MATE SELECTION IN POPULAR WOMEN'S FICTION Cynthia Whissell Laurentian University
A study of twenty-five popular women's novels and six famous romantic stories has led to the conclusion that such novels and stories are tales of mate selection and mating commitment. P~russe's (1994) predictions with respect to mate choice are confirmed by the activities of male and female protagonists in the novels (binomial test, p ~ .01 in all cases). Males choose mates on the basis of sexual exclusivity and fertility. Females choose mates on the basis of economic factors and parenting potential. As well, male and female characters differ in terms of their display of functional emotions. KEY WORDS:
Inclusive fitness; Mate selection; Popular fiction.
Production and sales data suggest that fiction of all kinds, including the romantic fiction discussed in this paper, have become increasing popular in the past century (Audley 1983; Noble 1980). The monotonic rise in sales figures for popular fiction is probably the result of several factors, including (1) the rise in world population, (2) higher literacy levels, and (3) the increased availability of relatively inexpensive methods of production and distribution of fictional materials. There is an important unstated assumption underlying analyses of the popularity of fiction based on population size, level of literacy, and availability: this is the assumption that popular fiction produces a hedonically positive experiReceived December 20, 1995; accepted April 3, 1996. Address all correspondence to Cynthia Whissell, Psychology Department, Laurentian University, Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6 Canada. E-mail: cwhissel @ nickel.laurentian, ca Copyright 9 1996 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 427-447. 427
1045-6767/96/$1.00+.10
428
Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1996
ence for the consumer, who is therefore motivated to approach it and attain it. Numbers, literacy, and availability only add up to greater sales if readers are motivated to approach fiction. In terms of Young's theory (1973), objects of positive hedonic value have the power to excite approach behaviors that culminate in positive emotions ranging from mild pleasure to extreme delight. Pleasure and delight are internal emotional experiences and therefore not liable to direct observation. They may be inferred from the strength of the approach behavior (Young typically measured this strength in terms of preferences for one object over another: for example, Young 1973:110). Hedonic value is one mechanism whereby organisms are encouraged to pursue stimuli and behaviors necessary for survival. Stimuli and behaviors with a positive hedonic value incite approach and consummation while stimuli and behaviors with a negative hedonic value incite avoidant and possibly destructive responses. Sales figures are the surest indicators of approach behavior for popular fiction. Because the purchase of novels is a voluntary activity exercised on the basis of preference, it is possible to conclude that the novels which are most frequently purchased are those that produce the strongest approach responses, and by inference also those that engender the strongest positive hedonic reaction. If the popularity of certain classes of fiction such as romantic fiction is taken to reflect the hedonic value of that fiction, then the contents of the genre should be studied in terms of their potential for positive hedonic value. Romance fiction is not today, and never has been, an attempt to depict reality. Nor does it represent an attempt to escape reality. What romantic women's fiction does represent is a subset of reality with a high hedonic value. It is no accident that this high hedonic value is most often associated with mate selection and mating commitment. Fox (1995) has noted the important role that mate choice plays in epic literature and has suggested that a "sociobiology of literature" might reveal some further interesting trends. It does not take a very great stretch of the imagination to generalize the importance of mating to popular fiction, and the data discussed in this paper support such a generalization. The advent of explicit sex in popular women's fiction is relatively recent (it only became widespread in the 1980s), but romance and mating commitment have been central to the novel from its very inception. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (published in 1740 and often classified as the first English novel) tells a tale of mating commitment. This novel was enormously popular with w o m e n readers (Thomson 1900). Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice appeared in the very early years of the nineteenth century. In spite of the author's disclaimer of any intention of
Mate Se}ectzon in Popular Women's Fzction
429
writing a romantic tale (Sutherland 1975), it is still regarded by many as the prototype of the Regency Romance genre. Regency Romance novels are usually set in the nineteenth century, with their protagonists being members of the British upper classes. The proud-rich-aristocrat-marriespoor-but-intelligent-heroine plot seen in Pride and Prejudice is repeated in virtually every Regency Romance written since. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not the first Gothic novel written by a woman, but it embodied all the critical aspects of the Gothic genre. The Gothic heroine, alone and without a single friend or family member to aid her, arrives at a gloomy threatening locale and meets the gloomy threatening hero, whose innocence she doubts until the moment w h e n she realizes her love for him. Green suggests that the English novel was "feminized" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in her view, this feminization resulted in the advent of the courtship-and-marriage novel popular with women, and the separation of this type of novel from an alternate branch of fiction, the pursuit-and-seduction novel popular with men (Green 1991). An early popular exemplar of this type of novel, according to Green, is Richardson's Clarissa (published in 1748), where the male protagonist has the seduction of the female as his main aim throughout most of the novel. In later novels, such as Ian Fleming's James Bond series and the films this series has spawned, pursuit-and-seduction came to complement adventure, which was the main theme of the story. Green's logic is supported by the bifurcation of popular literature, and by the existence today of two distinct genres of best-seller fiction, one directed at men and the other at women. The work of J. Carroll (1995) emphasizes the importance of the evolutionary perspective to literary criticism. One of the biological concepts which regulate Carroll's thinking "is the idea that innate psychological structures--perceptual, rational, and affective--have evolved through an adaptive process of natural selection and that these structures regulate the mental and emotional life of all living organisms, including h u m a n beings" (1995:121). Carroll further argues that all explanations of h u m a n behavior can be traced back to an "ultimate cause," which he identifies as inclusive fitness. H u m a n behaviors are not all directed toward reproduction, but they evolved in an environment where mating and reproduction were both of paramount importance. Carroll's arguments point to evolutionary issues in mate selection and in reproduction as a possible and even highly likely source of the hedonic value of romantic fiction. Readers of romantic fiction are probably quite well aware of the source of the pleasure it gives them, but scientists who have no direct contact with the genre can only appreciate the importance of
430
Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1996
successful reproductive strategy in fiction s e c o n d h a n d - - t h r o u g h articles such as this one. In an evaluation of the predictive value of evolutionary principles in actual mate selection, P6russe (1994) tested several predictions derived from an evolutionary theory. These predictions were made on the basis of the resource contribution of each sex to reproduction and the withinsex variability of the resource. In actual mate selection, males were s h o w n to be discriminating where the partner's age/fertility and exclusivity were concerned, and females were s h o w n to be discriminating where the partner's economic resources were concerned. P6russe m e n t i o n s - - b u t only indirectly tests--the issue of investment in parenting which is also discussed by Hinde (1989). Hinde points out that h u m a n males are moderately polygamous in comparison to males of other mammalian species. This moderation is in part responsible for the moderate sexual dimorphism of the h u m a n species. If polygamy (more specifically polygyny) were high, males and females would be even more highly differentiated. In species where polygamy is low, less gender differentiation is predicted. In Hinde's view, a direct correlate of moderate polygyny is a moderate male investment in childrearing. Lancaster and Kaplan (1992) suggest that ecological factors are the ones that determine the male's best choice (mating effort or parental investment) for promoting inclusive fitness. The tradeoff between mating effort and parental investment is influenced by the prolonged development period of h u m a n young (Lancaster and Kaplan 1992), because if the young or juvenile offspring enter a risky period (a "selection funnel") only dedicated parental investment can promote their survival. (High mating frequency is useless if the offspring do not survive.) Female mammals have a high investment in childrearing because they possess the expensive (rarer) gametes and the means of feeding the offspring, and because they have a limited potential for bearing offspring. Survival of a female's genes is heavily d e p e n d e n t on her ability to nurture offspring. Two people can generally do the job of child rearing better than one, making the male's contribution to parenting an important factor in female mate selection. Since parenting the offspring (as well as producing them) is important, and because variability in parenting performance is higher among males than among females, females should, according to P6russe's (1994) logic, be discriminating of parenting ability in their mating partners. If popular romantic fiction is hedonic by virtue of its depiction of valid principles of mate selection, P6russe's predictions should hold true for such fiction. Specifically, women's popular romantic fiction should:
Mate Selectton m Popular Women's Fiction 1.
2.
3.
431
Depict males who make mate selections on the basis of female's reproductive validity, where reproductive validity is defined in terms of age and reproductive exclusivity. Depict females who make mate selections on the basis of a male's economic resources, where resources are defined on the basis of social class and income. Depict females who make mate selections on the basis of a male's parenting potential, where parenting potential is defined in terms of the male's general interest in children other than his own, his demonstrated ability as a caregiver and nurturer of family members and his specific stated interest in his own future offspring.
Plutchik's (1980) psychoevolutionary theory of emotion can be used to categorize and predict sex differences in emotion and personality (Whissell 1996a). Plutchik's model focuses on the adaptive potential of eight different emotions and describes personality as an outgrowth of preferred or most frequent style of responding. Figure 1 is a drawing of Plutchik's model of emotion, with two of its pairs of emotions interchanged. Plutchik used this circular arrangement of emotions in his earlier work, and it is the one which best fits findings of sex differences. Using both typical and stereotypical judgments of masculine and feminine emotions and personality traits, I concluded that men are expected to score higher on certain segments of the emotion circle depicted in Figure 1 than women, while women are expected to score higher than men on others. The results replicated most consistently across the analyzed sets of data favor distrust/rejection, anger/aggression, and boldness/exploration as emotions or survival strategies preferred more by males than by females, and trust/friendliness, timidity/withdrawal, and surprise/orientation as those preferred more by females than by males. In Plutchik's theory, timidity represents survival through the functional behavior of flight, friendliness represents survival through the functional behavior of affiliation, and surprise represents survival through the functional behavior of orientation and freezing (holding still and analyzing sensory input as a priority). Although both men and w o m e n use all of these functional behaviors, w o m e n do so more often than men. The functional equivalent of anger is destructive behavior, that of rejection is distrust and distancing, and that of boldness is the exploration of n e w territory. Actual sex differences between men and w o m e n rating themselves rather than a stereotype were smaller and less frequent but almost always in the same direction as those for stereotypical expectations. Happiness (which promotes mating) and sadness (which promotes rein-
432
Human Nature, Vo|. 7, No. 4, 1996
Happiness 1.Boldness ~ ~
/',/-~
1.Friendliness
/ ~,tq_e~/,' Ferntn,ne \ 2.Aggression [ Triadj~-~.-~T_riad i 2.Timidity
t~"
3.Rejec
//qi/
"_~~~~3".Surprise Sadness
Figure 1. The masculine and feminine triads in Plutchik's emotion circumplex (women score higher than men on the feminine triad, men score higher than women on the masculine one, and happiness and sadness show few sex differences). tegration after a loss) produced equivocal results and were therefore assigned to both males and females in accordance with the model discussed by WhisseU and Chellew (1994) which incorporates a gray area of overlap coincident with these emotions. Sex differences along the emotional triads should be evaluated by comparing male and female fictional characters--not necessarily by comparing different aspects of males or females to each other. According to one theory of sex differences (Whissell 1996a), a heroine may be more rejecting than she is timid, but she will be more timid than her male counterpart. Many heroines, including Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Bronte's Jane Eyre, are determined, bold, firm in their beliefs, and at times even rejecting. Jane Bennet (Elizabeth's sister in Pride and Prejudice) is probably closer to the trusting/timid/surprised stereotype than Elizabeth herself. However, Elizabeth is less rejecting than Darcy (his rejecting commentary lays the foundation for their mutually distrustful relationship), and Jane Eyre is definitely friendlier than Rochester. It is difficult to make a complete argument for the relationship of each of the eight emotions to inclusive fitness at this time, but their relationship to the immediate survival of the organism (a prerequisite to inclusive fitness) is more obvious. The tendency of the smaller of two interacting primates to employ flight while the larger employs threat or aggression
Mate Selection in Popular Women's Fiction
433
improves the immediate survival potential of each member of the dyad (the larger sequesters desired resources, the smaller remains alive). Again, a smaller primate has more to gain (in terms of survival) by social relationships than a larger one, and more to lose by exploring potentially dangerous territory. On the basis of the consistently replicated sex differences noted for Plutchik's eight emotions, it is further predicted that 4.
5.
male protagonists in romantic fiction will have personalities illustrative of the male triad (rejecting/aggressive/bold) to a greater extent than female protagonists, while female protagonists will have personalities illustrative of the female triad (trusting/timid/surprised) to a greater extent than male protagonists.
The five predictions of this study were tested in two ways. First, some extremely popular exemplars of romantic stories that have stood the test of time were analyzed with respect to each prediction, and then twentyfive recently published romance novels were subjected to the same scrutiny. The formulaic character of this class of fiction (Whissell 1994) and certain segments of the formula which bear directly on the predictions of this study are also discussed below.
METHOD AND RESULTS Romantic Stories That Have Stood the Test of Time
Table 1 outlines the relevant plot elements of six romantic stories that have stood the test of time. The first two are from the Old Testament (Ruth, Esther: Good News Bible, Today's English Version, Canadian Bible Society, Toronto 1976), the second two from the early years of the English novel (Pride and Prejudice: Austen, 1813, and Jane Eyre: Bronte, 1847), and the last two from the opus of Georgette Heyer (These Old Shades: 1926, Regency Buck: 1935). The last are the most recent books in the list, but even they are more than fifty years old. They continue to be reprinted and sold on a regular basis, as in fact do all exemplars in Table 1. When plot elements were tabulated, they were done so with respect to the ultimate cause of mating and reproduction, and without prejudice
o ~ ~ :~ "~ E~.=.~ =~ ~
m
~ ~
=
A study of twenty-five popular women's novels and six famous romantic stories has led to the conclusion that such novels and stories are tales of mate selection and mating commitment. P~russe's (1994) predictions with respect to mate choice are confirmed by the activities of male and female protagonists in the novels (binomial test, p ~ .01 in all cases). Males choose mates on the basis of sexual exclusivity and fertility. Females choose mates on the basis of economic factors and parenting potential. As well, male and female characters differ in terms of their display of functional emotions. KEY WORDS:
Inclusive fitness; Mate selection; Popular fiction.
Production and sales data suggest that fiction of all kinds, including the romantic fiction discussed in this paper, have become increasing popular in the past century (Audley 1983; Noble 1980). The monotonic rise in sales figures for popular fiction is probably the result of several factors, including (1) the rise in world population, (2) higher literacy levels, and (3) the increased availability of relatively inexpensive methods of production and distribution of fictional materials. There is an important unstated assumption underlying analyses of the popularity of fiction based on population size, level of literacy, and availability: this is the assumption that popular fiction produces a hedonically positive experiReceived December 20, 1995; accepted April 3, 1996. Address all correspondence to Cynthia Whissell, Psychology Department, Laurentian University, Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6 Canada. E-mail: cwhissel @ nickel.laurentian, ca Copyright 9 1996 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 427-447. 427
1045-6767/96/$1.00+.10
428
Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1996
ence for the consumer, who is therefore motivated to approach it and attain it. Numbers, literacy, and availability only add up to greater sales if readers are motivated to approach fiction. In terms of Young's theory (1973), objects of positive hedonic value have the power to excite approach behaviors that culminate in positive emotions ranging from mild pleasure to extreme delight. Pleasure and delight are internal emotional experiences and therefore not liable to direct observation. They may be inferred from the strength of the approach behavior (Young typically measured this strength in terms of preferences for one object over another: for example, Young 1973:110). Hedonic value is one mechanism whereby organisms are encouraged to pursue stimuli and behaviors necessary for survival. Stimuli and behaviors with a positive hedonic value incite approach and consummation while stimuli and behaviors with a negative hedonic value incite avoidant and possibly destructive responses. Sales figures are the surest indicators of approach behavior for popular fiction. Because the purchase of novels is a voluntary activity exercised on the basis of preference, it is possible to conclude that the novels which are most frequently purchased are those that produce the strongest approach responses, and by inference also those that engender the strongest positive hedonic reaction. If the popularity of certain classes of fiction such as romantic fiction is taken to reflect the hedonic value of that fiction, then the contents of the genre should be studied in terms of their potential for positive hedonic value. Romance fiction is not today, and never has been, an attempt to depict reality. Nor does it represent an attempt to escape reality. What romantic women's fiction does represent is a subset of reality with a high hedonic value. It is no accident that this high hedonic value is most often associated with mate selection and mating commitment. Fox (1995) has noted the important role that mate choice plays in epic literature and has suggested that a "sociobiology of literature" might reveal some further interesting trends. It does not take a very great stretch of the imagination to generalize the importance of mating to popular fiction, and the data discussed in this paper support such a generalization. The advent of explicit sex in popular women's fiction is relatively recent (it only became widespread in the 1980s), but romance and mating commitment have been central to the novel from its very inception. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (published in 1740 and often classified as the first English novel) tells a tale of mating commitment. This novel was enormously popular with w o m e n readers (Thomson 1900). Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice appeared in the very early years of the nineteenth century. In spite of the author's disclaimer of any intention of
Mate Se}ectzon in Popular Women's Fzction
429
writing a romantic tale (Sutherland 1975), it is still regarded by many as the prototype of the Regency Romance genre. Regency Romance novels are usually set in the nineteenth century, with their protagonists being members of the British upper classes. The proud-rich-aristocrat-marriespoor-but-intelligent-heroine plot seen in Pride and Prejudice is repeated in virtually every Regency Romance written since. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not the first Gothic novel written by a woman, but it embodied all the critical aspects of the Gothic genre. The Gothic heroine, alone and without a single friend or family member to aid her, arrives at a gloomy threatening locale and meets the gloomy threatening hero, whose innocence she doubts until the moment w h e n she realizes her love for him. Green suggests that the English novel was "feminized" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in her view, this feminization resulted in the advent of the courtship-and-marriage novel popular with women, and the separation of this type of novel from an alternate branch of fiction, the pursuit-and-seduction novel popular with men (Green 1991). An early popular exemplar of this type of novel, according to Green, is Richardson's Clarissa (published in 1748), where the male protagonist has the seduction of the female as his main aim throughout most of the novel. In later novels, such as Ian Fleming's James Bond series and the films this series has spawned, pursuit-and-seduction came to complement adventure, which was the main theme of the story. Green's logic is supported by the bifurcation of popular literature, and by the existence today of two distinct genres of best-seller fiction, one directed at men and the other at women. The work of J. Carroll (1995) emphasizes the importance of the evolutionary perspective to literary criticism. One of the biological concepts which regulate Carroll's thinking "is the idea that innate psychological structures--perceptual, rational, and affective--have evolved through an adaptive process of natural selection and that these structures regulate the mental and emotional life of all living organisms, including h u m a n beings" (1995:121). Carroll further argues that all explanations of h u m a n behavior can be traced back to an "ultimate cause," which he identifies as inclusive fitness. H u m a n behaviors are not all directed toward reproduction, but they evolved in an environment where mating and reproduction were both of paramount importance. Carroll's arguments point to evolutionary issues in mate selection and in reproduction as a possible and even highly likely source of the hedonic value of romantic fiction. Readers of romantic fiction are probably quite well aware of the source of the pleasure it gives them, but scientists who have no direct contact with the genre can only appreciate the importance of
430
Human Nature, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1996
successful reproductive strategy in fiction s e c o n d h a n d - - t h r o u g h articles such as this one. In an evaluation of the predictive value of evolutionary principles in actual mate selection, P6russe (1994) tested several predictions derived from an evolutionary theory. These predictions were made on the basis of the resource contribution of each sex to reproduction and the withinsex variability of the resource. In actual mate selection, males were s h o w n to be discriminating where the partner's age/fertility and exclusivity were concerned, and females were s h o w n to be discriminating where the partner's economic resources were concerned. P6russe m e n t i o n s - - b u t only indirectly tests--the issue of investment in parenting which is also discussed by Hinde (1989). Hinde points out that h u m a n males are moderately polygamous in comparison to males of other mammalian species. This moderation is in part responsible for the moderate sexual dimorphism of the h u m a n species. If polygamy (more specifically polygyny) were high, males and females would be even more highly differentiated. In species where polygamy is low, less gender differentiation is predicted. In Hinde's view, a direct correlate of moderate polygyny is a moderate male investment in childrearing. Lancaster and Kaplan (1992) suggest that ecological factors are the ones that determine the male's best choice (mating effort or parental investment) for promoting inclusive fitness. The tradeoff between mating effort and parental investment is influenced by the prolonged development period of h u m a n young (Lancaster and Kaplan 1992), because if the young or juvenile offspring enter a risky period (a "selection funnel") only dedicated parental investment can promote their survival. (High mating frequency is useless if the offspring do not survive.) Female mammals have a high investment in childrearing because they possess the expensive (rarer) gametes and the means of feeding the offspring, and because they have a limited potential for bearing offspring. Survival of a female's genes is heavily d e p e n d e n t on her ability to nurture offspring. Two people can generally do the job of child rearing better than one, making the male's contribution to parenting an important factor in female mate selection. Since parenting the offspring (as well as producing them) is important, and because variability in parenting performance is higher among males than among females, females should, according to P6russe's (1994) logic, be discriminating of parenting ability in their mating partners. If popular romantic fiction is hedonic by virtue of its depiction of valid principles of mate selection, P6russe's predictions should hold true for such fiction. Specifically, women's popular romantic fiction should:
Mate Selectton m Popular Women's Fiction 1.
2.
3.
431
Depict males who make mate selections on the basis of female's reproductive validity, where reproductive validity is defined in terms of age and reproductive exclusivity. Depict females who make mate selections on the basis of a male's economic resources, where resources are defined on the basis of social class and income. Depict females who make mate selections on the basis of a male's parenting potential, where parenting potential is defined in terms of the male's general interest in children other than his own, his demonstrated ability as a caregiver and nurturer of family members and his specific stated interest in his own future offspring.
Plutchik's (1980) psychoevolutionary theory of emotion can be used to categorize and predict sex differences in emotion and personality (Whissell 1996a). Plutchik's model focuses on the adaptive potential of eight different emotions and describes personality as an outgrowth of preferred or most frequent style of responding. Figure 1 is a drawing of Plutchik's model of emotion, with two of its pairs of emotions interchanged. Plutchik used this circular arrangement of emotions in his earlier work, and it is the one which best fits findings of sex differences. Using both typical and stereotypical judgments of masculine and feminine emotions and personality traits, I concluded that men are expected to score higher on certain segments of the emotion circle depicted in Figure 1 than women, while women are expected to score higher than men on others. The results replicated most consistently across the analyzed sets of data favor distrust/rejection, anger/aggression, and boldness/exploration as emotions or survival strategies preferred more by males than by females, and trust/friendliness, timidity/withdrawal, and surprise/orientation as those preferred more by females than by males. In Plutchik's theory, timidity represents survival through the functional behavior of flight, friendliness represents survival through the functional behavior of affiliation, and surprise represents survival through the functional behavior of orientation and freezing (holding still and analyzing sensory input as a priority). Although both men and w o m e n use all of these functional behaviors, w o m e n do so more often than men. The functional equivalent of anger is destructive behavior, that of rejection is distrust and distancing, and that of boldness is the exploration of n e w territory. Actual sex differences between men and w o m e n rating themselves rather than a stereotype were smaller and less frequent but almost always in the same direction as those for stereotypical expectations. Happiness (which promotes mating) and sadness (which promotes rein-
432
Human Nature, Vo|. 7, No. 4, 1996
Happiness 1.Boldness ~ ~
/',/-~
1.Friendliness
/ ~,tq_e~/,' Ferntn,ne \ 2.Aggression [ Triadj~-~.-~T_riad i 2.Timidity
t~"
3.Rejec
//qi/
"_~~~~3".Surprise Sadness
Figure 1. The masculine and feminine triads in Plutchik's emotion circumplex (women score higher than men on the feminine triad, men score higher than women on the masculine one, and happiness and sadness show few sex differences). tegration after a loss) produced equivocal results and were therefore assigned to both males and females in accordance with the model discussed by WhisseU and Chellew (1994) which incorporates a gray area of overlap coincident with these emotions. Sex differences along the emotional triads should be evaluated by comparing male and female fictional characters--not necessarily by comparing different aspects of males or females to each other. According to one theory of sex differences (Whissell 1996a), a heroine may be more rejecting than she is timid, but she will be more timid than her male counterpart. Many heroines, including Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Bronte's Jane Eyre, are determined, bold, firm in their beliefs, and at times even rejecting. Jane Bennet (Elizabeth's sister in Pride and Prejudice) is probably closer to the trusting/timid/surprised stereotype than Elizabeth herself. However, Elizabeth is less rejecting than Darcy (his rejecting commentary lays the foundation for their mutually distrustful relationship), and Jane Eyre is definitely friendlier than Rochester. It is difficult to make a complete argument for the relationship of each of the eight emotions to inclusive fitness at this time, but their relationship to the immediate survival of the organism (a prerequisite to inclusive fitness) is more obvious. The tendency of the smaller of two interacting primates to employ flight while the larger employs threat or aggression
Mate Selection in Popular Women's Fiction
433
improves the immediate survival potential of each member of the dyad (the larger sequesters desired resources, the smaller remains alive). Again, a smaller primate has more to gain (in terms of survival) by social relationships than a larger one, and more to lose by exploring potentially dangerous territory. On the basis of the consistently replicated sex differences noted for Plutchik's eight emotions, it is further predicted that 4.
5.
male protagonists in romantic fiction will have personalities illustrative of the male triad (rejecting/aggressive/bold) to a greater extent than female protagonists, while female protagonists will have personalities illustrative of the female triad (trusting/timid/surprised) to a greater extent than male protagonists.
The five predictions of this study were tested in two ways. First, some extremely popular exemplars of romantic stories that have stood the test of time were analyzed with respect to each prediction, and then twentyfive recently published romance novels were subjected to the same scrutiny. The formulaic character of this class of fiction (Whissell 1994) and certain segments of the formula which bear directly on the predictions of this study are also discussed below.
METHOD AND RESULTS Romantic Stories That Have Stood the Test of Time
Table 1 outlines the relevant plot elements of six romantic stories that have stood the test of time. The first two are from the Old Testament (Ruth, Esther: Good News Bible, Today's English Version, Canadian Bible Society, Toronto 1976), the second two from the early years of the English novel (Pride and Prejudice: Austen, 1813, and Jane Eyre: Bronte, 1847), and the last two from the opus of Georgette Heyer (These Old Shades: 1926, Regency Buck: 1935). The last are the most recent books in the list, but even they are more than fifty years old. They continue to be reprinted and sold on a regular basis, as in fact do all exemplars in Table 1. When plot elements were tabulated, they were done so with respect to the ultimate cause of mating and reproduction, and without prejudice
o ~ ~ :~ "~ E~.=.~ =~ ~
m
~ ~
=
