Theorising early modern jealousy. A biocultural perspective on Shakespeare's Othello

Studia Neophilologica

Volumn 74, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 146-160

  Nordlund, Marcus ^a  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249585652     PISSN: 00393274     EISSN: 16512308     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/003932702321116172     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. All references to Othello are taken from The Arden Shakespeare : Complete Works, eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames : Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998).
2. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generale (London, 1604).
4. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiesling, Rhonda Blair. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 3. 3. 2: 273-311.
5. Quoted in Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (1994; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 76.
6. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 1603, ed. W. E. Henley (New York: AMS Press, 1967) 3. 5: 88.
7. Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J. H. Mozley. Loeb Classical Library 97 (London: Heinemann, 1947) 104.
8. For a recent replication in a fairly egalitarian country, see Michael W. Wiederman and Erica Kendall, "Evolution, Sex, and Jealousy : Investigation with a Sample from Sweden," Evolution and Human Behavior 20 (1999): 121-28.
9. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, "Introduction," Emotion and the Arts, eds. Hjort and Laver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 3-19: 7-9.
10. The philosopher Paul Griffiths - who actually distinguishes between three kinds of constructivism - defines this version as "trivial" since it has been watered down to an unhelpful truism. See What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 138-65.
11. For a general discussion of social constructivism 'from the inside' which is friendly but critical of its vagueness, see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).
12. Nancy Easterlin, "Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and the Foundations of Literary Theory," Mosaic 32 (1999): 131-47: 131.
13. Randolph R. Cornelius, The Science of Emotion: Research and Tradition in the Psychology of Emotions. (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996) 326.
14. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
15. As Peter Laslett points out, it seems "rather hazardous to judge the relative prevalence of sexual deviation from changes in the tone of admonitory literature, confessional handbooks, or any source emanating from the respectable themselves, especially the ecclesiastics ... " See "Introduction: Comparing Illegitimacy Over Time and Between Cultures," in Bastardy and its Comparative History (London: Edward Arnold, 1980) 59.
16. Modern historians of emotion have also stressed that we must distinguish between so-called "feeling rules" (that is, normative emotional standards) and "emotional experience itself - see Peter N. Stearns, "History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact, " in Handbook of Emotions, eds. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2000): 16-29: 20.
17. Quoted in Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 45.
18. See, for example, Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991);
19. David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: Free Press, 2000);
20. and Helen Fisher, The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994).
21. Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London : Penguin, 1995), 486. Conversely, it is just as mistaken to suppose, as Rom Harré and other constructivists do, that cross-cultural variation is evidence that a trait is cultural and cannot be subjected to evolutionary explanation (See Griffiths, 160, and my discussion in section two of this essay).
22. Ralph B. Hupka, "The Motive for the Arousal of Romantic Jealousy: Its Cultural Origin," in The Psychology of Jealousy and Envy, ed. Peter Salovey (New York: Guilford, 1991) 252-70: 254, 262.
23. Melford E. Spiro, Culture and Human Nature, eds. Benjamin Kilborne and L. L. Langness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 23.
24. For some notable examples, see the recent collection entitled Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, eds. Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), which contains many diatribes and sarcasms directed at an 'ultradarwinist' straw man (Mary Midgley's essay on memetics is one welcome exception).
25. Two notable attempts to incorporate evolutionary theory into literary theory are Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995)
26. and Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
27. Brian Boyd's article "Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature," Philosophy and Literature 22:1 (1998): 1-30, is a useful introduction to this field and provides extensive bibliographical information.
28. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. (London: Heinemann, 2000) 337.
29. Robert L. Trivers, "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection," in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971, ed. B. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine, 1972): 136-79.
30. Trivers' ideas were later reformulated by Donald Symons and others in terms of typical and minimum parental investment: "Humans are like other mammals in that a male's minimum possible parental investment is very small, but different from other mammals in that a male's typical parental investment is very large" (Douglas T. Kenrick, Edward K. Sadalla, and Melanie R. Trost, "Evolution, Traits, and the Stages of Human Courtship: Qualifying the Parental Investment Model," Human Nature: A Critical Reader, ed. Laura Betzig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 213-24: 215.
31. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Natural Selection and the Female of the Species (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999) 85.
32. Buss 171: see also Victor S. Johnston, Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions (Cambridge, Mass: Helix/Perseus, 1999) 136.
33. Some, like the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, would carry the organism/environment equation so far as to declare such problems insoluble; see, for example, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and The Construction of Sexuality (New York: BasicBooks, 2000). But Fausto-Sterling's conclusion that we "need to stop looking for universal causes of sexual behavior and gender acquisition and instead learn more about (and from) individual difference" (246) seems incoherent; how can we ever hope to explore difference meaningfully without simultaneously exploring sameness? Like her earlier Myths of Gender (1992), this politically inflected argument wavers precariously between two contradictory commitments : scientific realism and strong constructivism.
34. Margo Wilson and John Daly, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel," in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, eds. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 289-322: 301.
35. Mildred Dickemann, "Paternal Confidence and Dowry Competition: A Biocultural Analysis of Purdah," in Human Nature: A Critical Reader, ed. Laura Betzig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 311-28: 313.
36. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 147.
37. John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 15.
38. Vivien Brodsky, "Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations," in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 122-54: 146.
39. Marriage was not an obvious option for the great majority of young men and women "who had no secure expectation of property, and whose chances of founding an establishment were so much affected by economic vicissitudes." (Laslett 58). For other considerations, see Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life," in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, 1575-1625, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
40. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 146.
41. On this point, see Edward Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986);
42. for literary perspectives, see Rose, The Expense of Spirit (1988).
43. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers : Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford : Clarendon, 1996)
44. and Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999) 78, 122.
45. Edward Coke, quoted in Alison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) 24.
46. Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 32-33.
47. Karen Newman, '"And Wash the Ethiop White': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello" in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987) 143-62: 153.
48. It should perhaps be pointed out that such crimes of passion were not common in the early modern period, and that homicide rates were not extremely high compared to some modern Western countries. According to J. A. Sharpe, homicides in Essex fell from 7 per 100,000 inhabitants in the late sixteenth century to 2,8 in the late seventeenth century - see Early Modern England: A Social History 1550-1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987) 111. In comparison, rates in the USA have averaged between 5 and 10 in the second half of the twentieth century.
49. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. (New York: Continuum, 1989) 498.