Perhaps I am not sufficiently evolved

John A. Johnson et al.'s "Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels," based on the data derived from this survey, argues that "[m]uch of the differences in emotional reaction can be attributed to the characters' proclivity toward social dominance versus cooperation" (729) and goes on to conclude that

The predominance of Valence, though, suggests that in these novels conflict between the sexes is subordinated to their shared and complementary interests. In the agonistic structure of plot and theme, male and female protagonists are allies. They cooperate in resisting the predatory threats of antagonists, and they join together to exemplify the values that elicit the readers’ admiration and sympathy. Both male and female antagonists are exclusively fixated on material gain and social rank. That fixation stands in stark contrast to the more balanced and developed world of the protagonists—a world that includes sexual interest, romance, the care of family, friends, and the life of the mind. By isolating and stigmatizing dominance behavior, the novels affirm the shared values that bind its members into a community.  (730)

I will cheerfully admit that I cannot double-check the article's statistics. (Bill Benzon, call your office.)  Even taking those statistics as a given, however, I do have some questions:

1. As every Victorianist from here to tomorrow will no doubt observe--some already have--the article gets off to a rather bad start by collapsing the "long nineteenth century" into "Victorian."
2. Along the same lines, it is not clear how the authors' list of texts even remotely qualifies as "canonical."  Many of the works on the list qualify as important from a literary historian's point of view, but not canonical--sometimes not even in the sense of "a novel someone with a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British fiction might expect to read in the normal course of human events."  (There has already been some exasperated commentary about this on the VICTORIA list.) It's not clear how the authors arrived at their choice of texts, and the article includes no reflections about how the selection might have influenced the results.  Obviously, the authors wanted novels recognizable to, if not your average bear, then your average Victorianist (despite my qualms to the contrary), but this criterion eliminates works that might generate entirely different results.  (Does it matter, for example, that there's just a handful of non-realist texts on the list?  That Victorian Catholic fiction tends to downplay and problematize marriage plots? Or that there's such a thing as Victorian radical fiction for working-class readers? Etc.)
3. Perhaps most importantly, I cannot understand the authors' use of "egalitarian," particularly not "egalitarian" in the context of "hunter-gatherer societies."  The authors are quite correct in arguing that mainstream Victorian novels "isolat[e] and stigmatiz[e] dominance behavior" and praise self-sacrifice, duty, obligation, what we would call "altruism," and the like.  Moreover, most novelists would happily agree that they believed in a theory of sexual complementarity, even before Darwin trotted along.  (After all, variants on the theme preceded Darwin by centuries.)  But the argument that "[a]gonistic structure in these novels seems to serve as a medium for readers to participate vicariously in an egalitarian social ethos" (732) would seem to require us to ignore not only everything else in these novels, but also whatever the authors explicitly state in the course of the narrative.   (And by "explicitly," I mean "the author makes it clear, courtesy of the narrator or a mouth-piece character, exactly what he intends us to understand here.")  Because mainstream Victorian novels are often overtly horrified by anything resembling egalitarianism, let alone the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies, let alone the egalitarianism of an analogy to hunter-gatherer societies. Often enough, they aren't even pro-democratic.  In fact, the authors skate right over the problem that acts of "dominance behavior" in mainstream Victorian fiction are frequently displayed by those characters who want to level the playing field. 

I think what the authors have done here is perform a bit of argumentative sleight-of-hand: they've collapsed very localized egalitarian moments between specific characters (if that) into a generalization about how the novels represent "the social."  There's no attention paid here at all to what "community" might mean in these texts, or to those antagonists who have to be excluded from it in order for the purported "egalitarianism" to succeed.  It is quite possible for protagonists to be models of self-sacrificing virtue and yet be in a novel that assumes that the poor need to know their place, that Jews (or Catholics, or evangelicals, or High Church Anglicans, or whatever) are a danger to the state and must be "kept down," or even that egalitarian relationships mean nothing for the world at large.  (The ending of Little Dorrit, anyone?)  However, any discussion of these issues would require us to actually pay attention to the language of the novels, and not just to readers' evaluations of their emotional responses to specific characters.  This is not a matter of a "descriptive" analysis vs. a politicized analysis--the authors' description of the novels' "social order(s)" itself is at issue. 

Now, the authors could argue that as long as the novel reaffirms certain "shared values," then the content of the shared values is irrelevant.  That is, the structure trumps the content: any status quo in a storm, no matter how unpleasant the status quo is. And in fact, many trees have already died to prove that most Victorian fiction supports the social order, albeit not the one the authors suggest here.   But given the article's concluding sentences--"In their larger imaginative structures, though, the novels evidently do not just represent human nature; they evoke certain impulses of human nature. Vicarious participation in the novel stirs up the reader’s impulses to derogate dominance in others and to affirm one’s identity as a positive, contributing member of his or her social group. It may not be too much of a leap to suggest that the emotional impulses aroused by the novel carry over when the novel is put down, actually encouraging people to suppress dominance and cooperate with others in real life" (732)--I am not sure why the authors would wish to advance such an argument.