Humans Have Evolved Into Beings

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Over millions of years, humans have evolved into beings capable of abstract, critical thought and have attained unprecedented levels of intelligence. Indeed, the human race still has a multitude of things to discover about itself, and many boundaries which it has yet to push and go beyond. The origins of human beings, however – although Darwin’s theory has been only relatively recently accepted – lies squarely in our existence as animals, as mammals who first existed in the wild and underwent a series of beneficial mutations, to shape us as we exist today. Along with physical adaptations that have been handed down from generation to generation, a number of psychological processes have also been inadvertently innately ingrained within our genetic make-up. Essentially, the human race is the singular known species that has been able to overcome its psychological impulses and instincts, and has indeed superseded them by developing its capacities for intelligence and language, along with refining and attuning its emotions, and developing constructs such as morality, compassion and love.

Still, it is hard for one to draw a definite line in order to distinguish between what is instinctual and what has been inherited from ancestors, due to the boundaries that societies have imposed upon humans in order to suppress the raw instinct in a bid to create a more intellectually-developed community of humans. In fact, one can notice many cases of deviations from what has been deemed the norm, in the form of societal indiscretions, or what may arguably be called basic natural impulses which have not been reigned in by some particular individual. Strictly within the context of male-female interaction, how has the male been established as being superior, while the female has been relegated to a more minor role, in a hierarchical structure established thousands of years before now? What is it that might drive a male to physically assault or rape a member of the female sex? How do these basic predisposed impulses affect the way that society has been formed, and, ultimately, how does it affect humans on the personal level? While not all of these questions may be examined and answered, the novels shall here be used to give an cross-sectional observance of male-female interaction, from the 19th century, in relation to what has been established according to nature, and what has been filtered into our culture and relationships.

In the case of many animal species, after courting the female, the male mates with her, impregnates her, and then is free to roam on. The female, meanwhile, invests her time and energy in raising successful offspring. In a number of species, including the human race, the male takes care of his mate and offspring and provides for them until they are physically able to fend for themselves. For both sexes, investment in a suitable partner that will possess and pass on suitable genes, as well as provide the required support in rearing, is one of the most crucial criteria in choosing a mate. This has been taken several steps further in humans, whose establishment of the marriage institution carries with it the weight of lifelong partnership and companionship. The hierarchical structure, in which the male is the superior, within the social construct of marriage may still, however, be regarded as being very basic by its very nature, if one may consider it to be one of the many things inherited by our ancestors whose main concerns were survival.

Historically, and even pre-historically, speaking, the male gender has tended to take the leading active and dominant role in the taking care of families and indeed societies as a whole. In a completely different age where success meant being able to provide and sustain yourself and your family with suitable food, and when a successful rate of procreation indicated optimal fitness and health, man’s leaner, more muscular body allowed him to easily slip into the role of protector of his offspring, and hunter of food. On the other hand, woman, due to the comparatively higher amount of body fat, was less adapted for such a role, and more apt at fulfilling the (still very physically taxing) role of the gatherer; the forager for food and (quite literally) the stay-at-home mother who provided primary care for her offspring. Furthermore, as Simone de Beauvoir points out, ‘pregnancy, giving birth, and menstruation diminished their work capacity and condemned them to long periods of impotence.’ [2] Therefore one might easily argue that, founded on the very basis of our very physiognomy, biologically, man is perfectly adapted to taking up the role of the central, dominant provider individual with superior decision-making power whose responsibility is for the whole of a family, or on a far larger scale, society as a whole.

At the tradition goes, ‘it is a truth universally acknowledge’ that a male who is successful will be at one point of his life, ‘in want of a wife’ [3] (the more sophisticated version of a ‘mate’) to produce successful offspring and lineage – and might have to prove himself worthy of her attentions. In order to attract a male, who will not only provide food for her but will also care for their rather demanding offspring, the female would have to present herself as an equally deserving mate, and as ‘sexually receptive’. [4] He is the active agent, while she is passively receptive; he is the do-er, she gets – crudely put – done. According to Andrea Dworkin, heterosexual intercourse is by nature a ‘tyrannical master/slave relationship... with the man "communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status ... shoving it into her, over and over ... until she gives up and gives in—which is called surrender in the male lexicon."’ [5] In both situations, the family will then be in the care of the male-dominant who is expected to provide for his family, and consequently have a greater say in what happens or doesn’t within his family unit. One may easily see how this is translated into the domestic scene, where a father has the final say about what does or doesn’t go. Although this trend is no longer as strong as it once was (presumably due to another growing trend in society, where the married wife and mother also works and provides for her family), it can be seen as being a predominant circumstance in Victorian times as portrayed in Jane Eyre.

Jane finds herself adopted by a number of different households throughout the novel, two of which considered her to be a member of the family (rather than a student or employee). As an adult, she is taken in by a St John Rivers and his two sisters; as a child, she was raised in the Reed family. Jane herself is immediately aware of her ‘physical inferiority’ [6] to her cousins, especially the ‘stout’ male, John is the only male figure and who shows no respect to any of the female members of his own family. John asserts his superiority by reprimanding her for not calling him ‘Master Reed’ [7] and resorts to physically attacking her when she uses her superior intelligence and range of reference against him. A study conducted about domestic violence states that acts of violence in the domestic setting may be a result of feelings of low personal control. It stems from ‘the belief that one’s own intentions and behaviours can impose control over one’s environment’, called ‘personal efficacy’ and ‘mastery’. [8] When Jane uses her superior intelligence as a weapon against him, he physically lashes out, safe in the knowledge that she is not a match for him this way. Women in Not Without my Daughter are also silenced, or controlled and reprimanded through physical assault.

Women’s adaptation at being the only sex able of carrying a child may lead to her being seen mainly as a baby-producing machine. In the time when lineage was of utmost importance, women’s main role was to provide their husbands with legitimate heirs. A historical figure probably more well-known for his private affairs, rather than his public ones, is Henry VIII. He infamously annulled four of his marriages and killed two of his wives, and it is common knowledge that he felt that his wives had failed him by not giving him a legitimate male heir (it would be intriguing to see his reaction in finding out that the sex of a child is determined solely by the male sex cell). In The Handmaid’s Tale the main prerogative in Gilead is for Handmaids to bear children at a time when the birth rate is in serious decline. Handmaids are reduced to one of their basic bodily function – of being ‘two-legged wombs’. [9] Even the positions of those partaking in the Ceremony symbolises this; the Handmaid rests on the Wife’s hips, as if she were a fertile continuation of the Wife’s body. The doctor examines only the lower part, while the upper part of the Handmaid’s body is covered, as if only her sexual organs are of any relevance. After birth, the Handmaid has no role in rearing the child, and if, after three terms, a Handmaid does not conceive, she is made redundant and is practically killed. Women who are Handmaids are valued for the sole purpose of what their bodies have to offer, and not through whatever individual talent they might be able to offer.

The view on the role of motherhood from a feminist perspective is a rather split one. Theorists such as feminist political philosopher Mary O’Brien ‘hold that the reproductive process is the basis of a female reproductive consciousness, which necessarily underlies feminist theory.’ [10] She insists that ‘a feminist theory based on the reproductive process would allow, on the one hand, a criticism of traditional patriarchal theory’ [11] , and argues that the concept of ‘feminist perspective’ does exist indeed, and criticises a number of individuals for basing their work mainly on existing male theories, which she labels as being ‘malestream’. [12] As the word illustrates, this signifies the sexist bias which has been propagated in the majority of previous theories. One of the people she criticizes is Simone de Beauvoir, who feels that female reproductive capacities – and therefore female biology – is, at least partially the cause of patriarchal oppression:

‘the fundamental fact that from the beginning of history doomed woman to domestic work and prevented her taking part in the shaping of the world was her enslavement to the generative function.’ [13] 

In The Handmaid’s Tale, this is the very reason for female oppression, psychologically and physically, in the form of the Handmaid. All of these roles that women fulfil in Gilead may be considered demeaning; from the Wife who is forced to live with the Gileaden equivalent to a mistress, and partake in the Ceremony, in the hope that a child is conceived to the Handmaid, who has no other option, and would not dare to oppose those above her. Women who may be considered as being a burden or useless to society (such as Offred’s mother, or Handmaids who were deemed infertile) were shipped off to the colonies to clean toxic waste, which would poison and kill them within a few months. It is important to note that in Gilead, even men are oppressed, despite their ‘naturally’ superior male roles. Only select men, Angels, are provided with daughters to marry. Other men, such as the Guardians who grant Handmaids access, are forbidden to even look at handmaids and feel any form of attraction or lust towards them. Any transgression for the norm is heavily punished – a man supposedly (possibly falsely) accused of rape is thrown into a group of angered Handmaids, to be torn to shreds.

Overall, female sexuality in the 19th Century was largely misunderstood, and grossly misrepresented not only in literature, but also in science. Indeed, ‘as late as 1905 an Oxford physician could seriously testify that nine out of ten women disliked sex, and the tenth was invariably a harlot.’ [14] The ideal standard, where women were virginal beings who had to display disinterest and even disgust towards sex, while fulfilling their wifely duties in bearing children, must have been unbelievable hard to meet.

In Jane Eyre, Bronte ‘externalises’ the division of the Victorian psyche in producing two completely different characters – Helen Burns and Bertha Mason. [15] On the one hand, the young, virginal schoolgirl Helen embodies the Victorian ideal; she is a figure of female restraint and self-control, who suffers in saintly Christian silence, based on ‘love and forgiveness as well as on submission and self-denial’. She bears her floggings, holds no resentment to her strict teachers, and will not allow herself to think of leaving Lowood and returning home without finishing her education. One would think that she would be far more suitable than Jane could ever be as St John Rivers’ wife. Her early death, however, seems to symbolise that she is not a strong enough figure fit to survive and exist in the changing world she inhabits. [16] In striking contrast, Rochester’s first wife Bertha is a larger than-life, far stronger figure. Bertha lunges at Rochester and attacks her half-brother, and therefore needs to be physically restrained, and requires the round-the-clock supervision of Grace Poole. Jane describes her as being animal-like, ‘shaggy’; her features ‘bloated’, her face ‘purple’ [17] Rochester says that she is ‘intemperate and unchaste’ [18] , and in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s embracing of her sexuality, a concept completely alien to Victorian England, yet perhaps not so much in Jamaica, is one of the many vices that Rochester holds against her in order to prove her madness.

Bertha in Jane Eyre has been seen as a representation of all ‘the sexual ‘hunger’ that all the women in the novel either repress (in the hope of spiritual reward), or pervert (for financial gain)—sexual hunger that (as Showalter also noted in the seventies) some Victorian physicians thought could drive a woman to madness’...

By her own admission, Jane is ‘no Helen Burns’, and, however passionate she may be in her thoughts, emotions and actions, she is no Bertha Mason either. Critic Elizabeth Rigby, however, states that ‘Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit’ (Gilbert and Gubar 173–4) [19] She seems to live in a mid-way state; refusing absolute submission while also rejecting absolute liberty in aspects such as sexuality.

Abuse of the female form is explicit in The Handmaid’s Tale. As the Commander tells Offred, in the time before the regime women would, in their attempts to attract men, go on extreme diets and undergo plastic surgery in order to attain the supposedly ‘ideal’ female figure. They would put on revealing clothes and display their bodies for all to see, and magazines which featured naked or half-naked women could be freely bought. The problem, he says, was that men found sex to be ‘too easy’ [20] to get, and that they no longer valued it. The solution to this problem, and the one of the declining birth rate, was to oblige women to ‘adorn themselves in modest apparel’ [21] and to almost completely eradicate the availability of sex and sexuality in general. In Iran, women were obliged to be completely covered in public, allowing the female body to exist only in the imagination. This, however, gave rise to another form of abuse in Gilead, under the pretence of change. The mentality towards sex is changed so that, not only is it largely unavailable, a commodity, but so that it is also seen and treated as a duty by women, thus practically taking the pleasure of the sexual act out of the equation.

One may note that this mentality is only a few steps away from its physical manifestation in female genital mutilation, which is practiced in a number of African countries, with the aim of reducing sex to its purely societal obligation. For obvious reasons, men are unable to undergo a procedure that will give the same result without rendering them infertile – while women are urged not to think of their own pleasure. Such is the Handmaid’s role, in doing her part for some Greater Good; and it is this relishing of sexual pleasure which Bertha/Antoinette enjoys that causes highly moralistic Victorians to call her ‘unchaste’ and ‘mad’. Both male-driven societies attempt to curb the natural biological drive.

Conclude with note about male-driven societies, built by laws made by men