new ebook collection to our ebook store. It is The Brontë Collection and contains all the Brontë sisters’ novels and poetry as well as two biographies: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Poems, The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell and Emily Brontë by A. Mary F. Robinson.

Categories: Brontëana, In the News, Victorian Era, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights