Primitive Love and Love-Stories — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Polemical Preface and Evolutionary Framework

Finck's preface establishes a combative tone. He cites Samuel Johnson's remark that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord Chancellor, then credits Schopenhauer with first grasping love's significance—though limited by pre-Darwinian thinking. The author positions his work as the first to treat love from an evolutionary perspective, building on his earlier Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (1887). He explicitly frames the book as a 'Vindication of Civilization' against sentimentalists who blame white contact for savage depravity. This rhetorical stance shapes the entire volume: Finck is not a neutral observer but a polemicist marshalling data to prove a thesis.

Forcible Courtship and the Absence of Choice

The excerpts detail Australian marriage customs that Finck presents as evidence of love's absence. He quotes observers describing men seizing women by the wrist and shouting 'Yongul ngipa!' ('This one belongs to me'), while the woman resists 'with feet and hands' and shrieks for a mile. Finck notes that women always resist—not from coyness but because they 'do not like to leave their tribe.' Another practice, 'swapping girls,' is described as the most common way to obtain a wife: a man exchanges his sister or daughter for a bride, with the girl's opinion never asked. Old men monopolise young women, bartering daughters for additional wives. Finck uses these accounts to argue that primitive marriage is a matter of force and property, not affection.

The Yam-Stick as a Measure of Agency

A telling detail emerges from Brough Smyth's account: a girl reaching marriageable age receives a yam-stick, with which she can drive away any young man she does not fancy—a mere 'no' would not suffice. Yet Finck emphasises that women never initiate matches; marriages are arranged between men exchanging sisters. When a man 'proposes' after bartering, he approaches armed for war, ready to parry the woman's 'love-taps.' If she has serious objections, the text implies she may be overridden. Finck's selection of this anecdote highlights the narrow space for female agency within a system of coercion, reinforcing his thesis that romantic love—requiring mutual choice—cannot exist under such conditions.

Finck's method is to let the ethnographers' reports speak, but he curates them relentlessly to support his evolutionary narrative. Readers should attend to the tension between the raw observations—which sometimes hint at affection or resistance—and Finck's framing of them as proof of love's absence. The book is less a dispassionate survey than a sustained argument, valuable for its period assumptions as much as its data.

Reading this old treatise on love's evolution, I remembered my own youthful certainty that passion was timeless. Then Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex — Themes and Context quietly undid that. It felt like watching a tide pull back, revealing how much of our inner weather is borrowed from our era’s shorelines. That book, like this one, made me wonder how much I merely inherited.