ELC Saunders #5, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number five regarding this book.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Seven: Sherwood Anderson, "The Untold Lie"

To me, this chapter is not as illuminating of literature as others. The evolutionary interpretation of "The Untold Lie" seems to be a straightforward application of the theories of the male sexual strategies developed by Robert Trivers and Donald Symons and popularized by David Buss in his book The Evolution of Desire. These strategies are part of Buss and Schmitt's Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss, D. M., and Schmitt, D. P. (1993). "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.)

The two primary male characters in the story are Ray and Hal. Ray is an older man who has many children. He has worked hard to provide for his large family, and he is exhausted by the effort. He questions the wisdom of the path he has taken.

Hal is a young man whose dashing looks and fearless behavior has attracted women. His father had also had a reputation as a man who pursued high-risk behavior. He is not yet committed to one woman, and he has apparently had sex with many. Hal is now in a relationship with a young woman with whom he is contemplating settling down and raise children. He comes to Ray for advice. Should he propose marriage to her?

Ray, thinking about his own life, is jealous of Hal. He wishes he had been able to pursue a life of sexual adventures with many women in which he did not accept responsibility for the subsequent children. He is strongly tempted to urge Hal not to settle down with this woman.

Evolutionary psychology predicts that males should have different sexual strategies from females. Because it is possible for males to invest very little and still achieve reproductive success, while it is not possible for females who gestate a fetus and nurse the resulting offspring to do the same, males might achieve more reproductive success by mating with many females.

Symons and David Buss fleshed out a theory that men might pursue two different sexual strategies, summed by the sound bite, "Dad or cad." The male might invest a great deal in the offspring in a committed relationship with one female, or the male might attempt to reproduce with many females and not invest much in their offspring. Because of the biologically required female investment, females have biological tendency to be more selective in mate choices and may have different sexual strategies.

In this story, Ray has pursued the first sexual strategy. He is committed to one woman and has invested heavily in their children. Hal has up until now pursued the second sexual strategy, having sex with many women and not committing to their possible children. Hal is now considering changing strategies.

When Hal poses the question of his future to Ray, Ray comes to the realization that he might have wanted to pursue a different course of action than he did. He does not consciously think of it as an example of biological evolution, but he has devoted his life to his family because of psychological tendencies that had evolved not for his own happiness but for the continuation of his genes. As Saunders says, "For one luminous moment, he recognizes himself for the 'gene machine' he is and longs to detach himself from its designs" (Saunders, 136).

This is a competently written essay, but the conclusion is not as unexpected as was the essay on Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, which I discussed in the March, 2021, blog post.