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PART 5
Conclusions and
Future Directions for
Evolutionary
Perspectives on Violence,
Homicide, and War
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CHAPTER
413
e Extremes of Confl ict in
Literature: Violence, Homicide,
and War
Joseph Carroll
Introduction
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the
clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel
works of nature!
—Darwin, 1903; 1: 94; letter to Joseph Hooker of
July 13, 1856
e world is a violent place. More are born, in every
generation, than can survive. Natural selection fi l-
ters out weaker organisms. Among creatures with
nervous systems, those that do not survive seldom
go quietly into that good night. ey struggle and
often suff er horribly before they die. Many become
food for other animals. All compete for scarce
resources against other creatures, including mem-
bers of their own species. Human beings, despite
all their technological and cultural contrivances,
have not escaped this universal struggle. Confl ict
and struggle are integral to the evolved and adapted
24
Abstract
Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who
experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and
more important, in the interpretation of depicted events: in the author’s treatment of the depicted
events; the reader’s response to both the depicted events and the author’s treatment; and the
author’s anticipation of the reader’s responses. This chapter outlines possible stances toward violence,
makes an argument for the decisive structural significance of violence in both life and literature, and
then presents a representative sampling of violent acts in literature. The examples from literature are
organized into the main kinds of human relationships: one’s relation to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals,
lovers, and marital partners; family members (parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins);
communities (violence within social groups); and warfare (violence between social groups).
Key Words: literature, emotions, interpretation, author, reader, suicide, lovers, family,
community, war
characteristics of human nature. Literature arises
out of and depicts human nature, so confl ict is inte-
gral to literature, too.
Literary works sometimes depict hostile encoun-
ters between alien groups, but more frequently, the
emotional interest of literary works arises out of
confl icts among people who are intimately related
to one another. Such confl icts are a natural prod-
uct of inclusive fi tness. Like other animals, human
beings share fi tness interests with their mates and
off spring. Except for identical twins, though, the
fi tness interests of even the most closely related kin
are not identical. Inclusive fi tness produces a per-
petual drama in which intimacy and opposition,
cooperation and confl ict, are closely intertwined.
e evolved reproductive strategies of men
include both paternal investment, which requires
mate guarding, and low-investment short-term
mating, which often requires eluding the vigilance
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414
of other men. Men form coalitions for coopera-
tive endeavor but also compete for mates (Geary
& Flinn, 2001). Women have evolved strategies
for securing a bonded attachment with men will-
ing to commit resources, but they have also evolved
strategies for taking advantage of short-term mating
opportunities with other men, especially men who
have higher genetic quality than their own mates
(Buss, 2000, 2003; Geary, 1998). e pleasurable
feelings associated with sexual relations are thus
necessarily tinged with suspicion, jealousy, frustra-
tion, and resentment. Much of the time, men and
women manage workable compromises, but sexual
relations sometimes break down in rejection, vio-
lent emotional struggle, and physical abuse, includ-
ing murder (Buss, 2000; Daly & Wilson, 1988).
A parent and child both have a fi tness interest in
the child surviving and reproducing, but a child has
a 100% genetic investment in itself; each parent has
only a 50% genetic investment in a child. Mother–
child confl ict begins in the mother’s womb, with
the embryo struggling to acquire more resources
from the mother than the mother is willing to give.
Siblings share fi tness interests but also compete for
resources. Parents must often distribute resources
across multiple off spring, all of whom want more
than an equal share. Parents often prefer some chil-
dren to others, and they must also make choices
between eff ort devoted to parenting and eff ort
devoted to mating. Such tensions can and do erupt
into homicidal violence, in both life and literature.
e confl icts generated from diff ering fi tness
interests manifest at the proximal level as motives
that are driven by emotions: desire, love, jealousy,
guilt, shame, frustration, resentment, rage, and
hatred (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Ekman, 2003;
Plutchik, 2003). Literature depicts such emotions,
evokes them, and makes them available to readers,
who experience them vicariously (Oatley, 1999,
2002, 2003; Tan, 2000). An author and a reader
inhabit an imagined world created by the author,
who chooses a subject, adopts a stance toward that
subject, organizes the presentation of the subject,
and modulates style and tone to aff ect the reader’s
responses. Readers can passively register the images
and sensations thus evoked, but they can also stand
apart from them, situating them in their own ana-
lytic and evaluative frameworks. Literary criticism is
only the most explicit and highly developed form of
readers’ refl ections on the imagined worlds created
by authors.
Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted
events alone but also, and more important, in the
interpretation of depicted events: in the author’s
treatment of the depicted events; the reader’s
response to both the depicted events and the author’s
treatment; and the author’s anticipation of the read-
er’s responses. It is worth pausing to emphasize the
fundamentally social and psychological character of
literature. Meaning in literature cannot be reduced
to plot. Meaning consists in an imaginative expe-
rience at least partially shared between an author
and a reader. When we analyze narrative/mimetic
literature (stories, plays, and novels, as opposed to
lyric poems), we have to consider the interplay of
perspectives among characters, authors, and readers:
how characters regard one another, what they think
about one another, what the author thinks of them,
what the author anticipates readers will think, and
what readers actually do think about the characters
and also about the author’s responses to the char-
acters. Consequently, in this chapter, the literary
examples do not consist only in plot summaries.
e chapter also takes account of authorial stances
and readers’ responses. Authorial stance and reader
response are the substance of literary experience;
they are, accordingly, the proper subject matter of
literary criticism.
After outlining a range of stances toward psy-
chopathic violence, this chapter makes an argument
for the decisive structural signifi cance of violence in
both life and literature. e chapter then presents a
representative sampling of violent acts in literature.
e examples from literature are organized into the
main kinds of human relationships: one’s relation
to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and mar-
ital partners; family members (parents, children,
siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities
(violence within social groups); and warfare (vio-
lence between social groups).
Stances Toward Cruelty
Psychopathic cruelty is relatively rare (Baumeister,
1996; Grossman, 2009). Even in genocidal warfare,
people seldom regard their own behavior as inten-
tional harm infl icted for pleasure. Instead they
rationalize violence as self-defense or as a means
toward a greater good. ey also minimize or turn a
blind eye toward the suff ering of victims and instead
magnify threats to themselves (Baumeister, 1996;
Smith, 2007). Studies of soldiers in warfare support
the contention that most people in postagricultural
societies are on the whole reluctant to harm oth-
ers. Even after heavy conditioning, and even when
they are themselves in danger, many soldiers never
fi re their weapons, or they fi re to miss (Grossman,
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415
2009; Marshall, 1947). (Wade [2006] and Cochran
and Harpending [2009] argue that sedentism, a pre-
requisite to agricultural and industrial economies,
has selected for personalities less prone to violence.)
Psychopaths, people who actively enjoy killing and
feel no remorse, evidently constitute only about 2%
of modern male populations (Swank & Marchand,
1946; cited in Grossman, 2009, p. 44). A similar per-
centage would probably prevail among male literary
authors, and a still smaller percentage among female
authors. Only a very few literary authors clearly
invite readers to participate vicariously in sadistic
pleasure. e Marquis de Sade, whose name is the
source for the term “sadism,” is one such author.
(See for instance One Hundred Days of Sodom.) In
the fi nal chapter of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange, the fi rst-person narrator unconvincingly
disavows the gleeful psychopathic violence in the
main body of the novel. In contemporary fi ction,
the most prominent overtly psychopathic novel is
Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Film directors
attracted to sadistic cruelty include Stanley Kubrick
and Brian de Palma. Kubrick produced a fi lm ver-
sion of A Clockwork Orange; and both Kubrick and
de Palma produced fi lm versions of Stephen King
novels, eliminating, in both cases, the compassion
that gives emotional depth to King’s explorations of
horror (Kubrick, e Shining; de Palma, Carrie). In
most literary works that depict psychopathic cru-
elty, the author’s stance registers revulsion against
cruelty.
Baumeister (1996) defi nes “evil” most sim-
ply as “the adversary of good” (p. 67). We tend
to regard ourselves and our associates as good
people, and our enemies as bad people. Our ene-
mies, who have their own distinct points of view,
reverse the nomenclature. In fi ction, the “good” is
typically embodied in protagonists—agents with
whom readers are invited to sympathize—and evil
is embodied in their adversaries, that is, in antag-
onists (Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, & Kruger,
2008; Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, Kruger, &
Georgiades, 2010; Johnson, Carroll, Gottschall, &
Kruger, 2008, 2011). Among literary characters,
most psychopaths are antagonists, for instance:
Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello; the malignant dwarf
Daniel Quilp in Charles Dickens’s e Old Curiosity
Shop; Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the Catholic priest who tor-
tures Dr. Monygham in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo;
the renegade Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry’s west-
ern Lonesome Dove; and the serial killer Arnold
Friend (based on a real person) in Joyce Carol
Oates’s frequently anthologized story “Where Are
You Going, Where Have You Been?”
A few narratives adopt a structurally ironic
stance, taking psychopaths as ostensible protagonists
but treating them with implicit contempt and anger.
Instances include Henry Fielding’s caustic 18th-cen-
tury narrative about a professional criminal, Jonathan
Wilde, and William Makepeace ackeray’s depic-
tion of Barry Lyndon, a heartless rogue who leaves a
trail of wreckage behind him. (Kubrick’s fi lmed ver-
sion of Barry Lyndon eliminates ackeray’s satiric
stance and turns the story into a prettily fi lmed pica-
resque adventure.)
Some writers are hard to locate clearly on either
side of the divide between psychopathic and sym-
pathetic perspectives. Flannery O’Connor, for
instance, a Catholic American writer from the
middle of the 20th century, envisions homicidal
violence as a means of transcending ordinary social
life, which she regards as hypocritical and spiritu-
ally shallow. Her story, “A Good Man Is Hard To
Find”—one of the most widely anthologized of all
short stories—depicts a psychopathic killer, e
Misfi t, as a religious skeptic. e protagonist of the
story is an old woman who achieves, in terror for
her life, a moment of Christian charity toward her
killer. e protagonists of O’Connor’s novels e
Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood both achieve
spiritual metamorphosis through acts of homicidal
violence.
Among contemporary writers held in high
esteem, Cormac McCarthy gives an exceptionally
prominent place to graphic violence. roughout
McCarthy’s novels, gaining a tough-minded, realis-
tic perspective means accepting the ultimate, deci-
sive reality of homicidal violence. e dead do not
get to establish moral norms. In All the Pretty Horses,
McCarthy’s protagonist is a young man who gets
thrown into a brutal Mexican prison. To survive, he
has to accept that lethal violence takes priority over
all moral considerations, but his struggle to come
to terms with the necessity of his situation tacitly
locates his homicidal behavior in a moral con-
text. e protagonist of No Country for Old Men is
humane and warm hearted. He ultimately falls vic-
tim to a psychopath who tempts readers to identify
with his stance of cool command. A similar kind of
temptation for the reader is at work in Shakespeare’s
depiction of Richard III. Like the protagonist of A
Clockwork Orange, Richard is witty and droll, though
vicious. Even when dominant characters are purely
destructive, they naturally tempt readers to iden-
tify with them, but Shakespeare and McCarthy also
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416
include characters who off er alternative perspectives.
Both authors leave it to the reader’s own strength
of mind to decide how to feel about the characters.
In Blood Meridian, based on a historical event from
the middle of the 19th century, McCarthy depicts
a band of psychopathic killers who cut a swath of
random violence through Mexico and the American
Southwest. e protagonist is a boy who had been
traumatized by violence from the time of his earli-
est memories. ough tagging along with the band,
in a psychologically numbed condition, he is not
ultimately absorbed into mindless and heartless
brutality. In e Road, a futuristic novel situated in
an American landscape devastated by an ecologi-
cal holocaust, possibly nuclear, the moral lines are
more clearly demarcated. e protagonists, a father
and his son, are struggling to survive in an environ-
ment dominated by cannibalistic bands. e emo-
tional focal point of the story is the father’s devotion
to his son. ough McCarthy is preoccupied with
violence and often noncommittal in his own emo-
tional responses, it seems safe to say that he is not
ultimately a sadist along the lines of Burgess, Ellis,
de Palma, and Kubrick. He just pushes the reader
harder, in morally challenging ways, than most
writers do.
How Important Is Violence in Literature?
Within social groups, the exercise of power tends
heavily toward containing and defl ecting lethal vio-
lence (Boehm, 1999). In virtually all social groups,
the amount of time spent in violent encounters is
small relative to the time spent in peaceful interac-
tion. Nonetheless, because violence is the ultimate
sanction against behavior that violates group norms,
the potential for violence has a powerful organizing
infl uence on behavior within a group. A similar point
can be made with respect to interactions between
social groups. One possible way to look at collec-
tive violence is to suppose that history consists in
periods of peace and stability occasionally disturbed
by military confl ict. It would be more accurate to
say that periods of peace and stability are contained
and organized by periods of mass violence (Potts &
Hayden, 2008, pp. 12, 268). Consider American
history. Americans have not had a war within their
territorial boundaries since the Civil War, 150 years
ago, but the country was founded on aggressive
acts of territorial acquisition from the natives; the
natives the fi rst colonists encountered were just the
survivors of about 15,000 years of savage tribal war-
fare; the nation came to birth, as a nation, in an
act of collective, organized violence ( e War of
Independence); the South had an economy heavily
dependent on slaves held in place by coercive force;
the regional political confl ict between the North
and South was fi nally suppressed only in a bloody
civil war; and during the last century America par-
ticipated in the two largest wars in history, thus con-
solidating, for half a century, its now rapidly fading
position as the dominant military and economic
power in the world.
e picturesque landscapes of Europe—
crumbling castles, walled towns overgrown with
moss and ivy—are the quaint relics of a history of
mass violence that shaped the demographic and
political landscape. On the largest scale, world
history consists in migrations and invasions: huge
masses of armed people descending on other peo-
ples, killing many of them, enslaving others, and
gradually merging with the survivors. Instances on
a continental scale include the barbarian hordes that
inundated the Roman Empire; the Mongol inva-
sions of China and Europe; the European invasions
of North and South America; the Bantu expan-
sion south and east in Africa; and the English col-
onization of Australia and New Zealand (Gibbon,
1776–1789/1994; Roberts, 2003; Turchin, 2007;
Wells, 1921). Great Britain is the product of mul-
tiple genocidal events: the Germanic invasions that
overwhelmed the Romanized Celts, who had them-
selves pushed aside the Picts; the Danish incursions
into Anglo-Saxon lands; the brutal Norman con-
quest that subjugated the Anglo-Saxons and Danes;
and the English conquests of Scotland and Ireland,
especially Ireland (Davies, 1999; Johnson, 1980).
World War II was initiated chiefl y by German and
Japanese eff orts once again to change the shape of
populations over whole continents (Davies, 2006;
Gilbert, 1989; Keegan, 1990; Snyder, 2010; Spector,
1984). Both before and during the war, the Soviets
reshaped and redistributed their vast population by
starving, shooting, or deporting millions of their
own citizens (Snyder, 2010). e period of rela-
tive geopolitical stability produced by World War II
will not last forever. Expanding global population is
placing increasing pressure on scarce resources, and
that kind of pressure has always been a chief cause
for the mass movement of populations. Sometime
within the present century, the geopolitical land-
scape will perhaps be once again transformed by
cataclysmic upheavals (Friedman, 2009; Wilson,
1998, ch. 12).
e case for the organizing power of violence on
a world-historical scale has a bearing on even the
most domestic and polite form of literature: the
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417
“novel of manners.” Novels by authors such as Jane
Austen and Anthony Trollope (both British writers
of the 19th century) contain very little overt vio-
lence. Pride and Prejudice and Barchester Towers, for
instance, chiefl y concern themselves with confl icts
over mate choice and social status. But these domestic
dramas take place within a sociopolitical landscape
that is the stabilized result of acts of domination:
the domination of whole populations over others,
in fashioning the British nation; the domination of
the whole population by an elite class living off the
proceeds of agricultural labor; and the political and
religious upheavals, culminating in the English Civil
War, that created a national church and associated it
with the elite political class descended from military
barons who had domineered over a population of
serfs. Austen’s novels take place during the era of the
Napoleonic Wars. No battles are depicted, but offi -
cers of the army and navy fi gure very largely among
the casts of characters. In Persuasion, the male pro-
tagonist, Captain Wentworth, has become rich off
the spoils of the French vessels he has defeated in
battle. e polite manners and well-regulated social
hierarchies in domestic novels are like the rock for-
mations produced by molten lava once it has cooled.
e exercise of social power in such novels has stabi-
lized, so that violence is no longer often necessary,
but violence helped create the stabilized social order
and still sustains it through foreign wars.
e novel of manners is built on a foundation
of cooled and congealed violence. e action in
much canonical literature is violence still hot and
liquid. (“Canonical” literature is literature that has
had a seminal, creative force that makes itself felt
in subsequent literature.) For the literature of the
West—Europe, the Americas, Australia, and those
portions of Asia, especially Japan, that have come
under the cultural sway of the West—canonical lit-
erature has two chief wellsprings: ancient Greece
and the Bible. Both sources off er abundant enter-
tainment for readers with a taste for what the pro-
tagonist of A Clockwork Orange fondly describes as
“ultraviolence.”
e Old Testament consists largely in chroni-
cling the wars, conquests, defeats, and enslavements
of an ancient pastoral people who commonly prac-
ticed genocide against their neighbors (Headlam
Wells, 2011). In the story of Noah’s Flood, God
goes the Hebrews one better, wiping out not just a
few neighboring tribes but the whole human race,
all but Noah and his family. e fi rst family drama
in the Bible, after Adam and Eve are cast out of par-
adise, is the murder of one brother by another. at
theme is taken up again in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
probably the single most widely known work of
modern Western literature. Contemplating his
crime, Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, laments, “O, my
off ence is rank, it smells to heaven; / It hath the
primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder”
(3.3.36–38; for an evolutionary interpretation of
Hamlet, see Carroll, 2011b, pp. 123–147).
So also with the Greeks. e oldest classic that
has come down to us is Homer’s Iliad. Much of
the Iliad consists in graphic depictions of the grisly
forms of death produced by barbarian warriors
wielding edged and pointed weapons (Gottschall,
2008b). Before the Greeks could set sail to rape,
murder, and pillage among the Trojans, the Greek
leader, Agamemnon, had to placate the Gods by
sacrifi cing his daughter Iphigenia. And thereon
hangs a tale, or series of tales: the Oresteia, three
plays by Aeschylus (Agamemnon, e Libation
Bearers, and e Eumenides). e act of child sac-
rifi ce sets off a chain reaction: Agamemnon is mur-
dered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover,
Aegisthus; and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are mur-
dered by Clytemnestra’s son Orestes. In addition to
being Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus had a second
motive for murdering Agamemnon: Agamemnon
and Aegisthus are cousins; Agamemnon’s father
Atreus had murdered Aegisthus’s brothers, who, like
Aegisthus, were Atreus’s nephews. ( e murderous
confl ict between Atreus and his brother yestes is
the subject of a play, yestes, by the Roman play-
wright Seneca the Younger.)
If we fast forward to the Christian Middle
Ages, skipping past the derivative drama of Rome
and the illiterate centuries of barbarian chaos, the
most prominent landmark is Dante’s Inferno, which
consists largely of graphic, gruesome descriptions
of physical torture, varied with monstrous inge-
nuity, in the nine circles of hell. Fast forward once
again, and the next major landmark in Western
literature is Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Roman his-
tory plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
hinge on assassination and war. e
English history
plays chronicle the Wars of the Roses, a drawn-
out sequence of intrigues, betrayals, assassinations,
and bloody battles. e major tragedies (Othello,
Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear) turn on murder,
war, torture, or all three. Move up to the 19th cen-
tury, a period in which representational/mimetic lit-
erature is dominated by the novel, and ask: What is
widely regarded as the greatest of all novels? War and
Peace, many would say. e central subject in War
and Peace is Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the
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418
retreat in which most of his army perished. Tolstoy’s
chief competitor for title of greatest Russian nov-
elist is Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment is about
a young man who uses an axe to murder two old
women; e Brothers Karamazov is about a malig-
nant old man who is murdered by his illegitimate,
psychopathic son. And in our own time, the last
major canonical American novel that formed a
shaping imaginative experience for a whole genera-
tion, many people feel, is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,
a war novel full of violent deaths.
In answer then, to the question, How important
is violence to literature? we can say that violence is
as important in literature as it is in life. Like sex,
even when it does not take much time, proportion-
ally, it can have a decisive impact on subsequent
events. Gloucester in King Lear jokes that there
was “good sport” at the making of his illegitimate
son Edmund, but then Edmund betrays Gloucester
to his enemies, who gouge out Gloucester’s eyes.
McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove off ers an illustration of
the same point. e protagonists are two middle-
aged cowboys, former Texas Rangers, on a cattle
drive. At one point, they must fulfi ll the unpleasant
task of hanging one of their old friends. e friend
is good natured but morally lax and had inadver-
tently become involved with a band of psychopathic
killers. Over the years, the amount of time the three
friends had spent in genial exchange was much more
extensive than the few minutes required to perform
the hanging, but the hanging is more important,
practically, than anything that had preceded it;
moreover, it sets the moral quality of the relation-
ship into stark relief, revealing that the executioners,
unlike their condemned friend, have a severe com-
mitment to a moral code.
e emotional intensity and decisive practical
character of homicidal violence invest it with spe-
cial signifi cance as evidence for underlying force in
human mental and emotional life. Hence the very
large role violence plays in literature.
Literary Depictions of Violence in the
Phases of Human Life History: A Sampling
Beneath all variation in the details of organi-
zation, the life history of every species forms a
reproductive cycle. In the case of human beings,
successful parental care produces children capable,
when grown, of forming adult pair bonds, becom-
ing functional members of a community, and caring
for children of their own. Survival, mating, parent-
ing, and social life thus form natural categories in
the organization of human life. ey are common
topics in textbooks of evolutionary psychology and
also common themes in literature. In this section,
these categories are used to organize a sampling of
depictions of violence in literature.
Violence Against Oneself
Understanding Suicide From an
Evolutionary Perspective
People seem to have a natural inhibition against
harming their own kind and a much greater inhi-
bition against harming themselves. ey often
overcome both inhibitions, but not without a
psychological cost. When we speak of “violence,”
the connotations of that word do not limit them-
selves to actions. “Violence” suggests high stress:
intense passion and confl ict, including inner confl ict.
Popular “action” movies are imaginatively uninter-
esting because they falsely depict violence as easy;
they are emotionally shallow. Literary depictions of
violence are most interesting when they evoke the
greatest degree of inner struggle. No form of inner
struggle is more intense than that which culminates
in taking one’s own life.
Most forms of violence can plausibly be described
as extensions of adaptive behavior—sexual jealousy,
struggles for dominance or resources. Not suicide.
Eff orts to explain self-infl icted death as a strategy for
propagating one’s genes have a strained look about
them (deCatanzaro, 1981). From an evolutionary
standpoint, not all signifi cant features of human
physiology and behavior need be regarded as adap-
tive. Illnesses such as stroke, cancer, heart attack,
and diabetes are not adaptations; they are break-
downs in complex adaptive systems. at does not
mean that evolutionary explanations are irrelevant.
To understand how and why a system breaks down,
one must understand the function for which it was
designed. Adaptation by means of natural selection
is the default explanation for complex functional
organization (Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides,
1992). It also provides the necessary explanatory
context for dysfunctional behavior.
Humans have a uniquely developed sense of self-
awareness that derives from the evolution of the
neocortex. Individual persons have a sense of per-
sonal identity continuously developing over time,
and they consciously locate themselves as indi-
viduals within social networks and within nature.
Self-awareness facilitates planning and actions
that require shared images of collective purpose
(Hawkins & Blakeslee, 2004; Lane, 2009, ch. 9;
Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005).
Self-awareness is evidently functional; it is complex,
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419
expensive, universal, and reliably developing. It is
also fragile. Human beings are peculiarly vulnera-
ble to conceptions of their own existence that cause
them intolerable mental pain. Grief, guilt, self-
loathing, and the feeling of being trapped in impos-
sible social situations or incurable mental illness can
drive people to escape from their own minds in the
only way possible: escaping from life itself.
Guilt
Literary suicides arising from simple grief are
relatively rare. ey do not reveal complex inner
confl icts and thus off er little insight into inner life.
Romeo kills himself because he mistakenly thinks
Juliet is dead; Juliet kills herself because Romeo
has killed himself. Lyrically moving, yes; psycho-
logically interesting, no. Guilt is a more complex
emotion than simple sorrow and a more common
motive for literary suicide. In the best known of
all ancient plays, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus
stops short of suicide, but when he discovers that
he has murdered his father and married his mother,
even though he had acted inadvertently, he gouges
out his own eyes. Oedipus’s incestuous marriage
produced a daughter, Antigone. In Sophocles’s
Antigone, the autocrat Creon is Antigone’s uncle but
has Antigone walled up alive for defying his orders.
She hangs herself. Creon’s son, who is in love with
Antigone, kills himself when she dies. His mother
then kills herself. Antigone does not reach an emo-
tional climax in Antigone’s despair, her lover’s grief,
or the grief of his mother. It reaches emotional
climax in the tragic anguish of Creon, humbled,
shattered, chastened, riven by guilt, with his vision
of himself and the world fundamentally and per-
manently changed. Shakespeare’s Othello murders
Desdemona out of sexual jealousy. When he realizes
that he has been duped and that she was innocent,
he fi rst mortally wounds the man who deceived him
and then kills himself, turning his sense of justice
against himself. In Jean Racine’s 17th-century ver-
sion of the Phaedra story (Phèdre), a stepmother
succumbs to a guilty passion for her stepson; when
her husband, eseus, brings down a fatal curse
on his son, unable to endure the commingled grief
and guilt, she poisons herself. In Conrad’s novel
Victory, the protagonist Axel Heyst loses faith in the
woman he loves. Too late he realizes that while he
had been cynically repudiating her, she had been
giving her life for him. He builds a funeral pyre for
her and uses it also to immolate himself. In Émile
Zola’s érèse Raquin, érèse has a passionate aff air
with her husband’s closest friend. She and her lover
murder her husband, but the guilt torments them
until they take poison to escape from themselves
and from each other.
In most readers’ perceptions, érèse and her lover
undergo a transition in role: from being objects of
horror—merely villains—to being objects of tragic
pity. ey learn about the moral magnitude of their
crime only by committing it, but they do learn. As
moral agents, they are thus radically distinct from
characters such as Richard III, who commit horri-
ble atrocities—Richard murders children—without
ever feeling a shiver of guilt. On the scale of guilt,
Shakespeare’s Macbeth falls somewhere between
Othello and Richard III. Macbeth and his wife are
both tormented by guilt at the murders they have
committed; she kills herself, but Macbeth, like
Richard III, fi ghts on to the end. Such a death leaves
most readers suspended between a feeling of tragic
pathos and a feeling of satisfaction at a just retribu-
tion. at ambivalent feeling can be contrasted to
the simple emotions of grief and horror readers feel
when Macbeth’s henchmen murder Macduff ’s wife
and children. (For convenience, responses to drama
are designated as responses of “readers,” though of
course drama is in the fi rst instance intended to be
watched and listened to, not read.)
Oscar Wilde’s e Picture of Dorian Gray has a
fantastic plot device: Dorian remains perpetually
young and beautiful, but his portrait becomes ever
older and more hideously ugly, revealing the deprav-
ity of his soul, which has been corrupted by cruelty,
drugs, and sexual excess. e portrait is an external-
ized image of his conscience. Riven by unresolvable
confl icts between irrepressible desires and guilty
self-loathing, he stabs the portrait in the heart; the
portrait returns to its original state, and he him-
self lies dead, old and vile. Self-loathing is also the
motive for suicide in omas Hardy’s e Mayor of
Casterbridge. In middle age, the title character fi nds
himself bereft of everything he had ever wanted or
achieved; he is an outcast, without social stand-
ing, without friends, without family. He feels him-
self despised and also despises himself. He starves
himself to death and leaves behind a will demand-
ing that no man remember him. He has not lived
a good or wise life, but having passed such severe
judgment on himself, he leaves none for the reader
to exercise in vindictive satisfaction.
Social Failure
People are social animals. Even their most inti-
mate feelings about their own identities refl ect their
sense of their place in a social network. Some of the
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best-known literary suicides fi nd themselves caught
in a socially intolerable situation—entangled in for-
bidden or hopeless passions, pushed against the wall
for lack of money, or trapped in an ideological or
political impasse.
In Hippolytus, Euripides’s version of the Phaedra
story, Phaedra is caught out in an illicit passion for
her stepson, realizes she is socially lost, and hangs
herself. Virgil’s Aeneid, the most prestigious and
infl uential literary work of the Roman world, con-
tains a long episode in which Aeneas, fl eeing from
the havoc at Troy, lingers with the Carthaginian
Queen Dido. When he abandons her to pursue his
destiny, she builds her own funeral pyre and dies on
it. (Christopher Marlowe produced a dramatic ver-
sion of the story, and Purcell an operatic version.)
Dido dies not merely from sorrow but from the rec-
ognition that she has hopelessly compromised her
position as queen. Anna Karenina leaves her hus-
band for the man she loves. Discovering that pas-
sion alone, outside the system of accepted social
roles, cannot sustain her, she throws herself under a
train. Winnie Verloc, in Conrad’s e Secret Agent,
murders her husband, fl ings herself at another man,
and when he abandons her, throws herself over-
board from a ship. Lily Bart, the protagonist in
Edith Wharton’s e House of Mirth, cannot bring
herself to marry for money without love, or for love
without money. She loses her place in the social
world and poisons herself. In George Gissing’s New
Grub Street, Harold Biff en, an impoverished author,
realizes he has no hope of winning a worldly wom-
an’s love. He poisons himself. In George Orwell’s
Burmese Days, John Flory, a colonial administra-
tor, is publicly humiliated and then rejected by the
woman he loves. He shoots himself and his dog.
In Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Emma
Bovary takes arsenic because she has secretly gone
into debt. e protagonist of Willa Cather’s story
“Paul’s Case” is a sensitive adolescent aesthete, unfi t
for the world of middle-class squalor into which he
is born. He steals money, lives a few days in lux-
ury, and then throws himself in front of a train. In
Dickens’s Little Dorritt, the charlatan fi nancier Mr.
Merdle—a Bernie Madoff of the Victorian period—
creates a speculative bubble and then cuts his throat
before the bubble bursts. In Anthony Trollope’s e
Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez plays a high-stakes
game for money and social position, loses, and
throws himself in front of a train.
Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
and Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, are all polit-
ical people; their inner sense of self is bound up in
their political identity. When they come to the end
of their political ropes, they all take their own lives.
Cleopatra uses an adder to poison herself; Cassius
and Brutus fall on their swords. Hyacinth Robinson,
in Henry James’s e Princess Casamassima, takes
an oath to perform a political assassination. He
loses confi dence in the righteousness of his cause
but still feels bound by his oath; he resolves his
dilemma by shooting himself. In Kate Chopin’s
e Awakening, Edna Pontellier feels stifl ed by the
sociosexual roles open to her in turn-of-the-century
New Orleans; she swims out to sea and drowns. In
Chinua Achebe’s ings Fall Apart, the protagonists
Okonkwo attempts to lead the people of his tribe in
a revolt against White domination; when the rebel-
lion fails to take fi re, he hangs himself.
Meaning in fi ction depends heavily on the
degree to which an author’s perspective corresponds
to that of any given character. Gissing’s perspective
in New Grub Street is morose and self-pitying; he
identifi es closely with Biff en, and even more closely
with Biff en’s friend, Edward Reardon, who dies of
illness brought on by hunger and exposure. Tolstoy’s
stance toward Anna Karenina remains clinically
detached, registering the vacuity of the social con-
ventions against which Anna rebels, but registering
also the self-destructive character of her emotional
impulsiveness. Cather evokes Paul’s aestheticism in
a sensitive way, but she looks with cold irony at the
delusions with which he sustains his fragile arro-
gance. Emma Bovary, too, lives in fl attering delu-
sions. Flaubert sustains a stance of cool contempt for
her, as he does for most of his bourgeois characters,
in all of his fi ction. (His stance toward his protago-
nists in Salammbô, in contrast, is almost tender. e
protagonists are barbarian warriors leading a slave
revolt in the ancient Near East. Salammbô luxuri-
ates in a voluptuous welter of vengeful cruelty on a
massive scale.) Emma’s death is particularly painful
and ugly. Flaubert dwells on the physically repulsive
details of death by arsenic.
An author’s moral and ideological views often
strongly infl uence how he or she responds emo-
tionally to characters. Euripides evidently expects
readers to disapprove of Phaedra’s willingness to
sacrifi ce fi delity to a guilty passion. Her death seems
right and necessary. Virgil regards Dido as a tragic
victim of historical forces larger and more impor-
tant than individual passion. He sympathizes with
her, but his sympathy is tinged with contempt.
Trollope regards Lopez as both an outsider and a
psychopathic adventurer. Lopez’s self-destruction
reestablishes social equilibrium and thus serves as
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421
a form of resolution. For Dickens, Merdle virtu-
ally embodies fraudulent social pretense; Dickens
exults in vindictive glee over Merdle’s death.
Chopin seems to regard Edna Pontellier as a vic-
tim of a stifl ing social order—hence Edna’s current
status as an icon of resistance to patriarchy. James
elicits pity for the death of Hyacinth Robinson
and indignation against the maliciously manipula-
tive anarchist who has placed him in an untenable
position. Orwell’s John Flory is intelligently appre-
ciative of Burmese culture; he serves Orwell as a
foil for the unintelligent arrogance of the British
Raj. Nonetheless, Orwell registers the weakness of
Flory’s ego with pitying contempt. For Conrad,
Winnie Verloc’s passionate though “morbid” devo-
tion to her retarded brother serves as a counter-
weight to the moral vacuity of the anarchists who
surround her. Conrad treats Winnie’s death with
a combination of overstrained pathos and ironic
distaste.
Tragedy requires an element of grandeur or
nobility lacking in most cases of suicide for rea-
sons of social failure, but Achebe’s Okonkwo and
Shakespeare’s Roman protagonists are tragic fi gures.
Okonkwo is a strong but fl awed man, victimized
both by circumstances and by the limitations in
his own perspective. In the deaths of Cleopatra,
Cassius, and Brutus, Shakespeare evokes a Roman
ethos in which suicide is the only honorable conclu-
sion to a failed political intrigue.
Mental Illness
Mental illness is a neurophysiological dysfunc-
tion that produces mental anguish (Oakley, 2007).
Virginia Woolf suff ered recurrent bouts of mental
illness; rather than go through it one more time,
she drowned herself. Some sense of the horror she
must have experienced is captured in one of her
novels, Mrs. Dalloway. Over the course of a single
day, Woolf counterpoints Mrs. Dalloway’s placid
ruminations with the hallucinatory terror of a bat-
tle-shocked veteran suff ering from schizophrenia.
At the end of the story, as Mrs. Dalloway is enjoying
herself at a party, he kills himself by jumping out
of a window. In Maid in Waiting, John Galsworthy
gets readers close to the suicidal anguish of uncon-
trolled bipolar disorder, before that disorder had
a clinical name. Edward Ashburnham, in Ford
Madox Ford’s e Good Soldier, is a slave to recur-
rent and irresistible romantic passions. He fi nally
escapes by cutting his own throat. Severe clinical
depression gets canonical expression in Hardy’s
last novel, Jude the Obscure. Jude is a disappointed
man, morose and fearful. His oldest child, a vir-
tual personifi cation of clinical depression, hangs
himself and his siblings. Jude eventually stays out
in the rain long enough to get pneumonia, thus
bringing his own misery to an end. Chief White
Halfoat, in Catch-22, uses the same strategy for
ending his life.
Existential Despair
Human beings are the only species with a brain
so highly developed that they can locate them-
selves in a cosmic scheme of things. Humans are
susceptible to religious fantasies and supernatural
terrors. ey often need to feel that their existence
has some “meaning” within the larger scheme of
things. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, caught somewhere
in between medieval supernaturalism and modern
metaphysical nihilism, yearns to destroy himself but
fears the afterlife. In his closet drama, Empedocles on
Etna, Matthew Arnold captures the mid-Victorian
mood of metaphysical despair, translocating his
own metaphysical gloom into the voice of an early
Greek philosopher. After discoursing eloquently
about the futility of human life, Empedocles fl ings
himself into a volcanic crater. In the later 19th cen-
tury, with the widespread loss of religious belief
among educated people, the sense of existential
despair became a predominating theme in litera-
ture. Conrad is particularly eff ective in giving voice
to that theme. In Conrad’s epic novel Nostromo,
Decoud, a Gallicized South American patrician,
is trapped in solitude on a small boat for several
days. Losing all sense of purpose or meaning in
life, he shoots himself and falls over the side of the
boat. Conrad speaks of this death with mocking
contempt, but the contempt is directed as much
at himself as at his character. Decoud’s perspec-
tive is a close approximation to one main aspect of
Conrad’s own point of view; and, indeed, Decoud
kills himself by shooting himself in the chest, the
same method that in his youth Conrad had adopted
for attempting suicide. Aldous Huxley’s futuristic
utopia/dystopia Brave New World depicts a society
in which life is perfectly regulated by genetic engi-
neering and behavioral conditioning. e protag-
onist, a “Savage” who had grown up on an Indian
reservation and has thus escaped conditioning,
cannot fully articulate what he feels is intolerable
about such a society, but he ends up hanging him-
self in despair. e existential problems explored
by writers like Shakespeare, Arnold, Conrad, and
Huxley have not been solved; they are part of our
active cultural heritage.
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422
All in the Family
Next to one’s relation to one’s self, one’s closest
relations, genetically, are to parents, off spring, and
siblings. e “ultimate” causal force, inclusive fi t-
ness, creates “proximal” feelings of psychological
closeness. Blood is thicker than water, but in family
dramas blood sometimes runs like water, producing
in readers peculiarly intense sensations of shock and
horror. Not surprisingly, in Dante’s Inferno, people
who commit crimes against kin are placed in the
ninth circle of hell, the lowest circle.
Family violence is sometimes complex and
sequential. e cycle of family violence that moti-
vates Aeschylus’s trilogy about the house of Atreus
has already been mentioned: Agamemnon mur-
ders Iphigenia, is murdered in turn by his wife,
Clytemnestra, who in turn is murdered by her son
Orestes. Sophocles’s depiction of Oedipus has also
been mentioned: Oedipus murdered his father and
married his mother, then in remorse gouges out his
own eyes; Oedipus’s daughter Antigone defi es her
uncle Creon and is executed by him; Creon’s son,
who loves Antigone, kills himself, and his mother
then kills herself. In both Euripides’s and Racine’s
versions of Phaedra’s story, eseus’s wife, Phaedra,
betrays her stepson; eseus invokes the power of a
god to destroy his son; and Phaedra commits sui-
cide. In King Lear, Edmund betrays both his father
and his brother Edgar. Lear’s two oldest daughters,
Goneril and Regan, collude in humiliating their
father but then fall out over a sexual rivalry, each
competing for Edmund’s favor. Goneril poisons
Regan, and then, when she is exposed and trapped,
stabs herself to death. Edgar kills Edmund in com-
bat, but Edmund has already ordered the execution
of Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia. After she dies,
Lear dies from grief. In Dostoevsky’s e Brothers
Karamazov, Fyodor Karamazov’s illegitimate son
Smerdyakov, inspired by the atheistic writings of
his brother Ivan, murders his father. en, feeling
betrayed by Ivan, Smerdyakov kills himself, leaving
another brother, Dmitry, to take the blame for the
patricide.
Murdering one’s own children has a peculiarly
horrifi c eff ect, since it combines the revulsion against
murdering kin with the revulsion against murdering
children. In Flaubert’s Salammbô, the worshippers of
Baal are fi ghting off a genocidal revolt of slaves, and
the war is going badly. To propitiate Baal, they burn
alive all the infants in the city, fl inging them one by
one into the glowing belly of the great brass god.
Medea, in a play by Euripides, abandons her home-
land for Jason’s sake; when he later abandons her,
she murders their two sons for revenge. In George
Eliot’s novel Adam Bede, an unmarried woman,
Hetty Sorrel, leaves her newborn infant to die in the
woods. In William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Sophie
has to choose which of her two children to sacrifi ce
to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Later, tormented
by guilt, she commits suicide. e protagonist of
Toni Morrison’s Beloved chooses to murder her chil-
dren rather than have them returned to slavery. In
King’s e Shining, Jack Torrance is gradually pos-
sessed by evil spirits in an isolated hotel; under their
infl uence, he almost succeeds in murdering his wife
and child.
In fi ction, murdering members of one’s own
family almost always has an evil cast, but evil can be
contextualized in many diff erent ways, depending
on the total worldview of the writer. Greek trage-
dies tend to adopt a stance that hovers ambiguously
between moralism and fatalism, that is, between
emphasizing the consequences of behavioral choices
and counseling resignation to the caprice of the
gods. In Salammbô, Flaubert seems to be aiming
at a purely aesthetic goal: evoking the ferocity of a
barbarian culture, without judging it from a moral
stance. George Eliot, in contrast, dwells on a moral
theme: the opposition between egoism and empa-
thy. She sets up a clear moral dichotomy between
the vain and shallow nature of Hetty Sorrel, who
abandons her newborn child, and the loving nature
of the female protagonist, Dinah Morris. e three
main characters in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—a Polish
Catholic woman victimized by the Nazis, a Jewish
schizophrenic, and a descendant of Southern slave
owners—off er an occasion for meditations on prob-
lematic racial and ethnic relationships. Morrison’s
Beloved is designed as an indictment of slavery in the
American South. Dostoevsky situates Smerdyakov’s
patricide within the context of a philosophical
debate over morality and religion. Jack Torrance in
King’s e Shining is a recovering alcoholic and a
failed writer. His demonic possession is cast in terms
of an inner struggle between egoistic vanity, fueled
by alcohol, and his devotion to his wife and child.
e Shining is essentially a moral drama, like Adam
Bede. King Lear, too, is a moral drama. Goneril and
Regan are faithless and wantonly cruel; they pro-
vide a foil for the idea of family bonds personifi ed
in their sister Cordelia.
Violence and Sex
Sexual Rivals
e biblical story of David and Bathsheba exem-
plifi es homicide prompted by sexual desire. Greek
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423
myth is replete with instances of Hera, queen of
Olympus, punishing Zeus’s mortal lovers or their
off spring. Lethal jealousy is a major theme also in
the three great epics of the Greco-Roman world—
the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. e Trojan
War, the subject of the Iliad, takes place, ostensi-
bly, because the Trojan prince Paris runs off with
Helen, the wife of the Greek leader Agamemnon.
Gottschall (2008b) makes a compelling argument
that this specifi c motive was merely the symbolic
tip of the iceberg. All of Greek tribal culture in
this historical period was organized around raid-
ing for women. (Gottschall draws inspiration
from Napoleon Chagnon’s [1979] studies of the
Yanomamö.) e Odyssey, recounting Odysseus’s
eff orts to return home after the Trojan War, culmi-
nates with Odysseus slaughtering the suitors who
had gathered around his wife, Penelope. e last
half of the Aeneid occupies itself with Aeneas’s war in
Italy against Turnus. e ostensible occasion for the
war is rivalry over the hand of the princess Lavinia.
e fi rst story in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “ e
Knight’s Tale,” turns on the jealous rivalry of two
former friends, who fi ght in knightly combat until
one eventually dies. In Guy de Maupassant’s Une
Vie, a husband discovers his wife in a tryst inside a
covered cart, which he rolls off a cliff , killing both his
wife and her lover. Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend tries to drown Eugene Wrayburn
in jealousy over Lizzie Hexam. William Boldwood,
in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, has a wed-
ding party that is spoiled when his fi ancée’s husband,
erroneously supposed dead, shows up at the party.
Boldwood shoots and kills the husband. In Cather’s
O Pioneers!, the protagonist’s brother is murdered by
a jealous husband. Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning
Moon” depicts homicidal violence animated by
both sexual jealousy and racial hatred; both rivals
die, one with his throat slit, and the other burned
at the stake by a lynch mob. Zora Neale Hurston’s
“Spunk” depicts a hapless wronged husband pitted
against a cocky, dominant rival, Spunk, who shoots
him. On the surface, Spunk seems unrepentant, but
he is haunted by the murdered man’s ghost, who
pushes him into a buzz saw.
Sexual jealousy leading to violence, and espe-
cially male jealousy of rival males, is a human uni-
versal (Buss, 2003; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Geary,
1998). However, diff erences in cultural attitudes
make a large diff erence in the stance authors take
toward this universal disposition. From the perspec-
tive of Greeks in the barbarian period, Odysseus is
wholly within his rights to murder his rivals, and
along with them the serving maids with whom the
suitors had had sex. In modern literature, men who
resort to violence in response to sexual jealousy are
seldom if ever treated as epic heroes. More often,
they seem self-destructively obsessed with passions
they cannot control. ere are no modern literary
heroes, like Odysseus, who are celebrated for mur-
dering hordes of their rivals. Odysseus is a chief in a
polygynous warrior culture. Modern heroes have to
conform to the ethos of a monogamous bourgeois
culture (Gottschall, 2008b; Jobling, 2001).
Lovers’ Quarrels
Jealous hatred of a rival, like grief, is a simple pas-
sion. Jealousy of a lover or spouse is more likely to
put intense emotions into confl ict with one another.
After murdering Desdemona, Othello describes
himself as a man who “loved not wisely but too well”
(5.2.44). In Racine’s version of the Phaedra story,
Phèdre is torn between jealous rage and shame;
she colludes in a false accusation that results in her
stepson’s death, and then guilt, grief, and shame
drive her to suicide. In Robert Browning’s dra-
matic monologue “Porphyria’s Lover,” the speaker
has been driven insane by jealousy. After strangling
his lover with her own hair, he tells himself that
he has fulfi lled her own wish, since she can now
“give herself to me forever.” In William Faulkner’s
frequently anthologized story “A Rose for Emily,”
Miss Emily has an aff air with a man disinclined to
marriage. Like the speaker in “Porphyria’s Lover,”
she kills him in order to keep him with her. Many
years later, after her death, the town’s folk fi nd the
lover’s skeleton in a bed in her house, with a strand
of her gray hair on a pillow next to it. In Honoré de
Balzac’s novel Cousine Bette, the fi ckle and oppor-
tunistic siren Valérie strings along several men at
once, exploiting all of them, and is fi nally poisoned,
along with her new husband, by one of her deceived
lovers. Tolstoy, in his own life, was tormented by
obsessive jealousy, a theme that fi gures promi-
nently in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
In “ e Kreutzer Sonata,” the fi rst-person narrator
explains that he murdered his wife because he was
enraged both by ordinary sexual jealousy and by his
own enslavement to sensual passion. In Zola’s La
Bête Humaine, Jacques Lantier is driving a train on
which his mistress is a passenger; another woman,
prompted by jealous rage, derails the train, killing
many people, but not the two she was intending to
kill. Remorse drives her to suicide. Lantier himself,
affl icted with a mental disease that couples sexual
passion with homicidal fury, eventually murders his
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mistress. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love pits two
egoistic and dominating personalities, Gerald and
Gudrun, against one another. After nearly strangling
Gudrun to death, Gerald wanders away, yearning
for a release from passion, and falls off a cliff .
Murder/suicide is as common in the crime sec-
tion of the newspaper as it is in works of fi ction.
e commingling of love and hatred in works such
as those just described gives readers imaginative
access to the states of mind that animate such real-
life behavior. Literary depictions also give us access
to a range of possible attitudes toward this behav-
ior. Racine’s play is a neoclassical tragedy; it elicits
responses that mingle emotions of horror and com-
passion. Browning’s monologue creates a sensation
of horror like that in some of the works of Edgar
Allen Poe (“ e Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance)—
horror both at homicidal violence and at mental
derangement. Insanity precludes the dignity and
grandeur that are typical of tragic emotion, but
most readers’ revulsion against Browning’s lunatic
is nonetheless tinged with pity. Commenting on “A
Rose for Emily,” Faulkner (1965) declared that his
own attitude toward the story was essentially one of
compassion for Emily’s wasted life. Balzac’s attitude
toward Valérie and her lovers has an air of moral
disapproval tinged with sensationalistic fascination.
e fi rst-person narrator in Tolstoy’s story evokes
little compassion for the wife he murdered; he
wishes instead to mitigate his guilt by treating sexu-
ality itself as a mental disease. In this story, Tolstoy
not only depicts a deranged state of mind but also
exemplifi es it. Zola adopts a naturalistic stance—
clinical, detached, empirical, fascinated by the spec-
tacle of power out of control. At the end of La Bête
Humaine, Lantier is driving a train full of drunken
soldiers toward the front in the Franco-Prussian
War. He gets into a fi ght with his stoker, with whose
wife he is having an aff air, and both fall overboard,
leaving the train without a driver, hurtling toward
disaster. Lawrence’s stance in Women in Love is
essentially moralistic; Gerald and Gudrun are used
as foils for another couple, Birkin and Ursula, who
represent, for Lawrence, a more wholesome form of
sexual passion.
Killing a lover, like killing oneself or one’s kin,
limits opportunities to propagate one’s genes. So in
what way can an evolutionary perspective illumi-
nate this kind of homicide? Two explanations seem
most plausible. One is that a known disposition for
uncontrollable violence can have a powerful deter-
rent eff ect (Frank, 1988; Schelling, 1960, cited in
Wright, 1994, p. 278). Some people decrease their
fi tness by killing a mate; but many mates avoid
infi delity at least in part because spurned or cuck-
olded lovers can be dangerous. e other expla-
nation is that human passions are not necessarily
optimized for inclusive fi tness in every possible
combination of circumstances. All adaptations
have costs; all adaptive benefi ts involve trade-off s
against other possible adaptive benefi ts; and some
adaptations confl ict with others. Male bears have
adaptations for having sex and also for eating small
animals; they sometimes eat their own off spring.
Humans have adaptations for erotic fi xation and
also for punishing cheaters; they sometimes kill
their lovers. In “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar
Wilde meditates on a man condemned to hang
for murdering his lover. Protesting against sin-
gling this man out for punishment, Wilde declares
that “all men kill the thing they love.” e gener-
alization stretches the point further than it will
quite bear, but many people do indeed kill the
thing they love; they thus also sometimes destroy
themselves.
Violence Within the Social Group
Instrumental Violence
Much of the violence outside the family circle, in
literature as in life, is largely instrumental in char-
acter. People harm or kill others to defend them-
selves or their family and friends, to obtain money
or other resources, or to remove an obstacle to
social ambition. Odysseus jams a burning pole into
the Cyclops’s eye because the Cyclops is eating his
companions. Robinson Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe’s
novel, also kills cannibals. In Dickens’s A Tale of Two
Cities, the elderly and very proper Miss Pross shoots
Mme. Defarge in order to protect Lucie Manette’s
family from the guillotine. In Haruki Murakami’s
Kafka on the Shore, Nakata, a gentle old man, stabs
Johnny Walker to death to stop him from tortur-
ing cats. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov
murders a pawnbroker because he needs money;
and he murders her sister to cover up the deed. In
Frank Norris’s McTeague, McTeague beats his wife
to death over the money she is hoarding. Macbeth
murders Duncan because Macbeth wants to be
king, and Duncan is in the way. Claudius murders
Hamlet’s father for the same reason; and the future
Richard III murders several people to eliminate the
obstacles between himself and the throne. In Eliot’s
Middlemarch, Bulstrode murders Raffl es because
Raffl es is threatening to expose his shady past and
thus ruin his social standing. In eodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffi ths murders his
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425
pregnant girlfriend, Roberta, because she is threat-
ening to spoil his chances of social advancement. In
cases such as these, though violence might be fueled
by rage or hatred, harming someone else is not the
ultimate purpose of violence; harming someone else
is merely a means to an end.
e value attached to instrumental violence,
like the value attached to all depicted behavior,
depends on the state of mind of the character, the
author’s stance toward the character, and the read-
er’s response to both. e stance of the author and
the reader’s response are in most cases heavily con-
ditioned by the cultural ethos of the character, the
author, and the reader, but any given cultural ethos
is itself only a particular organization of the ele-
ments of human nature.
Odysseus exults over defeating his monstrous
enemy, and most readers rejoice with him. Miss
Pross is permanently shaken by the enormity of the
deed required of her, but Dickens clearly regards her
as a hero and as a symbol of British moral courage.
Nakata is deeply disturbed to discover his own capac-
ity for violence but recognizes, dimly, that violence
is sometimes necessary to sustain humane condi-
tions of life. Raskolnikov, fi nding he cannot ratio-
nalize murder, ultimately turns himself in; remorse
and redemption are the central themes of Crime and
Punishment. McTeague, in contrast, does not have a
moral consciousness suffi ciently developed to expe-
rience remorse. McTeague is a “naturalist” novel, a
genre that typically depicts characters operating at
a level of mindless animal brutality. Richard III,
unlike McTeague, is not a mindless brute, but he is
a psychopath, and he delights in his cunning manip-
ulations. Readers are simultaneously lured into his
perspective and repelled at his viciousness. Claudius
and Macbeth are more like Raskolnikov than like
Richard III; they are unable to reconcile themselves
to the murders they have committed. Richard III
requires readers to establish their own independent
moral perspective; Hamlet and Macbeth provide an
internal moral monitor in the conscience of the
characters. An American Tragedy, like McTeague, is
naturalistic. Clyde Griffi ths has a social imagina-
tion more refi ned than McTeague’s, but he seems
morally helpless before the lure of social glamour.
ough planning and executing a murder, much
of the time he seems baffl ed, frightened, and wist-
ful. One central implication of a naturalist vision is
that people are ultimately driven by forces outside
their control—a conclusion that converges with the
fatalistic stance in much Greek drama. e polar
opposite to that stance can be located in highly
moralistic writers such as George Eliot. Bulstrode
in Middlemarch serves Eliot as an exemplar of a
morally ambiguous nature: a man with high ideals,
low ambitions, and intellectual integrity too weak
to acknowledge the discrepancy between them. For
Eliot, Bulstrode’s morally underdeveloped mind
serves as a foil for the protagonistic characters who
exemplify the power of directing one’s own behavior
in morally conscious ways.
Dominance and Reciprocation
In addition to association by kinship, there are
two basic principles in human social organization:
dominance and reciprocation (Boehm, 1999; de
Waal, 1982; Trivers, 1971; Wilson, 1993). In social
groups not related by kinship, if violence does not
serve a primarily instrumental function, it usually
serves either to assert social dominance, to sup-
press dominance in others, or to punish transgres-
sions against equitable behavior. Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar off ers a straightfor ward instance of dominance
as a central theme. Caesar seizes dictatorial power,
overthrowing the collective power of the senatorial
class. In assassinating him, the senators exemplify
the social dynamic delineated by Boehm (1996):
collective force aimed at suppressing dominance in
individuals. Suppressing dominance in individuals
blends into punishing transgressions against equity.
Individuals typically assert dominance by harming
others; they thus violate an implicit social contract
to treat others equitably.
In chimpanzee societies, sheer physical power
establishes dominance. Even when weaker males
form coalitions to overpower stronger males, phys-
ical strength ultimately determines hierarchical
status. Two relatively weak males working together
can be physically stronger than a single male who is
stronger than either individually (de Waal, 1982).
Physical power also undergirds human social rela-
tions, but human social relations are heavily regu-
lated by norms and laws that prescribe obligations
according to social roles (Hill, 2007). Civil society
leaves little scope for individuals to assert domi-
nance through sheer brute strength. Humans must
instead use accumulated resources and acquired
skills, including social skills, to establish their
place in a social hierarchy. Sports constitute a par-
tial exception. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It and
Achebe’s ings Fall Apart, the protagonists gain
prestige through victory in wrestling matches. But,
then, sports are not means for dominating a social
hierarchy through raw physical strength; they are
forms of regulated social activity.
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426
In most literary traditions, domestic violence—
asserting individual dominance through physi-
cal force—falls outside the range of acceptable
behavior. e most famous character in medieval
English literature, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, takes
as her chief theme the moral norm that prohibits
violence against wives. In the prologue to her tale,
she describes her relationship with her fourth hus-
band, a scholar and misogynist. ey quarreled; she
ripped pages out of his favorite antifemale tract, and
in a rage he struck her, knocking her senseless. His
remorse was so severe that he conceded complete
interpersonal dominance to her. She says they were
very happy together after that. Her actual tale, as
distinct from her prologue, is a fable illustrating the
idea that men should yield domestic dominance to
women.
In literature as in life, alcoholic derangement
often plays a precipitating role in domestic vio-
lence. In e Dram Shop, Zola depicts the moral
squalor of the alcoholic underclass in Paris. A father
who gradually beats his prepubescent daughter to
death is only the most poignant instance of perva-
sive, gratuitous violence. McTeague is drunk when
he beats his wife to death. In King’s e Shining,
Jack Torrance reverts to alcoholism, beats his wife
nearly to death, and tries to murder his son. At the
time, he is under the infl uence of “evil spirits” in
both senses of the word. e supernaturalism of
the novel serves as a symbolic vehicle for depict-
ing Torrance’s losing struggle to resist his own inner
demons.
Individuals in literature seldom assert dom-
inance through sheer force, but groups often do.
Racial or ethnic domination forms the theme of
works such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Faulkner’s
Light in August, Richard Wright’s Native Son,
Tadeusz Borowski’s is Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, William Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice and e Confessions of Nat Turner,
and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Class confl icts culmi-
nating in riots with fatal consequences appear in
Scott’s e Heart of Midlothian, Benjamin Disraeli’s
Sybil, and Eliot’s Felix Holt. Dickens’s Barnaby
Rudge climaxes in a deadly riot animated by reli-
gious strife. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens depicts
the Terror that followed the French Revolution. In
most representations of collective violence, authors
sympathize with protests against racial oppression,
class injustice, or political tyranny. At the same
time, few literary authors give an approving depic-
tion of mob violence.
Revenge
Individuals who assert dominance through sheer
physical force belong to a despised fringe in both
life and literature. Using violence to gain revenge
for injuries or insults is a diff erent matter. Bullies are
held in contempt, but characters who seek revenge
through violence often elicit readers’ respect, if not
their conscious approval.
Personal injury motivates many instances of
murderous revenge. Samson is tricked, blinded,
and shackled for public display. When his strength
returns along with his hair, he crushes the Philistines,
along with himself, under the stones of their temple.
In One ousand and One Nights, a medieval Islamic
collection of stories, Sharyar, a Persian king, discov-
ers that his wife is unfaithful. He has her executed,
and then, extending his revenge to womankind in
general, marries a new woman every night, execut-
ing each the next morning. (Scheherazade avoids this
fate by telling Sharyar a new story each night, but
leaving each unfi nished until the following night.)
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s mon-
ster develops a grudge against his creator and even-
tually kills everyone in Frankenstein’s family. In
Dickens’s Oliver Twist, the criminal psychopath Bill
Sikes beats his girlfriend to death because he thinks,
mistakenly, that she has informed against him. e
protagonist of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is
raped and her hopes of happiness ruined by Alex
d’Urberville. She stabs him with a carving knife. In
Conrad’s e Secret Agent, the anarchist agent pro-
vocateur Mr. Verloc lures his wife’s retarded youn-
ger brother into trying to blow up the Greenwich
Conservatory. e brother stumbles en route and
is himself blown to smithereens. Like Tess, Verloc’s
wife uses the instrument nearest to hand, a carving
knife, to take her revenge. In John Steinbeck’s e
Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad kills a policeman who has
just smashed in the skull of his friend preacher Casy.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Clare Quilty helps
Lolita escape from Humbert Humbert; in return,
Humbert tracks Quilty down and shoots him mul-
tiple times. In King’s Carrie, the town outcast, a
teenage girl, is humiliated at the senior prom; she
uses her telekinetic powers to slaughter the whole
graduating class of the high school, trapping them
inside a burning building.
Indignation at personal injury is a close cousin
to off ended pride. e protagonist of Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus is driven into traitorous homicidal fury
by outraged pride. Iago destroys Othello because
Othello has passed him over for promotion. In
Edgar Allen Poe’s “ e Cask of Amontillado,” the
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427
narrator protagonist Montresor says his acquain-
tance Fortunato has casually insulted him, so he
shackles Fortunato to a wall deep underground and
bricks up the niche. e Duke in Browning’s mono-
logue “My Last Duchess” has his wife murdered
because she shows too little regard for the dignity of
his rank. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the French maid
Hortense murders the lawyer Tulkinghorn because
he has insulted her.
Harm to kin or lovers is a common motive for
revenge. Aeschylus’s Oresteia consists in a sequence
of vengeful murders within a single family. In
Shakespeare’s fi rst tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Lavinia
is raped, and her rapists, to prevent her from iden-
tifying them, cut out her tongue and cut off her
hands. ( e source story, the myth of Philomela,
appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.) Lavinia nonethe-
less succeeds in identifying her assailants. In the sub-
sequent cascade of vengeful acts, the two rapists are
killed, cooked in a pie, and fed to their unsuspecting
mother. ( e same kind of revenge appears in Seneca
the Younger’s play yestes.) Laertes in Hamlet stabs
Hamlet with a poisoned rapier because Hamlet has
murdered Laertes’s father, Polonius. Hamlet murders
Claudius, his uncle, because Claudius murdered his
own brother, Hamlet’s father. In one of the earli-
est English novels, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa,
Clarissa is abducted, drugged, and raped. After she
dies from grief, her uncle kills her assailant in a duel.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s e Great Gatsby, Gatsby is
murdered because a man mistakenly believes that
Gatsby killed the man’s wife. In Denis Lehaene’s
Mystic River, a father murders a childhood friend
because he believes, mistakenly, that the friend mur-
dered his daughter.
ough often moralistic on other themes, many
literary authors display a strikingly tolerant attitude
toward revenge as a motive. Revenge looks like a
basic form of justice and often gives a feeling of
emotional satisfaction to readers. If that were not
the case, “poetic justice” would not be so widely
used as a plot device. Poetic justice occurs when
“good” characters are rewarded and “bad” characters
made to suff er. Judging by the relative frequency of
plot structures, we could reasonably infer that read-
ers can more easily tolerate a plot in which a “good”
character comes to a sad end than a plot in which a
“bad” character lives happily ever after.
Blood feuds are a special case. One murder leads
to another, but the whole sequence proceeds in a
senselessly mechanical way. e deaths of Romeo
and Juliet result in an agreement to end the blood
feud between the Capulets and the Montagues.
e darkest moments in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn involve the murderous feud between the
Sheperdsons and the Grangerfords. When Huck
asks his Grangerford friend what started the feud,
the boy cannot provide an answer, but he nonethe-
less falls victim to the feud. Twain clearly expects
readers to register the sad futility in killing of this
kind.
Death by Law
Legal execution is partly instrumental—it aims at
deterrence—and partly a form of collective revenge.
When it serves the purposes of “poetic justice,” legal
execution can be neatly folded into the emotional
satisfaction with which a story concludes. Even Billy
Budd’s hanging, in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, is
presented as a tragic sacrifi ce to the necessities of
naval discipline. At other times, though, legal execu-
tion is presented as the medium of a malign fate, an
unjust social order, or both. At the end of Stendhal’s
e Red and the Black, Julien Sorel is guillotined for
shooting his former mistress. He and Stendhal both
seem to regard his fate as an indictment against an
aristocratic social order that provides no career open
to talent. When Tess of the d’Urbervilles is hanged
for stabbing her rapist to death, Hardy explicitly
protests against some cosmic principle of injus-
tice. In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the retarded
giant, Lenny, accidentally kills a woman. His friend
and protector, George, shoots him before he can be
lynched. In e Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck explicitly
protests against social injustice. In Of Mice and Men,
he seems less interested in protesting against injustice
than in stimulating the reader’s compassion for the
plight of an itinerant male underclass. In Ambrose
Bierce’s “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge,” a Southern
civilian is hanged by Federal troops. e bulk of the
story consists in depicting his fantasized escape, as
the rope breaks and he falls into the water under the
bridge. At the end of the story, he is snapped back
to reality, with a broken neck, swinging beneath the
bridge. e story focuses emotional attention not
on retributive satisfaction, social protest, or simple
compassion. Instead, it evokes the love of life and
the horror of death. It also captures the sharp con-
trast between the victim as a mere object, for his
executioners, and his own intense inner conscious-
ness, frantic with terror and yearning.
Human Sacrifices
Along with “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
and “A Rose for Emily,” Shirley Ann Jackson’s “ e
Lottery” is one of the most frequently anthologized
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short stories. In a quiet farming village, somewhere
in mid-century America, the local people gather for
the annual lottery, selecting slips of paper from a
box. e “winner,” Tessie Hutcheson, is stoned to
death. Her own family members, including her
toddler, take part in the stoning. Stories do not
become canonical merely because they are shock-
ing and bizarre. “ e Lottery” has a deep symbolic
resonance; it suggests that even within civil society,
in a time of peace, there is a force that subjugates
individuals and family relationships to the col-
lective identity of the social group. e coercive
power of the social group is given symbolic form
also in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. A group
of English school boys, stranded on an island by a
plane crash, quickly revert to savagery. e three
boys who retain civilized values—Piggy, Simon, and
Ralph—are sacrifi ced to the cohesion of the sav-
age band. In 1984, George Orwell locates coercive
social force in a totalitarian regime. At the end of
the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is being
tortured by an agent of the government. To end the
torture, he must betray the woman he loves, begging
his torturer to hurt her rather than him. During the
torture, he is required to guess the right answer to
a question about what motivates the totalitarian
government. e right answer, as it turns out, is a
desire for power, as an end in itself. e fi nal stage
in Winston Smith’s subjugation is to come to feel,
sincerely, that he loves the totalitarian regime that
will soon, as he knows, murder him.
e totalitarian regime in 1984 is essentially psy-
chopathic. Its practices are a collective equivalent of
the psychopathic cruelty that animates novels such
as A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho. Unlike
Burgess and Ellis, Orwell does not invite readers to
participate vicariously in the enjoyment of cruelty.
1984 is designed to create a sense of angry outrage
in its readers. It is a symbolic indictment of totali-
tarianism, not a peep show. In that respect, it adopts
a stance similar to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s realistic
depiction of the Gulag in One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. A tacit indictment of the psychopathic
political culture of Stalinist Russia also informs
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
War
ere are only two primate species in which coali-
tions of males band together for the express purpose
of making lethal raids on neighboring bands of con-
specifi cs: chimpanzees and human beings (Jünger,
2010; Potts & Hayden, 2008; Wrangham, 1999).
is behavior has evidently been conserved from
the last common ancestor shared by humans and
chimpanzees some 7 million years ago, and specif-
ically human forms of evolutionary development
gave an extra impetus to coalitional violence. Early
in their evolutionary history, humans gained “eco-
logical dominance” (Alexander, 1989; Flinn, Geary,
& Ward, 2005); that is, they became the dominant
predator in their environments. e most dangerous
creatures they faced were members of other human
bands. Male coalitional violence thus became a pri-
mary selective force in human evolution. Highly
organized modern warfare is an extension of the
coalitional aggression that characterizes most bands
and tribes in preliterate cultures.
War has fi gured as a main subject of litera-
ture for every phase of history, from the ancient
world, the medieval period, the Renaissance and
Enlightenment, to the 19th and 20th centuries.
War forms the subject matter of verse epics, plays,
prose fi ction, and lyric poetry. Much war litera-
ture blends closely with autobiography and history:
lightly fi ctionalized memoir and accurate historical
reconstruction that includes many actual historical
persons.
We have no surviving narratives from prehistory,
but William Golding’s e Inheritors off ers a pow-
erful reconstruction of lethal interaction between
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. e Iliad and
the Bible evoke the warrior ethos of barbarian cul-
tures; and Flaubert’s Salammbô, like Golding’s e
Inheritors, raises historical reconstruction to the
level of high literary art. Steven Pressfi eld’s Gates of
Fire reconstructs the Battle of ermopylae.
e oldest surviving classic of French literature,
the Song of Roland, describes an 8th-century battle
in which the protagonists, like the Greek warriors
at ermopylae, are all killed. Scott’s e Talisman
locates its action in the Crusades. In the classic
Japanese medieval epic, e Tale of the Heiki, two
clans struggle to dominate Japan. A 14th-century
Chinese novel, Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the
ree Kingdoms, also focuses on dynastic struggles.
Shakespeare dramatizes the English Wars of the
15th century. e irty Years’ War—the religious
war that devastated Germany in the 17th century—
provides the setting for Hans von Grimmelshausen’s
semiautobiographical tale Simplicissimus. e pro-
tagonist in Friedrich Schiller’s dramatic trilogy
Wallenstein is a general in the irty Years’ War.
Eighteenth-century wars include the fi rst and
second Jacobite uprisings (rebellions aimed at restor-
ing the Stuarts to the throne of England), the Seven
Years War (the struggle among the main European
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powers that spread into the American continent in
e French and Indian War), and the American War
of Independence. ackeray’s protagonist in Henry
Esmond joins the fi rst Jacobite uprising, and Scott’s
protagonist in Waverly joins the second. Henry
Fielding’s protagonist in Tom Jones sets off to fi ght in
that same military venture, though he never arrives.
ackeray’s Barry Lyndon fi ghts in the Seven Years
War, which also forms the background to Major
von Tellheim’s plight in G. E. Lessing’s play Minna
von Barnhelm. James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the
Mohicans is set in the French and Indian War. In
ackeray’s e Virginians, two brothers, grandsons
of Henry Esmond, fi ght on diff erent sides in the
American War of Independence. Children’s nov-
els about that war include Esther Forbes’s Johnny
Tremain and James Collier’s My Brother Sam Is
Dead.
e Napoleonic Wars dominated European
politics in the fi rst 15 years of the 19th century.
Diff erent phases of that war fi gure prominently
in War and Peace and ackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series of novels and
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series chronicle
this period with gritty military and naval detail.
Cornwell’s Waterloo off ers a brilliant fi ctional recon-
struction of the Battle of Waterloo. ackeray gives
a short but rhetorically powerful description of
the same battle in Vanity Fair. e protagonist in
Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma witnesses Waterloo
from the fringes, though without understanding the
course of the action.
European wars between 1815 and 1914—from
the Battle of Waterloo to the beginning of World War
I—include the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian
War, various Balkan confl icts, and the small imperial
wars on the fringes of the British Empire, including
the Boer War. Tennyson’s poem “Charge of the Light
Brigade” chronicles an episode in the Crimean War.
Several of Maupassant’s short stories are set in the
period of the Franco-Prussian War. e protagonist
of G. B. Shaw’s play Arms and the Man is a mer-
cenary Swiss soldier serving in the Serbo-Bulgarian
War. Several of Kipling’s early stories depict British
military actions in India, what is now Pakistan, and
Afghanistan. Kenneth Ross’s play Breaker Morant,
which provides the basis for the Bruce Beresford fi lm
of that name, is set in the Boer War.
Conrad’s Nostromo depicts a South American rev-
olution that transforms the lives of the characters,
including English and Italian expatriates. Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude takes up sim-
ilar themes from a South American perspective.
e major American war of the 19th century was
of course the Civil War, which produced a crop of
contemporary novels and a steady fl ow of historical
reconstructions, including Stephen Crane’s e Red
Badge of Courage, Michael Shaara’s e Killer Angels,
Shelby Foote’s Shiloh, and Charles Frazier’s Cold
Mountain. Children’s novels about the American
Civil War include Harold Keith’s Rifl es for Watie and
Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils.
Among the many novels about World War I,
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western
Front holds a special place as one of the greatest of
all war novels. e last scene of omas Mann’s e
Magic Mountain presents its philosophical protago-
nist charging across a battlefi eld in World War I, with
limited prospects for survival. Henri Barbusse’s Under
Fire gives a French perspective on the war. American
novels about World War I include Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms, William March’s Company K, John
Dos Passos’s ree Soldiers, and Dalton Trumbo’s
Johnny Got His Gun. British novels include Ford’s
Parade’s End, Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to
Babylon, and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Some
of Faulkner’s and Kipling’s best short stories are set
in World War I. Charles Harrison’s Generals Die in
Bed gives a Canadian perspective on the war. For
Russians, World War I merges into the Bolshevik
Revolution and the Russian Civil War. at period
forms the background for Michail Sholokhov’s
And Quiet Flows the Don, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor
Zhivago, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s series of nov-
els included in e Red Wheel. In addition to novels
and short stories, the war generated a large body of
fi ne lyric poetry by poet-soldiers such as Wilfred
Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden.
World War II produced major novels in sev-
eral national literatures. American novels include
Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s e Naked and
the Dead, James Jones’s e in Red Line, Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, and James Dickey’s To
the White Sea. Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an unpub-
lished play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, was
the basis for the fi lm Casablanca. e Spanish Civil
War, a prelude to World War II, is the setting for
Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Colin
McDougall’s e Execution is the most important
Canadian novel about World War II. German expe-
rience in the war forms the subject of Günter Grass’s
e Tin Drum, Willi Heinrich’s Cross of Iron, Russ
Schneider’s Siege, Heinrich Gerlach’s e Forsaken
Army, and eodor Plievier’s Stalingrad. e great-
est Russian novel of the war, Vasily Grossman’s Life
and Fate, is designed to cover multiple theaters of
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430
the war and to interweave politics, combat, the
Holocaust, and civilian terror in the Soviet Union.
Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt gives an Italian perspec-
tive on the war. British involvement in the war
forms the background for Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of
Honour trilogy and J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
Ian McEwan’s Atonement reconstructs the British
retreat to Dunkirk. Japanese novels about the war
include Ashihei Hino’s Wheat and Soldiers, Tatsuzō
Ishikawa’s Soldiers Alive, and Ooka Shohei’s Fires on
the Plain. e international order in Orwell’s 1984
includes a perpetual world war.
Novels of Vietnam include Larry Heinemann’s
Close Quarters, James Webb’s Fields of Fire, John del
Vecchio’s e irteenth Valley, and Tim O’Brien’s
e ings ey Carried. Báo Ninh’s novel e Sorrow
of War off ers a Vietnamese perspective. Francis Ford
Coppola’s fi lm Apocalypse Now takes the core of its
plot from Conrad’s e Heart of Darkness, which is
set in the Belgian Congo, and transposes the plot
to Vietnam. e script writer, Michael Herr, incor-
porates episodes from Dispatches, his own journal-
istic memoir about his experiences as a reporter in
Vietnam.
In science fi ction, war is often projected into a
fi ctional future and extended to confl icts between
humans and other species. H. G. Wells’s War of the
Worlds provides a prototype for this genre. More
recent examples include Robert Heinlein’s Starship
Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s e Forever War, and
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.
Fantasy worlds are as likely to be riven by war
as actual worlds. John Milton’s Paradise Lost depicts
the war in heaven between the good and bad
angels. ( ey use cannons with gunpowder, as in
the English Civil War, but to little eff ect, since they
are immaterial beings.) J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings trilogy culminates in an epic confl ict among
the inhabitants of Middle Earth. ough written
in the interwar period, Tolkien’s account of this
war looks like an eerie forecast of World War II.
C. S. Lewis’s e Lion, the Witch, and e Wardrobe
chronicles a war in Narnia between the forces of
good and evil—and indeed most fantasy wars, com-
pared with real wars, are more easily reducible to
ethical binaries. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
culminates in a bloody battle between the protago-
nists, practitioners of benign magic, and the min-
ions of Voldemort, the Dark Lord.
ough deeply ingrained in genetically transmit-
ted human dispositions, war puts exceptional stress
on men’s minds. Combat elicits instinctive fi ght-
or-fl ight responses but channels them into highly
disciplined patterns of behavior regulated by rigidly
hierarchical social structures. Shared danger creates
a bond among soldiers that many describe as the
most intense and intimate they have known. At
the same time, war systematically dehumanizes the
enemy in ways that make it easier to breach the psy-
chological inhibition most people feel against doing
violent bodily harm to other people (Baumeister,
1996; Grossman, 2009; Smith, 2007). Some fi c-
tional treatments of war, and some lyric poetry
inspired by war, adopt emotionally simple stances:
heroism and patriotism, or protest and revulsion.
Most evoke an ambivalent swirl of emotions that
include terror, rage, exultation, resentment, pride,
horror, guilt, and self-pity. Authors seldom stand
wholly outside the emotions they evoke. Readers
can easily enough adopt ideological principles that
either justify war or condemn it, but the conscious
formulation of explicit ideological principles is not
the same thing as an imaginative poise that refl ects
genuine emotional mastery. Psychopaths have the
least diffi culty accommodating themselves to the
emotional challenges of war (Baumeister, 1996;
Grossman, 2009). For most people, war remains a
troubling and sometimes traumatic experience. e
quality of that experience varies from individual to
individual and from war to war. e perspectives
of authors and characters are often heavily condi-
tioned by the nature and outcome of the war. Most
novels about World War I and about Vietnam reg-
ister a dreary sensation of futility mingled with hor-
ror and revulsion. Novels about the Napoleonic
Wars, the American Civil War, and World War II
have a much wider emotional range. e total emo-
tional trajectory of World War II was very diff er-
ent for Americans, British, Russians, Germans, and
Japanese. Such diff erences necessarily enter into
authorial perspectives on the emotional signifi cance
of the violence they depict.
Conclusion
When we think of literature, we tend to think of
quiet, civilized activity: writers sitting at a desk, pen
in hand; readers sitting in poised contemplation over
the pages of a book; the solemn hush of a library;
the mellow leisure of a bookstore. At fi rst glance,
then, literature would seem to have little to do with
violence—with men beating or raping women; peo-
ple stabbing or shooting each other; individuals poi-
soning, shooting, drowning, or hanging themselves,
cutting their own throats, or throwing themselves
out of windows; or with large masses of men caught
up in the frenzy of mutual slaughter. And yet, as this
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431
survey suggests, violence is pervasive in literary rep-
resentation. William Wordsworth defi nes poetry as
emotion recollected in tranquility (1800/1957). Is
literary violence, then, just a form of sensationalistic
emotional self-indulgence? No. Freud (1907/1959)
made a great error in supposing that literature
consists in wish-fulfi llment fantasies. Most of the
instances of violence cited in this essay are ugly and
painful. Very few people have ever enjoyed watch-
ing as Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes, or
have felt pleasure listening to Lear’s howls of grief
after Cordelia is hanged. Most depictions of mur-
der and suicide produce discomfort, at the mildest,
in readers’ minds. e satisfaction of revenge and
the lust of battle off er partial exceptions, but such
pleasures are hardly pure. Revenge is at best a bitter
satisfaction (Baumeister, 1996). e warriors of the
Iliad who exult in a momentary victory also have a
despairing consciousness that they will probably die
a similar death, and soon (Gottschall, 2008b).
e painful character of violence in literature
points us toward what is, in the present author’s
view, the central adaptive function of the arts. We
do not read stories primarily because they pro-
duce vicarious sensations of pleasure; we read them
because they give us a deeper, more complete sense
of the forces that motivate human life (Carroll,
2011b). Humans do not operate by instinct alone.
ey have a uniquely developed capacity for envi-
sioning their lives as a continuously developing
sequence of actions within larger social and natu-
ral contexts. Aff ective neuroscientists have shown
that human decision making depends crucially on
emotions; we are not simply “rational” creatures
(Damasio, 1994; Linden, 2007; Panksepp, 1998).
Literature and other emotionally charged imagi-
native constructs—the other arts, religions, and
ideologies—inform our emotional understanding
of human behavior. e arts expand our feeling for
why other people act as they do, help us to antici-
pate how they are likely to respond to our behavior,
and off er suggestions about what kind of value we
should attach to alternative courses of action.
Fictional violence delineates extreme limits in
human experience. We do not necessarily enjoy
reading about violent acts, but we do enjoy fi nding
out about the extreme limits of experience. at is
a kind of information for which we have evolved an
adaptively functional need.
Future Directions
For many scholars and scientists, in both
the humanities and the social sciences, literary
experience seems hopelessly outside the reach of
empirical scientifi c knowledge. Such scholars and
scientists might acknowledge that biographical
information about authors and facts about plots can
be determined in a reasonably objective way. ey
might also acknowledge that the demographics of
literacy can be assessed with the statistical methods
of the social sciences. But the heart of the matter—
the meaning authors build into plots and the eff ects
such meanings have on the minds and emotions of
readers—all of that, many scholars and scientists
feel, must always remain a matter of vague specula-
tion, subjective at best, fanciful or absurd at worst,
in any case not accessible to scientifi c inquiry.
I am confi dent that this set of assumptions is
mistaken. Outside the now obsolete behaviorist
school, mental events—images, thoughts, and feel-
ings—are the standard subject matter of psychology.
Pen-and-paper tests, experimental designs with live
subjects, and neuroimaging give access to mental
events. Mental events also form the substance of lit-
erary experience. Mental events in the responses of
readers are as accessible to empirical inquiry as any
other mental events, and the responses of readers
provide an opening to the intentions of authors and
the psychosocial functions of literary works (Carroll
et al., 2008, 2010).
To make major advances in empirical knowl-
edge about literary experience, two main changes in
attitude need to occur. Social scientists need to rec-
ognize how large and important a place every kind
of imaginative experience holds in human life; and
literary scholars need to recognize that incorporat-
ing empirical research into scholarly study will give
their research a kind of epistemological legitimacy
it desperately needs. Integrating humanistic and
empirical methods of inquiry will also vastly expand
the scope of literary inquiry, making it possible to
locate literary study in relation to multiple contig-
uous disciplines.
Literary meanings and eff ects like those described
in this chapter are complex phenomena. To make
them accessible to objective scientifi c knowledge,
we have to break them down into components and
devise empirical methods for analyzing each compo-
nent. We should start with recognizing that literary
meaning is a form of communication, an inten-
tional meaning created by an author who anticipates
responses of readers. At the base of empirical liter-
ary research, then, we need to tease apart the rela-
tions between mirror neurons, empathy, emotional
circuits, and mental images (Baron-Cohen, 2005;
Decety, 2011a, 2011b; Rizzolatti & Fogassi, 2007).
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432
We also have to work out the relations between
responses to actual events and “offl ine” responses to
fi ction—that is, emotional responses “decoupled”
from immediate action (Tooby & Cosmides, 2001).
Neurocognitive research on the way people process
emotionally charged information will make it pos-
sible to produce empirical knowledge about the
formal aspects of fi ction: narrative structure, syn-
tax and prose rhythm, word choice, modulations of
tone, and symbolic imagery.
To locate neurocognitive fi ndings within com-
prehensive explanatory sequences, we have to link
the highest level of causal explanation—inclusive
fi tness, the ultimate regulative principle of evolu-
tion—to particular features of human nature and to
particular structures and eff ects in specifi c works of
art. Human life history theory off ers the best avail-
able framework for analyzing the components of
human nature (Kaplan, Hill Lancaster, & Hurtado,
2000; Low, 2000; MacDonald, 1997; Wrangham,
2009). Gene-culture coevolution off ers the best
available framework for understanding how specif-
ically human mental capabilities interact with basic
motives and emotions (Carroll, 2011a). Gene-
culture coevolution also provides a framework for
analyzing the way specifi c cultures organize the ele-
ments of human nature.
A comprehensively adequate explanation of a
given work of art would stipulate the character and
causes of its phenomenal eff ects (tone, style, theme,
formal organization); locate the work in a cultural
context; explain that cultural context as a particu-
lar organization of the elements of human nature
within a specifi c set of environmental conditions
(including cultural traditions); register the responses
of readers; identify the sociocultural, political, and
psychological functions the work fulfi lls for specifi c
audiences (perhaps diff erent functions for diff erent
audiences); locate those functions in relation to the
evolved needs of human nature; and link the work
comparatively with other artistic works, using a tax-
onomy of themes, formal elements, aff ective ele-
ments, and functions derived from a comprehensive
model of human nature.
In addition to locating individual works in evo-
lutionary explanatory contexts, scholars and scien-
tists must also deal with groups of works, organized
by period, national literature, and features of formal
organization and style (genre). ese are standard
categories in traditional literary research, and for a
good reason: ey constitute conventions within
which authors encode meanings and readers decode
those meanings. All such traditional categories of
literary scholarship should now be studied with an
eye toward generating explanations integrated with
principles of human life history and gene-culture
coevolution.
Evolutionary study tends toward an emphasis on
human universals. at is an indispensable starting
point. It gives access to basic motives and basic emo-
tions. Identifying cross-cultural regularities makes
it possible to isolate the elements that enter into
complex cultural confi gurations. But the particu-
lar character of those cultural confi gurations does
in fact substantially alter the quality of lived and
imagined experience. We are only just beginning to
understand gene-culture coevolution at a rudimen-
tary theoretical level (Carroll, 2011a). To advance
in our understanding, we need highly particularized
studies of specifi c cultural moments focusing both
on macro-structures of social dynamics (Turchin,
2007) and also on the neurophysiological character
of experience within given ecologies (Smail, 2008).
Cultural analysis is a necessary middle level in liter-
ary research.
e study of individual identity is yet another
level at which literary scholars need to work. ey
have to understand individual diff erences in person-
ality as those diff erences apply to authors, charac-
ters, and readers. Evolutionary psychology took a
wrong turn, early on, in deprecating the adaptive
signifi cance of individual diff erences (Tooby &
Cosmides, 1990). at wrong turn is now being
corrected (Figueredo et al., 2005; Nettle, 2007a,
2007b). at correction will make the evolutionary
standpoint much more valuable both to psycholo-
gists studying live subjects and to literary critics
studying fi ctional subjects (Johnson et al., 2011;
McCrae, in press).
Substantial progress has already been made
in many of the research areas recommended here
(Boyd, 2009; Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall, 2010;
Carroll, 2011a, 2011b; Gottschall, 2008a, 2008b).
But in truth, we have only just begun. In physics,
“dreams of a fi nal theory” involve integrating the
weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, elec-
tromagnetism, and gravity (Weinberg, 1992). In all
areas that concern human behavior, integrating the
humanities and the social sciences presents a sim-
ilarly fundamental challenge. e opportunities
are immense. Violence is only one topic within the
broad fi eld of evolutionary literary research, but it
is such an important topic that advances in under-
standing literary violence will almost certainly open
out into generalizable principles across the whole
range of human behavior.
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Most of the literary works mentioned in this chapter are
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