Jealousy–An Evolutionary Advantage

There is no more common human trait than jealousy.  Shakespeare understood it perhaps better than most, and featured virulently jealous characters in Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Much Ado About Nothing.  While these are plays about men behaving badly – all have been duped, tricked, and deceived, and on the flimsiest of evidence have gone on to condemn their lovers and by the way condemning all women.  Othello tells his judges about to sentence him for the murder of Desdemona that he did them a favor ridding the city of yet one more lying slattern.

Claudio, lover of Hero, is taken in by the most transparent trickery of Don John who wants to avenge Claudio’s military victory.  He arranges for a mock balcony scene where imposters play Hero and her lover and their exchange is to be overheard and relayed to Claudio.  Claudio takes this contrived hearsay for fact, and launches a virulent attack on the unfaithful Hero and on all women.  Even Leonato, Hero’s father is quick to judgment and assuming guilt condemns his daughter.

Posthumus in Cymbeline is taken in by Iachimo, and in one of Shakespeare’s most violently misogynistic passages, condemns his wife as a treacherous vixen.  The men, fathers and sons, in The Winter’s Tale are no different. Hearsay added to innuendo and jealous suspicion throws the sweet, innocent Perdita’s character into disrepute.

As much as one can accuse the men of these stories of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

As much as one can accuse the men of these stories of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists such as Megan Doe have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Critic Gail Kern Paster focuses less on evolutionary factors for jealousy and suspicions, and draws on Pauline influence: “Sixteenth century English society had not yet dispensed with forms of overt, virulent misogyny inherited from medieval Catholicism which made marriage, especially for men, a less perfect way of life than celibacy.”

She goes on:

The point is not only that the difference between man and woman…but that women are responsible for their sins, and men are not. Even more crucial is to recognize the instability between a misogyny which posits All-Women-Are-The-Same and an idealization which posits Women-as-Different. In the conversations between Claudio and Benedick, as in the similar conversations between Romeo and Mercutio this instability in the categorization of women is easy to detect. “Can the world buy such a jewel as Hero?” idealist Claudio asks rhetorically. “Yea”, comes the misogynist’s bawdy reply, “ and a case (vagina) to put it into”.

Perhaps the best fictional depiction of jealousy is in Strindberg’s play, The Father.  For years the Captain has ruled his wife, Laura, and commanded all decisions about her, their home, and their daughter.  When Laura feels that he has finally overstepped his bounds, making arbitrary decisions about their daughter and her education, she decides to refuse and force his capitulation.  She does so with the psychological canniness and evil intent of Iago, introducing the idea, however subtlety that their daughter is not his. She knows that paternity is at the heart of male jealousy and insecurity – men can never absolutely know whether the children borne by their wives are theirs – and she progressively suggests that their child might not be his.  Such doubts, especially since they never can be proven, are by nature corrosive, and eventually the Captain goes mad.  Laura commits him to a mental institution, and she takes charge of her daughter.  Adding insult to injury she tells him, “Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father…, you are not needed any longer and you must go.”

Marcel Proust was perhaps the most eloquent about jealousy:

It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – in this moment of deprivation – the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively.

Vladimir Nabokov was equally compelling about jealousy, and in the final scenes of Lolita Humbert has Claire Quilty read this poem:

Because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die

And Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden she would be saddled with until not long before his death.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets to his young man express a jealousy which is romantic and purely felt.  The poet expresses no anger, no hostility, or no vengeful thoughts. It is simply love which demands an emotional fidelity to be returned and requited:

Sin of self love possesseth all mine eye/And all my soul, and all my every part;/And for this sin there is no remedy/It is so grounded in my heart…(Sonnet 62)

While Darwin’s Origin of the Species makes ultimate sense and has been part of the scientific canon for over 150 years, it is hard for many to accept its application to human behavior.  Yet, there it is, the survival of the human species characterized by territorialism, self-interest, aggressive defensiveness, tribal hegemony, and the impulse to dominance.  That we are no different from the animals is one thing, but to accept the fact that we can never outgrow, evolve or mature from a hardwired human nature is another entirely.  Despite millennia of human history and its record of territorial wars, the bloody expansion of empire, and the perennial struggles for supremacy, there are those who insist that we can overcome this nature and become better human beings.  We can achieve Utopia, a peaceful, verdant, calm and collaborative world.

These same observers would like to think that the personal drives and instincts that fuel the international conflicts of today and yesterday can be blunted, expunged, and dismissed.  Jealousy, known less for its literary appeal and universality and more for its physical violence, abuse of women, and virulent misogyny is no different.  With compassion, understanding, and education, men can be tamed of their worst instincts.

The evidence is all to the contrary, and jealousy is an essential piece of our Darwinian destiny.  Jealousy is an expression of possession, and possession is at the heart of survival of the fittest.  Men are jealous of the women they have won because of their high valuation of them, and the chance to continue the line.  Women are similarly jealous of the men they have attracted because they do not want to lose their prized possessions.

Jealousy is here to stay and well it should.