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On the Limits of Culture: Why Biology Is Important in the Study of Victorian Sexuality Robert Jonathan Burns

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On the Limits of Culture: Why Biology Is Important in the Study of Victorian Sexuality Robert Jonathan Burns View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 5-2-2007 On the Limits of Culture: Why Biology is Important in the Study of Victorian Sexuality Robert Jonathan Burns Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Burns, Robert Jonathan, "On the Limits of Culture: Why Biology is Important in the Study of Victorian Sexuality." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2007. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/13 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ON THE LIMITS OF CULTURE: WHY BIOLOGY IS IMPORTANT IN THE STUDY OF VICTORIAN SEXUALITY by ROBERT BURNS Under the Direction of Paul Schmidt ABSTRACT Much recent scholarship in Victorian studies has viewed sexuality as historically contingent and constructed primarily within the realm of discourse or social organization. In contrast, the following study details species-typical and universal aspects of human sexuality that must be adequately theorized if an accurate model of the ideological forces impacting Victorian sexuality is to be fashioned. After a short survey of previous scholarly projects that examine literature through the lens of biology—much of it marred by an obvious antipathy toward all attempts to discover the involvement of ideology in human behavior—this study presents a lengthy primer to the modern study of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and human sexuality. Because the use of science is still relatively rare in literary studies, the first chapters are designed both to convince the reader of the necessity of considering biology and evolution in examining human sexuality, as well as to provide the general educated scholar in our field with the basic framework of knowledge necessary to follow the remainder of the text. Chapter three follows with a detailed examination of the sources of the political resistance to biological and genetic models of human behavior within liberal arts and social science departments, and chapter four presents an evolutionary and biochemical model for the apprehension of art that locates the origins of culture within the evolutionarily-fashioned brains of individuals and attempts to recuperate the concept of aesthetic emotion and foreground the special nature of erotica in its ability to produce immediate neurochemical effects in the brains of its consumers. Finally, the study examines works of Victorian literature, especially My Secret Life, to demonstrate the deficiencies in constructionist and interactionist theories of human sexuality while detailing the new readings that emerge when one is aware of the biological basis of human mate selection mechanisms. INDEX WORDS: Evolutionary psychology, Behavioral genetics, Human mate selection mechanisms, Human mating behavior, Victorian marriage novels, Victorian pornography, Victorian erotica, My Secret Life, Thomas Hardy, Victorian sexuality, Biology and literature ON THE LIMITS OF CULTURE: WHY BIOLOGY IS IMPORTANT IN THE STUDY OF VICTORIAN SEXUALITY by ROBERT J. BURNS A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2007 Copyright by Robert Jonathan Burns 2007 ON THE LIMITS OF CULTURE: WHY BIOLOGY IS IMPORTANT IN THE STUDY OF VICTORIAN SEXUALITY by ROBERT J. BURNS Major Professor: Paul Schmidt Committee: Wayne Erickson George Pullman Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2007 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The conclusion of this academic project presents me with a welcome opportunity to thank some of the individuals who have played such an important role in my intellectual development so far. First of all, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my entire dissertation committee for their patient and much-needed guidance. Paul Schmidt, the chair, has been a friend and mentor ever since my days as an undergraduate, always willing to lend a sympathetic ear to my craziest ideas and unfailingly gentle and courteous in his efforts to pull me back in line when such action was required. Wayne Erickson has been a friend and mentor for an equal amount of time, and the countless hours of stimulating conversation we have shared have been invaluable in my own struggles to articulate my own, often poorly conceived, ideas. And George Pullman, the final member of my committee, proved extremely helpful through his consistently articulate and intelligent suggestions as I pursued my project. The standard disclaimer, nevertheless, applies; all errors in thought and mistakes in the following pages are completely my own and occur in spite of the best efforts of my committee to prevent me from including them. I also need to express my gratitude to all the members of the English Department staff—especially Tammy Mills and Marta Hess—for making my traversal of the dual duties of scholarship and teaching assistant so unbelievably smooth and untroubled. Finally, I owe thanks to my family, who have patiently watched as I pursued enough research for four or five projects of this size and scope. And above all, I would like to thank Yoon K. Nam, who has literally shown me a new way of looking at v the world and whose unique intellectual gifts and incomparable sensibility stand as a constant inspiration to me as I hew so much more closely to the ground. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv FORWARD: A CAUTIONARY TALE vii INTRODUCTION: HOW I ARRIVED AT MY CURRENT PROJECT xiv CHAPTER 1 PREVIOUS CRITICISM AND AN INITIAL DISCUSSION OF MY 1 GOALS 2 THE BIOLOGY OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE 42 3 THE RESISTANCE TO BIOLOGICAL THEORIES 85 4 EVOLUTION AND THE ORIGINS OF ART 123 5 MY SECRET LIFE 156 6 A FEW FINAL WORDS ABOUT EVOLUTION AND THE 208 VICTORIAN “MARRIAGE” NOVEL 7 WORKS CITED 220 vii FORWARD: A CAUTIONARY TALE Although Richard B. Freeman, the organizer of the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, had asked Harvard president Lawrence Summers to be controversial in his remarks to the fifty attendees who had been invited to the private affair, no one could have foreseen how spectacularly successful Summers would be in this regard. Indeed, by the Monday following his extempore comments at the Friday, January 14, 2005, conference, Summers found himself firmly ensconced in the national news for his speculations about why fewer women than men are represented at the top ranks of science in the United States. Nor did the furor die down quickly enough for Summers to save his job, for despite an immediate and extremely contrite letter of apology to the faculty, he shortly thereafter received a “no confidence” vote, and early in 2006 he announced his resignation. Summers‟ lecture pursued several points, but the two that seemed to create the most dissension involved the availability of qualified female hires at the high end of the science and engineering market. Summers certainly made few friends in the audience with his assertion that discrimination at the hiring level doesn‟t make a very persuasive explanation for the disparity, though his logic, in terms of economics, was unimpeachable. Summers‟ point was simple: given the massive amounts of funding spent on minority recruitment by the top universities in America—Harvard‟s new program is funded by a fifty million dollar grant—there must be only a small pool of viii well-qualified individuals or else the schools involved would be having greater success. Also, in logic especially obvious to the economist, such discrimination in the highly competitive hiring market would have encouraged at least a few schools to assemble faculties with a far larger proportion of highly qualified minority hires at lower starting salaries in order to have lower overall costs. Because they were made by one of the most respected economists in America, Summers‟ comments would probably have created nothing more than a few articles in the local paper, but he also speculated why there might be fewer female scientists available to hire, and here he forwarded the possibility that there is “a different availability of aptitude at the high end.” There‟s certainly nothing new in the “more idiots/ more prodigies” thesis regarding human males, which seems to be true even in areas outside the reach of cultural forces, so Summers wasn‟t speculating wildly. Applying the preceding concept to this particular problem, Summers pointed out that although males and females as a group have the same average scores on math tests males dominate either end of the performance spectrum. In other words, far more boys than girls miss all the questions on the math portion of the SAT, and far more boys than girls get all of them right. Therefore, if extreme proficiency in math is a good predictor of extra-high competency in science and engineering—which Summers and many others think is the case—then the pool of candidates qualified to be hired at a school of Harvard‟s caliber will be skewed heavily in the
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