Evolution and the Romance Novel
I am now about to venture on a strange path that has only ever been dimly lit - at least for me. I refer to the evolution of women (and implicitly, men) and the Romance Novel.
One of my - female - students once described the romance novel as 'porn for women', inplying that they occupy the same niche in the female psyche as girly pics for men.
Anthony Cox, Centre for Psychology & Computing, Dartmouth, Canada, and Maryanne Fisher, Department of Psychology, St Mary's University, Nova Scotia have analysed the romance novel in order to test evolutionary hypotheses about women.
They used 15,000 Harlequin novels (Mills and Boon in the UK) as their base data sets and checked for word use.
The five most common words used, in descending order were:
Love (840)
Bride (835)
Baby (696)
Man (672)
Marriage (612)
Other much used words were : Doctor, Cowboy, Night, Nurse, Boss, King, Knight, Rancher, Midwife, Bodyguard, Sheriff, Pirate.
Now evolutionary theory predicts that the sexual-specific strategy of women would suggest that they be interested in the following characteristics in a man:
Status, health, Commitment, Fertility.
Status is key because a high status man is better able to support her and her children.
Commitment clearly important - he has to stick around after the baby is born.
Health because a dead or sick man ain't much use as a provider or protector.
Fertility because, well, that's what it's all about.
If you look at the buzz words found in romance novels, they do tend to support evolutionary theory. Men are described by high status words (doctor, king, knight) or physically fit hero-words (cowboy, sheriff, bodyguard).
What is interesting is that the physical appearance of men (other than healthy, fit, fertile physical clues) is not of much relevence in the books. That is why men's body's are functional rather than elegant.
I was once told by a journalist that women like reading about the appearance of women, and looking at pictures of women (fashion, hair styles etc) and, of course, so do men but for other reasons. This is why women's magazines tend to have pictures of women on the front and so do men's magazine.
You know, we should be able to reduce this to a mathematical formula. I do maths. If so, I could write the perfect romance novel without understanding romance.
What do you think?
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