Doing the Brontë maths

LiveScience highlights a new paper just published on literary Darwinism:

Classic stories still retain their storytelling power centuries later, and smart remakes do well to retain much of the original plot. (...) Such fascination with stories has compelled a small group of researchers to mine theories in evolutionary biology and psychology, in hopes of finding a connection between storytelling and the evolved human mind. Most agree that stories represent products of humanity's highly social existence, but debate rages over whether stories themselves may have evolved as an adaptation or social byproduct.(...)
Most people can easily identify the good guys and bad guys, or protagonists and antagonists, in well-known stories such as "Pride and Prejudice" or their spinoffs. But some researchers wanted evidence that the identification pattern holds true across many different stories.
"People use the terms protagonist and antagonist, but I'm not able to identify any essay or theoretical work that specifically focuses on protagonist and antagonist, major and minor characters," said Joseph Carroll, an English professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Carroll helped found a movement known as Literary Darwinism, which looks at how stories reveal common evolutionary behaviors shared by all humans. His work has strong championing from evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson at Harvard University.
In this case, Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation — similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior.
He joined forces with another Literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, as well as two evolutionary psychologists on the study. Their online survey asked respondents to identify characters from classic 19th century British novels as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, and to rate character traits and emotional responses based on a psychological model of personality.
As predicted, people rated protagonists as displaying cooperative behavior that produced feel-good, positive responses from readers. They rated antagonists as being motivated by desire for social dominance, which drew negative emotional responses.
The study also found strong agreement among respondents rating character traits, even if just two people responded regarding a certain character. "Pride and Prejudice" had no lack of responses — 81 people showed a familiarity with heroine Elizabeth Bennett that might have made the Austen protagonist blush.
However, certain characters seemed to blur the line between protagonist and antagonist. Readers found plenty to dislike about characters such as Becky Sharp in "Vanity Fair" or Catherine and Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," but also empathized with the plight of those characters. "Such exceptions are extremely interesting but do not subvert the larger pattern," the study authors wrote. (Jeremy Hsu)

The actual reference is

Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson and Daniel J. Kruger, Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels: Doing the Math, Philosophy and Literature - Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009, pp. 50-72

Three broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature -- of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers to those texts, and (3) produce data -- information that could be quantified and could serve to test specific hypotheses about those texts. Evolutionary social science is still in the process of constructing a full and adequate model of human nature. Evolutionary social scientists know much already about how human reproductive behavior and human sociality fit into the larger pattern of human evolution.

and can be read here.

The article's specific reference to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is:

Charlotte Bronté’s (sic) Jane Eyre has a personality that is unequivocally protagonistic but that also has a distinctive cast common to Charlotte Bronté’s (sic) protagonists and to those of her sister Anne: very low on Extraversion (–1.14), well above average on Agreeableness (.47) and Emotional Stability (.38), and high on Conscientiousness (.98) and Openness to Experience (.81). Bertha Rochester, in contrast, the madwoman in Jane Eyre, has a personality that is unequivocally antagonistic and that also reflects the character of her insanity: low on Agreeableness (–.80) and Openness to Experience (–.46), and ultra-low on Conscientiousness
(–1.46) and Emotional Stability (–1.61). (...)
There are of course exceptions to the large-scale patterns that prevail in the data—a small but distinct class of agonistically ambiguous characters such as Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights, the Monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lucy Graham in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Dorian Gray in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such characters tend to score low on Agreeableness but also high on Openness to Experience, high on Dislike but also high on Sorrow. Such exceptions are extremely interesting but do not subvert the larger pattern.

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