earticle

영어

Evolutionary psychology is rooted in Darwin’s evolutionary biology. It attempts to explain human beings’ psychological traits in terms of Darwinian mechanisms that “lead back through unbroken casual sequences to the elementary biological drives toward survival and reproduction” (Carroll viii). Literary Darwinism grounded in evolutionary psychology brings literature within the category of cognitive and behavioral features susceptible to an adaptationist understanding and seeks innate patterns of human behavior system: survival, technology, parenting, mating, kin relation, social relation, and cognition. The methodology of literary Darwinism is, Joseph Carroll suggests, to connect the highest levels in the organization of human nature with the most detailed and subtle aspects of literary meaning. In other words, it is to connect the basic life history goals such as survival, growth, and reproduction with the finest nuances of theme, tone, and style in the organization of literary meaning in specific works (Carroll 189). This paper aims to read Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye through evolutionary psychology and then to give an explanation of black characters’ maladaptation in terms of Darwinian literary criticism. The Bluest Eye is the novel through which a tension between the affirmation of the primary need to parent and mate and the recognition of cognitive behavioral system is at work. Human nature motivated as parenting and mating in The Bluest Eye is harshly distorted, which shows the way in which the false cognitive behavior system matters. Maladaptation of Pecola can be explained as a case that calls upon audience to recoil from maladaptive acts by invoking that this is not how humans behave. This kind of reading is an ultimate explanation of literature while sociopolitical and identity-based reading is a proximal one. At the risk of oversimplified reductionism, the former is expected to supplement the latter with a new and scientific interpretation of human behavior and motives in literature.