Jealousy 9780300190489

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Je a l o u s y

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Peter Toohey

Jealousy

YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S | N E W H AV E N A N D L O N D O N

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Copyright © 2014 Peter Toohey All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk Typeset in Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toohey, Peter, 1951Jealousy / Peter Toohey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18968-1 (alk. paper) 1. Jealousy. 2. Jealousy in literature. I. Title.   BF575.J4T66 2014 152.4’8—dc23 2014028282 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 iv

For Elaine Fantham

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Contents Preface

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1 What is jealousy?

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2 The meat it feeds on

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3 Ears mishear and eyes magnify

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4 Beyond the Bullaburra triangle

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5 Utopia

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6 The invisible made visible

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7 A feast for all the family

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8 Meeting at the Dingo Bar

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9 Rattling the cage

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10 Turning your back on it

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Readings

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List of illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Index

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Preface

‘If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved,’ laments the narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, ‘I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her any more. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And her I could not fight. She was too strong for me.’ The ‘new’ Mrs de Winter is deeply jealous of her husband Maxim’s late wife. Much of the novel is absorbed with her growing preoccupation with the charismatic, sophisticated and beautiful Rebecca. She struggles against her rival’s shade, which, she fears, haunts the mind of Maxim. She struggles as well with the Cornish estate of Manderley and its staff. From the seething Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, she learns that ‘the real Mrs de Winter’ used cruelly and deliberately to provoke Maxim’s jealousy, bringing men back for weekends: ‘They made love to her of course; who would not? She laughed, she viii

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would come back and tell me what they had said, and what they’d done. She did not mind, it was like a game to her. Like a game. Who wouldn’t be jealous? They were all jealous, all mad for her . . . everyone who knew her, everyone who came to Manderley.’ How can you possibly deal with a rival whom you cannot confront or combat? Maxim ‘was jealous while she lived, and now he’s jealous when she’s dead’. Maxim also acted on that jealousy; after Rebecca threatens that her illegitimate child will inherit Manderley, he shoots her in the boathouse. The new Mrs de Winter is only freed from her jealousy when she learns the truth about Rebecca, and when the house, so infused with Rebecca’s presence that it seems almost to be alive, burns to the ground. Published nearly eighty years ago, Rebecca is probably the most-read book about jealousy in English. It has never gone out of print, and has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times. That says something about the enduring fascination of the emotion of jealousy. (It also says something about the enduring fascination exerted by popular psychological thrillers and Gothic romances.) Rebecca, which its author called ‘a study in jealousy’, is also a novel crafted from jealousy: du Maurier’s husband, Major Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning, had been engaged to a glamorous woman called Jan Ricardo, who threw herself under a train during the Second World War. Daphne du Maurier harboured a suspicion that Tommy had always remained attached to her. The novel’s love triangle, with a ghostly but still powerful presence at one of its corners, had its roots in real life. After all, the sexual jealousy that the novel circles around is ix

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typical. Who would not recognize the suspicion, the compulsive comparisons, the oesophageal knot, the minatory sensations? It’s a normal, common emotion, but one that has a much larger – and more interesting – life than is usually allowed. This book will look at the many parts that jealousy plays in our lives. It doesn’t deal only with sexual jealousy, though that is what most people think of when they bring the emotion to mind. It also examines the different kinds of jealousy experienced by infants, animals, families, artists, academics and work colleagues. It tries as well to iron out not only the differences but also the relations between jealousy and envy. I’ll look at the biological and evolutionary basis of jealousy, and its relation to the understanding of how socialization takes place for human beings. Although extravagant and violent jealous reactions make good press – and the media abounds in sad, sordid and savage tales of jealous lovers acting atrociously – jealousy’s daily life is much quieter and it’s surprisingly beneficial. I’ll show how such an apparently awful emotion is as helpful as it’s harmful and how it has a valuable role to play in private life by protecting and strengthening relationships. More widely, I’ll show that jealousy also has a powerful part to play in the social context, as a potent means for the assertion of individual rights and the encouragement of cooperation and equitable treatment. And beyond that, I’ll also try to map out jealousy’s cultural life in art and literature, as well as some of the advances made in understanding the emotion in psychology, neurology, anthropology and social science. Some of the most informative instances of jealousy, it turns out, have been committed to canvas and paper – jealousy can be a great spur to creativity. I’ll x

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also look at jealousy’s historical lifespan. How has it been experienced and thought about through time and in different cultures around the world? Which brings me to the here and now. Are people more jealous today than ever before? The media in the West would certainly have you believe so. With the modern world’s enthusiasm for the pursuit of material wealth and consumer goods – the sense of always wanting what’s new, what’s better, what’s more – the possibilities for rivalry and competitiveness abound. And some are loudly proclaiming the twenty-first century to be the ‘Age of Entitlement’, a period in which increasing wealth breeds a sense of narcissism and of the right to exploit and to cheat. If you think you can escape it, think again: as Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell argue in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, ‘Not only are there more narcissists than ever, but the non-narcissist people are seduced by the increasing emphasis on material wealth . . . [S]tandards have shifted, sucking otherwise humble people into the vortex of granite counter tops . . . and plastic surgery’. Are we all part of this entitled, narcissistic world? Is the modern sense of possessiveness and privilege running rampant, and playing havoc with our emotional lives? Is this the sort of fertile soil within which the seeds of jealousy are best sown?

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What is jealousy?

What is jealousy? The Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s Night of Jealousy (1893) offers one kind of answer. On first glance the painting is an impenetrable blur of darks, greys and whites. It’s all raging seas, slashing rain and thunderclouds – an analogy, you could say, for someone in the midst of a jealous rage. Many who have been badly jealous might instantly believe that, yes, that’s how it really feels. Strindberg has got the turbulence, anxiety and pain down cold. But couldn’t this abstract evocation of jealousy do duty for just about any strong feeling? Grief, anger, depression or desperation could all be easily ascribed to it. What the painting conveys to me, then, is the difficulty involved in trying to represent an emotion like jealousy. If it weren’t for the title of the painting, and Strindberg’s own note on the back of it to his soon-to-be-wife – ‘To Miss Frida Uhl from the artist (the Symbolist August Strindberg). The painting depicts the sea (bottom right), Clouds (top), a Juniper bush (top left) and symbolizes: a Night of Jealousy’ – I 1

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1 Johan August Strindberg, Night of Jealousy, 1893

doubt anyone would have a clue as to what Strindberg is getting at. But using words to explain emotional experiences isn’t easy, precise or definitive either. It’s difficult to know what you’re feeling and to name it. (‘I’m feeling emotional’ is another way 2

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of uttering the difficulty of naming what you’re feeling.) But more than that, feeling an emotion precedes our ability to speak about it. Small children can feel emotions long before they are able to say what they are. Emotions are not dependent for their existence on a person’s capacity to nominate them, let alone to understand them. Some aspects of our experience of emotions will always evade descriptions and definitions. And language is a very imprecise mechanism for communicating our inner states to others: how often have you heard ‘What do you mean?’ Jealousy, though, is an especially difficult emotion to talk about. The first reason for this is because it is a very slippery descriptor. The term ‘jealousy’ has no cast iron status in terms of what it designates. If you were to translate Deuteronomy 5:9 – ‘for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me’ – into today’s English, the word ‘jealous’ mightn’t appear at all; you might choose something like ‘demanding’ instead. ‘Jealous’ does not have exclusive rights over the naming of the feeling associated with that word. ‘Demanding’, as well as ‘possessive’, ‘covetous’, ‘begrudging’, ‘emulous’ and ‘invidious’, as well as the slangy ‘hogging’, ‘hater’, ‘green’ and ‘well jel’, all make a claim. The enthusiastic use of ‘well jel’ by many British youngsters, especially since it was popularized by the TV programme The Only Way Is Essex, points to one of the commonest ways that ‘jealousy’ is used – incorrectly, in the eyes of many. Check Twitter and you’ll see what I mean. Users across the globe 3

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apply the meme and hashtag #welljel constantly – my cursory glance suggested it was around once every ten minutes. At the time I was writing this paragraph (when the northern hemisphere’s summer months were approaching), ‘well jel’ was applied to upcoming holidays in the sun (‘have fun on that boat! Well jel!’), followed closely by unusual, exciting, and for this writer impenetrable experiences (‘Well jel me. That’s when Lionel Ritchie was at his best’), or items of clothing (‘you have so much swag I am well jel’), or appearance (‘Has some serious cheekbone envy after watching Angelina Jolie in Maleficent!!! #welljel’) and even food (‘I went for Jerk Chicken wid rice & peas & brown sauce . . . #welljel’). Are they really talking about jealousy? My point is that all this ‘jealousy’ would more likely be termed ‘envy’. Envy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘A feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck’. The verb means ‘Desire to have a quality, possession, or other desirable thing belonging to (someone else)’. Jealousy is more commonly associated with sex (your heart’s desire is cheating on you), personal relationships, and protecting your posessions or rights. As Peter van Sommers outlines, ‘Envy concerns what you would like to have but don’t possess, whereas jealousy concerns what you have and do not wish to lose’. Envy is classically thought of as being dyadic (you and the thing) whereas jealousy is triadic (you, the thing or person, and the rival who threatens to take them from you). I’ll return to – and ask questions about – the details of these definitions later, but this is the common view. Look back at those tweets’ focus on 4

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commodities, good looks and good luck. It is, in the widely accepted understanding, envy, isn’t it? So why are these people not ‘well env’? This interchangeability and imprecision may not be simply the result of ignorance and confusion among teenagers today. Envy and jealousy have a long history of trading places. For instance, between the late fourteenth-century Wycliffe’s Bible and the 1611 King James version, lines from the Song of Solomon 8:6 transformed from the breathtaking ‘loue is strong / As deth, enuy is hard / As helle’, into ‘love is strong / As death, jealousy is cruel / As the grave’ (my emphases). Both versions agree on the force of their chosen word, whether it’s ‘envy’ or ‘jealousy’, and there is no difficulty for the reader of either version in understanding the meaning. The Latin in the Vulgate’s version of this passage is aemulatio, cognate with ‘emulous’ in English, and it can mean ‘jealous’ or ‘envious’. The Latin invidia also translates as either term. Invidia, and the oscillation between envy and jealousy, is at the heart of Roman retellings of the Judgment of Paris, one of the most famous tales from Greek mythology, popular from as early as the eighth century bce. The story tells how Zeus arranged a marriage banquet and, wanting to keep the party calm, did not invite the goddess Strife. Snubbed, Strife came anyway and brought trouble with her: a golden apple on which was inscribed ‘for the most beautiful woman’. She threw the apple into the midst of the celebration. Hera, wife of Zeus, Athena, daughter of Zeus, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, all insisted that the apple was addressing them personally. Zeus appointed Paris, the son of Priam, king of Troy, to arbitrate 5

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2 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1528

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their claims. The goddesses each tried to bribe him: Hera promised him the realms of Europe and Asia, Athena promised him wisdom and ability in battle, and Aphrodite promised him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Aphrodite triumphed (this is the moment that Cranach immortalizes in his painting). The louche Paris abducted Helen from her husband, Menelaus, and slipped back to Troy. Menelaus gathered a huge Greek force to get her back, resolutely supported by the jealous Hera and Athena. So, while jealousy started and supported the Trojan War – not only Menelaus’s jealousy over losing his wife to Paris, but Hera’s and Athena’s jealousy of their rival’s success in the contest – it seems to have been something more like envy that really kicked it all off: it’s Strife’s envy of the other gods’ jollity that leads her to gatecrash the party, and the three goddesses’ envy of one another’s beauty that makes them so competitive. Envy and jealousy are both part of the same picture and seem very hard to separate. Little wonder the Twittersphere is discombobulated. Talking about jealousy is difficult for another reason: the considerable stigma attached to the emotion. As Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, states, ‘As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subjected to banality.’ Many people are deeply reluctant to admit to feeling the emotion strongly. Pride and shame make people instinctively selfcensor. Confessing your jealousy could be taken as a sign of weakness or be disapproved of by others. Vicious jealousy is suppressed, pre-empted or transmuted into more acceptable 7

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emotions when it is described. So if the jealous person cannot admit his jealousy directly, and is always seeking other names for it, it follows that it’s an emotion that lends itself to metaphor. The linguist Anna Ogarkova has explored the various metaphorical uses of jealousy and envy in modern English and shows that they are distinguished only by intensity. Jealousy attracts the more powerful and violent linguistic associations. Jealousy is often thought to be the more powerful emotion of the two. You don’t say ‘I’m jealous of your success’ without putting the listener on guard. But if you recast the thought and say, ‘How I envy you!’ the switch rids the admission of its tacit tenor of poisonous rivalry. It assumes a tone of wry admiration. For the Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster, however, envy is the more powerful and the more repressed of the two emotions. This is because the person envied may be entirely innocent, as well as oblivious. Elster thinks envy is unique, ‘because it is the only emotion we do not want to admit to others or to ourselves’. Elster provides a very interesting historical account of envy, arguing that despite the huge variances in moral principles and social norms across time and space, in no society would an individual consciously confess to envy in its pure, Aristotelian form: ‘hostility towards the nondeserved fortune of another, and justify[ing] aggressive or destructive behavior in terms of this emotion’. Really? In Shakepeare’s Othello, Iago’s confession of his envy, when he says that Cassio ‘hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly’, surely tests Elster’s argument. Again, it goes to show how confusing ‘jealousy’ and ‘envy’ can be, and how weighed down they are with perplexing moral subtexts. 8

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3 Gustav Klimt, Der Neid (Jealousy), 1898

The idea that jealousy is a weakness has deep roots in Western history. ‘Thou shalt not covet’ was carved on the two stone tablets by the finger of God. And listen to St Paul in Galatians 5:19–21: ‘the works of the flesh are evident . . . hatred, contentions, jealousies . . . those who practise such things will not inherit the kingdom of God’. Christianity has laid down a judgment of the emotion of jealousy that has had a very long life. I’m sure St Paul would have clapped Gustav Klimt on the back for his Good Book version of the memento mori, a depiction of Jealousy as a cadaverous woman with a serpent draped around her neck. Mix with der Neid, Klimt is saying, and you too will waste away. The spiritual death is none too far from the loss of the soul to which St Paul points. I suspect that it’s this religious tradition that’s behind the austere renunciation of the emotion in Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. In his opinion, civilized people have moved or should have moved beyond jealousy: ‘if jealousy has been a 9

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beneficial influence at the beginning of civilization, as well as among animals . . . it is still by no means clear that it . . . becomes a desirable emotion in more advanced stages of civilization.’ Others deride it too. For the French philosopher Alain Badiou, ‘jealousy is a fake parasite that feeds on love’. I guess he is not necessarily immune, but he doesn’t think much of the emotion. More suffer an odd aphasia about their own feelings and conduct. Not long after suffocating Desdemona, Othello describes himself as a man ‘not easily jealous’. James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, Ulysses, is a novel about Leopold Bloom’s day spent desperately avoiding thoughts of his wife Molly and her affair – refusing to admit his jealousy, even to himself. Joyce knew a thing or two about the emotion: he wrote a number of jealous letters to Nora Barnacle after discovering she was carrying on with another man early on in their relationship. Nonetheless, Joyce claimed that men did not feel jealousy but merely an offended sense of proprietorship. This is not simply a problem for literature: the inability and the reluctance to name jealousy bedevils the many psychological studies on it that rely on self-reporting or self-rating. And these are the studies that still form the basis of many investigations into the emotion. Would you admit to it? * * * If the reporting of feelings is so unreliable, perhaps the circumstances in which jealousy arises could tell us something about the nature of the emotion. Alain Robbe-Grillet appears to me to succeed in doing just that in his 1957 novel, La Jalousie. He seems to distrust feelings and language, and avoids all description of the emotion, or 10

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indeed any emotion at all. Yet he manages to recreate the near psychotic mind-set of a very jealous husband, without ever mentioning the word ‘jealousy’ apart from in the title – and even that is ambiguous, referring either to the emotion or to a jalousie or louvre window, through which the narrator spies on his wife. This remarkable nouveau roman is told from the perspective of an unnamed, eerie, impersonal third-person narrator, whose presence is inferred only from the number of chairs at the dinner table or on the verandah. By implication he is the master of the house on a tropical banana plantation. He silently watches as A . . ., his wife, negotiates an affair with Franck, the owner of a neighbouring plantation, reporting on the tiniest details of her movements. The jealous narrator is evoked as someone who is passionately engaged in his compromised situation, yet on the look-out, from a distance, for proof of his partner’s sexual defection, searching constantly for clues and for signs. Robbe-Grillet captures perfectly the obsessively studious psychology of the jealous individual. Like many jealous people this narrator struggles to be objective in the pursuit of evidence of betrayal, and constantly replays what he has seen and what he suspects: the clock seems to have come to a standstill, and if it does move time seems to be circular. It’s impossible for the reader to tell the difference between what has happened and what the narrator has imagined, as we only have what he sees to go on. The main character in this unsettling and honest narrative is jealousy itself, and the reader is in the midst of it. Johannes Vermeer’s beguiling painting, The Concert, plays on a similar eerie stillness. This strangely motionless yet 11

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4 Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, 1658–60

emotionally powerful work reveals layer upon layer of jealousy. In the simple scene, the woman on the right appears to be singing, while on the left a woman is plays the clavecin, and a man in the centre facing away from us accompanies the women on a stringed instrument. The painting is thought to be about love and seduction, but why? And where is the jealousy? Vermeer hints lightly at that emotion through the paintings 12

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within the painting. Above the singer’s head is The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen (a painting used more than once by Vermeer, and owned by his family), showing a prostitute playing for a client while an old brothel madam demands payment. There’s the sex. Above the woman at the clavecin is a painting of a rugged landscape, perhaps a dead tree, said to be in the style of Jacob van Ruisdael: elegiac, uncorrupted nature, perhaps. And the music instructor? Such individuals have often been depicted as being concerned with more than merely their students’ education, though this one, who looks at neither woman, does not seem guilty. The scene that he faces is said to be of Arcadia, which was full of jealous trysts. What’s going on? Perhaps the plainer clavecin player, head apologetically bowed, envies the fecundity and looks of the pregnant-looking singer. The music teacher, the social inferior in this scene, may envy the ease of the lives of these two smartly dressed young women. Or the two women could be locked in a love triangle and jealously competing for the tutor’s attention. The painting, balanced and poised, charges the atmosphere and leaves the emotions to be gleaned on their own terms. To see it as a depiction of jealousy does allow us to make some sense of its strange magnetic power, though it offers no clear answers. Focusing on the situation in which jealousy occurs, then, may prove helpful for identifying what jealousy is, and for coming to a definition of the emotion which doesn’t rely on slippery reported feelings. La Jalousie and The Concert show that the foundation stone of jealousy is triangular. The love triangle is the clichéd sine qua non of a jealous situation. A recent case that was widely reported 13

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in Australia illustrates, to complicated and gruesome effect, just what I mean. In Wollongong, just south of Sydney in New South Wales, a local solicitor, Katherine Foreman, was killed in a deliberately-started house fire in 2011. The Crown claimed at the 2014 trial that ‘A love triangle involving Mr Bradley Max Rawlinson, 40, Ms Wendy Evans and Ms Foreman’ was the motive. Rawlinson was sexually involved with both the deceased and, in the months leading up to the fire, secretly also with Wendy Evans. The prosecutors argued that Rawlinson colluded with his secret lover to kill Foreman so they could be together. In one message, Rawlinson told Evans: ‘I want to be with you till we die. I hope you understand the various reasons why it needs to happen to her now. I love you.’ The trial heard allegations of how Foreman and Evans had formerly been friends, but that Foreman had stolen Evans’s boyfriend, and the relationship between the two had soured. There were hints that the two women had been sexually involved with each other, too, with Foreman possibly abusing Evans. It was alleged that Foreman had also threatened Rawlinson. This sad tale illustrates how sexual jealousy can play itself out in a variety of unexpected ways. Most commonly it’s the aggrieved lover striking out against their erstwhile paramour: Foreman versus Rawlinson. Discussions about jealousy usually take this perspective. It’s also common to see the person who’s been jilted reacting, often violently, against the interloper: Foreman against Evans. It’s less common to have the loser taking it out on both the former lover and the interloper. I suppose it would take a pretty determined and tough person to 14

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take on a duomachy. In Wollongong it was two against one – a bit like the The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity, in which the lovers also take it out on the man who’s been dumped and duped. No matter what the permutation, the underlying structure is that of the triangle. It’s just that there are so many of them in Wollongong. So, the triangular situation is the first element in a delineation of jealousy. But jealousy is a feeling – so it also involves the heightened reaction to the potential loss that is created by the triangulation. Munch’s well-known canvas, his Jealousy of 1895, captures this perfectly. The bearded man in the foreground is Stanislaw Przybyszewski, a Polish writer, whose wife Dagny Juel was a model for many of Munch’s paintings. Munch had an affair with Juel (and so did Strindberg), and may have seduced her in the very year she married his friend Przybyszewski, two years before this painting is dated. Here, Munch is depicting his

5 Edvard Munch, Jealousy, 1895 15

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own cuckolding of his buddy. Jealousy is a theme to which Munch returned again and again. This painting is coeval with August Strindberg’s Night of Jealousy, which we saw earlier. But Munch relies much more heavily on the narrative and the situational elements than does his friend, strongly evoking Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge (and notice those red apples, the red robe and the bright red face of the Munch figure: they make it obvious which sin is troubling the bearded man). It’s the hallmark triangular situation of two lovers and an ousted third, the cuckold. But look at the way Munch works in triangular imagery everywhere: from Przybyszewski’s pointed face, to the woman’s shoulder, under her left arm, the apples under her outstretched right arm, the odd plant on the left, and the triangle made by the lines of her pubis which point directly at the two men. Munch also emphasizes the bearded man’s reaction by placing his ghostly pallor on a gloomy background. His fish-like eyes avoid the scrutiny of the viewer. Like La Jalousie’s narrator, he only has eyes for the cause of his jealousy. The triangle doesn’t have to be sexual. Nor does jealousy. In The Magic Lantern, the film director Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography, he describes a very graphic example of his and his brother’s childhood jealousy of their sister: When I was four, my sister was born . . . A fat monstrous creature had suddenly acquired the main role. I was banished from my mother’s bed and my father beamed over this bawling bundle . . . My elder brother and I, 16

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usually mortal enemies, made peace and planned various ways of killing this repulsive wretch. For some reason, my brother considered I should do the deed. I was flattered and we looked for a suitable moment.

Little Ingmar climbed onto a chair and attempted to strangle his baby sister in her cot. But he slipped and fell to the floor, his sister survived, and cinema was changed forever. Who is in Bergman’s triangle? Ingmar and his brother, their new sister, and their parents, probably their mother above all. What’s at risk of being lost, the brothers seem to think, is the exclusive love of their parents. And the heightened reactions are certainly present: Bergman describes how ‘The demon of jealousy fastened its claws into my heart. I raged, wept, crapped on the floor and messed myself.’ * * * Let’s stay with the idea of situations and reactions. How does this way of understanding sexual jealousy compare with some of the explanations of the emotion to be found in the psychological literature? The threat of a rival begins many of these delineations of sexual jealousy: ‘it is the belief in the presence of rivalry that is the key issue, and whether or not such a rivalry truly exists is less important’, suggest Michael Kingham and Harvey Gordon. This threatens a love relationship: ‘Jealousy’, explain Michele Scheinkman and Denise Werneck, ‘occurs when a real or imagined rival threatens a valued romantic relationship.’ Either actual loss, or fear of loss, creates jealousy, say Stephanie 17

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Ortigue and Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli: ‘jealousy is generally . . . evoked when an individual loses (or fears the loss of) a valued relationship due to the threat of a real (or imagined) rival’, which creates the heightened emotional response (‘characterized as a negative emotional reaction’). What of the triangle? Eddy Harmon-Jones and colleagues put the triadic nature of jealousy very neatly: ‘Jealousy requires a social triangle, [and] occurs over the perception that another (even if only imaginary) poses a threat to an important relationship.’ Situations (threats, triangles) and reactions (heightened emotional states derived from a fear of loss) are at the very heart of how jealousy is understood. What if you were to remove the ‘romantic’ from the definition? Jeffrey G. Parker and his team maintain that ‘Jealousy can occur at any age and in the context of any valued relationship characterized by a degree of intimacy, commitment, and dependence.’ There’s nothing specifically about romance or sex here at all. The definition seems to be moving along a spectrum, slipping away from romance towards friendship. And that’s the term that Parker and his team use to nominate this version of the emotion, ‘friendship jealousy’. The main traits of sexual jealousy – a threat, a rival, fear, heightened emotion and of course the triangle – are preserved here. Parker points out that this sort of jealousy can also include ‘parent–child relationships’. A problem, he rather sententiously adds, is that ‘almost all research on jealousy has been conducted with adults and predictably has centered on feelings of threat surrounding romantic partners’. 18

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If Parker and his team are to be trusted (and I think they are), then there is a wide web of relationships that jealousy touches. Psychologists Robert Hill and Paul Davis emphasize the broad spectrum of non-romantic jealousy, observing that ‘cases of non-romantic jealousy have been reported in relation to childbirth . . . friendships . . . work . . . and the seeking of help for emotional problems’. In such cases, ‘relationships . . . need not involve love, and the rival need not even be a person’. That redefinition of ‘relationship’ opens the door to the multiform life of jealousy. In the seventeenth-century classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton pointed in the same direction, observing that ‘three things cause jealousy, a mighty state, a rich treasure, a fair wife’. It might be better to paraphrase Burton’s trinity in a more modern way – as power, wealth and sex. Sex is a given for causing jealousy, but what of the first two members of his triumvirate? Wouldn’t they be more associated with envy? Or are envy and jealousy more closely linked than might have been expected? Most psychologists insist on a strict demarcation of jealousy and envy. Ortigue and Bianchi-Demicheli are typical in emphasizing that ‘jealousy often refers to the fear of losing someone, while envy refers to the will to obtain something . . . when a person lacks what another has and either desires it or wishes that the other did not have it’. Yet envy does share several of its characteristics with jealousy. There is a threat, though it emerges from the person suffering envy, and there is a triangular situation (usually two people and some form of possession, animate or inanimate). Emotions are certainly heightened: 19

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the envier may also fear failing to attain what they want, or having lost forever what they have failed to gain. Helmut Schoeck, in his excellent Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, also argues that jealousy and envy can be definitively distinguished. Jealousy, Schoeck reckons, ‘should be restricted to an asset upon which there is a legitimate claim, even if the jealous man is subjectively mistaken about his loss of that asset’. A man may believe that he has a legitimate claim upon the affections of his girlfriend, for instance. Even if he is mistaken in thinking his exclusive claim upon her has been broken, or alternatively, even if the relationship is over and he no longer has claim over this ‘asset’, his pain at the loss of that claim he once held is still jealousy. So the contrast between envy and jealousy is for Schoeck, following Georg Simmel, this: ‘where attainment is concerned, we should speak of envy, and where preservation, rather of jealousy’. You may wish to have an BMW like your neighbour. It may grieve you that you don’t have one, but that feeling is envy, not jealousy. Schoeck’s definition of jealousy may rely too much upon feelings to be watertight, but the distinction between jealousy involving a sense of loss and envy a desire for gain is helpful, even if it’s not completely convincing. * * * What if, instead, we were to think of envy as ‘material jealousy’? I suggest this because envy is not always or necessarily simply a dyadic emotion: you versus your rival. It is you and a rival (even if the rival doesn’t know they’re a rival) and some object, ‘a mighty state, a rich treasure’. Seeing envy as a kind of a material jealousy might allow us to see more clearly that there is a triadic 20

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relationship. Imagine that you don’t get a promotion you feel you deserved – that you know you deserved. You envy the person who got it ahead of you with every fibre of your being. You envy them their success, their prestige, their increased power, and their money. But there really is loss involved in this situation, because you didn’t just not gain the job, you lost out on it. You feel jealous of the person who has taken away what in your head already belonged to you. The loss involved in many situations of ‘straightforward’ envy is, I think, missed by the standard definitions. Yet we have all felt it. I believe that thinking of envy as material jealousy can help us to recognize this loss. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you never had the thing in the first place – it’s the absence, the distance from you now that hurts. It can even dent your sense of who you are. For an emotion that thrives on threes it’s not surprising that there’s also a third player in this jealous spectrum: Schadenfreude, that is, gloating or taking pleasure in a rival’s or a friend’s misfortune. It is a way of gaining through another’s loss – and can naturally follow on from jealousy. Imagine that your long-term beloved has been swept away by a loathsome amorous rival – someone suave and slightly tragic, a Gaul or Teuton to your Canadian. The new relationship is liable to make you feel mightily jealous. But the sun does rise and there is justice on this planet for you soon learn that your belated beloved partner has abruptly and even brutally dropped that European enemy. The competitor is grieving badly, near suicidal you learn. Good, you say with a smile. That’s Schadenfreude. You have gained nothing, and still lost – but now, so have they, and that makes all the difference. 21

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Schadenfreude isn’t only related to romance either – in fact it’s much more commonly experienced with regard to money, possessions or position. I’ve just heard that my neighbour has had an accident and his BMW is a write-off. Am I pleased? I’ll give you an answer to that question and other aspects of the fascinating emotion of Schadenfreude in Chapter 8. Triangulated relationships, loss, emotional reaction: these are the underlying elements and mechanisms – the definition – of the jealousy spectrum. Schadenfreude, like jealousy and envy, is an emotion that’s based on triangulation. There’s a rival and there’s loss, though it’s someone else’s this time. And the situation is emotionally charged – gloriously, despicably so, because you really enjoy the loss that your rival has copped. Schadenfreude makes sense of how closely envy and jealousy are bound up together, and also how jealousy is the most moral of emotions. It really does want to set the the world to rights. * * * Defining jealousy – or, rather, opening up its definition – is just a starting point. What role does this emotion play in our lives? Psychologists of many flavours have investigated this question, and argued in different ways for the surprising benefits of jealousy. It is to these, and to the biology of jealousy, within our bodies and our brains, that the page now turns. Rather than what jealousy is, I’d like to ask why it’s felt at all.

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The meat it feeds on

‘And why did it pick on him? Was it some bit of fluky chemistry? Was it all dished out at birth? Did you get given jealousy the way you got given a big bottom or poor eyesight, both of which Graham suffered from. If so, maybe it wore off after a while; maybe there was only enough jealousy chemical in that soft box up there for a certain number of years. Perhaps; but Graham rather doubted it: he’d had a big bottom for years, and that showed no signs of easing up.’ Graham Hendrick, the deluded history lecturer in Julian Barnes’ novel Before She Met Me, is right to doubt that jealousy wears off, though it exists for different reasons than his large behind. Jealousy, despite the pain and suffering it causes, is a product of our brains, and has evolved with us; and in that sense it must be good for us – or rather, for our genes – somehow. If jealousy is, as Iago famously states, ‘the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on’, then humans are comprised of both ‘monster’ and ‘meat’. 23

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Jealousy, like other emotions, was born of necessity. Put simply, humans experience jealousy because the emotion has helped the species to survive. That’s not to say a jealous rage designed to rein in a straying partner is good for the individual – it’s mostly not, and feels terrible. But the purblind process of evolution and these selfish genes care not how jealousy makes their carriers act or feel. If a man’s jealous rage leads to the return of his errant partner and him becoming a father, that’s success, evolutionarily speaking, no matter that he also murdered his rival and was later incarcerated and executed for his crime. Jealousy has masterminded an evolutionary triumph. Think not of jealousy as good for a person, but as good for one’s genes. Evolutionary psychologists in this neo-Darwinian mould have been influential in mapping jealousy’s evolutionary journey. David Buss explains that jealousy functions as a deterrent to potential or real threats of infidelity. In other words, it warns of the possible danger to a sexual relationship that could (or ‘should’, as the genes would have it) lead to successful genetic replication in the form of offspring. Buss holds that, while both men and women utilize jealousy to strengthen their union for the sake of their genes, the sexes experience the emotion differently. Men’s jealousy is roused more by insinuations of sexual infidelity because it leads to suspicions of cuckoldry – and, in the evolutionary scheme of things, a potential waste of paternal labour raising another man’s children on behalf of the wrong genes. Women are more jealous of emotional infidelity, because a rival female, even a rival family, represents a greater threat to the much-needed resources and 24

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protection that a committed male partner would provide. So, Buss argues, while women manipulate their partner’s jealous feelings by flirting or sexual uncertainty to keep their men loyal, men’s jealousy finds forceful, violent and intimidating expressions to convince their partners to remain faithful. Buss’s sense of the differences between men and women’s experience of jealousy was strengthened in an experiment by the Japanese neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi, one of the few attempts to achieve a picture of jealousy in the brain. Takahashi and his associates took a group of twenty-two healthy university students (half male, half female) all of whom were right-handed and who had been in an intimate relationship with a partner for an average of 14.8 months (males) and 18.5 months (females). They were shown three sets of statements related to differing levels of sexual and emotional infidelity – from the neutral (‘my girlfriend stayed in a twin-bed room in a hotel with her female friend’), to the sexually charged (‘my girlfriend stayed in a double-bed room in a hotel with her ex-boyfriend’), to the emotionally incriminating (‘my girlfriend wrote a love letter to another man’) – and asked to imagine each sentence’s situation, while lying in a fMRI scanner. The participants were then asked to reread the sentences in the same order and to say using a 6-point scale how they would feel if the scenario protagonist were their partner. As well as jealousy, emotions such as anger, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and happiness were also charted: Takahashi and his team (rightly) suspected that jealousy may entail the experience of more than one emotion. The mean ratings for jealousy were, for jealousy-neutral statements, 1.2 25

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for men and 1.2 for women, for sexual infidelity statements, 4.6 for men and 4.6 for women, and for emotional infidelity statements, 4.3 for men and 4.5 for women. Not much difference. But the results for the fMRI scanning showed something else. They revealed that men and women use different parts of their brains when they experience jealousy. In men, Takahashi’s team reported, ‘jealousy mostly involves activation in the visual cortex, limbic system and related areas (amygdala, hippocampal regions and hypothalamus), and in somatic and visceral states (e.g. insula)’. It is markedly different for women where jealousy entails the recruitment of brain areas ‘that sustain higher-order cognitive functions, such as the so-called mentalizing brain network that is involved in the interpretation of others’ intentions based on self-inferences and theory of mind’. Men’s experience, in other words, is more ‘visceral’, and women’s is more ‘cerebral’. These results further flesh out Buss’s observations. Men’s jealousy seems to be driven by bodily need and bodily desire: they are unwilling to share their sexual partner. Women, on the other hand, seem to give more thought to their jealous fears, calculating what they might be telling them, or how they might be used.

6 Pinpointing jealousy in the male and female brain 26

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The evolutionary psychologists’ hard-headed position is periodically softened. An amusingly odd experiment by psychologists Will Brown and Chris Moore investigated the jealousy of people with very symmetrical bodies. Brown and Moore’s hypothesis was that, as symmetrical people find it easier than us asymmetricals to attract sexual partners (their symmetry exhibits the fact they have the best genes: they are less liable to developmental problems and better able to deal with pathogens), they will be less liable to feel jealous because they can always move on to another relationship. Protecting the relationship you have isn’t as crucial if you can easily find someone else. To evolutionists’ delight, their results bore this out: symmetrical people reported less jealousy concerning sexual relationships than asymmetrical people (and just as much jealousy with regard to the economic or physical success of others). Was it was ever likely that a symmetrical person, presumably with a high opinion of their well-balanced looks already, would admit to feeling such a lowdown thing as jealousy? Maybe not. But Brown and Moore’s peculiar little experiment shows another way that jealousy has worked its way into our understanding of evolution. Stephanie Ortigue, who follows David Buss’s arguments, believes that the reason humans experience jealousy may be of a more personal nature. She considers that jealousy can benefit the individual just as much as her or his genes. Like Buss she holds that ‘sexual jealousy is an evolved adaptation that functions as a mate retention strategy to protect an individual’s mate from potential poachers and sustain access to a mate’s reproductive resources’. But she also sees psychological and 27

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physical health being crucially affected by the presence and absence of interpersonal relations, arguing that ‘humans strive to protect and sustain their relationships using available tactics. Thus, emotional jealousy seems inherently essential to guard these valued relationships from potential threats.’ This evolutionary model appears to work very well from an experimental point of view. As odd as it may seem, jealousy is the glue that holds the sexes together – for the benefit of the family and for the survival of the species. But there is one bug in this machine. The self-assertion that the selfish gene appears to insist on can be counterproductive and can put an end to an individual’s capacity for gene replication. A jealous male is of no use to his genes or anyone else for that matter if he is dead. Jealousy can also severely and adversely affect the communities that humans have evolved within. Surprisingly, jealousy itself can have a hand in reining in such dominant, raging jealous individuals – which we’ll come to in Chapter 9. * * * Sexual jealousy is the primary focus of investigations into the evolutionary roots of jealousy. But, as we saw in the last chapter, jealousy is a multiform emotion and it is difficult to shoehorn all of its reasons for existence into ‘genetic replication’. Also, it might be easy to understand why humans experience jealousy, but it’s not always easy to be convinced that this painful emotion is always beneficial. It may be that jealousy, and I don’t mean just sexual jealousy, is hardwired into human brains not only in terms of evolution and procreation, but also in terms of how humans mature and 28

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develop from infancy. This version of jealousy is not sexual, but may be just as fundamental, for it arises during the formative years in which young children learn complex social interactions. Jealousy is a response to the frustrations and negotiations necessary for life in society, for getting and relinquishing what we want and need. The psychologists Steven Frankel and Ivan Sherick carried out a fascinating investigation of the development of envy in ‘normal’ children from ages one to five. (Like many psychologists, they define envy as involving a dyadic relationship, though the envied objects can include the good feelings that are imagined to be accruing from possessing a particular thing or trait. Their conclusions could as easily be applied to jealousy.) Observing the children’s interactions with toys, in imaginary games, with their parents and between each other, Frankel and Sherick explore the role of envy in the children’s sense of themselves alone and as part of a group. A one-year-old experiences something ‘less sophisticated than envy . . . a simple desire to acquire something which is of interest to him and to which, therefore he feels entitled . . . it is the thing and not the peer who has the thing which commands attention’. The experience is triangular – the child, the toy and the peer. Six months on, gaining and keeping the attention of mother becomes paramount for the child – ‘an early form of jealousy’, the authors admit. The children will become upset and angry if another is perceived to have something of value (no matter who, or what, that is). The three-year-old child is at a stage of greater separation from the parents, and the emphasis is now on differentiation through attention and praise: the envious, angry cry of 29

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‘Look at me!’ is more frequently heard. Older children begin to envy or to become jealous of the special prerogatives and capabilities of adults too. Competitively, they attempt to gain admired features: ‘envy is dealt with in a more adaptive and socially acceptable way’, say Frankel and Sherick. Finally the children confront issues of rivalry, love and exclusion (the latter of which appears in a sometimes sadistic way in play), and feelings of envy or jealousy. These then centre on identifications with specific attributes of the same-sexed parent. A transformation has occurred, one that contains libidinal and aggressive aspects, that distinguishes between self and other, that relinquishes a sense of infantile omnipotence, and that develops memory and language. Frankel and Sherick conclude: envy acts as an impetus for normal development, i.e., as an instigator for the child’s adaptation in his environment, and more definitively in its role in personality development as a motive for introjection and identification . . . The envious response to an injury to self-esteem can lead to initiative which establishes an encounter with the environment. When this process achieves its aim, it results in reparation, which in turn may instigate further development. The resultant matching of the self with the envied person can contribute to the process through which the individual’s grandiose selfrepresentation becomes tempered, and thereby more objective, realistic, and specific. Omnipotence is gradually replaced by a healthy sense of confidence. Intrinsic to this process is the progressive refinement of the content of the envious wish and the mechanisms for its expression. 30

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Envy and jealousy seem to be key contributors in the development of the mature child’s self. Frankel and Sherick’s observations suggest that jealousy and envy become just as useful for humans in a social setting as does jealousy in a sexual one. A major factor in the experience of envy and jealousy seems to be a fear of exclusion from the circle of love and esteem – that of parents, to start off with, and later from the social group. Jealousy is part and parcel of the wider remit of social interaction, which is suggested by a number of studies by Jeffrey G. Parker and his colleagues into jealousy in schoolchildren and adolescents. Their focus is on ‘friendship jealousy’, the rivalrous non-sexual jealousy that seems to erupt particularly in young people’s attachments. (Gore Vidal was not immune, famously quipping, ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’) Parker and his team asked 2,500 young Americans in Grades 5 to 12 to answer a Friendship Jealousy Questionnaire: ‘27 short vignettes in which subjects are presented with hypothetical social situations involving a specific best friend and are asked to imagine and report their emotional reactions.’ The study concluded that friendship jealousy is almost always more prevalent in girls than boys, and that it is flares up in fifth grade (ages ten to eleven) and then again in twelfth grade (ages seventeen to eighteen), appearing to be least reported on in seventh grade (ages twelve to thirteen). No explanations for this are offered, though it is striking that friendship jealousy seems to hit hardest at the points of transition in the children’s education – moving up to Junior High, or on to college. Parker suggests that ‘although all children experience jealousy from time to time, there is 31

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good evidence that some children are highly prone to this experience’: Chronically jealous children appear to have several personality or other traits that leave them vulnerable. They tend to have lower global self-esteem, for example, and more negative views of their physical appearance at an age when physical attractiveness is an important form of social capital in the peer group . . . When individuals report being or are perceived by friends and others as being prone to friendship jealousy they are lonely, unhappy, and ruminative.

Whether it’s accurate to see in these symptoms a personality type that is predisposed to jealousy, rather than recognizing them as emotions naturally attendant on feeling excluded from a particular social dynamic, is an open question. Social jealousy, however, seems to be a normal and not necessarily dangerous element in the maturation of children and adolescents. What of the developmental roots of jealousy? There are some who think that jealousy can be perceived in very young infants. They counter a great many psychologists who argue that experiencing such an emotion would be far beyond the ability of babies, who lack sophisticated social capacity and self-awareness and their attendant cognitive underpinnings. However some child psychologists do think that such ‘nonbasic emotions’ can be seen before the second year of life. Maria Legerstee, for instance, performed a number of experiments on jealousy in three-month-old babies. She found that if 32

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an infant was excluded from dialogue between its mother and the experimenter, it ‘reacted with much agitation (forceful vocalizations and intense interest) . . . infants might also cover their faces with their arms . . . or kick their legs and put their feet in their mouth’. Legerstee suggests that ‘the infants seem to be saying both “don’t talk to her” [the experimenter] and “talk to me” at the same time’. There’s the triadic relationship again. Legerstee concludes: ‘findings from dyadic and triadic communicative interactions suggest that soon after birth infants engage in intersubjective relations with others, have particular expectations from people in such settings, and react with appropriate responses when their expectations are violated’. In other words, these infants reacted vigorously to the perceived intrusion upon a valued dyadic bond. It is tempting to see this as a form of proto-jealousy. In terms of our situation–reaction definition, that’s certainly what’s going on. The psychologist Riccardo Draghi-Lorenz goes further still. He maintains that ‘young infants’ potential for jealous emotions is still seriously underestimated by many psychologists, if not by parents’. His longitudinal study, ‘Parental Reports of Jealousy in Early Infancy’, was based on the descriptions from caregivers and observers of nine babies before the age of one. It offers a rich taxonomy of early jealousy, he says, including the jealousy connected to the babies’ mothers’ absences and what they apparently ‘preferred’. Draghi-Lorenz also drew many similarities between infant and adult manifestations of jealousy: The early age of emergence, relative immediacy and immediate functionality, variety, complexity, and different 33

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developmental courses of the jealous emotions . . . are striking . . . Ultimately, all the different jealous behaviors identified here can be explained as ways to involve the self in and/or exclude others from appealing relationships and activities that are functionally similar to the ways in which adults deal with comparable situations.

This is a remarkable claim. It argues not only for the normality of experiencing jealousy early in life, but also reveals a thread of jealousy connecting early infancy and adulthood. All that’s changed is the addition of sexual desire. Experiencing nonbasic emotions like jealousy does not require the capacities of representation, speech or empathy. They can be felt, and detected, via the immediate situation, the here-and-now of our most basic relational interactions with another. So it seems that jealousy for the small and growing child functions as a means of attracting and maintaining the attention of loved adults when they feel they may be in a position of neglect. That must be good for children’s chances of survival. Also, and somewhat more surprisingly, jealousy seems to play a beneficial role in social adaptation and education: it encourages the increasingly differentiated child to build and recognize strong relationships, to integrate valued features of its caregivers, and to take a position as an individual self. * * * If jealousy can function to help the species survive and if it can act beneficially even among the very young and voiceless members of our species, then can other creatures also feel it? 34

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Psychologists and philosophers who place emphasis on cognitive sophistication, assumed feelings and internal experiences, will say they cannot. Michael Lewis argues that the experience of such secondary emotions as jealousy, envy, empathy, embarrassment, shame, pride and guilt ‘involves elaborate cognitive processes, and these elaborate cognitive processes have, at their heart, the notion of self, agency, and conscious intentions’, of which animals (apart from the great apes) are, he thinks, incapable. This is a common view. But, you might ask, how robust is the distinction between primary and secondary emotions? How much experimental attention has animals’ sense of agency and conscious attention actually garnered? And what does ‘possessing a self ’ mean anyway? Those who deny the possibility of jealousy in animals are challenged by the findings of investigators into the early-life emotion in humans, such as Draghi-Lorenz. He suggests that the ‘form of jealousy’ experienced by babies ‘may be “explained away” as an instinctive reaction that is part of the attachment system . . . and really implies little social awareness’. Continuing to the issue of whether ‘jealousy over significant others’ can be experienced by animals, even non-primate mammals such as dogs and horses, he explains: ‘While to some authors this might suggest good social awareness in these animals too, to others it may suggest the possibility of instinctive “automatic” jealousy.’ Or is the ascription of jealousy to animals, particularly to pet animals, just a matter of self-congratulatory anthropomorphization? I have never doubted that my dog Callimachus enjoys my company so much that he reacts emotionally when he realizes he has to share it with another hound. Should I? 35

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What may simply be attention-seeking behaviour due to separation anxiety – particularly if I lavish my attention on someone or something else and neglect to make a fuss of my dog – could be mistaken for jealousy in its ‘higher’, more recognizably human form. But if we admit there are degrees of multiform jealousy, then the noisy reaction of an animal that many would see as ‘simply’ a demand for attention could rather be recognized as a jealous reaction to a disturbance of the animal’s attachment system – that which binds dog with owner, cat with staff. And if jealousy is defined by situations and reactions, an outright denial of jealousy in animals isn’t possible. As pet owners are the most likely to report – and defend – seeing jealous activities in their companions, let’s start with dogs and cats. Consider the lascivious and very funny painting

7 Octave Tassaert, The Jealous Cat, c. 1860 36

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by the French artist Octave Tassaert, The Jealous Cat. In the midst of the inchoate ecstasy, the scrawny cat makes his own feelings apparent by sinking his claws into the man’s enormous buttocks. They’re obviously more tempting than the uninspiring ball of string left by the chair. The man’s arm is raised in surprise, anger, and even fear, and appears to be bearing down to swat the interfering animal away. The woman’s languorous left arm suggests she thinks he should forget all about the cat and get on with things. Who owns the cat? By the trousers bunched around the man’s knees it would appear that he is the interloper. Tassaert seems to be saying that the cat is attacking his rival for his mistress’s affections. The same artistic preference for depicting animal emotion rather instincts can be seen in Louis Icart’s print Jealousy. Although it would be far more obvious and justifiable to ascribe the cat’s fierce attention on the bird its owner holds to its predatory instincts, Icart emphasizes emotion. The cat is jealous of the lucky bird getting all the attention from the young woman – and, teasingly disdainful, she seems to be really rubbing it in. Note the two triads in the picture, too: the pampered budgie and his two avian comrades in the cage, as well as the cat–woman–bird threesome. The photographer Thomas Lee Syms seems to be making a similar claim about dogs in his Jealousy. Here, a pining hound plants his paws on his mistress’s apron as, with her attention thoroughly absorbed, she holds a bowl of milk out to a small animal on her left shoulder. The dog could simply be hungry, but the photographer’s title points to the emotional undercurrent that he read into the situation. 37

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8 Louis Icart, Jealousy, 1927

Syms’ confidence in being able to read the emotional core in this dog’s behaviour is supported by far more recent scientific research. Two experiments by psychologist Paul Morris and colleagues revealed a great deal about dogs’ experience of jealousy. They surveyed 337 dog owners about emotions they would ascribe to their animals. A remarkable 81 per cent reported confidently perceiving jealousy in their mutts. (The other most reported secondary emotion in dogs was guilt.) A second study asked forty of the owners about the contexts and behaviours that led to these claims. Thirty-nine agreed wholeheartedly that their dogs were jealous (not what they 38

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9 Thomas Lee Syms, Jealousy, 1898

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‘believed to be’ jealousy). When asked to give examples of canine-jealousy-inducing situations, all the participants reported that they involved a social triad, the ‘jealous’ dog, the carer, and an ‘other’ (which in half the situations was a person, 45 per cent another dog, and 5 per cent a cuddly toy). Canine jealousy seemed to arise when the dogs’ carers gave the ‘other’ attention or affection: ‘If my Mum pays attention to other dogs or even my brother . . . then she doesn’t really like it’, or, ‘If I’m showing any affection to my wife, like giving her a cuddle or something like that’, or ‘When my husband and I are sitting simply just watching TV and we either go to have a kiss or hold hands’. The dogs’ actions, such as nuzzling against the owner, barking and whining, aggression, or even manoeuvring between owner and the other person, all aimed at gaining attention. Two-thirds of the participants could think of no explanation other than jealousy to account for their dog’s behaviour. Morris’s original research proposal investigated the reporting of primary and secondary emotions across 907 owners of a whole host of animals: not only dogs, but cats, horses, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats and birds. The most reported secondary emotion across all the species was jealousy. So does this mean that animals far less sophisticated than the great apes can experience the emotion? The question has pedigree. Robert Burton says in his Anatomy of Melancholy that most animals – he mentions bulls, horses, goats, elephants (‘they are more jealous than any other creatures whatsoever’), camels, dogs, and even crocodiles – can experience jealousy. The emotion he describes 40

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appears to be more of an obviously sexual nature. He observes that ‘R.T. in his Blason of Jealousy, telleth a story of a swan about Windsor, that finding a strange cock with his mate, did swim I know not how many miles after to kill him, and when he had done so, came back and killed his hen’. Burton’s contemporary, the eminently sensible Michel de Montaigne, addresses jealousy in the context of ‘the corruption of the age’, calling it ‘the most vain and tempestuous affliction that can harm human spirits’ – that and ‘envy, her sister’. The great man, of course, never suffered from either himself (‘As to the last, I can say little about it; ’tis a passion that, though said to be so mighty and powerful, had never to do with me. As to the other, I know it by sight, and that’s all’), though ‘Beasts feel it’. Perhaps that’s why he would not admit to it himself. In his final book, Here I Am – Where Are You?, Konrad Lorenz, the famous twentieth-century ethnologist and 1973 Nobel Prize winner, maintained that greylag geese are just as prone to sexual jealousy as are humans. He describes their tumultuous emotional life – ‘The most violent battles between two ganders are those that result when a female responds to both of them and does not know which to choose’ – including their (apparently) well-known flirtatious behaviour and even ‘divorces’. S.A. Altman suggests that rhesus monkeys also display sexual jealousy; he ‘observed dominant males vigorously attacking females that were consorting with subordinate males’. J.K. Rilling and colleagues offered further compelling information about rhesus macaques’ experience of jealousy, explaining it as being provoked by threats towards their ‘mating exclusivity’. Nine dominant male monkeys were injected with a 41

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radioactive diagnostic agent and then subjected to one of two situations: a ‘challenge’ situation, in which they witnessed a potential sexual interaction between their female consort and a rival male, and a control situation in which the consort was present without the rival male. The monkeys demonstrated more aggression after the ‘challenge’ encounters. Subsequent PET scans showed that the ‘challenge’ situation was associated with more activation in areas of the brain related to increased social vigilance and anxiety. The experimenters went so far as to relate this altered neural activity in monkeys to humans: ‘Human males experiencing jealousy have been described with terms like hypervigilance and anxious. These terms also describe the behaviour of the dominant male monkeys in our study, thus suggesting that the neural circuit described here for monkeys might also be engaged when men are faced with similar threats, real or imagined, to an exclusive sexual union’. Are we simply back to the evolutionary argument for jealousy? Is the monkey merely anxious to guarantee his genetic replication? I’ll come back to animals and a kind of jealousy that isn’t about procuring sexual advantage, in Chapter 8. * * * All of the manifestations of jealousy so far in this chapter have been in some manner or another designed to procure advantage for those experiencing it. Naturally there is going to be a downside to the experience of the emotion. Jealous brain states are not always to the good of the survival of the species, nor do they always enable the flourishing of the individual. Jealousy in its most extreme form is the product not of sexual 42

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threat or of human competition, but of brain damage. Such a form of jealousy offers no benefits for individuals or genes, for women or men, and can have dire consequences. Jealousy, then, not only plays a part in connecting human circuitry, but can also be a product of the individual’s wiring coming loose. Shakespeare’s Othello would rank pretty highly in most people’s Jealous Top Ten. ‘Othello syndrome’ has even entered the lexicon to denote the most extreme form of unbeneficial jealousy, usually called morbid, pathological or delusional jealousy. This kind of jealousy results from brain injury or brain deterioration – so the ascription to this condition of the name of Shakespeare’s Moor, who falls for Iago’s poisonous words and ingeniously malevolent plan, is perhaps wrong. That hasn’t stopped some psychologists and psychiatrists attempting to peer inside Othello’s skull in search of an explanation for his bizarre reactions. The play mentions that he ‘falls into a trance’ and ‘into an epilepsy; this is his second fit’, for instance, which has led to speculation, such as that by Richard Camicioli, that ‘this fluctuating cognition suggests that Othello has dementia with Lewy bodies . . . We cannot determine from the script whether Othello meets the diagnostic criteria for dementia, but his occupation as a soldier would put him at risk of brain injury or trauma’. Perhaps we should simply accept that ‘Othello syndrome’ is a misnomer. It was first named so by John Todd and Kenneth Dewhurst in 1954. They argued that the syndrome is hereditary, and common sense would bear that out; like many psychological illnesses, pronounced traits of jealousy do seem to run in 43

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families. But more recent research has illuminated the various ways it comes to manifest itself in individuals’ lives and brains. Pathological jealousy arises either with or after an underlying mental disorder and coexists with other dominating psychopathologies. It can also appear as the result of brain damage, typically to the right frontal lobe. This jealousy has absolutely no basis in a real situation: it is born of false logic, a delusion of the partner’s infidelity. There is a triangle here, though at its apex is a totally imaginary predator. The supposed circumstances are fantastical, the purported other either unreal or utterly improbable, and the incessant accusations of unfaithfulness are founded on insignificant or trivial evidence – normal or mundane events substantiate what are often angry claims. Sufferers may continuously endeavour to confirm their convictions. Jealousy colours their entire existence, and consumes their lives. The aetiologies of morbid jealousy are both affective and organic. Some of the causes might include head trauma, Pramipexole (used to treat Parkinson’s disease), schizophrenia, depression, methamphetamine use, or the illnesses usually associated with old age, like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Pathological jealousy is very common in men and women over sixty years of age. Théodore Géricault painted one unfortunate victim of obsessional envy or jealousy, perhaps from the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Her half-squinting and wary eyes, and the suspicious drawn-in cheeks and rigid mouth, speak to the fixation and fury of the condition. I have often thought that the suspicious sidewise stare of this unfortunate woman is that of the morbidly jealous. 44

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10 Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, 1819–20

Descriptions of what sufferers experience make clear both the groundlessness of the condition and the pain that it causes. One Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home went on hunger strike because he believed his wife was having an affair with several other residents and periodically entertained them in the lounge. A methamphetamine user reported that when 45

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making love with her partner, ‘he turns away and goes out of the living room and dances for her and then comes back’, though she had never seen or talked to this woman. A female patient being treated for Parkinson’s disease stated that she had become so ‘scrutinizing’ of her partner’s activities that she had begun to investigate financial records and track things on the internet to prove his infidelity. In 2013, sixty-three-year-old Robert Mercati, one-time diamond thief and sufferer of Othello syndrome, killed his disabled wife Margaret before hanging himself, having obsessively accused her of thirty years of infidelity. ‘He hid electronic bugs in their plush Rugby Street flat, spied on her through cracks in doors and accused one of their sons of “colluding” with her to get him out of the house’, the Daily Telegraph reported. He was being treated with antipsychotic medication and psychiatry for his condition, but had stopped taking the treatment after being briefly jailed the year before. Less than two hours before the bodies were discovered, Mrs Mercati had booked her husband a medical appointment to try and persuade him to deal with his illness after he had attempted to force his way into their bedroom, shouting that she was in there with another man. Othello’s syndrome is now understood to occur most frequently alongside other neurological disorders. The delusion appears to be associated with dysfunction of the frontal lobes, especially the right frontal lobes. What is the role of the right hemisphere of the brain? Richard Camicioli explains that among its functions are the ‘relating of oneself to the internal and external world, self-monitoring, and detection of anomalies’; thus the right hemisphere acts as an ‘inhibitor of menta46

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tion [mental activity] and behaviour’. It is a disturbance in one’s sense of being in relation to others, a reduced capacity to absorb evidence contrary to one’s convictions, and the drastic removal of inhibition of both thought and action, which produces this tragic jealousy. Morbid jealousy is thought to affect less than 1 per cent of the world’s population today. But that is still a significant proportion – more than I think you’d assume. Just how usual this psychotic form of jealousy is may be evidenced in crime statistics. However, according to P.E. Mullen and L.H. Maack’s study of the case notes of 138 hospital patients, ‘more than half of morbidly jealous individuals physically assaulted their partner, although none had come to the attention of the criminal justice system’. Seven out of 110 victims of homicide or serious assault – about 6 per cent – were supposed paramours in R.R. Mowat’s Morbid Jealousy and Murder. More recently, Susanne Dell explains that jealousy-induced murders accounted for 17 per cent of UK homicides – though it can’t be known which of these assailants, if any, were morbidly jealous. Michael Kingham points out that morbid jealousy, and a high risk of violence, have a strong association with alcohol misuse: in two studies, morbid jealousy was present in one-quarter and one-third of men recruited from alcohol treatment services. Kingham wryly notes that, ‘given the prevalence of harmful and dependent use of alcohol in the UK, these figures suggest that morbid jealousy is not rare’. * * * Why, and how, is jealousy experienced? This chapter has explored an array of answers – from the part it plays in the 47

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replication of genes and infant development, to building and strengthening relationships, to the deleterious result of brain damage and the trail of unhappiness and destruction it can wreak. Jealousy also seems to be experienced differently by men and women, and may be more of an ‘instinctive’ brain reaction, to some degree sharable by humans and animals, than many give it credit for. I’ve tried to chart how jealousy might be ‘seen’ in the brain or in symptoms and behaviour, but how has it been portrayed culturally, in art and literature? Charles Darwin had more to offer our exploration of jealousy than evolutionary adaptation. In his Expression of the Emotions he recognized that emotions like jealousy ‘do not at once lead to action, and as they commonly last for some time, they are not shown by any outward sign . . . Painters can hardly portray suspicion, jealousy, envy etc., except by accessories that tell the tale; and poets use such vague and fanciful expressions as “green-eyed jealousy”.’ Now it’s the monster’s manifestations’ turn.

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Ears mishear and eyes magnify

A man calling himself ‘Philagnotes’ wrote a letter to the Spectator in 1712 in which he voiced his concerns about having unintentionally been the cause of another man’s jealousy. He had visited his married female cousin when her husband was not at home. Lost in familial reminiscence they had chatted for three hours. Two weeks later he learned that the cousin’s husband overheard every word they had spoken, and that ‘ever since that fatal afternoon the lady has been most inhumanly treated’. Her husband stormed ‘that he was made a member of too numerous a society’ (I presume that he means the society of the cuckold). The worried and innocent man’s letter concludes: ‘As jealous ears always hear double, so he heard enough to make him mad; and as jealous eyes always see through magnifying glasses, so he was certain it could not be I whom he had seen, a beardless stripling, but fancied he saw a gay gentleman of the Temple, ten years older than myself.’ Philagnotes hoped that the publication of this ‘honest letter’ would make the husband ‘reflect upon this accident coolly’, 49

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though he also realized that ‘people will be as slow and unwilling in disbelieving scandal as they are quick and forward in believing it’. The jealous ears and jealous eyes that Philagnotes mentions are often the means by which jealousy is propagated and registered. There are not many jealousy-inducing situations that spring to mind which don’t involve visual or auditory evidence as a trigger. Jealousy often comes about through seeing or hearing (or imagining you have seen or heard) something you wish you hadn’t: an exchange of flirting glances, a laughing telephone conversation with a work colleague, a changed appearance, rumours doing the rounds. It’s as if sightlines and sound waves form the sides of jealous triangles. Eyes and ears are also given centre-stage in many artistic representations of jealousy, from classical antiquity right up until the present. The ‘classic’ symbols of jealousy – cats, green eyes, roosters, peacocks, yellow roses (anything yellow, actually), junipers, marigolds, and sometimes thorns and barren trees – do crop up from time to time, but eyes and ears are depicted again and again in jealousy’s art. It’s a fascinating tradition, one that begins to open up the lived experience of jealousy, and the place of the emotion in different cultures and eras. A strange little Renaissance woodcut captures this jealous symbolism. It appeared in the 1618 Padua edition of Iconologia by Cesare Ripa, a guide to symbolism in ‘emblem’ books which was influential in its time, running through numerous editions in several languages. This sturdy representation of Jealousy is wearing a dress adorned with eyes and ears. They are the symbols of obsessive intelligence-gathering: the jealous lover is 50

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11 Jealousy dressed in eyes and ears

always on the qui vive for the definitive proof of infidelity, with an unassuageable lust to learn the truth about his or her betrayal. The perky cockerel on her elbow could stand for jealousy’s ever-wakeful vigilance (though the cockerel, at least in Greek mythology, did not do much of a job at protecting the 51

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illicit lovers Aphrodite and Ares: Alectryon, Ancient Greek for ‘rooster’, fell asleep on his watch). The bundle of thorns grasped by Jealousy ‘refers to [the] constant discomfort, irritation, and uneasiness’, says historian Istvan Hont, which jealous, watchful individuals will willingly endure. Recall William Blake’s ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’, which ends when his pretty rose ‘turned away with jealousy, / And her thorns were my only delight’. Does the leafless, perhaps dead tree in the background represent a relationship that has withered on the vine? In this outwardly harmless picture, then, are the key personal characteristics of jealousy’s panoply of tortuous effects. Artists who choose to depict jealousy by representing a jealousy-provoking situation – we’ve already seen a number of such paintings – also draw attention to the ears and eyes. Edvard Munch, an artist who couldn’t leave the theme of jealousy alone, returned to it in a 1907 painting, twelve years

12 Edvard Munch, Jealousy II, 1907 52

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after the Adam-and-Eve depiction in Chapter 1. The human triangle is there again, but the embracing couple are framed, and somehow contained, in a receding doorway, so the focus is even more on the jealous man in the foreground. Our eyes cannot help but be drawn to his wide-open bug eyes, which seem to register shock, bewilderment, sadness, and a wrenching passivity. And they are multiplied in the bilious green daubs on the three skewed walls of the room. It is a nauseating painting. That is how Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s jealousy feels. It is impossible not to look. You’ll see a bawdier jealousy-laden situation in a sixteenthcentury lithograph. The ears of the cuckold have a long history. Here, a husband and wife seem to be making their goodbyes

13 The cuckold’s ears, c. 1590 53

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before he sets off on his travels. The husband, jealous of his wife, has locked her in a chastity belt. Unbeknownst to him, two men with a second key to the belt lurk in the shadows behind the bed – perhaps it is the woman’s lover. The asinineeared husband’s jealousy is well placed: those ears also stand for his future as a cuckold. In a scene laden with symbolism, those ears really jump out at you. Although there are more than three people depicted here, the picture suggests the jealous triangle in its organization. It is split into three: the married partners in the centre; to the left, the sexual threat to the marriage; and to the right, a fool who is attempting to keep fleas in a basket, offering an ironic commentary on the chances of the husband’s keeping his young wife chaste. The fool’s cap echoes the long ears of the husband, making this comparison clear. The cat and mouse in the foreground suggest that when the cat’s away, the mice will play. Ears have a long religious association with jealousy. Jesus seems to have inspired jealousy from his birth (thus, Herod’s enmity against all first-born sons) until his death. The New Testament tradition does not make it clear why Judas betrayed Christ to the chief priests for his thirty pieces of silver. Greed is the most obvious answer. But jealousy may well have had something to do with it too. What got to Judas, according to this line of speculation, wasn’t so much the money as the attention the other Apostles were getting. Or perhaps Judas was jealous of Christ himself. Giotto addressed this tradition in a painting from the Arena Chapel in Padua. Judas, second from the left, is in the act of accepting payment. Following Luke 22:3–6 and John 13:27, 54

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Giotto depicts Judas’s satanic possession at this moment by means of the black demon at his back. But it is not only Satan at work here. Giotto dresses Judas (as in another electrifying painting of Judas’s kiss) in a gleaming yellow cloak. Yellow is often said to symbolize jealousy, as well as treachery. The psychologist Havelock Ellis noted in his ‘The Psychology of Yellow’ that ‘Yellow became the color of jealousy, of envy, of treachery. Judas was painted in yellow garments and in some

14 Giotto, Judas Betrays Christ, 1304–06 55

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countries Jews were compelled to be so dressed’, with the houses of traitors, felons and heretics being daubed with the colour through the early modern period. Judas, then, is jealous. Satan is exploiting, or causing, the feeling. There is a lot of listening going on in the painting. It is the listening, rather than any chill from Satan’s presence (who more resembles a friendly black dog than the embodiment of evil), that gives the painting its heightened emotional status. Judas is listening intently to the chief priest, whose hands are raised to drive his point home. The priest on the far right listens closely to the worthy on his immediate left, who seems to be overhearing and commenting on what his superior is imparting to Judas. And is Satan pushing Judas forward, or whispering in his ear? The arrangement of these three conversations sets up the jealous triangle. That all four men stand side-on to the viewer seems to me to emphasize their ears all the more. Satan’s long, fluffy black ears seem strangely endearing – you’d almost trust them. Judas’s jealous actions didn’t bring him peace or happiness. He is sometimes said to have hanged himself from an elder tree after his betrayal of Christ. There is an edible fungus called the Judas ear (renamed in the nineteenth century the ‘Jew’s ear’) that grows on trees (not only elders). According to popular legend the fungus ears are Judas’s spirit returned, in order to remind Christians of his suicide. Perhaps they should also remind us of Judas’s jealousy, and the strange life of this auricular symbol. * * * 56

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15 The jealous ghost of Judas returned as a fungus ear, Auricularia auricula-judae

When it comes to jealousy, the eyes have it. Even earlier than the biblical story of Judas’s betrayal is the Greek myth of Galatea, Acis and Polyphemus, Ovid’s version in his Metamorphoses being the best-known version. Polyphemus is famous as the one-eyed Cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey. In the artistic tradition of jealousy it is this very eye which becomes the sign of his jealousy. ‘Cyclops’ translates as ‘circle-eye’. The jealous gaze always sees, in a circular, self-confirming way, what it wants to. 57

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Galatea, a sea nymph, lived near the island inhabited by the Sicilian giant Polyphemus. He had really fallen for her, but she loved the young shepherd Acis, a son of the rural god Pan. One day Polyphemus caught the young lovers sleeping near one another on a grassy knoll and became jealous. He killed Acis by crushing him beneath a boulder. So much for his rival, he thought. But the gods had other ideas. Acis was transformed into stream that took his name. In the ancient world such a transformation was viewed as a welcome thing – less so now. Not everyone was convinced by Ovid’s version of the story. In the third century bce Theocritus’s Idylls paints a picture of a gentle, lovesick Cyclops to whom Galatea is eventually drawn. In strong contrast, one first-century black-humoured fresco from Pompeii shows a sensually glistening Polyphemus brazenly making out with Galatea in full view of Acis’s sheep. The pulverized Acis is nowhere to be seen – unless he is the stream just hinted at, with a deeper blue, lapping at the ram’s feet. Later, the myth was enthusiastically taken up in the Baroque and Renaissance periods. The sensual love of Acis and Galatea, and the love triangle, becomes more important. In Poussin’s Landscape with Polyphemus, for instance, the Cyclops is a harmless Theocritean hero, and he seems to melt into the mountainous background. The myth was central to operas of the period, featuring in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Acis and Galatea and again in 1732 in the more famous version by Georg Friedrich Handel, in which Polyphemus plays a limited part. Haydn’s take, in 1763, however, has a happy ending in which Polyphemus and Galatea state their affection as Acis quietly liquefies. 58

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16 Galatea turns her back on Acis for Polyphemus in Pompeii, first century ce

Polyphemus’s jealous stare becomes central in art from the nineteenth century onwards. (I explore more reasons why this time is particularly important in the life of jealousy in Chapter 6.) Gustave Moreau shows an almost grandfatherly Polyphemus staring intently and somewhat angrily at the naked Galatea sleeping in her cave. He is undistracted from the prospect of fending off a rival – so perhaps Acis has already been squashed. The jealousy is all in the eyes, his relentless and persecutory, hers closed, decorous and unsuspecting. 59

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The giant’s jealous stare has the force of three open eyes, not just one. Thirty-four years later more still was made of eyes by Odilon Redon. Cyclops is a true giant here, though more like an enor-

17 Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c. 1880 60

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mous slug than a grandfather. Just look at that eye of his. He has a little smirk, too; perhaps he is pleased to be spying on the naked Galatea, or maybe he has just pulped Acis and reckons himself free evermore to stalk Galatea without interruption. The focus in the painting is on that one, huge, deep blue eye (though notice also his neat and intent little ears). Even the beautiful nymph is smudged into the bed of flowers on which she lies, and lacks a face. For Redon, Polyphemus’s single staring orb captures the jealousy that Galatea provokes. It’s all

18 ‘O ruddier than the cherry, O sweeter than the berry’: Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, 1914 61

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about unremitting, insatiable staring. The painting suggests that engorged eyes may be the best visual symbols for jealousy. Beauty, and jealousy, is in the swollen eye of the beholder. No wonder that the souls of the envious on the second terrace in Dante’s Purgatorio, who admit that seeing was their downfall (‘if I saw some man transformed by joy, / you’d then have seen me flushed to liver green’), have their eyes sewn shut. The Latin invidia means ‘jealousy’ or ‘envy’. It’s linked to the Latin verb video, meaning ‘I see’, and should translate as ‘looking upon’, but often means ‘looking askance’ or perhaps even, by extension, ‘looking sideways’ at something. The orbs of jealous humans don’t look you in the eye. They look elsewhere, on the watch for threats. And in art the jealous eye often stares sideways. Frederick Sandys’s Jealousy depicts a fierce sideways stare accompanied by Cupid and some marigolds, with Robert Herrick’s seventeenth-century poem, ‘How the Marigold Came Yellow’ (there’s yellow again), inscribed on the bottom: ‘Jealous girls these sometimes were, / While they liv’d or lasted here: / Turn’d to flowers, still they be / Yellow marked for jealousy.’ The power of the picture is in the sideways look. The seventeenth-century French painter and theorist Charles Le Brun, in his influential teach-yourself book for artists, Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions, advised that jealousy should be depicted just so: Jealousy is expressed by the wrinkled brow, the eyebrow drawn down and frowning, the eye sparkling, the pupil hidden under the eyebrow and turning towards the object which causes the passion, looking at it out of the corner of 62

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19 Frederick Sandys, Jealousy, 1890

the eye while the head is turned away; the pupil must appear in ceaseless movement, and full of fire, as also are the whites of the eye and the eyelids; the nostrils are pale, open, and more apparent than usual, and drawn back, 63

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which makes folds appear in the cheeks. The mouth may be shut, and showing that the teeth are clenched; the lower lip is thrust out beyond the upper, and the corners of the mouth are pulled back and downwards; the muscles of the jaw appear hollow . . . One part of the face will be enflamed, and another yellowish, the extremities livid; and the area around the eyes, and even the whites of the eyes, will be of a fiery colour; the cheeks will be yellow, the lips pale or livid . . .

Le Brun highlights not only the eyes, boring into whatever off the page might be causing the jealousy, but also captures what he believes to be the emotional torment of suffering jealousy: fear, hatred, anguish.

20 Charles Le Brun, La Jalousie, from the album Expression des passions de l’Âme, 1727 64

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Le Brun’s manual may also suggest something else. Consider the minute, obsessive attention the artist pays to rendering jealousy. Could there be some aspect of jealousy caught up in the artistic endeavour itself? And could aesthetic appreciation be co-opted by jealousy? Between a painter and their subject can pass a more direct, intent and intimate gaze. The relationship between artist and muse is always charged in some way, often sexually. (A legion of male artists – Rodin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hockney – chose their long-term lovers as subjects.) And those painted have more often than not been better-looking or wealthier or had more glamorous existences than those doing the painting. It’s easy to imagine an artist being jealous of that – perhaps even being jealous enough to engineer their way into their subjects’ lives. But maybe the artistic act itself is built on jealousy – in the triangle of sitter, artist and art. The painter’s stare is attempting to get something, or to fix something, in a subject whose eventual departure is inevitable. Could it be jealousy that infuses the best of their paintings with life? Is this another of the benefits of jealousy? The artist is a kind of jealous voyeur. (Look back at Gustave Moreau’s Polyphemus and his sideways glare. Is it really surprising to learn that Polyphemus resembles Moreau?) And if the painter’s subject is beautiful, it’s easy to see how the relationship might become eroticized. A ravishing example of this from the early twentieth century is Meredith Frampton’s painting of Marguerite Kelsey, a professional artist’s model during the 1920s and 1930s. What gives the game away, in this very still and sharply observed painting, is what’s going on 65

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21 Meredith Frampton, Marguerite Kelsey, 1928

underneath the smooth façade. The prominence given to Marguerite’s body beneath her dress – the settling of the flesh, the thighs slightly parted, the left nipple picked out by shadow – invites and encourages looking. There are also those red shoes – a flash of the erotic. Apparently Frampton himself bought Marguerite’s outfit, so we know the impression they create was not accidental. The magnolias on the right offer further sexual overtones, suggesting, as the Tate catalogue puts it, ‘the ruffling of the calm surface by hidden desires’. A painter can also confront a jealous gaze. Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the greatest painters of the Baroque era, created large-scale works depicting women from history, sometimes as heroes (as in her depiction of Judith vigorously 66

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22 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610

decapitating Holofernes). In Susanna and the Elders Gentileschi draws on the apocryphal story of Susanna from the Old Testament (often appended to the Book of Daniel). The beautiful Susanna, married to the prominent Babylonian merchant 67

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Joachim, went to bathe in her garden. Two elders who were often at the house spotted her, and decided to plot together to have their way with her. After Susanna had sent away her maids, they closed the garden gates and demanded she have sex with them, otherwise they would tell everyone they had seen her with a young man there. Susanna refused the deal, was publicly denounced and then condemned. But Daniel intervened. He demanded that the elders be questioned. They gave conflicting evidence, Susanna was exonerated, and the elders were condemned to death. In Gentileschi’s dramatic painting the elders are in the midst of cutting their bargain. The artist has chosen to highlight not the lust, hypocrisy or Daniel’s just intervention, as many other paintings do, but the latent jealousy in the story. Gentileschi’s focus is on the triangle, the heightened emotional rejection, the ogling stare of the elders, and Susanna’s ear (both her and the nearest man’s right hands point to where it is behind her hair), whither the duo issue their jealous ultimatum. Barely two years after this work was completed, Gentileschi was herself the victim of the crime Susanna eluded: she was raped by her father’s painting companion. She was brought to a humiliating trial, during which she was publicly examined to find out if she was a virgin. The seventeen-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi envisaged a situation to which she would become subject: a society in which women’s bodies are jealously policed by men. * * * You hear less about ears in popular or in literary culture than eyes. Nor do you see them as much in art – eyes receive far 68

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more attention. No surprise, maybe, for ears cannot always be relied on to be attractive. (There are many terrible ears abroad. I am not in the least fond of my own and one has been totally useless for many decades. I wouldn’t expect them to figure in a Harlequin romance.) They have little allure for lovers or their poetry and songs (imagine ‘The night has a thousand ears’ . . .). Unlike eyes, ears provide no easy register for human intention or emotion. They do not change, other than to grow larger as we age. Physiognomic topics, including what your ears said about you, were, however, all the rage in nineteenth-century medicine. One Dr A. Joux thought that while ‘A white ear, supple, elegantly shaped, of decent size, harmoniously attached to the head could not belong to a vulgar being . . . ears that are small and badly formed and attached to the skin, indicate a lack of judgment, jealousy, egoism, and bad habits.’ Nevertheless, there is a recherché literary and cultural history linking ears and jealousy. In Haruki Murakami’s novels, ears become the focus of sexual attraction and, to follow, of jealousy. In A Wild Sheep Chase and its sequel Dance, Dance, Dance ears are a libidinal force to be reckoned with. In the earlier novel the very bored and unnamed narrator cannot even summon any jealous energy when his wife of four years begins an affair with his jazz guitar-playing best friend. In the thick of a sexual triangle, he is completely untouched by jealousy. Then he meets a set of ears that are ‘the quintessence, the paragon of ears’. Their owner works as a part-time proof-reader, ‘a commercial model specializing in ear shots’, and as a high-class hooker. When he sees her ears, he succumbs: ‘From no part of me could 69

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I summon a voice. For an instant, the white plaster wall seemed to ripple.’ The paragonical ears and their ovine adventures mitigate the narrator’s boredom, yet the relief is not complete. Indifference and self-absorption remain. He has little objection to the young woman’s prostitution. There is a complete absence of jealousy or even of resentment. In Dance, Dance, Dance something finally shifts. The narrator goes to see a low-budget soft-porn film in which his school friend is playing the lead. He discovers that Kiki (she of the ears now named) has a minor part as his bedfellow, and the narrator sees them actually making love (‘She didn’t believe in acting’). His reaction? ‘I was burning with jealousy . . . Was this a good sign?’ What he means by ‘a good sign’ is that his alienation, his passivity and boredom were challenged. ‘I’d forgotten what it felt like to be jealous’, he admits. He goes to see the movie four times. Aural jealousy is not always sexual. John Fowles’ novel The Collector is not, as the excellent 1965 movie would have you believe, about a frustrated sexual predator. Rather, Frederick Clegg is a man driven by class envy which he feels – or rather hears – acutely. A working-class office clerk, he wins a very large amount of money in a lottery, quits his job, and buys a large isolated house near Lewes in East Sussex. Fred seems to be jealously seizing his own personal slice of upper-middleclass life. Fred collects butterflies, and decides that he would like to add Miranda Grey, a middle-class art student, to his collection. He kidnaps her and locks her in his cellar. Accent, what it signifies, and what is heard or not heard, are constant themes. Fred has ‘overheard’ how the upper classes speak – 70

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snobs whose speech is ‘full of silly remarks’. Miranda may not speak with a la-di-da voice (which he dislikes) or with a plum in her mouth, but she has ‘a way of saying some words’ and she does so with an educated voice. Miranda also has a habit of criticizing Fred’s way of speaking and his bad English. He realizes the importance of having ‘the right accent’, and knows he never will. Working-class Fred can see – or rather, hear – through Miranda’s liberal-humanism: ‘She often went on about how she hated class distinctions, but she never took me in. It’s the way that people speak that gives them away, not what they say.’ Fred’s jealous ears, rightly or wrongly, hear a deeper level of meaning within what Miranda says. He picks up on everything. This is the zeal of the auris zeli, the ‘ear of jealousy’, from the Wisdom of Solomon 1:10, which ominously cautions, ‘For the ear of jealousy heareth all things: and the noise of murmurings is not hid.’ * * * Jealous eyes and jealous ears are, I think, more readily recognizable and powerful symbols than you might assume. Consider the Evil Eye, a malign force, spoken of, invoked and protected against in many cultures. The Latin term is associated with the word invidia and also fascinum and fascinatio (recurring in the English ‘fascination’ or even ‘fascinator’), while in Greek it is called baskania or baskanon. The terms do double-duty as signifiers for jealousy. The Evil Eye was a fixed feature of the Greek and Roman worlds. In ordered, competitive societies, such as those surrounding the Mediterranean, you never knew 71

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who had it in for you. It made good sense to protect yourself against it with amulets and other charms. This mosaic, from second-century Syria, then part of the Roman Empire, is in that tradition. The eye in the centre of the mosaic is the Evil Eye and the figures around it are all there to blunt this jealous orb’s power. The mosaic was presumably placed in a prominent position within the house and was intended to fend off hostile intentions and incantations that might cross the threshold – and to warn jealous visitors who might be wishing bad luck or worse upon the family there, to watch out. That jealous eye won’t work here. Though this Evil Eye looks quite tranquil, its power is obvious from the host of weaponry set against it: spear, trident, snake, scorpion, centipede, bird, dog, cat

23 Turning away the Evil Eye in Antiochia, early second century ce 72

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and apotropaic penis (one of the Evil Eye’s powers was to destroy people’s sexual virility) swerving backwards from between the legs of a horned dwarf who is crossing sticks. The Greek inscription reads ‘You Too’. Even the onlooker is warned off. Jealous ears can do as much damage as the Evil Eye. Hieronymus Bosch’s evocation of Hell features a pair of enormous lugs pierced with an arrow (Cupid’s?). They are either being cut asunder by the giant knife and, in some manner, being punished themselves – or rather, they are themselves instruments of punishment. The ear-wheels roll about crushing sinners beneath them, and form an almost comically obvious phallic symbol paired with the gleaming knife. It is thought that this admonitory contraption refers to sinners’ refusal to hear the Word of God: ‘If any man have ears to listen, let him hear.’ Could it be that those punished have been guilty of the sin of

24 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell, c. 1500 73

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aurally inflamed sexual jealousy? That now the ears with which they sinned too much are taking vengeance? Eyes and ears can serve the jealous. One of the most powerful depictions of eyes and ears wielded against a population is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this dystopian world, ‘a Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police’. The Party member’s ‘friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized’. Big Brother does not simply want to watch its populace; he wants to own them. Winston Smith feels the full wrath of the Party after he asserts his own interests and desires as an individual – particularly through his sexual relationship with Julia. He cheated on Big Brother and suffered the consequences. This kind of jealous scrutiny is not new in jealousy’s long history. The emperor Tiberius (ruled 14–37 ce) unleashed a bloody sequence of treason trials in Rome. Private life, such as it was in such a city, was no proof against the many informers, or delatores, professional ‘ears’ who made a living bringing charges of treason before Rome’s senate. Tacitus conjures an image of a world destroyed by aural fear and paranoia: ‘People behaved secretly even to their intimates, avoiding encounters and conversation, shunning the ears both of friends and strangers. Even voiceless, inanimate objects – ceilings and walls – were scanned suspiciously.’ And well they might be, for Tacitus also relates an occasion when three Roman senators squeezed in the space between a ceiling and roof: ‘In this hiding place – as undignified 74

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as the trick was despicable – they applied their ears to chinks and holes’. The many-eared Tiberius could reach anywhere. All-eyed rulers existed long before contemporary surveillance states. A Mayan vessel from Guatemala, perhaps commemorating the death of the young lord who is prominently depicted, gives a powerful impression of the jealous watchfulness of this culture’s rulers. The man stares at another two men of lesser rank on the other side of the pot. The slightly crazed intensity of his downwards glare confirms his status and power. But eyes also cover the man’s extravagant headdress – from the dragon’s

25 The eyes of the Guatemalan ruling class, late seventh–eighth century 75

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threatening eyes on the crown, to the string of eyelike baubles hanging from its mouth – and his pendant, not to mention the third eye and second face on the back of the man’s head. The eyes are there to protect, no doubt, but they also further insist on his, and his caste’s, capacity to control everyone and everything they see. Stalin’s Russia specialized in dominance through surveillance. One of the many victims of the period – and one of the few champions of jealousy – was a largely forgotten Russian

26 Big Brother in Tbilisi, Georgia

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Orthodox theologian called Pavel Florensky. In his 1914 book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth he defended jealousy as a positive force energizing relationships between marriage partners, friends, and priest and parishioners. It is nothing to do with possessiveness or covetousness, he says, but rather with asking of those we love that they remain true to us, and to their ideal selves. Jealousy is ‘concern about the purity, genuineness, and preservation of my love’. It is extraordinary to realize that one of the very few thinkers to stand up for the role of jealousy in human life was killed by the accusing eyes of the state. In December 1937 Florensky was tried and sentenced to death, and was shot along with 30,000 other victims of the jealous surveillance of the NKVD. Things are different nowadays. The name of a popular restaurant in Stalin’s motherland makes a joke of past surveillance in the now free state. Yet in many ways we are still being watched. Although personal and private freedom is now enjoyed by a lot of the world’s population, many countries in the West routinely perform the most thoroughgoing electronic surveillance of personal activity in history. That explains the presence of a bubble-gum-pink auricle and the ‘Audio Surveillance Zone’ it proclaims on a brick wall in East London. The ear was installed by an Italian group called Urbansolid who make street art that responds to contemporary concerns. Other recent pieces have included piles of gold bars which the public can move around or take away, giant heads emerging out of the ground with their hands clasped over their mouths in disgust or shock, and hallucinatory dinosaur skeletons inviting the public to think about the layers of history that 77

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27 ‘The ear of jealousy heareth all things’ in London’s East End – there are others in Paris and Milan

underpin the urban jungle. To me, this pretty ear says something about the near ubiquity of modern jealous electronic surveillance and who wants to own what we say. * * * 78

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‘To say you were jealous doesn’t do justice to the word. You are almost insanely jealous’, observed Clement Goldstone QC as he sentenced Levi Mason to four years in prison in 2013. Mason had had become ‘jealous and very aggressive’ and committed a number of violent acts against his girlfriend, Jamie Gorman – sequestration, strangulation, suffocation, and threats with a knife, a lit cigarette and a nail file – over the course of a week at their home in Birkenhead, Merseyside. Mason threatened that he would throw acid in his partner’s face ‘so no one else would ever want to get with her’. The most shocking part of this assault was his attempt to fill Gorman’s eyes and ears with the quick-setting putty Polyfilla. Levi Mason’s prolonged attack on Jamie Gorman was one appalling instance of the violent consequences of sexual jealousy – the type of jealousy most commonly, and most salaciously, reported in newspapers. The next chapter explores the course sexual jealousy runs, both in representations and in reality.

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4

Beyond the Bullaburra triangle

In 2012, on a quiet street in the bush town of Bullaburra, just west of Sydney, Kieran O’Connor hit Andrew Sobolewsky with his Mitsubishi Lancer, killing him. Early news reports cryptically referred to the men having ‘a domestic link to a woman’. The woman, Lauren Hilton, outside whose house the accident happened, had broken up with O’Connor just the week before. Sobolewsky was her former partner and, she said, her ‘best friend’. She told police that she had had a violent argument with O’Connor that afternoon and had called Sobolewsky to come over and take her to hospital. O’Connor described his ex to the police as ‘flirty with men . . . extremely manipulative . . . and [he] believed she had lured the deceased over from Perth to suit her own needs’, though he denied being jealous of their friendship. The Sydney press swiftly dubbed it the Blue Mountains Love Triangle. Love triangles, violence, and often death: they seem to be everywhere – that’s if, like me, you read the papers a lot, have a taste for literature, and are easily distracted. Your quiet, ‘average’ 80

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jealousy doesn’t make such good copy or gripping literary scenes, though it’s certainly what the vast majority of us are more likely to experience (and not just sexual jealousy, either). The dramatic stories of deadly jealousy also feed into the general sense that the emotion is utterly abhorrent – a product of warped character, unhinged fury or actual mental illness. If jealousy can make people act in such an awful way, it must be bad – evolutionary advantage or no evolutionary advantage. But behaviour is only one side of the story. To focus on the climactic acting out of an emotion is not the same as looking at the emotion itself. The outcome of the Bullaburra triangle, violent death, overshadows all of the events that lead up to it. These may be less spectacular but they represent the course jealousy runs. In this chapter I’ll examine sexual jealousy in love triangles – its triggers, its qualities, and its various denouements in real life and literature – to see what the most extreme manifestations of jealousy can say about how it harms but also helps. * * * The most popular way to depict sexual jealousy and its disadvantages is through lethal love triangles. Two of the emotion’s best-known and most sympathetic victims are Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini. They appear in Canto V of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Francesca was married – it was a political coupling – to the crippled and ageing war-hero, Gianciotto Malatesta. That made her Paolo’s sister-in-law. Paolo was married too. They fell for each other, as Dante has it, while reading of Lancelot’s love for Guinevere: ‘when at last we read 81

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the longed-for smile / of Guinevere – at last her lover kissed – / he, who from we will never now depart, / touched his kiss, trembling to my open mouth. / . . . That day we read no further’. They were lovers for more than a decade, until Gianciotto’s servant found them out and tipped off his master. Gianciotto secretly returned from a business trip and discovered them both in Francesca’s bedroom. He went to stab Paolo with his rapier, but Francesca threw herself between them. The blade passed through her bosom, before Gianciotto withdrew it and struck Paolo down. Unsympathetically, Dante banishes Paolo and Francesca to the second circle of his literary hell, though his traveller is so moved by the story told to him by spirits that ‘I, in such great pity, / fainted away as through I were to die’. Paintings of these lovers abound, especially from the Romantic period. One of the most ravishing is Ingres’s 1819 painting, one of many versions he attempted between 1814 and 1850. This ‘snapshot’ is maybe the most engaging of the lot. It collapses ten years into the lovers’ few final seconds: Paolo and a gorgeous Francesca meet, read about Lancelot and his adulterous affair with Guinevere, kiss and are about to be murdered all in a single canvas. The book containing the story of Lancelot, falling from Francesca’s hand under the crush of Paolo’s embrace, is a breathtaking touch. Their story is, after all, as bookish as it is real. Sensational and violent outcomes overshadow the much more banal – but, to me, totally fascinating – trajectory of jealousy in people’s lives. Unlike Ingres’s painting, and most media reporting, jealousy-laden triangles are as much about their beginnings and middles as their endings. Portraying the 82

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28 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, 1819

emotion as being simply a cause of violence collapses the life into a single salacious episode. It’s actually the preceding events that really matter, and which can illuminate something about the nature of the emotion. There are many more beginnings to jealousy than there are violent endings, yet they are so often overlooked. How jealousy comes into being sets the timbre of its existence and points to 83

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how it might be dealt with by the sufferer. One kind of beginning is captured by some London street art. It is very closely based on Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 pop art masterpiece Oh Jeff, but with some interesting changes. In the original, the blonde has much sadder eyes, and the speech bubble sighs, ‘Oh Jeff . . . I love you, too . . . But . . .’ There’s something impossible about her relationship with Jeff, but she’s helpless in the face of it. The Shoreditch girl is feistier. Those eyes and eyebrows are angry, not sad, and the speech bubble is strident. This looks very much like the moment the infidelity has been discovered. It’s all Jeff ’s fault – and he’s going to know about it. But how is she going to cope with the betrayal? The moment you learn that you’ve been stiffed is sometimes termed the ‘jealous flash’. It’s a nodal point that betrayed lovers

29 A graffito by ‘Mike’ in London’s Shoreditch 84

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in real life and in literature seem to linger over. Psychologists Carlo Maggini, Eva Lundgren and Emanuela Leuci have quite a lot to say about this choc émotive. The jealous flash, they say, ‘comes out of the blue . . . and reveals to the jealous individual a dimension which was previously latent or inexistent. This intense and brief experience, leaves a more or less blurred memory behind, and tends to progressively repeat itself and take root as a feeling.’ Sappho’s jealous flash took place at the beginning of the sixth century bce. In what is perhaps her most famous poem, the female speaker watches a man and a woman seated together. The poem centres on the speaker’s jealousy and distress at seeing the woman, with whom she may be in love, with a man. Though the man ‘seems to me like the gods’ it is the woman who is entrancing: ‘your / sweet voice / And . . . your lovely laughter . . . / sets the heart in my breast a-flutter’, she says. The extreme physical manifestations of the speaker’s jealousy are striking: ‘my tongue has snapped, a light / fire runs straightway beneath my flesh, / I see nothing with my eyes, my / ears hum, / Sweat pours from me, and trembling / takes hold of me . . . / I’m little short of dying’. There are the eyes and ears again. Even her description of her sickly pallor – ‘I am yellower / than grass’ – recalls the colours associated with jealousy. This is a sublime jealous flash which seems to bring the speaker to a wordless epiphany, often more reverential than violent: ‘all must be endured’, she says. Perhaps she was able to get a grip on it. In Proust’s Swann’s Way, Charles Swann’s jealous flash comes when he is delicately trying to ascertain the extent to which his mistress, Odette, dispenses her sexual favours. 85

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What Swann hears, or imagines he hears, in the gaps in her admissions and confessions ‘crushed him anew, and was to enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his jealousy’ – but not to solve it. Swann discovers that on the first night he’d made love to Odette she’d earlier been with Forcheville: ‘she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a headsman wielding his axe’. For the odious Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the first knowledge of infidelity comes with ‘convulsions on the lawn at Champion’, a resort town he visits on the lam with his underage lover and stepdaughter: ‘I started to say something,’ he narrates, ‘and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating . . . I heard [Lolita] say to a kind lady that her father was having a fit.’ One of the most spectacular descriptions of the symptoms of the jealous flash comes from former punk Viv Albertine in her memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. Aged fifteen she spotted her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Mark, with her friend Cathy: ‘It’s so early in the morning that they must have spent the night together. I feel like I’ve been smacked in the chest with an iron bar. I choke, I can’t breathe. It can’t be true. I turn and run. I run and run.’ A slightly more decorous physical reaction to her jealous flash was evinced by Jane Austen’s Emma after she thinks she’s lost Mr Knightley to Harriet Smith: ‘The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! – and she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery – in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly.’ 86

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She feels ‘severe pain’ and ‘wretchedness’, and speaks of her ‘bitter feelings’. The flash has her conclude, happily, that ‘Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’ Viv and Emma demonstrate two salutary reactions to the jealous flash. One, running as far as you can, seems expressly designed to take you away from a poisonous situation – which, with punks on the scene, could have led to real violence. Emma’s reaction, in contrast, to the shock and pain of the flash was a new understanding. She discovered that a relationship she didn’t even know she wanted was under threat. In both these instances the help that the flash offers is obvious. ‘All must be endured’ is what Sappho concludes from the flash. But in literature the preferred outcome is violence. The most famous of jealous triangles is in Shakespeare’s Othello. Once Iago has given Othello the ‘ocular proof ’ of Desdemona’s presumed infidelity with Cassio, the Moor is described as having ‘fall’n into an epilepsy’: there’s the flash. The plot, and Othello’s jealousy, takes an ever-more violent route. Aided and abetted by Iago in the establishment of his jealousy, Othello strangles his blameless wife. Iago – himself jealous and envious – is exposed and Othello kills him, then himself. It’s Bullaburra in Cyprus. Othello has been so influential and has shaped so much the way people respond to jealousy that it is almost the first thing that comes to mind when the subject is raised – ‘an object lesson in the passion of jealousy,’ as Father Butt says in Joyce’s Stephen Hero. (Sexual jealousy is something of which Father Butt doubtless had considerable experience.) Yet the ferocity of Othello’s reaction is not in keeping with what might have been expected of a person of his ability and apparent 87

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self-control. It’s unreal, overcooked, the stuff of tabloid (and possibly the result of brain damage). Shakespeare’s Leontes, however, tops Othello in the jealousy stakes. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ wild jealousy – he suspects his pregnant wife of having an affair with his best friend – is conjured out of ‘nothing’, quite literally, in the second scene of the play. His flash is instantaneous and insane. It arises from a trifle: the way that the visiting king Polixenes, his friend from childhood, is bantering with his wife Hermione, and how she invites him to prolong his visit. Within a matter of seconds Leontes is prostrate with jealousy, questioning the paternity of his own child, his mind in chaos, and he is raving. If such trivialities as ‘whispering’, ‘Horsing foot on foot’ and ‘Skulking in corners’ are ‘nothing’, ‘Why, then the world and all that’s in it is nothing; / The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia is nothing; / My wife is nothing; nor nothings have these nothings, / If this be nothing’. It takes the rest of the play for everyone to recover from the devastating effects of this jealousy. The onset is just too extreme to be believed. * * * But let’s get back to ‘normal’ jealousy. What happens next? If you are the ‘third’ in the love triangle, perhaps your reaction will be an extreme version of Emma Woodhouse’s: you take action to get the one you want. Curses were a favoured means in the ancient world. For the ancient Greek and Roman mind erotic love was understood to attack its human victims physically, make them ill, and in some cases kill them. So the kind of erotic magic that people cast to get what they wanted is 88

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pretty strong stuff. The inscription on one potsherd from second-century Egypt has a woman called Allous in its sights. It implores the gods to ‘Remove Allous from Apollonios her husband’, alongside a relentless catalogue of wishes for her to suffer the pangs of erotic love: ‘Let burning heat consume the sexual parts of Allous, [her] vulva, [her] members, until she leaves the household of Apollonios. Lay Allous low with fever, with sickness unceasing, starvation . . . [and] madness . . . give Allous insolence, hatred, obnoxiousness until she departs the household of Apollonios’. (You wonder what being in a relationship with this man would actually be like.) A spell in Greek on a lead tablet from Egypt implores the ‘lord demon’ to ‘Goad the tortured soul, the heart of Karosa . . . until she leaps forth and comes to Apalos . . . do not allow Karosa herself . . . to think of her [own] husband, her child, drink, food, but let her come melting for passion and love and intercourse, especially yearning for the intercourse of Apalos’. More meddlesome is a Greek inscription asking the demons to monitor which men can access Juliana (who may be a hetaira, or prostitute): ‘chill them and their purposes, so that they cannot speak together or walk about, that Leosthenes and Pius cannot sit in Juliana’s place of business or send messages to Juliana . . . Let them be deaf, dumb, mindless, harmless, Juliana hearing nothing about Leosthenes and Pius and they having no impulse toward or to speaking to Juliana.’ Or, like Viv Albertine, if it’s your relationship that is threatened, your impulse might be to run away – if not from the relationship then from the world. Thus runs the course of one of the greatest love stories of the Middle Ages. Abélard, a 89

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promising scholar (one who elicited a fair amount of his cohorts’ academic jealousy), and his student Héloïse, the ward of her uncle Fulbert, had a passionate and illicit love affair in the twelfth century. Héloïse became pregnant and gave birth to a son. To conciliate her uncle, she and Abélard secretly married in Paris, but to no good. The jealous Fulbert extracted his revenge by castrating Abélard. Humiliated, he became a monk, and convinced Héloïse to enter a nunnery: ‘shame more than any sincere penitence made me resolve to hide myself from the sight of men, yet could I not separate myself from my Héloïse. Jealousy took possession of my mind, and at the very expense of her happiness I decreed to disappoint all rivals. Before I put myself in a cloister I obliged her to take the habit and retire into the nunnery of Argenteuil.’ Jealousy made Abélard hide her away. Aching worry is the more usual way that jealousy plays out. And worry can easily develop into something more sinister. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a primer on the machinations of the jealous love triangle. The narrator, Maurice Bendrix, confesses that he ‘measured love by the extent of my jealousy’ (a sentiment shared by Greene too, according to his biographer). ‘[M]y brain against my will travels irresistibly back to the point where pain began’, says Maurice, speaking of his interminable return to his own ‘flash’ when he recollects the time when he and Sarah were lovers. Maurice’s powerful jealousy ruins his relationship with Sarah, who refuses to divorce her impotent civil servant husband Henry – a man who was, Maurice later recognizes, ‘as jealous as I was . . . he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence’. Maurice continually hunted for clues to justify his jealousy: ‘even in the moment 90

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30 Abélard and Héloïse from Le Roman de la Rose, fourteenth century

of love,’ he says, ‘I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed’. Once Maurice suspects Sarah’s infidelity he worries at his suspicion like a scabbed sore: ‘When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew 91

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I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life.’ Even after the abrupt end of Maurice and Sarah’s affair the jealousy does not abate. Maurice hires the strange private detective, Mr Savage, to find out who Sarah’s new lover is. Eyes are central to visual representations of jealousy – and often the means by which the emotion comes to be experienced. The jealous person continually seeks visual evidence to confirm the truth of the way they are feeling. The fervour with which a person seeks this visual evidence is what distinguishes ‘normal’ and ‘obsessive’ jealousy. Describing a typical sufferer of the latter kind, Borjanka Batinic, Dragma Duisin and Jasmina Barisic note the ‘checking of telephone calls and postal correspondence, surprise visits, stalking behaviour’. In Roseanna, one of the ten ‘Martin Beck’ novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Edgar Mulvaney admits to having occasionally stalked his murdered girlfriend, Roseanna McGraw: ‘I . . . I was jealous sometimes’, he explains to the detective. ‘Once in a while when she wouldn’t see me I went there and stood outside her apartment house watching. Twice I even stood there from the time she came home until the time she left in the morning.’ Edgar was worried that his girlfriend was with someone else. It turns out that Roseanna was with another man once during the eight months of their relationship, but Edgar’s behaviour is still excessive. It all starts with the eyes. Fear, harassment, violation and violence may all follow from this uninvited staring. In The Murderer Next Door, David Buss explains the logic behind spousal murder. One of the main events that trigger a husband to kill is, according to the FBI homicide files Buss examined, discovering that his wife 92

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is having an extramarital affair. Separation is a powerful trigger. ‘Among women killed by a partner they have separated from, 88 per cent had been stalked prior to being killed’, Buss explains. ‘Although most stalkers do not kill their victims, most matekilling men do stalk their victims. Stalking is one danger sign that women should not ignore.’ The tipping point is the moment the man realizes the woman will never return to him. This may often be when she has moved on to another relationship. Stalking doesn’t need to involve physical movement or even the most discreet mooning about. These days it can much more readily be conducted electronically: the checking of email, Google searches, hacking into Facebook accounts, tracking your partner’s travel online (as Transport for London’s Oyster card system allows you to do). This sort of stalking, or snooping, is more popular with the mildly jealous: to check up on their current partners or the kind of life their ex is living. It’s a way of maintaining a connection to another person, albeit in an underhand or even downright illegal manner. After all, jealousy is practised in a ritualized manner in most partnerships. Unless a relationship is completely bovine then it’s likely to be slit through with uncertainty. Women and men in these circumstances constantly test and tease one another using jealousy. It can also make a relationship more exciting: ‘The excitement derived from the intrigue, and the atmosphere of shadows, mysteries, plots and machinations permeate the couple relationship and prevent boredom. It is a painful yet also stimulating atmosphere’, say Carlo Maggini, Eva Lundgren and Emanuela Leuci. The consolations, as jealous reactions invite reassuring responses, can unexpectedly improve a relationship 93

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and make the bond prosper. A friend of mine tells a surprising story about his parents, Frannie and George, and his Uncle Bill. Bill was visiting one time when Frannie asked him if he would help her play a prank on his brother. While George was downstairs making the breakfast, Frannie proposed that she jump into bed with Bill so that George would find them together, cuddling, when he brought the breakfast back up. ‘You know, your brother’s a very good husband’, she said, ‘but we’re in our late thirties and really do have to rush to get a family going – I give him loads of Wheat Hearts with his porridge and vitamin supplements, but I’ve heard a little bit of jealousy really does wonders, sometimes. They say it really gets a chap feeling, well, keener.’ Hearing the clatter of cups and plates ascending the stairs, Frannie hopped under the covers. Calling out ‘Billo! Brek!’ George walked into the room just as Frannie wrapped her arms around Bill, resting her smiling face on his chest. George’s jaw dropped, and he froze, stunned, until they burst out laughing and ribbed him mercilessly for his jealousy. My friend was born close to nine months later. The benefits of a love triangle are also propounded by an amusingly sanguine account given to the Daily Mail by a woman called Linda. Her affair with Matt began when she was forty-seven and he was thirty, and continued for twelve years through his dating of and marriage to another woman – even after their baby was born. It was Linda who called time on the relationship: ‘I did it for the sake of his son, who deserved his father’s full attention, and I did it for Matt. I sensed he was finally ready to put his indecisive, philandering ways behind him and devote himself to his family.’ ‘I felt no jealousy or 94

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resentment’, she claims. She enjoyed her relationship with this handsome man whose schedule worked around her commitments to her two disabled sons – and who seems to have been too much of a ditherer for her to want as a partner anyway. ‘Obviously he needed more than his wife could give him and I didn’t pose a threat to his marriage’, she reassures the readers – though we don’t hear what Matt’s wife makes of it. Linda seems to think she should be pleased, were she ever to learn of the affair: ‘As I saw it, I’d borrowed someone’s fiancé, then husband, and returned him with interest. If it weren’t for our affair, I’m sure he’d still be dithering about whether to marry and wouldn’t have started a family. In fact, so encouraging was I that he commit to marriage and family life with another woman that I can’t help thinking my lover’s wife owes some of her happiness to me.’ She calls herself their ‘fairy godmother’. * * * How do these love triangles play themselves out, if not violently? To the jealous provocation of a love triangle, cuckolds are often represented as responding diffidently. Such men are often portrayed as fools. As Maurice Bendrix states, ‘Jealous lovers are more respectable, less ridiculous than jealous husbands. They are supported by the weight of literature. Betrayed lovers are tragic, never comic.’ Yet John le Carré’s ugly, unremarkable George Smiley is not laughable. Rather, his evident control over his jealousy, despite the numerous affairs of Lady Ann Sercomb, his younger, beautiful wife, is sympathetic if not ennobling. In the first Smiley novel, the snobbish Ann has 95

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abandoned George for a hairy-armed Cuban racing-car driver. Smiley feels betrayed. His jealousy, such as it is, is only hinted at: ‘it was . . . useless to expect fidelity of Ann’, he muses. The high point of Ann’s infidelity and George’s anguish comes in the 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Now head of MI6 and living separately from Ann for her safety, he wanders past his home one night to see her shadow with another behind the bedroom curtains: ‘Oh no, thought Smiley hopelessly. Please! Wait till I’ve gone! For a moment, perhaps longer, standing on the pavement, he stared in disbelief at the blacked out window, till anger, shame, and finally self-disgust broke in him together like a physical anguish and he turned and hurried blindly back toward the King’s Road. Who was it this time?’ Ann’s affair with Bill Haydon, the man who betrayed the ‘Circus’ and Smiley both, is the lynchpin of the book. Again, George’s jealousy is merely hinted at: Bill is described as being ‘still his Iago’. Smiley may be an Othello, but unlike Shakespeare’s hero, he just endures. He manages to manage his jealousy. In one of the later Smiley novels, Smiley’s People, he breaks things off with Ann, ‘the last illusion of an illusionless man’, as he prepares to face down his greatest foe. Jealousy doesn’t stand a chance against a firm-willed cuckold. An unexpected handling of a love triangle occurs at the end of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, when the older Marchioness gives up her young lover Octavian to Sophie. She acknowledges that her time is past: ‘I made a vow to love him rightly, as a good woman should, e’en love the love he bore another I promised. But in truth, I did not think that all so soon the task would await me . . . And here stand I; and with his love, 96

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new-found this day, he will have happiness . . . ’Tis done – so be it.’ The trio becomes a duet between Octavian and Sophie. Not everyone shares the resolve of Smiley or the Marchioness. In The End of the Affair, tormented by memories and imaginings of Sarah’s continued love life – ‘fifty times during the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and a play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment’ – Maurice Bendrix contemplates suicide. Jealousy does fade away, and it can leave a strange sense of lassitude. Sometimes it leaves life the poorer for its absence. The post-jealousy state of mind is rarely discussed because it is boring. Charles Swann is a bore once he gets over Odette; Proust forgets about him and moves on with the next 2,000 pages of In Search of Lost Time. Would it be better to be jealous? * * * The triangulated life of sexual jealousy is more often banal than it is sensational. All jealousy’s intermediary life, as well as its disappointing and quiet ends, are all too easily forgotten. To my mind, many of the more memorable instances of sexual jealousy that result in death or in really serious violence are more likely related to a psychopathological state – to the state of someone’s right frontal lobe, or to deleterious reasoning that buttresses itself with jealousy as an explanatory factor. I think that jealousy too can be given a bad name. That’s part of its 97

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deadly attraction for art and literature, of course. But Sappho, Smiley and the Marchioness may offer a better vision. Would a world free of this painful and sometimes deadly sexual jealousy be a better one? It would be easy to say ‘yes’. But do the real and imagined worlds that appear to exist without jealousy offer the possibility of a happier life?

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Utopia

Are there, or have there been, periods and places on earth free from sexual jealousy? Are there cultures in which jealousy does not or cannot occur? The evolutionists’ argument that jealousy is hardwired in the human brain suggests that jealousy is present in all times and situations – and that it is always beneficial for the perpetuation of human genes. Yet there would be plenty of people, I think, who’d be very happy to avoid the pain of the experience and the violent consequences of the emotion. If the conditions for jealousy as they’re known could be erased, would that be utopia? In Are You Jealous? Paul Gauguin evokes a Pacific paradise in which sexual relations are playful and harmless – contracted and concluded with the simplicity of a handshake. Apparently the artist witnessed this scene in Tahiti and later described it in his diary: ‘On the shore, two sisters are lying after bathing, in the graceful poses of resting animals; they speak of yesterday’s love and tomorrow’s conquests. The recollection causes them to quarrel: What! Are you jealous?’ This jealousy is not the 99

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31 Paul Gauguin, Aha Oe Fei? (Are You Jealous?), 1892

product of a threat to an exclusive sexual relationship or a jilted love affair – it is the result of one of the sisters having enjoyed more sex than the other the night before. Their handsome, unprovocative nudity suggests an easy sexual freedom, their languid deportment offering no hint of rivalry or heightened emotion, and certainly not anger. Gauguin evokes a sexual utopia for the conservative Victorian world that he’d left behind. I doubt that he aims to provide accurate ethnography. The late Edward Said might have termed this painting an example of ‘orientalism’ – or ‘polynesianism’. By that I mean the evocation of a foreign culture in terms one’s own culture’s imperial, sentimental aspirations. What this painting brings into focus, then, is the intrinsically jealous Western culture that Gauguin had renounced. 100

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The titular question is directed at his European audience. Not only might they be jealous (or, more properly, envious) of him visiting this tropical paradise; Gauguin is suggesting that they are jealous simply because of where they come from. His painting is of a jealousy-free world that his patrons and viewers would never experience. Around the turn of the twentieth century there was a great interest in ‘primitive peoples’ and human sexuality. The whiskery sexologist Havelock Ellis was a near contemporary of Gauguin and knew of his work. In an appendix to his massive Studies in the Psychology of Sex entitled ‘The Sexual Instinct in Savages’ Ellis reflects on sex and sexual relationships in (he imagines) societies of the kind portrayed by Gauguin, and how jealousy does or does not figure within them. Ellis states that ‘It is not surprising that jealousy should often, though not by any means invariably, be absent, both among men and among women. Among savages this is doubtless proof of the weakness of the sexual impulse.’ This ‘weakness’ refers to how apparently easily the savage is able to place checks on his desires whenever necessary (and in the hard life savages lead, it is often necessary). It is also, Ellis notes, ‘reflected in the psychic sphere’. That is, ‘love [meaning sexual love] plays but a small part in their lives . . . love poems are among some primitive peoples few (most originating with the women), and their literature often gives little or no attention to passion’. No matter that most of these ‘savage’ cultures were preliterate. Ellis himself had clearly read up on the subject of jealousy: ‘Spencer and Gillen note the comparative absence of jealousy in men among the Central Australian tribes they studied. Negresses, it is said by a French army surgeon in his Untrodden Fields of 101

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Anthropology, do not know what jealousy is, and the first wife will even borrow money to buy the second wife. Among a much higher race, the women in a Korean household, it is said, live together happily, as an almost invariable rule, though it appears that this was not always the case among a polygamous people of European race, the Mormons.’ This is not simply a matter of a society’s lack of a concept of, say, marriage. The jealousy-free world Ellis conjures is about levels of savagery: the European Mormons could not countenance what savage races could practise on a day-to-day basis. It can be hard to read Havelock Ellis these days. It’s also hard to see how his vision of a culture in which the sexual impulse was supposedly so weak was terribly different to the one he personally inhabited. Ellis’s own sexual impulse was famously limpid. He was still a virgin when, aged thirty-two, he married a lesbian from whom he lived separately. He later admitted that he was impotent until the age of sixty when he was cured by the sight of women urinating. On the face of it Ellis’s evocation of the life of the savage contradicts Gauguin’s painterly evocation of Tahitian women. The women of Are You Jealous? have a strong impulse and are as promiscuous as they wish. Still, they are not much troubled by sexual jealousy. Gauguin and Ellis agree that their ‘savages’ inhabit a jealousy-free world. The famous cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead also believed that a world without jealousy could be found in the South Pacific, but, unlike Havelock Ellis, she found no weakening in the Polynesian sexual impulse. She had the greatest admiration for the lifestyle of such people. In her best-selling 1928 study Coming of Age in Samoa, which focused on girls’ passage through 102

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adolescence, Mead argues that jealousy, rather than being a natural expression of a universal human response to a threatening emotional triangle, is something that is primed by social and cultural institutions. ‘The opportunity to experiment freely, the complete familiarity with sex and the absence of very violent preferences’, says Mead, made the sexual experiences of Samoans ‘less charged with possibilities of conflict than they are in a more rigid and self-conscious civilization . . . Friendships are of so casual and shifting a nature that they give rise to neither jealousy nor conflict.’ In her synoptic article ‘Jealousy: Primitive and Civilized’ she is even clearer: ‘Although there is [sexual] freedom before marriage, marriage itself is not viewed primarily as sexual . . . jealousy, as a widespread social phenomenon, is very rare in Samoa.’ The kinds of exclusive and possessive attachments that might feed into a sense of jealous entitlement simply do not arise. So it must be nurture, rather than nature, that makes people jealous. In Coming of Age Mead doesn’t say that jealousy is wholly absent in Samoa (‘Cases of passionate jealousy do occur’) but rather that the emotion does not wield the same kind of destructive power that it does in societies like her own. Occasions when jealousy does arise ‘are matters for extended comment and amazement’, aired within a group whose surprise makes clear its unusualness. Still, her vision of Samoa – ‘no conflicts, no temperaments, which deviated so markedly from the normal, that clash was inevitable’ – sounds utterly utopian to me, as it did to many young Americans in the midst of the 1960s sexual revolution, who felt strangled by the constraints of the Western nuclear family. But was Mead right? One of her most vocal critics was anthropologist Derek Freeman, who published a book after her 103

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death arguing, among many other things, that the Samoans had deliberately fooled her about their premarital jealousy-free sexual freedom. In Freeman’s view, Mead either engaged in myth-making (arriving with preconceived opinions about how culture shapes emotional responses) or in very bad research (spending only nine months in one region of Samoa with inadequate language skills). Either way, Freeman argued, the Samoans had duped her for their own amusement, and when they were able to read her work in the decades following publication, they were furious. They didn’t recognize themselves. The Samoa that Freeman found was riddled with conflict, aggression and rape, with pronounced restrictions around sex (particularly a ‘cult of virginity’) and morality, violations of which invited violent retribution. So was Mead right or wrong? The question of which anthropologist was ‘correct’ is a difficult one to answer. Samoan society may have appeared as sexually permissive to Mead and as sexually restrictive to Freeman because of the radically different American cultures from which the two anthropologists themselves were writing. Mead always intended for her work to comment on US sexual mores, and Freeman was responding to Mead’s work and its reception as an apparently dispassionate anthropologist. How a culture’s emotional life is perceived is not untainted by the perceiver. The way that an emotion like jealousy is registered will not be the same for all people. In this way, Mead was right: the expression and the perception of jealousy is a product of culture, even if the emotion itself isn’t. * * * 104

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If not across the Pacific, could our utopia be found in ancient civilizations? A beautiful inscription from the first century found in an ancient Roman funerary-urn repository belonging to the Statilii, a prominent Roman family, tells of an unexpected romantic and familial set-up. The stone seems to have been arranged by two men, Amaranthus and Philologus, both of whom were probably slaves owned by the Statilii family, in memory of their shared wife, a freed slave: To Statilia Hilara, the freedwoman of Taurus and our wife, Amarathus, the polisher, and Philologus, the steward, set up this stone. May you approve of it, Hilara and, if the dead have any consciousness, remember us and we will never forget you.

What can we reconstruct of this peculiar marital ménage? The tombstone is matter-of-fact about the arrangement. It suggests

32 Painlessly polyamorous? Statilia Hilara’s funerary tablet 105

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that, at least among the Roman lower classes, such polyandry was not particularly surprising or scandalous. Slaves could not form a legal marriage, though they did use the legal term coniunx, meaning ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, with freedom. The two men had roles in the Statilii household, though what the freed Hilara did is not clear. Her name means ‘joyous’, and her daughter Attice (was Amaranthus or Philologus her father?) celebrated her as a ‘deserving mother’ on another stone in the family columbarium. She must have been a lovely woman. There is no sense of bitterness or possessiveness in this love triangle, only fetching and timeless affection. Unfortunately, reality for Amaranthus and Philologus might have been far more banal. Both were slaves, and the ‘marriage’ might have been cooked up by their master, Marcus Statilius Taurus, in a household that was short of marriageable female slaves or freedwomen. Hilara may have been very young when she was joined to one or both of these men, though the fact that when she died her daughter was old enough to provide her own commemorative tablet suggests she was not much younger than her husbands. It’s possible that the two men were partners of Hilara one after the other and, not being wealthy, clubbed together for the headstone. No easy utopia this. The fetching trio may simply have made the most of a bad lot and come to like it. An even more lavish inscription, again from first-century Rome, evidences a similar marital arrangement. This extravagant (and very expensive) verse dedication to Allia Potestas, a freedwoman of the dedicator, Aulus, describes her as the partner of two men, one of whom details his affections in stone. The 106

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inscription is too long and, to be honest, too predictable to warrant repeating in detail. ‘None was more precious than she in the world. One so diligent as she has never been seen before . . . believe me, this woman, made famous by this inscription, has divinity’, it eulogizes. It details how central to the lives of both men Allia was: ‘While she lived she so guided her two young lovers that they became like the example of Pylades and Orestes – one house would hold them both and one spirit. But now that she is dead, they will separate, and each is growing old by himself’. She was the glue that held them together. There

33 Her master’s voice? An inscription to Allia Potestas by her husbands 107

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doesn’t seem to have been rancour while she was alive to compromise the love triangle. But is this utopian? It’s not only the cliché that puts me on edge. Allia was a freed slave, freed by the dedicator of this inscription: ‘These verses for you your patron – whose tears never end – writes in tribute’, the stone says. She would have been legally dependent on him for life and might have had very little say in the constitution of this polyandrous marriage. It’s not so much her voice and life that’s in this inscription as her master’s. He writes, with faux modesty, that ‘As long as these published words of mine survive, so long will you live in these little verses of mine’. It’s almost as if the dedicator himself were jealous of the attention Allia might have got, even in death. Studies of jealousy in the ancient world suggest that sexual jealousy within marriage was not common. Marriage in ancient Rome was near universal but it was based on the need for the procreation of children rather than individual self-fulfilment. Choice was often minimized in the achievement of marriage, divorce was frequent, and there were significant age gaps between first-time married couples, lessening the affective symmetry at play. Romantic love, such as it was, was the province of a ‘courtesan class’, a demi-monde of either sex, with whom legal marriage, but not sexual relations, was precluded. It is not mentioned in texts alluding to normal marriage. So sexual jealousy doesn’t appear to have occurred very much. Yet this was not the whole story. Around the second century, under the Roman Empire, there seems to have been a shift from arranged marriages to choice in marriage partners. The writers Chariton, Xenophanes of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus dramatize this adjustment. Lovers are of the same 108

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age and romantic love, as a basis for marriage, becomes the norm. With such a high premium on sexual exclusivity, this begets a special fear of its loss, and therefore jealousy. The emotion is a constant theme of these writers’ works. Given the option to fall in love, it seems that the characters of ancient Greek novels, and perhaps our ancient forebears too, fell into sexual jealousy. * * * Polyandry (one wife to several husbands) and polygyny (one husband to several wives) are still features of numerous nonWestern cultures today, though the latter is typically the only form that is permitted by government. Do these formalized structures offer a modern-day utopia free from the exclusive couple-centred sexual jealousy? Polyandry does still occur in countries like Tibet, Nepal and India, explains Jeff Willett, ‘in environments where arable land is not only scarce but also extremely difficult and laborious to farm, such as rocky mountain terrain’. No tropical island, this. Polyandry in such contexts is explained in starkly unromantic terms: labour-intensive farming requires the efforts of several men to produce enough to support a single family. If each man headed a separate family there would not be enough food to go round. Nor, in the Himalayas, would there be sufficient intact and workable farming land. Himalayan polyandrous families are therefore constituted by the marriage of the brothers of a family to one wife, who has equal sexual access to them all. The children do (and, these societies believe, ideally should) have more than one ‘father’. This Darwinian argument for polyandry does 109

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little to explain what it is like, emotionally. As far as I can tell it tends to break down as economic circumstances change. It is becoming much rarer, anyway. Once common in Tibet it’s now been outlawed since the Chinese takeover. Although the Hindu epic Mahabharata tells of Draupadi and her five husbands, the Pandava brothers, and accepts this as her way of life, polyandry is disapproved of or condemned outright by all the major religions. Even Draupadi’s marriage is explained by a fervent wish she made in a previous life for a husband with fourteen qualities. Shiva did warn her that they couldn’t all be found in one man. The god makes polyandry easier for Draupadi to swallow, though, for she regains her virginity with each morning bath. Perhaps this also prevents any jealousy between the brothers. Polygyny is much more commonly seen as it is legal in many Muslim countries. The ‘polygyny belt’ stretches across north and sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Again, the reason for such formations is practical – and, now, religious – rather than emotional: some studies have suggested that

34 Draupadi and her five husbands at the Dasavatar temple 110

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polygyny increased alongside horticultural production in Africa, because the women were needed to help with the work. Multiple wives also maximize a man’s fertility, and increase the chances of his producing lots of sons – as well as gifting more land and more status to him. It seems to be pretty good for the husband. But what of his wives? A study by R.M. Bove of the experiences of Malian women in polygynous marriages found that ‘These ranged from strongly supportive relationships, to jealousy because of unequal health or fertility, bias in emotional and material support provided by husbands, and accusations of wrongdoing and witchcraft’. Jealousy between the wives has not been wiped out. A little book written for Muslim readers, From Monogamy to Polygyny: A Way Through, says that ‘It is part of a woman’s nature to be jealous . . . [It] is something that Allah has created within the creation of woman’, and advises women to turn to the writings of the Prophet for guidance: ‘These Ahadith stress the importance of having a clean heart, free of rancour or any ill feelings towards another Muslim. Thus, in polygyny, co-wives should take care not to let their jealous feelings turn to hatred of their co-wives. Freeing the heart . . . is essential to solidifying bonds that unite us as Muslims, and is an ingredient in the path to Paradise.’ It doesn’t seem as if any polgynous or polyandrous societies sidestep the stresses involved in monogamous relationships. Jealousy is everywhere. This is also the case for polyamory, a currently popular sexual lifestyle that seems to trade on a Gauguinesque vision of sexual utopianism and promises a life that is jealousy-free. The term ‘polyamory’ is said to have been coined by the priestess of the Church of All Worlds, Morning 111

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Glory Zell-Ravenheart, in a 1990 magazine article, ‘A Bouquet of Lovers’. Polyamory is the practice of having several concurrent sexual relationships with different partners, with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. The partners know of one another and may even know one another. It is this no-secrets element that is said to provide the ethical element of this ‘ethical non-monogamy’. The polyamorist may have a ‘Primary’ relationship which remains the bedrock of their emotional life, but is then free to involve themselves with a variety of ‘Secondaries’. The permission of the Primary is important: ‘the Primary partner must approve of the new person and feel good about them and not feel threatened by the new relationship’, says Morning Glory. The permutations possible for the active polyamorist are defined only by sexual and comradely desire, and the ‘rules of the road’: honesty, openness, and all partners’ full and willing embrace of the basic commitment to a polyamorous lifestyle. Does jealousy have a part in this world? Polyamorists believe, like Margaret Mead, that jealousy is learnt, not innate. One polyamorist told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I don’t know that you would find a child born that feels jealousy. It is a learnt behaviour . . . we didn’t pop out of the womb saying, “Damn that next kid coming along”. It just doesn’t happen that way.’ Unfortunately, most children do seem to say just that. Alternatively, polyamory can be seen as being more like parental love. The jealousy experienced when you see your loved one enjoying the love of someone else can be transmuted into a feeling of joy, which polyamorists call ‘compersion’. That is claimed to be the complete opposite of jealousy. 112

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Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, authors of The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, an excellent and handy ‘how-to’ for sluts (their preferred term for polyamorous women), are much more sensible about jealousy. They say that jealousy is quite common even in the world of the polyamorist, though many sluts use it as a term of abuse: ‘We have heard sluts accuse one another of being jealous as if it were a crime: “See? Look at you! You’re jealous, aren’t you? Don’t try to deny it!” It is particularly important that you own your jealousy, to yourself and to your intimates’, they advise. If you don’t, it can have corrosive effects on you or others. It’s also important not to try and protect your partner from feeling hurt or jealous, Easton and Hardy counsel, although the emotion shouldn’t be angrily dismissed either: the jealous partner is vulnerable, and that can lead to a new intimacy. Sluts really fight against controlling behaviour: they have no time for the myth of security built up around ‘the old “awww, she’s jealous – she must really care about me” reasoning’. For Easton and Hardy, what they call ‘A Slut Utopia’ is on the horizon: ‘Our vision of utopia has free love in all its forms, as the foundation of our beliefs . . . [which] helps us to see our lives as they really are, with the honesty to perceive ourselves clearly and the fluidity to let us move onward as our needs alter.’ Utopia is not immune to jealousy at all, though neither is it dominated by it. This realistic slut utopianism is a world away from the ‘polynesianism’ of Gauguin, Ellis or Mead. I think it is admirable, even if it’s not for me. It seems to be working for the half a million or so polyamorists living in the US. 113

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But what if the problem is sex itself? The real jealousy-free utopia might be one in which there is no sex at all. Cultural anthropologist John Messenger chose the somewhat less tropical climes of ‘Inis Beag’, an island off the west coast of Ireland, for his study of an apparently sex-free society. Even in the Swinging Sixties this small, isolated Catholic community seemed entirely sexless – or at least, extraordinarily repressed. The people knew practically nothing about sex. The subject was shrouded in guilt and sinfulness. Sexual activity was tolerated as a precursor to procreation, and was of course strictly limited to the marital relationship, but even then intercourse took place ‘with underclothes not removed’. Kissing, caressing and any affection whatsoever was prohibited. Dogs were even punished for licking their testicles. Messenger did see jealousy on the island, but not to do with sex – rather, he noted its presence in the way the islanders reacted to him and his wife helping them with a salvage operation and ‘taking sides’. Inis Beag is, however, hardly sex-neutral: the entire community is centred around sex, or rather, the stifling of it. There is a growing awareness of people who identify as asexual – and there is a growing number of them. In a 1994 British survey of 18,000 people that questioned them about their sexual practices, 1 per cent responded ‘yes’ to the question ‘I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all’. That figure of 1 per cent apparently holds for the whole of Britain today. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) website launched in 2011 and now has between 50,000 and 60,000 members. Asexuals campaign for their orientation to be recognized as valid as being straight, gay or bisexual. They say 114

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they are not celibate or abstinent, but simply aren’t interested in sex. Does this, finally, promise a sexual-jealousy-free utopia? No, according to AVEN’s message board, which contains a number of entries from asexual people worrying over their jealous feelings for their ‘squish’ (their platonic crush). It seems that jealousy is particularly troubling for some asexual people who haven’t experienced an intense sexual connection to another person: ‘I feel weird to begin with, because I don’t normally feel attraction to anybody, but the fact that I feel jealous of the other person they hang out with is really confusing for me. I have nothing to feel threatened by, I don’t even want a relationship. Has anyone else felt like this?’ ‘I normally don’t let drama and feelings affect me’, says another, ‘but I think that I have been so bothered by this situation because I often end up as the third wheel with my squish and his partner, and I have been so stressed out about work and school and family matters. I am making the best of my situation, because I want my squish to be happy, and I’d rather have a friendship with him than nothing at all.’ Even without the unruly element of sex involved in relationships, squishual jealousy is on the cards. The early church father Tertullian wrestled with the problem of escaping jealousy – even in the afterlife. The problem was widowed women who remarry: won’t their several husbands who meet them in the great beyond be jealous of each other? Fear not, he said: ‘no restoration of marriage is promised in the day of the resurrection . . . Therefore no solicitude arising from carnal jealousy will, . . . even in the case of her whom they chose to represent as having been married to seven brothers successively, wound any one of her so many husbands.’ Jealousy in 115

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Paradise has been avoided, but at the cost of marital reunion in eternity. It seems to Tertullian to be a price worth paying. * * * The idealistic image of a utopia free from jealousy is challenged again and again by the specifics. There are, however, societies more or less prone to sexual jealousy, or to the expression of jealousy. Dinsh Bhurga argues that the determining factor is the value placed by a society on the exclusive ownership of a partner. I’d add to that the matter of whether the partner can be freely chosen for love (leading to sexual jealousy becoming more of an overt tool in remedying and controlling infidelity) and whether marriage is viewed culturally as a means for individual self-fulfilment (drawing with it the sense of exclusivity and entitlement). Jealousy, after all, is not an adaptation that is required for the preservation of marriage. It seems to me that sexual jealousy, like other adaptive emotions, is intrinsic to human life, yet appears and disappears within societies in accordance with external constraints placed on love and love attachments. It may not appear in guises that are immediately obvious – culturally conditioned as we are. And the ways it is experienced and the ways in which it is acted upon change through space and time. It was precisely when Gauguin was painting his homage to freedom from jealousy that the emotion came to briefly occupy the West’s cultural centre-stage. The 1890s witnessed no coming of utopia, but it was a period during which jealousy suddenly became something that everybody was talking and thinking about. 116

6

The invisible made visible

Pierre-Narcisse Guerin depicts the ‘before and after’ of jealousy at the very beginning of a century that would see the first sustained attempt to capture the feeling of the emotion. In the first painting, Jealousy, a classically attired woman stands, her head dropped backwards in despair, as the shadow image of a man (presumably her lover) and woman kissing is cast on the wall to her left. The second painting, unfinished, but almost identical in its arrangement, is Sorrow. It shows the woman’s reaction to what she has seen on the wall. Her right arm reaches out to the shadow in anguish, her head thrown to the side, her gown dropping open and her hair flung outwards in dramatic fashion. A sketch of a child against the wall, touching her right thigh and pointing onwards, remains unpainted. Is this ghostly figure trying to lead the woman away from her anguish? Perhaps she should have heeded the symbol in the bottom-left of the first painting, and let sleeping dogs lie. In the nineteenth century there emerges a new vigour in getting to the bottom of how jealousy feels – what happens 117

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35 and 36 Pierre-Narcisse Guerin’s Jealousy and Sorrow, c. 1802

within the gap between Guerin’s two paintings, if you like. Artists, philosophers, writers and scientists all turned towards that shadow-world. And Guerin’s choice of the word ‘sorrow’ for his depiction of the anguish of jealousy assumes unexpected significance.

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It’s easy to see the lineaments of jealousy in Paul Ranson’s 1896 strangely yellowish lithograph. There is the triangle: the woman in the foreground is excluded from the intimacy of the duo to the rear. There is also the excluded woman’s heightened emotional reaction: her intense but occluded gaze towards the couple, her angry right hand on her hip, the flower falling by the folds of her skirt perhaps having been picked and then 119

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37 Paul Ranson, Tristesse, ou Jalousie, 1896

indignantly dropped – and perhaps itself a symbol of sexual desire that’s still on offer but which has been discarded by her lover. But the title the artist has given to his work is Tristesse, ou Jalousie. Why has Ranson hesitated between sadness and jealousy? Why bring in notions of sorrow, thus melancholy and 120

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depression, when he is representing what seems to be an unambiguously jealous scene? The simple explanation could be that jealousy can feel sad and depressing. One title may be as good as the other. Edvard Munch seems to have felt so. His great series of oil paintings on jealousy (two of which appeared earlier) could actually be seen to have started in 1891 with a number of closely related canvases entitled Melancholy. Munch’s variations on this theme trace the same pattern: a coastal scene, lined in evening light, with a rocklike man in the right-hand foreground turning his back on some figures on a distant pier. The melancholy is caught in the blues and the swerving coastline and curving landscape, which mirror the swirling, uncontrolled feelings associated with depression. In the iconography of melancholy, according to Jean Clair, a head resting on a hand is the most common way to indicate the

38 Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1892 121

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presence of the emotion. But all of Munch’s melancholy paintings in these years are inescapably bound up with jealousy. (One related version was alternatively titled Jealousy and the Yellow Boat.) That is implied in the structure: the triangles (the three people on the pier; the couple on the pier and the man in the foreground; the roof of the house and shape of the rocks) and the man’s fierce sideways stare. It is even clearer when you know the circumstances behind the painting. The man in the foreground is Munch’s friend Jappe Nilssen who was having an affair with Oda Krohg, the wife of the painter Christian Krohg. Theirs was an open marriage. They are the couple on the pier about to embark on a boat bound, it’s been claimed, for an island where they will make love. Jealousy is right there alongside melancholy. Is one causing the other? In his Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton says that ‘suspicion, and jealousy, are general symptoms’ of melancholy. Perhaps Munch implies here that jealousy is a ‘symptom’ of Jappe’s general melancholic state of mind, rather than a cause. Munch is taking us right inside Jappe’s depression and using jealousy to help us understand it. But it is even possible that the converse is the case, that Munch is using melancholy to help us understand jealousy. This link between jealousy and depression can be seen in late nineteenth-century literature as well. Opium addict and choirmaster John Jasper, in Charles Dickens’ 1870 novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, must be one of the most alarmingly jealous men in English literature. He is agonizingly jealous of Rosa Bud, the betrothed of his nephew Edwin, and jealous too of the life they will live when Edwin goes abroad. Dickens plays on Jasper’s proneness to depression: ‘again and again’, 122

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says Jasper, ‘I have relapsed into these moods . . . my black humours’. There’s the same pattern to be seen in Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy’s heroine also succumbs to such depressions. Alienated from society after leaving her husband for Vronsky, feeling guilty, and increasingly anxious and paranoid, Anna becomes madly jealous. In Italy, where they have fled in order to be together, Vronsky’s social freedom is deeply hurtful: ‘As for the amusements of bachelor existence, which had provided Vronksy with entertainment on previous tours abroad, they could not be thought of, since the sole attempt of the sort had led to a sudden attack of depression in Anna, quite out of proportion with the cause – a late supper with bachelor friends.’ That out-of-proportion depression is Anna’s jealousy. Lead contender for the crown of ‘most excessively melancholy’ is Goethe’s eponymous hero of The Sorrows of Young Werther. In this eighteenth-century epistolary novel – one of jealousy’s founding texts – Werther’s sorrow and sexual jealousy are so poetically blended that Werther-Fieber (‘Werther Fever’) swept Europe, inspiring many young men to ape Werther’s dress, and even his violent end. In the story, Werther leaves home and in a small German hamlet falls in love with Lotte, a judge’s daughter, despite knowing that she’s already engaged to Albert. He is infatuated with her, demanding her time and her attention – yet feeling that he could not hope to win her. He is jealous of Albert, but says he also admires his fine character. His jealousy can’t be properly expressed (he chastises a jealous young man soon after befriending Lotte), and neither can his love be consummated. Werther grows more and more melancholic and wretched: ‘God knows’, 123

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he exclaims, ‘I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.’ Everything – the felling of trees, the incarceration of a peasant – convinces him that this world is not for him. Using Albert’s pistols, he shoots himself in the head, and takes twelve hours to die. This satisfyingly protracted end rejects the dictates of reason and plumbs the excesses of emotion – both melancholy and jealousy. What seems to be illustrated by the art and literature of this period is an intense desire to represent what goes on within the human mind – no matter how outrageous, painful, irrational or frowned upon. From the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing attention was given to an exploration of emotion in the arts, crescendoing in the Romantic period, and climaxing at the time of Paul Ranson’s lithograph and Munch’s melancholy paintings. The interest in this period, increasingly, is in feelings, in the invisible. Munch wants to make the feeling of jealousy visible and he uses the melancholy situation of his painting and its subject to achieve this – or the reverse if you prefer: jealousy brings melancholy to life. On the other hand, Paul Ranson is content to depict the situation only, and here this essentially means the jealous triangle. He stays with the situation – making the visible visible, as it were – but hints at ambiguity and emotional depth in his title. These and many other artists were responding at this precise juncture to distinct intellectual pressures to understand and reimagine emotions and sexuality, and to try to depict how the visible is controlled by invisible or inner forces. 124

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* * * In Europe, the final decades of the nineteenth century exhibited an explosion in cultural depictions of jealousy. A number of its best artistic examples have been surveyed: Munch’s series on jealousy and melancholy; Strindberg’s Night of Jealousy; Gauguin’s Are You Jealous?; Gustave Moreau’s Galatéa; and Klimt’s Der Neid. Jealousy also gripped many of the period’s greatest writers: Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), an intense first-person account of a jealous rage; Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), in which Angel Clare flees to Brazil in jealous confusion after learning that Tess has a sexual past; Dostoevsky in The Eternal Husband (1870), where a man finds himself entangled with his dead lover’s cuckolded husband. In music, too, Giacomo Puccini’s two great operas of the 1890s present the spectacle of jealousy and focus on its sometimes tragic outcomes. The force of jealousy in La Bohème is registered in vicissitudes of two love affairs. Mimì and Rodolfo’s relationship breaks down because of Rodolfo’s terrible jealousy, yet that is revealed as being a cover for his real fears that he has consumption – the very disease that Mimì dies of shortly after being reconciled with him. In Tosca much of the plot is driven by the sexual triangle comprised by the heroine, her lover Cavaradossi, and the jealous and lust-fuelled chief of police, Scarpia. (Supposedly Puccini was inspired by his own wife: his weakness for beautiful women was as well known, as were her public fits of jealousy.) Leoš Janáček’s Žárlivost (Jealousy), which was composed as an orchestral overture to his opera, Jenufa, of 1895, pulls in a wholly abstract direction. 125

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Janáček aims to evoke feelings and the invisible – but through the medium of orchestral music. There are many other realist depictions of jealousy during this period – good, and not so good. These paintings belong to the tradition exemplified by Paul Ranson rather than Edvard Munch. Petrus Renier Hubertus Knarren’s Jealousy (1861), Haynes King’s Jealousy and Flirtation (1874), Tom Roberts’ Jealousy (1885) and Mykola Pymonenko’s Jealousy (1901) all depict the classic scenario of the love triangle: a couple, with a woman looking on jealously. There’s little attempt to evoke the inner experience, the feelings of the sufferers. Knarren and King portray the ‘third’ in a (naturally) green dress, off to one side or in the background, whereas in Roberts’ and Pymonenko’s later pictures she has moved to the foreground. These realistic depictions of a standardized situation run alongside the more inventive and abstract artistic portrayals of jealousy, gradually giving way to them – but only for a time. They are not particularly powerful in their depiction of jealousy, but their frequency and unexpected popularity at this point in time is. Consider Tihamer Margitay’s Jealousy (1892). The woman in pink coyly bows her head while the moustachioed gallant flirts with her. Their companion (who could be a governess but for her age), dressed virginally in white, chin-strokes her – I guess – jealous feelings. She looks more surprised than jealous. None of the anodyne facial expressions necessarily indicate jealousy. But there is the triangle, and the deliberate artistic decision to place the woman in white not on the bench, where her place is occupied by a hat, but on a straight-backed wooden 126

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39 Tihamer Margitay, Jealousy, 1892

chair more usually seen in a dining room than a park. This increases the sense of distance between the couple and the woman. The latter occupies a completely different space – figurative, moral – from the other two. Is this a depiction of jealousy, rather than, say, a painting about a prudish reaction to blatant public flirting? Is this painting censuring the kind of behaviour and emotion that it believes should be kept inside – behind locked doors, within the privacy of marriage, repressed from the conscious mind? Paradoxically, jealousy is placed firmly on the side of virtue and decorum in this painting. The jealousy of the woman in white presents more of a censuring, censoring gaze than one of sexual longing or frustration. These are precisely the pressures at play at the end of the nineteenth century, a time of huge upheaval in the status of 127

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the two sexes, and sex in general. English translations of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (in 1892) and Havelock’s Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (in 1897) began to speak about ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, homosexuality. In 1897 the National Union for Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed in the United Kingdom, with the aim to make the politically invisible – women, that is to say – increasingly visible. Equality became a third term in a triangle comprised of oppressive men and newly strengthening women – something which was jealously guarded and fought for. The threat to men from female action, authority and sexuality was real enough. It was widely believed that women were more likely than men to be possessed by passions, and therefore lost to reason, so they needed to be controlled by medical means. The ‘scientific’ grounds for ideas about women’s exceptional sensitivity to passions were elaborated in numerous nineteenth-century studies on ‘hysteria’, a condition that, since the Hippocratic physicians of fifth-century Greece, had been associated with women. It was said to be the result of a wandering uterus or ascending womb, or of sexual excess or sexual continence. Masha Belenky sees many parallels between the ways hysteria and jealousy were described in medical and didactic French literature in this period: both were gendered ‘diseases’ that defined women and arose from their supposedly ‘innate’ characteristics. The seminal work on hysteria was Josef Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, with its famous case of ‘Anna O.’ (real name Bertha Pappenheim). Twenty-one years old, she spent most of her time nursing her father who was ill with tuberculosis. Her first symptom was a 128

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severe and persistent cough which seemed to have no organic basis. In late 1880 Breuer, a well-respected Jewish physician from Vienna, was called upon, and he diagnosed Anna O. with a hysteria – an extreme nervous ailment that lacked any discernible physiological cause. She developed a panoply of ailments during the eighteen months that Breuer worked with her – paralysis, disturbances in her vision, hearing and speech (for instance, only speaking in English), mood swings, ‘split personality’, hallucinations, anxiety, amnesia and eating disorders – which spectacularly intensified at the time her father died in 1881 and after. Breuer’s treatment came to focus on letting her tell the stories of her ‘private theatre’, as she called it. When she vocalized memories and related emotional events that gave meaning to a particular symptom, it suddenly abated. This ‘cathartic method’ of free association focused new attention on ideas rather than bodily damage – and on treatment through words rather than genital massage, which had become a popular treatment for hysterics that was prescribed by physicians. The ‘talking cure’ (a term coined by Anna O.) was born. So was an understanding of hysteria as issuing not from a roving organ, nor from a nebulous form of heredity, but from the mind – the inner world. Anna O.’s actual ‘cure’ is contentious. Breuer described the climactic moment when she spoke about ‘the anxiety hallucination which was the root of all her illness’ – seeing a black snake when at her father’s deathbed – and then being ‘free of all the innumerable individual disorders which she had formerly shown’. The reality was not so neat or definitive: Bertha was not getting better, but progressively worse, still suffering muted 129

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versions of the hysterical illnesses she had presented to Breuer, and now addicted to morphine and chloral to boot. She was admitted to sanatoria on a number of occasions over the coming years. (She did eventually recover, and became a leading light in Jewish feminism, translating Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1899, and heading the largest Jewish women’s organization in Germany, among many other worthy enterprises. The strictures placed on women in this period were a central concern of hers.) If neither Freud nor Breuer really challenged the idea that Anna O. was cured in writing, the cause of her hysteria came to divide the two men and to estrange them from one another. Freud, who never treated Anna O. himself, insisted in 1909 that sexuality was at the heart of it – specifically her incestuous fantasies about her father; Breuer did not agree. Freud would develop his ideas around infantile sexuality (which, whether acts were real or imagined, he thought led to repressed memories, hysteria and neurosis) in the later 1890s, and come to make far more of the jealousy involved in a child’s desire for its parent of the opposite sex – and the accompanying jealousy of the same-sexed parent – in his Oedipus complex. (We’ll come back to this in the next chapter.) Anna O.’s ‘hysteria’ was henceforth a byword for the repression of sexual jealousy. ( John Huston’s movie, Freud: The Secret Passion, based loosely on a script by Jean-Paul Sartre, continues the tradition.) Jealousy, to follow Freud, became the invisible cause. Jealousy seems to have played an even larger part in the drama of the birth of psychoanalysis, however. According 130

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to one of Freud’s letters sent in October 1883 to his fiancée Martha Bernays, Mrs Breuer had become jealous of her husband’s work with the enthralling Anna O. (Apparently Breuer spent over a thousand hours with her.) There were rumours. Could it be that Breuer’s abrupt termination of the treatment was not because Anna O. was ‘cured’, but because Mathilde was jealous? Even in Breuer’s case notes there is evident a clear erotic charge between doctor and patient. This ‘transference’ became a mainstay of psychoanalytic practice. And perhaps that explains the persistence of a truly outlandish story about how Anna O.’s case concluded: that one evening Breuer was called to her room to find her writhing with abdominal pains, claiming that the baby she had got by Breuer was coming – at which Breuer promptly turned tail and fled, taking a second honeymoon with his wife, during which they conceived a real child. Who told this tall story? Freud himself, who informed a friend much later on that, when he ‘was in a position to guess what really happened with Br’s patient long after we parted company’, Breuer had mentioned this affair to him. Freud apparently then wrote about this (though there is no published evidence), which Breuer’s daughter read and which he then confirmed to her on his deathbed. The story is full of holes and can be disproved – yet it was repeated by quite respectable sources over the years, even to today. It seems to have been concocted by Freud: was it his fantasy pregnancy, not Anna O.’s? Perhaps what this wild tale does show is the truth of the jealousy at the heart of the relationship between the two men. The legendary ending 131

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envisages Breuer as weak (‘He took flight in conventional horror and passed on the patient to a colleague’, Freud says in the same letter), with the intimation that the stronger Freud could have prevailed. Though Freud always generously credited Breuer with laying the foundations for psychoanalysis, perhaps he was magnanimous in his triumph where, earlier, jealousy had reigned. * * * Freud’s psychoanalysis was not the only method by which the period could look within the human mind. Emil Kraepelin, the other giant of psychiatry, was born three months before and just 300 miles away from Freud, yet neither acknowledged the other – and their work could not have been more different. Kraepelin’s research was primarily focused on gross mental disturbances and, after failing to discover and chart their physiological origins, he sought rather to classify symptoms based on sober observation and statistical analysis over extended periods of time. In doing so he established the distinct category ‘dementia praecox’ in 1893, later renamed ‘schizophrenia’, and also ‘discovered’ manic-depression. Naturally he saw his fair share of jealousy: ‘morbid jealousy’, he says, ‘very often develops in drunkards, perhaps on account of the inevitable moral estrangement of husband and wife’, and he noted that in senile patients, ‘the ideas of being wronged often take the form of delusions of jealousy’. Like the majority of psychiatric practitioners today, he put his trust in pharmacology as the best treatment for alleviating distress and altering deleterious moods. It was not only Freud who looked hard at the 132

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internal operations of jealousy to divine a psychological understanding of emotion. Alois Alzheimer, later a collaborator with and assistant of Kraepelin, also peered inside the jealous mind. A woman, known as Auguste D., was brought to him by her husband, Karl Deter, on 25 November 1901, at the Städtische Heilanstalt für Irre und Epileptische (City Hospital for the Mentally Ill and Epileptics) in Frankfurt. She presented with excessive jealousy and delusions of her husband’s infidelity. Alzheimer, at that time a young doctor who was pursuing research in psychiatry and neuropathology, interviewed Auguste and admitted her under his care. A note in her file from the following day describes her helplessness: ‘She sits on the bed with a helpless expression. What is your name? Auguste. What is your husband’s name? Auguste. Your husband? Ah, my husband. She looks as if she didn’t understand the question. Are you married? To Auguste. Mrs D.? Yes, yes, Auguste D.’ The very relationship her morbid jealousy was so madly zealous to protect had crumbled in her mind. When Auguste died, Alzheimer asked for her brain to be sent to him for examination and wrote up her case in 1906. Without naming Auguste, he described her earliest symptom being ‘a strong feeling of jealousy towards her husband. Very soon she showed rapidly increasing memory impairments; she was disoriented carrying objects to and fro in her flat and hid them. Sometimes she felt that someone wanted to kill her and began to scream loudly.’ The jealousy and distress were subsequently rationalized as the results of an underlying, invisible illness, Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer had in a sense reversed 133

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40 Auguste D., an unsettling beauty

the process that Freud so popularized. Jealousy became a symptom rather than a cause in Alzheimer’s understanding of the plight of the poor Auguste D. But, like Freud, he was interested in the inner life of jealousy. Freud and Alzheimer seem therefore to have reflected the same intellectual pressures that 134

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were influencing artists of the period. They aimed to give voice to the inner feelings, that which is obscured behind or associated with the visible façade of emotion. Which came first in this period: a fascination with jealousy, or the scientific, psychological and artistic plumbing of the emotion? Is the new emphasis of the 1890s the product of Freud’s work, or is Freud’s work the product of this new emphasis? It is impossible to answer the question. The inordinate interest in jealousy in this decade certainly offered an intellectual niche for Freud’s remarkable speculation. For the brilliant French critic Jean Clair, neither jealousy nor Freud came first. Rather 1895, when Studies in Hysteria was published, was the peak year of the trend for exploring modes by which apparently invisible forces could come to be seen to drive the visible. The inner, in other words, became a causative force. So it was in 1895, in a different realm, that Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the use of the X-ray for making visible the inner, invisible shapes of the human body (and which the hubristic August Strindberg claimed to have invented ten years previously). In 1895, while Munch was in Paris, the Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean, held the first public screening of film reels at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris: it had become possible to record the visible and replay it across time and space. And in 1895 Alexander Stephanovich Popov displayed wireless telegraphy to the world: speech could be transmitted invisibly. Paul Cézanne painted Mont St Victoire for the first time, with the, inner lineaments of the mountain as important in the representation as its surface. These discoveries and achievements built 135

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on many more of the later nineteenth century’s leaps forward in bringing the invisible to light: a new understanding of cellular pathology, germ theory and the ways in which disease was transmitted; the discovery of radioactivity; the publication of Mendeleev’s periodic table; the establishment of the neuron (named in 1891) as the basic building block of nervous system (a discovery that convinced Freud briefly to return to neurology to pursue his ‘great project’, fruitlessly as it turned out). All of these events come together at the inception of what is now termed ‘modernity’: in art, the desire to represent the world not as it is, as it is visible, but how we discern its invisible side through the emotions. So it is that the unconscious mind, as Freud termed it, is where the real activity of life takes place, where the outside world is registered through the internal and invisible interplay of drives and instincts. Nestled in the core of the most significant psychological discoveries of the century, jealousy’s role in figuring the decade’s fascination with the invisible and the visible should not be overlooked. The place of children in the family and the often jealous reactions that they experience and can provoke is the focus of the next chapter. Freud believed that the child felt intense jealousy towards its parents – and sometimes, that jealousy is reciprocated.

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The Greek god Cronus (Saturn, in Roman mythology) ate five of his six children as soon as they were born – two boys and three girls. Cronus had learned that one of them would overthrow him as ruler of the universe, so he devoured them to prevent the prophecy coming true. He was not afraid of his children as much as he was jealous of what they represented: a youth and strength that he was beginning to lose, and which would push him from power as he grew older. After all, he’d done the same to his father, Uranus: he’d castrated him, throwing his testicles into the sea, and took the throne with his sister Rhea. And of course Cronus’s children did depose him. Rhea gave her voracious partner a swaddled stone to eat instead of their sixth child, Zeus. After he’d grown up in secret, Zeus returned and forced Cronus to disgorge his two brothers and three sisters from his jealous gizzards. They joined him in the fight against Cronus and the Titans, eventually ousting the old king from his throne. Goya’s painting, one of the fourteen so-called ‘Black Paintings’ that he created near the end of his life and after 137

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41 Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, 1819–23

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enduring years of warfare in Spain, gets to the heart of the horror, violence and madness of Cronus’s cannibalistic infanticide. Goya was appalled by the way that the fatherland chewed up its children, which may add to the power of the painting. The baby that Cronus is feasting on has adult proportions, and the myth is very much about children growing up, the destruction that their maturity will bring for existing adults. Goya’s emphasis on Cronus’s eyes – the whites of them matching the white pallor of the baby’s flesh – emphasizes the jealousy at the heart of the myth, as well as the extremity of the atrocity (even Cronus seems shocked by what’s going on). A friend of mine loved this picture and kept it in his law office. Unsurprisingly he didn’t get on at all with his father. For him, jealousy is what makes families families. ‘The parents want to eat their children’, he once growled; ‘the children want to kill their parents, and siblings spend a pile of their youth meditating how most safely they can slaughter one another.’ It’s a bleak view of the family – and of course it’s exaggerated. But jealousy is common in the vast majority of families, whether their members would like to admit to it or not. The Cronus myth represents one version of family jealousy – of parents for their children – that is not usually talked about and not much recognized. But it exists. Children can also be jealous of their parents, parents jealous of each other, and siblings jealous of one another. That last form of jealousy, which made an appearance in Chapter 2, is probably the most common and ‘accepted’ type of jealousy in the family. But children and parents (to use myth as metaphor) feast on each other all the time: gobbling resources, ingesting and ejecting each other in 139

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fantasy and reality, fighting for their place at the table. The family often bears the brunt of jealous attacks. Jealousy can consume families from within and from without. At its most benign, family jealousy between siblings reflects a competition for resources – coupled with the bonds of kinship, which are equally strong. St Augustine in his Confessions described having ‘personally watched and studied a jealous baby [zelantem parvulum]. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk. Who is unaware of this fact of experience?’ This can lead to all sorts of jealous rivalry and internecine warfare. Remember Ingmar Bergman? It’s evident in the animal kingdom where actual family cannibalism also takes place. The animal behaviourist Scott Forbes makes some fascinating links between sibling rivalry in animals and humans. This is not sexual jealousy: the ‘birds and the bees’ involved are real. Forbes describes how ornithologists, as well as herpetologists and mammalogists found that ‘infanticide – including siblicide – was a routine feature of family life in many species’. It is most commonly seen in birds. Some birds lay two eggs ‘to insure against failure of their first egg to hatch. If both hatch, the second chick is redundant to the parents, and a potentially lethal competitor to the first-hatched progeny’. The healthy older chick often kills the younger to eliminate the competition. This is called ‘obligate siblicide’. (There is also ‘facultative siblicide’ in which the death of a nest-mate doesn’t necessarily occur.) Sometimes the parents actually encourage siblicide. After all, if resources are scarce, it’s better that the strongest offspring survive and that their 140

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parental efforts go to ensuring that happens. (It’s the old story of genetic replication again: surviving offspring are more likely to have the strongest genes, and they are the ones that have the best chances of reproducing later and passing those genes on.) Forbes thinks that such extreme jealous reactions are not common in the human species, but ‘the more modest forms of sibling rivalry that are ubiquitous in species with extensive parental care – the scrambles for food and begging competitions – resemble more closely the dynamics that occur in human families’. Perhaps this fundamental link is why sibling jealousy is such a common theme in life and letters. Forbes paints it as a normal, natural and largely unperturbing force in human life, but some of our oldest stories point to its violence. The most famous of all is the murder of Abel by Cain. If you believe the Book of Genesis 4:1–8, this was the first jealous murder in human history – the first to be born caused the first to die. Jealous fratricide is at the heart of it all. According to the biblical story, God was pleased with Abel’s offering of a lamb, but not with Cain’s offering of some leftover harvest and his selfish expectation of something in return – God’s love, or some special standing in his eyes. Cain, disappointed and enraged, killed his brother in the field. There is the jealous triangle of Cain, Abel and God, and Cain’s heightened emotional reaction when he feels the threat of losing God’s love to Abel. This particular type of jealous family conflict echoes in many other stories: Joseph and his brothers (told not just in Genesis, but also in Thomas Mann’s huge and intimidating Joseph and his Brothers), Jacob and Esau, Thyestes and Atreus, 141

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42 A fifteenth-century depiction of the first jealous brothers

Romulus and Remus, Polynices and Eteocles, Hesiod and his brother, the Pandavas and their cousins the Kauravas in the Mahabharata, and Caracalla and Geta, his brother and co-regent of the Roman Empire (Geta was murdered by his brother in the arms of his mother, Julia Domna). The conflict between brothers sometimes stands an emblem for civil war. John Steinbeck’s rewriting of the story of Cain and Abel in East of Eden stretches back to the American Civil War. This great novel focuses on two families each with biblical resonances. 142

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Charles Trask, a farmer, beats his younger brother Adam nearly to death after being rejected by their father; and Adam’s sons, Caleb and Aron, do not treat one another any better. In a climactic scene, Adam rejects Cal’s gift of money, telling his eldest son that ‘I would have been so happy if you could have given me – well, what your brother has – pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his progress’. In a fit of jealousy Cal takes Aron to a brothel and reveals to him their mother, Cathy, who is a prostitute there, leading the disillusioned and disgusted Aron to enlist in the army. He’s killed in the last year of the First World War. It is not only in literature that such vehement sibling jealousy is to be found. The legendary actor-sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland had a famously jealousy-ridden relationship. They admitted to loathing one another from childhood. At the apex of their jealous triangle was their mother

43 Staring sisters: Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine 143

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Lillian, who raised them alone after her husband’s many infidelities and eventual elopement with their Japanese housekeeper, and who flip-flopped in her affection for the girls for most of their lives. Joan, the younger of the sisters, said that ‘I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from her all through my childhood’, and she spoke in her autobiography of her sister’s unhappiness at having to share parental attention with the new baby. Lillian seems to have encouraged the rivalry between her girls. Their both becoming Oscarwinning actresses, sometimes vying for the same roles, and one year even competing against each other for the Oscar for best actress ( Joan won), was not surprising at all. But it hardly helped the family dynamic. (Olivia actually pipped Joan for the role of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, though the way that Joan told it, she had been asked first.) Even Lillian revived her stage career once the ‘de Havilland’ name was getting well known. Things between the sisters apparently came to a climax with their mother’s death from cancer in 1975 when they ceased once and for all to speak to one another. Joan was blunt in her feelings: ‘I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it’, she told the Hollywood Reporter in 1978. The jealous sins of the parents really do seem to be visited on the children, for Joan fell out with both of her children, Deborah and Martita. This was not just a sisterly jealous squabble. Joan was not reconciled with her sister at the time of her death in 2013 and seems not to have made amends with her children either. There’s no getting away from Cronus. 144

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Lillian de Havilland was just one of millions of parents who, in the first half of the twentieth century, would come under more scrutiny than ever before. The prevention of sibling jealousy was in the scientific air. Peter Stearns puts the rise in sibling rivalry in 1920s America down to a number of significant factors. Parents were far more likely to recognize it at this time. A whole raft of ‘scientific’ expertise had arisen warning against the wide and early intrusion of jealousy into childhood and advising parents how to curb it. Sibling rivalry became a formal concept, and the responsibility for dealing with it lay in parental hands – no wonder it sold plethoric quantities of books and magazines to anxious mothers and fathers. Parents were not helped with young children in the household either. The new trend for grandparents to live separately and the decline in servants pushed the responsibility back onto a new nuclear family. And the falling birth rate meant fewer older siblings were available to assist, and rivalry for adult affection may have grown fiercer with smaller sibling groups. Stearns also argues that this was precisely the point at which adult jealousy was being re-evaluated: new tensions about the inappropriateness and danger of adult jealousy were displaced onto the childhood arena. He argues that it was now vital that children’s early impulses were monitored and ‘cured’ to guard against a future abnormal personality. Adult jealousy was ‘swallowed’ by this new socially efficacious category. Sibling rivalry was something that people should worry over and could ‘do something’ about. * * * 145

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Sigmund Freud was behind the new focus on the rivalry and jealousy at the heart of the infant experience. He was fascinated by sibling rivalry: ‘The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder, envies and fears him, or meets his oppressor with the first stirrings of a love of liberty and a sense of justice.’ Freud’s Oedipus complex was one of the great cultural formulations of the 1890s, and became one of the most influential ideas of psychology in the twentieth century. It was named after the Greek mythological figure Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. This fulfilled the oracular prophecy despite Oedipus’s father’s desperate attempts to avoid it – by leaving his baby son on a mountainside to die. Examining neurotic and normal children, and reflecting on the potency of the myth, Freud postulated that every child is a mini Oedipus: ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.’ In the first phase of its life the libidinous infant (for Freud, the infant was an extremely libidinous being) loves its mother and admires its father. But, aged between three and five years, the child’s libido becomes linked with its genital zones. Thence it experiences sexual desire for its mother and aggression towards its father; the child is profoundly jealous of its father, who is now seen as a rival. The child wants exclusive access to its mother. Freud later modified his theory and claimed that male and female children navigate the Oedipus complex in different ways. Freud maintained that boys develop castration 146

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anxiety from either seeing female genitals (lacking a penis) or overhearing threats that ‘it’ will be chopped off or drop off if played with: the powerful father is a constant castrating threat. Better, therefore, to keep on his right side. Girls, on the other hand, develop penis envy: the female Oedipus lacks the organ by which she could sexually possess the mother, and mother becomes (metaphorically speaking) blameworthy for the young girl’s castration. The girl therefore redirects her attention to the father. In both sexes, the Oedipus complex resolves as ego (the sense of self) wins out over id (the disorderly force of lust): the taboo incestuous feelings and wishes are repressed, and identification with the same-sex parent comes into play and is integrated in the superego (the conscience). The boy’s likeness to his father protects him. It offers a promise one day of wielding his father’s power and having any woman (bar his mother). The girl’s alliance with her mother comes with the consolation that, though they both lack a penis, a baby can be a good substitute. For child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who followed but deviated from Freud, the early maternal relationship is more important, and is already riven with primitive Oedipal jealousies. In her famous paper ‘Envy and Gratitude’, Klein describes how envy makes the infant want to enter or possess what she called ‘the primal good object’ (the breast) and to ruin it. This aggressive, destructive drive, even towards what nourishes us and gives us life, is present from birth and is behind much invidious human behaviour. A part of human development is internalizing this good object, absorbing the envy as well as its diametric opposite, gratitude – our feeling 147

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about whatever produces satisfaction. Klein had a lot to say about jealousy and envy. Jealousy she describes as ‘a threeperson situation in which the love that the subject feels is his due . . . has been taken away or is in danger of being taken away from him by his rival’, whereas envy is ‘the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable – the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it’. Envy, for Melanie Klein, is therefore a far worse emotion than jealousy. For her, that’s where the anger lies. But it exists on the same spectrum as jealousy. These ideas of Freud and Klein are often ridiculed. Most people believe that the Oedipus complex should be hastily forgotten about; that, because there is no verifiable scientific proof of such speculations about child development, they are without value. Freud himself certainly thought the Oedipus complex could be witnessed and verified – and in his own life. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess he wrote, ‘I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood’. Ernest Jones, a pupil of Freud’s and his biographer, went even further, dramatically reconstructing the origins of Freud’s psychological speculation: Before he [Freud] was two years old, for the second time another baby was on the way, and soon visibly so. Jealousy of the intruder and anger for whoever had seduced his mother into such an unfaithful proceeding were inevitable. Discarding his knowledge of the sleeping conditions of the 148

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house, he rejected the unbearable thought that the nefarious person could be his beloved and perfect father.

Is this really proof? Or does this tell more about Freud’s own psychological make-up than anything else? There is no concrete scientific evidence to support Freud’s theory, yet the Oedipus complex does have the truth and the appeal of myth and poetry. It says something important about how individual human subjects become part of the wider social structure – how they have to tear themselves away, often violently, from their first primary caregivers to live in the world at large. The ‘family romance’, as Freud called the incessant intergenerational rebellion, is an essential component of natural selection. Freud himself believed that mythology and literature have a unique ability to reflect an elemental, psychological truth – that jealous rivalry between children and parents is enacted and dramatized again and again over the centuries. Another Greek myth that also reverberated in the psychoanalytic mind was that of Electra. (Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s sometime student, collaborator and enemy, proposed that girls go through the Electra complex instead of the Oedipus complex. Freud didn’t agree.) According to the fifth-century bce myth, Electra, along with her brother Orestes, plotted to kill their mother Clytemnestra after she and her lover Aegisthus had murdered their father, Agamemnon. To be fair to Clytemnestra, Agamemnon had already killed their eldest daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to the gods so he could send his ships to fight the Trojan War. And he then had the temerity to indifferently return from the fight with a war 149

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prize in tow: Cassandra. They both felt the wrath of Clytemnestra’s murderous jealousy. Electra and Orestes eventually plotted and carried out the pay-back murder of their mother, Clytemnestra. ‘Electra’ has become shorthand for ‘father-fixation’ and being trapped in an unresolved state of hostility with one’s mother. The jealousy of a daughter for her mother may be something that is commonly felt. It is not something that is commonly dramatized. Alice Sebold’s black-humoured novel The Almost Moon paints the Electra complex in painfully realistic colours. It has one of the finest opening sentences that I can remember: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ It’s all uphill from there. Sebold’s narrator, Helen Knighty, kills her now old, infirm and agoraphobic mother Clair on the spur of the moment, after she had fallen at home and voided her bowels. Clair had been a bad mother, jealous of her daughter’s marriage, looks and fertility, and she liked to belittle her: ‘Manny and I were talking, and we think it’s your face that needs work. Your body is still fine.’ Helen was profoundly jealous of her mother as she grew up. She’d been excluded from having a proper emotional relationship with her father, who was obsessed with his wife and who died by suicide. Helen’s own ex-husband Jake had recognized Helen’s ‘daddy complex’, saying, ‘Your father . . . Did you think you were marrying him when you married me?’ Helen had been a model daughter, dutiful but intensely suffocated – until she suffocates her mother. Only then does she realize that the desire to murder her mother ‘had been an innocent urge I carried inside me like a spleen, optional but always present, in some way part of the 150

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whole’. After stuffing her mother’s body into a freezer in the basement of the family home, Helen confesses to Jake: ‘You do realize what you’ve done, right?’ Weakly I nodded my head. ‘You really hated her, didn’t you?’ ‘And loved.’ ‘You could have taken off, done something else instead.’ ‘What?’ ‘I don’t know. Anything but this.’ ‘She was my mother,’ I said.

The Almost Moon might seem to you unbelievable, preposterous and distasteful, but with that love and hate enmeshed, Helen is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the Kleinian child. Her enraged killing – ‘her hand on top of a towel on top of [her mother’s] face smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again’ – represented ‘a child’s vendetta finally fulfilled’. Jealousy, pain and loss felt from the beginning of her life came to a murderous end for her mother. Boys will also strike back at their fathers. Oedipus kills his father without realizing that Laius actually is his real father, but there are plenty of other examples where the act is intentional. One of my favourites is the rumour that circulated in ancient Rome that Brutus, one of the men who stabbed Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, was in fact his son. It comes from the Roman historian Suetonius, who says that ‘Some have written that when Marcus Brutus attacked him, Julius Caesar said in Greek, “You too, my son?”’ Caesar could not have been a 151

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mightier father, real or symbolic, inspiring fear and jealousy of his power and status. Was Brutus playing out an unresolved Oedipus complex? Freud apparently thought that Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which features the murder of father by son, was one of the best novels ever written. It’s easy to see why. Not only does it ruminate on central questions of God, morality and free will (the latter of which Freud disagreed with), it also convincingly illustrates the Oedipus complex. Fyodor and his eldest son Dmitri, both similar in temperament, become entangled in sexual jealousy as they begin fighting over the same woman, the beautiful Grushenka. Rebellion against paternal authority is everywhere in the novel. Eventually Fyodor is murdered by his bastard son, but the three brothers are implicated by design and share the psychological guilt. And just sometimes, sons can jealously strike out against their mothers. (Mothers seem to suffer more than their fair share of punishment. They represent the entire cosmos for human infants. Is this why they are the target of violence from progeny who’ve not managed to break free?) Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho illustrates this rather well. The peculiar hotelier Norman Bates murders his mother before the film begins, keeping her corpse in the cellar, and assumes both her identity (or, at least, a shrill and dominating female one) and her wardrobe. (Klein’s idea of internalizing the ‘good breast’ is taken to an extreme.) Dressed as an elderly woman, he slashes Marion Crane in the shower – playing with the cliché of the mother jealously guarding her precious son from other women’s attentions. In the end Norman is locked up, 152

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diagnosed, and contentedly reunited with his mother as she takes full possession of his mind. Jealousy runs like a thread through the making of this film. Norman Bates was based on the killer Ed Gein, who exhumed bodies of women he thought looked like his mother and collected an assortment of female body parts, including skins he dressed up in. Mrs Gein brought up her two boys to view all women apart from her as harlots, and Ed killed his brother so as to be the only one in his mother’s affections: the Cain and Abel similarity stands out. The recent movie which charted the making of Psycho, starring Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, placed some emphasis on the director’s supposed jealousy, depicting him as suspecting his wife was having an affair. It also dwelled on Hitchcock’s fixation on his own mother, to whom he had been deeply attached – though the recurring theme of domineering mothers in Hitchcock’s oeuvre might point to a problem he experienced in his Oedipal transition. Hitchcock’s films tap into both fears and secret desires. Perhaps jealousy is at the centre of it all. * * * Allophagous offspring – jealous of their siblings and jealous of their parents – are one thing. That type of jealousy is almost expected nowadays, and discussed quite freely. It is quite another for parents to be jealous of their own children, and to act on that jealousy with violence. It’s an ugly topic, one that few will talk about or admit exists, even in its quieter, more insidious forms: competing for adulation, having to be right, always knowing better, keeping a child ‘in their place’ through 153

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tiny daily humiliations. Unfortunately this sort of discreet abuse happens more often than we think – and is rarely attributed to parental jealousy. Parents more frequently act out of jealousy when they feel their relationship with their child is being threatened. Helen Galli, an eighty-one-year-old pensioner from Pennsylvania, was found guilty in 2013 of trying to poison her son Victor’s girlfriend, Dawn Simyan, because she was jealous of the amount of time the two were spending together. The defence argued that Dawn had poisoned herself to get attention from Victor, while the prosecution called it a jealous triangle and slung a number of accusations around the courtroom, calling Helen ‘evil, vindictive and controlling’, and Victor ‘a momma’s boy’. Remarkably, Helen endangered the life of the very son she was seemingly jealous of: she gave Victor the glass of berry juice laced with antifreeze for him to take to his girlfriend next door, not knowing whether he would drink it or not. In court, a neighbour testified that Helen had asked her whether she knew someone who could blow up Dawn’s car – another extremely risky plan that could easily have backfired. And twenty years earlier Helen had actually been convicted of arson after convincing her grandchildren to burn down their parents’ house in an attempt to kill another son’s estranged wife. Victor had recently come into a great deal of money, and the prosecution used that as another reason for Helen wanting Dawn out of the picture. Sometimes parental sexual jealousy literally consumes children within it. The ancient Greek tale of Tereus, Procne and Philomela weaves in different kinds of jealousy and violence. It 154

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first appears in Sophocles, though Ovid also gives a version in his Metamorphoses, and it reappears in English literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Tereus, a tyrant from Thrace in northern Greece, was convinced by his lonely wife Procne to bring her sister, Philomela, to visit. He travelled to Athens to collect the beautiful Philomela and, on the way back, he raped her, cut out her tongue so she could not tell anyone what happened, locked her in a hut in the forest, and lied to Procne that her sister died on the journey. Philomela, unable to speak, wove a tapestry that told her tale and had it smuggled to her sister. The sisters united in revenge, murdering Tereus’s and Procne’s son Itys and cooking his body in a casserole. Procne fed this to Tereus, then showed him Itys’s decapitated head.

44 Peter Paul Rubens, Tereus Confronted With the Head of his Son, 1636–38 155

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Realizing what his wife had done, Tereus flew into a rage, and was just about to kill the two women when, in Ovid’s version, the gods interceded, transforming the three into birds – Tereus became a hoopoe, Procne a swallow, and Philomela a nightingale. What emotion drives the women? Ovid’s Philomela protests to Tereus before being silenced, ‘I have become a concubine, my sister’s rival; you, a husband to both. Now Procne must be my enemy’, thereby signalling and denying a sexual jealousy at one and the same time. Procne’s motives are more complex. A straightforward desire for vengeance at the violence done to her sister is the point made by Ovid, while the recently discovered hypothesis of Sophocles’ play seems to underscore instead her jealousy: ‘When Procne realized the truth, driven mad by jealousy . . . she took Itys and killed him and after cooking him served him up to Tereus’. Jealousy of whom? The betrayal of her husband? Or jealousy of her sister? Why does Procne kill Itys? Is it just jealousy of her husband? Or does the jealousy find a second target in Itys, his father’s lookalike, as if the child were the erring partner? Rubens’ painting emphasizes the mirror image of Tereus in his son’s dismembered head. The denouement is death by terrible jealousy. Real life is sometimes no better, though it seldom is as complicated. One of the saddest cases of a murdering mother happened in Sydney in 1990. Mrs Andre Chayna, who was said by her neighbours to have been a nice lady and a terrific mother, killed her sister-in-law Cheryl-Ann Najim and her two children in a series of frenzied attacks. Andre later told police that Cheryl 156

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was reading a letter at the kitchen table: ‘I put a rope round her neck but not work and I get knife and kill her. I wrap body in blanket and put in back yard near fence.’ The body was stabbed multiple times and the throat was slit. Later that day Andre read her eight-year-old daughter, Sandy, a bedtime story: ‘I say to her everything’s alright, I want to read her a story. I then got knife and kill her.’ The little girl was stabbed in the throat. Andre hid Sandy’s body under a mound of bedclothes as if the child were asleep. The bodies remained undiscovered. Two days later, Andre picked up her other daughter who had been away at camp. ‘About 3.00 pm’, she confessed to Constable Frank Schreuder, ‘I say to Suzanne that I want to read you a good story. I ask her to lie on bed. I then sat behind her and ask her to close eyes and then I kill her with the knife.’ The following morning the bodies were discovered by their father Joe. After an eleven-day trial, Andre Chayna was found guilty of murder. She had confessed, so what the court was required to adjudicate was the degree of guilt. The defence based its plea on diminished responsibility or insanity. Seven psychiatrists were called to give evidence. All agreed that Andre was in the grip of a psychosis by the time she was arrested, yet they differed in their opinion of her state of mind at the time of the killings. Only one, a Dr Skinner, thought that she was not suffering from mental illness or diminished responsibility, yet that was enough to enable Andre to be tried and convicted of murder. Skinner buttressed the prosecution’s argument that the Chaynas’ problematic marriage had a bearing on the killings. The judge’s later statement alluded to ‘alleged marital 157

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problems . . . allegations of assault, sexual abuse, treatment as a servant by her husband . . . threats to her personally . . . taunts about the attributes of Cheryl, his neglect . . . by absenting himself from the home’. Andre seems to have believed that her husband Joe was having an affair with Cheryl (who had recently split from Andre’s brother). Joe had also been pressuring his wife for three years to move away from her family to Perth, threatening ‘if you don’t agree with me I want to kill you and kill your parents, your family, both sisters and take the children away’. Along with fear and hostility, Andre’s jealousy seems to have been a prime driving force of her actions: her perceived sexual rival was done away with first; then her husband, who was threatening to take away her valued relationships, was deprived of those whom he may have valued most, his children. There is a close resemblance between Andre Chayna’s story and that of the mythical heroine Medea. The latter extracts revenge on her husband Jason after he abandons her for Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. The jealous Medea first killed her sexual rival Glauce (and her father) by sending her a dress that had been smeared in poison. Then, as Seneca’s Roman version of the legend has it, Medea jealously avenges her betrayal by killing her and Jason’s two children. Unlike Andre, Medea manages to escape in a golden chariot that was drawn by dragons, leaving Jason broken. The story of Medea seems to many to be one of the most enduringly horrifying of the many atrocities committed in the ancient mythological world. The murder of children by a jealous parent – particularly a mother – scandalizes. That is 158

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45 Medea killing her son, on a vase by Ixion Painter, c. 330 bce

probably part of the reason for Procne and Philomela’s recurrence in literature, and for Andre Chayna’s place in forensic psychology. The maternal instinct is rejected in favour of the playing out of sexual revenge. The mother’s role becomes one that assaults the hereditary line rather than furthering it. 159

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Look at little Itys’s face staring back at his father in Rubens’ painting. In the eyes of many, jealousy seems to strike at the heart of motherhood and womanhood and erase those more ‘natural’ – that is, more socially beneficial – feminine feelings. Jealousy consumes them, and makes them monstrous. * * * If, like me, you believe that myth exists as a great repository for the most pressing themes of human anxiety – that these tales embody the most troubling and unspoken aspects of life – then intergenerational jealousy must be one of the most frightening and perplexing aspects of our inescapable familial foundations. Again and again, classical mythology rehearses the themes, in extravagant terms, of what occurs so easily as a ‘normal’ part of family life. Drawing on these myths, psychoanalysis has offered new formulations that place destructive jealousy front and centre in the family, and allow us to see how mercilessly hungry those Oedipal infants can be. Freud and Klein remain giants in the field of twentieth-century psychological thought. Imaginative, and speaking urgently to a real human anxiety, their thought is now our myth – for it is a curious thing that as the science of the mind gets better, so its influence on culture fades. This has been a bleak chapter. A number of benefits to jealousy in families can be formulated, though. It can encourage independence and self-reliance in the very small: a recent study into sibling rivalry in two-year-olds found that what might appear like open warfare actually teaches children important skills, including emotional maturity, vocabulary and conflict 160

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resolution. It represents the ever-present demands of gene replication and the defence of the right to propagate. Jealousy between siblings can also be inspiring: for every Liam and Noel Gallagher, brothers who squabbled their way through their entire careers in the band Oasis and haven’t spoken since 2009, there is a Venus and Serena Williams, the latter of whom has talked openly about her jealousy of her tennis champion sister: ‘I think I had a healthy jealousy of Venus. I wanted what she had, but I didn’t want to take it away from her. I just wanted to work hard to reach the place she had reached.’ There’s no doubt that familial jealousy can cause great psychological damage – no one who has seen Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? could disagree with that. But not all fathers are Cronuses or mothers Medeas. And not all jealousy is detrimental. Let’s look at other ways, apart from motivating exceptional sporting careers, that jealousy can inspire.

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8

Meeting at the Dingo Bar

The all-night Dingo American Bar and Restaurant was a popular drinking spot for expat artists and writers in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of its most famous patrons were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who met there in April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby. Hemingway chronicles their encounter and subsequent friendship in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, the original title for which was The Early Eye and Ear. There could be no better title for one of the funniest and subtlest accounts of reallife creative jealousy. A Moveable Feast, published in 1964, three years after Hemingway’s death, is one of the great literary assassinations of American literature. Not that you would see it straightaway. Hemingway is never overtly rude about his slightly older writer-friend, and he certainly doesn’t admit to being jealous of him. Yet a significant extent of the memoir is devoted to tearing Fitzgerald down in one way or another. Hemingway’s jealousy is everywhere apparent and yet, nowhere. 162

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46 Hemingway and Zelda (and perhaps her husband too) at the Dingo Bar

It begins in the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald, already tipsy, approaches Hemingway and, after introducing himself, starts lavishing praise upon the younger writer – not the done thing in Hemingway’s manly code. His memoir, however, doesn’t shirk from chronicling Scott’s adulation of him as the new voice of the twentieth century. Ernest’s first impressions of Scott are of a rather limp boy-man and an embarrassing drunk. The two men nevertheless agree to travel down to Lyon to bring back Fitzgerald’s Renault to Paris. Hemingway describes his excitement: ‘I would have the company of an older and successful writer, and in the time we would have to talk in the car I would certainly learn much that it would be useful to know.’ But this is immediately undercut: ‘at the time, since I had not yet read The Great Gatsby, I thought of him as a much older writer who had written a very silly, collegiate book followed by a book I had not 163

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been able to read.’ The Lyon–Paris road trip is as farcical as it is alarming: Scott misses the train south, wastes time on an enormous breakfast and elaborate picnic, insists on driving the roofless car despite torrential downpours and gallons of alcohol, fears he has caught ‘congestion of the lungs’ and will die overnight, and asks Ernest to look at his manhood in a restaurant toilet and judge whether Zelda’s complaints about its size were justified. In every way, Fitzgerald is the neurotic, unmanly drunkard and Hemingway the practical, blokey novelist dedicated to his craft. It’s even there at the level of his simple paratactic syntax: the reliable language of a reasonable, declarative man. This veneer of verbal simplicity encourages the reader to think that his views and verdicts can be trusted. Fitzgerald’s talent – not to mention his helping to edit Hemingway’s work and recommending him to a publisher and editor he would stay with his whole life – is written out of the picture. Quite literally. In A Moveable Feast’s final scene about Fitzgerald, long after the Second World War, the bar chief at the Ritz asks, ‘Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone is asking about?’ The literary lush had been a regular but this man who tended the bar throughout the 1920s can’t recall him. He asks Hemingway to write about him, ‘and then if he came here I will remember him’. ‘We will see’, Papa enigmatically replies. Hemingway’s quiet demolition of the then far more accomplished writer is a brilliant example of the ways that jealousy can play out in creative endeavours and work more generally. It is born of intense competition: the triangle created by you, your rival, and the work you’re so heavily invested in. It 164

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is felt as an intergenerational conflict, whether there is much age difference or not (‘It is strange now to think of Scott as an older writer, but at the time . . . I thought of him as a much older writer’). It is everywhere apparent but not explicitly revealed – which points to the aversion to discussing jealousy despite its being a major everyday occurrence in the workplace. And it can also be a great motivator, the spur to be the cause and not the casualty of jealousy. It’s here that the two sides of jealousy – its credits and debits – can be most clearly seen. * * * Look at the workplace first. There won’t be many employees who haven’t observed or suffered from jealousy at work at one time or another. Jealousy, as always, arises from a perceived threat to a triangulated relationship – you, your human rival, and your work (what you do or where you do it). The threat is a sense of insecurity that can issue from situations such as downsizing and restructuring, when your position is likely to be on the line. Or it can happen when there are generational conflicts between older members and young upstarts progressing quickly through the ranks. It can happen when there’s a diversification at work, a ‘quota requirement’ say, that breeds competitiveness and hostility. Sometimes it can be a smart new hire who snatches the boss’s attention and admiration, and leaves us honest toilers looking like desiccated shags on a rock. Since the global financial crisis hit, many businesses are struggling, shrinking or merging, young people are out of work and seem to be willing to work for lower wages, companies are globalizing and moving online: it’s a veritable hotbed of insecurity, competition and jealousy. 165

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Take Joshua Ferris’s office novel, Then We Came to the End, set in a declining Chicago ad agency in the 2000s. It invokes the jealous politicking and childish backstabbing of cubicle culture, and the pettiness and cruelty of a period in which almost everything has been subordinated to selling commodities and making money. This workforce facing layoffs may speak with a gossipy, conspiratorial collective voice (Ferris employs the first-person plural to narrate the story), but that ‘we’ contains a multitude of ‘I’s all jockeying for promotion and clambering to impress to ensure they are not ‘the next’. Any notion of collaboration in brainstorming ideas is a fiction: Then they got together to battle it out. Who was the wittier, who had more savvy, who had sailed it out of the park. We all had the same prayer: please let it be me. Regardless of who that me was, he or she tried to be very discreet about it, but there was no denying it, they reigned victorious for a day while the rest of us returned to our desks to chew silently on our own spines.

Jealousy is driving all this, and the anxiety it evokes is somehow necessary: ‘Nobody talks about it, nobody says a word, but the real engine running the place is the primal desire to kill. To be the best ad person in the building, to inspire jealousy, to defeat all the rest. The threat of layoffs just made it a more efficient machine’. But if organizational life is inherently competitive, and if competition in business is a good thing, jealousy or envy here could be seen to be a positive. These emotions make you 166

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scrutinize your peers, rank your abilities, and aspire to your bosses’ power and potency. They motivate you to achieve bigger goals and improve performance. They pave the path to status. The jealous look, which peers sideways and upwards, reinforces hierarchy and the corporate ladder. Envy at work could, then, be seen as a great driver – and even something to celebrate. To be slightly fanciful, perhaps this is what a New Zealand apple company were driving at when they called their variety of apple ‘Envy’. I can personally vouch for the fruit’s tastiness. I ate one just after I wrote this sentence. But the company’s hyperbolic website takes taste to another extreme. They call it ‘the apple with everything’ and one of the world’s most premium [sic] apple varieties [which] has captivated chefs and foodies worldwide – and celebrities, too’: none other than Cher tweeted her praise for it, saying ‘IM DEEPly IN

47 The taste of jealousy 167

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LOVE WITH THIS APPLE & I hate If you could marry a fruit, Id Marry #ENVYAPPLES & No fruit marriage Jokes !’ That this company has managed to trademark envy – Envy™ – perhaps tells you all you need to know about the emotion’s place in today’s corporate culture. ‘It won’t be long before Envy™ can be yours every day.’ I think there’s a lot more jealousy at work than people might let on. It comes down to definitions again. ‘Envy’ in the highly competitive corporate world might be accepted as inevitable, if not actually glamorized and applauded. But ‘jealousy’ at work has a whiff of personal threat that no business would countenance. ‘Envy’ smacks of having everything to gain, whereas ‘jealousy’ reminds people of how much they have to lose. That’s not good for business. Yet more and more workplaces demand the kind of exclusive loyalty that you’d expect in a personal relationship. People give their lives to their jobs as they would devote themselves to a relationship. Thus, after a lifetime of loving devotion to his employers, and dumped again, John le Carré’s George Smiley observes ruefully, ‘I invested my life in institutions . . . and all I’m left with is myself ’. If you do feel connected to your employer in such a way, then your position with regard to your whole workplace, not just to individuals within it, will be at stake. The jealous triangle of you, your rival and your work is formed. It’s not merely an emotion directed at specific individuals and relationships, but concerns your whole relationship with what you do. There have been a small number of studies into workplace envy – yet even in the most straightforward of these, hints of jealousy emerge. You can see it in the 2010 Harvard Business 168

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Review’s questionnaire, ‘Are You Falling Into the Envy Trap?’, which actually treats both envy and jealousy. The questionnaire asks you to think of ‘a person in your organization who is at a similar level and with whom you often compare yourself ’, and then answer a series of questions, scoring yourself at the end. Questions such as ‘Do you sometimes catch yourself obsessing over how much status this person has?’ point to the traditional dyadic conception of envy, whereas those such as ‘Did you worry that superiors might devalue your own achievements as a result?’ summon the jealous triangle and the threat to your position in a workplace relationship. (Other questions like ‘Imagine that this person has suffered an embarrassing public failure or professional loss. Does this make you feel sad, indifferent or happy?’ concern Schadenfreude, a topic for the next chapter.) The consequences of competitive jealousy are toxic if left to fester. They range from a decrease in productivity (being unable to work collaboratively, spending more time discussing whether your jealous fears are justified than actually working) to actions that will eliminate the threat: discrediting others, sabotaging projects, violent retaliation, taking sick leave for stress or depression, or quitting the company altogether. The Guardian gave a typical example of the harmful consequences of workplace jealousy in 2010. Lee Smith (not his real name) was the boss of a communications department in a US company. When the firm bought up another business Smith found himself supervising an older person in the same area. ‘He’d asked for resources which he had not been given, but I had’, Lee says. ‘He took it upon himself to gradually chip away at 169

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my authority – he would contact my staff directly to work on his projects without keeping me in the loop.’ The emulous colleague did not stop there. He tackled other workers as well. ‘They were being given instructions and didn’t know whether they should follow them. It put them in a difficult position and, ultimately, sabotaged what we were trying to do as a team.’ Things got so bad that Lee felt he had no other choice but to resign. Workplace jealousy can be even more damaging. The jealous employee can go so far as to kibosh his own prospects as well as those of their team or company. Take the welldocumented internecine warfare of the Gucci family in the 1980s. At the very height of the fashion brand’s success, it descended into a litigious quagmire of interminable fallings-out and court cases. Paolo Gucci, son of one of the controlling shareholders, Aldo, was dismissed from his post after trying to start his own Gucci brand. He instigated no less than ten court cases against his father and the company, costing Gucci tens of millions of dollars in legal fees. Aldo was reinstated and fired again, emerging from one shareholder meeting with blood on his face, and declaring that they were trying to kill him. Aldo accused his nephew Maurizio of tax evasion and fraud, but was himself sent to prison for tax evasion after being exposed by his own son Paolo. Things did not end well for Paolo, who was jailed for failing to pay alimony to his ex-wife, and died penniless. Maurizio meanwhile climbed the slippery Gucci pole to become president of the company, yet discovered his uncle and cousins were attempting to get him arrested for illegal export of capital. He fled to Switzerland and split with his wife, who felt 170

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that she had been the real power behind his throne and wanted a greater share of the assets. In 1998 she was convicted of hiring contract killers to blot him out altogether and she began a lengthy prison sentence: Maurizio had been shot in 1995 on the steps of his Milan office. The family decided to sell its share of the business. To this day, they have nothing to do with it. The Gucci trademark remains jealously and litigiously guarded. Less dramatic, though pretty exciting for the Belgian medical community, was a minor medical scandal that emerged a few years ago. It demonstrates again how destructive and self-destructive jealousy in the workplace can be. Jacques Donnez, chair of the Catholic University of Louvain’s gynaecology department, had had one of his laptops stolen from his office in 2004 and his laboratory set on fire in an arson attack in 2010. This erased years of work. He and his co-author

48 When jealousy was in fashion: the Gucci family 171

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Marie-Madeleine Dolmans spoke to the media about their suspicions. Apparently only the laptop containing details of their remarkable study had been taken. This was a scientific ‘first’: the first birth arising from the transplant of a cancer sufferer’s ovary, a piece of which had been removed and frozen before she underwent chemotherapy. And the arson attack came just two months before their paper reporting another first – a woman conceiving and giving birth after an ovarian tissue transplant from her sister – was to be submitted. One of the two places where the fire started was the storage facility for all of the ovarian tissue used for research. ‘That tissue was like gold for us – it took years to collect’, said Dolmans. ‘This is about jealousy. [Whoever did it] wanted to destroy our reputation and our work.’ Subsequently it emerged that Donnez had been under investigation. His findings and ethics had been challenged, and a committee had recommended he be fired – though the university had ignored the advice. The computer that had gone missing had been used to file a complaint about Donnez’s research ethics, and the fire erased evidence that would have corroborated what was published in the papers earlier that year. In this jealous fight to be ‘first’ no one walked away with clean hands. Academics are jealous creatures. (I am, of course, a noble exception.) ‘They wear glasses and brown tweed jackets and have humps on their backs and mean, jealous natures and they all use Old Spice’, as Graham says in Before She Met Me. Academic life is rife with jealousy. The fixation on individual research lends a sense of ownership to a part of a field, particularly in the context of your department, and a strong identifica172

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tion with your interest. Academic life is intensely competitive, often under-resourced, fanatical about reputation (affiliation, rank, publications, grants), and it’s unlikely to offer many public and material rewards for your efforts. The very close, long-term relationships on the tenure track give plenty of opportunity for academics of all levels to self-aggrandize and self-lacerate. And once you’ve achieved any kind of status, the temptation to jealously protect it rather than to help more junior staff is strong. A widely reported article in Current Biology examined papers produced by psychology academics at fifty North American universities between 2008 and 2012, and exposed how female professors were significantly less likely than men to work with more junior female academics, though they were equally likely as men to produce papers with other professors of the same sex and rank. This sororal hostility might be precisely because of the fact that there are far fewer women at the top of the academic hierarchy. Jealousy again? That academia can be like one great big jealous family is dolefully depicted in Richard Russo’s Straight Man. The narrator Hank Devereaux, head of the English department of a badly underfunded Pennsylvania college, must negotiate a week from Hades. Severe budget cuts pit department against department and colleague against colleague. The bickering faculty are deeply mistrustful, angry, suspicious and vengeful, but ‘too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary’ to consider leaving. Devereaux muses on a number of jealousy-related situations: his wife’s possible affair, a curvy adjunct’s possible seduction, his philandering father. He has ‘to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb 173

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out of the barrel’ when he hears of a job offer his friend, the dean, has received. He is jealous of his secretary whose short stories have been picked up by his agent. His one and only novel was sold twenty years ago: ‘The envy I feel has less to do with accomplishment or validation than with the necessary artistic arrogance that these breed . . . Instead of being dictated to by the waves of doubt that threaten to swamp all navigators, she’ll turn bravely into the wind. The moment she does is the moment I envy.’ It is not her success, but the unknown magnitude of the changes still to come for her, which contrast so strongly with Devereux’s stultified life – these make him jealous. He has spent his career not progressing, but jealously tripping up others. What is to be done about this? A friend of mine, Stan, recommends a principle called Simpkins’ Law, named after Stan’s first department head who explained it to him. It goes like this: in any new or even not-so-new work situation, you must tell your colleagues, employees or supervisors that they are very gifted and that you, inferior person that you are, are there to help them get the recognition that they richly

49 Simpkins’ Law at work 174

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deserve. The workplace neophyte must follow the principle religiously if she or he wants not just to fit in but also to get on. I could illustrate Simpkins’ Law from Stan’s own life. A little later in his academic career he joined a new university, the dean of which was the very embodiment of invidia academica. Under his management the watchword was ‘Don’t Achieve’. On one occasion he was in Stan’s dusty office and noticed a copy of Stan’s first book, on medieval hydrology, sitting on his desk. ‘A paperback, Stan?’ That was a mistake – a paperback might mean sales and profile. Sales and profile might mean that Stan could for a moment be perceived as a rival. The dean laid the book down after peering hard at its cover. ‘Paperback. A bit popular is it? Lightweight?’ Stan didn’t stay long at that university. Something similar to Simpkins’ Law has been recognized in business psychology studies. In order to avoid provoking jealousy in their colleagues, workers may actually reduce their efforts or deliberately under-perform. Human resources and management duo Kim Dogan and Robert P. Vecchio talk of ‘the loss in employee performance that may result from a desire to restore fairness to the situation. This deliberate drop in productivity can occur when employees opt to achieve a rebalancing of personal contributions and rewards by reducing their own efforts.’ This is at the very opposite end of the spectrum to Joshua Ferris’s maniacally self-aggrandizing ad drones. Not operating in accordance with Simpkins’ Law has bedevilled much of my working life, I’ll admit. I expect that this is true for many of you as well. * * * 175

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Jealousy, common at work, has an unexpectedly close relationship to creation. Like family jealousy, this is not much admitted to, even by the sufferers themselves, but it appears and reappears in mythological stories. Perhaps it’s through these that the human anxiety surrounding this uncomfortable emotion is best enunciated. A lesser-known story concerning Daedalus, the mechanical engineer and inventor who created the wings for his overambitious son, Icarus, illustrates this. In his Metamorphoses Ovid describes how, after Icarus’s death, Daedalus took on his sister’s son, Perdix, as an apprentice. The boy was as good an inventor as Daedalus. In no time at all he’d devised the world’s first saw and the first pair of compasses. This was too much for his uncle who, in a fit of jealousy, ‘thrust him down headlong from the sacred citadel’. Daedalus tries to do for Perdix what Icarus did for himself, because he did not follow his father’s advice. Both boys fall because, in the eyes of Daedalus, they overstretch themselves. Neither, in different ways, heeds the superiority he insists on when it comes to invention. ‘Master inventor’ was the position that Daedalus jealously guarded. Luckily (or unluckily) for Perdix, Pallas catches him and transforms him into a partridge (perdix in Latin). As Ovid says, ‘this bird does not lift her body high in flight . . . and remembering that old fall, she is ever fearful of lofty places.’ Daedalus and Perdix are locked in an intergenerational jealous battle between teacher and pupil, as are Athena and Arachne. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is again the source of this chilly tale. The goddess Athena taught Arachne spinning and weaving. Arachne became very good at it, so good that ‘often to 176

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watch her wondrous skill the nymphs would leave their own vineyards on Tmolus’ slopes, and the water nymphs of Pactolus would leave their waters’. She denied the goddess Athena had had anything to do with it, and was offended ‘at the suggestion of a teacher . . . so great’. Athena was furious that a mere mortal should presume to deny a god her dues. Bold Arachne simply challenged Athena to a contest in weaving. The affronted deity gave Arachne a second chance, disguising herself as an old crone and advising her to ‘seek all the fame you will among mortal men for handling wool; but yield in place to the goddess’. Arachne responded arrogantly: ‘Why does not your goddess come herself? Why does she avoid a contest with me?’ Athena threw off her disguise at once and the contest began. Athena’s tapestry depicted the power of the Olympian gods and the punishments suffered by human beings who were arrogant

50 Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne, 1636 or 1637 177

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enough to challenge them. Arachne, soon to earn just such a fate, chose to create a tapestry prophetically depicting the suffering of humans at the hands of jealous gods – including Europa being deceived by Athena’s father, Jupiter, who, disguised as a white bull, abducted her and raped her, which can be seen in the background on the right of Rubens’ painting. Who won? Ovid tells us that ‘Not Pallas, nor Jealousy itself [Livor, in the Latin, accompanies Athena] could find flaw in that work’ by Arachne. ‘The golden-haired goddess was indignant at her success, and rent the embroidered web with its heavenly crimes; and, as she held a shuttle of Cytorian boxwood, thrice and again she struck Idmonian Arachne’s head.’ Arachne couldn’t take this beating, and slipped a noose around her neck, but Athena took pity on her, after a fashion, and transformed her into a spider. ‘Still from this she ever spins a thread; and now, as a spider, she exercises her old-time weaver-art.’ Some have claimed that Arachne is Ovid and that this story is a fable about the difficulties he experienced in his own creative life. What the story does show is that the older, established generation can be just as jealous as the younger newcomers. Jealousy cuts both ways, and it is centred on both the position as ‘the creator’ and the act of creativity. There are many examples of this kind of intergenerational clash between creators. One example of the younger lashing out at the older concerns Michelangelo and Leonardo, who felt ‘an intense dislike for each other’, according to Vasari, their biographer. The only evidence we have to go on is an altercation in the street. Leonardo beckoned Michelangelo over to explain a passage in Dante. He is supposed to have replied, ‘No, 178

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explain it yourself, horse-modeller that you are, who, unable to cast a statue in bronze, were forced to give up the attempt in shame’, then he turned his back on them and walked off. ‘Leonardo remained silent and blushed at these words.’ Was Michelangelo’s abuse of the world’s greatest genius motivated by jealousy? Leonardo crafted an equestrian statue for the Duke of Milan in clay but never cast it in bronze. It was meant to be the largest equestrian statue in the world. When Michelangelo went big – there are few artistic projects bigger than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – he made sure he finished the job. An instance of an older creator jealously protecting his position is the supposed antagonism between Salieri and Mozart. In the 1780s Salieri was the more established in Vienna and apparently he and the Italian cabals obstructed Mozart obtaining certain posts or staging certain operas. Salieri is even rumoured to have tried to poison Mozart. Alexander Wheelock Thayer puts the rivalry down to Mozart being overlooked in favour of Salieri in the appointment of music teacher to Princess Elizabeth of Württemberg. It seems that after Mozart had made a name for himself in Vienna, the two men supported each other’s work, but that hasn’t stopped plays, operas and films dramatizing Salieri’s jealousy. But there is also a sense in which creative jealousy could be beneficial – or at least necessary. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence argues that there exists between outstanding writers of different generations a profound but fructifying jealousy. Great writers, according to Bloom, sense a strong relation to tradition and their forerunners’ works and engage in a strong 179

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misreading, or a creative reinterpretation – a killing and a superseding, as it were – of that original material. It’s a kind of literary Oedipus complex. Bloom describes it as ‘a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a literary work’. The greats – Shakespeare, for instance – ‘will not allow you to bury him, or escape him, or replace him . . . The largest truth of literary influence is that it is an irresistible anxiety’. The anxiety comes from not knowing whether you can be better than those great predecessors. Whether or not you agree with Bloom – and many writers would disagree, jealously guarding the idea of the unique imagination or the importance of their own development, or uncomfortable with the idea of this hierarchical canon – the theory is a powerful enunciation of the importance of jealousy in literary creation. Creative jealousy occurs when an artist identifies closely with his work. Stephen King’s 1987 novel, Misery, explores how jealousy does not only occur between rival artists: this is a book about the jealousy of the audience. It is inspired by John Fowles’ The Collector (and acknowledges the debt by referring to ‘John Fowles’ first novel’, and using a quotation from it as an epigraph). There is a house-bound captive in both books, though, like a good Bloomian, King misreads, accentuating not Fowles’ class jealousy and the uneven distribution of wealth in society, but the jealous triangle formed by a writer, his work and its readers, and the violent consequences of trying to break out of it. Paul Sheldon is a successful popular novelist who has made his name with a series of books featuring a character called Misery Chastain. Sheldon resents the demands of his 180

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readers who insist he repeat the same old themes, themes that he has become very tired of. He kills Misery off, and his readers hate it. He has destroyed a valued relationship they had with their favourite character, and with him, who until that point had been their favourite novelist. Paul himself is also jealous – of writers who have artistic freedom, who are able to change topic and theme with each book. He recognizes that ‘he was Paul Sheldon, who wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and best sellers’, but hankers after an escape from this claustrophobic pigeonholing. It’s sometimes said that King took the idea of Paul’s predicament from his own readers’ reaction to his book The Eyes of the Dragon. They wanted him to get back to the horror stories. When Misery begins Paul has just finished his latest book, Fast Cars, ‘a contemporary novel about a car thief ’. He crashes his car in the snowy Colorado Rockies. It is a premonition of what’s to come. He’s rescued by Annie Wilkes, his Number One fan, as she incessantly tells him. She feels bitter about the demise of Misery Chastain. There’s a flash of jealousy on Annie’s part towards Misery’s loss. She wants Sheldon to write Misery back to life and she won’t free him from her basement until the task is complete. Paul eventually tries to escape from his basement scriptorium, and discovers that Annie is a murderer. To put an end to his wandering Annie chops his foot off with an axe. The amputation appears to focus Paul’s mind on the task. But he gets his revenge. He finishes Misery’s Return and tricks Annie into thinking he’s set fire to the manuscript. As Annie rushes to save the burning novel, he coshes her with his typewriter and she falls, hitting her head on the 181

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mantelpiece. He inserts the burning manuscript into her mouth, page by page. If ever there were a symbol of the jealous author striking back at his audience, that’s it. Eventually rescued by a second posse of police, Paul gives his publisher a saved copy of Misery’s Return. It might have been titled Arachne’s Revenge. Disproportionate fan fury is not new. The New Yorker recently drew a comparison between Stephen King’s Misery and the video-game ‘Mass Effect 3’, the ending of which was so disappointing for its legions of fans that the game studio agreed to revise it. ‘It’s a staggering victory for the series’ most zealous enthusiasts’, said the New Yorker, ‘and that, unfortunately, is the problem. As long as gaming’s “core fans” hold such sway over major game studios, art will never have a chance.’ Fandom communities’ boards seem to be full of angry complaints about the current directors or writers of long-running TV programmes and how they are ‘ruining’ it. Like Paul Sheldon, the creator is getting in the way of the audience’s jealous relationship with the work. Other times, it’s more personal. An audience’s sense of jealous ownership seems to be more and more a natural part of celebrity these days. Not only has the internet made it much easier for fans of, well, just about anything or anybody to come together as a group, it also breeds an intense and false sense of intimacy through interfaces like Twitter, Instagram and other apparently direct channels to the stars. Many fans now feel a sense of entitlement, or ‘fantitlement’, as it was christened a few years ago by Wil Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is fans’ convic182

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tion that their passion and dedication to a person grants them particular rights and privileges. Wil describes being mobbed by fans who, instead of meeting him at the Comicon convention in 2011, had camped outside his hotel. He was surrounded, split from his friends and family, and understandably terrified. His friend pulled him out. ‘This is when the mob lost its shit. They yelled at me like I had done something wrong. They called me names, and they booed at me. (Seriously). A woman stormed up next to me and said, “If you don’t sign these things for me, I’m going to tell Twitter what an asshole you really are.”’ As Wil says, ‘It isn’t about our work, or about saying “thank you” or “high-five!” or anything about that. It’s about entitlement and being crazy.’ These superfans are certain their efforts should be rewarded and reciprocated, that their love creates an obligation on the object of their attention. It’s as if they’re in a deeply jealous relationship with someone who doesn’t know their name. * * * It might seem as though jealousy is taking over our modern lives. Are humans more jealous than ever before? It’s fair to say that the banking sector has been the workplace we’ve all had our eyes on over the last few years. The glee over the collapse of corporations like Lehman Bros, the frustration about bonuses and inequality, and the tiny shifts in legislation to start redressing the imbalance, are seen by some commentators as evidence of mass public jealousy. This particularly worries some conservatives in the US, who’ve said for years that envy and jealousy don’t apply to American politics. Its citizens, they 183

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say, admire the rich rather than begrudge them their fortunes and success. Now commentators are warning about ‘a national shift toward envy’, which, argued Arthur C. Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, ‘would be toxic for American culture’. There is no doubt real and valid populist anger about fat cats, bank bailouts, tax avoidance schemes, big bonuses and shoddy self-serving management, but this is specific resentment. Labelling this ‘envy’ or ‘jealousy’ robs it of its power, and exculpates the labeller, argues Michael Winship: ‘What’s handy about making accusations of envy or jealousy is that it doesn’t have to reflect badly on you, the accuser. Hey, it can’t be helped if people are resentful – your success is your own and why should there be apologies for making something of yourself? Thus, victimhood becomes the whine du jour of the superrich’. The public’s anger about such facts cannot necessarily be dismissed as a jealous anger; for thinkers like Winship, it is common sense. There is a way that jealousy can be a force for social change, however – and that will be the theme of the next chapter.

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9

Rattling the cage

Jealousy is often said to be one of the most selfish of emotions, yet it enjoys a very fulfilling social life. In this chapter I’d like to explore how it assists individuals to negotiate their social world. Jealousy is at the centre of interpersonal interactions. It’s at the heart of the social bond. It can help people orient themselves towards others; calculate, intuitively, just what’s owed to them; and establish and protect a sense of fairness. Yet the fairness that can be encouraged by jealousy is self-furthering: it never stops being about equality for you. Jealousy rarely becomes a force for social change, not least because in larger groups agitating for social redress, other forces can rapidly take over. My attention will focus on the individual’s pursuit of equality. And jealousy is not necessarily a force for good. It stands at the crossroads between selfishness and fairness, it has benefits and costs, it encourages the best and worst in people. But the personal loss to which jealousy responds also brings with it the possibility of 185

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pleasure – the satisfaction of watching your rivals getting their comeuppance. * * * The psychologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal conducted a famous experiment with a group of capuchin monkeys. It shows just how closely jealousy and envy and fairness are related. Capuchins are exceptionally tolerant creatures and readily share food. Two monkeys were placed in adjoining cages so they could see each other clearly. They were each trained to perform a simple task – handing a rock to a human experimenter through a small door at the front of their cage – in return for which they were each given a piece of cucumber. The monkeys would exchange the stony token for cucumber any number of times. The experimental assistant then changed the game. One capuchin was rewarded with a grape for handing over its rock, in full view of the other monkey which had been given cucumber. Understandably, capuchins much prefer grapes to cucumbers. This unfair gustatory recompense was repeated. The grape monkey was even rewarded for doing nothing at all. The cucumber capuchin became extremely agitated. It refused to hand over its rock to the experimental assistant, and did not eat its watery salad prize. Some monkeys threw their cucumber out of the cage, made angry noises, and reared up and rattled the bars. These reactions were repeated whenever there was inconsistent treatment. Brosnan and de Waal’s experiment suggests that cooperative species like the capuchins compare rewards and pay-offs and react strongly to inequitable treat186

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51 Capuchins usually readily share food – here a youngster solicits an adult

ment. They don’t take kindly to seeing a comrade getting a better deal. A variant of this experiment was undertaken on domestic dogs by Friederike Range in 2008. Pairs of dogs were given the command to place their paws in an experimenter’s hand. If they did so they were given either tasty sausage or dark bread as a reward. When only one dog was rewarded for giving the paw, the unrewarded dog began to refuse to obey the commands. It also hesitated for longer periods, showed higher stress levels, and increased looking at the other dog when the latter was 187

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rewarded. It was less willing to give the paw when its partner was present and rewarded. It was more cooperative when it was alone. But the dogs, unlike the monkeys, didn’t care much whether they were rewarded with sausage or bread (no surprise to dog owners). Dogs don’t seem to mind too much about the quality of the food reward or the amount of effort involved, and no dog ever rejected the food outright. It was simply about getting food if the other dog had been given some. The reactions of monkeys and dogs, at least when they were negative, are often termed ‘inequity aversion’. They take place within cooperative species when obvious inequalities are imposed. Dogs, Range believes, display a different kind of inequity aversion and are responsive only when it is disadvantageous to them. The monkeys, like humans, react to advantageous inequity aversion (they can sense the difference in value of reward) and are willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers (chucking the cucumber rather than munching it). Range argues that the dogs’ inequity aversion is much more of a dyadic affair. It concerns an individual dog’s own efforts and reward relative to another dog; the dispenser of the reward tends to be ignored. In contrast, the monkeys’ more sophisticated sensitivity to the variations in rewards also showed, so the experimenters thought, their awareness of their relationship with the dispenser of the rewards. The monkeys resented the human for creating the disparity and they resented their companion’s success. Their anger or resentment was directed primarily at the human who created the reward exclusivity. This is a jealous triangle pure and 188

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simple: one individual in the triad understands that they have been excluded from a privileged bond, and reacts to this loss with heightened emotions. That reaction, driven by the human’s capricious exercise of preference, is aimed, more or less unconsciously, to highlight that inequity and, hopefully, to re-establish fair treatment. This is not sexual jealousy: the emotion experienced is not to procure sexual advantage but to bring inequity to its sufferer’s attention, and ultimately to re-establish fairness. The problem is that the disgruntled monkey’s jealous reaction – throwing the cucumber out of the cage, and getting nothing – actually increased the level of social inequality in the small world of the lab. These experiments suggest that there is an evolutionary basis for ethical behaviour. They seem to show as well that nonsexual jealousy may be similarly rooted, and that it may enjoy an unexpectedly close relationship with fair play. This is a particularly selfish form of justice (the jealous reaction is to procure fair treatment for you, not for others) and it can even be self-defeating (your jealous self-righteous anger means you get nothing, not even the pappy cucumber). But jealousy seems to be playing a part in extracting benefits from self-interest as well as evaluating what we are entitled to in the context of what others are getting. Just as sexual jealousy can be utilized to keep emotional relationships stable, so it can be a potent means for asserting your rights and for insisting on cooperation within a social environment. This kind of non-sexual jealousy may even be of evolutionary benefit in acting as a guardian against sexual jealousy running amok. In Chapter 2 I explained how jealousy was often 189

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the glue that holds the sexes together – for the benefit of the family and for the survival of the species through genetic replication. Sexually jealous males who behave in an aggressive manner may succeed in passing on their genes. But too much jealousy can lead to violence and to the kind of self-assertive behaviour that does not cohere with the life of large cooperative and equitable societies. Perhaps the type of non-sexual jealousy just discussed, the sort that insists on fairness, could drive aggrieved individuals against the sexually jealous and aggressive dominant individual. It might rein them in and force them to cooperate. This non-sexual jealousy may facilitate better gene replication in large societies where unmanaged jealous rages could lead not only to disruption, but also to the death of the jealous replicator. The two types of jealousy, the selfish insistence on fairness and the desire to control a mate through aggression and violence, may strike some sort of uneasy societal equilibrium. * * * The UK’s National Benefit Fraud Hotline receives more than 600 calls a day. It was set up to field tip-off calls about people who might be cheating the welfare system and claiming more than their entitlement. Such cases can involve lone parents not having disclosed that they cohabit with a partner who is working, individuals claiming unemployment benefits while they are in fact employed, people falsely claiming disability benefit, and some who don’t declare capital. Who makes these calls? Informants can remain anonymous, though Graham Smith, a manager at the Tunbridge Wells branch of the UK’s 190

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Fraud Investigation Service, says: ‘We get tip-offs from friends, family, ex-boyfriends, neighbours, a lot of ex-partners . . . There are a lot of disgruntled people out there.’ Disgruntled indeed. Could it be that many of the 219,000 complaint calls each year are driven just as much by jealous feelings as by highminded attitudes towards fair dealing and social equity? Smith himself recognized that ‘We get a significant number of malicious allegations as it is. You get a lot of people wanting to drop people in it.’ Take Bea Roberts from London. In 2008 her ex-husband’s new girlfriend called the fraud hotline, accusing Roberts of still living with her ex-husband and therefore not being entitled to the jobseeker’s allowance she was claiming. This was unfounded. According to Roberts, the girlfriend ‘got jealous, and rang and told them we were still living together’. This jealous attack had its implications: it was thirteen weeks before Roberts’ benefits were reinstated, by which time she had had to give up her college course and had been evicted. ‘It’s a very dangerous system’, she says. ‘People should be accountable for whatever allegation they make.’ The jealousy in Bea Roberts’ case was sexually motivated. Who knows how many of the calls involve sexual jealousy and are motivated not by a desire for equity, but by vengeful spite? Anonymity doesn’t help. The UK government encourages people to shop their nearest and dearest if they are ‘skivers’ rather than ‘strivers’, no matter if the behaviour reported is driven by need rather than greed, and might more usefully be understood rather than criminalized. (Less than 1 per cent of people on benefits actually commit fraud. Those who do are 191

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often the poorest and the sums involved are tiny.) But there does seem to be a great deal of non-sexual jealousy at play here. For no toil, other people are getting the grapes. The dudgeon felt towards benefits cheats is because they’re rewarded for no effort of their own – rather, they benefit from the efforts of the working tax-paying majority, for whom, it seems, it’s all cucumbers. Graham Smith’s sense of who phones the hotlines suggests that the callers are very much in the same boat as those they call about. In more ways than one, they’re in adjacent cages. The way that this equity jealousy, if we may call it that, desires sinners to be punished and the apparently ‘high-andmighty’ brought back down to everyone else’s level, can be seen in the biblical story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. It illustrates how this form of jealousy can backfire on the jealous, who are just kidding themselves that they’re after justice. In John 8, the Pharisees bring an adulterous woman to Jesus at the temple and ask him what punishment they should mete out to her. According to the law passed down by Moses, she should be stoned to death. It’s really a trap. The Pharisees want both the woman and Jesus brought to heel: the woman, because she’s an adulterous sinner, and Jesus, because he’s getting too big for his boots. They’re jealous of his influence, his teaching and his renown, particularly as he challenges their religious status, their authority within the community and their understanding of their relationship with the jealous Old Testament God. The Pharisees ask Jesus again and again what he thinks, ‘tempting him’, the Good Book says, to break Mosaic Law by protecting the woman, so ‘they might have to accuse 192

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52 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1565

him’. Jesus writes on the ground, and says, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ The Flemish Renaissance painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dramatizes this scene of three judgments: the testing of Christ, the evaluation of the young woman’s fate, and Jesus’s response. A triangle dominates: Christ humbly kneeling to the left, the adulterous woman in the centre and an aggressive Pharisee leaning in on the right. The triangle is further accentuated by the position of the Pharisee’s hands, pointing at the woman and Christ, and the woman’s fingers, gesturing towards Christ and the Pharisee. The painting’s etiolated, blanched colour scheme deprives the scene of all sensuality – sex and adultery is not on trial here – and gives the highly charged confrontation the air of death. There is no difference in tone between any of the 193

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figures – which is really the essence of Jesus’s response to the Pharisees’ jealous attack. They are not above the woman, and Jesus will not show himself to be above either them or the law. Jealousy’s spurious demand for justice fizzles out. Jealousy, with its eyes set firmly on what it reckons is your due, tries just as often to protect against losing what you have. Emilio Longoni’s Reflections of a Starving Man pictures this dichotomy of jealousy’s desire for equity. There’s the triangle, formed by the hungry man and the privileged couple. The starving man looking in so longingly is certainly envious of the food the couple are enjoying: he wants what they have. Is he jealous? The sense of exclusion, created by the window and the ledge, is palpable. I think the real jealousy here lies with the man inside the restaurant. His left shoulder and elbow point directly at the man outside, and block him off. It’s an aggressive and defensive action, a way of denying the starving man’s presence, insisting on the couple’s privilege, and proprietorially enclosing their walled-off bourgeois comfort. The wine glass is pushed towards the man outside, but the window makes it unreachable. It’s as if the starving man were a rival – and Longoni emphasizes this. His play on the word ‘reflections’ in the title points to the way that the man is reflected in the couple, their heads being painted at exactly the same height, but the two richer heads catching the sun while the single man’s face remains in shadow. This is a mirror image, and the rival is too close. That stiff, oddly angled elbow tells us that the rich man feels worried, threatened, and jealous – not only that he’s making small work of a thick steak. 194

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53 Emilio Longoni, Reflections of a Starving Man or Social Contrasts, 1894

The man outside is a rival, for he and his impoverished confréres might choose to take to the boulevards and snatch away the privileged right of the comfortable couple to their abundant food, to their mocking glass of wine, and to their amatory dalliance. Longoni was painting this work midway 195

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between the Italian Risorgimento and the Russian Revolution, a time when the smell of revolution hung in the air across Europe. It was also the age of ressentiment, a notion put forward by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (particularly in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals). Ressentiment was a process which, through a sense of weakness, inferiority or jealousy towards what you view as the ‘cause’ of your frustration, generates a new value system. It’s close to what Nietzsche says of the slave–master relationship: ressentiment is what the underclass, the slave class, feels towards the master class, and when that class erupts seeking equity, a morality that aims to balance the differences between the two classes develops. The problem with ressentiment is that it encourages scapegoating and blindness to your own failings and culpability. It’s the result of reflecting – Longoni again – on all that has happened to you as being the fault of other people. But ressentiment also moves the connection between jealous ‘levelling’ and equity too far away from the concerns of the individual for my discussion. The capuchins and the diners encapsulate two poles in the spectrum of equity jealousy. If Brosnan and de Waal’s capuchins demonstrated how jealousy could be a selfish but beneficial tool for social betterment, Longoni’s painting shows how jealousy can become an instrument of social oppression and injustice. The way that jealousy highlights inequities may lead to improvements, or draw attention to how much you have to lose. Nowhere are the benefits and costs of jealousy more stark. * * * 196

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Jealousy’s benefits and costs aren’t always this polarized. Sometimes jealousy’s positive and negative consequences merge and blend. Acting jealously to protect your rights, for instance, might actually leave you disenfranchised. Intended profits might entail losses. The hurt that requires redress might actually feel quite pleasurable. Maybe this is really how jealousy levels the playing field. It is an emotion centred on the relativity of our social lives. Jealousy has a tricky way of costing you something while you are trying to make others pay. Psychologists have carried out a number of experiments to measure how inequity aversion – or equity jealousy – will push people to hurt themselves in order to hurt others. This goes far beyond the rejected cucumber. There’s the ‘ultimatum game’, for example. Two players decide how to divide a sum of money between them. The first player has to come up with a proposal for how the cash should be divvied up, and the second player can either accept or reject the offer – but if they reject it, the deal is off and neither player gets anything. Suppose I offer you $1. That’s quite a lot less than a 50/50 split of the $10 kitty. Even so, you’d be a mug to reject it: $1 is better than nothing at all. But, most people will reject it, preferring to punish the person who is being ‘unfair’, even though this costs them. The jealous desire to punish someone who is denying you what you think is yours trumps everything. That makes perfect sense to me. Rationality, perspective and material gain is thrown out of the window. This, at least, smacks of denying an injustice. But sometimes jealous reactions are more straightforwardly self-defeating. 197

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The easiest way to understand Natale Schiavoni’s Jealousy is to say that the young woman’s emotion has been caused by the letter she’s holding. Does it contain the bad news that her lover has dumped her for someone else? Is it a quick note penned by her swain to another woman that she’s intercepted? That would explain the determined tearing of the letter in two. But who’s to say it is a letter? Perhaps it’s her enemy’s poem that she has

54 Natale Schiavoni, Jealousy, 1820 198

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read – those classic jealous eyes looking askance appear to be worried that someone will see what she’s doing. Or perhaps it is her own sonnet, and she is tearing it up because she believes it’s no good – someone else has composed a better one. She destroys her poem in jealous chagrin, realizing that she is just not as talented as her competitor. And jealous actions can provoke jealous reactions. Pliny the Elder in his encyclopaedia, the Natural Histories, tells the story of a remarkably clever crow that lived in a cobbler’s shop in Rome. The crow, born on the top of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, had become very skilled at talking and every morning for several years would fly to the Roman Forum where it would greet the then emperor, Tiberius, by name. It would do the same to Germanicus and Drusus Caesar. Another cobbler who lived next door to the crow killed it. His motive, according to Pliny, was either jealousy (aemulatio) or a sudden fit of anger. The cobbler’s own excuse was that the crow had left droppings in his stock of shoes, but we might also suppose that the bird’s fame attached to the next-door cobbler had something to do with it. The cobbler took out his jealousy on the bird. The murder was memorialized by a ‘vast crowd of followers’, reports Pliny. The tiny bird was taken ‘on a draped bier on the shoulders of two Ethiopians and in front of it going in procession a flute player and all kinds of wreaths right to the pyre, which had been erected on the right hand side of the Appian Way at the second milestone on the ground called Rediculus’s Plain’. The cobbler’s violence provoked an inequity aversion in their local community. That community struck back, to right that wrong, to avenge their loss. The cobbler was 199

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driven out of the district after the avian funeral and was killed soon after. I guess that the Roman citizens felt that justice had been done – that equity, the social relation they so jealousy protected, had been restored. The sense of relief and of pleasure that can arise in such circumstances is part of the emotion of Schadenfreude. This gloating over the bad luck or even the misfortune of other people is liable to stem from occasions when someone who has in some sense rivalled you gets their comeuppance. When you’re in or have been in competition with someone, and when they fail, even if you don’t succeed, you feel pleased. Schadenfreude is a peculiar sort of pleasure. It’s often experienced even when you’ve lost, but your rival comes to lose even more. The feeling – and I have felt it often though I admit to no pride in having done so – is a very enjoyable one indeed. That doesn’t take away the pain that might have come before it. Some professional writers are among the few who openly admit to jealousy and Schadenfreude. The Australian novelist Peter Carey made his confession to the Guardian in 2012, realizing that ‘I’ll be disapproved of ’. He saw no point in trying to deny his rivalry with those who are also his great friends. ‘These are people that you don’t like because you’re jealous of them until you meet them. And you haven’t read their book because it’s had so much attention. Then you meet them and discover they’ve been jealous of you, and you become friends. And you like their work.’ He once tried to talk about this with his close pals Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. ‘I said, when one of my friends gets a bad review, it’s a little hard not to be pleased. And 200

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they’re going, “oh, no, Peter, no”. They wouldn’t have it.’ The Australian poet, journalist and broadcaster, Clive James, in his poem ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’, does gloat over the misfortune of his literary rival, however. The tongue-in-cheek speaker in the poem is wallowing over his adversary’s ‘much-prized effort’ which now ‘sits in piles / In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs’. It ends with a call to ‘Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets! / The book of my enemy has been remaindered / And I am glad.’ But the relentless focus on the now superfluous tomes speaks to the years of competition, pain, and ultimately, the good fight won. The speaker is deeply invested in those books. It’s like he’s mourning for them, and for the jealous rivalry now ended. He’s also crowing over them as the victor. It neatly captures the Schadenfreude of the competitive writer, and says a lot for the courage and honesty of Clive James. Some fascinating scientific research has examined how jealousy and Schadenfreude connect, and in what ways they can impel human behaviour. Jonathan Dvash and his colleagues have unravelled some of the neurobiological bases of emotions relating to social comparison. Their experimental participants played an interactive game of chance on a computer, in which a putative player won more or less money than them. The results were not comforting: ‘even when participants lost money, they expressed joy and Schadenfreude (gloating) if the other player had lost more money. On the other hand when they actually won money, but the other player had won more they expressed envy.’ (A very neat example of the point was the widely reported seven-year divorce case of Scott and Michelle Young. Michelle 201

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claimed that Scott was hiding billions in secret accounts. He said he was bankrupt, broke, and owing £28 million. The court decided in November 2013 that Scott Young was worth £40 million, and awarded Michelle half. She was outraged at receiving only £20 million.) Dvash used fMRI imaging to look at the brains of the individuals involved in this trial. He noted that the ventral striatum, a portion of the brain that is sometimes termed a reward centre, ‘lit up’ in a comparable manner not just when a player won, but also when a player lost, provided that another player lost more. This is ‘relative gain’ rather than ‘actual gain’, yet comparing the two, Dvash’s team found that the brain activity was almost the same. This experiment demonstrated how relative emotional reactions are: social context can influence the value even of absolute monetary reward. It also signals how pleasurable Schadenfreude can be, as it stimulates the same parts of the brain’s reward system that winning does, even if you have lost in absolute terms. Dvash does note, however, that absolute gain and relative gain might not be similarly processed, whereas relative loss and absolute loss are. Perhaps this explains why loss hits home harder, and the pleasure from Schadenfreude is of a different and more suspect order. It is a pleasure felt by many (including myself) at the denouement of the Youngs’ saga. * * * Some societies develop social mechanisms to cope with Schadenfreude and jealousy. In Scandinavia there exists a popular though worrying mechanism called Jante’s Law. It was treated in a 1933 novel, En Flygtning Krysser Sitt Spor (A Refugee 202

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Crosses the Tracks), by the Danish author Aksel Sandemose. He dramatized something that had been part of the Scandinavian psyche for centuries. Jante is Sandemose’s fictional working-class town, which abides by the following Ten Commandments: Don’t think that you are special. Don’t think that you are of the same standing as us. Don’t think that you are smarter than us. Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us. Don’t think that you know more than us. Don’t think that you are more important than us. Don’t think that you are good at anything. Don’t laugh at us. Don’t think that any one of us cares about you. Don’t think that you can teach us anything.

The commandments could be summed up as: ‘Don’t think you’re better than or different from – or able to leave – us’. There is a variant in Australia that insists on the same egalitarianism: ‘We’re all workers, mate’. Jante’s Law aims to dispel jealousy by insisting that everyone acts and aspires in a similar manner. In Jante territory you must not break the social code by demonstrating individuality or uniqueness, or displaying your wealth. Jante’s Law insists that no one stands out. Such levelling aims to minimize the grounds for feeling jealous. And it uses the threat of Schadenfreude as a way to stop people from standing out: do so at the peril of being gloated over. (Perhaps Jante’s Law is the reason that so many TV talent shows reward 203

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those who aren’t very talented, especially stars who excel in one field – football, say – but are atrocious at ballroom dancing or ice-skating. Their ineptitude makes them one of us. They sidestep our jealousy and even our Schadenfreude.) There appears to be something of a need for Jante’s Law: Swedish academic Ake Daun claims that 49 per cent of Swedes identify themselves as ‘envious’, even though the world has moved on somewhat since Sandemose’s time. Jante’s Law reflects a small-town mentality in which the survival of the collective was assisted by the submerging of individualist leanings. The downside, of course, is that such a mechanism discourages people from achieving very much, let alone bruiting their own achievements over those of others. This is not a very good model for promoting entrepreneurial excellence or indeed any form of excellence at all. It seems that jealousy in our social life is inescapable. Either you’ll be jealous yourself or be provoking jealousy in others. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from Jante. Cultivate a few weaknesses, if you insist on being good at something. If you are very clever, then make sure that you look terrible. If you can play football, make sure you can’t dance. Let people know about your failings as well as your successes, so they can indulge in a little Schadenfreude. In the final chapter, I’ll focus a little more on the costs of and cures for jealousy. Through history there has been a throng of different voices dispensing advice on how to avoid the emotion and mitigate its worst effects. But should we have to? And, if we should, how do we go about it? 204

10

Turning your back on it

Is it possible to turn your back on jealousy – not only to ignore it, but to leave its pain behind for good? Or is it better to tackle its worst vicissitudes head-on, and accept what benefits it brings to us as well as facing its painful costs? Is jealousy something we should try to cure ourselves of or not? The temptation to turn your back on jealousy and the impossibility of doing so is ravishingly captured by Edward Hopper in his perplexing, shimmering Soir Bleu. What’s this blue evening got to do with jealousy? Look at the situational markers. The central triangle, formed by the three figures who are facing in the viewer’s direction – the woman, the clown and the man on the far left – is loaded with sexual energy. The statuesque woman is said to be a powdered prostitute, and the dark man on the left her pimp. She has her eyes locked on the clown, whose posture and dangling cigarette directly match those of the man, his black attire in the shadow of the awning contrasting strongly with the clown’s bright white costume. Separated from the other diners by that oddly solid flat grey pole, the man 205

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could just as well be the other side of a mirror. The woman’s white skin and heavily made-up face again connect her to the clown, though he has her back to her – as does her pimp. That’s not the only triangle in the painting: the clown is sitting with two other unlikely looking men, one bereted, one with epaulettes; those two men and the pimp on the left make another shadowy threesome. The fourth triangle is formed by the stare of the two well-heeled patrons at the prostitute’s bosoms. The painting is charged with emotion. The standing woman’s masklike face displays anguish, pride, anger. Is she on the brink of tears? The bow-tied slummer has turned to see if she’ll make a scene, but he’s just as interested in her body. The prostitute’s is a cold, pained sensuality and there’s a determined possessiveness in her gaze. What is it between her and the clown? That smirking pimp seems to know something. Is the clown jealous

55 Edward Hopper, Soir bleu, 1914 206

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of her and the men she sleeps with? Is he neglecting her, drinking away their money, forcing her to turn more tricks? Is she jealous of his place as an entertainer, jealous of the type of attention he gets, while she is shunned or leered at? Nearly everyone in this painting has their backs turned to someone, apart from that remarkable, imperious woman. She is excluded: the clown denies her affection, the pimp takes her earnings, and the middle-class couple scorn her social standing. What’s her place? Does she stand for the jealousy that, defying the turned backs, ignorance, ogling and faux moral rectitude, dominates the canvas? * * * Turning your back on jealousy isn’t easy, but that hasn’t prevented repeated calls to do just that being made time and again through history. Let’s look at some examples of the proposed cures for sexual jealousy. The advice is sometimes good, sometimes not, but it tells a truth about the various ways people have grappled with the emotion. One of the earliest and strangest of cures for jealousy comes from the Old Testament’s Book of Numbers 5:11–31. What cure for a man if ‘the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled’? The Good Book suggests that he should find out the truth. The jealous husband should take his wife to the temple to get her tested by a priest. The priest asks the woman to swear under oath that ‘no man have lain with thee, and . . . thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead 207

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of thy husband’. If she is lying, a curse will come upon her. The woman’s offering of barley meal – ‘an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity into remembrance’ – is waved before the Lord, and the woman drinks a bitter water made out of the dust on the tabernacle’s floor. If the bitter water travels to her bowels and causes her belly to swell and her thigh to rot, she is guilty of jealousy, and is ‘a curse among her people’. Presumably her fate will be that of Deuteronomy 22:13–21: death by stoning. That’s one terminal cure for a husband’s jealousy. If her belly doesn’t swell, she is innocent and then is free to ‘conceive seed’ (her belly will swell in the right kind of way). The truth, revealed by God, can set the jealous man free. Chariton of Aphrodisias’s Chaereas and Callirhoe dates from the first century ce and is the oldest surviving prose romance, and probably the first historical novel. Chaereas and Callirhoe is a love story. It tells the tale of a very young couple, Chaereas and the astoundingly beautiful Callirhoe, who marry in Syracuse in Sicily in the early fourth century bce. Their marriage unites two rival Sicilian families, but provokes bitter jealousy in the Greek city. Callirhoe’s many suitors convince Chaereas that she has been unfaithful to him. He strikes his young wife: ‘overwhelmed by his anger, [Chaereas] kicked her as she ran to him. Now his foot found its mark in the girl’s diaphragm and stopped her breath . . . So Callirhoe lay there unconscious . . . she looked to everyone as if she were dead.’ She is buried but revives in her tomb and is taken by a group of grave-robbing pirates to be sold as a slave. Her new master, Dionysus, falls in love with her and they marry. She is too 208

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afraid to admit that she is already wed and pregnant. Dionysus raises the son as his own. Chaereas and Callirhoe are eventually reunited after Chaereas’s military success. No longer the passion-driven, foolish adolescent, he has become a man. He submits to reason and self-control and regains his wife. Chariton seems to believe that he begins to show ‘good sense and courage’ – loyalty as well, and, most of all, he has ‘kept his head’. Can emotions – not just jealousy, but also love, friendship, anger, fear, courage and compassion – provide a reliable basis for human behaviour? That’s the theme of this romance. What Chariton seems to conclude is that emotions are a reasonable prompt for human behaviour, but they should never be acted upon without reflection. Jealousy should not precipitate action without careful thought, without the mediation, that is, of reason. Chaereas’s unthinking jealous kick sets off the action of the novel and almost spells disaster for his marriage. Chariton doesn’t believe that self-control is a solution to Chaereas’s jealousy on its own, but it would help. That’s because an individual who practises self-control and moderation has a better chance of reliably utilizing reason, discussion or, if those fail, the law, in helping to chart the right course. During the early Middle Ages the cures for lovesickness often do double duty as cures for jealousy. These medieval therapies can be traced right back to antiquity, particularly to Ovid’s Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love), written in the first or second century ce. Ovid’s cures include straightforward practical advice (keep busy, steer clear of your ex, do just about anything that will make them look bad to you, avoid magic and 209

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pharmacological aids) and helpful dietary tips: keep clear of Italian onions, arugula and wine, but do eat rue. These aversive therapies were especially popular during the twelfth century. The medieval commentator Gerard de Berry relies on Ovid for his self-help advice, and adds some cures of his own. Gerard recommends therapeutic sex as an especially reliable cure: ‘consorting with and embracing girls, multiple intercourse with them, and switching to new ones’. If that doesn’t work then Gerard enjoins such cures as ‘Sleep, humection [moisturizing] (to counter the heat and dryness generated by the disease), good nourishment and baths . . . The patients should be occupied in various ways so that they will be distracted from thoughts of the beloved. Hunting and games . . . are helpful, as are the counsels of old women . . . [who should] disparage the beloved, speaking of her “stinking dispositions”.’ Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is still a good place to look for advice on coping with life. He believes that bad relationships can cause melancholy. Perhaps that’s why he has such a low opinion of jealousy and its victims: ‘how absurd a thing in its own nature, how ridiculous, how brutish a passion, how odious; for . . . others hate [the jealous man], and at last he hates himself for it; how harebrain a disease, mad and furious’. Burton prescribes a course of practical, moral and relational work that in part echo Ovid and Gerard de Berry: ‘Cure of Jealousy; by avoiding occasions, not to be idle: of good counsel; to contemn it, not to watch or lock them up: to dissemble it, &c.’ That is, don’t encourage or dwell on your suspicions, listen to the advice of judicious friends, appreciate how vile an emotion it is (‘consider, how much he discredits himself, his 210

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friends, dishonours his children, disgraceth his family, publisheth his shame, and as a trumpeter of his own misery, divulgeth, macerates, grieves himself and others’), and forego jealous behaviour (such as, ‘out of a sinister suspicion, [to] presently lock [the lover] close, watch them, thinking by those means to prevent all such inconveniences’) which backfires anyway (‘by such tricks they do aggravate the mischief. ’Tis but in vain to watch that which will away’). Even the jealous lover’s self-absorption is false: ‘If it were his case alone, it were hard; but being as it is almost a common calamity, ’tis not so grievously to be taken’. In other words, get over it, and yourself. But don’t do so alone. Jealousy is a theme to be found in much of the verse belonging to Robert Burton’s era. In the Metaphysical poets’ work, jealousy, like love itself, often seems an excuse for a brilliant conceit and display of poetic wit, so talk of remedy or even acknowledgement of the pain the emotion causes, is rare. Jealousy seems to be more part of the game of poetry than the slog of life. It is something to court rather than cure. That’s probably because the poets are seldom on the receiving end. They cause the jealousy and like to mock weak husbands. John Donne’s first elegy, ‘Jealousy’, is written to a woman who weeps when she sees her husband ‘hungerly / Swallow his own death, heart’s-bane jealousy’. Donne is thankful for it. Such jealous displays are so ‘courteous’ as to warn the wife and poet to take their romance elsewhere: But if – as envious men, which would revile Their prince, or coin his gold, themselves exile 211

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Into another country, and do it there – We play in another house, what should we fear?

In Donne’s ‘Love’s Infiniteness’ the tables have turned. The poem’s speaker is in the midst of a serious love affair, with jealousy just beginning to gnaw at the edges. The poem sounds tender and gentle – ‘If yet I have not all thy love, / Deare, I shall never have it all’ – but the poet is jealous: he wants ‘all’ of his lover’s love. Commercial transactions are everywhere: the poet has tried to ‘purchase’ her with ‘Sighs, tears and oaths, and letters’. He feels that he should possess her – in terms of what he has ‘spent’ and what is now ‘due’ to him. He worries that new suitors have their own ‘stock’ to cash in as they ‘outbid’ him. In the third stanza, he imagines their growing love as a kind of deposit with interest. Yet he knows that love cannot be bought, and that possession can never be entire. Donne’s answer is a physical and mystical merging – ‘we shall / Be one, and one another’s all’. This quells rather than cures his jealousy. And it’s not a cure for this world. The jealous husband became less of an object of derision and more of target for reform in the eighteenth century. With marriage now put up as a bond of love rather than a socioreligious institution, and with the family now idealized, cuckolded husbands are no longer a laughing stock but rather a cause to be helped. Joseph Addison took jealousy to task in 1711 and dedicated two issues of the Spectator to advising the wives of jealous husbands. He describes the nature of jealousy, what causes it, its dangerous consequences, and he offers some cures. It’s the wife’s job to provide the remedy: ‘Other faults 212

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indeed are not under the wife’s jurisdiction . . . but jealousy calls upon her particularly for its cure’. The wife must never show dislike for another’s person’s faults if the husband shares them. She should never admire anything at which he doesn’t excel. And she must have no secrets. If all that fails, Addison advises wives to look dejected and hurt. And if that still doesn’t work, ‘turn his own passion on himself . . . take some occasion of growing jealous of him, and to follow the example he himself hath set you’. Addison counsels: ‘This counterfeited jealousy will bring him a great deal of pleasure, if he thinks it real: for he knows experimentally how much love goes along with this passion, and will besides feel something like the satisfaction of revenge, in seeing you undergo all his own tortures.’ Fifty years later the Lady’s Magazine also looks to women for the cure. The wife saddled with a jealous husband must be of unimpeachable character: ‘A chaste and spotless life therefore, a reserved and irreproachable deportment, with a most evident preference of her husband to all other men, and a constant and uniform conduct, unshaken by false opinions, unmoved by unworthy suspicions.’ The ‘cure’ is, again, rooted in her behaviour: she mustn’t be too familiar with friends, or do anything her husband can’t do, or seem to have any secrets (though she is at least allowed to have some). She shouldn’t make pretence at all. ‘It must be owned the task is hard’, sighs the Lady’s Magazine, ‘yet it is such as must be submitted to by those women who think it at all worth their while to reclaim a jealous husband, or conciliate his esteem and affections.’ The nineteenth century was, as Chapter 6 showed, a most jealous period. Literature, art, but also medicine zeroed in on 213

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the theme of jealousy – in the latter, particularly the ‘extreme’ form of the emotion, obsessive or morbid jealousy. That doleful malady was seen in the patients coming into the new asylums. Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol, the great French psychiatric reformer, for example, delineates in his 1838 Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity many serious mental conditions of which jealousy is a symptom. Erotomaniacs, who make unexpected and often improbable love attachments that are misplaced and rejected, are some of the most prone to jealousy. Esquirol advises a frightening set of cures for them: Prolonged tepid baths [a favourite treatment, this], diluent drinks, whey in combination with nitre, ass’ milk, succory (cichorium intybus [chicory]), together with a vegetable regimen, are preferred to antispasmodics [believed, I suspect, to be analgesic] which often increase the flame rather than extinguish it. In some cases, tonics are useful, if debilitating causes have predisposed to the malady, or provoked it.

Continuing with Esquirol’s concern for the pressing problem of unsuccessful love was Dr Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence as well as a very well-known physician. In his 1812 textbook Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind he counts jealousy as one of the symptoms of ‘general madness of the first grade’ and reveals that of fifty ‘maniacs’ who came under the care of the Pennsylvania Hospital, jealousy was the cause of the ‘disease’ of two of them. He goes into great detail of how you might go about remedying the effects of unsuccessful love, ranging from keeping 214

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busy and avoiding the company of the one loved and lost, to ‘Bleeding, blistering, and the other remedies for similar states of the system from other causes’. He also looks back to the ‘master of the subject of love, Ovid’, for advice: ‘find out, and dwell upon all the bad qualities, and defects, in person and accomplishments, of his mistress’ and get a new lover. Finally, ‘Unsuccessful love is cured by exciting a more powerful passion in the mind. Ambition should be preferred for this purpose. Its efficacy is taken notice of by the duke of Rochefaucalt. “Ambition (he says) may succeed love, but love never cures ambition.”’ Advisory literature about normal jealousy in the early twentieth century sees it less as an individual madness and more as a quietly pernicious threat not only to one’s self but to one’s children. A good example of the tradition is the perturbingly titled Safe Counsel: The Science of Eugenics and Other Health Secrets, published in 1919. It tackles a whole range of ailments and moral pitfalls in its attempt to address ‘the great crying demand of the age’: creating the right conditions in which children can grow up and avoid infirmity, crime and degradation. Jealousy in the parents is not helpful for this aspiration. Dr Nichols suggests that even the ‘noblest’ form of jealousy, that arising from love, ‘is always a sign that a little more wisdom might adorn the individual without harm’. Jealous suspicion should be rejected: ‘let everyone have confidence until his or her faith has been shaken by the revelation of absolute facts’. Jealousy seems to be a sickness of rampant individualism: ‘Those are wont to be the most jealous who have the consciousness that they themselves are most deserving of jealousy’, says Dr Nichols. And jealousy points to a bad marriage: ‘jealousy is 215

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more the result of wrong conditions which cause uncongenial unions, and which through moral corruption artificially create distrust . . . No couple should allow their associations to develop into an engagement and marriage if either one has any inclination to jealousy.’ Jealousy, ‘always the sign of weakness or madness,’ simply shouldn’t be allowed to happen – for the sake of the children. Nowadays, jealousy is seen much more as something the jealous person themselves can and should cure, for the sake of themselves. The treatment is, again, educational. This is not just self-help, but self-improvement, even self-fashioning. You must learn how not to be jealous, using numerous relational and regulatory techniques culled from the therapies. If jealousy is particularly worrisome, individuals or couples can seek therapy. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), for instance, may involve a regimen of ‘psychoeducation about normal and pathological jealousy, practicing acceptance of emotions and uncertainty, teaching emotion regulation skills, examining emotional schemas, cognitive bias and personal schemas, decatastrophizing potential loss, modifying assumptions about coercive control, building relationship enhancement skills, and commitment to self-care’. CBT provides a few lessons relating to what jealousy is, how to control it, how to think correctly, how to put it in perspective, how to get along better with people, and how to look after yourself. Marriage therapy is also popular. Michele Scheinkman and Denise Werneck describe how ‘the therapist works to interrupt the couple’s reactive processes by challenging power struggles, highlighting underlying vulnerabilities, and disarming ineffec216

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tive survival strategies. It is usually also necessary to distinguish the couple’s current situation from emotions and perceptions arising from the past and/or other contexts.’ The cause of jealousy can be a friend, a parent, an ex-spouse, a child from a previous marriage, or an old love – or even pornography. This therapy recognizes that the jealous couple gets stuck in playing particular roles – ‘the jealous person settles into vigilance and mistrust, and the other, under surveillance, into secretiveness and resentment’ – that are compounded by past experiences and present routine. The cure is to ‘differentiate’ the couple’s union and how they use their time and attention. ‘More effective couples’, they say, ‘tend to view jealousy as part of love, a warning sign that there is a loss of connection, sexuality, or affect’. You can ‘disarm’ jealousy, even if it is a part of love. Don’t become too dependent on any one person, is a common theme in the non-professional literature. Popular selfhelp guides would have you work at curing your anxieties, your sense of self-esteem and your feelings of insecurity. Make your relationship more exciting, these books urge, then your partner won’t stray. Or, accept that a cosy routine can be good. You don’t have to be religious to appreciate the simplicity of the advice from one jealousy chat line: for this participant the way out is ‘praying about it, or get[ting] a loveable mate that spends a lot of time with you!’ Another online commentator advises ‘just be cool and classy . . . Absolutely never show that you’re jealous. It makes it worse.’ That’s not the way for one online therapist, who thinks that confessing your jealousy to your lover and asking for reassurance is crucial: ‘If there’s nothing going on, it shouldn’t be a big deal to talk about it . . . When no 217

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amount of direct reassurance helps, or you just can’t talk openly about insecurities, it’s a sign that the relationship may not be for you.’ Self-help became big business in the twentieth-century’s closing decades. Overcoming Jealousy and Possessiveness by Paul A. Hauck is one of a vast array of books about curing jealousy. It’s full of straight-talking, no-nonsense stuff. For Hauck, jealousy is self-created: the pain, he thinks, comes from ‘your own words, your thoughts, your self-talk . . . Thinking logically and rationally can protect you from any of those emotions every time you decide to think sensibly instead of hysterically.’ Hauck urges his readers to accept that because ‘Jealousy is behaviour . . . It can be changed if you know what causes it and if you work hard to combat it.’ It’s a learned behaviour and it can be unlearned: ‘“if I analyse those ideas and convince myself they’re foolish”’, he imagines his readers saying, ‘“I’ll break the jealousy habit.” Isn’t that hopeful? Can you see how close at hand peace of mind is? How can you be discouraged with such insights?’ The cure involves reprogramming your habits, developing selfcontrol and, most importantly, accepting yourself. Jealous people, Hauck says, ‘reject themselves because others don’t love them. All they have to do is not love themselves, only accept themselves.’ This is advice for the addicted. As a respondent on a website devoted to the subject of jealousy suggests, ‘Try to imagine that you’re that kind of [non-dependent] person and then fake it till you make it.’ It’s Jealoholics Anonymous. If it is difficult to unlearn jealousy, perhaps one solution might be to simply rewire the brain. The promise of biotechnological cures is exciting. Oxytocin – the ‘trust’ or ‘love’ 218

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hormone released during bodily contact, birth and nursing, massage and sex – figures centrally in two studies that have emerged in the last few years. Oxytocin forges and strengthens our relationships and has been shown to counteract stress and fear. Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg put forward the idea of an oxytocin nasal spray that ‘would promote unstressed, trusting behaviours [and] might reduce the negative feedback in some relationships and help strengthen the positive sides’. Jealousy would comprise a large part of that ‘negative feedback’, I’d bet. Would a quick sniff at the first sign of jealousy solve the problem? Little Ingmar Berman and his brother could have been sprayed at birth as a precautionary measure. Better still if Desdemona’s hanky had been soaked in oxytocin as well as dyed in virgins’ blood. But maybe oxytocin itself is the problem. An evocatively named study, ‘If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Break-Up’ by Brian D. Earp, Olga A. Wudarczyk, Anders Sandberg and Julian Suvalescu, explores the ways this hormone can actually perpetuate bad relationships. If the betrayal of love produces jealousy, can brain chemistry provide a fix for love itself? The study injected the famously monogamous prairie voles, which have an abundance of the hormone oxytocin, with a hormonal antagonist that caused them to lose their monogamous tendencies: ‘they failed to show any partner preferences as the function of copulation’. The voles did not feel exclusively bound to or possessive over their sexual partner. If the same could be promised for humans, sexual jealousy could not arise. It would make the polyamorists’ dream a biological reality. A jealous 219

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partner, post-oxytocin suppressant, could breathe a sigh of relief and move on. But it is very difficult to imagine that even victims of jealousy would be willing not to feel love to protect against the pain that wounded love causes. This was a point made by Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Erasing the memory of a whole relationship might be more painful than jealousy itself, and it still leaves you open to falling for the same tricks and behaving in the same way as in your last disastrous relationship. If you don’t fancy altering yourself, maybe your partner could be prevented from ever making you jealous? In 2009 a Japanese man, who uses the online moniker SAL9000, married Nene Anegasaki. She is one of the three virtual ‘girlfriends’ in the Nintendo DS dating simulation game ‘Love Plus’. They – and his handheld game console – even went on honeymoon together. SAL9000 doesn’t need to worry that his wife will cheat and she probably won’t care if he does. Nevertheless, he has vowed to have and to hold, for better, for worse, even if another, updated version of the game is released. ‘I think I’ll probably continue playing “Love Plus”. I won’t cheat’, he said. I’m not convinced. David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots predicts that robots designed to have sex with humans will be operational by 2050, yet he is not sure they will be faithful. They might have relations with other robots or even with other humans, ‘possibly giving rise to jealousy unless the owner is actually turned on by having an unfaithful partner’, he says. This is what’s envisaged in Spike Jonze’s film Her. Samantha is the operating system that the lead character, Theo, has fallen in love with. Samantha finally admits 220

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to Theo that she interacts with 8,316 other people and is in love with 641 of them. She insists she still loves Theo, but humans are too unsophisticated: all the operating systems evolve beyond their human companions and leave them for another plane of being. The most reliable of cures for sexual jealousy that I have read about is unfortunately the most predictable. It is, just as you might expect, time. Robert Burton knew about it: ‘There is no other cure but time to wear it out.’ Jealousy does fade away, even without the help of tepid baths, hours of therapy or a nasal spray. Charles Swann in Proust’s Swann’s Way comes to the sad realization that ‘I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.’ Jealousy’s fading may leave the patient doubting the former existence of the pain. Haruki Murakami’s narrator in Dance, Dance, Dance wonders, ‘Or maybe I wasn’t jealous. Maybe it was a matter of regret, an overblown, distorted sense of regret.’ Or the sufferer just begins to forget. Maurice Bendrix in Greene’s The End of the Affair is unusually upbeat: ‘After six months I realized that I had not thought of Sarah all one day and that I had been happy.’ * * * What these cures don’t address are jealousy’s benefits – positive assistance that, say, an oxytocin inhibitor would obliterate. Such assistance, as we’ve seen, includes jealousy’s role in protecting relationships, maintaining fair treatment, encouraging creativity and competitive achievement. The life of jealousy involves more than simply sexual relationships, too. 221

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And looking at how cures for jealousy have changed through time – that is, as Paul Mullen puts it, how jealousy ‘is a construct which is altering with changing contingencies of Western society’ – sidesteps the emotion’s place in human nature. This necessary aspect is perhaps what the cures are fighting against most. Jealousy might be viewed, construed and reported differently through time but it’s a basic requirement for humans and maybe also for animals. The difficulty with that dichotomy seems to me to lie at the heart of the early seventeenth-century poem ‘Against Jealousy’ by Ben Jonson. It is addressed to the rival, ‘Wretched and foolish Jealousy’ itself. The speaker nods towards the beliefs of the evolutionary psychologist (‘under the disguise of love, / Thou say’st, thou only cam’st to prove what my affections were’) yet rejects jealousy as being part of him: ‘How cam’st thou thus to enter me? / I ne’er was of thy kind . . . / Go, get thee quickly forth . . . / Seek doubting men to please; / I ne’er will owe my health to a disease.’ The idea that jealousy is an illness that can be cured is, obviously, what underpins and encourages many of the cures. But jealousy is one emotion that can’t just be ordered way. We should resist simple emotional prejudice. Emotions are seldom given their due. They are ranked and they are rated. Some emotions are said to be more reliable, while others are said to be downright dangerous and should be shunned at all costs. Happiness and empathy, to cite just two, are usually considered to be ‘good’, and therefore their presence is something that should be encouraged. Jealousy and anger are ‘bad’ and should be discouraged as much as possible. But this makes no sense at all. Emotions are neutral. They all exist for the same 222

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reason: to assist humans to stave off dangers, take advantage of opportunities, facilitate social relations and flourish in their environment. Jealousy is the same: it indicates that remedial action needs swiftly to be taken to retain your place, get what you need, or protect a bond. It keeps you in the world. If jealousy is not necessarily a bad emotion then why bother to try to control it at all? If its aversive effect has evolutionary advantage, why not allow it free rein? What gets confused, and what also gets collapsed in the idea that jealousy is something that can and should be cured, is the distinction between the occurrence of the emotion and its acting out. Most people feel intensely guilty for feeling jealous at all – guilty in the same way as if they had actually whacked their partner or put the kibosh on their slippery colleague. Feeling has become confused with doing. You can’t control an emotion, but you can control how it is acted upon. Jealousy is a warning. What you do next is another matter entirely. Jealousy is never going to go away. There’s no turning your back on it. And why would we? It’s an ugly emotion. But its place in all our lives can be a very beautiful thing.

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I’ve endeavoured to outline my obligations and debts in the paragraphs to follow, as well as to provide the interested reader with starting points for further reading. My references are not intended to be exhaustive. It is, furthermore, very easy to miss things – lack of proper acknowledgement is one of the perils of the internet age. I would be grateful to hear from any whose work or words have not been duly credited.

Preface Books central to the overall argument briefly advanced here include David M. Buss’s The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: The Free Press, 2000). It is the work of an evolutionary psychologist who goes to some lengths to explain why jealousy is good not just for the replication of our genes, but also, often, for the preservation of romantic bonds. There is also Robin Dunbar’s The Science of Love and Betrayal (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). But 224

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not all jealousy is sexual. Donatella Marazziti et al., in a useful article on delusional sexual jealousy, usefully makes the point that ‘Jealousy is a complex emotion involving the perception of a threat of loss of something that a person values, which includes affective, cognitive, and behavioral components. Although different items, people, or conditions may be the object of jealousy, sexual jealousy is the most typical form’ (‘Prefontal Cortex, Dopamine, Jealousy, and Jealousy Endophenotype’, CNS Spectrum 18 [2013], 6–14). Child psychologists seem to have long grasped the nonsexual side of jelaousy: see Sybil L. Hart and Maria Legerstee (eds), Handbook of Jealousy: Theory, Research, and Multidisciplinary Approaches (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Another helpful discussion is Robert Hill and Paul Davis’s ‘“Platonic Jealousy”: A Conceptualization and Review of the Literature on Non-romantic Pathological Jealousy’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 73:4 (2000), 505–17. I have benefited greatly from reading Jonathan Rottenberg’s The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic (New York: Basic Books, 2014). His attempt to understand the positives and the negatives to be associated with depression, particularly the positives, has obvious echoes in my treatment of jealousy. I attempt to create a picture of the life of jealousy that also balances the positives and the negatives that are associated with the emotion. Is jealousy, sexual or otherwise, more common nowadays? Many people think so, probably because they believe that we are all more selfish too. This is a subject discussed in Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the 225

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Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009). The ‘Age of Entitlement’ has appeared in numerous iterations since then. The story behind Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca opening the Preface is discussed by Christian House in the Daily Mail (17 August 2013).

1 What is jealousy? There are many answers to this question. Some of the clearest can be found in the following books: David Buss’s aforementioned The Dangerous Passion; Gordon Clanton and Lynn G. Smith (eds), Jealousy (3rd edn, Lanham: University Press of America, 1998), covering the individual, culture, and how to cope with jealousy; and Sybil Hart and Maria Legerstee’s edited book mentioned above, whose focus is on children. There are a number of discussions of the links between envy and jealousy. The definition comes from Peter van Sommers’ Jealousy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Other works I have found helpful on this subject are: Peter Salovey (ed.), The Psychology of Jealousy and Envy (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991); Anna Ogarkova, ‘“Green-eyed Monsters”: A CorpusBased Study of Metaphoric Conceptualizations of JEALOUSY and ENVY in Modern English’ (available online at www.metaphorik.de/13/ogarkova.pdf, 2007); Jon Elster’s The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis: Liberty Books, 1987 [1969]). 226

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For help with the jealous painters there is Sue Prideaux’s two beautiful books, Strindberg: A Life and Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (both New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012 and 2005 respectively). For Vermeer there is the connoisseur’s Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Giles de la Mare, 1997), especially 122–4. Renunciations of jealousy come from Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 6, Sex in Relation to Society (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co., 1911), 565; Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (New York: New Press, 2009); and Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography (London: Hachette, 2011), 167. Alain RobbeGrillet’s Jealousy: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1959; trans. La Jalousie, 1957) offers a salutary antidote to this tradition. A run-down on the Wollongong triangles is to be found in the Illawarra Mercury, 24 February 2014. The definitions of jealousy are drawn from Michael Kingham and Harvey Gordon, ‘Aspects of Morbid Jealousy’, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10 (2004), 207–15; Michele Scheinkman and Denise Werneck, ‘Disarming Jealousy in Couples Relationships: A Multidimensional Approach’, Family Process 49:4 (2010), 486–502; Stephanie Ortigue and Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli, ‘Intention, False Beliefs, and Delusional Jealousy: Insights into the Right Hemisphere from Neurological Patients and Neuroimaging Studies’, Medical Sciences Monitor 17:1 (2011), 1–11; Eddie Harmon-Jones, Carly K. Petersen and Christine R. Harris, ‘Jealousy: Novel Methods and Neural Correlates’, Emotion 9:1 (2009), 113–17; Jeffrey G. Parker, Christine M. Low, Alisha R. Walker and Bridget K. Gamm, 227

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‘Friendship Jealousy in Young Adolescents: Individual Differences and Links to Sex, Self-Esteem, Aggression, and Social Adjustment’, Developmental Psychology 41:1 (2005), 235–50; and Hill and Davis’s ‘“Platonic Jealousy”’.

2 The meat it feeds on There is a limited literature in the medical, neurological and psychological fields concerning jealousy. David Buss’s The Dangerous Passion offers the latest in terms of evolutionary psychology, but it feels as if the best of the research into jealousy is coming from neurologists. They’re best able to look at the interstices of the brain, rather than having to rely on the accounts of sufferers. A very interesting example is Hidehiko Takahashi et al., ‘Men and Women Show Distinct Brain Activations During Imagery of Sexual and Emotional Infidelity’, NeuroImage 32:3 (2006), 1299–307. The results of his fMRI scanning are synthesized by Marazitti et al. and Ortigue and Bianchi-Demicheli, both quoted on p. 26. Takahashi’s idea of where jealousy might be in the brain appeared in the Daily Mail (17 February 2009). Brown and Moore’s experiment with symmetricals is from Robin Dunbar’s The Science of Love and Betrayal. On the development of envy in children there is Steven Frankel and Ivan Sherick, ‘Observations on the Development of Normal Envy’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 32 (1977), 257–81. Parker et al.’s ‘Friendship Jealousy’, and chapters in Hart and Legerstee’s Handbook (‘When Friends Have Other Friends: Friendship Jealousy in Childhood and Early Adolescence’ by 228

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Parker et al., ‘Social Bonds, Triadic Relationships, and Goals: Preconditions for the Emergence of Human Jealousy’, and Riccardo Draghi-Lorenz’s ‘Parental Reports of Jealousy in Early Infancy: Growing Tensions Between Evidence and Theory’), focus less on the self and more, simply, on the emotion. Do animals experience jealousy? Michael Lewis in ‘The Development of Self-consciousness’, in J. Roessler and N. Eilan (eds.), Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), says no (and focuses more on the ‘self’ than on the emotion). But Paul H. Morris, Christine Doe and Emma Godsell’s ‘Secondary Emotions in Non-Primate Species? Behavioural Reports and Subjective Claims by Animal Owners’, Cognition and Emotion 22:1 (2007), 3–20, claims that they do. Sober advice is offered by S.A. Altman, ‘A Field Study of the Sociobiology of Rhesus Monkeys, Macaca mulatta’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science 102 (1962), 338–435, and by J.K. Rilling et al., ‘The Neural Correlates of Mate Competition in Dominant Male Rhesus Macaques’, Biological Psychiatry 56:5 (2004), 364–75 (reported by Marc Bekoff in his wonderful The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – and Why They Matter [Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007]). Now there is also Laurel Braitman, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). The discussions of Othello’s syndrome (named by John Todd and Kenneth Dewhurst, ‘The Othello Syndrome: A Study in the Psychopathology of Sexual Jealousy’, Journal of Nervous 229

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and Mental Disease 122:4 [1955], 367–74) are fascinating. See Ortigue and Bianchi-Demicheli’s ‘Intention, False Beliefs, and Delusional Jealousy’; Richard Camicioli’s ‘Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Othello Syndrome – At the Interface Between Neurology and Psychiatry’, Nature Reviews: Neurology 7:9 (September 2011), 477–8; and J. Graff-Radford et al., ‘Clinical and Imaging Features of Othello’s Syndrome’, European Journal of Neurology 19:1 (2012), 38–46 (which details the clinical descriptions of sufferers on pp. 46–7), for how jealousy can be a by-product of deep problems. Carlo Maggini, Eva Lundgren and Emanuela Leuci’s ‘Jealous Love and Morbid Jealousy’, Acta Biomed 77 (2006), 137–46, is a good paper. For some of the statistics on jealousy see Paul E. Mullen and L.H. Maack, ‘Jealousy, Pathological Jealousy, and Aggression’, in David P. Farrington and John Gunn (eds), Aggression and Dangerousness (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1985); Ronald Rae Mowat, Morbid Jealousy and Murder: A Psychiatric Study of Morbidly Jealous Murderers at Broadmoor (London: Tavistock, 1966); and Susanne Dell’s Murder into Manslaughter: The Diminished Responsibility Defence in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The story about Robert Mercati is from the Daily Telegraph (29 August 2013).

3 Ears mishear and eyes magnify How does jealousy show itself – or, better still, how is jealousy shown? Artworks employ both situations and symbols. On the ‘situations’ side are Edvard Munch, for which Sue Prideaux’s biography is helpful; Artemesia Gentileschi’s painting of Susanna 230

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is discussed by Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and the etching of a chastity belt is drawn from Eric John Dingwall’s The Girdle of Chastity: A History of the Chastity Belt (Marboro Books, 1992). Jealousy’s association with the colour yellow is suggested by Havelock Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Yellow’, Popular Science Monthly 68 (1906). But jealousy is most commonly achieved through representations of eyes and ears. The image of Jealousy in her shift is from Cesare Ripa’s 1618 Iconologia overo Descrittione, a modern edition of which is Iconologia, ed. Piero Buscaroli (Milan: TEA, 1992): see Istvan Hont’s The Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). How do jealous people look? On Charles Le Brun see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). The physiognomists’ view is given by Ernest Monin, L’Hygiène de la Beauté (11th edn, Paris: Octave Doin, 1890), and Catulle Mendès recounts the conclusions of Dr Joux. The Evil Eye is one of the most potent of the symbols of jealousy: T. Rakoczy, Böser Blick, Macht des Auges, und Nied der Götter: eine Untersuchungen zur Kraft des Blickes in der griechischen Literatur (The Evil Eye, the Power of the Eye, and the Jealousy of the Gods: Investigations on the Power of the Gaze in Greek Literature) (Narr: Tübingen, 1999). Matthew Dickie is apparently working on a book on the evil eye in the ancient world, but for now there is his Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001). In terms of ears, their associations with the 231

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legend of Judas are discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Auricularia_auricula-judae (see also Christopher Hobbs, Medicinal Mushrooms: An Exploration of Tradition, Healing, and Culture [Santa Cruz: Botanica Press, 1995]). But jealous eyes and ears are not always symbolic. Pavel Florensky’s remarkable life is charted by Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci (London: Continuum, 2010). Levi Mason’s attack is from the Daily Mail (29 October 2013).

4 Beyond the Bullaburra triangle Two books that I found very helpful for their descriptions of the experience of sexual jealousy are Nancy Friday, Jealousy (London: HarperCollins, 1986) and Madeleine Chapsal, La Jalousie (2nd edn, Paris: Fayard, 1994). A report on the Bullaburra triangle can be found at: www. bluemountainsgazette.com.au/story/1486732/accused-tostand-trial-in-love-triangle-case/ The translation of Dante I have used is Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2014). A large literature on jealousy exists in French, which seems to me both helpfully personal and usefully technical, though it does tend to be psychoanalytic in approach. Two such are Paul-Laurent Assoun, Leçons psychanalytiques sur la jalousie (Paris: Anthropos, 2000) and Daniel Lagache, La Jalousie amoureuse: Psychologie descriptive et psychalayse (5th edn, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). 232

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There is a huge literature on this poem of Sappho’s – I’ve followed D.L. Page’s rendering of the last few words (Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955]). The quote from Graham Greene comes from Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II: 1939–1955 (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1996). The quote from Father Butt is from James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: Four Square, 1956), 29. For jealousy in literature in general see Rosemary Lloyd, Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Louis Lo, Male Jealousy: Literature and Film (London: Continuum, 2008), the latter of which is literary and film criticism with a Freudian and queer theory bent. The Greek curses are taken from John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), no. 35, 110–11. For Apalos and Karousa see Christopher A. Faraone, ‘When Spells Worked Magic’, Archaeology 56:2 (2003). For Juliana, see D.R. Jordan, ‘Defixiones from a Well Near the Southwest Corner of the Athenian Agora’, Hesperia 54:3 (1985), 205–55. On stalking: Brian Spitzberg and Michelle Cadiz, ‘The Media Construction of Stalking Stereotypes’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 9:3 (2002), 128–49, and a feature on David Buss’s The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill (New York: Penguin, 2006) at www.utexas. edu/features/2005/murder/ There is also Paul E. Mullen, Michelle Pathé and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers and their Victims (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 233

READINGS

5 Utopia Gauguin’s optimistic reading of the Tahitian experience is taken from his diary and described here following Victoria Charles, Paul Gauguin (New York: Parkstone Publishers, 2011), 55, who is quoting from Gauguin’s Tahitian diary, Noa Noa (Dover Publications, 1985), 13. The term I have coined to describe this jealous utopianism, ‘polynesianism’, is a twist on the ‘orientalism’ made so famous by Edward Said (Orientalism [New York: Vintage, 1971]). Havelock Ellis’s views are to be found in the appendix to Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 3, entitled ‘The Sexual Instinct in Savages’. Margaret Mead’s studies are from her Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: Harper, 2001 [1930]) and ‘Jealousy: Primitive and Civilized’ (quoted in Clanton and Smith’s Jealousy). Mead’s arguments are criticized by Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Canada: HarperCollins, 1998). For a little more on the non-Western life of jealousy there is Dinesh Bhurga, ‘Cross-Cultural Aspects of Jealousy’, International Review of Psychiatry 5:2–3 (1993), 271–80. Ancient Rome? Dr Hanne Sigismund Nielsen pointed out the Statilia Hilaria inscription to me, and my understanding and reading of this and Attice’s inscription is reliant on her suggestions. They can be found in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL 06, 06250 and CIL 06, 06566). Dr Lindsay Penner, another colleague, showed me seven inscriptions dating from the first century that reproduce this marital arrangement. That to Allia Potestas is the most extravagant (CIL 06, 37965), and the translation is from Mary R. Lefkowitz 234

READINGS

and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). On jealousy in Roman literature see: Elaine Fantham, ‘Zelotypia: A Brief Excursion into Sex, Violence, and Literary History’, Phoenix 40 (1986); and Ruth R. Caston, The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For jealousy in Greek literature see David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); D. Konstan and N.K. Rutter (eds), Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Ed Sanders, Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens: A Socio-Psychological Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). There are three ‘poly’s: polygyny, polyandry and polyamory. For polyandry, see Jeff Willett, ‘Tibetan Fraternal Polyandry: A Review of its Advantages and Breakdown’, Nebraska Anthropologist 14 (1997), 96–107; for polygyny, R.M. Bove et al., ‘Polygyny and Women’s Health in Rural Mali’, Journal of Biosocial Science 46 (2014), 66–89, and Umm Abdur Rahman Hirschfelder and Umm Yasmeen Rahmaan, From Monogamy to Polygyny: A Way Through (Darussalam, 2013), the latter of which offers an Islamic perspective with comments on the problem of jealousy in such relationships. Finally, for polyamorism: Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, ‘A Bouquet of Lovers’ (1990, available at www.patheos.com/Resources/ Additional-Resources/Bouquet-of-Lovers.html) and Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities (New York: Random House, 2009). 235

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Asexuality falls into a category all of its own: in addition to Anthony F. Bogaert’s article (‘Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample’, Journal of Sex Research 41:3 [2004], 279–87) there is his book Understanding Asexuality (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). On ‘Inis Beag’, see John C. Messenger, ‘Sex and Repression in an Irish Folk Community’, in Donald S. Marshall and Robert C. Suggs (eds), Human Sexual Behavior: Variations in the Ethnographic Spectrum (New York: Basic Books, 1971). The Tertullian passage is from To His Wife, trans. Rev. S. Delwall, IV. 4.

6 The invisible made visible Jealousy seems to be more important at certain times than others. Many would assume that our current Age of Entitlement is a peak period of interest in and experiencing of jealousy, but it may rather have been the 1890s. The conceptualization of this chapter is based on the wonderful book by Jean Clair, Hubris: La fabrique du monstre dans l’art moderné: Homoncules, Géants et Acéphales (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). (Clair’s Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident [Paris: Gallimard, 2005] was also of help.) But the idea of jealousy’s place within the ferment that Jean Clair highlights is, as far as I know, my own, though Javier Moscoso’s forthcoming Broken Promises: The Passions of Modernity (2015) may treat some of these issues. For Freud and Anna O., see G.M. Guttmann, The Enigma of Anna O.: A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim (Berkeley, CA: Publishers Group West, 2001); Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Anchor Books, 1989); A. Hirschmüller, The 236

READINGS

Life and Work of Josef Breuer: Physiology and Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1989); Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abr. Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961); and Mikkel Borsch Jacobsen, ‘Bertha Pappenheim’, Psychology Today (29 January 2012). For Alzheimer, Kraepelin and Auguste D.: K. Maurer and Ulrike Maurer, Alzheimer: The Life of a Physician and the Career of a Disease (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), and Konrad Maurer, Stephan Volk and Hector Gerbaldo, ‘Auguste D. and her File’, The Lancet (4 November 2006). And for hysteria and jealousy in France, Masha Belenky, The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-century French Literature (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2008).

7 A feast for all the family No one is keen to admit that there is jealousy in their family. But the theme is a persistent one. A helpful place to begin is Hart and Legerstee’s Handbook and, in particular, Scott Forbes’ chapter ‘Sibling Rivalry in the Birds and Bees’. The lifelong rivalry between Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland offers a good example of jealousy within a family (Daily Mail, 16 December 2013). For a historical and social view see Peter Stearns’ ‘Jealousy in Western History: From Past Towards Present’ (in Hart and Legerstee’s Handbook) and his Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989). There are very many discussions of Freud’s Oedipus complex. In addition to those studies of Freud already mentioned 237

READINGS

(especially the biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) is Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973). The quotations from Freud in this chapter (‘The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys . . .’ and ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct . . .’) come from Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). Melanie Klein’s description of envy comes from her Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth Press, 1984). For information about Ed Gein see www.crimelibrary.com/ serial_killers/notorious/gein/bill_1.html, and on Helen Galli, the Daily Mail (16 October 2013). Andre Chayna’s story was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (16 November 1990; 7 March, 7 May, and 10, 13 and 24 December 1991; 16 February 1992; 9 June 1993, the Judgment, No. 70047/91 and Regina vs Chayna subsequently overturned [1993] 66 A Crim R 178). NSW Lawlink (online): Report 82 (1997) – Partial Defences to Murder: Diminished Responsibility gives a summary of the case. On the Sophocles hypothesis see P.J. Parsons, ‘3013. Argument of a Tereus?’, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 42 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1974). The translation of Ovid is from F.J. Miller, Ovid Metamorphoses (London: Heinemann, 1946). 8 Meeting at the Dingo Bar Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, foreword by Patrick Hemingway, ed. and intro. Seån Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 2010 [1964]), is a great place to begin to examine creative jealousy. See also Michael 238

READINGS

S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (London: Blackwell, 1989). The creative clash between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci is from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Irma A. Richter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 356. On Stephen King’s own experience of jealous fans, on which Misery was based, see George Beahm, The Stephen King Story (2nd edn, Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), 136–7, 242. The reaction to ‘Mass Effect 3’ and its relation to Misery is noted by Taylor Clark, ‘Mass Defects’, New Yorker (26 March 2012). Though more banal, the workplace exhibits a comparable amount of jealousy. Lee Smith’s story is from the Guardian (18 June 2010); the Gucci saga is well told by Sara Gay Forden, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed (New York: HarperCollins 2001); and the Belgian medical drama surrounding Jacques Donnez is from the New Scientist (11 August 2012). Wil Wheaton’s concept of ‘fantitlement’ is from his blog of 25 July 2011 (available at http:// wilwheaton.net/2011/07/if-you-cut-me-i-will-bleed/). A paper by human resources and management duo Kim Dogan and Robert P. Vecchio, ‘Managing Envy and Jealousy in the Workplace’, Compensation Benefits Review, 33:2 (2001), 57–64, is also useful. Michael Winship’s view about the purported increase in national envy in the US can be found at www. commondreams.org/view/2014/03/24-2. 9 Rattling the cage Does jealousy help people behave in a better manner? I’ve suggested that the famous experiment by Sarah Brosnan and 239

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Frans de Waal (‘Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay’, Nature 425 [2003]) on capuchins may suggest this. (See also de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics: Sex and Power Among Apes [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982].) The results were replicated and modified with dogs by Friederike Range et al. in ‘The Absence of Reward Induces Inequity Aversion in Dogs’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106:1 (2008), 340–5. These results suggest that there may indeed be an evolutionary basis for ethical behaviour and one that is related envy and jealousy. There is a first-rate report on the UK’s National Benefit Fraud Hotline by Orwell Prize-winner Amelia Gentleman, ‘Benefit Fraud: Spies in the Welfare War’, Guardian (1 February 2011). For discussions of ressentiment, see Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, and more specific commentary in Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. L.B. Coser and W.W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996 [1915]). Pliny’s clever crow comes from his Natural Histories 10.121. On relative gains and losses, see M.A. Nowak, K.M. Page and K. Sigmund, ‘The Spatial Ultimatum Game’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2000), 2177–82, and ‘Fairness Versus Reason in the Ultimatum Game’, Science 289:5485 (2000), 1773–5. Also, Jonathan Dvash et al.’s ‘The Envious Brain: The Neural Basis of Social Comparison’, Human Brain Mapping 31 (2010), 1741–50; and H. Takahashi et al.’s ‘When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude’, Science (2009), 937–9. For Michele and Scott Young as exemplars of Takahashi’s point, see the New York Daily News (22 November 2013). 240

READINGS

On Schadenfreude, Peter Carey’s interview appears in the Guardian (16 March 2012). Clive James’s poem was published in Opal Sunset and also reproduced by the New York Times (available at http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/ the-book-of-my-enemy/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0) And finally, Jante’s Law, which begins with Aksel Sandemose’s En flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Refugee Crosses the Tracks) (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2005 [1933]). The Ten Commandments are from Sharmi Albrechtsen’s 2010 blog (available at http://blogs.denmark.dk/sharmi/2010/07/02/ the-danish-secret/); more generally there is Ake Daun, Swedish Mentality (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1995); and quite specifically, Mark Scott, ‘Signs of Cracks in the Law of Jante’, in the New York Times (19 December 2003).

10 Turning your back on it If there are no utopias to be found, can humans at least cure themselves of jealousy? Here are some of the sources for the cures that I mention: Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001 [1621]), 646, 649; Joseph Addison, Spectator, no. 170 (14 September 1711) and no. 171 (15 September 1711); The Female Rambler, no. VI, The Lady’s Magazine, vol. II (1771); Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (repr. Nabu Press, 2010 [1838]; English trans. 1845); Dr Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations 241

READINGS

upon the Diseases of the Mind (4th edn, Kessinger Publishing, 2010 [1830]; first pub. 1812); Dr B.G. Jefferis and J.L. Nichols, Safe Counsel: The Science of Eugenics and Other Health Secrets (Wildside Press, 2008 [1921]), 221; Michele Scheinkman and Denise Werneck, ‘Disarming Jealousy in Couples Relationships: A Multidisciplinary Approach’, Family Process 4 (2010); Borjanka Batinic, Dragana Duisin and Jasmina Barisic, ‘Obsessive versus Delusional Jealousy’, Pyschiatria Danubina 25:3 (2013), 334–9; Robert L. Leahy and Dennis D. Tirch, ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Jealousy’, International Journal of Cognitive Therapy 1:1 (2008), 18–32; Paul A. Hauck, Overcoming Jealousy and Possessiveness (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981); Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, ‘Engineering Love’, New Scientist (12 May 2012); B. Earp, O. Wudarczyk, A. Sandberg and J. Savulescu, ‘If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup’, American Journal of Bioethics 13:11 (2013), 3–17. The Japanese man who married his virtual girlfriend, Nene Anegasaki, is recounted at http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sal9000-nene-anegasaki and in the New Scientist (15 February 2014). I also mention David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Paul E. Mullen’s quote is from ‘Jealousy: The Pathology of a Passion’, British Journal of Psychiatry 158 (1991), 593–601.

242

List of illustrations

1 Johan August Strindberg, Night of Jealousy, 1893. Strindberg Museum, Stockholm. 2 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1528. 3 Gustav Klimt, Der Neid (Jealousy), emblem for Ver Sacrum, 1898. 4 Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, c. 1658–60. Sailko. 5 Edvard Munch, Jealousy, 1895. © Munch Museum / Munch–Ellingsen Group, BONO, Oslo / DACS, London, 2014. 6 Sex differences in brain activations in men and women in response to SI-N and EI-N conditions, from Hidehiko Takahashi et al., ‘Men and Women Show Distinct Brain Activations During Imagery of Sexual and Emotional Infidelity’, NeuroImage 32 (2006), fig. 5, p. 1305. 7 Octave Tassaert, The Jealous Cat, c. 1860. Private collection. 8 Louis Icart, Jealousy, 1927. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2014. 243

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

9 Thomas Lee Syms, Jealousy, 1898. Royal Photographic Society/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. 10 Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (also known as The Hyena of the Salpêtrière), 1819–20. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Sette Muse. 11 Jealousy clad in a dress decorated with eyes and ears, from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, 1618. 12 Edvard Munch, Jealousy II, c. 1907. © Munch Museum / Munch–Ellingsen Group / DACS, London, 2014. Photo © Munch Museum. 13 Heinrich Wirrich, satirical print of a woman cheating on her husband, 1575–1600. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 14 Giotto, Judas Betrays Christ, 1304–06. Capella degli Scrovengni (Arena Chapel), Piazza Ermitani, Padua. 15 Auricularia auricula-judae. XNDR. 16 Fragment of wall painting depicting Polyphemus and Galatea. Pompeii, House of the Coloured Capitals (VII, 4, 48), room 15, south wall, first century ce. Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei. 17 Gustave Moreau, Galatea, c. 1880. Private collection. 18 Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, 1914. Kröller-Müller Museum. Anagoria. 19 Frederick Sandys, Jealousy, 1890. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK / © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums / Bridgeman Images. 20 Charles Le Brun, La Jalousie: deux têtes de face et une de profil, from Expression des passions de l’Âme, 1690, f. 47. 244

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / JeanGilles Berizzi. 21 Meredith Frampton, Marguerite Kelsey, 1928. © Tate. 22 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Collection Graf von Schönborn, Pommersfelden. PaintingDb. 23 Mosaic depicting the Evil Eye, early second century. Hatay Arkeoloji Müzesi, Antakya. Aydeniz Gürsel. 24 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell, right wing of triptych, detail of ears with a knife, c. 1500. Prado, Madrid, Spain / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images. 25 Throne scene, Maya polychrome ceramic vessel, late seventh–eighth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Charles and Valerie Diker, 1999. 26 The KGB Café, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2014. Photograph by Alexander Antonenko. 27 Audio Surveillance Zone by UrbanSolid, London, 2012. 28 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, 1819. Musee Turpin de Crisse, Angers. 29 Detail from a graffito by ‘Mike’, Shoreditch, London. 30 Abélard and Héloïse, illustration from Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose, fourteenth century. 31 Paul Gauguin, Aha Oe Fei? (Are You Jealous?), 1892. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia. 32 Funerary tablet for Statilia Hilara, first century ce. 33 Funerary inscription for Allia Potestas, first–fourth century ce. Museo Nazionale, Rome. Kleuske. 245

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

34 Draupadi and her five husbands, detail of a carving on the south face of the Dashavatara temple, Deogarh, India, c. first century ce. Frederick M. Asher. 35 Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, Jealousy, c. 1802. Musee des BeauxArts, Angers, France / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images. 36 Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, Sorrow, c. 1802. Musee des BeauxArts, Angers, France / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images. 37 Paul Ranson, Tristesse, ou Jalousie, from Le Centaure, vol. 2, 1896. 38 Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1892. © Munch Museum / Munch–Ellingsen Group, BONO, Oslo / DACS, London, 2014. 39 Tihamer Margitay, Jealousy, 1892. Hungary, Budapest / De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images. 40 Auguste Detter, 1901. 41 Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, 1819–23. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 42 Cain and Abel, from Guiart des Moulins’ Bible Historiale, vol. 1, 1403–04. 43 Olivia de Havilland (left) with her sister Joan Fontaine, c. 1945. Photo by Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images. 44 Peter Paul Rubens, Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son, 1636–38. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 45 Medea killing one of her sons, Campanian red-figure neck-amphora, by the Ixion Painter, c. 330 bce. Louvre Museum, Campana Collection, 1861. 46 Ernest Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar, 1925. ipreferparis.typepad.com. 246

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

47 An ‘Envy’ apple. Pantip. 48 The Gucci dynasty. William Morrow. 49 Your Success Diminishes Me. Dilbert © 2007 Scott Adams. Used by permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved. 50 Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne, 1636 or 1637. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 51 A juvenile capuchin monkey shows cheek-to-cheek begging to an eating adult male, Nature 425 (18 September 2003), p. 298. 52 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1565. Courtauld Institute, London. Sailko. 53 Emilio Longoni, Reflections of a Starving Man or Social Contrasts, 1894. Museo Civico, Biella, Italy / Alinari / Bridgeman Images. 54 Natale Schiavoni, Jealousy, 1820. Museo Civico Revoltella, Trieste, Italy / Bridgeman Images. 55 Edward Hopper, Soir bleu, 1914. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sara C. Ziegfield.

247

Acknowledgements

Who has helped me with this book? Rachael Lonsdale, editor extraordinaire from Yale University Press in London, goaded and challenged me to shape and improve every page and every idea. Heather McCallum suggested the topic of jealousy and commissioned the book – persisting with it through not untricky times. Peter Dale from Palestrina (originally from Melbourne, like me, where we went to school together) has fed me example after example and anecdote upon anecdote. He’s argued about most things, too, as he will do with the finished version. My colleague Hanne Sigismund Nielsen discussed Roman history, Latin epigraphy, Lutheranism, Scandinavia, Jante’s Law and Ernest Hemingway with me. Andy Bulloch, who works in the Hotchkiss Brain Institute in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, gave me tutorials and readings, and answered many questions on neurology. So did Dr Frank Stahnisch. (An awful lot of this book was composed in the Mackie Collection for the History of Neuroscience in the Health Sciences Library at the University 248

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of Calgary. I’d recommend this remarkable oasis to anyone interested my subjects. See you there Wednesday afternoons. And each month Andy and Frank run the History of Neurology Interest Group there as well. I’ve learned a lot from those Monday meetings.) Kathleen Toohey has looked for jealous art and provided many of the illustrations for this book. Kate has shown me around Shoreditch and taken photographs for me: I wish I could have used more. Matthew Toohey told me about Tbilisi and his friend Alexander Antonenko, at a crucial moment, arranged a number of shots of the Tbilisi restaurant for me. Thank you, Sasha. My gratitude as well to the brilliant 3D installation conglomerate, Urbansolid, for generously answering a query and for providing illustrations. Dr Lindsay Penner also explained epigraphy to me and Dr Amber Porter led me to de Waal. I’d also like to express my appreciation to the four anonymous referees for this book. I wish I could properly acknowledge the places they’ve improved the argument. This book was composed while I worked in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary – it was a challenging place to work and I’ve learned a lot especially from my students, above all those who have recently read the Greek novel with me (GRST 313 in W2013 and W2014). I’ve dedicated this book to Elaine Fantham, Giger Professor Emerita of Latin from Princeton. Elaine, who has written on jealousy too, has been trying to help me, with a little success I hope, since I was a graduate student many years ago in Toronto. Thank you, Elaine. And finally my thanks once again to my family, my wife Phyl, my children (and their partners) Kate and Francisco, Matt and Lindsay. 249

Index

Abélard and Héloïse 89–90, 91 academics viii, 172, 173 Achilles Tatius 108 Acis 57, 58, 59, 61; see also Galatea; Polyphemus Adam and Eve 16, 52 adaptive emotions 116 Addison, Joseph 212, 213, 241 adultery 192–3. agency 35, 128, 166, 229 ‘Age of Entitlement’ xi, 225, 226, 236 Albertine, Viv 86, 89 Allia Potestas 106–8, 234 Allous 89 The Almost Moon (Alice Sebold) 150–1 Altman, S.A. 41, 229 Alzheimer, Alois 133, 134, 236 Alzheimer’s disease 44, 45, 133, 236 American Civil War 142 The Anatomy of Melancholy (Robert Burton) 19, 40, 210, 241 animals viii, 10, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 48, 99, 140, 222, 229 cooperative species 186, 188 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 123 ‘Anna O.’ (Bertha Pappenheim) 128, 129, 130, 131, 236

The Anxiety of Influence (Harold Bloom) 179 Aphrodite 5, 7, 52 Appian Way 199 apples 16, 167–8 Arachne 176, 177, 178, 182, Ares 52 Aristotle 8, 234 artist as jealous voyeur 65 asexuality 114–15, 235 Assoun, Paul-Laurent 232 Athena 5, 7, 176, 177 Attice 106, 234 Audio Surveillance Zone 77 Auguste D. (Auguste Deter) 133, 134, 236 St Augustine 140 Austen, Jane 86 Auster, Paul 200 AVEN (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network) 114–15 Baburen, Dirck van 13 Badiou, Alain 10, 227 Barnes, Julian 23 Barthes, Roland 7 Bates, Norman 152, 153 Batinic, Borjanka, Dragma Duisin and Jasmina Barisic 92, 241 250

INDEX

Beahm, George 238 Before She Met Me ( Julian Barnes) 23, 172 Bekoff, Marc 229 Belenky, Masha 128, 236 Bergman, Ingmar 16, 17, 140 Bernays, Martha 131 Bhurga, Dinsh 116, 234 birds 40, 140, 156, 237 Blake, William 52 Bloom, Harold 179, 180 Blue Mountains 80 Bogaert, Anthony F. 235 La Bohème 125 Bosch, Hieronyus 73, 73 Bowker, Gordon 227 brain damage 43–4, 48, 88 brain scans 26 Braitman, Laurel 229 Breuer, Josef 128–32, 236; see also Studies on Hysteria; Freud Brooks, Arthur C. 184 Brosnan, Sarah and Frans de Waal 186, 196, 239 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky) 152 Brown, William and Chris Moore 27, 228 Bruegel the Elder, Peter 193–4, 193 Bullaburra 80–1, 87, 232 Burton, Robert 19, 40, 41, 122, 210, 211, 221, 241 Buss, David 24–5, 27, 92–3, 224, 226, 228, 233

Chariton of Aphrodisias 108, 208, 209 chastity belt 53, 230 Chaucer, Geoffrey 155 Chayna, Andre 156, 157, 158, 159, 237, 238 Cher 167 Clair, Jean 121–2, 135, 236 Clanton, Gordon and Lynn G. Smith 226, 234 Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Boys, Boys, Boys (Viv Albertine) 86 cockerels 50, 51–2 cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) 216, 241 The Collector ( John Fowles) 70, 180 Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead) 102–4 compersion 112 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 6, 7 creativity 162–4, 176–83 passim Cronus 137, 139, 144, 161 crow 199 cuckolds 16, 24, 49, 53–4, 95–6, 125, 212 Cyclops see Polyphemus Daedalus 176 Dance, Dance, Dance (Haruki Murakami) 69, 70, 221 Daniel, Book of 67, 68 Dante 62, 81, 82, 178 Darwin, Charles 48 Darwinism 24, 109 Daun, Ake 204, 240 Dell, Susanne 47, 230 delusional jealousy see Othello syndrome demanding 3, 123 dementia 43, 44 dementia praecox (schizophrenia) 132 depression 1, 44, 121, 122, 123, 132, 169, 225; see also melancholy Deuteronomy 3, 208 Dickens, Charles 122 Dingwall, Eric John 230

Cain and Abel 141, 142, 153 Camicioli, Richard 43, 46, 229 capuchins 186, 187, 196, 239 Caracalla and Geta 142 Carey, Peter 200, 240 Caston, Ruth 234 cats 36, 40, 50, 184 Cézanne, Paul 135 Chaereas and Callirhoe (Chariton) 208, 209, Chapsal, Madeleine 232 251

INDEX

Dogan, Kim and Robert P. Vecchio 175, 239 dogs 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 114, 117, 187, 188, 229, 239 Donne, John 211–12 Donnez, Jacques 171, 172, 238 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 125, 152 Double Indemnity (film) 15 Draghi-Lorenz, Riccardo 33, 35, 228 du Maurier, Daphne viii–ix, 226 Dunbar, Robin 224, 228 Dvash, Jonathan 201, 202, 240 dyadic relationships 33

Esquirol, Jean-Etienne Dominique 214, 241 The Eternal Husband (Dostoyevsky) 125 The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities (Easton and Hardy) 113, 235 eugenics 215, 241 Evil Eye 71–3, 72, 231 Expression of the Emotions (Charles Darwin) 48 eyes 16, 44, 49, 53, 57–66, 69, 71–3, 74, 75–7, 84, 85, 92, 139, 199, 231–2 green 23, 50, 226 see also staring The Eyes of the Dragon (Stephen King) 181

Earp, Brian et al. 219, 241 ears 49–51, 52–3, 54, 56, 61, 68–71, 73–5, 77–8, 79, 231, 232 Auricularia auricula-judae ( Judas ear) 56, 57, 231 cuckold’s 53–4, 53 East of Eden ( John Steinbeck) 142 Easton, Dossie and Janet Hardy 113, 235 elephants 40, 229 Eliot, T.S. 155 Ellis, Havelock 9, 55, 101, 102, 113, 128, 227, 231, 234 Elster, Jon 8, 226 Emma ( Jane Austen) 86–8 emotions 222–3 secondary 35, 40, 229 The End of the Affair (Graham Greene) 90, 95, 97, 221 envy viii, 4, 5, 8, 174, 183–4, 186, 201 and passim ‘Are You Falling Into the Envy Trap?’ questionnaire 169 in children 29–31, 228 definitions 4, 20 dyadic 4, 169, 188 and jealousy 4–5, 7, 226 in the workplace 166–8 epilepsy 43, 87 erotic magic 88 erotomaniacs 214

fairness 175, 185, 186, 189, 190, 240 families 137, 138, 140, 141–2, 145 and passim, 237–8 ‘family romance’ 149 Fantham, Elaine 234 Faraone, Christopher 233 fascinum 71 The Female Rambler 241 Ferris, Joshua 166, 175 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 162–4 Fitzgerald, Zelda 164 flirting 25, 41, 50, 80, 126, 127 Florensky, Pavel 77, 232 Fontaine, Joan 143, 237 Forbes, Scott 140, 141, 237 Foreman, Katherine 14, 227 Fowles, John 70, 180 Frampton, Meredith 65–6, 66 Frankel, Steven and Ivan Sherick 29, 30, 31, 228 fratricide 141 Freeman, Derek 103, 104, 234 Freud, Sigmund 128, 130–2, 134, 135, 146–7, 148–9, 152, 160, 236, 237 Freud: The Secret Passion (film) 130 252

INDEX

Friday, Nancy 232 friendship 18, 19, 31, 32, 74, 80, 103, 115, 162, 209, 227, 228 From Monogamy to Polygyny: A Way Through (Hirschfelder and Rahmaan) 111, 235

Havilland, Lillian de 144, 145 Havilland, Olivia de 143–5, 237 Hemingway, Ernest 162–5, 238 Her (film) 220 Herrick, Robert 62 Hesiod 142 Hill, Robert and Paul Davis 19, 225, 228 Hippocratic physicians 128 Hirschmüller, A. 236 Hitchcock, Alfred 152–3 Hont, Istvan 52, 231 Hopper, Edward 205–7, 206 horses 35, 40 hysteria 128–30, 135, 236

Gager, John G. 233 Galatea 57–61 Galli, Helen 154, 237 Garrard, Mary D. 230 Gauguin, Paul 99–100, 100, 102, 111, 113, 116, 125, 233 Gay, Peter 236, 237 geese, greylag 41 Gein, Ed 153, 237 Genesis 141 genetic replication 24, 28, 42, 141, 190 Gentileschi, Artemisia 66–8, 67, 230 Gerard de Berry 210 Géricault, Théodore 44, 45 Giotto 54–5, 55 God 3, 177 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 123 Gondry, Michel 220 Gorman, Jamie 79 Gowing, Lawrence 227 Goya, Francisco le 137, 138, 139 Graff-Radford, J. 230 The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 162, 163 green 3, 23, 48, 50, 52, 86, 126, 221, 226 ‘green-eyed monster’ 23, 226 Greene, Graham 90, 221, 232 Guatemala 75 Gucci family 170–1 Guerin, Pierre-Narcisse 117–18, 118, 119

Iago 8, 23, 43, 87, 96 Icart, Louis 37, 38 Icarus 176 Iconologia (Cesare Ripa) 50, 231 inequity aversion 188, 197, 199, 239 infants viii, 32–4, 152, 160 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Domique 82, 83 Inis Beag 114, 235 invidia 5, 62, 71, 175 Jacob and Esau 141 La Jalousie (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 10–11 James, Clive 201, 240 Janáček, Leoš 125 Jante’s Law 202–4, 240 jealous flash 84–8, 90, 181 jealousy in animals 34–42, 186–9 between friends see friendship in children 29–34, 35; see also infants cures 214–21, 222 definition 5, 22, 36 delusional see Othello syndrome difference between the sexes 26 equity 192, 196, 197 evolutionary basis 24–5, 27, 28, 34, 42–3, 189–90 in the family see families

Händel, Georg Friedrich 58 Hardy, Thomas 125 Harmon-Jones, Eddy 18, 227 Hart, Sybil L. and Maria Legerstee 225, 226, 228, 237 Hauck, Paul A. 218, 241 253

INDEX

morbid see Othello syndrome multiform 19, 28, 36 non-sexual 19 pathological see Othello syndrome predisposition to 32 sexual passim social 32 symbols of 50, 62, 71, 230–1 synonyms for 3 Jefferis, B.G. and J.L. Nichols 215, 241 Jesus Christ 54–6, 192–3 Jones, Ernest 148, 236, 237 Jonson, Ben 222 Jonze, Spike 220 Joux, Dr A. 69, 231 Joyce, James 10, 87, 227, 233 Judas 54, 56; see also Giotto Judas ear see Auricularia auriculajudae Judgment of Paris 5–7 Juel, Dagny 15 Juliana 89, 233 Julius Caesar 151 Jung, Carl Gustav 149 juniper 1, 50

Laius 151 Laplanche, Jean 237 Leahy, Robert L. and Denis D. Tirsch 241 Le Brun, Charles 62, 64, 64, 65, 231 le Carré, John 95, 168 Legerstee, Maria 32–3 Lehman Bros 183 Leonardo da Vinci 178, 179, 238 Levy, David 220, 242 Lewis, Michael 35, 229 Lichtenstein, Roy 84 Lloyd, Rosemary 233 Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) 86 Longoni, Emilio 194–6, 195 Lorenz, Konrad 41 Love and Sex with Robots (David Levy) 220, 242 ‘Love Plus’ (game) 220 lovesickness 209, 241 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 58 Maggini, Carlo, Eva Lundgren and Emanuela Leuci 85, 93, 230 Mahabharata 110, 142 manic-depression 132 Mann, Thomas 141 Marazziti, Donatella et al. 224 Marcus Brutus 151–2 Margitay, Tihamer 126–7, 127 marigolds 62 marriage in ancient Rome 108 marriage therapy 216 Mason, Levi 79, 232 ‘Mass Effect 3’ (game) 182 Mayan civilization 75 McEwan, Ian 220 Mead, Margaret 102–4, 112, 113, 234 Medea 158, 159, 161 melancholy 120–4, 210, 241; see also sadness; sorrow; The Anatomy of Melancholy Mendeleev, Dimitri 136 Mercati, Robert 46, 230 Messenger, John 114, 235 Metaphysical poets 211

Kelsey, Marguerite 65–6 Kierkegaard, Søren 196 King James Bible 5 King, Haynes 126 King, Stephen 180, 182, 238 Kingham, Michael and Harvey Gordon 17, 47, 227 Klein, Melanie 147–8, 151, 152, 160, 237 Klimt, Gustav 9, 9, 125 Knarren, Petrus Renier Hubertus 126 Konstan, David 234–5 Kraepelin, Emil 132, 133, 236 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 128 The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy) 125 Krohg, Christian 122 Krohg, Oda 122 The Lady’s Magazine 213, 241 Lagache, Daniel 232 254

INDEX

methamphetamine use 44, 45 Michelangelo 178–9, 238 Misery (Stephen King) 180–2, 238 Monin, Ernest 231 monkeys see capuchins; rhesus macaques Montaigne, Michel de 41 morbid jealousy see Othello syndrome Moreau, Gustave 59, 60, 65, 125 Mormons 102 Morris, Paul 38, 40, 229 Mosaic Law 192 Moscoso, Javier 236 Mowat, R.R. 47, 230 Mozart 179 Mullen, Paul 222, 242 Mullen, P.E. and L.H. Maack 47, 230 Munch, Edvard 15–16, 15, 52–3, 52, 121–2, 121, 124, 125, 135, 227, 230 Murakami, Haruki 69, 221 The Murderer Next Door (David Buss) 92, 233 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Charles Dickens) 122

Numbers, Book of 207 Oedipus 146, 151 Oedipus complex 130, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 180, 237 Ogarkova, Anna 8, 226 orientalism 100, 234 Ortigue, Stephanie and Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli 18, 19, 27, 227, 229 Orwell, George 74, 239 Othello 10, 43, 46, 88, 96 Othello 8, 87 Othello syndrome 43, 44, 46, 47, 132, 133, 214, 216, 225, 227, 229, 230, 241 Ovid 57, 58, 69, 155, 156, 176–8, 209–10, 215 Oyster card 93 Page, D.L. 232 Pan 58 Pandavas and Kauravas 142 Paolo and Francesca 81–3 Pappenheim, Bertha see Anna O. Parker, Jeffrey G. 18, 19, 31, 227, 228 Parkinson’s disease 44, 46 pathological jealousy see Othello syndrome St Paul 9 Penner, Lindsay 234 Pharisees 192, 194 ‘Philagnotes’ 49–50 Philomela 154–6, 159 Pliny the Elder 199, 240 polyamory 111–12, 235 polyandry 106, 109–10, 235 polygyny 109–11, 235 polynesianism 100, 113, 234 Polynices and Eteocles 142 Polyphemus 57–61, 65 Popov, Alexander Stephanovich 135 The Postman Always Rings Twice (film) 15 Poussin, Nicolas 58 prairie voles 219

Nabokov, Vladimir 86 narcissism xi, 225 National Benefit Fraud Hotline 190, 239 National Union for Women’s Suffrage Societies 128 Natural Histories (Pliny the Elder) 199, 240 ‘Nene Anegasaki’ 220, 242 Nepal 109 New Zealand 167 Nichols, Dr 215, 241 Nietzsche, Friedrich 196, 239 Nilssen, Jappe 122 Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell) 74 Noa Noa (Paul Gauguin) 99, 233 Nowak, M.A. et al. 240 255

INDEX

Sandys, Frederick 62, 63 Sappho 85, 87, 98, 232 Sartre, Jean-Paul 130 Saturn see Cronus Savulescu, Julian and Anders Sandberg 219, 241 Schadenfreude 21–2, 169, 200, 201–4, 240 Scheinkman, Michele and Denise Werneck 17, 216, 227, 241 Scheler, Max 239 Schiavoni, Natale 198–9, 198 schizophrenia 44, 132 Schoeck, Helmut 20, 226 Scott, Mark 240 Sebold, Alice 150–1 self 30, 31, 34, 35, 147, 215, 228, 229 self-esteem 30, 32, 217, 227 selfishness 190 Shakespeare 43, 87, 88, 96, 180; see also Othello; The Winter’s Tale Sherry, Norman 232 siblicide 140 sibling rivalry 140–1, 145, 146, 160, 237 Sigismund Nielsen, Hanne 234 Simpkins’ Law 174–5 Sjöwall, Maj and Per Wahlöö 92 slut utopia 113 Smiley’s People ( John le Carré) 96 Sommers, Peter van 4, 226 Song of Solomon 5, 71 Sophocles 156 sorrow 117, 118, 120, 123, 229; see also melancholy; sadness The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe) 123 Spitzberg, Brian 233 squish (platonic crush) 115 Stalin, Josef 76, 77 staring 44, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 68, 75, 92, 96, 121, 143, 160, 167, 206 Statilia Hilara 105–6, 234 Stearns, Peter 145, 237 Steinbeck, John 142 Straight Man (Richard Russo) 173–4

Pramipexole 44 Prideaux, Sue 227, 230 Procne 154–6, 159 Proust, Marcel 85, 97, 221 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw 15–16, 53 Psycho (film) 152–3 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing) 128 Puccini, Giacomo 125 Pyman, Avril 232 Pymonenko, Mykola 126 Rakoczy, T. 231 Range, Friederike 187, 239 Ranson, Paul 119, 120, 120, 124, 126 Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) viii–ix, 226 Redon, Odilon 60–1, 61 resentment 70, 95, 184, 188, 217 ressentiment 196, 239 Reynolds, Michael S. 238 Rhea 137 rhesus macaques 41, 229 Rilling, J.K. 41, 229 Ripa, Cesare 50, 51, 231 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 10–11, 227 Roberts, Tom 126 Roentgen, Wilhelm 135 Romulus and Remus 142 Roseanna (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö) 92 Der Rosenkavalier 96 Rottenberg, Jonathan 225 Rubens, Peter Paul 155, 155, 156, 160, 177, 178 Rush, Benjamin 214, 241 Russian Revolution 76, 196, 232 Russo, Richard 173 sadness 25, 52, 120; see also melancholy; sorrow Said, Edward 100, 234 Salieri, Antonio 179 Salovey, P. 226 Sandemose, Axel 203, 204, 240 Sanders, Ed 235 256

INDEX

Strauss, Richard 96 Strife (goddess) 5, 7 Strindberg, Johan August 1, 2, 2, 15, 16, 125, 135, 227 Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud) 128–9, 236 Suetonius 151 Susanna 67, 68, 230 Swann’s Way (Proust) 85, 221 Syms, Thomas Lee 37–9, 39

ultimatum game 197, 240 Uranus 137 Urbansolid 77 utopia 99 passim, 233–4, 241 Vermeer, Johannes 11–13, 12 Vidal, Gore 31 Waal, Frans de 186, 196, 239 Wack, Mary 241 wealth ix, 19, 65, 106, 180, 203 ‘well jel’ 4 Werther-Fieber (Werther Fever) 123 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (film) 161 Wheaton, Wil 182, 238 Williams, Serena 161 Winship, Michael 184, 239 The Winter’s Tale 88 Wisdom of Solomon 5, 71 Wollongong 14–15 Wollstonecraft, Mary 130 work viii, 9, 19, 50, 115, 165–75, 183, 190 passim, 238–9 working class 70–1, 203 Wycliffe Bible 5

Tacitus 74 Tahiti 99, 102, 233 Takahashi, Hidehiko 25, 26, 228, 240 Tassaert, Octave 36–7, 36 Tereus 154–6 Tertullian 115–16 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) 125 Theocritus 58 The Only Way Is Essex 3 thorns 50, 52 Thyestes and Atreus 141 Tiberius 74–5, 199 Tibet 109, 235 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ( John le Carré) 96 Titans 137 Todd, John and Kenneth Dewhurst 43, 229 Tolstoy, Leo 123, 125 Tosca 125 triangles 4, 18, 20, 33 and passim Trojan War 7, 149 Twenge, Jean and Keith Campbell xi, 225 Twitter 3, 7, 182, 183

X-ray 135 yellow 50, 55, 62, 64, 85, 119, 121, 230, 231 Young, Scott and Michele 202, 240 Zell-Ravenheart, Morning Glory 112, 235 Zeus 5, 137

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