Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives 9780814723371

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives Elaine Hoffman Baruch

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright © 1991 by New York University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baruch, Elaine Hoffman. Women, love, and power: Literary and psychoanalytic perspectives Elaine Hoffman Baruch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8147-1155-3 (cloth) i. Women in literature. 2. Literature—Psychological aspects. 3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 4. Psychoanalysis and literature. 5. Love in literature. 6. Feminism and literature. 7. Women and psychoanalysis. 8. Control (Psychology) I. Title. PN5Ó.5.W64B3 1991 809' -93352042—dc20 90-49329 CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. cío 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Book design by Ken Venzio

To my father and the memory of my mother

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Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

ix

i

2. Whatever Happened to Romantic Love? 25 3. He Speaks/She Speaks: Language in Some Medieval Love Literature 31 4. The Politics of Courtship

52

5. Marvell's "Nymph": A Study of Feminine Consciousness 69 6. Romantic Narcissism: Freud and the Love O/Abject

82

7. On Splitting the Sexual Object: Before and After Freud

103

8. The Feminine Bildungsroman: Education through Marriage 122 9. Ibsen's Doll House: A Myth for Our Time 10. Women and Love: Some Dying Myths

145

161

11. "A Natural and Necessary Monster": Women in Men's Utopias 182 12. Love and the Sexual Object in Zamyatin's We and Orwell's 1984, with a Postscript on the Feminist Utopia 207 13. The Female Body and the Male Mind: Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir 230 vu

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CONTENTS

14. The Return of Romantic Love: Living the Literature 247 Index

269

Acknowledgments

This book took a long time to write and there have been many people to thank along the way, including some who never saw the manuscript but who sustained me in other ways, especially Gail and Hank Hoffman, Rosette Bakish, and Alice Stahl. For intellectual inspiration and encouragement I am greatly indebted to J. A. Mazzeo. To Lucienne Serrano goes my appreciation for the many hours we have shared working on other projects that have helped to illuminate some points in this one. Members of the CUNY Graduate Center and the History of Psychiatry Section at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center heard early versions of the chapters on medieval literature and splitting the sexual object. A shorter version of the chapter on dystopia was given at the Cornell University conference entitled, "Zamyatin, Orwell, and Mayakovsky: The View from 1984." The chapter on Romantic narcissism was originally presented in somewhat different form at New York University for the conference "Love, the Drive, the Object," sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Lacan Study Group. I am grateful to all of these groups for their suggestions. I am especially indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research fellowship on "Women in Utopian Literature: Implications for Ethics and Values" and for a summer fellowship for the NEH Seminar for College Teachers, "Women in Medieval Life and Literature," directed by Joan Ferrante as well as to the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation for grants supporting work on Freud and love in literature, and women and men analysts on women, all of which were invaluable for this book. IX

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks also to Kitty Moore, Despina Cimbel, and Jason Renker of the NYU Press for their understanding and kind support as well as their proficiency. Sheila Winchester and Tess Agostisi of the York College Library and staff were unfailingly helpful, and Betty Gold was always refreshing in her down-toearth suggestions. Above all, I want to express my appreciation to my son, Greg. I also wish to thank the following for granting me permission to reprint copyrighted material: Dissent for permission to adopt earlier versions of the following essays that appeared in that magazine, "Whatever Happened to Romantic Love?" "The Politics of Courtship," and "The Female Body and the Male Mind: Reconsidering Simone de Beauvoir." The Yale Review for permission to reprint "Ibsen's Doll House: A Myth for Our Time" (The Yale Review, Spring, 1980), copyright Yale University. The Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, Arizona State University, Tempe, for permission to reprint "Women and Love: Some Dying Myths?" from The Analysis of Literary Texts: Current Trends in Methodology edited by Randolph D. Pope, 1980. Schocken Books, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to adopt an earlier version of " 'A Natural and Necessary Monster': Women in Utopia" from Women in Search of Utopia edited by Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch. Copyright © 1984 by Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Ruby Rohrlich. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., for permission to quote from "The Golden Country" from 1984 Revisited, ed. Irving Howe, Copyright © 1983 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas. Études Anglaises for permission to reprint "Marvell's 'Nymph': A Study of Feminine Consciousness" (Etudes Anglaises 31, no. 2 [1978]). The Massachusetts Review for permission to reprint "The Feminine Bildungsroman: Education through Marriage" (The Massachusetts Review 22, no. 2 [Summer, 1981]).

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l Introduction

THIS book is about women, love, and power in some past and

present literary works, written mainly by men but also by women. It looks too at some recent cultural developments that have led to a resurgence of the romantic love that many social and literary critics had pronounced dead just a few years before (myself among them). The chapters here, written over a period of about a dozen years, explore different forms of love, particularly romantic love, in different periods, and the ways these have given women power or deprived them of it. For women, much more than for men, love has provided reparations for social injustice or has served as a giant pacifier. And because until recently women were prohibited from seeking knowledge directly, love has also been the chief agent of their development of self. It had once been primarily the husband or the tutor/lover that could bring them to intellectual and experiential awareness, however vicarious and however seldom this happened. But despite the usual view that women are more the victims of romantic illusion than are men, some literary works by women give the lie to this, as far back as the Middle Ages, when a practical realism revealed itself in the trobairitz, the female troubadours, unlike their brothers, who wallowed in longing. Unlike many social historians, I believe that literature and social reality are intimately connected, and that the courtly love tradition, for example, did affect the relations of women and men in everyday life, first in the upper classes and then, through a filtering-down process, in others. Love has been variously defined as narcissism, illusion, idealii

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

zation, identification, crystallization, reparation, regression, fusion, inspiration, infatuation, pathology, health, mythology, physiology, spirituality, lust, madness, sanity, wisdom, folly, altruism, selfishness, dependence, a finding of self, a losing of self, a source of freedom, a source of oppression, an escape from the world, a bulwark in the world, in the interests of the state, against the state. Whatever else it may be, from the Freudian point of view love is a stockroom for pre-Oedipal baggage, a loading dock for the Oedipal past, a launching pad for the post-Oedipal future. Such terminology, to be sure, privileges traditional psychoanalysis. But I will here be referring to some other forms as well. The definitions of romantic love are almost as various as those of love in general. Though the term usually applies to love during the period of Romanticism (the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and continues into our own time, I use it for earlier periods as well, namely the Middle Ages, when courtly love flourished. Wherever it is found, romantic love involves the idealization of the love object and a disinterest in utilitarian ends. Though it is always fueled by passion, in earlier periods romantic love often separated love and sex, for consummation was sometimes impossible for the lovers. In recent times, perhaps with the advent of more reliable contraception, romantic love has fused the two. What is fascinating is that love and sex were split once again in the 19605 and 19705, in part by feminists, this time with the prohibition on love rather than on sex. For perhaps the first time in history, women saw emotional entrapment as more dangerous than physical indulgence. For a while, it seemed as if the new object of idealization was the self itself (see chapter 2). The eighties, however, brought a return of romantic love, primarily because of the fear of AIDS (see chapter 14). Though historically romantic love began outside of marriage —in the courtly love of the Middle Ages with a few earlier precedents—it may also take place within it. Though it has often aimed for equality and a transcendence of gender polarization, it may exist within a framework of domination/subordination, sometimes overturning the traditional allocation of power. It may take place on one side only—indeed the love object may not even

INTRODUCTION

3

know about it—or as part of a triangle. But whatever its form, romantic love thrives on obstacles, impediments to fulfillment. Something should here be said about the word object, both the term and its referents. Feminists in particular have objected to men's use of women as sexual objects, valued primarily for their looks, and/or as reproductive objects, valued for their bodies. But while literature has often adulated feminine beauty and sometimes fetishized it, as in the sonnets of Petrarch, this is certainly not always the case. The greatest love poet of the English Renaissance, a period that prized feminine beauty, never describes the way a woman looks: John Donne. Nor has literature (outside of Utopian literature) concerned itself with reproduction. Still the term object itself is in many ways objectionable, indicating passivity in both the grammatical and the existential sense. Psychologically, it is also problematic since it implies a subject of desire to which the object is not equal. Since that subject is generally male and the object female—despite the claim of the object-relations school of psychology that it deals with both sexes — some contemporary feminist analysts would like to change the terminology in the interest of equality. In the meantime, however, it would be well to remember that in love, the "object," meaning the person longed for, is sometimes more important than the subject, more important than life itself for many a male lover, in literature and sometimes in life, despite the disclaimer of Shakespeare's Rosalind (another realist) in As You Like It: Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (iV, i)

Nonetheless, much—perhaps too much—of women's fantasy life in men's view has centered on love, not that men wanted it otherwise: Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.

So wrote Byron, in Donjuán (canto I, st. 194). And so most of us believed, including feminist critics who lamented the fact in the late 19605 and 19705. The general feminist position on heterosexual love in the seventies (and to some extent

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

today) was that culturally determined inequalities in the sexes prevented authentic love from taking place. Feminists also believed that women's mistaken overvaluation of love kept them from concentrating on what was more likely to give them satisfaction: work and participation in the public world. "A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure," wrote Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), one of the most influential books of the women's movement. "For love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today." 1 In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had already claimed in The Second Sex: On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself. The innumerable martyrs to love bear witness against the injustices of a fate that offers a sterile hell as ultimate salvation. 2

Implicit in Beauvoir's lament was her assumption that men knew how to love and that theirs was a model for women to follow. This despite her disdain for men's mythologizing. But in their later deconstruction of love, feminist critics questioned whether men could love at all. "(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity," wrote Firestone (127). Only through something approaching temporary insanity could men think they were in love at all and render "void the woman's class inferiority" (132). Germaine Gréer in The Female Eunuch also noticed the linguistic as well as temporal fragility of men's being "in love." "/n love, as in pain, in shock, in trouble. Thus love is a state, presumably a temporary state, an aberration from the norm." 3 While Firestone assumed women could love, Greer claimed that "love is not possible between inferior and superior, because the base cannot free their love from selfish interest, as the desire either for security or social advantage . . . " (146).

INTRODUCTION

5

In their attack on male love as selfish and domineering, the radical feminists get support from unexpected quarters: Nietzsche, for example. As Irving Singer puts it, "Far from being selfless and sacrificial, sexual love is for him the best illustration of selfinterest and the universal will to power. . . . Nietzsche calls attention to the relentless quest for domination that motivates the lover's need to possess." 4 Way before Nietzsche it is fascinating to see that the same complaints about love or the deficiencies of men as lovers voiced by feminists and indeed women in general appear in Plato's Phaedrus, where Lysias complains that the lover is selfish and exploitative, jealous and faithless, hurtful and unreliable. Because he is in a state of temporary madness, he might always leave when he recovers; in the meantime he wants to reduce the beloved to a state of dependence, intellectually and economically. What is perhaps most surprising is that these complaints are not about heterosexual but homosexual love. Is this because men make deficient lovers no matter what the sex of the love object? Or is it because domination and subordination stem as much from differences in age, economic status, and education as they do from sexual difference? Unlike the feminists, Plato did not reject love altogether. Rather he made a distinction between true and false love and argued for a love governed by reason not passion. But for us, in the 19705, anti-love books for women (men didn't seem to need such warnings) became a major genre, as popular in our own time as homiletic literature admonishing the reader against sin, particularly the lures of sex, had been in earlier periods. Love became the new sin for women, with "Thou shalt not love" a new commandment. For a while love went underground. Impoverished and ignored, it watched its sibling, sex, the prodigal son, get fatter and fatter during the seventies. But recently love has been revived. Even the so-called age of narcissism began to long for intimacy in a world that seemed increasingly bare of meaning. And some feminists too began to lament the death of love. Julia Kristeva, the literary critic and psychoanalyst, was one of the strongest early voices. In an interview conducted in 1980 in

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

France, before her book Tales of Love (Histoires d'amour) appeared, she said: the space of freedom for the individual is love—it is the only place, the only moment in life, where the various precautions, defenses, conservatism break down and one tries to go to the limit of one's being. . . . The love relation is a situation where the limits between the Ego and the Other are constantly abolished and established. 5 When I noted that ''People like Kate Millett in Sexual Politics or Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex say that love is a myth propagated by men for the control of women, that, in effect, what it has done is to perpetuate the hierarchy of the sexes and make women accept their oppressive place within the family," she responded that love has a history, "an evolution which is not necessarily progress": . . . it is obvious that in certain situations and some of the time, it has been possible that it is a means of blackmail by one sex of the other— and essentially by the male in the history of humanity as we have experienced it in relation to the female. But that is a vision, perhaps, through the wrong end of the telescope, which doesn't interest me very much because if you look at things that way, the whole of culture oppresses women—a madrigal or Shakespeare is antiwoman. . . . Now love is a moment in the life of a speaking being who, all the while caught in the body, opens oneself to the symbolic dimension. I love the other . . . who gives me the possibility of opening myself to something other than myself. This can take place through an imaginary fusion with this outer body, but if it is experienced not in a merely narcissistic way but as the governing principle of my whole subsequent existence, what I call love is openness to the other, and it is what gives me my human dimension, my symbolic dimension, my cultural and historical dimension. So if one says that it's patriarchy which produces that, long live patriarchy. (143-44) This is a compelling if ironic defense of patriarchy. Later in the decade the appearance of AIDS, for all of its horrors, helped the cause of love and fidelity as opposed to widespread sexual experience, for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Though there may not be a connection, several books by psychoanalysts and philosophers appeared in the late 19805 that lauded

INTRODUCTION

J

the joys of romantic love. In contrast to the earlier feminists, the current praisers of love often see no gender differences in connection with the chubby cherub, or discount those they do find. This may be because, like Denis de Rougemont earlier, author of the influential Love in the Western World, they do not always consider the two genders.6 Psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann, for example, subtitles his book The Anatomy of Loving, published in 1987, The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is.7 That indeed is the problem, for his book is little concerned with women's quest. Philosopher Irving Singer makes no such mistake in gender in the title of his third volume of The Nature of Love: The Modern World. (On the contrary, he is most aware of the presence of women. In the preface, he writes, "Like most of my recent publications, this book was written in virtual collaboration with Josephine Fisk Singer.") 8 Another philosopher from a younger generation, Robert C. Solomon, gives one of the most positive contemporary views of romantic love in About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Time (1988): romantic love is an emotion that presupposes two autonomous individuals, the dramatic freedom of choice enjoyed formerly only by a king or queen (but which we take for granted) and the freedom to enjoy love in leisure apart from the economic and social demands of marriage and family considerations.9

Far from seeing love as a tool of oppression for women, he claims: Many of love's virtues represent the proudest achievements of our civilization— the respect for the individual and our protection of individual choices, the equalization of the sexes and the destruction of class differences in society, the delicate balance between sexual desire and expression and the need for privacy, subtlety and limitation, the pursuit of happiness. (54~55)

This seems centuries away from the radical feminist view of the 19705. Nor can we attribute this difference solely to the sex of the author. Psychoanalyst Ethel Person writes in similarly golden hues: "Love is a uniquely human experience, and it does not

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

discriminate between the sexes."10 She even sings the praises of unrequited love or love which, though reciprocal, does not last. "Psychic transformation through love, whether or not love endures, is, of course, one of the greatest of love's gifts, one that we intuit and may seek, whether consciously or unconsciously" (70). Jessica Benjamin, however, in her book The Bonds of Love, follows in the line of the feminist anti-love critics insofar as she connects love in patriarchy with domination and subordination. She sees these polarities as usually if not always linked to gender: From a feminist point of view, the missing piece in the analysis of Western rationality and individualism is the structure of gender domination. The psychosocial core of this unfettered individuality is the subjugation of woman by man, through which it appears that she is his possession, and therefore, that he is not dependent upon or attached to an other outside himself n

Benjamin suggests a replacement for gender polarization: intersubjectivity, that is, mutual dependence and differentiation of two subjects, not subject/object. But she feels that this transformation, at least in any widespread form, lies in the future. I would argue, however, that love has provided the one space where some crossing of the gender line has been possible. Much current feminist theory is less concerned with love than with other problems of gender, defined in "Anglo-American feminist discourse" according to Elaine Showalter as "the social, cultural, and psychological meaning imposed upon biological sexual identification." 12 I do not think that psychological meanings can be so easily imposed; one major difference between AngloAmerican feminist critics and the French and French-influenced ones is the importance that the latter have been willing to grant to the unconscious within the social order. "Through challenging the very nature of representation, in revealing the unconscious elements within it, psychoanalysis calls all discourses into question. But this does not mean that it is itself immune to crossquestioning," 13 writes Elizabeth Wright. As Karen Horney suggested back in 1922, about Freudian psychoanalysis, perhaps it is masculine narcissism that concludes that "one half of the human race is discontented with the sex assigned to it. . . ."In 1926 she

INTRODUCTION

9

added, "The present analytical picture of feminine development (whether that picture be correct or not) differs in no case by a hair's breadth from the typical ideas that the boy has of the girl."14 What the new psychoanalysis of women reveals is that there are two centers of consciousness — and unconsciousness— that must be taken into account. "We have become aware of our construction as gendered subjects, in part because the symbolic order of language identifies us by the definitive opposition man/woman," writes Linda Kauffman in Gender and Theory.15 One might ask why we weren't aware of it before. The answer lies partly in the great attention that is now being given to language as well as sexual difference. Yet the great love literature of the world is one place that we might look for transcendence of gender polarization, for sites of deconstruction before the concept of deconstruction became fashionable. Although the bait of "love" has often been used to preserve the status quo, love in a different guise has been a form of desocialization and disruption of the hierarchically structured binary system of man/woman. It therefore undercuts Oedipal primacy and brings back the mother and the chora (sounds and images that precede the symbolization of sexual difference) as Kristeva puts it. When this occurs we may not find equality, but we will find a different distribution of power from the one that we are used to in the public world. Unlike some feminist critics, I assume that there is psychological as well as economic, political, and social power. Just because the former is not yet measurable does not mean that it does not exist. This is not to say that psychological power always works to women's benefit, however. Because it arouses feelings of fear as well as exaltation, it has led to social institutions that oppress women. One problem is that such power in both its positive and negative forms remains relatively unanalyzed. Except for the few books I have mentioned, even the psychoanalytic literature, if not the couches, has been guilty of neglecting love, perhaps because anything as fleeting, persistent, evanescent, entrenched, and seemingly simple but complex as love does not readily lend itself to scientific investigation. Then too most men have considered love too effeminate a theme to be worthy of their attention—

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

which is perhaps a form of denial. But if love has been condemned by the scientists, feminist theorists, satirical poets, and sometimes the culture at large, literature has been the one place where it has dared to expose itself without fear of mockery and betrayal. It has done so not just in women's writing but more conspicuously in men's, sometimes in the works of those same poets who were satirical elsewhere. Among feminist scholars, love as a theme in literature (at least by men) has been a minor motif in their attention to the symphony of sexual difference. Feminist criticism of the early seventies was primarily concerned with the leitmotif of men's "images" and "stereotypes" of women. What was not pursued at that time was why men should have a need to portray women in this way, other than a conspiratorial one. It is that deficiency that I hope to remedy in part here by utilizing the findings of psychoanalysts, both traditional and revisionist. In our book Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States, Lucienne Serrano and I describe stereotypes in the following way: A stereotype is an emotional not a rational response to a problem that endangers the individual. For example, the stereotype that women are passive is less a logical analysis than a wish fulfillment, which installs men in a dominant position. Stereotypes are hard to change because they support emotional needs. We might ask whether women have supported these stereotypes. And the answer surprisingly is yes, not simply because the culture conditions them to do so, but because we are all, women and men, unconsciously overwhelmed by the omnipotent, preOedipal mother, still trying to separate from her and afraid of eliminating the boundaries between self and other (however much we may desire fusion at some moments). 16 For various psychobiological and cultural reasons men were more fixated on images and stereotypes than women have been, but this is not to say that these were merely formulas designed to oppress. They were signs of men's mystification by women and therefore had a richness and a resonance that was undisclosed by the critical name-calling that was itself a mirror image (or stereotype) of what these early critics thought men were doing to women. Furthermore, the excitement of the great literary text often lies in its ability to transcend the stereotype, to deal with the

INTRODUCTION

II

marginal, with what is unsaid in the culture at large. Sometimes the critics have been far more sexist than the work of artistic creation, and this sexism has been present on both sides of the gender line. After this first stage of feminist theory, which viewed literature by male authors as a form of conscious political victimization of women, feminist critics considered it a betrayal of women's cause to continue to analyze the works of men rather than those of women writers. Much attention began to be paid to women's genres, women's themes, and women characters in the light of women's experience, and many important works were discovered — or rediscovered. Then, in the 19805, another shift occurred. As Elizabeth Abel noted, there began a new interest in male texts, "examined less as documents of sexism than as artful renditions of sexual difference."17 One of my premises is that literature by men often reveals the truth about men's psychology and lays bare the male fantasies about love that affect women's lives and their portion of public and private power as much as laws and institutions. I would also agree with writers such as Hélène Cixous and Michèle Montrelay in France who see literature as the place where truths about the feminine (a positive term for the French) are also found, in both male and female authors. Recently, more readers have been concerned with what Kristeva calls the semiotics of disruption in literature. Mary Jacobus writes, feminist criticism is now interested in the woman reader, "with woman as the producer of her own system of meanings; meanings that may challenge or subvert patriarchal readings and undo the traditional hierarchy of gender." 18 That hierarchy of gender, I would add, is already overturned in many literary works of the past. What literature richly illustrates is the paradox of women's psychological power, often exerted through love, paired with political and economic impotence. Much of this paradox has to do with our relation to the early mother that I treat later. Nonetheless, it is true that much literature like other art forms depends on gender polarization, sometimes but not always to the woman's detriment. (In the ballet, for example, extreme polari-

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

zation yields great beauty and excitement.) Psychoanalytic theory, both Freudian and post-Freudian, particularly what we might term feminist psychoanalysis, helps us to explore how Oedipal prohibitions, the vulnerabilities of male biology, the male fear of female sexuality and envy of childbearing lead to such dominant themes in literature as the splitting of the sexual object into madonna and whore (see chapter 7), placing the object on a pedestal, for example, in courtly love (chapters 3 and 5), using the woman as a narcissistic mirror (chapter 6), and prohibiting women's search for knowledge and selfhood outside of love and marriage (chapter 8). By going off on her own to seek autonomy and knowledge after a traditionally romantic marriage, Nora in A Doll House presents a "myth for our time" (chapter 9), in striking contrast to Marvell's nymph (chapter 5), who is a paradigm of passivity. Through some representative works, I seek here to illuminate different facets of the changing patterns of love and their connection to women's power and sense of self. This entails some examination also of love in relation to the state and why it is that those ideal states, the traditional utopias, as envisioned by men at least, have tried to eliminate love altogether, just as they have tried to exclude all fantasy, both conscious and unconscious. In them, love has been seen as a diminution of the state's power and conversely as an increase of the individual's, man's and woman's (chapters n and 12). All utopias and dystopias try to change the mode of reproduction and child care. A question to speculate on is how changing gender roles by equalizing the roles of father and mother in childrearing, as Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow have suggested, would change the nature of love.19 Would widespread changes lead to the death of the myths of women, or would they increase male mythology? A more extreme question is whether taking reproduction out of the body entirely—an idea that seemed mere fantasy in Shulamith Firestone but appears more and more likely given the advances in reproductive technology 20 —would destroy romantic love altogether. We do not as yet know. For the most part, I have allowed those chapters written earlier to remain as they were originally. There are two main reasons for this. One is that they utilized the findings of psychoanalysis be-

INTRODUCTION

13

fore this approach found favor in feminist criticism, when the social construction of reality was considered all important. Another is that they illustrate strikingly how cultural events do invade the seemingly private world of feeling. For example, in chapter 10 I suggested that romantic love is dying. However, the fear of AIDS in the 19805, particularly in the United States, has led to a resurgence of the very romanticism that seemed to be disappearing (see chapter 14). It may be, however, that if the heterosexual population begins to feel less threatened, the recent patterns of the sexual revolution will reassert themselves with renewed force, so that my overall thesis of the disappearance of romantic love in the twentieth century will hold. This remains to be seen. Though there may be great similarities, the experience of love is often quite different for the woman and man involved, and this has been reflected in both men's and women's writing. Some of these differences have to do with the divergent developmental stages for girls and boys, many of which are enforced by the culture. As Robert Stoller and Gilbert H. Herdt put it, "the first order of business in being a man is: don't be a woman." 21 The male child's intense drive for individuation, for separation from the mother as opposed to the girl's greater connection and concern with care (as Carol Gilligan has pointed out) 22 reveals itself in the later quest for love. For example, the man fearing that he will be overwhelmed by the woman may strive for a sense of separation through domination, whereas the woman in the same relationship may experience fusion, through her subordination, a unió my suca as the psychoanalyst Annie Reich puts it 23 (chapters 6 and 14). Dorothy Dinnerstein suggests that in order to have sexual pleasure some women may need the experience of fusion in romantic love since this is a way to recover the feeling they had in their early relationship with the mother, whom they had to give up when they turned to a heterosexual object (68). Then, too, some lovers unconsciously seek separation through domination and subordination, with the usual gender norms reversed and actual physical distance, as in the troubadours (chapter 3). Others reveal a search for equality, unity, a crossing of the gender line ("He Speaks/She Speaks," "Romantic Narcissism").

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

Much of men's (and to a certain extent women's) ambivalence about women, and the consequent images of idealization and degradation stem from the enormous power of the early mother, something that both Freud and Lacan tend to ignore. Roy Schafer in Language and Insight writes: ''For the girl and boy alike, and both preoedipally and oedipally, the mother, far from being the ground or the passive object, emerges experimentally as a gigantic figure to contend with and come to terms with." 24 The great emphasis on the pre-Oedipal in recent psychoanalytic theory amounts to something of a revolution. French analysts in particular speak of the pre-Oedipal mother as either an engulfing abyss or a seductive paradise. This, of course, has more to do with the unconscious than any objective reality, but by making these images conscious one can see why the experience of fusion in love is both welcome and feared. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests that the concept of the phallic mother (which occurs late in the pre-Oedipal period) is a construct that is less threatening to the girl and boy than the overwhelming mother who they fear can swallow them up again through the opening in her vagina. 25 Of course, once they realize that the mother has no penis, she may be subject to scorn (particularly on the part of the boy child; the girl is more likely to suffer disappointment) and this affects later feelings and behavior also. Karen Homey sums up the antithetical attitudes of men toward women, in "The Dread of Woman": The attitude of love and adoration signifies: "There is no need for me to dread a being so wonderful, so beautiful, nay, so saintly." That of disparagement implies: "It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all round, is such a poor thing." 26

Although Freud, unlike Melanie Klein, 27 did not pay extensive attention to the power of the early mother, he did pay a great deal to sexual difference. Almost every feminist has attacked Freud's treatment of female sexuality, notably the concept of anatomy as destiny (which also affected his theory of narcissism). Since I mention it at several points, something should be said about it here. Freud refers to anatomy as destiny in two places, first in 1912 and then in 1924. The first is harmless enough to women:

INTRODUCTION

15

The fundamental processes which produce erotic excitation remain unaltered. The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces— remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: "Anatomy is destiny." 28

The second reference, however, is another story. In "Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" Freud writes that the female sex also has a type of Oedipus complex, a castration complex. He continues: Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take us far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find expression in differences of psychical development. "Anatomy is Destiny," to vary a saying of Napoleon's. The little girl's clitoris behaves just like a penis to begin with; but, when she makes a comparison with a playfellow of the other sex, she perceives that she has "come off badly" and she feels this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for inferiority. 29

Some women analysts reject huge chunks of Freud. The Kleinian Hanna Segal, for example, calls his theory of penis envy "bunko," 30 although she has great admiration for him in other respects. Recently, Nancy Chodorow has presented a defense of Freud in spite of his theory of penis envy, claiming that he gave us "a theory of how we become sexed and gendered."31 Furthermore, she continues, because it makes the "individually created unconscious conscious," psychoanalysis "is a theory of human nature with positive, liberatory implications" (171). Others, such as Monique Schneider in France, combine what I would call a deconstructive and contrapuntal approach. Rejecting "the collecting of Freudian texts into a theoretical monument," Schneider combines different levels of his writing: the theoretical works, the more speculative works, and the letters. "What interests me then is to see all the work of erasing, of restructuring in the different levels of writing." 32 She finds this particularly important for Freud's treatment of women. "In Freud the representation of women should not be accepted at face value, but has to be decoded, interpreted, seen in reverse." Schneider continues:

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W O M E N , LOVE, AND POWER

Freud shows that in all the processes of knowledge, there is a movement toward and a movement away. Some hypotheses are presented in both a furtive and sharp manner, with the possibility of being negated in the next moment. It is as if knowledge proceeds in steps which put the researcher at risk. It is like a war where one advances and then retreats. The construction, the rather theoretical steps, have to be studied in their movement, and not considered as immobile. If one admits that negating a proposition can lead to affirming it and being conscious of it, I believe that Freud should be studied in his moments of negation. (174)

Some of the most exciting feminist analysts are finding new inspiration in Freud through their new readings, their refusal to monumentalize the text. Even when it comes to love there has been a battle of the sexes. Who loves more? Women generally say women, and men say men. In direct contrast to the radical feminists, Freud thought that women were more prone to narcissism than men, who he said tended to overvaluate the sexual object. Many women analysts and critics posit the reverse. Karen Horney writes about women's overvaluation of love. I consider here some of the excesses in love that women have demonstrated, from the medieval Héloíse to the twentieth-century Simone de Beauvoir. But such excess may itself spring from great narcissistic needs and grandiosity, or perhaps what has been termed negative narcissism, a trait revealed also by Marvell's nymph complaining for the death of her fawn. This is not the form of narcissism that Freud attributes to women in his famous essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction," where, on the contrary, he equates it with self-love and indifference to men: Such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a combination of interesting psychological factors. For it seems very evident that another person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey.33

INTRODUCTION

17

So the women most attractive to men according to Freud are those like children, cats, and wild beasts. One might notice that Freud here sounds like the misogynist Nietzsche as well as many a Romantic. But if this catalogue is—or was—true, one might conclude that men in patriarchy—at least Victorian patriarchy— were forced to give up too much of their own emotional life, and to live it vicariously through women. Jung gives an additional explanation for the appeal of certain unconscious feminine types to men in a highly polarized society: First, they are so empty that a man is free to impute to them anything he fancies. In addition, they are so unconscious that the unconscious puts out countless invisible feelers, veritable octopus-tentacles, that suck up all masculine projections; and this pleases men enormously. All that feminine indefmiteness is the longed-for counterpart of male decisiveness and single-mindedness, which can be satisfactorily achieved only if a man can get rid of everything doubtful, ambiguous, vague, and muddled by projecting it upon some charming example of feminine innocence. Because of the woman's characteristic passivity, and the feelings of inferiority which make her continually play the injured innocent, the man finds himself cast in an attractive role: he has the privilege of putting up with the familiar feminine foibles with real superiority, and yet with forbearance, like a true knight. 34

Still, women are often attracted to types bearing precisely those characteristics that Freud said men found appealing in women: they too like "objects" that are indifferent, childlike, and wild. Freud too often does not grant that women and men may love similarly. Even more striking, Freud never acknowledges that the myth of Narcissus is about a man, not a woman, as literary critic Shoshana Felman has pointed out. (An equivalent sleight of hand would have been for Freud to turn Oedipus into a woman.) The only voice a woman has in the most popular version of the Narcissus myth is as Echo. What many a Romantic male lover wanted was a soul mate to be his mirror or his echo—or both. Contrary to Freud, I would suggest that the myth of Narcissus is central in the story of the male lover who generally seeks a mirror, preferably one who will reflect him at twice his real size, as Virginia Woolf puts it. Freud is not the first to see the woman as Narcissus. Milton sees Eve in Paradise Lost similarly, seemingly

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

never recognizing the far greater narcissism of Adam, who wants her to worship and mirror him, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he is weak in the face of her beauty. Monique Schneider (185-86) asks why Freud and not just Freud have a need to see women as narcissistic. It is as if, she says, culture wants to bind woman up before a mirror to deny her multiple being. In the same essay on narcissism Freud speaks about two ostensibly different types of love: (i) the anaclitic—the type that overvalues and is based on need—which goes back to the early mother and (2) the narcissistic, which stems from the self. (See chapter 6 for a further discussion of this.) Freud does believe that narcissistic object choice is possible in love. But here he attributes it to men rather than women. (Of course, narcissistic love is preferable to pure narcissism, which may be the reason why he does so.) Freud writes that with narcissistic object choice, a person may love: (a) (b) (c) (d)

what he himself is (i.e. himself), what he himself was, what he himself would like to be, someone who was once part of himself. (90)

But surely, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen points out, these possibilities, particularly (b),(c), and (d), are more common among women than men.35 It seems to me that there is an equivalent of the anaclitic type for women that Freud also ignores. It exists not just in the desire of many women to be taken care of, supported, and protected. In analyzing Gretchen and Faust the sociologist Georg Simmel in the book On Women, Sexuality, and Love gives a more subtle equivalent that also combines features of narcissistic love: Gretchen certainly does not love Faust as a personality, but rather as the spiritual, utterly towering and domineering man. It is one of thousands of relationships in which a girl of noble character and an inferior level of culture is filled with a diffuse, perhaps unconscious yearning for a more sublime world, not a glimmer of which penetrates the circumstances of her own life. She falls victim to a man who descends to her from that world, bringing unimagined fulfillments and dazzling her unaccustomed eyes with its sun. Here resistance is no more possible than it was for the daughters of the earth against Zeus. In the same way that this kind of

INTRODUCTION

19

man can seduce any number of girls of this sort, the surrender of the girl is not tied to the singular nature of the man at all but only to his type.36

To some extent this theory is operative in the feminine Bildungsroman, although the heroines that I treat are generally more educated and sophisticated than Gretchen and seek to develop themselves through marriage rather than mere seduction. Since I am here faulting Freud on his treatment of love, one might question why I seem to have such dependence on him in some of my chapters. The answer is twofold: (i) a genius should not be expected to be right or inclusive on all points; in fact where he's wrong, he is perhaps most provocative, and somewhere, sometimes even in his brilliant footnotes, he corrects himself or at least hints at other possibilities. (2) Freud is particularly illuminating on Romantic love, because he was himself among the last of the great romantics. Despite his using the male as the sexual model, Freud was quick to point out male fragility with regard to love, a corrective that is needed since some radical feminists act as if men are giant, godlike creatures, never subject to a moment's doubt when it comes to love. Rousseau is another figure in the long line of seeming misogynists who sees the great power that women exert because of men's need for love.37 Still, what Freud did not do is consider the woman's plight in love directly. If the myth of Narcissus is actually more central to the man in love, who often seeks mirroring, than the woman, then the myth of Salmacis or Hermaphroditus as told by Ovid in The Metamorphoses33 is central to the woman, who often seeks fusion. Salmacis was a water nymph, who would not follow Diana in the hunt. She would only bathe or comb her lovely hair, gather flowers, or gaze into the mirror of the pool, not like Narcissus because she desired herself but rather to see which clothes were most becoming to her. The implication is that she wants to be desired by others. Sure enough, Hermaphroditus, a lovely adolescent youth, who has gone exploring, finds himself at the fountain's edge. She wants him. He rejects her. But when he plunges into the pool to escape, she follows and coils herself about him—serpentlike. She begs the gods to make them one. In a kind of reverse "Symposium" myth, they do so. She is then happy but

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he is not. He now feels that he is half a man, with softened limbs. Because of his plea to the gods, ever after the water enervates any man who enters it. A complicated myth and susceptible to varying interpretations, it represents both the desire and fear of sexuality—women's desire and men's fear. What we see also is a quest for omnipotence — the desire to be both sexes — represented in Hermaphroditus' name if not his words. But most of all the myth seems to represent women's desire for fusion and men's fear of it—as if it castrates them. It was Hermaphroditus who came to the water in the first place. What was he doing there? Of course, he is very young, which is perhaps part of the problem. Boys no more than girls should be initiated into sexuality before they are ready. Then, too, while Salmacis achieves her dream of fusion, she does not get any sexual gratification from Hermaphroditus, which might indicate that some sort of separation is necessary even in the sexual act—at least for men. Much of the feminist attack on love in the 19708 and earlier in Simone de Beauvoir—and even earlier than that in Mary Wollstonecraft— 39 centered on women's renunciation of independence and men's mystification of women. Marxist feminists, too, believe that if we could do away with the myths of women that men purposely constructed to ghettoize women, life would be much improved. In direct contrast to this position Jung has said, "The mythological images belong to the structure of the unconscious and are an impersonal possession: in fact, the great majority of men are far more possessed by them than possessing."40 We don't have to agree with the first part of his statement to see the truth in the second. It is doubtful whether fantasy can be legislated out of existence—the assumption of Zamyatin's One State in his dystopia We. Some women thinkers, such as literary critic and psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, don't believe that one can eliminate mythology and see it as part of the history of our development. Others would not want to give it up even if we could. Nina Auerbach feels that these myths give women a source of power. "As an essentially metaphysical creature, one whose very presence brings eternity into time, woman enlarged by myth has

INTRODUCTION

21

more in common with fictional creations than she does with living men; her fictionality is one source of the energy that aggrandizes her." 41 Raquel Zak de Goldstein, an analyst in Buenos Aires, feels similarly; she believes that "our view of female sexuality becomes enriched by considering the dilemma woman constitutes for man." 42 This dilemma is part of the problem, for the myths are not only ennobling, they can be degrading. Should love disappear, it is easy for one type to pass into the other, one reason why some want to eliminate myth altogether. One might also raise the question of whether romantic love can survive without myths (see chapter 10). I think that it can—romantic love has been resilient enough to appear in many forms. It is possible, too, that new myths will take the place of the old. In the meantime Zak de Goldstein advocates awareness rather than suppression of fears and longings. "The reciprocal knowledge of the psychic and sexual diversity between males and females would contribute to the awareness of the persecutory contents involved in the prejudice against the female and would give the carnal body its place, even though the anxiety of the limits re-emerged as well" (187). Perhaps men's patterns in love—particularly their defects — are less the social product of patriarchy than problems in psychobiology, not all of which may be remedied by culture. This does not mean that we have to structure future types of love according to these defects or that we have to excuse behavior now that we consider unlovable and unloving. But the French have a saying: "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," to understand all is to forgive all. We haven't reached that point yet. But perhaps even to understand a little is to forgive a lot—at least in literature.

Notes i. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 126. There are, of course, many types of feminism besides the extreme or radical variety. I treat some of them in chapter 14. We should perhaps speak of feminisms rather than feminism.

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2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952), trans, and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 669. 3. Germaine Gréer, The Female Eunuch (1970) (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 169. 4. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 3, The Modem World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 85. 5. "Julia Kristeva," in Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano, Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 142. 6. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (1956), trans. Montgomery Belgion, rev. and augmented (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 7. Martin Bergmann, The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 8. Singer, The Nature of Love, p. xiii. 9. Robert C, Solomon, About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 25. 10. Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 13. 11. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 188. 12. Elaine Showalter, ed., Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-2.

13. Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 161. 14. Karen Horney, "On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women" (1922), p. 38 and "The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women as Viewed by Men and by Women" (1926), p. 57, in Feminine Psychology, ed. and with intro. by Harold Kelman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 15. Linda S. Kauffman, Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 2. 16. "Introduction," in Baruch and Serrano, Women Analyze Women, p. 12. 17. Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 2. 18. Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. xiii. 19. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 20. See Firestone, "Feminism and Ecology," in The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 192202; Elaine Hoffman Baruch, Amadeo F. D'Adamo, and Joui Seager, eds., Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights: Exploring the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Haworth Press, 1988).

INTRODUCTION

23

21. Robert Stoller and Gilbert H. Herdt, "The Development of Masculinity: A Cross-Cultural Contribution," JAP A 30 (1982): 33. 22. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 23. See Annie Reich, "Narcissistic Object Choice in Women" (1953), in Psychoanalytic Contributions (New York: International Universities Press, 1973), p.

i85.

24. Roy Schafer, Language and Insight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 158. 25. "Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel," in Baruch and Serrano, Women Analyze Women, p. 117. 26. Horney, "The Dread of Woman," in Feminine Psychology, ed. and with intro. by Harold Kelman (1967) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 136. 27. See The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986). 28. "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" ("Contributions to the Psychology of Love" 2, 1912), vol. n in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 189, Future references to this edition will be labeled S.E. 29. "Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924), S.E., vol. 19: 178. 30. "Hanna Segal," in Baruch and Serrano, Women Analyze Women, p. 249. 31. Nancy J. Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 168. 32. "Monique Schneider," in Baruch and Serrano, Women Analyze Women, p. 174. Jerry Aline Flieger in "Entertaining the Ménage à Trois: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Literature," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 206, writes that "Freud himself'returns to Freud,' each of his 'histories' being framed and overdetermined by others in an intertextual chain where the notion of 'mastery'—sometimes equated with activity or masculinity—is undercut time and again." 33. "On Narcissism: An Introduction," S.E., vol. 14: 89. 34. See "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1938 and 1954, rev.), in C. G. Jung, Aspects of the Feminine, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 117-18. 35. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 104. 36. Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 173. 37. See Elizabeth Rappaport, "On the Future of Love: Rousseau and the Radical Feminists," in Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), pp. 185-205.

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38. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 90-94. 39. See Norton Critical edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 40. C. G. Jung, "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore," in Aspects of the Feminine, p. 148. 41. See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 15. 42. Raquel Zak de Goldstein, "The Dark Continent and its Enigmas," Internationaljournal of Psycho-Analysis 65 (1984) pt. 2: 180.

2 Whatever Happened to Romantic Love?

At the same time that many feminist critics were attacking romantic love as a tool to oppress women, I was lamenting its loss—not in individual cases, of course, but as an ideal. In the ic?os the new obstacle to romantic love was love itself. Yet it seemed to me that if such love was disappearing, it was less because of any new-found freedom than because we now loved our selves above all. Some wiser than I said, "Wait." And it is true that as I write this comment in 1990, some of what I said with passion before seems as far away as an unattainable object. But if the current scene has changed, and love seems to have returned in part, the general configuration that I described here still holds. The current love and the recent anti-love positions are more alike than one might at first realize. As Christopher Lasch points out in The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), (>( Because narcissism knows no distinction between the self and others, it expresses itself in later life both in the desire for ecstatic union with others, as in romantic love, and in the desire for absolute independence from others, by means of which we seek to revive the original illusion of omnipotence and to deny our dependence on external sources of nourishment and gratification" (245-46). What we are perhaps trying to do today is combine both tendencies.

I

N his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud summed up the views of two diverse cultures on love, his own and that of the ancient Greeks:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the 25

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WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER

instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuse for it only in the merits of the object.1

This passage was added as a footnote to the essays in 1910. What is striking about it now is how we have come full circle. Instead of glorifying the object, a salient characteristic of romantic love, we too now emphasize the sexual instinct. We are like Helen and Paris, who were never the slaves of each other, but only of Aphrodite. 2 Agamemnon would have been as satisfied with Achilles' slave girl, Briséis, as he was with his own, whom he was forced to give up, The two women were interchangeable. We have gone further than the Greeks in that males as well as females are now replaceable. The sexual revolution has assured women along with men an assembly line of moving parts, found not in the factory but at the bar counter. Should one object prove defective, it is easy to pick up another. Perhaps we are moving toward a third possibility, wherein, like Ovid's Roman swingers, we glorify neither the object nor the instinct but rather, in the words of one New York psychiatrist, see everyone as either an opportunist or an opportunity. 3 It is a commonplace that romantic love was born in the twelfth century, in the canzons of propertyless knights singing the praises of their unattainable (i.e., married) ladies. However, there are precedents for the glorification of the object even among the Greeks, albeit in some unexpected places: in the lyrics of Sappho, 4 for example, which are often unequivocally lesbian, and the love dialogues of Plato,5 in which the homosexual component looms large. I discount the Greek romances as sources because their relationships are strictly physical, whereas romantic love always glorifies the object spiritually as well as physically. Even Phaedra and Medea, for all their suffering, do not qualify because they are less enthralled by their lovers' qualities than they are obsessed by the gods. They are women possessed, externally and internally, by a fearsome, destructive power, that of sex.6 Among the Romans, romantic love is perhaps present in some, although by no means all, of Catullus's lyrics to Lesbia 7 and in Virgil's Dido.8

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ROMANTIC LOVE?

27

Although Dido, too, is a victim of the gods, one feels that, unlike her Greek counterparts, she is never beside herself in her love. To the end, she is accountable. In this respect, at least, she is romantic. In what is perhaps the most famous romantic example of all, that of Tristan and Isolde, whether in the thirteenth-century Gottfried 9 or the nineteenth-century Wagner version, the lovers do not refer to the love potion as the source of their love. The romantic lover may be inspired by an outside force, but he always feels his beloved is worthy of veneration. He never loves in spite of himself.10 As Romanticism develops in the nineteenth century, however, a strange phenomenon emerges. While in medieval love stories it is external obstacles that impede the love relationship, even the historical one of Héloíse and Abélard,n in Romanticism it is often the absence of the love object herself that is the obstacle. As far away as we are from Goethe's romantic hero Werther,12 whose suicide over unrequited love for Charlotte led to a wave of reallife imitators, we are perhaps even further from Chateaubriand's René,13 whose melancholy longing afflicted generations of Europeans. Searching for an elusive ideal, he clasped her imaginary form in the wind, and saw her phantom everywhere, her reality nowhere. In nineteenth-century love theory, a man searches for his other half, not a complementary physical half as in Aristophanes' account of our split bodies that were originally one in The Symposium,14 but a soul mate who can vibrate with him in imaginative sympathy. Shelley is the great spokesman for this fantasy of the mirror image, which admittedly still exerts an influence on us and has caused many a woman, in her willingness to be some man's glorified object, to become his mere shadow and echo.15 Thanks to the new breed of feminists, however, the appeal of the double is fast disappearing. In the nineteenth century, men, perhaps even more than women, were under the sway of the soul-mate ideal, which often finds literary expression in the brother/sister incest theme. The great love stories of the Romantics are about unattainable or nonexistent objects, which is a sign of a low regard for the

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instinct. Even the seducer in Romanticism is different from ours. Through all his adventures, the Romantic Don Juan seeks the ideal woman. That is why even his sexual impulses are doomed to frustration. His contemporary counterpart, however, seeks only the ideal sensation. What is more, some women in the seventies, the "post-Sherfey females," now aware of their theoretically limitless sexual capacities, quested after sensation in even more numerical fashion than their brothers. 16 This is about as far from romantic love as one can get, for whether contractual or "free," romantic love is never purely physical. Whether in the Middle Ages or the nineteenth century, romantic love depends on obstacles: internal, external, or both. It is impedimented love. Usually the impediment involves some kind of sexual prohibition, as in the myth of Tristan and Isolde, in which one of the lovers is married. (Even when romantic love enters into marriage, as it does in the Renaissance, it is subject to impediments, for example, in Romeo and Juliet,17 where the social forces in the form of forbidding parents impinge on eros.) For the Victorians, sex itself was the great prohibition. Remove all impediments as we did recently, and one removes romantic love. Many would say "good riddance." Feminists, in particular, view romantic love as a tool of patriarchal control. But cry as we will for liberation, other people are less equals to us than gadgets, mere appliances to turn us on. Ironically, in light of the description that I quoted earlier, it was Freud himself who gave the coup de grâce to romantic love, for his recognition of the reality of sexuality behind the official pronouncements on feminine purity finally pushed the lady off the pedestal. It is not that we have gotten rid of pedestals, however. It is simply that the object on the pedestal has changed. In his essay "On Narcissism," Freud had said that the love object is often a projection of ourselves idealized.18 What we have done is to eliminate the middleman or woman. The object on the pedestal is now ourselves. No longer do men look to women as inspirational guides and saviors, as they still do in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and even in Ibsen's Doll House (in the Krogstad/Linde

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ROMANTIC LOVE?

2Ç

relationship).19 The analyst has taken women's place as the source of illumination. We would be foolhardy, however, to think that by rejecting the glorification of women we are achieving the mature genitality that presumably escaped other ages. While it is possible to view the adulterous love literature of the Middle Ages in terms of the Oedipal conflict, exemplified in the knight/son, lady/mother, lord/father constellation, and to view nineteenthcentury Romanticism, with its emphasis on nature, death, and unattainable objects as a desire to return to the breast-feeding mother, contemporary literature offers old problems in new bottles. Although they no longer so readily polarize women into good and bad as the Victorians did, men are still effecting a split between their tender and sexual feelings, except that now they direct all tenderness inward toward themselves and turn outward only for sensation, à la Roth, Mailer, Bellow, and company. Like the Greek youth Narcissus, men and women today seek the elusive ideal in their own perfection; they seek it in their inner selves, a phantom even harder to grasp than a reflection in a pool. In trying to reach the illusion, we sometimes drown or put our head into an oven,20 which gives to our self-love the compelling intensity of Tristan's and Isolde's passion, made permanent in the lovers' death. Romantic love may thus not be dead at all, for the last and most difficult impediment to overcome is our own imperfection. As long as we remain narcissists, we remain romantics.21

Notes 1. S.E., vol. 7 (1905): 149. 2. See Homer's Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1967). 3. Or did, until the advent of AIDS. 4. W. Barnstone, Sappho (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 5. See "The Phaedrus" and "The Symposium" in Plato's Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953). 6. Euripides, Four Tragedies: Alcestis, The Medea, The Heradeidae, Hippolytus, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1970).

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7. Catullus, C. Valerius, The Complete Poetry for Modern Readers, trans. Reney Myers and Robert Ormsby (New York: Dutton, 1970). 8. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. R. Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983). 9. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, with the surviving fragments of the Tristan of Thomas, ed. and with intro. by A. T. Hatto (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972). 10. Proust's Swann does. This is what keeps him from being a romantic lover. Rather he is obsessed and recognizes that Odette, the object of his obsession, is not even his type. See Marcel Proust, Swann's Way in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1989). 11. See The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans, and with intro. by Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Books, 1974). 12. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Victor Lange (New York: Rinehart, 1958). 13. Chateaubriand, Átala/Rene, trans. Irving Putter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 14. See the Oxford edition referred to in note 5 above or The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 1951). 15. See the essays "On Love" and "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vols. 6 (201) and 7 (223-29) (New York: Random House, 1965). 16. See Mary Jane Sherfey, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1966). 17. See Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.). 18. See "On Narcissism" (1914), S.E., vol. 14: 67-102. 19. See Ibsen: Four Major Plays, vol. i, A Doll House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Signet, NAL, 1965)20. I am here thinking of Sylvia Plath. 21. As Norman Mailer recognizes in his essay "Narcissism," in Pieces and Pontißcations (New York: Little, Brown, 1982), "One can detest oneself intimately and still be a narcissist. What characterizes narcissism is that the fundamental relationship is with oneself" (109).

3 He Speaks/She Speaks: Language in Some Medieval Love Literature

i

Tisoneoftheironiesofliterature-asoflife-thatthelan-

guage of love, the terms in which it is supposedly revealed, often has little to do with love itself. In fact, that very language has recently been seen—by mutually opposed groups — as proof that love perhaps does not exist at all where it was formerly most recognized. It is not often that classical psychoanalysis and radical feminism join hands. Therefore, it is something of a surprise to find that their basic position on courtly love is the same. They don't like it. In psychoanalytic terms, courtly love represents an intense, neurotic fixation on the mother that has been codified and institutionalized. The analytic condemnation of courtly love turns on men's sexual limitations, the inability to achieve genitality. So too in a way does the feminist reading, which sees at least some of the causes of sexism in sexual fear and inadequacy. But unlike the analysts who view courtly love as destructive to men, feminist theorists, such as Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, see it as oppressive to women, this time with the carrot instead of the stick. Both sides are perhaps the victims of their own ideology. The feminists forget that many of the ladies sung to had real power, whether off or on their pedestals, often more than the men who sang to them. Some analysts forget that when literary conventions are so widespread, something more than neurosis must be involved. Besides, if the problematic term courtly love is to have 3i

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any veracity, it must be used to cover many types of love popular in the courts of the twelfth century, not just the adulterous or pre-adulterous pattern of unattainable ladies and suffering lovers. This is not to suggest that proponents of love should embrace courtly love with open arms. There was plenty of ambivalence in the troubadour lover, for example, and the traits he attributes to his inspiring lady in the lyrics are not always so desirable. I am not talking merely of her uniformly predictable blond hair and grey eyes. Insofar as she is an elusive ideal, it would perhaps have been wrong to individualize her further. Rather it is her often predictable cruelty that is more problematic. For example Cercamon (fl. 1135-1145) writes in "When the sweet breeze turns bitter" ("Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis"): I am pleased when she maddens me, When she makes me stand with my mouth open, staring; I am pleased when she laughs at me, or makes a fool of me right to my face or behind my back, for after this bad time the good will come very quickly, if such is her pleasure. Bel m'es quant ilh m'enfolhetis e-m fai badar e-n vau muzan; et es me belh si m'escarnis o m gaba dereir'o denan, qu'aprop lo mal me venra bes ben tost, s'a lieys ven a plazer. 1

Although commentators have paid some attention to the male's ostensibly neurotic position vis-à-vis the lady, that is, his fixation on the Oedipal stage, where he plays out the supposedly central drama of his life, not much has been written about the woman's psychology in the conventions of courtly love. While critics often recognize the knight as being in the position of a child in relation to the mother, actually it is the lady whose narcissistic childishness is glorified, at least in the male writings. It is she who is allowed to live out the childhood fantasy of unconditional love; she who gets immediate gratification of demands, no matter how irrational. Many of the lyrics and some of the adulterous ro-

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manees institutionalize the lady's whimsicality, her willfulness, and even sadism. In this sense, the literature refers more to the pre-Oedipal than the Oedipal period. A case in point is Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of the Cart), in which Lancelot is faulted by Queen Guinevere not, as he thinks, for getting into a cart, the ignominious form of transport reserved for those on their way to the pillory, but rather for hesitating, however briefly-, to get into it for her sake. While Chrétien ultimately seems to disapprove of such feminine self-indulgence, many another writer depicts such willfulness with admiration. If the troubadour paradoxically allowed the lady, the paragon of virtues, to be an omnipotent child, it is probably because he longed to be one too. Disciplined as he was from his earliest training, the knight must have been secretly pleased with the female overthrow of the male hierarchy to which he had to submit, even if this overthrow occurred only in fantasy, and even if he were its prime victim. After all, if he were of the same class, the poet himself was granting this control to the woman through his own largess. He could always take it away. Much courtly love poetry takes on the quality of play, perhaps because it has generally been only through games that women have been allowed to teach men anything. The playing presents an "as if" situation, which allows a shift of power to take place, granting it to the woman, but only in fun, as it were. Nonetheless, it is not merely a joke. Narcissistic childishness, as represented in petulance, may be a safety valve for something much more rebellious and threatening to the social order—on the part of both women and men. Insofar as some of these women had real power, whether indirectly through their husbands or directly when their husbands were off on crusades, the male poetry represents a witty application for employment, whether in bed or out. The courtly love lyrics are often linguistic manifestations of power and powerlessness, of sex and sexlessness. The courtly love of the lyric, if not of the adulterous romance, is often about pre-adultery rather than adultery, or perhaps we might say it is about emotional adultery insofar as the married lady often remains physically unreachable. (Even this is too strong or adult a term since the knight often writes as if he expects to be rejected,

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as was the child he once was by the mother.) Often there is no communication with the beloved at all, let alone consummation. The lady is spoken about rather than spoken to. In that same poem by Cercamon, we read: I start, I burn, I tremble, all over, sleeping and waking, for love of her. I am so afraid of dying, I dare not think of asking her; however, I shall serve her two years or three, and then, maybe, she will know the truth. (97, st.V) Totz trassalh e bran e frémis per s'amor, durmen o velhan. Tal paor ai qu'ieu mesfalhis no m'aus pessar cum la deman, mas servir l'ai dos ans o tres, e pueys ben le sabra'n lo ver (96, st.V)

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in The Freudian Subject asks if "the erotic vassalage, the blind submission to the Lady, to the Mistress (domina) who keeps the ego in her castle," represents unrequited love. "Yes and No," replies Borch-Jacobsen to his own question: Yes, if "the aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object-choice is to be loved" . . . as Freud writes, and if the transference of narcissism is negotiated in view of a counter-transference. And no, because the ego, in the last analysis, is by no means lost in erotic ecstasy. That is why Freud also remarks that those men "who have renounced part of their own narcissism" . . . far from choosing women who will love them (as men), are attracted to those women who reflect back to them the image of an intact narcissism.2

"Narcissism triumphs . . . in the defeat of love. And it finds satisfaction in submission, in that peculiar Voluntary servitude' that submits it to itself in the figure of the Lady," 3 he continues. So the quest would seem to be for a lost narcissism rather than for a new love. And the author feels that this is as true for women as for men. Perhaps, but women have tended to gratify their narcissism through the presence of a man whereas men have often

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done so in the absence of the beloved, as in the troubadour tradition. As Jessica Benjamin puts it, "men idealize women as the beautiful but unattainable object," not as a subject.4 Sometimes this object is less the willful child than the unattainable ideal and as such has great symbolic significance. In its most extreme development, the amor de lonh or love from far away that typifies the twelfth-century troubadour (the phrase is Jaufré Rudel's) results later in Dante's Beatrice, who isn't even aware of her symbolic value and furthermore achieves her greatest importance for the poet in her death. One might say that much of the great love literature of the world is silent or at least is about a silent partner—or object, to use that objectionable term. If we consider the unattainable lady of the courtly lyric and her descendants the way we would a real woman, courtly love is to be sure neurotic, or narcissistic, but if we view her as a symbol of cultural aspiration, another meaning emerges; at least the narcissism is of a different order, one concerned with progression rather than regression. Psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel believes that all higher social aims are associated with the repression of sexuality.5 (Whether it has to be this way is another question.) Courtly love is as much about the achievements of culture as it is about love, that is, it uses love as a metaphor for sublimation of instinctual urges. This is not necessarily bad for love or the status of women, however, for it unites that which the analyst generally separates, love of women—and cultural achievement. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes: "Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence—those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men: it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable."6 Certainly this is not the view of woman that is depicted in the troubadour poet, for whom she is sometimes the repository of all wisdom. Arnaut Daniel claims in "To this sweet and pretty air" ("En cest sonet coind'e leri"):

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Each day I am a better man and purer, for I serve the noblest lady in the world, and I worship her, I tell you this in the open, I belong to her from my foot to the top of my head; and let the cold wind blow, love raining in my heart keeps me warm when it winters most. (Goldin, 217, st. 2) Tot iorn meillur et esmeri car la gensor serv e coli del mon, so-us die en apert. Sieus sui del pe tro q'en cima, e si tot venta-ill freid'aura, l'amors q'inz el cor mi plou mi ten chaut on plus iverna. (216, st. 2)

But perhaps that is because he is not married to her. In the courtly romance of Chrétien and the lay (which has been defined as a short romance) of Marie de France (known to her peers as the best storyteller of the Middle Ages), marriage does occur and, contrary to popular belief about the Middle Ages, it is often coupled with love. (Tales of January/May marriages and the consequent dissatisfaction for the woman generally come later, as in Chaucer.) In Chretien's Erec et Enide marital love is contrasted with what is commonly called courtly love (though we might well enlarge the definition), which is attacked for giving women too much rather than too little power, as opposed to the view of contemporary feminists. In Chretien's "Joy of the Court" episode, a knight is living in virtual imprisonment because he made a promise of love service to his lady without knowing what it would entail: remaining in an enclosed garden till he was defeated by a challenger. The idyllic space that was to keep the lovers in a permanent state of bliss is surrounded by spikes on which are impaled the heads of the losers, castration symbols before Freud. According to Henri Rey-Flaud, in La Névrose courtoise, the woman on a pedestal represents the perpetual erection of the phallus,7 surely an example of male narcissism; yet Rey-Flaud goes on to fault the woman. The garden is at once paradise and death (62), for in courtly love, the Other or third party (i.e., the world) is

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radically excluded from the enclosed garden, where the lovers live together in a pétrification of desire, that of the woman, which is really a non-desire, since it represents immobility (66). There has to be something in courtly love for women. Too many men are against it. What Chrétien shows indirectly is why the lady should want the exclusive rights over the lover that being on a pedestal affords: it is because of her insecurity and fear that love might change, even disappear. Women perhaps more than men recognize that "the release of libido is not a gift (that is, a loss), but rather a loan: the cathexes may at any moment be withdrawn from objects by the ego, which is always free to insist on its proprietary rights, to withdraw its cathexis, to withdraw ¿fce//(Borch-Jacobsen, 96). Perhaps it is also because the lady has been excluded from action in the larger world that she wants the lover to join her in private bliss. What Chrétien suggests in contrast to the 'joy of the court" hardly seems better or less narcissistic to this reader. His hero, Erec, falls in love with and marries the lovely and virtuous Enide, his feminine reflection in every way except that of social class. (He is a prince and she is poor though noble, but of course he raises her up.) As long as she remains his perfect mirror, he is happy with her; in fact he refuses to leave her side. But once she dares to speak, and not simply to echo him, he is devastated— though this is revealed as anger. Unable to speak directly, she voices the words of others who fault him for loving her too much, thereby expressing both her fear for his reputation and her own narcissism. He then sets out on a quest, which is unique in that he takes her with him, but it is meant to test her as much as to demonstrate his knightly prowess to her, to himself, and to others. It is only after she proves her willingness to die for him that he is able to trust her once again. Why she should be willing to trust the boy/husband who has repeatedly left her the prey of any would-be rapists wandering the countryside as he pursues his separation/individuation adventures is difficult for the feminist reader to understand, though many (male) critics have seen this quest as leading to an ideal marriage, with the appropriate balance between love and honor.8 Still it may be the critics who are more at fault than the author, a common problem.

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Despite her self-lacerations at having spoken to begin with, it is Enide's thoughts that the author gives us, not Erec's, her interior life that Chrétien reveals. It is almost as if Erec doesn't have any, as if that dimension were totally lacking in him. Though later enjoined to silence, a mandate which she continually disobeys when she thinks Erec is in danger, it is Enide's few spoken words initially that restore Erec to the fellowship of knights, which he had formerly deserted because of her. For this, he is ultimately thankful, so she remains a mirror with the crack transformed or the fissure fixed. Could it be that despite what men say, they do not want women to be silent after all? A common question in France and the United States recently has been whether there is an écriture féminine, that is, a different consciousness and consequently a different imagery, language, and style in women's writing that stems from something other than the different experiences that the two sexes have. 9 If we look at the small body of poems left by the trobairitz, the women troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the answer seems to be yes although it would be rash to attribute such differences to sexual ones. Still, there must be some significance to the fact that the troubadours sing of unrequited love and the trobairitz of unrequited sex. In the women's songs, we hear nothing about the merciless lady from afar, who is so widespread in the male troubadour lyrics. The female poets are all too ready to give and lament when they haven't. The Countess of Dia, certainly the most well-known and amone; the most talented of them, writes: Estât ai en greu cossirier per un cavallier qu'ai agut, e vuoil sia totz temps saubut cum ieu l'ai amat a sobrier; ara vei qu'ieu sui trahida car ieu non li donei m'amor, don ai estât en gran error en lieig e quand sui vestida.

I've lately been in great distress over a knight who once was mine, And I want it known for all eternity how I loved him to excess. Now I see I've been betrayed because I wouldn't sleep with him; night and day my mind won't rest To think of the mistake I made.10

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While the men want emotional requital, the women long for more sexual gratifications. Perhaps both conventions were fantasies equally removed from real life. But they are refreshing in that they reverse the sexual stereotypes of more recent centuries. Though the men may be far away in the women's verse, they are not worshiped as absent gods in a manner comparable to the men's adulation. It may be that in their love literature, men grant women superiority because this is the only way to bring the assumedly inferior sex up to equality. Indeed, in the secular writing of the twelfth century, love itself turns the world upside down and reverses the relationship of the sexes, as if literature were a kind of reparations payment for social injustice. In Chretien's romance Cliges, the hero says about shrinking from a mere girl: "I seem here to be seeing the hounds fleeing before the hare and the fish chasing the beaver, the lamb the wolf, the pigeon the eagle."11 It is only in love that such weakness has been allowed the male. (Why this should be is in itself extraordinary.) But this "weakness" on the part of men is not apparent in the women's poetry. Considering their innovative psychology, their intense exploration of sexual difference, themes that the men never deal with, it is quite amazing that the French critic and scholar Alfred Jeanroy could write: "I would imagine that our 'trobairitz,' slaves to tradition, incapable of analytic effort, limited themselves to exploiting the existing themes, to using the current formulas, by simply inverting the roles."12 One can only conclude with Meg Bogin that he did not read the poems. However, insofar as the women were realists, they do echo a tradition in male writing, that of the female deflator of male pretense and hypocrisy, as found in comedy and some forms of the pastorelle. What the trobairitz seem to be saying is that the male poetry was itself a fantasy of a fantasy, that relations between the sexes weren't what men said they were, even in the game of love. It seems that the men in the women's poetry rarely achieve the qualities that they aspire to in the men's poetry. Castelloza, for example, writes: Amies, s'ie. us trobes avinen,

Friend, if you had shown consideration,

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humil e franc e de bona merce, be. us amera, quan m'en sove que. us trob vas mi mal e fellon e trie; (118)

meekness, candor and humanity I'd have loved you without hesitation; but you were mean and sly and villainous. (Bogin, 119)

The troubadours make it sound as if it were the women who were unfaithful, but the trobairitz reveal that the theme of la donna è mobile was a male projection that is not limited to Italian opera. Was this stance expected of women writers by men, and is this why the women write the way they do? It is an unnerving thought, but was their departure from the dominant troubadour tradition less original than mandated? Are the women prisoners of genre as well as gender? They probably aren't. The wit is too sharp, the language too fresh, the psychological perception too acute. Medievalist Marianne Shapiro has noted that nowhere in the women's poems "does the masculine beloved appear to incarnate or substitute . . . for a total scheme of ideals" as the women do in the men's poems.13 Could this be because the woman sees herself as embodying these values? After all, the troubadours had said so often enough. I doubt it. Perhaps it is because women do not see themselves as guides and mentors, or even as participants in culture, that they do not stress cultural values, that they insist that the men exist first and foremost for them, in the flesh. (Was Freud right, after all?) Whatever the reason, men for them do not take on symbolic significance. Their lovers remain men, no matter how worthy: Qu'ieu n'ai chausit un pro e gen, per cui pretz meillur' e genssa, lare et adreig e conoissen, on es sens e conoissenssa. Prec li que m'aia crezenssa, ni om no. 1 puosca far crezen qu'ieu. fassa vas lui faillimen, sol no. trob en lui faillensa. (Countess of Dia, "Ab joi et ab joven m'apais," 84)

I've picked a fine and noble man in whom merit shines and ripens— generous, upright, and wise, with intelligence and common sense. I pray him to believe my words and not let anyone persuade him, that I ever would betray him, except I found myself betrayed, (trans. Meg Bogin, "I thrive on youth and Joy," 85)

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4!

There is a considerable fear of the man who is too powerful in the women troubadours, an attitude similar to that of many contemporary feminists. The trobairitz do not put men on pedestals. Neither do they put themselves there. They want equality without any affirmative action. The author of one anonymous poem in a tensón (a dialogue between a man and a woman—the form itself reveals equality) complains: . . . per que. us metetz amaire, pus a me laissatz tot lo mal? quar abdui no. i partem egual? (146)

Why did you become a lover, since you leave the suffering to me? Why don't we split it evenly? (Bogin, 147)

In the women's writing, there is none of the haughtiness and petulance that men attribute to women in the male troubadour lyrics, except perhaps in play. Is this because such petulance was a male projection or because women were afraid to confess it publicly? We cannot be sure. But even though theirs are often poems about unrequited love, there is a tone of reasonableness that pervades the suffering of the trobairitz. The women do not speak of mesura (moderation) directly; yet they exhibit it, whereas the men preach it, often while lamenting unrestrainedly. Whether the men's greater expression of suffering reveals more feeling or simply more exhibitionism is again something about which we cannot be sure. Perhaps the lady as a poet does not appropriate male excesses or even the excesses the troubadours attribute to her as a woman because she does not feel entitled to them. As already noted, the lady often has sovereignty through the male's dispensation. He can therefore take it back. If we felt him to be a real slave, the courtly poet wouldn't be interesting. It is the tension between the psychological power that he ostensibly gives the woman and the physical power which he holds in reserve that is compelling. We need merely reverse the sexes in reading the troubadour poems out loud to hear how insufferably arrogant a similar stand would sound on the part of a woman, since the terms in which we address the lover are generally a projection of how we want to be treated (is this a reason why men overvaluate

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the sexual object, according to Freud?). Indeed, many women are now finding this stand insufferable in men. But if the trobairitz are more realistic than the men, more tolerant of ambiguity, more desirous of communication (they often address the men as friends—though to be sure the male writers sometimes do this, it is far less common), more accepting of sexuality (what Andreas Capellanus in The Art of Courtly Love14 calls mixed as opposed to pure love), they are often less exciting as poets. Louise Bogan said in this century: "Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead." 15 Certainly it isn't always like this. Look at Sappho, for instance—or Sylvia Plath, an example closer to home. But the trobairitz, with few exceptions, do seem "provident instead," and normalcy, restraint, and moderation are not the stuff of which great poetry is made. Or at least it doesn't seem so to modernist or post-modernist taste. Other periods have thought otherwise and may well think so again. What the trobairitz have that we can recognize is wit, charm, a capacity for the exploration of self and the psychology of the lover, an examination of the subtle changes in the process and progress of love, which the male poets tend to see in more absolutist terms—all this with a self-acceptance and quiet confidence often lacking in women's later writing. Working against the dominant conventions the trobairitz bring the lady to life. They are the Pygmalions in this tradition for the man as well as the woman, for they give life to his psyche in ways the male poet never thought of. Perhaps the true female parallel to the more immoderate male troubadour verse is found not in the lyrics of the trobairitz but rather in the earlier letters of Héloí'se (1101-1164), the brilliant student, lover, and then wife of the charismatic cleric and philosopher Abélard, who was castrated because of her. Granted these letters might have later been heavily edited, I think it unlikely that they represent a male fabrication, as some have suggested. The psychology of female submission seems authentic enough. Though Héloïse's adulation of Abélard is reminiscent of the troubadour adoration of the beloved, there are major differences. For one, Héloí'se is far more prescient. In her fusion of extreme physical desire with the idealization of the love object as well as her

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rejection of social and religious strictures, Héloíse represents the pinnacle of romantic love centuries before it officially arrives: God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.16

Her claim that she would rather be Abélard's whore than empress of the world led Jean de JVleun, one of the authors of the Roman de la Rose in the thirteenth century, to say that she was crazy in her excesses. We, being less romantic than the nineteenth century, might think so too. It is for Abélard, not God, that she joins a nunnery, perhaps the ultimate in heresy and sanctification of the love object in place of God. The male medieval lyricist does not achieve the sexual and spiritual fusion of Héloíse because as long as he idealizes the woman and sets her up as a guide, he divorces her from sexual contact. When women accept men as guides, however, as Héloíse does, they idealize them sexually as well as spiritually, as in the ancient tradition of the tutor/lover that continues down to the present day, a term that Ellen Moers uses somewhat differently. This literary distinction points to a real differentiation between the sexes, granted one that may have been socially constructed. Jessica Benjamin speaks of the little girl's lack of an identificatory father as the source of women's later romantic or "ideal love."17 Furthermore, unlike men, women tend to eroticize all experience since until recently it was only through a male intermediary that women were allowed access into the public realm, whether to experience the joys of the intellect or of restaurants. The male troubadours eroticize culture also but in a different way. In their works more obviously than most anywhere else, men's professed humane goals are seen to be sublimations. With men, the influence of the love object is felt more when she is an absent muse than a tangible presence. From the troubadours to Yeats and Maud Gönne, the more distant she was, the more powerful her influence. Perhaps Héloíse is allowed to be so excessive in the private realm of desire because she too is distanced from Abélard. The

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abbess who burns at mass is no longer a threat, for her passion can no longer pose a danger. She can no longer overwhelm and engulf. Perhaps what is most striking here is the revelation that even in the great love stories of the world, on some level the men are not reachable. It is understandable that Abélard should appear cold and unfeeling after his castration. But he writes of himself beforehand also as something of a selfish seducer. We no longer have his love songs, for which he was famous throughout Paris, to disprove his words in the Historia Calamitatum (66). Instead we have Héloíse's letters about her remaining passion and his — silence. It was her words and knowledge that first attracted Abelard, that he said set her above other women. It is her words — at least of passion—that he ignores later. And yet we pity him—for his great hurt, for the very silence that we feel must mask fire, not ice. But can we be sure? 18 It is not simply contemporary women who complain about men not being able to love. Medieval women did too. We have seen this in the trobairitz. It is also true of Héloíse. Stephen G. Nichols believes that precisely because they were marginalized, Héloíse and other medieval women writers are able "to express the essential contradiction of humans poised between 'the thin ice of language and the ocean of the psyche.' " Nichols sees their insights rediscovered in the twentieth-century Emmanuel Levinas: " 'To say that sexual duality presupposes a whole, is to presuppose love as fusion. But the pathos of love lies in the insurmountable duality of beings. It is a relationship with the fugitive. A relationship does not in itself neutralize alterity, but preserves it. The pathos of desire lies in the fact of being two.' Lacan goes even further when he says that courtly love "is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it. It is truly the most staggering thing that has ever been tried." 19 It may well be, however, that there are gender differences in desire. Even early in the story of Héloíse and Abélard, which sounds as much literary as historical, as much forbidden as marital, it is lust (the desire for the body) rather than love (the desire for the other's desire) that Abélard most reveals (not that Héloíse complains

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about this.) She writes: "Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence; queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed" (115). Gilson makes a big point about the purity of Héloíse's love, in contrast to Abélard's, by which he means not the absence of the physical but rather her concern above all for the welfare of the beloved.20 It is true that Héloíse wishes to do nothing that would interfere with Abélard's career; she initially argues against marriage with the same intensity that she later pleads for Abélard's epistolary attention. My male students find her passionate and single-minded devotion exceedingly attractive. But this does not mean that we should absolve Héloíse from her own variety of self-love. No doubt the lovers had a competition in grandiosity. Each made a great sacrifice: Abélard for God and Héloíse for him, not only through the internment of her love but also of her sexuality. Abélard says that it was for his castration that she was created, a position only slightly more shocking than the common notion since biblical times that women were created for men's pleasure. Putting Abélard on a pedestal came easily to her, but as might be said of the male troubadour poets, it is easy to offer oneself as a slave to someone one knows will not accept. Still, it is probable that Héloíse would have been happy to actively engage in extreme submissiveness. If Abélard was all ego, then Héloíse was all his. She became part of the god she created, and this no doubt was preferable to being a mere woman. The psychoanalyst Annie Reich cogently points out that what may appear to be "specially 'real' forms of love" might stem from extreme infantile and narcissistic needs. Gifted though she was, Héloíse recalls Reich's patients, whose extreme submissiveness "results in a feeling of oneness, of being one body with the grandiose sex partner." 21 "This unió mystica can be compared to Freud's 'oceanic feeling' — the flowing together of self and world, of self and primary object. It has to do with a temporary relinquishment of the separating boundaries between ego and id and ego ideal. . . . Grandiose masculinity was gained through the ecstatic intercourse" (186). Reich equates "the phallic object with whom this mystic identification occurred" (186) with the father, but then goes on to say that "the fantasy of becoming one with a

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grandiose love partner" might well be "related to the original homosexual object, the mother, primitive attachments to whom had never been relinquished. The undisguised phallic character of the later fantasy represented a subsequent addition, as a reaction to the disappointment at the lack of a penis in the mother" (187). Deprived of both mother and father at an early age (unless we are to believe that her adoptive uncle was actually her father), Héloíse was particularly vulnerable to both possibilities. Part of the function of romantic love is to turn both partners into more than ordinary mortals, but I don't know if it should be faulted for that. It is something to which we all aspire, but which only some of us are able to relinquish. As the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel says, "Successful love is love which accepts the limits that are inherent in the human condition."22 It is part of the attraction of courtly and romantic love that they refuse to do so. Perhaps the closest fictional counterpart to Abélard and Héloïse is Gottfried's Tristan, written at the beginning of the thirteenth century. But Tristan and Isolde (I am using Wagner's version of her name here—she is sometimes referred to as Iseult and Iseut elsewhere) have a relationship of greater equality. Still Tristan too is something of a tutor/lover, who instructs Isolde in music; they share a passion for language and literature as well. But though their story is considered by many to be the greatest romance in the Western world, I have some reservations about their ability to love also, spoiled children that they are, with a desire always to be seen, to exhibit themselves. Why else do they make love in broad daylight, in the open air? There are no enclosed gardens as in courtly love, but rather open meadows and orchard (although they do find shelter in a cave of love later in the work). True, they seem to prefer love with impediments, with danger, as so many of the rest of us do. But their longing for "unhappy mutual love" as Denis de Rougemont puts it, is a model that few of us would care to emulate. An adopted child, Tristan ostensibly has three mothers: Blanchefleur, his biological mother, who dies in childbirth, Floraete, wife of the marshall, who nurtures him afterward, and even Isolde, as wife of his uncle and substitute father, Mark. Perhaps it is because he was adopted and unsure of his identity in childhood that Tristan is unable to take what is right-

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fully his later: Isolde, whom he could have claimed by virtue of having killed the dragon. It is perhaps also because of his early abandonment through the death of his parents and his later abduction and need for disguise that Tristan has trouble with names and the realities they signify. This accounts in part for his unconscious cruelty to Isolde of the white hands, the bride he takes in despair, in Thomas's version, when he sings her a song about the first Isolde, but it may also have fostered his sensitivity to multiple meanings in language, which is what makes him a lover more than anything else. In Gottfried's Tristan, the most richly complex of the variants, it is both Blanchefleur, Tristan's mother, and Isolde, who first broach the subject of love to their lovers, but it is through the language of metaphor, that is, displacement, that they do so. When Blanchefleur tells Rivalin that he has injured her best friend, he wonders what she could mean, but then concludes rightly that her best friend is her heart and that she is speaking of love. His pleasure at this recognition has the effect of firing his feelings too, perhaps a case of self-love fueling love. Like his father Rivalin, Tristan has a gift for understanding metaphor. After Tristan and Isolde have drunk the potion on board ship, when Isolde laments that "1'ameir" is what distresses her, Tristan recalls that "I'ameir" means love, that it also means bitter and that "la meir" means the sea. This triple play on bitter, the sea, and love can be explained psychoanalytically as an unconscious awareness of that oceanic feeling that exists in the primary unity of mother and child—"1'ameir" of course also has a play on la mere, the mother—embittered now because such unity no longer exists. At first it is only the latter two meanings that Tristan mentions, afraid to venture too close as yet to the shores of love. But when Isolde denies that the tang of the sea is too bitter for her, it is he who first declares their love outright. The use of language, both its images and vocabulary, and its hesitations and silences, reflects the position of the speaker as well as his or her attitudes toward the other. Woman, the exchange object of man, must speak in metaphor, the exchange object in language. It is usually men alone who have been allowed to speak

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directly. If Héloïse also seems to do so, it may be because the distance between her and Abélard mitigates any threat in her sexual directness. At the lovers' final parting in Gottfried's version, Tristan's words of love, for all his literary talents, are much briefer than Isolde's. It is she who exhorts him to eternal union, eternal fidelity, even if apart. "We are one life and flesh. . . . The life we share is in your keeping."23 She gives him a ring that would seem to be more binding than any wedding band if we take into account the other versions of the tale. (Gottfried's was left unfinished.) Yet we feel that it is ultimately the power of her language that keeps Tristan from consummation with Isolde of the white hands in Thomas of Brittany's variant, for it is language as a palpable force that unites the lovers and that acts as a separator from others, even when the lovers are apart. Language becomes as substantial and weighty as any physical barrier. It is the shared body of the lovers — the child that they nurture and cherish. It may be that children are so absent from love literature because words take their place. Even in the life of Héloíse and Abélard, there is barely a mention of the child that resulted from their "fornication." After she enters the convent all of Héloïse's pleas, her arguments, her idealization, her arousal of guilt are produced in the hope that Abélard will answer her, will not desert her mind and spirit as he has deserted her body. She succeeds. And we have the letters, a genre in which women have always excelled. As in Tristan this is another love story in which the female partner was not silent. Ultimately it is death and silence that claims the bodies of Tristan and Isolde (as, of course, it did those of Héloïse and Abélard, who were eventually reinterred and buried in the same tomb). Ernest Jones speaks of the desire of lovers to die together as a way of escaping the father and returning to the mother.24 Though Jones speaks of incestuous desire, return could also signify recovering that early unity and sense of omnipotence that exist before social restrictions (and speech) enter consciousness, that is, before what Lacan calls the symbolic order intrudes. The romance of Tristan and Isolde represents a regression to that childhood bliss that can exist again only in fantasy. Perhaps, ultimately, as Freud indicated, it is death alone that can restore us

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to that fusional happiness. Still, in the less Utopian world of the living, it is language as probe and explorer that can lead us to a hint of the paradise that lies behind if not before us. But it is a hint only. As Linda Kauffman says, "Because desire lies between the needs to which the body responds and the demands that speech articulates, it is always a gap in language that cannot be filled, and consequently, every discourse of desire is a critique of language: it cannot encapsulate, enclose, sum up desire—much less satisfy it" (301). Many of the great medieval romances, including those of Héloíse and Abélard in their epistolary form and Tristan and Isolde, were filled with obstacles and unsatisfied desire though they were consummated. Many of the troubadour lyrics sang of unconsummated love altogether. These works dealt with what ChasseguetSmirgel, among others, calls the amorous state, which she distinguishes from love. For her, the amorous state remains the carrier of the ego ideal at the same time that it includes the primitive desire to return to the mother's body, to the lost paradise. The amorous state remains magically invested with this desire and therefore gives the reader the illusion of being satisfiable one day. But once satiated, desire becomes something completely limited. . . . The tragedy of human love is that unhappily when this love is realized, it loses much of its attraction. It is necessary to add many other things to the fascination of the first moments of love, in particular, the possibility of consoling each other for its loss, and of loving each other not only because one reaches paradise together but also because one remains outside the door. (124)

Still there is much to be said for courtly love and its later developments, even with regard to the human condition. Traditional psychoanalysts and radical feminists are both wrong. There are many varieties of courtly love, including some which have to do with marriage. Furthermore, the male troubadours were not all fixated at the Oedipal level though they may have employed such conventions, nor were those conventions necessarily oppressive to women as some feminists feel. Courtly love mitigated both sexism and rampant lust. Though it often emphasized the pleasures of love with obstacles and impediments at the expense of more realistic joys, by increasing desire it increased humanity

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(animals are not noted for their sexual delays when in heat), and at the very least took away the palm of victory from those former heroes, the seducer and the rapist.25

Notes 1. Frederick Goldin, trans., Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 98-99. Further quotations of the male troubadours will be from this edition. 2. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 108. 3. Ibid., p. 108. 4. "Jessica Benjamin," in Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano, Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 327. 5. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). 6. Civilization and Its Discontents, S.E., vol. 21: 103. 7. Henri Rey-Flaud, La Névrose courtoise (Paris: Navarin: Diffusion, Seuil, 1983), p. 20. 8. See, for example, W. T. H. Jackson, The Literature of the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). 9. See "Special Issue: On Feminine Writing," Boundary 2 12 (Winter 1984). 10. Meg Bogin, The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of 12th-century Provence and a Collection of their Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 88-89. As Bogin notes, the sleeping that is referred to might not entail actual consummation. All quotations of the women troubadours will be from this edition. See also Domna C. Stanton, ed., The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present, a bilingual anthology (New York: Feminist Press, 1986). 11. Arthurian Romances/Chrétien de Troyes, trans. D.D. R. Owen (London: Dent, 1987), p. 144. 12. Quoted in Bogin, Women Troubadours, p. 68, from Charles Camproux, Le Joy d'amor des troubadours (Montpellier: Causse & Castelnau, 1965). 13. Marianne Shapiro, "The Provençal Trobairitz and the Limits of Courtly Love," Signs 3/3 (Spring 1978): 564. 14. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). 15. Louise Bogan, "Women," in The Blue Estuaries: Poems igzj-igoS (New York: Ecco Press, 1968), p. 18. 16. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans, and with intro. by Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 114.

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17. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Loue: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 122. 18. Linda Kauffman is sure of the contrary and accepts Abélard's words without question: "Heloise's aim in writing is to reassure herself that she has sacrificed her life because of the greatness of his love, but he denies her that reassurance uncategorically. " In Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 81. 19. Stephen G. Nichols, "Medieval Women Writers: Aisthesis and the Powers of Marginality," Yale French Studies (1988): 93, quoting John Guillory, in "Canonical, and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," ELH 54 (1987): 505. Nichols's quotation (93-94) from Emmanuel Levinas is in Le Temps et l'autre, 2d ed. (Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France, T 985), p. 78. The Lacan quotation is in "God and the Jouissance of J^te" Woman," from Encore, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 141. 20. Etienne Gilson, Heloi'se and Abélard, trans. L. K. Shook (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1951). 21. Annie Reich, "Narcissistic Object Choice in Women" (1953), in Psychoanalytic Contributions (New York: International Universities Press, 1973), p. 185. 22. "Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, " in Baruch and Serrano, Women Analyze Women, p. 124. 23. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, with the surviving fragments of the Tristan of Thomas, ed. with intro. by A. T. Hatto (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 82. 24. Ernest Jones, "On 'Dying Together' with special reference to Heinrich von Kleist's suicide," in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, vol. I (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), 9—15. 25. See Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1961).

4 The Politics of Courtship

A,

w NYONE who doubts that the courtly love tradition influenced the actual relations of men and women (I'm not speaking of its influence on laws, which is another story) has merely to think of the lover's syndrome, so easily recognizable in young—and not so young—men and women who "fall in love." Among the symptoms codified in the Middle Ages and still with us are loss of appetite and sleepless nights, timidity, anxiety, fear, trembling, disdain for ordinary pleasures, such as worldly goods, or ordinary pains, such as heat or cold. This is followed by a rush of excitement, the thrill of seeing the world through "rose-colored glasses," should the beloved deign to recognize the existence of the plaintiff 1 Courtship practices and chivalry have also left their velvet fingerprints although recently they have been attacked by Marxists and feminists alike as sexist and elitist. Still critics, such as J. Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages, claim that some sort of courtly, that is, conventional, form is necessary to disguise the basic savagery of sex.2 We might add that courtship (which includes foreplay) has served to alleviate the anxieties of both sexes — about sex, savage or not. Though most commentators, at least since Victorian times, speak of courtship as designed to woo the woman for an act which she "instinctively opposes," Sandor Ferenczi—who himself wrote the former phrase—suggests quite a different reason as well: Psychoanalytic experience has established that the acts preparatory to coitus likewise have as their function the bringing about of an identifi52

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cation with the sexual partner through intimate contact and embraces. Kissing, stroking, biting, embracing serve to efface the boundaries between the egos of the sexual partners, so that during the sex act the man, for example, since he has as it were introjected the organ of the woman, need no longer have the feeling of having entrusted to a strange and therefore hazardous environment his most precious organ, the representative of his pleasure-ego; he can therefore quite easily permit himself the luxury of erection, since in consequence of the identification which has taken place the carefully guarded member certainly will not get lost, seeing that it remains with a being with whom the ego has identified itself 3

An arresting if uncommon admission of male vulnerability! As with literary works, sexism is sometimes more apparent in the critics than in the text—or in this case the practice itself. Ferenczi aside, too often the description of the basis and practice of courtship is sexist and elitist, with implied if not overt recommendation of male dominance. There is more egalitarianism in some of the manuals on love and courtesy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than in many popular science magazines or even scientific journals today. This in itself does not make their reports unscientific. Their bias, however, does. Too often examples from animal life are patently distorted while others are ignored, generally with the intent (sometimes unconscious) of controlling human female sexuality and aggrandizing men. One can generally find more truth about human courtship in the "fictions" of literature than in the scientific literature, but no doubt as more women scientists enter the field, this problem will be redressed. (In the meantime there is some amusement to be had in the reading.) At least in the popular scientific treatments, whenever courtship is described, politics isn't far behind. For this reason, female animals as well as female humans are the objects of sexually tendentious observations. Since at least antiquity, animals have been used to illustrate the "natural" reasons for human behavior in both the economic and sexual spheres. Our own follies and foibles are thereby projected onto the animal world, where they lead a colorful if imaginary existence. The mythological view of the world may be dead in certain branches of theology today, but

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it is alive and well in ethology as any cursory glance through the male-dominated literature on animal courtship will amply demonstrate. An issue of Science magazine not so long ago described "femme fatale" fireflies who "lure" male members of different species to a culinary death by imitating the signals of the female members of those species. One can almost hear the biblical injunctions of the scientific elders: "Beware the foreign woman." In the late seventies Scientific American reported that French investigators (one might have guessed) refer to the postcopulatory songs of the male cricket as "triumphal songs." A rather different view of supposed postcoital merrymaking appeared at about the same time in Science magazine's account of the "ultrasonic postejaculatory songs" of the male rat, perhaps because one of the investigators was a woman. It turns out that vocalizations are less those of "triumph" than fatigue—"desist-contact" signals, in the case of the rat, anyway. The term courtship with its echoes of courts and ladies leaves much to be desired in the way of scientific objectivity, but this does not prevent animal behaviorists from spinning many a fanciful tale of animal wooing and wedding. Konrad Lorenz, the last of the eminent Victorians, sings the praises of the greylag gander who woos the "virginal" and "modest" female and exhibits lifelong fidelity to her in the "most beautiful bond of all, matrimony." 4 Surely the most poignant tale of romantic love in recent literature is Emily Hahn's recounting of the case history of the greylag who lived and died—for a garbage can. As a result of being brought up in isolation, this gander would only mate with corrugated metal. When his beloved can was itself hauled away in a garbage truck, the gander was so distraught, he chased it until he was killed in traffic, a martyr for love. Readers less romantically inclined can find support for a promiscuous male "nature" in the behavioral accounts of primates with "harems," a rather exotic term for female groups with a single male attached. Also fascinating in the spectrum of courtship behavior is the male cichlid fish. In a sermonlike tone that seems to exhort similar

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behavior on the part of humans, sociobiologists and ethologists of the male-bonding school report that this extraordinary creature is totally unable to perform sexually unless the female is prostrate with awe. A rather different view is held by female behaviorists with whom I have spoken, which demonstrates that what is pronounced ''nature" all too often depends on who does the viewing. This does not mean, of course, that methods of sexual arousal do not exist among animals, only that our view of them is rather biased. The Encyclopaedia Britannica's section on "Animal Courtship" amused James Thurber some years ago.5 It is still amusing. There is the male bowerbird, for example, who builds a remarkable architectural structure, not for housekeeping but strictly for courtship purposes. (Afterward, he and his mate move into a far smaller unit built by the female.) There is the Hepialus butterfly who attracts by means of perfumes—or perhaps I should say colognes, since it is the male who emits them. My favorite is the tree cricket Oecanthus, who signals by means of a sweet liquor produced by his own body—an attractive prospect to anyone who has worked up a huge bar bill for the same purpose. When it comes to courtship, we lack many of the built-in advantages of animals, having to supply them at the liquor, drug, and clothing stores—a necessity that once led Lord Chesterfield to grumble that the expense of sex was damnable. We have an even greater problem. Somewhere in our evolutionary journey, we left estrus, that state of temporary sexual excitement that prevails in animal life, and migrated to a state of perennial sexual interest. Being a Donjuán is now year-round work. As far removed as animals may be from us, they provide us with analogies, those statements that Freud said prove nothing but make us feel more at home in the world. Whom he means by "us," however, is the crucial question. Perhaps understandably, considering that his essay "Courtship through the Ages" first appeared in 1939, Thurber assumed that the female of the species —from crabs up to humans—had to be cajoled or cudgeled into sex. But the most recent edition of the Britannica seems to proceed on the same assumption. True, female monkeys are said to "pre-

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sent" themselves, but somehow this is viewed as mere ''receptivity," in contrast to male peacocks actively ruffling their feathers, for example, or male nightingales vocalizing, an example perhaps of the male bias against female sexual initiation more than any bias in nature itself. Among animals, courtship—that is, behavior for the purpose of sexual arousal—is either a preliminary to reproduction or a reinforcement of sexual bonding. Among humans it is often neither. Not only does human courtship sometimes have nothing to do with marriage and reproduction, it may even be used to delay the sex act indefinitely. Much of the love literature of the West (and the social conventions related to it) has to do with one or the other of these possibilities. Conversely, sexual consummation of the most striking sort often has nothing to do with courtship. In the affair of Helen and Paris, for example, there is no wooing. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no love either, but that is another story. The Greeks did have courtship, but in homosexual relationships only—their marriages were arranged—which would seem to give the lie to those feminists who find courtship a mode of dominance of one sex over the other. It can be that but, obviously, it doesn't have to be. In ancient Rome, the god of love was often depicted as no more than a chubby boy with gilt-tipped arrows. It is under such diminished circumstances for erotic possibilities that manuals for courtship and sexual behavior arise. For Ovid, courtship is strictly an extramarital affair, designed to enhance sexual pleasure. Despite the use of the term love in his titles 6 —a term that included the concept lust in many languages until the nineteenth century when the two were divorced—Ovid seems interested in commitments that often last for only an afternoon or evening at a stretch. In that sense he is very modern. But while we seem quite willing to dispense with it, or were until recently, Ovid recognizes courtship as the civilizing force that, by refining and polishing us, spurs us on out of barbarism. In the Middle Ages, courtship became indissolubly bound up with love, but a love that was extramarital. At the court of Marie de Champagne, Andreas Capellanus (Andrew the Chaplain) wrote a book that is still highly influential, even in our anti-courtship

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age: The Art of Courtly Love. Mainly a series of dialogues between lovers who are not married, at least not to each other, the work says little about consummation and nothing about reproduction— a fine example of the ability of writers in all ages to discount biological contingencies when talking about human affairs, especially with jealous husbands around. In the Middle Ages, marriage was contracted much as any other financial arrangement and was often terminated—by the male—when more attractive prospects came into view; but courtship was a lifetime commitment—requiring a monastic discipline. No wonder women encouraged it, as a safety valve within an intensely patriarchal system. Since the women depicted in the love lyric, at least, were generally of higher social rank than the poets, there may well be some truth in the "bread-and-butter" theory that sees in this mode of courtship a means of entrée into higher circles for the male. While the rules of animal courtship always apply to the entire species, human courtship has often been limited to those of the upper classes or those aspiring to them (although, in the modern period, irhas sometimes been used to delay marriage among the poor). Andreas finds it contrary to the nature of the masses to be stirred by Cupid's arrows — they have other things to do, such as plough the fields. He therefore refuses to instruct them in the art of courtship,8 something, it seems, that doesn't come naturally to humans. One might expect such a view in the fiercely hierarchical Middle Ages. Yet despite our professed egalitarianism, a look at the department store ads for any issue of the New York Times yields a similar view today. Only the rich, it seems, deserve the fair and only the rich can afford to be fair. It is generally those who wish to preserve the status quo who point to nature for support, which tends to make mother nature the arch-conservative of the universe—a myth that even the briefest look at our evolutionary history should dispel and yet, it prevails. There are some exceptions, mainly in literature, that hotbed of subversive activity, but even they tend to represent the point of view of the dominant group, and an exploitative one at that. The idea of nature as a gigantic bedroom, for example, has

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been a staple of seduction poems since antiquity. Fleas, bees, and insects of all sorts generally represent symbols of libertine promiscuity, flitting as they do from one body to another with impunity, particularly in less hygienic ages than our own. Even in highly restrictive periods, the human female is urged to practice a similar freedom. 9 Unless they are pointing out the diabolical nature of female sexuality, however, poets do not speak of what happens to the males of some of these insect species after mating. The "nuptial flight" of the drone, for example, is followed by something other than an ecstatic honeymoon. He always dies, his stomach destroyed in the act of ejecting his sperm. Somehow, behaviorists never see this as any norm to follow, although the example seems just as "natural" as that of the cichlid fish. Human reproduction has sometimes seemed equally brutal, with regard to the female of the species, at least, which may be one reason why human courtship has sometimes been used paradoxically as a means of delaying the sexual act. The fear of biological consequences was prominent among the seventeenthcentury Précieuses, those ladies of the court of Louis XIV. It was one reason for their enhancement of courtship. There were others. Molière satirizes them for refusing to call a spade a spade. But nobody who wants romance calls a spade a spade. In that great but neglected Précieuse work La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette, the widowed princess refuses to marry the man whom she loves and who loves her, ostensibly out of duty but actually out of fear and anxiety: Perhaps the Prince de Clèves was the only man in the world who could maintain love in marriage. My destiny did not allow me to enjoy such happiness, and perhaps his love lasted only because I could not respond to it. But I would not have the same means of keeping your love; for I think it was the obstacles that caused your constancy.10

This sounds remarkably like Freud centuries later: "some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height." But what Mme de La Fayette also recognizes and Freud doesn't point out is that the purpose of courtship is often different for the two sexes. Her princess seeks to prolong courtship, not to heighten her

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desire but rather to mitigate the disparity in power between the sexes. In the 1920s the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote of flirtation, a minor form of courtship, as another equalizer. "The power of the woman in relation to the man is exhibited in consent and refusal. . . . Once she has decided, in either direction, her power is ended. Flirtation is a means of enjoying this power in an enduring form."11 Much of so-called courtship behavior, it would seem, turns out to be less sexual than defensive, a means of warding off aggression. One finds such defensive behavior in the animal world also, although not necessarily in relation to the opposite sex. Male monkeys, for example, will "present" themselves to their male superiors, as a sign of submission. But the techniques of courtship have also been a means of releasing aggression. The brothers Concourt wrote of Laclos's famed eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous alliances), "Seduction becomes an art equivalent in treachery, faithlessness, and cruelty to that of tyranny." 12 This is as true for the heroine as for the hero. The Marquise de Merteuil is a "scientist of the emotions" who, herself without feeling, destroys men with a mathematical precision. Such sports, of course, were only open to women of the upper classes. It was perhaps only "natural" that one outcome of courtship for manipulation and control should be force, and here it is certainly the men who come out on top. "How much self-esteem, youth, manhood, and vigor must one have to be sure of producing in a woman that doubtful and unsatisfying impression of pleasure. That of pain, on the other hand, requires nothing at all,"13 confides one of the Marquis de Sade's characters. Sade is one of the fathers of the heroine-as-victim figure that invades nineteenth-century literature like plant rot. But it's not just literature that mirrors him. There is much evidence today that the fear of being duped and of being unable to please often leads to male violence in fantasy and sometimes in fact. We are left with the uncomfortable possibility that if one function of courtship has been to contain violence, then one result of relinquishing it is the explosion of aggression.14

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I have not yet spoken ofthat form of courtship that most of us would consider most "natural": courtship for marriage. We should bear in mind that in many, perhaps most, periods and cultures, marriages are arranged and courtship does not precede marriage at all although it may follow it as part of sexual bonding. In the Western world, when love and marriage were united in the urbanized Renaissance, much of the courtship pattern of the adulterous Middle Ages was injected into premarital relationships. This is revealed in Castiglione's famous manual The Courtier,15 where, incidentally, there is an almost unisexual ideal of what makes the two sexes attractive, something that later centuries get away from. By the time we reach the eighteenth century, the right marriage was of importance to the woman in ways that it had not been previously, for, as Ian Watt has pointed out, it determined all of her emotional, economic, and geographic happiness in an age of economic individualism.16 Under such conditions, courtship for marriage became exceedingly important. What has not been sufficiently recognized, at least on any theoretical level, although jokes about it are legion, is that courtship for marriage has been practiced as much by women as by men, and it has sometimes been a pretty grim business. ''Courtship" under such circumstances often takes the form of a tantalizing arousal and denial at same time, forcing the male to propose, since marriage is his only route to sexual satisfaction. Such is the situation in Richardson's Pamela,11 that primary textbook for the professional virgin in fiction, films, and life. This tale of a servant girl who wins her master by keeping her petticoats down and his pulse up was preached about from the pulpit as illustrating the rewards of virtue. But what it reveals beneath its gloss of romantic wish fulfillment—perhaps the female equivalent of pornography—is a brutal quest for economic survival. "Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment," wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, more than a century later. For in her position of economic dependence in the sex relationship, sex distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all

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creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven.18

It was primarily this exacerbated economic dependence that encouraged the extreme sexual differentiation of the Victorian era, which ended with women looking more like upholstered armchairs, as George Bernard Shaw remarked, than women. Although some modern Aesops in male chauvinist dress assert that sexual dimorphism (marked differences in appearance between the sexes) leads to pair bonding and that increased dimorphism leads to more pair bonding, there seems to be no correlation between the two in the animal world. Gibbons, for example, are not sexually differentiated in any significant way; yet they have pair bonding, whereas the dimorphic chimps, gorillas, and orangutans do not. What does seem to exist, however, is an environmental or economic basis for dimorphism in nature. Here one finds some interesting parallels between animals and humans. Just as the most gorgeously plumed birds are those that contribute little to subsistence, their looks alone providing their attractiveness for sexual selection, so too the human sexes are most differentiated when women contribute little to economic life. There is this difference, however. While dimorphism in birds is a fact of nature, differentiation in humans is enhanced through artificial means—purposeful inactivity, for example, and conspicuous consumption in dress. It may seem extraordinary to us that the simulations of women should have looked enough like ' 'nature" to fool the most brilliant naturalist of modern times, Darwin, who attributed to them inherent traits of chastity, modesty, and self-sacrifice.19 It is possible, of course, that we are the ones that are fooled, but we now feel that "scientific" findings are all too often dependent on economic models — and psychological needs. In an age of industrial capitalism, Darwin saw women as the repository of religious values, as a museum of the primitive. Women always have to be good, it seems, as much on the ladder of evolution as in the Garden of Eden; otherwise, they are doomed. The terrain of bodies "loved" and left, often with fruit blasted in the womb,

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stretches from one continent to another in nineteenth-century literature, partial proof perhaps that widespread liberation would only be possible with widespread contraception. One might say that the "correction" of nature provided by contraception enabled courtship practices as controlling devices to disappear since it eliminated the fear of sexual consequences. Both sexes arrived at the point where any form of denial was seen as an unnatural interference with sexual impulses (until the advent of AIDS). Somewhere in all of our heads is the fantasy of the great sexual experience that transcends all considerations of time and place. From Tristan and Isolde's love potion to Isadora Wing's "zipless fuck," 20 literature and fiction bear testimony to our wish for the primacy of biology to assert itself, our assumption being, rightly or wrongly, that sex is the rock bottom of our nature. In our quest for the "natural," we forget that animals are not creatures of such urgency. The elimination of courtship may work against that very sexual salvation that each sex seeks so earnestly for itself. In Norman Mailer's "The Time of Her Time," the sparring partners — one can hardly call them lovers — reveal that the pursuit of immediate sexual adventure brings them less often to the smell of the sea than that of the boxing ring. "I threw her a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen-round fight," boasts the hero.21 In the past also, men and women no doubt were combatants, but it seems their matches usually took place outside the bedroom. What is extraordinary about the relations of men and women today is that the battle of the sexes may be taking place in the sex act itself. Fears that used to be dispersed in the rituals of courtship are now displayed in the ringside of the bed. If courtship practices reveal something about the environment, then the absence of courtship should tell us something about that environment also. In a charming modern bestiary, the French author Rostand writes, without objecting to it apparently, that with every naked couple in bed, there is always a third party present, that of society. Freud's bed was less crowded, containing only four in all, the two lovers and their parents of the opposite sex (today one must also include their two analysts, I suppose), but his was a similar point. It is precisely this social control that

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we seek to reject. The question is, what have we substituted for it? Our innumerable sex manuals make a number of techniques available to interchangeable partners, much the way our fast-food chains dispense the same fare to all comers. This leveling process is ironic when we consider that we have rejected courtship partly on the basis of a general distrust of societal conventions. There is nothing more conventional than McDonald's and its sexual equivalent. It is just possible, however, that we have not eliminated courtship but rather changed its form. Perhaps the seventies substituted a spatial for a temporal signal, an environment for a ritual. The bar scene, for instance, might have constituted a new form. A sexual releaser for those who enter its doors, its activities bear some remarkable resemblances to the ritual of the ruff, Philomachus Pugnax, a European shore bird. In Edward Wilson's description, the males of this species "display frentically on individual territories that are grouped tightly together in a communal area" and the "females wander singly or in groups from territory to territory, expressing their willingness to mate by crouching."22 There is no question that the animal courtship requirements of territorial confines, display, rivalry, and release are fulfilled in the bar scene, but whether this represents courtship in any human or humane sense I seriously doubt. It is disconcerting to note that the same kind of precopulatory indifference that has marked the traditional treatment of the prostitute is now exhibited to the women in the so-called singles scene or was until recently. If, as Marxists say, traditional courtship for marriage was oppressive to women by masking its basic motive—the exploitation of the reproductive labor of women—then lack of courtship or the "new" courtship seems hardly better. Yet, no doubt, here also there is accommodation to the environment. Our recent sexual freedom with its denial of pair bonding was a highly effective way of discouraging reproduction. What the one-night stand of the bar scene revealed was less the fulfillment of biological need than obedience to cultural dictate. The old traditional pattern at least obscured some of the hostility between the sexes. But we can't go back even if we would,

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less perhaps because women no longer want to be sexual objects than because men no longer want to worship them. Besides, we have succeeded so well in eliminating prohibitions, if there were to be anything like courtship in the old sense, we would have to create obstacles first. Perhaps AIDS has provided that obstacle. Yet, in some strange way, we might have already met the required conditions in the 19705. For there was (and is) one object that we glorified not for the moment, but, in the tradition of romantic courtship, for a lifetime—and that is the self. As for creating obstacles to heighten sexual pleasure, the great prohibition from biblical times on down has been self-love, onanism. Considering the plethora of vibrators that peer out of plate-glass windows and the paeons to masturbation that line the shelves of Brentano's, we are obviously much more tolerant of such love now than formerly; still, it is enough of an obstacle to present a challenge to courtship. It should come as no surprise that what we have had recently is the courtship of one. We have been willing to spend any number of years in any number of therapies to achieve the elusive object. Trappings once used to attract the other have recently been used to court the self. This might have been the underlying meaning of the renewed emphasis on fantasy dressing—even among so-called feminists before the coming of the new romanticism. New social movements tend to be puritanical—and feminism was no exception, despite its apparent plea for sexual freedom. Once certain gains are made, however, restrictions tend to be relaxed. Liberation is now defined as the freedom to be feminine as well as feminist, which makes the economy doubly happy: fantasy clothes for night and dress-for-success uniforms by day stuff the wardrobes of the "liberated" woman—and the pockets of the successful ad man. Of course, the economy thrives on the fears and needs of both sexes. The ad man is the pander between the self as lover and the self as object, bringing the two together in a relationship that we still view as forbidden, as witness all the guilt over our so-called narcissism. We hope that the right product will make us whole, just as we once had hoped that the right man or the right woman

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would do so. Perhaps now we are returning to the latter fantasy —with a difference. Our desire seems to be less for fusion than for Lawrence's two polar stars in orbit. Though the courtship of one might have been the only major form of courtship in the seventies, nobody was particularly happy with it. Assuming that some kind of equality between the sexes is possible, and that love is returning, a very different courtship from the traditional one will be necessary. For that reason alone, it might be worth changing its name; or, we might simply redefine it. Such a courtship would not aim at manipulation or economic advantage. It would be more "natural." Though such courtship would be predicated on respect and attraction, it would probably not depend on exaltation of the object. With sufficient ego strength, one wouldn't have to turn the lover into a private minigod. Nor would this courtship need obstacles to thrive. It may be that hindrances to sexual gratification were necessary in the past because they alone could give members of an inferior sex, or class, or age-group—as in the case of the Greek homosexual youths — some status. Obstacles also delayed marriage and pregnancy in heterosexual relationships. With equality—we have hardly begun to explore some of the problems in this highly ambiguous term—the tenuous system of checks and balances that has prevailed for so long could perhaps be discarded. Not that every physical activity would necessarily have consummation as its goal, to be recorded on some sexual score board, but at least social fear would not be a deterrent. As more women enter the forest to study primates and the rat race to study humans, the customary bias against female courtship will give way to a more objective view of biological facts. We do not as yet know what they are. Right now, it is still believed that the sexes are dimorphic in the matter of visual and tactile appeals, men supposedly more responsive to the former and women to the latter. But how can we be sure when all our training conspires to such results? In the new form of courtship, both sexes might well appeal to each other through different sensory means: visual, tactile, auditory, depending on predilection and circumstance.

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There would be mutual exchange of gifts, in support of each other instead of in support of a voracious narcissism or a voracious economy. In the new courtship, women could perhaps be as overtly aggressive (again the term is unfortunate, but I trust the reader will correct the connotative seasonings) as men in sexual initiation, without incurring their traditional epithets of harlot or sorceress. I say perhaps because there may be something in the biology of men that would be violated by such behavior. Men's current resistance to female aggression may be something more than culturally acquired. At this moment, we cannot be sure. This is not to say, however, that we must grant primacy to biology, as some conservatives insist. If such were the case, then our anatomy would have doomed all of us—men and women— to extinction ages ago. As one of my friends put it, it may be that anatomy determines many destinies rather than a single destiny. It is comforting to remember that even so great a suprematist as Darwin felt that females were active in the matter of sexual selection, opting for bigger, stronger males, for example, because they had reproductive advantage. No doubt human females have had some say in the matter of sexual selection and must bear at least part of the blame for the chauvinist type. Fabergé not too long ago had a cologne called Macho Macho Man, the implication being, of course, that a macho man is much man. If women do not want this equation, it will ultimately disappear. Even Rousseau recognized that male dominance depends on female acquiescence. A new courtship would allow for different personality types, determined not by sex but by temperament. The term courtship as I have been using it in these last pages is obviously based on an egalitarian model. It is perhaps nothing more than a type of mutual caring. And it is related to love.

Notes i. A striking medieval example of this occurs in Bernart de Ventadorn's poem "My heart is so full of joy" ("Tant ai mo cor pie de joya"), in which the poet exults that winter is full of white, red, and yellow blooms: "the ice I

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

lo. u. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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see is a flower,/the snow, green things that grow," in Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, trans, with intro by Frederick Goldin (Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Books, 1973), p. 131. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1924). Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory ofGenitality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 17. See Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Bantam, 1967) and The Year of the Greylag Goose, trans. Robert Martin (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979). See his essay "Courtship through the Ages," published in 1939, which is widely anthologized. Several sources are listed in James Thurber: A Bibliography by Edwin T. Bowden (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968). See Ovid, Heroides and Amores, Loeb Classical Library, 1977, and Ovid, The Art of Love, and Other Poems, Loeb Classical Library, 1939. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Ibid., pp. 149-50. Perhaps the most witty example of this mode of courtship is John Donne's "The Flea," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., vol. i, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). Madame de La Fayette, The Princess ofCleves, trans. Mildred Sarah Greene, University of Mississippi Romance Monographs, no.35 (1979)Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans, with intro. by Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 141. Edmond de Concourt and Charles de Concourt, The Woman of the Eighteenth Century: Her Life from Birth to Death. Her Love and Her Philosophy in the Worlds of Salon, Shop and Street, trans. Jacques Le Clercq and Ralph Roeder (Westport, Conn: Hyperion Press, 1982). See Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, trans. P. W. Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1961). Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Capricorn, 1966), p. 154. Ethel Person in Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) writes, "Seduction is a base version, or perversion, of courtship. (Perhaps one might say that domination, seduction and courtship form a continuum of sorts)," p. 46. See Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 139. Samuel Richardson, Pamela (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Carl N. Degler (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 38.

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19. See Darwin, Norton Critical edition, 2d ed., ed. Phillip Appleman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). 20. See Erica Jong, Fear of Flying: A Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973). 21. Norman Mailer, "The Time of Her Time," in Advertisements for Myself (New York: H. Fertig, 1982). 22. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 318.

5 Marvell's "Nymph": A Study of Feminine Consciousness

cCONSIDERING the querelle des femmes (debates on the nature of women) that took place in the Renaissance (in a sense they haven't died yet) and the probing quality of Andrew Marvell's mind, it is not likely that the seventeenth-century poet would have passed up the opportunity to examine his age's assumptions and conventions pertaining to women. It is from this perspective that I would like to look at one of his most enigmatic poems, "The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun," and its striking female narrator, who is obsessed with courtly and Petrarchan love and suffers as a result. In spite of or perhaps because of all the allegorical weight that Marvell's nymph has had to bear upon her slender shoulders, there is one way, ironically enough, that she has not been looked at at length, namely as a female creature.1 The type of femininity that the nymph represents is of particular interest for our own time in its réévaluation of sexual norms of behavior and temperament, for she embodies a type that has been especially attractive to Western consciousness. Yet despite his empathy with her, it does not seem that Marvell shared the general view. Indeed, to some readers the poet has seemed anti-feminine in his Petrarchan parody. The nymph says of the fawn, And oft I blusht to see its feet more soft, And white, shall I say then my hand Nay any Ladies of the Land.2

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But as the present generation recognizes, one may be anti-Petrarchan without being anti-feminine. What Marvell mocks is not femininity but rather the traditional feminine stereotypes (Shakespeare does something similar in sonnet 130) — sweet breath, soft skin, white skin—by attributing them in superior measure to the fawn. If we are going to worship softness and whiteness, implies the poet, we might more justifiably worship a white fawn than a white woman. However, the nymph's attitude does not seem to be the same as the poet's, and this contrast provides one of the fascinations of the poem. The nymph blushes upon seeing the soft white feet of the fawn. Modesty in the face of strong feeling was the usual seventeenth-century explanation for blushing. Current psychoanalytic theory suggests sexual repression or exhibitionism. But the nymph doesn't blush out of anger—she has totally denied this emotion, not even admitting any toward the murderous troopers —nor can I accept any theories of her sexual attraction to the fawn. Rather she blushes because of embarrassment that her physical beauty is inferior to the fawn's in those aspects exalted by Renaissance (and modern) image makers. Lines 82-84 make the nymph's feeling of inferiority particularly clear. Since white and red were the prime requisites for the beauty of the feminine complexion, how could the nymph hope to compare with the fawn, who "like a bank of lillies laid"? Upon the Roses it would feed, Until the Lips, ev'n seem'd to bleed.

That her supposed physical limitations (there is no doubt some affected modesty in her self-portrayal) should be a source of pain to her is not surprising when one considers the nymph's value system. All the qualities she admires in the fawn, not just physical attributes but character traits as well, are those traditionally associated with femininity, namely tameness, flirtatiousness, submissiveness. It is the passive, docile qualities of the fawn that the nymph adores. They cohere with one major view of femininity in the Renaissance. As Ruth Kelso points out, sweetness, peaceableness,

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and obedience are constantly recurring virtues in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.3 To be sure, there was another side to the coin that we should not forget, for it was no doubt known to Marvell. Jacob Burckhardt speaks of the equality of noble Italian Renaissance women with men in both education and morality.4 However, it is the former constellation of virtues that the nymph seeks to emulate. What is more provocative in her view of gender is that she would like men as well as women to exhibit the Stereotypie virtues of femininity. The fawn is not only a speculum nymphae (Berger 293), it is also a surrogate lover (Allen 165). Unlike Sylvio, who moves on, the fawn finds meaning only in relation to its master (in this case, mistress), again a traditionally feminine trait, but also part of the posture of the adoring lover, which Sylvio seems never to have been. Even at the height of his relationship with the nymph, his puns show too much coolness and deliberation. He is never the "fawning" lover that the nymph would like him to be. In contrast to the fawn's tameness is Sylvio's wildness, which the nymph finds distasteful: But Sylvio soon had me beguil'd. This waxed tame, while he grew wild. (Lines 33-34)

Many readers see a sexual connotation in the term wild5 and assume that Sylvio left this nymph for other more rewarding ones. Possibly! But wild could as easily refer to warlike behavior as sexual license. (Rather than its current meaning of mislead, the term beguil'd in 1.33 might have the obsolete meaning of to cheat of hopes and expectations, to disappoint.) Is it possible that Sylvio left the nymph to join the troopers, not necessarily the ones that kill the fawn but others? In either case the failure of "love" might have caused his departure. There is no evidence that the nymph understood him any more than he understood her. To those readers who find Marvell misogynistic in "The Garden" because Adam was happy there without a helpmeet,6 may I point out that the nymph seems equally content without a man in her garden, at least for a while. Is she misanthropic? Perhaps, but

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the point to notice is that whereas "The Garden" seems to present a state of androgyny before the Fall, "The Nymph complaining" reveals a polarization of the sexes after the Fall. Sylvio represents a summation of societal stereotypes about the "opposite" sex just as much as the nymph does. If she is soft, gentle, open, then he is hard, cool, deliberate. Not only are the nymph and Sylvio physically apart, like the lovers in "The Definition of Love," they are poles apart mentally as well. Unlike his contemporaries, the libertins, however, Marvell does not blame the woman alone for the alienation of the sexes. Just as the anti-Petrarchanism of the poem rejects the adulation of woman, its anti-libertinism rejects her degradation. As contemporary feminists recognize, the two themes are not unrelated, for the extravagant praise of women within the libertine tradition draws on Petrarchan motifs; the libertin often puts his woman on a pedestal the better to undermine her defenses and get her under it. Although we cannot be absolutely certain, it seems unlikely that this happened to the nymph, considering her guardedness and her ability to bear Sylvio's leave-taking. It is only after the fawn's death that the nymph speaks of withdrawing altogether from the blood-stained present into the timeless world of art. But all along she has shown elements of escapism. Before faulting her for this, however, we must remember that other speakers in Marvell's poetry withdraw from political controversy and strife, from passion and its consequences, also. The significant question is, what does the nymph do when she is alone in her garden? And the answer is, not much.7 For this, perhaps, we can fault her. The nymph never goes beyond sensuous experience, and unlike the speaker in "The Garden," her soul never prepares for longer flight. Though it is true that she conceives of sublimating suffering through art, she does not think of herself as the artist. The metamorphosis that she wants someone else to effect will lead her to create no poetry and no music, unlike Apollo and Pan, those metamorphosers of "The Garden." The only thing that she will produce are tears, which become surrogates for art, for thought, even for revenge. So great is the masochism at the end of the poem that the nymph becomes her own tear. So great is her narcissism that she sees her suffering itself as a work of art:

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First my unhappy Statue shall Be cut in Marble; and withal, Let it be weeping too: but there Th' Engraver sure his Art may spare: For I so truly thee bemoane That I shall weep though I be Stone: Until my Tears, still dropping, wear My breast, themselves engraving there. (Lines 111-18)

The tone at the end of "The Nymph complaining" is perilously close to that in "Mourning": She courts her self in am'rous Rain, Her self both Danae and the Showr. (Lines 19-20)

For all her ostensible rejection of self-idealization, ultimately the nymph worships herself.8 Her posture of adoration during the life of the fawn is reversed at its death. She now imagines herself with the fawn at her feet—those feet which are not as white and soft as the fawn is. The Petrarchan pedestal may be a cold and narrow place, but that is where the nymph wants to be. This is because the nymph sees only two possibilities for herself in the world: the pedestal or brutality. The reason why she so laments the fate of the fawn is that she sees it as her fate in the world of men. For the nymph, sexuality is equated with destruction, possibly because she has only known hunters, and she never reaches the level of adult consciouness. Like the fawn, she is a surrogate lover, only able to play at love. The nymph is also a surrogate mother.9 She proudly recalls nursing the fawn at her own fingers with sweetest milk and sugar. There may be some anti-Catholic parody in the fact that the fawn allows the nymph to be virgin and mother at the same time, the only way she could be so. Indeed, the nymph's life has some similarities with that of the nuns in "Upon Appleton House"; she too incloses "that wider Den/Of those wild Creatures, called Men." The nymph's stress on the fawn's whiteness not only reveals the importance of physical attractiveness to her, it is in large measure a projection of her emphasis on purity. The whiteness that the nymph advocates does not reveal all the colors that light does. Unlike the green of "The Garden" that

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represents a culmination of experience and a going beyond it to other worlds and seas, the whiteness in "The Nymph complaining" excludes most of the world. Nor is the nymph in touch with her own feelings. She is so repressed she is incapable of expressing either anger or passion. She remains not only isolated from the world but also ignorant of herself. A very different view of femininity is presented in "Upon Appleton House," in which Maria is treated as a repository of wisdom, the source of all order and harmony. The nymph has neither the intellectual resources nor the internal or external discipline that Mary has, and also unlike her, the nymph is not able to recognize the ambushes of men or to relate her idea of purity to any larger concept of chastity within marriage. Having neither mind nor the "wing'd artillery" of sexuality, the nymph is completely weaponless. Even had war not intruded into her life, she would have been totally vulnerable. The nymph sounds like a paradigm of those traits that Freud later described as most significant in the female personality: passivity, masochism, narcissism, modesty, jealousy, shame, and maternalism. Furthermore, she can perhaps even be used to illustrate his theory of the libido, for she has little or no sexual energy to sublimate, and therefore has no creative accomplishments. But this by no means implies that Marvell saw her as a paradigm. On the contrary, his view of female sexuality is often quite different, perhaps most pointedly in "To his Coy Mistress." In that poem despite the fact that the speaker never describes her directly, there is no question that he sees the woman he addresses as a person with a mind and energy as well as a body. He ends with the recognition of her as an equal, as sexually alive as he, as potentially active and aggressive (in the English psychoanalytic sense of "enterprising, energetic, active")10 and as deserving of pleasure. Let us roll all our Strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one Ball: And tear our Pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the Iron gates of Life.

One can scarcely imagine anyone addressing the nymph in a similar way. So lacking is she in aggression, it is not possible to

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think of her as a creature who is sexual in any participatory way. "To his Coy Mistress" implies the possibility of union and a joining together of the masculine and feminine components inherent in both sexes. Contrary to some readings, Marvell speaks of both the man and the woman here as having strength and sweetness, not one or the other.11 In his reworking of Aristophanes' myth of androgyny in The Symposium, Marvell goes further than Freud will later, for despite his recognition of a bisexual disposition in both sexes, Freud tends to polarize the sexes much more.12 But like Freud, Marvell recognizes that sexuality cannot be divorced from aggressive instinct. The poet unites thanatos and eras in the war-like images, such as birds of prey and rough strife that apply to both sexes. The lovers' integrated aggression will unite them into "one Ball." Marvell depicts sexuality in "To his Coy Mistress" as totality, not as the conquering of one sex by another. In "The Nymph complaining," on the other hand, one has the sense of total alienation of the sexes; Sylvio the huntsman will forever be estranged from the gentle nymph. The men in "The Nymph complaining" represent a particularly limited type of masculinity. Sylvio is, at least in part, a con man, a liar, a hunter, that is, a proponent of violence, who presumably leaves the nymph to hunt for other pleasures, either amorous or warlike. Men are "false and cruel" complains the nymph. And this is the line that most readers of the poem have taken. But before we make what would now be a liberationist interpretation of the work, which is admittedly tempting (like some of her twentieth-century sisters, the nymph says that she is content to live alone and give up the male world that has exploited and deceived her—of course, she does not seem to have any choice in the matter, for, after Sylvio leaves, no other suitors come calling), let us remember that in Marvell issues are never that simple. The quality of love that the nymph could offer Sylvio, assuming he were capable of receiving it, is highly questionable. Ironically enough, it is the nymph who might be the "coy" mistress, coy in the contemporary sense of affectedly shy. (The fawn, who represents a projection of the nymph, plays coquettish, teasing games, another meaning for the term coy.) Sylvio's language perhaps implies as much about the nymph as it does

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about himself since our use of language depends in part on our conception of the listener. Sylvio speaks to the nymph in puns and innuendoes. It takes her a while to figure this out on any conscious level and she resents it when she does, but one can hardly imagine anyone being honest with her: Unconstant Sylvio, when yet I had not found him counterfeit, One morning (I remember well) Ty'd in this silver Chain and Bell, Gave it to me: nay and I know What he said then; I'm sure I do. Said He, look how your Huntsman here Hath taught a Faun to hunt his Dear. (Lines 25-32)

In "To his Coy Mistress," on the contrary, the woman is coy only in the seventeenth-century sense of being remote, immediately unavailable. The lover professes to be open and honest, rejecting arithmetical flattery and other sexist conventions. He does not use lines or play games (unless it is the game of saying that he will not play games). He says that he will not put his mistress on a pedestal, and although he recognizes her highborn nature, he is not afraid of offending her sensibilities. Despite her "long preserved virginity," which he sees literally and metaphorically as a waste of time, he does not think of her as a creature too pure to address with candor, and he goes so far as to speak of her "quaint Honour." The very thought of it turning to dust brings him not to denounce the pleasures of the flesh but rather to turn away from the image of the marble vault to the possibility of a vigorous sexuality, rich in movement, force, and energy that she will share in equally, whereas "The Nymph complaining" ends with marble and a paeon to purity which, of course, can best be preserved in death. Through the metamorphosis into art, Marvell might well be implying that the only viable role for the nymph, a creature so conditioned in purity and vulnerability, is that of a statue. Given the vital and alive woman that Marvell suggests in "To his Coy Mistress," what are we to make of the characterization of the nymph? Is it a question of polarities? The bad woman versus

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the good one? Hardly. If this were the case, then the Mistress would not be "coy," her virginity would not be "long preserved," she would already be a lover, and there would be no need for the poem. Rather, I think that what Marvell is doing in "The Nymph complaining" is giving a study of a feminine sensibility that sums up a host of Western stereotypes from the point of view of a creature who believes them. Of particular significance is the fact that the nymph's story is narrated from her own point of view. The work is a brilliant study of a particular kind of feminine consciousness, and what Marvell reveals through the poem is something which we are beginning to recognize as much rarer than had been formerly supposed in writers, the ability to transcend one's own biological and societal fate and understand that of another sex. From the very opening of "The Nymph complaining," with its diffident nursery rhyme quality that captures a tone of feminine vulnerability, the tone of one who wants to be a victim and then cannot understand why she is one, to the end with its deepened seriousness, to my ear there is only a handful of lines that strains credibility, that does not seem to reveal the nymph's sense of self, that is, her self-consciousness, that gives her distance from the events she describes, an objectivity that she usually lacks and that may be termed traditionally masculine, for example, the similes of lines 95-100: The tears do come Sad, slowly dropping like a Gumme. So weeps the wounded Balsome: so The holy Frankincense doth flow. The brotherless Heliades Melt in such Amber Tears as these.

The voice of the poet seems to be coming through and overpowering the nymph's here, but this is unusual. Most fascinating are those passages in which the poet's voice is heard in counterpoint to the nymph's, for example, lines 71-76: I have a Garden of my own, But so with Roses over grown, And lillies, that you would it guess

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To be a little Wilderness. And all the Spring time of the year It only loved to be there.

On one level, the passage rings true as the ingenuous outpouring of a child; on the other, it represents a tissue of complicated allusions ranging from the Song of Songs to the paysage idéal. Marvell's use of multiple tones at the same time is a brilliantly economical way of treating the complexities of experience.13 Thus in "The Nymph complaining," there is on the one hand the naive, self-effacing tone of the young girl (sometimes assumed, I think) who, paradoxically, sees everything in relation to herself; and the sophisticated, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes mocking, tone of the poet who sees her experience in the light of larger historical, religious, and societal norms as well as in the light of all the literary traditions that have preceded him. But what is perhaps unexpected (as if the technique I have been describing were not brilliant enough) is that rather than present a reinforcement of the societal norms, at every point, Marvell seems to attack them. It is the nymph who has the conservative voice, who sings the praises of the traditional stereotypes of beauty, "femininity," and purity. She is trying to live a mythical ideal—perhaps that is why she is called a nymph—whereas the poet in his parody appears to be speaking out for liberation. Thus Marvell turns out to be an overturner of social as well as literary conventions, and that really should not surprise us at all. A Psychoanalytic Postscript. In thinking about Marvell's poem recently, it struck me that what Bruno Bettelheim has to say about female adolescence in The Uses of Enchantment14 throws a different kind of light on the nymph, particularly on Marvell's imagery of white and red, the nymph's solitude, her lethargy, and her fantasy of being turned into stone. There are many images of red and bleeding in the poem. Although bleeding might support the theory of some readers that the nymph was violated and abandoned by Sylvio, it could also refer to menstruation, as Bettelheim points out in his discussion

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of fairy tales. Of course, there is a connection between menstruation and the breaking of the hyman, as he notes also. But it is doubtful that the nymph had actual sexual experience. Rather it seems that she is afraid of it, which is perhaps why Sylvio left her. Like the unsuccessful suitors in "Sleeping Beauty," he probably pursued her before she was ready. This does not have to mean, however, that she is without desire. "I have a garden of my own," she boasts, indicating an awareness, perhaps unconscious, of her sexuality: But so with Roses over grown, and Lillies, that you would it guess To be a little Wilderness. (Lines 72-74)

In the time-honored (but now much maligned) equation of woman and land,15 her garden hasn't been cultivated yet. Bettelheim would see the nymph's passivity and lethargy in the garden as particularly adolescent. As he points out, a common motif in fairy tales is being turned to stone by some enchantment, a symbol of this passive state (225). The motif occurs in the poem, too, but here the nymph desires it in one of her few active moments. Her wish to turn to stone indicates both a fear of sexuality and a longing for omnipotence through immortality, a sign of the nymph's narcissism—negative though it may be. Her solitude, too, is meaningful psychologically. Although the following statement refers specifically to menstruation, Bettelheim adds that it applies to all the major events in human development. "The temporary absence of both parents when this event occurs symbolizes all parents' incapacity to protect their child against the various growing-up crises which every human being has to undergo" (232). True, Marvell's heroine is called a nymph, which might indicate her mythological status. (The term could also simply mean young girl in the seventeenth century). But myths are significant insofar as they speak to the human condition. Instead of being on the verge of a new blossoming, however, it is as if the nymph has been overwhelmed by the introjected object/s of mourning.16 Images of white win out over red. Her

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depression and longing for death at the end of the poem suggest a narcissistic identification with the dead fawn. They also reveal a rage against the aggressor that has been turned inwards. A psychoanalytic interpretation of "The Nymph complaining" by itself would be reductive, but added to others it enriches the interpretive possibilities of the poem. Notes 1. At the time that I wrote this chapter, some works had begun to examine the nymph's femininity, if sometimes only indirectly, namely, D. C. Allen, "Andrew Marvell, 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,' in Image and Meaning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), pp. 165-86, published first in ELH 23 (1956): 93-111; Leo Spitzer, "Marveil's 'Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun': Sources versus Meaning," MLQ 19 (1958): 231-43; Harold E. Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 129-37; Harry Berger, "Andrew Marvell: The Poem as Green World," Forum for Modern Language Studies 3 (1967): 290-309; Rosalie L. Colie, "My Echoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), passim. There are different types of femininity just as there are different types of masculinity. Though I sometimes use the term feminine to signify a traditionally passive, fragile type like the nymph, I also use it in a neutral or positive sense the way the French do (as in Chapter 8). Since the term female is almost exclusively sexual in meaning and often derogatory in connotation, I usually avoid it. 2. Cf. Edward S. LeComte, "Marvell's 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun,' " MP 50 (1952): 98 on this passage (lines 59-62). All quotations from Marvell are from The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd ed., ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E. E. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. i. 3. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 24. 4. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1860) (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 204. 5. Jack E. Reese, "Marvell's 'Nymph' in a New Light," Etudes Anglaises 18 (1965): 399-400, goes so far as to suggest rape. But the nymph's understated parallelism in line 34 would reveal too much emotional control in view of an experience as horrendous as rape. Furthermore, Reese fails to explain why the nymph's grief is uncontrollable only after the fawn's death and not after Sylvio's "wild" act.

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6. Cf. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1969), p. 176. 7. I cannot agree with Allen that the garden here is a symbol of the mind (pp. 179-182) or rather I cannot agree that it is a symbol of the nymph's mind, since she does not use hers, nor can I accept Ruth Nevo's interpretation in "Marvell's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience," RES 5 (1965): II, that the fawn is the subject of the contemplative imagination. 8. Cf. Berger, "Andrew Marvell," p. 294. 9. Evan Jones, "Marvell's 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun,' " Explicator 26 (1968): 73, sees the fawn as an illegitimate child and calls Marvell's poem "chill and tasteless"—a clear-cut case of projection. TO. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 21. u. For example, Donald Friedman, in Marvell's Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 186, agrees with Margoliouth in attributing strength to the man and sweetness to the woman. Colie, "My Echoing Song," also implies the separation (p. 60). 12. In his "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," in Collected Papers, vol. 5 ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 316-57, Freud allows for passivity in the male under certain conditions but does not recognize the need for aggression in the female; rather he sees it as a desire for the penis that must be relinquished. 13. In my article "Theme and Counterthemes in 'Damon the Mower,' " Comparative Literature, 26 (1974): 242-59, I treat Marvell's counterpoint of tone. 14. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976). 15. See, for example, Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Har-Row, 1979) and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 16. See Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," S.E., vol. 14: 243—58.

6 Romantic Narcissism: Freud and the Love O/Abject

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^RHAPS the biggest surprise for the reader who comes to RoJ LEI mantic literature for the first time or after long absence is its almost total disregard of what is now called romantic love, that is, a physical but spiritually idealized relationship between a man and a woman, whether within or outside marriage. The Romantics are interested in nature, in self, in love as an integrative force that binds the universe together, but of consummated love between man and woman we find remarkably little in their writings. What has been said of the troubadours might well be said of them. Their art is an avoidance of love. "The lover is a narcissist with an object." So writes Julia Kristeva in her book Tales of Love (Histoires d'amour).1 If this is true, we might say that the Romantic—at least the male Romantic—is often a lover without an object. His ideal is narcissistic love, but even this eludes him. Lacan put his lens on the problem when he said in Encore (IV, "L'Amour et le signifiant"; "Love and thé Signifier"), if love originates in the self as Freud said, how can we ever love another? 2 A footnote that Freud added in 1910 to his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," first published in 1905, illuminates the Romantic problem: The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified 82

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the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.3 What is striking about this statement is how we now appear to have come full circle. Like the Greeks, we emphasize the instinctual life (or at least did until the advent of AIDS). However, the Romantic view of love, which we are perhaps returning to, is epitomized by Freud's statement. Freud is often referred to as a Victorian. Yet in many ways he is the last of the great Romantics. As Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out in her article "Forbidden Love," "Psychoanalysis is itself to some extent romantic as a process and as a method of self-exploration, with its imagery of quest and hoped-for salvation, its tactic of enlightenment by metaphor." 4 And no less than the Romantics, many an analysand is searching for the ideal lover. There is ample evidence that the Romantics glorified the object and denigrated the sexual instinct. The problem is that the Romantic often longs for someone who is already betrothed, or someone who otherwise represents an incestuous object, or indeed someone who doesn't exist at all. Rather than splitting the object into the affectional and the sensual, the pattern that Freud treats in his essay "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," the Romantic is often split off from the object itself, a situation that places him in a state of profound abjection. Thus abject, the lover is often reduced to object status himself. In her book Powers of Horror (Pouvoirs de l'horreur) Kristeva associates abjection, a term which conveys a far greater sense of disgust—as well as fascination—in French than in English, with the mother and the need to separate from her. Perhaps too the Romantic lover cannot find an object because he only finds an abject. If, as Philip Rieff says in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, "the therapeutic goal of psychoanalysis [is] to abrogate the power of the prototype, to cut the umbilical cord of authority—so that love may be truly between persons, not between imagoes,"5 then few if any Romantic figures achieve psychic health. But for the Romantic, health was not the point. Intensity of feeling was. Who

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knows? Maybe it is the twentieth-century advocate of objectrelations school genitality who is settling for too little. Even for Freud, as Wilson points out, "Adult love . . . was always to some extent a reenactment of the grandiose and unattainable aspirations of the infant. Romantic passion is really, therefore, a longing for the impossible, representing, like so much else in Freud, the wish to escape the confines of reality and return to a former state of pleasure and happiness untinged by compromise" (222). In "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" Freud writes of a pattern of love which "stipulates that the person in question shall never choose as his love-object a woman who is disengaged—that is, an unmarried girl or an unattached married woman—but only one to whom another man can claim right of possession as her husband, fiancé, or friend." 6 Freud continues: this pattern (as well as that of normal loves) is "derived from the infantile fixation of tender feelings on the mother, and represents one of the consequences ofthat fixation." "Maternal characteristics remain stamped on the love-objects that are chosen later, and all these turn into easily recognizable mother-surrogates" (16869). This pattern is apparent in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774. Goethe was twenty-four when he wrote what many critics have called the first Romantic novel. The story of a young man who falls desperately in love with a betrothed woman, placing himself in a hopeless situation that leads eventually to his suicide, produced a wave of real-life imitations not only in Germany but on the rest of the Continent as well, a case of life imitating literature. What strikes us with fresh interest today in our examination of gender and masculine and feminine polarities is that the hero in this work displays all the traits that have been stereotypically associated with femininity. Werther is sentimental, passive, timid, and, judging by his end, unequipped for life. He seems to have as little conscious awareness of sex and aggression as Freud's sheltered women patients, and reminds us of another famous footnote, this time in Civilization and Its Discontents: In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people start-

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ing on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian lakes.7

Werther comes to an end that we now primarily associate with women and their failures in love. He is the sentimental man, a term that originally indicated sensitivity rather than feeling in excess of the cause. The sentimental man was a literary type similar in influence to that of the courtly lover. Both types overturn the definition of masculinity as assertive domination. Both could feel, cry, and suffer for the beloved and reveal this suffering. These were literary innovations that perhaps resulted as much from nurture as genre. In the Middle Ages perhaps the major determinant of such vulnerability was the position of the child squire and the later knight vis-à-vis the lady and lord of his household. In Romanticism, it was primarily the child's increasingly close relationship to the mother (largely influenced by Rousseau, who was, ironically, a notoriously poor father) that allowed the male to show tenderness. In his essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction" Freud writes: the persons who are concerned with a child's feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother or a substitute for her. 8

In adulthood, many people love according to this "anaclitic" or "attachment type." However, there are those who "have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed 'narcissistic' " (87). Narcissistic object choice in Freud's words may take the following forms: A person may love: — (i) According to the narcissistic type: (a) what he himself is (i.e. himself), (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be, (d) someone who was once part of himself. (90)

There is no question that according to Freud, Werther is an anaclitic or attachment type, since his love is focused on a nurtur-

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ing object, and yet as Freud also implies, the anaclitic type is barely a step from narcissism. In fact, I would categorize it as a form of narcissism, as does Sarah Kofman in France, who notes that according to Freud, "object love is a simple transference of the original narcissism."9 Furthermore, the anaclitic type is loved for what she can do for the lover, for her ability to service his needs. As analyst Ethel Person puts it, "Men have been socialized to expect their lover to be nurse, mother, wife, mistress, and muse; everything, that is, except a subject, a transcendent person in her own right." 10 Surely such love is a form of narcissism, perhaps even more severe than the other types, which at least have some recognition of the intrinsic qualities of the loved object. Yet Freud praises anaclitic love, which he believes is typical of men: Complete object-love of the attachment type is, properly speaking, characteristic of the male. It displays the marked sexual overvaluation which is doubtless derived from the child's original narcissism and thus corresponds to a transference ofthat narcissism to the sexual object. (88)

But if overvaluation is typical of men in contrast to women, as Freud believes, wouldn't it indicate that men have more narcissism to transfer than women do? Perhaps what has to be considered here is what Barbara Schapiro calls the wounded narcissist.11 Certainly Werther is one of those. Nor is the heroine totally guiltless. Her coquetry is a sign perhaps of her own deficiencies in narcissism or what some critics would claim is a mask for penis envy. Charlotte, the person who arouses the hopeless love of Werther, is a creature of supreme domesticity. In this regard, she is the complete antithesis of the lady of the troubadours. Werther's first vision of her, in her white robe and pink ribbons, doling out slices of bread to six children of various ages, sounds like nothing so much as an ad for The Ladies Home Journal of not-so-recent vintage. The Germans, it would seem, have long had a predilection for Kirche, Küche, and Kinder. They are not the only ones. By emphasizing the domestic aspects of women, as opposed to the femme fatales who also figure in their fantasies, the Romantics

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were able to divest instinctual urges of their danger and power. Yet contrary to twentieth-century views, Charlotte retains a good deal of power here. As Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out, the absence of woman as a signifier accounts for the illusion of the infinite. To the tempestuous Romantic sensibility, woman represents not only comfort but order and rationality. She is an oasis amidst turbulence. Her domestic serenity, seemingly so easy to achieve, escapes the Romantic hero, who invests the heroine with all the allure of a lost paradisal state, which is associated unconsciously with the mother. The greater the internalization of the original love object, the further away the chance of finding a suitable object in the external world. What Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) reveals is that intense love may lead to suicide if the ego is overwhelmed by an internalized object. When rage is directed inwards instead of toward the disappointing object, the lover can then treat himself as an object. That is precisely the case of Werther, who shoots himself with pistols that belong to Albert, Charlotte's husband and on a symbolic level Werther's castrating father. A less drastic solution to the problem of the forbidden object within the Oedipal triangle occurs in Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. " 'My soul is totally alienated in you,' cries Rousseau's Saint-Preux to his Julie, and she replies: 'Come Back [to me] and reunite yourself with yourself.' " As Anthony Wilden puts it, in his essay "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," "This is precisely the fate Saint-Preux must avoid: Julie marries Wolmar; Saint-Preux is safe again—in the Oedipal triangle he has never wanted to escape. Wolmar is the defense which enables SaintPreux to live out a 'normal' life in the rest of La Nouvelle Héloïse for he has unconsciously recognized the incestual danger."12 Is this true for Julie as well? The critic doesn't say. Although love triangles in reality often center on two women and one man, the opposite is the case in literature. Why this should be true is itself of some psychoanalytic interest. Perhaps it is because most authors hitherto have been male and being interested in passion, they have stressed conflict, or what René Girard calls the rival.13 Or maybe it is that patriarchal society prohibits

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any attraction to the mother or her substitute, whereas literature being more permissive of fantasy life allows this kind of regression. Much Romantic longing represents the desire to return to the mother. The incest barrier is "essentially a cultural demand made by society" 14 as Freud puts it, a demand the Romantic tries to reject by displacing the affection from the primary object onto the less forbidden substitute of the sister—or the brother, as in Dorothy Wordsworth's case. This transfer has the added charm of creating a love object that is more like the narcissist than any other could be. Yet even with this displacement, instead of Romantic rebellion, what one often finds is Romantic obedience, an inability to transcend prohibition, perhaps because the Romantic is so often the child in the Oedipal triangle, one reason why other children are so absent in love literature. (Another, as Georg Simmel notes, is that women are not reduced to reproductive objects in literature.) 15 Chateaubriand's Átala, published in 1801, a pastoral romance with an implied incest theme, was almost as famous in France as Werther was in Germany. One would expect sexual gratification to be possible, if anywhere, in this genre. Yet even in this work, all kinds of obstacles intrude. Átala, an Indian convert to Christianity, turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of a white man, Lopez, who is the adoptive father of the Indian, Chactas, with whom she falls in love. Átala dies after taking poison for fear that she is not strong enough to continue her vow of chastity, a vow which could have been reversed, as it turns out. The fictional situation here is a transformation of incestuous wishes. Chateaubriand was obsessed in his own life with a brother/sister attachment. Some readers feel that he portrays his sister Lucile far more richly in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe than any of the heroines in his novels. Whatever the autobiographical aspects of the work, Átala reveals a dominant theme of Romanticism. Brother/sister love becomes a major leitmotif of the century, sounding in Byron and Wagner's Ring, in the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde, for example. One of the keenest statements on Romantic love is made by the priest, Father Aubry, who tells Átala on her deathbed that she

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should not lament her fate, for not even Adam and Eve could remain in bliss. If they couldn't, how can couples after the Fall hope to do so? One can neither keep on living nor loving, claims Father Aubry. But in Átala, the love of Átala and Chactas is never even consummated. It is almost as if the Romantic, knowing that sexual love will not be sustained, decides to forgo it altogether. If French psychoanalyst André Green is right and sexual love provides an escape from the mother, we might say that the Romantic does not want to escape. Relinquishing sexual pleasure ensures that the forbidden parent will always remain in view, even if unconsciously. Even more compelling perhaps as an explanation for the Romantic rejection of sexual pleasure is Freud's theory of obstacles in his essay "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego": It is interesting to see that it is precisely those sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their aims which achieve such lasting ties between people. But this can easily be understood from the fact that they are not capable of complete satisfaction, while sexual impulsions which are uninhibited in their aims suffer an extraordinary reduction through the discharge of energy every time the sexual aim is attained. It is the fate of sensual love to become extinguished when it is satisfied.16

Freud never tackles the question of why one doesn't get tired of eating chocolate cake in the same way. Perhaps the problem is as much cultural as psychobiological. In a society that favors acquisition, the object, particularly the female object, suffers from devaluation after too much familiarity. The ego ideal for the narcissist must be of consummate perfection, a position difficult to sustain when the object is off the pedestal and in the bed. Besides, as Freud does imply, all objects are second-hand—thriftshop replacements for the original parents.17 The Romantic knew this unconsciously. It was Chateaubriand's René (1802) that held that place in France that Werther did in Germany. The mood of melancholy is even more intense in René than in Átala. Rene's ennui, his mal du siècle, is caused less by unrequited love than by a nameless longing. Unlike Werther or Chactas in Átala, he has not found the object of his passion but rather is constantly searching for her, clasping

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her imaginary form in the wind, seeing her phantom everywhere, her reality nowhere. Herein lies a major difference between the lover in the Middle Ages and the lover in Romanticism. The former always knew who the object of his passion was, even if she didn't, but the Romantic lover sometimes cannot even find her. One way of rendering the object sacred is, of course, to have it disappear altogether. René gives up civilization and retreats into nature. When the whirlwind beats down on his cottage, he implores God for another Eve to share his transports. But he remains alone, even later when he marries, incompatibly, like his author, and this leads to a profound languor. Here in René is a major expression of that search for the ideal lover, incapable of attainment, that still haunts the modern imagination, particularly that of women, much to their unhappiness. The lover who cannot find the object that satisfies his or her narcissism is perhaps even more narcissistic than the one who can. The Romantic often won't even risk the threat to narcissism that a real object, however ideal, always poses. Another reason for Rene's unrequited longing is revealed in his sister's revelation of her criminal passion for him. René cannot find the object of his longing because the object is the forbidden mother, our partner in the land of primary narcissism, or perhaps it is "the unsubstitutable place of narcissism itself," as Borch-Jacobsen points out.18 The incestuous relationship epitomizes that love which is forbidden and generally unattainable in the social order. It is perhaps the only kind of love, however, that could fulfill the Romantic desire for a soul mate, a spiritual and physical twin. Unlike the medieval poet, who sees the lady as his superior, the Romantic wants a mistress just like himself. Actually, what he wants is a mirror, just as Narcissus did; unlike Narcissus, he wants Echo also and often tries to combine the two. Actually, in Pausanias's version of the Narcissus myth, which is less known than Ovid's, Narcissus loves his twin sister. It is only after she dies that, as Bergmann puts it, he "regressed from narcissistic love to narcissism proper." 19 In his "Essay on Love," Shelley reveals a longing like Rene's, but he is able to give it concrete form. Love aims, Shelley claims,

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toward "the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own"; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own.20

Yet Shelley concludes that this cannot be achieved: "this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules" (202). In his "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love,"21 written after translating The Symposium, Shelley says something similar. In his transformation of Aristophanes' myth of an original unity in the Socratic dialogue, Shelley speaks less of the search for one's physical complement than for a spiritual double, whose archetype exists in the mind. In Romantic narcissism, unlike much of the courtly love variety, it is the male who is the teacher and the guide, the one who must be followed, echoed, mirrored. In this sense, the Romantics are like Abélard. A seemingly happy example of the mirroring of the subject occurs in Schlegel's Ludnde (which is unique also in treating the biological results of Romantic longing: a child), published in 1799, and based on Schlegel's actual relationship with Dorothea Veit. Peter Firchow, in his introduction, analyzes the relationship without embarrassment in this way: "The moon and the woman are mirrors, are passive, and the man who loves a woman truly sees his own light and his own image reflected in her; he loves himself, Narcissus-like in her. The love of the woman leads, consequently, to a fuller awareness of the self."22 It is fascinating how the more destructive elements of the Narcissus myth are ignored here. But not all narcissists were as lucky as Schlegel. Certainly mere reflection wouldn't be sufficient to make most men happy. Virginia Woolf is closer to the truth when she writes in a passage not quite free of acid: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and deli-

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cious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle." 23 In what reads like a parody of the entire Romantic quest for the ideal object (although I'm not sure it was meant to be one), Mary Shelley, who knew firsthand what narcissism was like with Shelley and his circle, depicts a monster, who is "filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification" on seeing his reflection in the water. He is a reverse Narcissus. Still, he too wants a soul mate of his own. He tells his creator, Frankenstein: "I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create." 24 But no more than most Romantic heroes does the monster find his soul mate. With real monsters, the case is a little different. Hélène Moglen in Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived writes of the Byronic cult, in which "the search by the self for 'the other' was intended to culminate in physical and spiritual union." 25 But she finds the result quite different from the ideal. "Instead of the oceanic feeling which allows the self to negate and transcend its own limits, union is realized through a pattern of domination in which the ego masters and absorbs 'the other' " (29—30). Perhaps it is only in his disappointments that the Byronic hero is Romantic. Once union is achieved, the patterns of patriarchy or what Jessica Benjamin calls the bonds of love, with their overtones of bondage, take over. Certainly this is the case of Byron himself. Even at its most ideal, the position of women in Romanticism, at least in the works of male authors, is the reverse of that in courtly love, where it is the desire of the Other, the lady, that is all-powerful, as Henri Rey-Flaud points out—not that contemporary feminists desire this state of affairs either. "Dans 1'amour courtois, la femme retrouve la position de toute-puissance originellement impartie à la reine, mère symbolique." ("In courtly love, the woman recovers the position of omnipotence originally bestowed on the queen, the symbolic mother.") 26 The Romantic lover is not interested in the desire of the Other. He is only interested in his own. Perhaps this is why his object of choice is

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so often the redeemed prostitute, the persecuted beauty, the recipient of ambivalent feelings of hostility and love that have been displaced from the mother. Goethe's Gretchen is an early example and Bizet's Carmen a late variant of this pattern. All is not necessarily bad for women, however. Romanticism transvaluated the sexual and the demonic as a source of vitality and energy. Therefore it is not surprising that it tried to validate the "fallen woman," seeing her not as the negative pole, in that ancient antagonism that men set up between good women and bad, but rather as a type of the glorified object. This is yet another example of Romantic narcissism, for the Romantic hero, now accepting the demonic and fallen in himself, no longer splitting himself into body and soul, projects his new self-acceptance onto a formerly degraded object. Still, the question remains why these newly glorified objects, the Lamias of legend and the Gretchens of the all-too-real prisons are usually killed off nonetheless. Why is there both rescue of the fallen woman and her retribution? Is it because one must avenge oneself against the mother, who, after all, was unfaithful in the Oedipal and even pre-Oedipal stage? Is it because otherwise the hero would kill himself, as Werther did? Perhaps the fallen woman is not fit to be a soul mate, no matter how redeemed or redeeming she may be. Perhaps no woman is. A question we might raise is whether narcissistic love is different in men and women characters, as depicted by men and women authors. Is there more acceptance of sexuality among women writers in Romanticism? Is the soul mate found—and kept? There seems to be fear of attaining the sexual object in nineteenthcentury women authors also. They do not always kill their heroes, but they may do something worse. In the chronologically Victorian but highly romantic Jane Eyre, a sexual union between the lovers does not occur until the dark and gloomy Rochester has been both maimed and blinded. An ideological reading might hold that this seeming castration was actually the only way the author could achieve equality between the socially, economically, and sexually (by virtue of being male) superior Rochester and the inferior Jane. Many women readers now see the early characterization of Rochester as falling into the sadomasochistic mode of the Harlequin romance, the female equivalent of pornography,

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but Ethel Person suggests a more positive reading. She feels that the archetype of the "powerful, aloof, even frightening hero" points to the need "to separate the conscious experience of romantic love from its infantile origins" in maternal love (270-71). Her interpretation of the ending of Jane Eyre is too kind, I think: In a rather interesting reversal of roles (and reversal of Bronte's own past history), the dependent, unworldly governess in love with a worldly man of wealth and power has, by book's end, become a strong, resourceful woman who must care for her now blinded, dependent but still beloved Mr. Rochester. Perhaps this tale may have been a kind of fantasied enactment and exorcism of Charlotte Bronte's own yearnings as the rejected lover. (294-95)

Perhaps—or it may have been a revenge on Constantin Heger, the married schoolmaster she worked for as an instructor in Brussels. Probably it was a combination of both. In one of the most striking (if anachronistic) recent readings, Linda Kauffman suggests another possibility: "Perhaps Rochester's maiming is not a punishment of him but a gift to Jane, for it allows her to see him realistically, rather than as the embodiment of ideal manhood."27 The author continues: "A pedestal, after all, is as uncomfortable for men as for women; blind idolatry oppresses not only the lover but the beloved; and the idolatry of male power is as much a form of objectification as the idolatry of female sexuality." I am not sure that men are willing even now to give up such idolatry, but what is even more extraordinary, Kauffman suggests that Rochester's blinding is Bronte's gift to him as well: "Her real achievement, however, is to transform him from someone terrified of intimacy, armed against vulnerability, into someone who because he is 'unarmed,' is no longer crippled emotionally" (200). How far are we here from Abélard's claim that Héloïse was born for his castration? Still, despite their critics, women authors, even of the same family as Charlotte Bronte, may provide more equality between subject and object or what feminist psychoanalysts prefer to call subject and subject than male authors do. Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, offers one of the most fascinating treatments of the

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soul mate theme. The ideal object that Shelley describes as invisible and unattainable actually exists in the work although not perhaps in quite the spiritual way that he would have preferred. "I am Heathcliff," cries Cathy, and Heathcliff claims that she has a heart as deep as he has.28 There is a difference. Cathy uses Heathcliff as her measure and Heathcliff too measures her according to himself. Since Cathy has the social superiority, she can perhaps reveal this largesse, though it is doubtful that any woman wanting love would do otherwise. No matter how liberated, most nineteenth-century women act emotionally as if they were created from Adam's rib. For all the seeming passion in the Catherine/Heathcliff relationship, there is no consummated sexuality (although the sadomasochism of their embraces gives a hint of what such sexuality would have been like.) Partly this is because of the latent incest theme, since Heathcliff is an adapted brother in the Earnshaw family. But more, their relationship is essentially that of souls. They are soul mates whose bodies are doomed to marry others. Social obstacles stand in the way of their union, at least according to Cathy, but Heathcliff recognizes that it was Cathy's choice not to have him. Freud has said that the finding of an object is the refinding of it.29 But we might just as soon say that the losing of an object is the relosing of it. That object is the mother—for both the orphaned Heathcliff and the motherless Cathy. Contrary to what Freud said, overvaluation of the love object applies more to women than to men. One need merely think of Héloïse in the twelfth century—a real figure—or of Madame Bovary in the nineteenth, a literary one who rings true enough. Such excess in love as theirs may itself spring from great narcissistic needs. Indeed such overvaluation seems to work in tandem with Freud's list of narcissistic object choices cited before. The psychoanalyst Annie Reich, in "Narcissistic Object Choice in Women," speaks of the extreme submissiveness of certain women to a glorified male who represents the excellence they lack (or think they lack). I referred to her before in talking about Héloïse. Much of what she has to say also applies to Madame Bovary, who was a Romantic narcissist, even if her author wasn't:

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An over-grandiose ego-ideal — combined, as it not infrequently is, with inadequate talents and insufficient ego strength—leads to intolerable inner conflicts and feelings of insufficiency. The reattachment of this ideal to an outside object and the reunion with it via sexual union, as in the cases of subservient women, thus represents an undoing of a feeling of narcissistic want, which coincides with the undoing of castration.30

In writing of her patients, Reich says: The fantasy of becoming one with a grandiose love partner [is] related to the original homosexual object, the mother, primitive attachments to whom had never been relinquished. The undisguised phallic character of the later fantasy represented a subsequent addition, as a reaction to the disappointment at the lack of a penis in the mother. (187)

(This statement might refer to Emma also, whose phallic disappointment surfaces again when her daughter is born.) Unfortunately, her lover Rodolphe sees Emma as a carp gasping for breath on a kitchen table, hardly an ego ideal for his narcissism. For all his sweet words, what interests him is seduction and abandonment. The Donjuán type would seem to run counter to the theory of disinterest in sexual gratification that I have suggested is a major element of Romanticism. Yet though he is apparently so indulgent of instinct, his flight from one conquest to another is in reality a "pathological quest for the other," as Anthony Wilden puts it (165), a quest which dooms to incessant frustration the very instinct he ostensibly seeks to gratify. According to Lacan, "Leporello's catalogue is endless because 'woman' is 'not everything,' she is the eternal 'minus-One.' "31 In Romanticism the seducer often ends up as abject as any of his peers suffering from unrequited love. Perhaps the most interesting nineteenth-century variant of the Don Juan theme is Kierkegaard's "Diary of a Seducer," in which it is not numbers of women that are important but rather the number of elements that contribute to one act of seduction. In this sense, Kierkegaard's is the most feminine of seducers. He resists sexuality, for he puts as much care and time and feeling into the manipulation of one night of seduction as any woman ever put into gaining a marriage partner. Then he throws it all over, almost making

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himself the abandoned heroine at the end. If, as Kristeva says, the traditional Donjuán, with his innumerable conquests, represents the phallus, then we might say that this seducer represents the flaccid penis. He is also a fetishist, which is not surprising, considering what I have just said. The number of objects listed in "The Diary," objects that arouse desire—eyes and lips and lashes, bosoms and feet—a catalogue of part objects rather than of women, what Lacan calls the objet petit a, is extraordinary. Tony Tanner in Adultery in the Novel defines fetishism in Lacanian terms as the "displacement of libidinal feeling from the complete sexual identity of the other . . . to an ancillary object, some adjunct or appurtenance, or to some portion of the body which being isolated from the living body, by drawing attention away from the whole to the part, takes on the status of a thing." 32 Actually, it draws attention away from "the hole" by supplying the missing phallus. As for the whole object, the girl, it is resistance alone that gives her value, says Kierkegaard's seducer: "only as long as that is present is it beautiful to love; when it is ended there is only weakness and habit." 33 Or we might say that once the narcissistic lover possesses her, she can no longer symbolize the grandiose self—or the erect phallus. She can only represent an ordinary self, which for the narcissist isn't good enough. Given such a psychology of the lover, the woman can gain power through love only through her denial (a point Nancy Miller has made in a somewhat different context in connection with the much earlier La Princesse de Clèves.) Kierkegaard recognized this point but only in relation to the lover, not the beloved. In defense of breaking his engagement, which made him a type of seducer himself, Kierkegaard said that the best thing a woman could do for a man was to come into his vision at the right time and then abandon him. (Since Régine hadn't done this, he did it for her.) His statement is as much a summation of the Romantic ideal as is the Freud statement on idealization of the object that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Only through abandonment, whether by death or desertion, is the ideal permanently crystallized. And by these means also, instinct is denied. Perhaps feminists reject romantic love because they recognize

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its essential fallacy. Romanticism doesn't turn women into sexual objects. It turns them into non-sexual objects. In Encore ("Dieu et la jouissance de La femme"; "God and the Jouissance of The Woman") Lacan writes: it is not by chance that Kierkegaard discovered existence in a little tale of seduction. It is by being castrated, by renouncing love that he believes he accedes to it. But then, after all why shouldn't Regine also have existed? This desire for a good at one remove, a good not caused by a petit a, perhaps it was through the intermediary of Régine that he came to it.34 But of course the love object is now totally out of reach, as far removed as Dante's Beatrice or Goethe's Gretchen. Perhaps the greatest example of consummated narcissistic love in the nineteenth century is Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Yet Jacques Barzun has written: "it may be doubted whether Tristan's drama has anything whatever to do with so-called romantic love. It is rather with biological love that the catastrophe is concerned."35 I think not. The aim of Tristan and Isolde is submergence and absorption, annihilation—death, not instinctual gratification. In his prose work, A Communication to my Friends, Wagner had anticipated some of the attitudes that he later embodied musically in Tristan. He writes: "I cannot conceive the spirit of music as aught but love":36 What, in fine, could this love-yearning, the noblest thing my heart could feel—what other could it be than a longing for release from the Present, for absorption into an element of endless Love, a love denied to earth and reachable through the gates of Death alone? (323) Ernest Jones in "On 'Dying Together' with special reference to Heinrich von Kleist's suicide" suggests that the grave that is so longed for by lovers is actually the mother's bed,37 a wish that may sound incestuous but that ultimately denies genitality in its quest for fusion. Wagner based the Tristan libretto mainly on Gottfried's medieval version of the legend. However, he doubles the Oedipal conflict by having Tristan replace two father imagoes. By transforming her Uncle Morold into her fiancé, Wagner increases the source

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of Isolde's bitterness when she discovers Tristan's identity as Morold's slayer. But Tristan and Isolde are already in love, for Wagner unlike Gottfried has the lovers fall in love at first sight. Following the cue of the great German romanticists, such as Novalis, Wagner makes light the enemy. This is a romantic transformation of Gottfried, whose lovers usually make love during the daytime, as in the orchard and grotto scenes. In the nineteenth-century version, it is death—the darkest night of all—that will bring the lovers release and "endless love." This is true, even though in the Wagnerian version the social order seems willing to bend for the lovers. At the end of the opera, King Mark, now aware of the love potion, which he mistakenly interprets as the source of Tristan and Isolde's love—it is only its symbol—comes to the wounded Tristan to grant him Isolde in marriage, but Tristan dies in Isolde's arms before he can find this out. In Wagner the death wish is stronger than the impulse toward eros. In narcissistic passion, as Rey-Flaud points out, one loves oneself in the other, engulfed in pleasure which leads toward death. In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud tries to explain why there should be an impulse working counter to that of gratification. Even when the sexual instincts seem to be most involved, they may be subordinate to another principle, implies Freud. In his examination of The Symposium and its account of an original hermaphroditism, he seems to approach Schopenhauer's view that death is the aim of life: Shall we follow the hint given us by the poet-philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavored to reunite through the sexual instincts?38

It is to a former state of unity that we long to return, a unity we felt in a state of primary narcissism, which is no longer recoverable in life. Such a theory explains why the ultimate desire of the Romantics is not sexual gratification in time but a loss of boundary limits in death. (The quest in The Symposium is a quest for omnipotence, for immortality, as Lacan points out.) 39 That Freud is so illuminating on Romanticism is not simply a revelation of his genius; it

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is also testimony to the fact that he was himself one of the last of the great Romantics. 40

Notes 1. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 33. 2. Jacques Lacan, "L'Amour et le signifiant," in Encore (1972-1973): Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 46. 3. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), S.E., vol. 7: 149. 4. Elizabeth Wilson, "Forbidden Love," Feminist Studies 10 (Summer 1984): 223. 5. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 167. 6. "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," in "Contributions to the Psychology of Love, S.E.," vol. n: 166. 7. Civilization and Its Discontents, (1930 [1929]) S.E., vol. 21: 134. n.l. 8. "On Narcissism," S.E., vol. 14: 87. 9. Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Women in Freud's Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 56. 10. Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 193. For a discussion of anaclitic love in women, see my Introduction. 11. Barbara Schapiro, The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. xii. 12. Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans., with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 165. 13. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). 14. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," S.E., vol. 7: 225. 15. Georg Simmel, Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans, with intro. by Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 171. 16. "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921), S.E., vol. 18: 115. 17. "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912), S.E., vol. n: 189. 18. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. no. 19. Martin S. Bergmann, The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 63.

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20. "Essays on Love," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 6 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 202.

21. "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 7 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 223-29. 22. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragements, trans, with intro. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 15. 23. Virgina Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), p. 35. 24. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus ed. with intro. by M. K. Joseph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 144. 25. Hélène Moglen, Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 29. 26. Henri Rey-Flaud, La Névrose courtoise (Paris: Navarin: Diffusion; Seuil, 1983), P- 63. 27. Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 197. 28. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York: Viking Penguin, 1965), p. 122. 29. In "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" Freud writes, "The finding of an object is in fact a refmding of it" (222). 30. Annie Reich, "Narcissistic Object Choice in Women" (1953), in Psychoanalytic Contributions (New York: International Universities Press, 1973), pp. 190-91. 31. Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 192. The reference is to Lacan's Encore, p. no. 32. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 33. Soren Kierkegaard, "The Diary of the Seducer," in Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, vol i (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 439. 34. In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 147-4835. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, rev. 2d ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 236. 36. "A Communication to my Friends," in Richard Wagner, Prose Works, trans, and ed. William Ashton Ellis, vol. r (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893), 306. 37. Ernest Jones, "On 'Dying Together' with special reference to Heinrich von Kleist's suicide," in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, vol. i (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), 9-15. 38. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," S.E., vol. 18: 58.

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39. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 205. 40. Similarly, Irving Singer writes that Freud's "notion that the aim of life is death reminds us of Wagnerian ideas about Liebestod," and sees its basis in what he calls "Romantic pessimism." In The Nature of Love, vol. 3, The Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 117.

7 On Splitting the Sexual Object: Before and After Freud

A.

L BOUT the best explanation that I have ever come across of the search for Mr., Miss, or Ms. Right occurs in Plato's Symposium, where Aristophanes speaks of the origin of both love and the sexes as we know them. Originally double—either all male, all female, or androgynous (a combination of the two)—because of their hubris, our ancestors were split in two by the gods. And ever since, we have been forced to look for our other half. Those of us who were originally all male or all female search for homosexual lovers to complete us; those who were originally androgynous now look for members of the opposite sex. As if this didn't lead to enough problems, Zeus warned that should we continue to be insolent, he would split us yet again, leaving us to hobble about on one leg. At least symbolically, this further splitting has already occurred, but mainly to women and not through any hubris of theirs that I can figure out; furthermore, it is men rather than Zeus who have visited this splitting on them. To jump from Aristophanes to another great myth maker, Freud, in the second of his "Contributions to the Psychology of Love," wrote of the tendency for men who suffer from psychical or selective impotence to split women into two component parts: "The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love."1 The wording here—a translation, of course —would lead one to believe that Freud thought such splitting was 103

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limited. Yet the essay in question is called "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" ("Über die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens," 1912).2 Of course, by "universal," Freud meant male. Freud saw the origin of this splitting in the incest barrier, noting that "the sensual current that has remained active seeks only objects which do not recall the incestuous figures forbidden to it." Men "seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love" (183). In other terms, the object of affection, who recalls the good preOedipal mother, must be kept separate from the object of desire, who recalls the forbidden Oedipal mother. Perhaps the Romantics cannot consummate their desire because they are caught in this dilemma. The splitting of the sexual object into the domestic and approved figure of wife/mother and the more exciting but feared one of sexual temptress was of course not Freud's fabrication. The fantasy of the nurturant woman who is at home waiting and the sensual creature that one encounters on one's journeys is at least as old as the Penelope and Circe of Homer's Odyssey. It is doubtful whether such splitting of the sexual object can be legislated out of existence; yet, we are beginning to feel, some of us at least, that some kind of synthesis is being effected at last. Is it possible that such splitting was as much the result of culture as of men's psychobiology? Where a cultural tendency is so pervasive, I find it of small comfort to think so. But I leave the question for the moment. The Romantics also attempted a synthesis of the two types. As I indicate later, they did not entirely succeed, and the Victorians who came after them were perhaps more extreme than any other group in history in their splitting of the object into two antithetical components, the angel in the house and the prostitute in the street, to name two extremes, a regression which, coming after the Romantics, makes one wonder about the possibility of any progressive form of liberation. We are now in the process of putting back together the female figure whose limbs the Victorians tore asunder so pitilessly. But the question remains to haunt us. Will we succeed where others have failed? And if so, what

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effects might such synthesis have that we are perhaps not considering? Romanticism transvaluated the demonic as a source of vitality and energy. Therefore it is not surprising that it tried to validate the sorceress, seeing her not as the negative pole in that ancient antagonism between good women and bad, but rather as another species of the glorified object. Yet ironically, though earlier heroes had at least savored their Circes and their Didos before they left them, nineteenth-century heroes cannot gain instinctual satisfaction from their harlots even or especially now that they are redeemed. The exaltation of the object tends to turn all women into untouchables, whether they are angel, temptress, or kitchen maid—to name three Romantic favorites — or all three at once, as in Keats's "Lamia." Inevitably, the father or his surrogate is victorious in the Oedipal constellation of Romantic works. In Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," for example, it is not sexual love that destroys the knight—a common misreading; rather it is the outside world that destroys both him and the lady, a patent reversal of that ancient tradition, in which the enchantress tries to keep the hero from his social destiny and is grievously faulted for doing so, as in The Aeneid.3 What the Romantics did was to give voice to those desires that were formerly repressed by the culture, not that they succeeded in gratifying them. Eventually, the social order decided that it could allow those guerrilla forces of the underground to see the light of day; by then, however, it also figured out how to control them. La belle dame is nothing but an ordinary dame now. Still, it was Romanticism, whose ideology persists in large measure to this day, that brought a new pluralistic ideal which granted anti-social types cultural sanction for the first time. A new kind of heroine begins to emerge in the nineteenth century, modeled on the Byronic hero although ironically Byron himself doesn't have any. Bizet's Byronic Carmen, for example, represents the triumph of the debased sexual object, inasmuch as she wins out over the hero's innocent fiancée in his affections. Insofar as Carmen is destroyed, however, she is very much like her earlier counterparts, the Didos and Acrasias, and women might well complain

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about this seemingly arbitrary solution to the male fear of the emancipated woman—although we must remember that Romantic heroes are not notably long-lived either. Earlier in the century, Stendhal is one of the few Romantic authors who is able to fuse the object of desire and the object of affection successfully, partly because he was, as Simone de Beauvoir states, feminist and romantic at the same time. What is more, he was totally indifferent to any contract, which he felt mitigated the passion of the free spirit. Not just in Romanticism, but generally, whenever synthesis of the split sexual object occurs, it is outside marriage (although that is where the prime debasement occurs also). Men seem better able to deal with women as people when they are at some distance. This is not to say, however, that the elimination of marriage was or is necessarily a panacea for women, as some would have it. And this is as true within Romanticism as at other times. Shelley laments in "Epipsychidion" that one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend to cold oblivion.

But this is less a plea for women's freedom as some commentators have suggested than one for the right of the man to have a ménage à trois or quatre or cinq, that is, the right to split the object several ways instead of just two. Freud illuminates the source of such multiple desires when he writes in "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" (1910), "the notion of something irreplaceable, when it is active in the unconscious, frequently appears as broken up into an endless series: endless for the reason that every surrogate nevertheless fails to provide the desired satisfaction." 4 Every woman, it would seem, is a surrogate object, a poor replacement for the original mother. Ironically, one consequence of free love for the Romantics is sometimes an even greater polarization between the sexes than obtained in marriage. This involved the more voluptuous side of the Romantic imagination as opposed to its synthesist side. One way of calming male fears of female sexuality and the engulfing

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mother was to tame the forbidden object, to make her similar to the object of affection, as is the case with Bryon's submissive Haidée, beloved of Don Juan; she is nonetheless destroyed along with her unborn child, "the blasted fruit of love." Possibly she was meant to be a parody. There was something the Romantics found most attractive about violation, innocence besmirched, the blossom trodden underfoot. One might say that this was their way of reconciling themselves to the fate of beauty in the modern world, but it was probably also another example of what Freud terms the debasement of the sexual object. Unlike the Victorian sensibility that Freud often seems to be describing, however, the Romantic one sometimes had the capacity to exalt and degrade the sexual object at the same time (a step in the elimination of splitting?), thereby gaining two sources of pleasure from the same object. But it was not pleasure of any durability. Indeed, the Romantics had too much capacity for boredom to consider the two terms compatible. And here Freud is helpful also in pointing out that the beauty of transient objects increases in value precisely because of its impermanence. While the Romantics rejected marriage because they saw it as an emotional anaesthetic, it was the bachelor Kierkegaard who perhaps gave its most brilliant nineteenth-century defense. If love thrives on external obstacles, then surely marriage should prosper, he felt, for its enemies are not ogres and monsters and hardhearted fathers — the usual problems in romances—but something far more dangerous: time. It was the Victorians who were perhaps best able to conquer the problem of time—or satiety—in marriage, through splitting the sexual object. Whatever attempts at synthesis had been made by some of the earlier Romantics were forgotten. Ironically, it was Rousseau, the great egalitarian, who was the Victorians' teacher in the matter of sexual polarization, if in little else. For him, all women form a huge servant class, whose function is to care for men, who are all aristocrats simply by virtue of their sex. Yet it is through their sweetness and docility as well as their assumed sexual indifference that wives gain the victory over such imperfect beings, a Rousseauistic paradox that many of us have swallowed along with our mother's or bottled milk.

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It is a matter of some fascination to see how the medieval and courtly literary convention of the unattainable lady was revived in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth in that most unlikely of places, bourgeois marriage, testimony perhaps to the fertility of the human imagination when dealing with the problem of fertility, since such idealization probably served as some form of birth control. It is testimony also to the increasing separation of the sexes in the sphere of production and the consequent need for some sort of compensatory value to be placed on the woman, that is, the middle- and upper-class woman. Perhaps surprisingly to us, in the Middle Ages, it was the mistress who was idealized and the wife who was debased, who was in any event the object of male lust. This would seem to refute Freud's theory of the degradation of the sexual object. Yet on closer examination, it turns out to be another proof. As Karen Horney has noted, there are two main ways that men deal with their fear of women: through debasement or idealization. The mistress who is sung to in the lyrics of courtly love was usually of higher social standing than the knight who sang to her. Therefore she was idealized. It was his wife who was debased. The reverse would seem to have been the case in Freud's Victorian Vienna, where the wife was placed on the pedestal. For Freud, one reason for the splitting of the object lay in women's having too much rather than too little power, a position that most feminists today would find laughable. They would be in more agreement with Reich who posits the degradation of the sexual object in the shift from what he calls a matriarchal to a patriarchal society: "At this juncture the sexual cult ceases to exist and is replaced by the barbarism of brothels, pornography, and clandestine sexuality." 5 Yet the two viewpoints can be reconciled. It is perhaps because women's "power," psychological, if not public power, threatens the male place in patriarchy that men turn to splitting as a device to protect their territory, anatomic as well as social territory, as I discuss later. Would splitting exist in a non-patriarchal society? Probably not, for splitting in its strongest form was part of a system of rewards and punishments that strengthened the hierarchy of the sexes. By exalting chaste moth-

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ers and degrading unchaste objects, splitting enlarged the population. At the same time it offered men sexual rewards outside the home, thereby preventing men's loyalty to the family from becoming absolute (unlike women's) and tying it to the state instead. In fact, one might say that a major function of the subordination of women has been less to insure male domination than to promote male subordination—to the state. Still there is no question that technology is changing social values. The effectiveness of modern contraception has eliminated one major reason for men's double standards and double objects: the fear of illegitimate heirs. Furthermore, by serving the current need to decrease the population, this technology makes possible an emphasis on pleasure rather than on reproduction. By promoting if not causing the sexual revolution, the availability of contraception and abortion has decreased the need for external sexual reward since every woman is now a somewhat debased object—or can be if she wants to. The decline of orthodox religion, particularly Christianity, is another reason for the decline of splitting, for the division of the sexual object was in part a projection of men's split of themselves into the antithetical categories of body and soul. It was this dualism that was mirrored in the object of desire and the object of affection. Once men stopped splitting themselves, they were less inclined to split women. But insofar as Romanticism was a secular form of religion, it is not surprising that it revealed a certain disgust with instinct through its unattainable objects. The body/ soul conflict had not yet disappeared. It merely became secularized. As for other major religions, Judaism splits the sexual object somewhat differently. It is the foreign woman who is feared and therefore debased in the Old Testament, for it is she who is most likely to steal one's property and lead one to the worship of false gods. She survives as the shiksa in contemporary Jewish fiction— and life. The menstrual laws of Leviticus reveal an even more fascinating instance of splitting, for they allow the wife to be approachable as a sexual object at only certain times of the month. At other times, she is unclean, untouchable, in fact. This is a case

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of chronological splitting of the same object. But like other religious laws, these are less and less observed except among the orthodox. Changes in family structure (resulting in no small measure from the reading and misreading of Freud) are leading to a decline in splitting also. Psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein and sociologist Nancy Chodorow feel that childrearing by fathers equally with mothers would change the entire Oedipal configuration and eliminate what I have been calling the splitting of the sexual object.6 It is doubtful whether either patriarchal capitalism or patriarchal socialism will allow such changes, since both see the primary responsibility for children to lie with mothers. Perhaps we do not even have to go this far, for already fathers are more permissive and mothers are de-idealized. By making us aware of the unconscious sources of splitting in the male's attachment to the mother, Freud makes dualism more difficult to practice, at least without self-consciousness. By revealing the beast under the skin of all of us, Freud helped forge an ethics of ambiguity so that we are better able to tolerate feelings of love and hate for the same person—without splitting them off—that is, if we are healthy. But if splitting of the neurotic variety has declined, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg speak of the much more diffuse type of splitting or fragmentation now taking place in borderline patients who fail to achieve satisfactory object relations. Whether this phenomenon will achieve the universality of neurotic splitting remains to be seen.7 What I have said thus far would indicate that the causes of polarized splitting are cultural. Yet these reasons do not exhaust the complexity of the problem. While many feminists would no doubt see the traditional form of splitting of the sexual object as yet another instance of a giant male conspiracy designed to keep women in their place, splitting has been perhaps just as much a ploy to keep male anxieties in their place, and surely these have their biological components. If literature is any guide, most periods in history were aware of the inordinate sexual capacities of women. One way for men to deal with their fear of loss of control or any sense of inadequacy was by splitting the sexual object, keeping the wife separate from the mistress and thereby distanc-

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ing them both. But a further clue to the paradox of men's degradation and exaltation of women perhaps lies as much in the vulnerability of the penis as in men's fear of female sexuality. For Freud, it is the fear of castration that leads the male child to split the object into tender and sexual components, one acceptable and one forbidden within culture. We might add that he then grows up to build the institutions that support the split. Would a more permissive society, one less punitive to the male child, lead to less splitting of the object? Perhaps that is the situation that we now find ourselves in. And yet this hardly seems the whole story. Though castration anxiety is no doubt part of the problem, it is perhaps not the major part, for the penis in its real attributes, never mind its fancied disappearance, is sufficiently phantasmagoric to provoke awe and terror—in men if not in women. Its risings and fallings, more mysterious than any female cyclical change, were often attributed to sorcery and witchcraft. For Augustine, part of Adam's punishment for his rebellious will was to lose control over his organ. (One might ask by what sense of justice God granted Adam control over Eve in place of it?) One hears much about men's valorization of the penis. But there is contempt for it also. It is literally either raised or fallen—like a pedestal or a footstool—images traditionally used to describe the female split object. If hysteria was primarily a female illness, a result of repression, then perhaps the disorders of megalomania and paranoia are particularly men's province. Though psychoanalysis has described these disorders at length, it has not done so in relation to the fact that men have an external organ that must be protected at all cost. The vicissitudes of male biology and the fears they arouse in men would themselves be sufficient to explain the genesis of the theory —or the fantasy—of penis envy, the "I am afraid of losing it; therefore she must want it" fantasy. Not that penis envy doesn't exist. But we have perhaps been looking for it in the wrong place. If we accept Lacan's theory that the penis has achieved a symbolic importance as the phallus because of men's privileged position in culture, we would have to say that it is phallus envy that is aroused in women, an envy which would disappear with their cultural equality. Furthermore, according to Lacan, nobody has

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the phallus — the always erect penis. The man's own desire for the phallus, states Lacan, "will throw up its signifier in the form of a persistent divergence towards 'another woman' who can signify this phallus under various guises, whether as a virgin or a prostitute." 8 Penis envy, however, is anatomical in origin and end. We must grant, I think, that it is real enough. It just happens to be men who have it in relation to each other. Perhaps men's great emphasis on the visual stems in part from their awareness of the width and length of the penis as differentiators. And perhaps women have been traditionally forbidden to look at men precisely because of what they might find wanting. Maybe anatomy is destiny after all. It's just that so far the wrong anatomy has been blamed. Is there no way out then from the biological determinants of splitting? I think that there is, for while penises and vaginas are biological organs, their meanings are culturally determined, overdetermined, we might say. Once women no longer allow themselves to be split, then men and/or their organs will have to make some kind of accommodation. To put it more positively, once women achieve more rights within culture, the penis will no longer have to carry so much symbolic weight as the phallus. No longer fearing the loss of their prized possession to women, men will need less protection for their "territory," their vulnerable outer space. They will no longer have to split the object to keep themselves whole. To some extent, this change is already taking place. One problem, however, is that women sometimes collude in their own splitting. As the wife/mother, they may wish to be free of the husband's sexual demands; conversely, as the mistress they may be in rebellion against a powerful mother, now represented by the wife, or have a need to debase the sexual object themselves by keeping their relationship with a man secret. Another problem is even more pervasive. By rejecting the male child as a sexual object and arousing his jealousy, the mother is providing the basis for the grown man's revenge later in splitting. As Nancy Chodorow puts it, "Because their sexualized preoedipal attachment was encouraged, while their oedipal-genital wishes

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were thwarted and threatened with punishment, men may defensively invest more exclusively in the instinctual gratifications to be gained in a sexual relationship in order to avoid risking rejection of love" (96). Yet the synthesis of the sexual object, insofar as it has occurred, brings with it its own problems. Women are now expected to fulfill all kinds of incompatible needs — of men. No longer are opposed figures kept separate. We have incorporated the traditional polarities within each individual. Partly this has to do with our egalitarianism. If everyone is equal, then some figures can no longer be idealized while others are debased. Now every woman can be both sexual temptress and wife/mother—in fact has to be. No longer split into good and bad, she is everything at once. Fantasy object by night, career woman by day, and hausfrau in between. What we are witnessing is perhaps less evidence of women's liberation than a resurgence of the pre-Oedipal desire for the phallic or omnipotent mother. There have been some other attempts to deal with splitting and the sexual polarization it entails. Making the sexes more and more alike, the unisex ideal, is one way of overcoming sexual anxiety. Another way—perhaps in some sense it is simply a different manifestation of the desire for unisex—is through the pursuit of androgyny. The attempt to become both sexes, to incorporate within the self the traditional attributes of male and female is a modern attempt to put back together those separated halves in the Symposium myth. In large measure, this pursuit is the quest for omnipotence. The chances are that the gods are not going to allow it this time around either. What is most fascinating today is that on some deeper level we may not have surmounted splitting at all. It is simply that for the first time in history, in the late sixties and seventies at least, the sexual temptress won out. For a while it was the wife/mother figure that was seen as dangerous, as subversive to the best interests of civilization. The rejection of motherhood among certain elements of the women's movement in the seventies may have been less a revelation of women's freedom to choose their reproductive destinies than yet another instance of splitting, this time

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with the mother image debased. Like all splitting or dualism, this degradation was a tool of social control, used then to limit rather than to enlarge the population. In her ironic essay "The Liberated Heroine" (Partisan Review, 1978/4), Diana Trilling suggested that women were acceding as much to male demands in the seventies as they had in the past. I'm inclined to agree. It is just that in this period (and to some extent today) men were demanding sexual indulgence rather than restraint from women. In a new form of splitting of the sexual object, it was the chaste objects who were the bad ones, to be sent to the therapist if not scorned outright. While few of us would wish to deny the benefits of the sexual revolution to women, there is a difference between choosing freedom and being forced into it, which was no doubt often the case in the late sixties and seventies; yet women were probably no more aware of being pressed into sexual experience than Victorian ones were of being denied their "sexual rights." It is enough to make one think that false consciousness is an inherited characteristic. Furthermore, as Otto Kernberg has pointed out, successful sexual performance is no sign of successful object relations9 (an unfortunate term, that, with its unintended suggestion of a subordinate other). Though we are "freer" sexually, we may be having more trouble achieving love. Generally, it is mothers who are blamed for this situation. In The Restoration of the Se//Kohut speaks of their failure to be empathie mirrors to their infants as a cause of the narcissistic personality, an attitude which itself is ahistoric and narcissistic. It is doubtful that mothers today are less motherly than they used to be, if only because high infant mortality rates kept parents in the past from investing too much of themselves in issue that might easily predecease them. One should not forget either that there were literal splits between mothers and wetnurses in certain classes until late into the eighteenth century. This greater distancing from their offspring may well have contributed to the idealization of mothers and the consequent splitting of the sexual object. For all the talk of mothers — and their déficiences (a way of decreasing the population by diminishing mothers' rewards?) some aspects of the mother have yet to be dealt with at any length in

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the psychoanalytic literature. One reason for the persistence of the split into mother and sexual temptress, with occasional transvaluation of the latter recently, lies in the tremendous threat of the eroticized mother. All women are supposed to be Virgin Marys in relation to their sons, however profligate they may be otherwise. No doubt there are subterranean territories here that terrify the exploring imagination. The mother has always been set off from the erotic object in history. Rarely do the great love stories of the world have anything to do with the results of all their sexual craving, perhaps because the hero is so often a symbolic child, caught in an Oedipal triangle. (Schlegel's Lucinde is a major exception). The actual mother/child dyad is essentially a threat to the husband or lover, which has perhaps contributed to the split object syndrome more than we care to admit, just as fear of unwanted childbearing may have caused women to collude in this splitting, by suppressing their own desire. Female troubadours in the Middle Ages speak of their fear of the biological consequences of love, something the male writers never consider, and the seventeenth-century Précieuses, women in the court of Louis XIV, expected their lovers to treat them platonically, that is, chastely, for relations without sex, free of reproductive consequences, wer,e a sign of male tribute to women. It was left to their husbands to debase them sexually. Thérèse Benedek has written of women's "primary instinctive ambivalence" toward procreation. Could it be that this ambivalence is transmitted to the child who grows up and takes revenge by splitting women into component parts? (The first "splitting" the child experiences is of course the birth process itself, as Fairbairn has pointed out.) 10 I leave it to the psychiatrists to consider, but this possibility is far removed from Freud's idyllic description of the mother's love for her son in what he considered the most perfect relationship. So far I have not spoken about the splitting of the sexual object among women. The reason is that I do not think that they engage in this very much. Though women sometimes speak of the kind man they cannot love and the bastard they do, this pattern isn't institutionalized. Besides, it is not love and sex that are split here. Though there may be two men involved, only one is the recipient

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of any feeling, both tender and sexual. The central fantasy for women is not that of one man waiting patiently at home and another one on the road. Rather it is of the knight in shining armor who rescues one. Madame Bovary dreams of a carriage on a dark night that comes to spirit her away to adventure and excitement—amorous, intellectual, experiential. One glorious man— never a split one—is all that is necessary. Perhaps he comes too rarely because in fact he should be split, he has so many things to do, but that is another matter. Contrary to what Freud said in "On Narcissism," in general the male figure is idealized. Although sexual attraction is part of the configuration, it is not the main element. Whether this should be attributed to women's greater maturity than men's in matters of love—a statement often made—is highly doubtful. In fact, women suffer from always idealizing the object. If men deny feeling when they debase the object, women err in the opposite extreme, not necessarily to their benefit. There are to be sure some cultural reasons for this difference. The social order has never sanctioned a single standard, or at least it never did in the past. That is, it did not allow women to have double objects. In "The Taboo of Virginity" Freud speaks of how the cult of virginity insured the woman's thralldom to one man by having him initiate her into an experience that was formerly forbidden. To be sure, this system occasionally misfired, but on the whole it achieved its aim well enough. Then too, insofar as women have been considered the other rather than the subject, even by women themselves, it was unlikely that they would allow themselves the liberty of splitting the male. In his essay on debasement, Freud does define the equivalent of degradation of the sexual object for women in a brief sentence, rich in implication: "The condition of forbiddenness in the erotic life of women is, I think comparable to the need on the part of men to debase the sexual object" (186-87). That is, there is for some women the desire to keep the love affair hidden, secret, even when there is only one man in the picture and that a legitimate one. If women did split men in the past it was mainly in the imagination. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, for example, Julie has a brief

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encounter with her tutor, Saint-Preux. She never engages in any activity with him after she is married. But she dreams about him constantly. Perhaps this kind of fantasy has been the equivalent of male splitting. Now that cultural prohibitions are giving way, should we expect to see more instances of splitting among women? According to psychiatrist Robert Stoller, we all have to reduce people to objects, to debase them, I suppose, we could say, if our excitement is to be aroused. If this is true does it mean that when women are more in touch with their desires, they will split, or at least debase more? It is an unnerving thought, yet not one to be dismissed out of hand. There were recently some cultural pressures on women to split the object in ways practiced by men alone in the past: in one-night stands, for example. But one wonders for which sex's gratification this pressure was operating. Still, if it is true that as biological creatures we desire both stasis and variety, it may be discovered that there are physiological reasons why women should split the sexual object. From yet another point of view, there is a way in which women have always split the sexual object, but their split is between the first object of love, the mother, and the father that later comes to supplant her, rather than between the pre-Oedipal affectionate mother and Oedipal genital mother, which is where the split is for the little boy. This sexual difference leads to another form of splitting that women practice, not primarily between love and sex, but rather between love and other kinds of power, which after all are substitutes for sex. One might say that while men split women, women split themselves. Women have felt they could have love or gratification of other sorts, never both. Madame de Staël, for example, forgave Rousseau for wanting to keep women out of public life because at least he granted them superiority in matters of the heart. To her it seemed an acceptable bargain. The question of why women have always been willing to make bargains (they still are; radical feminists are willing to give up love in order to gain power) deserves some less jocular response than that they are bargain hunters. The answer lies not simply in

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the fact that men have resisted all intrusions on their supposed territory—namely all of culture. The answer has much to do with the fear within women themselves. As French analyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, following Melanie Klein, puts it, the woman who asserts herself intellectually, that is, in the public sphere, feels that she is denying the father, superseding him in some way. 11 In her shift from the first object of love, the mother, to the father, a shift which Freudian analysts believe results from her frustration at not having a penis—although one might as soon say that both sexes fear and resent the all-powerful mother and therefore reject her—the little girl projects all the good aspects of the first object onto the second, who is then idealized. It is not castration that the little girl fears from the father as the little boy does — she already perceives herself castrated, a perception that French analysts such as Irigaray and Kristeva attribute to the meaning that culture places on the phallus as signifier; rather she fears the loss of the father's love. If this is true, one can see why women view their choice as lying between love and other sorts of power, intellectual or creative, sometimes approved of by the father and only then permissible. This would suggest that equal parenting would solve some problems, for the female child at least, by allowing her to individuate more freely. Yet Freud himself gives another explanation that suggests a simpler solution for this form of splitting or relinquishment. In " 'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908), he claimed that it was sexual repression (rather than fear of loss of love) that led to women's depreciation of the intellectual life in general; he there implied that the removal of prohibition in the sexual area would lead to enhanced development in the intellectual and creative sphere. This seems to have happened, at least in the middle and upper classes. (One might also say that increased opportunities for women's education (outside of the convent) led to greater sexual freedom. But for many gifted women in the past, the development of intellect and sensuous feeling were already fused in marriage, their major source of education, a theme I treat in chapter 8.) But in his personal life he did not seem eager for such change.

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A famous letter to his fiancée implores her to withdraw from strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of the home: It is possible that a different education could suppress all women's delicate qualities—which are so much in need of protection and yet so powerful—with the result that they could earn their living like men. It is also possible that in this case it would not be justifiable to deplore the disappearance of the most lovely thing the world has to offer us: our ideal of womanhood. 12

Here Freud recognizes that the sexual differentiation he admires is cultural rather than biological, a position as environmental as any radical feminist could wish. The difference is that he wants to hold on to the polarization. (Undoubtedly, Freud would not have liked the unrestricted sexual freedom of the sexual revolution, with its destruction of idealization and its suppression of tenderness.) In answer to those who point out that Freud was also surrounded by brilliant women disciples to whom he no doubt was attracted, I might note that that is precisely the point. He didn't marry one of them. To a large extent, he was a practitioner of the very split he describes. Nonetheless, for those of us who want synthesis, he provides a direction also, if not so much with regard to women and their tendency to fragment themselves, then certainly in regard to men and their propensity for fragmenting others. There has been much talk recently of whether it is possible to change the unconscious. The question is of particular interest in relation to the splitting of the sexual object. Would it be possible to change men's psychobiology so that a true snythesis of the object of affection and the object of desire could be effected? Or is this perhaps the wrong question to ask. Maybe the problem lies more in men's conscious than in their unconscious minds. As Freud himself points out, something which in consciousness makes its appearance as two contraries is often in the unconscious a united whole.13 We find that Freud who has been so excoriated for biologizing destiny places the blame for the splitting of the sexual object directly on culture. It is because civilization restricts sexual love through its prohibitions that there arises a universal (that is, male) tendency

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to debase sexual objects. In relation to the current desire for synthesis, it turns out that men's unconscious doesn't have to be changed at all. The problem is to remove the cultural overlays in order to recover it.

Notes 1. S.E., vol ii: 183. [There are some illuminating precedents for this kind of splitting in Plato, also, for example, in the Phaedrus and in the account of the heavenly and earthly Aphrodite in the Symposium, where, to be sure, the heavenly Aphrodite refers to homosexual love.] 2. Freud uses the term Sexualobjekt to refer to the object of affection as well as the object of desire. It is thus to be distinguished from our term sex object, although a Sexualobjekt may sometimes be a sex object also, particularly if it is debased. Although Freud does not speak specifically of splitting the sexual object, he does speak of the love life of some men being split in two directions. The translation in the Standard Edition reads divided instead of split, but the term gespalten that Freud employs is more often translated split, as in the usual translation of Melanie Klein's Objektspaltung (splitting of the object). The term split has caused much anxiety. Though favored by Otto Kernberg, perhaps the most prolific splitter in recent times, it has been a taboo term for others. Paul Pruyser, in a minihistory of the image ("What Splits in Splitting?" Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic vol. 39 [Jan. 1975]: i46), is one of its most graphic opponents: "Splitting is a very tricky, hyperactive word that is loaded with aggressive fantasies and thoughts of disaster (and yet it is also a word that can leave us in the lurch when we try to seek an agent who is to be held accountable for the action)." The power of metaphor to arouse such intensity of feeling is itself worthy of attention. 3. For an account of different recent readings of Keats's poem see Karen Swann's "Harassing the Muse" in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 81-92. 4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Epipsychidion," Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 415, 11.149-53; Freud, S.E., vol n: 169. 5. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Parrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 146. 6. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 7. See Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Univer-

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9. io.

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sities Press, 1971) and The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977); and Otto Kernberg, Object-Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (New York: Jason Aronson, 1976). Carol Gilligan in "The Conquistador and the Dark Continent: Reflections on the Psychology of Love," Daedalus 113 [Summer 1984]: 91, remarks that the language of the object-relations analysts in general, with its borders and boundaries, "creates an imagery of love that is indistinguishable from the imagery of war." See "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, éd. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 84. See Otto Kernberg, "Barriers to Falling and Remaining in Love," JAPA 22 (1974): 486-511. Thérèse Benedek, "Ambivalence, Passion, and Love," JAPA 25 (1977): 55. W. Ronald D. Fairbairn in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952) (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. no n. 1, speaks of the infant's "profound sense of separation at birth," which leads to aggression. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, "Feminine Guilt and the Oedipus Complex," in Female Sexuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 94-

13412. Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 76. 13. In "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," S.E., vol. n: 170.

8 The Feminine Bildungsroman: Education through Marriage LYNGSTRAND: I think that marriage has to be accounted almost a kind of miracle. The way a woman little by little makes herself over until she becomes like her husband. BOLETTE: Takes on his interests, you mean? LYN.: Yes, exactly! B.: Well, but his powers too? His skills and his talents? L.: Hm—yes, I wonder if all that couldn't as well— IBSEN, Lady from the Sea

I

T has long been a critical commonplace that there is no feminine Bildungsroman. But if the central theme of the Bildungsroman is the education of the hero who is brought to a high level of consciousness through a series of experiences that lead to his development, then many of the great novels that deal with women treat similar themes. From Emma to Jane Eyre to Madame Bovary to Middlemarch to Anna Karenina to Portrait of a Lady to Lady Chatterley's Lover and beyond, the novel presents a search for self, an education of the mind and feelings. But unlike the male Bildungsroman, the feminine Bildungsroman takes place in or on the periphery of marriage. That is its most striking characteristic. In his important book The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt made the point that, starting in the eighteenth century, marriage determined woman's social, economic, and geographic future. 1 In the Pamela tradition, which mirrors this social reality, the heroine 122

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seeks upward mobility in marriage. In the tradition that I am here treating, which is perhaps equally important, if not as widely recognized, the heroine longs for a love marriage that will increase her knowledge, often in some wide experiential sense. It is perhaps an index of how much we have changed that we can now dissociate women's education from marriage. However, throughout the nineteenth century things were quite otherwise. Hegel, who is merely one of many spokesmen for the idea, writes that women have their essential destiny in marriage and there only. In a seemingly unrelated passage, he speaks of women and learning: Women acquire learning—we know not how—almost as if by breathing ideas, more by living really than by actually taking hold of knowledge. Man, on the other hand, achieves his distinction only by means of advancing thought and much skilled exertion. 2

Hegel, who admittedly idealizes intuitive knowledge, doesn't recognize the causal connection in the two passages. What other way could women acquire knowledge than to "breathe" it? And what was more natural than for them to seek to make of their marital destiny a means of education, since almost without exception every other institution of higher learning was closed to them? Even in Mary Wollstonecraft's revolutionary Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a basic argument for equal education for women is that it will make them good mothers and faithful wives. Perhaps the least sexist of nineteenth-century novelists, Stendhal, advocates equal education (in his treatise On Love) so that women will be more desirable and lovable companions for men. Of course, it is possible that these arguments were designed with subversive intent. Their authors may have deferred to the populace in order to get women into the ivory tower by way of the kitchen door, so to speak. This seems entirely probable when one considers that Wollstonecraft also speaks of opening up all professions to single women and that Stendhal laments that all geniuses born women were lost to the world—hardly conservative statements, either one of them. One must admit, however, that these writer's enemies have turned out to be right. Women's education has led to the neglect

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of household tasks and the decline of motherhood. Still, critics today would hardly venture to return to the most popular midnineteenth-century position on women's education, that of Mrs. Sarah Stickney Ellis, who claimed that no husband was ever happy that his wife could read Virgil without a dictionary and who urged that women be educated for "disinterested kindness." 3 In the great, if not the popular, novels of the nineteenth century, it is the search for self rather than selflessness that takes place, in contrast to the prevailing educational theory and in contrast also to literary genres other than the novel, where woman is child, animal, housemaid, angel, femme fatale—almost everything on the great chain of being except the human. Yet in some respects, it is no surprise that woman's search for self becomes important in the nineteenth century, for as the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs says, once the outside world is no longer seen as the ground upon which the hero tests himself, then woman's soul becomes worthy of examination. 4 What happened in the novel is perhaps similar to what happened in Greek tragedy. According to classicist Werner Jaeger, once Sophocles revealed an interest in men's souls, it was only a matter of time before women's souls compelled interest as well.5 It seems possible, however, that among moderns, emphasis on the interiorization of women came first. Such, at least, is Madame de Staël's theory. It was women, says the baroness, who created an interest in private life, for they were allowed to explore it without limit. The advantage that the moderns thus have over the ancients is that of expressing a more delicate sensibility, a more various characterization because of a knowledge of the human heart, a knowledge that men owe to women. 6 De Staël implies that women discovered the self. Whatever its origins or the sex of its hero, the novel of education emerges at the time that the individual is no longer conceived of as static, a time when process and the inner life become valued over prescribed social roles. Although most of the women in Austen's Emma fall into the Pamela tradition because of their economic dependence, Emma herself is already beginning to hint at the Romantic importance of

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a woman's self. Having neither economic need nor romantic inclination, she eventually does consent to have her Knightley in shining armor. The question is why. Lionel Trilling rightly sees Emma as having a moral reality of her own unlike most women in fiction, and he recognizes her fault as "the classic one of hubris, which yields to the classic result of blindness," an inability to interpret experience realistically.7 When she realizes this, she quickly takes a husband to save her from self-destructive capacities. Whereas a traditional sign of manhood lies in the hero's ability to give up guides, the test of womanhood has resided in the heroine's ability to find a mentor. The male hero who sees the folly of his ways is allowed to correct himself, no matter what the cost in suffering. But Emma accepts a guide to lead her, after not suffering very much. It would seem that womankind cannot bear much reality. Although Emma marries for an educative reason, we do not see what happens to her after she makes her choice. She does care for Knightley and, presumably, she will live happily ever after, like Pamela. Although Knightley notably enables her to retain the childhood home of her own, Emma ends up as dependent on men intellectually and emotionally as the economically deprived women of the novel are on men financially. But we must not succumb to the twentieth-century fallacy of finding such pedagogical dependence charmless, as Trilling points out elsewhere.8 In large measure, the Pamela and Emma traditions are fused in Jane Eyre. The difference between the hero and heroine's social class and the reformation of the rake theme—pedagogical dependence may exist in males as well as females — are reminiscent of Pamela. However, Jane Eyre unlike Pamela is less about upward mobility through marriage than it is about the search for expanded experience. Bronte's work has often been labeled a moral tract, but one can hardly call the heroine's aims disinterestedly selfless. At Thornfield Hall, where Jane seeks a new life after her miserable existence at Lowood, she speaks movingly of women's need for activity: It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; they will make it if they cannot find it. ... Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a

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restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.9

Jane is attracted to Rochester, precisely because she is "weary of an existence all passive." Unlike romantic heroes who long for calm women, no doubt to provide some solace in their stormtossed lives, romantic heroines and their real-life imitators veer toward the less-safe choice in suitors, knowing that their only routes to activity and adventure lie in marital waters of some risk. The aims of men and women in marriage have been so opposed, one might say that marriage is an entirely different institution for the two sexes. While men, a Rochester, for example, have often expected marriage to root them into the social order, women, at least that type which I am here treating, have turned to marriage to achieve the goals of romantic individualism, those of increased knowledge, enhancement of feeling and experience, and precisely those dangers and adventures that men seek through marriage to escape. It was only through a male intermediary that women could attain such pleasures. This is the reason why, for all her ostensible independence and freedom of mind, Jane's world falls apart when her first engagement to Rochester does. All paths to her future development now seem closed. The fact that they are not indicates that Bronte was already transcending the rules of the genre even before they were firmly established. After discovering that Rochester is still married to a mad woman, Jane goes on a solitary journey which brings her, rain-drenched and starving, to Marsh End. This heroine is already light years away from the socially protected Emma. Her journey, which is not so much inside as on the periphery of society, brings her knowledge as well as suffering. Rochester, too, comes to a new awareness though he remains at Thornfield Hall. The passive hero and the active heroine seem to represent a reversal of more usual literary tradition. And here Bronte underscores a brilliant perception. Unlike the male heroes of the medieval romance, for example, who go forth to encounter the monsters of sexuality that

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they fear, the heroine here must confront a "monster" of spirituality, St. John, whom she conquers after much temptation. Spenser offers something of a precedent here, for St. John represents false chastity. Even more important, Spenser in The Faerie Queene had reinforced a Renaissance convention that becomes a major theme in the novel tradition, that of the female quest for the male. Like Spenser's Britomart, although less deliberately, Jane is searching for the right man to marry. He is not the bloodless St. John but rather a reformed Rochester. Unlike the lady of the chivalric romance who had merely to sit still in order to find a destiny in the form of some passing knight, modern woman must seek her own hero. The development of the self through marriage involves many trials, for assuredly finding the right man to be one's tutor/lover is far more difficult and dangerous an undertaking than finding the right university. There is something else to notice as well. Although the heroines in this tradition of education through marriage look to wedlock as the primary means of educating and developing the self, they often reveal a high degree of self-development before they marry. Their very accomplishments are designed to win them the kind of mate who will finish their education. Jane is a case in point. She develops enormously, even when unmarried, particularly in the second part of the novel, where like the other heroines of this tradition, she even comes to a measure of economic independence without which she could not marry in psychological comfort. Like the male hero of the Bildungsroman, she grows by going out into the world on her own, but the ultimate aim of her development is not life within the larger community as it is for the male hero, but rather marriage with the partner of her choice. Some years later, in another country, another dark lady—this time a beauty (Bronte is as down on beauty as any male misogynist)—does not fare as well. Like Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary is unwilling to sacrifice herself to "disinterested kindness" and seeks a self of her own. Because of this, she is often called selfish. Sainte-Beuve asks why she could not find a meaningful course of action in being useful to others or in loving her child.10 But why should she? Would a man who trained to be a doctor, a man who worked assiduously toward that end for which he had a gift (I do

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not speak here of a Charles Bovary, who was merely a hack), give up the idea of a career with calm? Emma Bovary had been training for one thing all her life. Why should she accept not achieving it? What does Madame Bovary want? The panorama of mountains and sea, fishing villages and gondolas is only one of her dreams — the setting for one type of lover; although less prominent and often forgotten by readers, she has another dream of a man who need not be handsome or elegant or charming provided he be brilliant. Her desire is for intensity, for a heightening of experience, either through the route of the senses or through the vicarious awareness of someone else's intellectual life. In either case, a man was necessary for the fulfillment of the dream. It isn't even that the "selfish" Madame Bovary wants to be loved. What she wants is to give love to a man who is worthy of her. All her formal education (which consisted in large part of reading romantic novels), her accomplishments — the piano playing, drawing, embroidering—all her style, elegance, and taste are directed toward this one end.11 Her type is still with us, and every little princess can say along with Flaubert, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Emma Bovary's entire life is taken up by the fantasy of Monsieur Right, so that even after she has made the choice (and it is pathetic how little choice she has in the one event toward which her whole being has been directed—her father answers for her, and Flaubert doesn't even let us know what she is thinking at the moment that Charles asks for her hand), she is still searching. No! The selfishness must lie elsewhere than in Madame Bovary. How many critics find her stupid. She is educated beyond her opportunities, say some, and beyond her intelligence say others. One might counter and say that she is not educated enough, and therefore she would seem to prove that her mother-in-law is not so ludicrous when she suggests as a cure for Emma's nervous disorders that she be kept away from books. As long as books arouse expectations that have no means of fulfillment, they can only increase melancholy and frustration. Unless they are read with discipline as well as passion, they will become a poison. Madame Bovary's problem was that she was educated to be one thing only—a seductress to her husband. In fact, Mme.

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Bovary lives out Rousseau's prescriptions for the ideal woman, and in doing so she fulfills Wollstonecraft's prophecy that a woman educated to be a seductress to her husband would end up an adulteress with someone else. Flaubert had thought of situating Emma in Paris, and we might well ask why he didn't do so. After all, what opportunities could she have had, being stuck in the provinces? Yet one suspects that Emma in Paris would have had the same fate as many a single girl who runs to the city today. She becomes the target of every roué, at least Emma's type does. The French critic Thibaudet finds it a stroke of bad luck that Emma has a daughter instead of a son.12 Bad luck or not, Flaubert's reasons for Emma's disappointment are more acute than Freud's are in analyzing similar responses. It is not that Madame Bovary wants a penis between her legs. Rather she wanted a male child so that she could participate vicariously in what her culture did not allow her to experience directly. "A man is free, at least — free to range the passions and the world, to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasure," she exclaims.13 One might ask which men, for certainly this does not apply to Charles. Unlike her husband, Emma cannot be satisfied with a vision of domestic pleasures for little Berthe. It is not that the mother is selfish so much as that she is in despair, for the one means of gaining experience through the marriage, for achieving identity, is denied her, and although this is never stated directly, perhaps she is in despair for her child too. It is testimony to the existential reality of Mme Bovary that the question, "What does Mme Bovary want?" has been answered so variously and with so much conviction by so many readers. For the reader today, the salient problem is perhaps that of identity. When Mme Bovary doesn't find what she wants in marriage, namely a god who could initiate her into passion and instruct her in life's pleasures, she turns outside it. What she learns from her lovers must still be considered education through marriage, however, for it was only within that institution that respectable women could take lovers. As part of his plan for seduction, Rodolphe says, "Madame Bovary! Everyone calls you that, and it's not your name at all.

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It's somebody else's. Somebody else's" (175). For all his deceptions and conniving, he has hit on the central problem of Emma's existence, that of autonomy. (The success of the seducer often lies in his awareness, his sensitivity in fact to the other person's needs, which he then manipulates to his own advantage.) Rodolphe speaks these lines to make her feel that she is her own person and can therefore turn to him with impunity, and probably he means also to imply that he would like her to have his name. This, of course, is a ruse, but he does strike the right notes. Emma yields to him because she needs him to give her an identity, having rejected that of the bovine Charles Bovary. In his endearments Rodolphe calls her a madonna and angel, but he thinks of her as a carp on a kitchen table, gasping for water. This counterpoint is a brilliant example of Flaubert's undercutting of the romantic ideal, but it is not Flaubert's dichotomy alone. The madonna and carp images are illustrative of much of woman's condition in the Western world. Within Christianity, she has either been the exalted, desexualized mother on a pedestal or the vulnerable object dependent for her very breath on the male. Yet one must also grant that Mme Bovary's concept of experience would have resulted in her destruction even had she been a male. Flaubert himself said that the Bovarian problem transcends sex. A male Bovary would have struck a Faustian bargain. Yet there is a difference. Traditionally, for women, at least since Eve, the devil has merely been the husband or the lover and not the real thing, for it is to the husband or his imago that the woman is to entrust her soul. Thus women's fall as well as their development has been vicarious. Of all the heroines that I treat, it is Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch who most consciously seeks an intellectual development through marriage. Ironically, it is a sensuous development alone that she ultimately finds. Dorothea envisages a husband as an awesome tutor/parent. "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." 14 Of her impending marriage to Casaubon, who is twenty-seven years her senior, she says, "I should not wish to have a husband very near my own

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age. . . . I should wish to have a husband who was above me in judgment and in knowledge." Eliot adds, "The union which attracted Dorothea was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide she would take along the grandest path" (51). In The Bonds of Love,15 Jessica Benjamin points out that little girls are deprived of an identificatory love with the father and therefore seek a form of reparation later (106-7). "They are drawn to ideal love as a second chance, an opportunity to attain, at long last a father-daughter identification in which their own desire and subjectivity can finally be realized" (n6)."The belief that the man will provide access to a world that is otherwise closed to her is one of the great motives in ideal love." It is also one reason why love for wom'en and men is or can be so different like the institution of marriage. In a brief but bold essay in The Longest Revolution, Juliet Mitchell sees romantic love, at least for men, as stemming from the pre-Oedipal, not the Oedipal self. Men's romantic love, she claims, looks backwards to "a return to his earliest self." In contrast, she writes, "the romantic love of women looks forward, forward to marriage." 16 One wonders which journey leads to more disappointment and whether romantic love must grow out of developmental deprivation. Perhaps the most pessimistic view is Lacan's: "Love rarely comes true, as each of us knows, and it only lasts for a time. For what is love other than banging one's head against a wall, since there is no sexual relation?"17 For Dorothea, "after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas" (112). But she doesn't find the "large vistas and wide fresh air which she dreamed of finding in her husband's mind but rather winding passages that seemed to lead nowhere" (227). Her awareness that he has nothing to offer intellectually is coupled with an awareness that he has nothing to offer in response to her feeling. One of the fascinating aspects of the search for knowledge through marriage is the unity of intellect and feeling that women envisage. But the unity is not realized:

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Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (307-8)

It is testimony to Eliot's sensitivity that she presents not only Dorothea's view. For Casaubon too, the marriage is a failure: 4 'the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no tenderness and submission afterwards could remove" (455). This is a revealing statement of why marriage for education so seldom works. It is because ''intellectual approbation . . . always involves a possible reserve of latent censure. A man—poet, prophet, or whatever he may be—readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered." 18 So Hawthorne had written in The Blithedale Romance. The words apply equally here. Dorothea's first marriage is a disappointment to both parties. But unlike the traditional male novel's solution to the problem, in Middlemarch, it is not the wife but the husband, whose theory "was already withered in the birth like an elfin child," that dies. His cousin, the young sensuous Will, becomes Dorothea's second husband. He would have been her adulterous lover in Continental tradition. Presumably, he is able to instruct her in matters of feeling if not in those of intellect. But as for Dorothea and her aspirations, "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother." But, as Eliot goes on to say, "no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought to have done" (894). "For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it" (896). Eliot, who has the range of a Tolstoy, is much more consciously aware of the restrictions of the social order on women. As Eliot points out in more than one reference, nineteenth-century England offered fewer opportunities to Dorothea than did sixteenth-century Spain to Saint Teresa. Notably, none of the authors that I consider, whether male or female, saw fit to treat a heroine who was

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a writer, but then few women authors deal with writers as heroines even in the twentieth century. It is as if women have not yet achieved the sense of self required to treat the artist as a young woman. The one striking early exception is Mme de Staël's Corinne, whose heroine significantly refuses to marry, as if recognizing even in 1807 that a true development of the self cannot take place vicariously. But most heroines are willing to give up all for love, for love is seen as the great developer of the self. Unlike Dorothea, who looks for an intellectual superior, Anna Karenina doesn't need an intellectual guide. Like Emma Bovary, what she wants is an education in passion. In some ways Anna Karenina is a study of what happens when Emma Bovary's romantic dream is fulfilled. Despite her superior intelligence, Anna is an obvious descendant of Emma. There are physical similarities. Both have beauty and style; both are "masculine" in some of their attire and behavior. Both are seemingly indifferent mothers to their daughters. Both are sensuous and desperate for experience. Both are caught in a bourgeois marriage without love on their side. (Even the physical characteristics of the two large-eared husbands are similar.) Both want a development of the self through feeling and are willing to break through societal confinements to get it. Anna, unlike Bovary, would seem to have the proper lover. Without pretense, Vronsky says that real people as opposed to the stupid bourgeois want to know passion.19 Yet the romantic ideal is shattered no less by Tolstoy than by Flaubert. One of Tolstoy's major themes is the triumph of bourgeois marriage over romantic love. In a departure from the dominant Western tradition, he sees adultery as destructive of passion. What is perhaps even more provocative is that, on close examination, we see that Anna and Vronsky never seem to be in possession of passion at all. Rather it seems to be something that they once had. For all her intelligence and learning—Vronsky comes to Anna for information and advice on agriculture, architecture, even horsebreeding—Tolstoy sees Anna as ultimately both destructive and self-destructive. She insists that she doesn't want contractual obligations, but what she wants is actually far more binding. Vronsky never moving from her side, slavish submission—what Emma

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was willing to give Rodolphe—only this could have satisfied Anna's desperate needs. The reader today finds this totally comprehensible since Anna couldn't venture a step in public without Vronsky's protection. Yet Tolstoy never blames the social order that so abuses her. One therefore feels that he is stacking the deck, the more when one considers that Anna's concept of love involves more than binding a man. It involves the total expenditure of energy. She has the Platonic realization that energy is based on love. Her tragedy is that there are so few places for her to expend this love. She recognizes that all her activities are a form of morphia. There is no reason to doubt that she loves her son, Serezha, and her brother Stiva says that she is bringing up her daughter splendidly, though she doesn't talk about it. But as for having other children, so moved is Vronsky by her beauty, one can hardly blame Anna for fearing to jeopardize her one source of power over him by becoming pregnant. We hear something about a children's book that she is writing, but Stiva is quick to say that she isn't at all a woman author, but rather a woman with a heart, as if the former were some kind of inhuman species (vii, Ix, 629). For Anna, both marriage and the opportunity for adultery that marriage offers fail as a means of developing the self And Anna comes to realize this though she sees the failure in more heroic terms as a defect of life itself. "Life is sundering us, and I am the cause of his unhappiness and he of mine, and neither he nor I can be made different" (691). This view is itself a romantic vision in that it allows for no modification. Tolstoy means us to reject it. But is his view any more palatable to us? Tolstoy sees the forces of the social structure not as changeable and determined by men but as the irrevocable working out of moral law. The very motto of his book is religious: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." Ultimately Tolstoy's moral sympathy is not with Anna. Like Virgil and Dido, Tolstoy finds Anna dispensable. It is the man who finally concerns him, for it is the man who has to learn to free himself from romantic meshes. General Serpukhovsky says to Vronsky, his friend from boyhood: Women are the chief stumbling block in a man's career. It is difficult to love a woman and do anything else. To achieve it and to love in comfort

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and unhampered, the way is to marry! . . . Yes, if you had to carry a load and use your hands at the same time, it would be possible only if the load were strapped on your back: and that is marriage. (284)

This is certainly not the kind of marriage that the heroines of this chapter envision and therein lies part of the problem. What women want is not what men want in marriage. For Tolstoy, the spheres of the sexes are ultimately highly differentiated, as in the Kitty/Levin marriage, in which Levin makes no attempt to share with his wife his moments of deepest religious illumination. For Tolstoy, marriage is a means of keeping men and women apart. Rather than offer a mode of vicarious experience to women, it offers a certain amount of distance and therefore protection to men. So role-defined is Tolstoy's theoretical as opposed to his imaginative point of view that he can ultimately praise only conventional aspects of femininity, such as Kitty's maternal impulses. But Tolstoy himself realized that his characters had a will of their own. Anna is a superb example of how artistic sympathies can outdistance moral precepts. The contemporary reader feels that Anna (unlike Madame Bovary) at another time and in another place would have been glorious. It is not so much that she wants love to do everything for her, as Elizabeth Hardwick says.20 It is that once a heroine gave herself to love, she had to give up everything else, for choosing love meant rejecting the social order. It is guilt that turned the Didos and the Cleopatras against culture. Anna's tragedy lies in having to define herself in terms of a man, a man who is probably her inferior. Had her talents been allowed to take shape and form, she might have known passion and survived. But such a solution would have required a vastly different social structure, one that is barely upon us now. If Anna Karenina gets what Madame Bovary wants, then Isabel Archer rejects it. Critics have argued that her marriage to Gilbert Osmond was inconsistent. Actually, nothing could have been more consistent. She marries him because she feels that he will not threaten her autonomy. She is searching less for a means of expanding the self than for a means of maintaining it. It is the fear

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of being diminished that makes Isabel resist marriage, for if the attraction of marriage to women has been the enrichment of possibility, its danger, which Isabel rightly recognizes, though in the wrong people, is the destruction of self altogether. She refuses Warburton, who would seem to be the ideal choice for her, with his good looks, his expansive personality, his expansive estates, because "he appeared to demand of her something that no one else, as it were, had presumed to do. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he rather invidiously lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but pervasive, told her to resist — murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own." 21 Her reasons for rejecting Caspar are similar: "It was part of the influence he had upon her that he seemed to deprive her of the sense of freedom" (i: 162). He expresses for her an energy, he is the stubbornest fact she knows, she sees him as "a kind of grim fate" (i: 163). "A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see—that's my idea of happiness," she tells her friend Henrietta (1:235). On first reading, this sounds like the cry of an Emma Bovary. But it isn't, for there is no man in this carriage. James describes Caspar's kiss at the end of the book in terms that are less reminiscent of the passionate love scene in the library of Middlemarch than they are like the suicide scene in Anna Karenina: His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread and spread again, and stayed; it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when the darkness returned she was free. (2: 436) There is no question that Isabel is sexually afraid, but I do not know that her fear is unjustified, for Caspar was the kind of man who no doubt would have tried to incorporate Isabel into his very being.

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Unlike Anna, Isabel does not have an illicit relationship, nor does she commit suicide. Perhaps her slow suicide is marriage to Gilbert Osmond. She marries him partly because he isn't a force, an energy. Isabel admires his mind from which she can distance herself, and Osmond is clever enough before their marriage to give her the illusion of freedom. When he discovers that she wants to travel, he says, "Go everywhere . . . do everything; get everything out of life. Be happy—be triumphant" (i: 411). None of her other suitors have this much apparent largess. Even when he tells her he loves her, "He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal discretion, like a man who expected very little from it, but who spoke for his own needed relief" (2: 18). His distance, his cool urbanity, never threaten her sense of control, unlike the sexual energy of her other suitors. Gilbert represents intellectual and aesthetic knowledge, a world of enlarged possibilities that Isabel thinks is accessible to her exploration. She doesn't realize that she is going to be Osmond's objet d'art, which after all is not too different from being a sexual objpct. "You were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante," says her cousin Ralph, who goes on to prophesy the very fate she most fears: "You were the last person I expected to see caught." "I don't know why you call it caught." "Because you are going to be put into a cage." (2: 65)

Because of her lack of experience of the world, Isabel does not recognize Osmond's moral failure. In a sense, marriage does bring her increased knowledge—of evil. The freedom that Osmond had seemed to offer her turns out to be a cul de sac. Isabel's realization is very much like Dorothea's: "she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end" (2: 189). But whereas Casaubon's limitations were self-limiting—his only sin was to want the "enclosed basin of his mind to be thought the open sea," Osmond wants to reduce Isabel's mind to miniature size, a miniature of his own, for his particular talent lies in being a stunter. This is graphically revealed not simply in his art collection but in the very careful dwarfing of his daughter, Pansy. Isabel comes to

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realize that her real offense was in having a mind of her own at all. "Her mind was to be—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park" (2: 200). In a way Isabel had duped Osmond also before their marriage, and she comes to realize this. "She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was" (2: 191). But her choice is by far the greater mistake, for as Mme Merle says, "A woman has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl" (i: 280). By the very conditions of their sheltered upbringing, women have often been doomed to choosing badly. Because marriage grafts them to the man's moral being no less than to his intellectual one, they are often caught in a web of great suffering. But such a marriage is nonetheless an educational institution for it initiates the heroine into the disaster that Heidegger finds the key element of experience. There is perhaps no other novel in which marriage assumes such oppressive weight as it does in Portrait of a Lady unless it be Jude the Obscure, and yet Isabel doesn't try to escape it, perhaps because she comes to realize that the feminine self is bounded wherever it may turn. When Isabel returns to England, Caspar says, "You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it is the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life —in going down into the streets if that will help her!" (2: 434). And he begs her to go away with him. But she doesn't. It seems that Isabel doesn't want that carriage in the dark night, after all, for a carriage, no less than marriage, is just another kind of cage. It is Lady Chatterley who most successfully escapes the cage, not the cage of marriage but that of her husband's crippled body. In this sense, she is like an unrepressed Isabel Archer. But in some ways she is a closer descendant of Anna Karenina. Lawrence thought that Tolstoy betrayed Anna, and offered Lady Chatterley's Lover as a rectification of Tolstoy's immorality, the immorality of denying the body. Lawrence glorifies marriage as much as Tolstoy ever did, but unlike the puritan Russian he accepts divorce and the possibility of a new marriage. For Lawrence, redemption is

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always possible. Much of the mythic strength of Lady Chatterley lies in its secularized religion and fairy-tale motifs. In this modern Sleeping Beauty, the prince has been democratized for the masses, and it is the lady who goes searching in the wood for the hero. Once she finds him, however, everything about her goes to sleep. One can hardly imagine Jane Eyre or even Anna Karenina giving up consciousness in this way. Yet according to Lawrence, Connie is happy to do so. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a climactic overturn of that tradition which seeks knowledge through the mind. As need scarcely be repeated, in Lawrence, the progression is from mind knowledge to blood knowledge. At the beginning of the novel, Connie sounds like many another heroine who seeks education through marriage. Connie had married Clifford "because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. . . . Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed."22 Only physical revulsion remains. Through Ivy Bolton, who is hired to take care of Clifford, crippled in the war, Lawrence strikingly reveals the particular attraction that learning from men has traditionally had for women: And his "educating" roused in her a passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he knew. (93)

But Lawrence views this "knowing" as an abnormality. For Lawrence, like St. Augustine, an unlikely fellow traveler, the fall takes place when mental self-consciousness occurs. The only way to put the fruit back on the tree, to get back to Eden, is to deny that consciousness. Connie moves from the hell of Wragby Hall to the Eden of the wood only after giving up consciousness. As long as her mind operates, she is in a mechanical and ugly world, even with Mellors. It is only when she loses her sense of self and becomes "small" that she is saved, or rather, I suppose one should say, that Mellors is saved: "And as she melted small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him" (162). It may be that men often want the beloved to be small because they themselves desire a regression to infancy. Unable to

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admit their dependence directly, they have to experience it vicariously. It may also be that unconscious womb envy leads them to play the big mother figure in relation to the lover/baby. This change in size has the additional advantage of reducing the male fear of being overwhelmed sexually by the woman. As long as Connie does not want to be effaced, she is unhappy. Once she becomes "a passive consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave," the reward is the finding of her physical self. It is this kind of theory that now freezes the blood supply of feminists. Yet Susan Sontag rightly notes that the feminists' limitation is that they wish to minimize the "intractable powers of unconscious or irrational feeling." "That voluptuousness does mean surrender, and that sexual surrender pursued negatively enough, experienced immoderately enough, does erode pride of individuality and mocks the notion that the will could ever be free—these are truths about sexuality itself and what it may, naturally, become."23 Nonetheless, women are right to be uneasy with Lawrence, and not just because of what he says or does not say about the feminine self. In his essay "Pornography and Obscenity," Lawrence calls works such as Pamela, Jane Eyre, and Mill on the Floss pornographic because "as soon as there is sex excitement with a desire to spite the sexual feeling, to humiliate it and degrade it, the element of pornography enters." 24 But what Lawrence has done in this novel is to create a male Pamela that is pornographic in its own way. It was once possible for a woman to rise in the social order by holding down her petticoats. Lawrence now makes it possible for a man to transcend his social limitations by taking off his pants and rising to the occasion. Lawrence devotes an inordinate amount of time to descriptions of Mellors's godlike equipment and Connie's consequent ecstasy in a manner that is reminiscent of scores of pornographic novels in which the penis is always ready and able and the vagina or other orifice is always, or at least ultimately, happy. This is the pornographic aspect of the book, not the four-letter words for which it was excoriated when it first came out. In the light of Victorian restrictions on female sexuality, one can see why Lawrence was so popular. But his solution is one

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that few women can accept today, less perhaps because he speaks of the self effaced by eroticism—after all, one time-honored way of finding the self has been by losing it—than because his depiction of female sexuality has nothing to do with the reality. Finally, Constance Chatterley ¿5 a Victorian heroine, for she doesn't even move. But while Lady Chatterley's Lover may be far from reality, it represents a fantasy that persists despite rational attempts to deny it. The work is perhaps the last great literary statement of the view of feminine consciousness (or unconsciousness) that is embodied in the central myths of our culture, that of Psyche, for example. Jungian analyst Erich Neumann sees the myth as the archetype of the development of the feminine consciousness. Because his books bear such titles as The Great Mother, Neumann has been espoused as something of a spokesman for the feminist cause, but actually he follows in the wake of the great irrationalist misogynist philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Central to his interpretation of the myth is his conviction that the development of Psyche and the male hero is ultimately different, though it may start out similarly. What is important for Psyche's individuation is her failure and the fact that a man has to save her. Ultimately, Psyche prefers beauty to knowledge and thus reunites herself with the feminine in her nature, says Neumann.25 In her nature or her culture? we might ask. To my knowledge, which is admittedly fallen, the only woman within the Western corpus of beliefs who sought knowledge directly without the intermediary of a man, the figure who could be the prototype of the feminine rite of passage, is Eve. But part of her post-lapsarian punishment is that her desire shall be to her husband, and ever after husbands have been intermediaries. It is only relatively recently in literary and cultural history that critics of the vicarious life have emerged on the scene. It is testimony to the boldness of his thought that Kierkegaard in his Concept of Dread blames Eve for seeking support beyond herself, in man.26 Thus his position is essentially the same as that of current liberationists. In Hegelian terms, the consciousness of feminine consciousness has only become perceptible at this time.

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In "Leda and the Swan," Yeats brilliantly poses the question of the relationship of sexuality, knowledge, and power: Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? As we view the central problems of gender relationships today, it seems to us that not only did Leda not put on Zeus's knowledge, she did not put on his power. To be raped is not to have greatness thrust upon one and, though it may be our limitation, we no longer consider it power to point to our twins in pride (although this may be changing). We feel that a true development cannot be vicarious. One has to have it oneself.27 This is why traditional criticism may in fact be right. The authentic feminine Bildungsroman is still to be written. In validating the search for the self, the novels I have been treating were not supportive of the status quo as some feminists claim, but rather, incipient revolutionary statements. However, insofar as their heroines' development remained inextricably linked to marriage, these works were less Bildungsromane than Bildungsromane manques. Notes 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 139. 2. This passage from the author's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts is translated and cited in Not in God's Image, ed. and trans. Julia O'Faolain and Lauro Martines (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 290. 3. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London: Peter Jackson, 1846), p. 69. 4. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), p. 117. 5. Werner Jaeger, Paidea: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 1:279-80. 6. Germaine de Staël, De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. P. van Tieghem (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1959), i: 150. 7. Jane Austen, Emma (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Riverside Edition, 1957), ed. with intro. by Lionel Trilling, pp. xi and xv.

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8. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 82. 9. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (New York: W. W. Norton Critical Edition, 1971), p. 96. 10. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert," trans. Paul de Man, in Madame Bovary (New York: W. W. Norton Critical Edition, 1965), p. 329, from a book review dated May 4, 1857. 11. Naomi Schor finds that Emma is a portrait of the artist as a young woman who wants her experience to cohere with literary models. In Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 15. 12. Albert Thibaudet, "Madame Bovary," trans. Paul de Man, Norton Madame Bovary, p. 381, from Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1935). 13. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Random House Modern Library Edition, 1957), p. 101. Subsequent references to this work are from this edition. 14. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Baltimore: Penguin Books 1965), p. 32. Subsequent references to this work are from this edition. 15. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 16. Juliet Mitchell, The Longest Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 114. 17. "Seminar of 21 January 1975," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 170. 18. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), p. loo. 19. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Maude translation, ed. George Gibian (New York: W. W. Norton Critical Edition, 1970), p. 104. 20. Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 182. 21. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (New York: Random House Modern Library College Edition, 1951), 1:144. 22. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: New American Library Signet Edition, 1959), p. 90. 23. R. Boyers and M. Bernstein, "Interview with Susan Sontag," Salmagundi 31-32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976): 42. 24. Edward D. McDonald, ed., "Pornography and Obscenity," in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers ofD. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1964), i: 177. 25. Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 123. Carol Gilligan has recently suggested that Cupid is as needy of Psyche as she is of him. 26. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 42n.

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27. As Freud suggested, narcissistic gratification can be gained through love or achievement. In the Bildungsroman women try to gain achievement through love. Men do just the opposite: they gain love after achievement. It is their reward for battling all of the monsters and dragons that figure so prominently in romance literature. In Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Viking, 1982), p. xxi, Rachel Brownstein writes, "In a novel, a 'realistic' rewriting of romance, a conscious female protagonist takes the quester's place. It is a she who is the representative of searching humanity; and she also continues to represent the obscure and vulnerable beautiful ideal. In the woman-centered novel she represents specifically the ideal of the integral self. What the female protagonist of a traditional novel seeks — what the plot moves her toward—is an achieved, finished identity, realized in conclusive union with her-self-as-heroine." But all too often this is done or sought through a husband who is mentor or guide. Trouble ensues when the ego ideals of the two partners do not cohere, as is the case in Portrait of a Lady.

9 Ibsen's Doll House: A Myth For Our Time

"I

ASK you directly: is there one mother among thousands of mothers, one wife among thousands of wives, who could behave as Nora behaves, who would desert husband, children, and home merely in order to become 'a human being'? I answer with conviction: no and again no!"1 Thus was the world premiere of A Doll House on December 21, 1879, greeted by the critic and theatre-manager M. W. Brun. He was not an isolated male chauvinist. On the contrary, critical sympathy was almost entirely with Torvald Helmer rather than with his wife, Nora. It would be a rash man today who would defend Torvald. If there is one work that qualifies as a myth of our time, it is A Doll House, if we mean by myth the embodiment of the ideals and aspirations of a sex. Though Ibsen professed to be interested in the rights of humanity rather than in those of women alone when he wrote the play, it is primarily the consciousness of women that it now seems to embody. A Doll House can be seen as the feminist play par excellence. That this is so reveals to us the uses of interpretation as mediation between ourselves and the cultural achievements of the past, for when works are profound and complex, they become the subjects of antithetical interpretations. From a feminist point of view, Nora is the new adventurer, a mythic hero for women to emulate, a rehabilitated Eve who has the courage to leave the garden in search of knowledge. There is no aspect of the contemporary women's movement that Ibsen doesn't anticipate and comment on. In this sense, he may rightly US

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be termed a seer. He questions all the underpinnings of our sexual politics: the assumptions of romantic love and marriage, the restrictions of the home in the nuclear family, the stereotypes of sexual polarization, the equation of functional with biological motherhood, the "nature" of femininity itself. He explores the nature of freedom for both sexes and considers the relationship of the individual to past and future as well as to the family and the state. Finally, he questions the traditional view of history. It is by raising the central questions about women in our time in imaginatively compelling form that the play achieves mythical status. Whether Ibsen intended it as such is not even to the point, for the defining characteristic of myths is that they can bear the meanings we read into them. Viewed thus, a coherent reading of the play emerges in which all of the time-honored domestic truths are laid open to question and woman emerges in a new light. Ibsen, no less than Flaubert, might have stated that his aim was to shock the bourgeoisie. Marriage is no longer sacrosanct for either writer. For the Scandinavian even more than the Frenchman, home is the great prison. It is significant that while ancient heroes never seem to be caged in by houses but rather live outside in the entire universe, modern heroes are possessed by their boxes. At the end of the play, Nora cries, "But our home's been nothing but a playpen. I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child."2 Her refusal to be an angel in the house, a doll in the playroom, can be seen as an act of existential courage, for by giving up preconceived roles for women and leaving home, she is abandoning the walls that protect as well as those that restrict. Insofar as the home is a prison for Ibsen, it is that for men as well as women. He gives the lie to the belief just born in the nineteenth century that home is a place where one can be oneself. On the contrary, the home is the training ground for our roles as actors. It is that for little boys as well as little girls, as Ibsen shows in his brief but pointed treatment of Nora's children. The whole world of the Helmer household is a masquerade. Nora, the little doll, grows up to be a big doll. She wears a mask of "feminine" dependency, designed to please Helmer. This masking is literally revealed in the scene where she dances the

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tarantella in a costume brought back from Italy years before. The masquerade scene forms an ironic counterpoint to Nora's real part in the Helmers' Italian journey. Far from having been dependent, submissive, and entertaining in that episode, Nora had forged a signature in order to obtain money for her husband's travel cure. Much of her subsequent life with Torvald involves the attempt to hide this reality. For much of the time she acts the part of a charming child, wheedling, cajoling, lying about not eating macaroons, and playing with her own children as if they were her dolls, thus insuring transmission of the problem to the next generation. But at the same time that she is acting, she is working—sewing, crocheting, embroidering, copying, all to pay back the debt she contracted to save her husband's life. Certainly, much of the "problem" aspect of the play hinges on women's economic dependency and men's pride. Nora has to assuage Torvald's vulnerable ego by appearing economically as well as emotionally dependent. One of the fascinations of A Doll House lies in Ibsen's treatment of classical oppositions: body/mind, feeling/reason, darkness/light, passivity/activity, gentleness/strength. The first member of the dualism has been traditionally associated with women, the second with men. We now refer to these dualisms as feminine and masculine stereotypes. Through his pervasive use of this binary mode of thinking, Ibsen places himself squarely in a mythical tradition. But by overturning the usual working of the mode, he becomes the creator of a new mythology. It is actually Helmer, authoritarian, rigid, correct, who is far weaker than the childlike, flirtatious, flighty Nora. It is he who turns out to be the creature of feeling, he who is a slave of the body, he who will be left in darkness at the end. Torvald has never outgrown the need for things that Rilke, in an essay called "Puppen" ("Dolls") written some thirty-five years after the play, sees as the most obsessive preoccupation of childhood. 3 The epithets Helmer uses—his wife is a lark, a squirrel, a sparrow—seem to indicate less her dependence than his, his reaching back to a childhood world of comforting pets and toys. At the moments that Nora angers him by her seeming stubborness, she becomes that terrifying creature, "a woman," which is a

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term of abuse for Torvald, whatever it may have become in our own time. He cannot handle her then, for she no longer fits into the doll house. There is no question but that the doll house is more his than hers, for she is the one who leaves it while he remains. Moderate feminists will blame the strains of the outside world for Torvald's need to create a doll house, in which everything— from mending to women—has to be attractive and in its place. (In some respects he is similar to that aesthete that Henry James created as a husband for Isabel Archer.) More radical feminists will see him as a villain and Nora as the victim of male arrogance and domination. Yet the play is more complicated than mere melodrama. At the end, when Nora speaks of becoming an individual like Torvald, she is still being in one respect duped by appearances. Torvald's freedom is as limited as hers. He too is a puppet. Though he is permitted to live in a doll house, which provides a kind of refuge from a world of increasing bureaucratization, in other respects he is never allowed to take off his mask of "masculinity," least of all by Nora, who leaves him when he does so. This is a point that many readers ignore, but one that indicates that men's freedom is tied up with that of women. Nora is less fragile than her husband needs to believe, yet part of her "mask" has become real. She is not nearly as independent toward the end of the play as some actresses (or directors) represent her. What she longs for until the final moments is a romantic hero capable of being her savior, hardly a feminist ideal. And yet, as we shall see, this desire is perhaps not as far removed from feminism as might at1 first seem the case. In The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage, a work Ibsen must have known indirectly if not directly, Kierkegaard, in opposition to such cynical romantics as Byron, had argued for the existence of romantic love in marriage. If romantic love thrives on obstacles, then what could be more of an obstacle than marriage itself, the Dane asked with characteristic brilliance. When once there awakens an apprehension of love's proper dialectic, an apprehension of its pathological struggle, of its relation to the ethical, to the religious, verily one will not have need of hard-hearted fathers or

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ladies' bowers or enchanted princesses or ogres and monsters in order to give love plenty to do. 4

As if in mind of this passage, Ibsen has Helmer long to be a knight of marriage: "You know what, Nora—time and again I've wished you were in some terrible danger, just so I could stake my life and soul and everything, for your sake" (104). We expect no one to be a hero any more, partly because of such plays as Ibsen's. But within A Doll House the possibility of heroism still seems to exist. Immediately after Torvald speaks his aspiring lines, the chance comes for him to prove himself. But when he learns of Nora's forgery, this would-be knight fails the test, and attacks his wife in a loathing born of cowardice. His greatest fear is that of losing his honor or the appearance of it. For all his protestations of sacrificial love, his "honor" resides in the state, not his wife. It is his failure to live up to the chivalric ideal that causes the play's denouement, for, ironically. Nora's dream was the same as his: TORVALD: Can you tell me what I did to lose your love? NORA: Yes, I can tell you. It was this evening when the miraculous thing didn't come—then I knew you weren't the man I'd imagined. . . . I was so utterly sure that you'd step forward, take the blame on yourself and say: I am the guilty one. (112)

Kierkegaard had advocated a marriage of "candor, openheartedness, revelation, understanding." These are our ideals in marriage today. But once the mystery and illusion disappear from the Helmer marriage, it is destroyed. In Kierkegaardian terms, Torvald never transcends the aesthetic. He is incapable of reaching the ethical. Nora too is unable to reach the ethical sphere, for as soon as Torvald fails to live up to her image of him, she rejects him. She leaves him, not, as her twentieth-century sisters might, because he shelters her too much, but rather because he does not shelter her enough. Once she sees that he is not a hero, she wants no part of him. Ibsen here seems to deal a death blow to the myth of romantic love in marriage, at least that love which is based on illusion. At the same time he suggests a reason for the growth of Nora's selfawareness. What is more important for the play's status as myth,

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he suggests a reason for the change in many women's consciousness today. It is disillusionment over Torvald that provides the soil out of which Nora's feminism grows. In large measure the feminist movement is a revolt against the myth of romantic love. Feminists attack it as a tool of oppression, a propaganda device designed to keep women in the home. But theirs may also be a cri de coeur for something that has gone sour or something that is found not to exist. Many an individual feminist's history is not very different from Nora's. Nora leaves to find herself. That's one reason. She also leaves to allow Torvald time to find himself. She doesn't give up her dream of a miracle, but now the "greatest miracle" would consist of their transforming themselves so that their living together would be a true marriage. If Ibsen had stopped here, a feminist interpretation of the play would hardly be possible, for it would seem to view marriage as the final solution to the woman problem, something that feminists refuse to accept. But Ibsen did not stop here. The possibility of divorce looms large when Nora slams the door. Thus A Doll House becomes a landmark play in the history of Western literature. It is not only a play about falling out of love, as Maurice Valency says, 5 it is also a play in which divorce is posited as a potentially happy ending, at least for one of the members in a relationship. This is another reason for according the play mythical status in our time. While leaving the husband no longer seems like much of a crime, it is hard even in the twentieth century to face the fact that Mommy may not live at home any more. In this regard we are little different from Ibsen's German audience, who demanded a revised ending. Critics as temperate and astute as Elizabeth Hardwick and John Weightman ask why Nora didn't take her children with her. Even some feminists—those who advocate the right to single motherhood—condemn Ibsen for making Nora seem heartless and cruel to her children. Actually it is less a desire for freedom than a great sense of inferiority and the desire to find out more about the male world outside the home that drives Nora away from her children. In his notes to the play, Ibsen says, "There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman." 6 Nora loses

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her faith in her moral right and ability to bring up her children when she finds out that the act she committed out of love is labeled a crime by the world at large. One should remember also that, unlike our contemporary situation, custody in Ibsen's time was normally retained by the father. Furthermore, Nora was not expected to have sole responsibility for the rearing of her children. That responsibility was partly with Anne Marie, the governess, who had brought up Nora herself. While Ibsen's contemporaries no doubt recognized this fact more than our servantless age is likely to, they nonetheless granted Nora a greater importance as mother than she felt herself to have. Another way in which Ibsen gives voice to the modern consciousness is in showing that when mothers feel negligible they will abandon house, as, for example, Ellida Wangel is tempted to do in Lady from the Sea before she is granted the freedom that alone enables her to take on responsibility toward her stepchildren. But Ibsen did not believe in making women feel important as mothers as a way of keeping them at home for the husbands. He rejects this time-honored means of control at the end of A Doll House, at least in the version that he chose to hand down to posterity. He did, however, write an alternate ending for his most conservative audience. Ibsen said he was outraged at having to tack on a conciliatory ending for the German production, but because he was not protected by copyright laws in Germany, and knowing that his work could be tampered with by others, he decided to meet the German request for revision.7 In the alternative German ending, Helmer forces Nora to the door of the children's bedroom and tells her that, if she leaves, they will be motherless, as she was before them. This convinces her to stay.8 In point of psychological fact, Ibsen is more accurate in having her leave them. She is simply repeating a pattern made familiar in her childhood. In another German version, not by Ibsen, after some time lapse Nora asks Helmer if she is forgiven. For an answer, he pops a forbidden macaroon into her mouth. 9 Such an ending reduces Nora to a cartoon character of the old mythology. It reinforces

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her in the passive, dependent, submissive, coy role that is overthrown in the authentic version of the play. For much of the play, Nora exhibits all the "feminine" traits that Freud was later to find destined by anatomy: childishness, narcissism, passivity, maternality, irrationality, and lack of a sense of justice. Yet within the space of a few minutes she sheds them all. I do not think it was because Ibsen was interested in novelty for novelty's sake, or in giving dramatic shocks to his audience, that this happens, though these were the reasons suggested by his earliest critics. Rather, Ibsen is exploring the question of biology versus social conditioning and its part in social history, an issue that is very much in the forefront of thinking about women today. In her rejection of the doll house, Nora blames her environment, not her genes, for her doll-like qualities. Considering her transformation, Ibsen seems to be supporting her feminist point of view. Her transformation becomes doubly credible when we realize that her so-called femininity was for much of her life largely an act. Nora's awakening is typical and therefore archetypal; however, her characterization grew out of the stuff of reality, not myth. It was Laura Petersen Kieler, a writer, who provided the model.10 One might question why Ibsen changed the original model and deprived Nora of any special talents, but by doing so, he reduced the problem of feminine selfhood to that of kinship relationships, where in fact the greater dramatic challenge lay. And—if one wishes to take a purely polemical view of the play, for a moment —that is even where the greater challenge lay with regard to the issue of women's subjection. The public might have been willing to grant that a writer needs a room of her own; even today it feels otherwise about a mere wife and mother. Ibsen tried to show that every person needs a room that is larger than a playpen. He transformed the Kieler story in other ways as well, for the problem in the Kieler case was not that of the wife's autonomy. In reality, it was the husband who left the wife after finding out about her sacrifice. He even had her committed to a mental institution for a month.11 Phyllis Chesler, in Women and Madness, contends that men deal with deviant behavior in women by institutionalizing them,12 but in all fairness one must add that Laura

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Kieler herself had written (of her attempts to earn money before her husband's discovery): "I worked harder and harder, my health grew worse and worse, and I was expecting another child. My overtaxed brain gave out; I saw visions; fancy appeared to me reality."13 Ibsen discards this aspect of the story, and reveals himself to be more emancipated than many writers today by refusing to take his heroine down the road of mental collapse. (He also rejects another traditional ending for the feminine hero, that of suicide, although he has Nora consider it.) Laura Kieler was reconciled with her husband, after a two-year separation, so as to be reunited with her children. While Laura Kieler claimed that Ibsen grew rich on her tears in producing A Doll House, what is striking to the reader today are Ibsen's metamorphoses of the basic conservatism of the Kieler story. Laura Kieler ultimately chose marriage and motherhood, but Nora's solution is thoroughly romantic in the philosophical sense of the term. Ibsen invests his heroine with a romantic emphasis on self that had been restricted to males earlier in the century. In a sense, the existential variety of feminism, which seeks personal fulfillment, may be seen as the last vestige of the romantic movement, for its posits the good of the individual over that of the social order. Then, too, the social order itself is becoming more fluid. As Rolf Fjelde, Ibsen's critic and translator, has said, "Ibsen lives in a universe where essences are no longer given a priori out of a fixed, eternal order, out of some Platonic idea of man and woman, but rather in a flowing process where selves are chiefly defined by the choices they make" (xxvi). It is Nora in this play who makes the choices; she is a revolutionary in that she seeks to break out of ordained categories for women. What is almost unique about Ibsen's treatment is that she does not do so through the usual route of sexual transgression with a man, the way of a Madame Bovary, for example. Instead, she acts by herself, without a man to aid her. Although he doesn't deny the individual's right to love, Ibsen does not share the romantic's exaltation of passion as a liberating force. The one major feminist issue that Ibsen slights is that of sexual rights. Yet one way of getting away from stereotyped views of woman was to detach her from her sexuality.

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Ibsen creates a new Eve; A Doll House offers a new interpretation of Genesis. Though Nora has done a forbidden thing in entering into a pact with that devil Krogstad, from whom she obtained the loan, her desire will not be to her husband nor will she be ruled by him (Genesis 3:16). She will go forth to seek knowledge, not through the intermediary of a husband, or indeed of any man, but rather by herself. Through her, Ibsen rejects what had been most prominent in the Western tradition, the vicarious existence of women. This is perhaps the dominant appeal of the play at this moment. Having suggested in what ways A Doll House can be seen as a myth of the feminist or liberated consciousness, I must point out that it is a myth in at least two other senses as well: tragic and fictive. Like the great tragic myths of the past, it can be used to illuminate general rather than transient truths. It is also a myth in the much narrower sense that it lends itself to our illusions and fantasies. We may be as mistaken about the meaning of the play now as we think the earliest viewers were. In his notes, Ibsen referred to A Doll House as a "tragedy of modern times."14 Some readers might consider Helmer the tragic figure, but he seems more pathetic than tragic to me; he never seems fully conscious of what has happened to him. If we look closely at the play, however, we see that Nora does fit a possible tragic pattern. One often hears the argument that there is no modern tragedy in the strict traditional sense. Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern tragedy is that its characters take on mythical significance outside rather than inside the play. A Doll House does fit this meaning of tragedy, for it has affected the lives of great numbers of people outside the play. What is more, Nora is perhaps more like the tragic figure of Antigone 15 than like any other dramatic character. Like Antigone, Nora is willing to give up all the appeals of love and marriage and state in the name of a higher "law." But, like Antigone, she cannot be considered totally in the right. The tragic import of Ibsen's play lies in what Hegel in his analysis of Antigone conceived of as a clash between two rights. In Ibsen, the claims of marriage and motherhood on one hand and those of the self, on the other, provide an irreconcilable conflict

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which feminist readers today are prone to resolve in favor of Nora's decision. Yet the clash is there and accounts for the enduring tension of the play. I have already said that Nora acts by herself. Nor does Antigone think of Haemon (Creon's son, to whom she is betrothed) in the most dangerous act of her life, burial of her brother, Polyneices, in defiance of Creon's order. Both heroines give up all the protections that have traditionally been afforded women. Yet we must not forget that Antigone's civil disobedience is based on divine law with respect to kinship. But Nora divests herself entirely of family ties. Only her first disobedience, the forgery, is carried out for the sake of her family. Her second "disobedience," the leave-taking, destroys family ties altogether. Paradoxically, even though she leaves in part to find out about the legal workings of the state, her leaving goes against the laws of the state and is sanctioned only by the demands of the self. Like Sophocles, Ibsen treats different codes of law within his play: that of men or the state, which is often satisfied with the mere appearance of right; that of women or the family, which depends on love and personal ties and may be at odds with the code of the state, as in the case of Nora's "crime"; and that of the self, which posits the claims of the individual as the highest good. By the end of A Doll House, Ibsen's Nora has replaced Sophocles' law of the gods with the law of the self The audience knows what happens to the hero and heroine in a closed society like Antigone's. It does not know what happens to Nora. Some critics claim that Ibsen's play ends where it should begin, but, in an open and fluid society such as Ibsen's and, even more, ours, this ending is the most authentic precisely because it is the most ambiguous. While Nora ultimately rejects a romanticism that rests on illusion and fantasy, she accepts a more profound romantic value in her assertion of the primacy of the individual over all other claims. Unlike Madame Bovary, with whom she initially shares some of the same fantasies about romantic love, Nora seems totally realistic at the end of the play, a Mme Bovary come of age. But is she? What is more illusory than to think that she can go out into the man's world, with no money and no occupation, and survive? Our question should not be

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whether she is going to come back but rather whether she is going to make it at all. This is not to say that Ibsen was against women's emancipation. Within his own lifetime, he fought for it, particularly for economic justice. In the play, however, he gives voice to what Max Weber was much later to call the ethical irrationality of human experience, the recognition that wherever there are individuals, families, and states, there will be conflicting claims, and that choosing one over the other inevitably entails losses. Reading the play from the point of view of tragedy may cause us to think again about what we identify as a myth for our time. To present readers A Doll House is about the shattering of illusion. With one slam of the door, Ibsen seems to bring down the doll house and all that it rests on. This is the aspect of the play that is impossible to ignore today, although it seemed easy enough to ignore for Ibsen's contemporaries. But it is the play's very ambivalences that allow first one reading and then another, and it is these ambivalences that we are in danger of ignoring. We tend to read the play as if we were free of the illusions that beset Nora and Torvald. But we are ourselves the victims of illusion if we think the outcome of the play is univocal. We are treating it as a myth in the sense of fantasy if we think that the play is about the triumph of individualism, particularly feminine individualism. That the individualism is there is incontestable, but that it is triumphant is far from certain. Every aspect of the play yields similar ambivalences. Because home seems so obviously like a prison to many of us today, it is easy to read Ibsen as if he agreed; indeed, there is ample evidence in his own life that he was enamored of neither house nor country. But Ibsen was often more ambivalent in his writing than in his conduct. He was precise and explicit in his stage directions for A Doll House; his requirements for lighting and properties were intended to convey symbolic and double-edged values. For example, the play moves from light and color in the opening act to a final scene of relative darkness when Nora takes off her masquerade costume and leaves. Yet where does the true light lie? In that darkness that precedes what may or may not be a new birth, or in the comforts of home illuminated by its Christmas tree

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glitter? Can we be sure that all the brightness of the opening is false? Feminists today reject the concept of marriage as salvation for the partners. If we look only at Nora and Torvald's failure, Ibsen would seem to be rejecting it also. Yet the relationship of Nora's childhood friend, Kristine Linde, and Krogstad, from whom Nora secured the loan, provides an interesting foil to the Helmer marriage. Mrs. Linde is willing to marry a man who is less than morally upright partly because she thinks of marriage as the means of insuring his rehabilitation. One must conclude that Ibsen is not necessarily rejecting the idea of marriage as salvation. What Ibsen does show unequivocally in the Helmer marriage is that men don't know themselves any better than women do. It is a fantasy to think that to live with someone means to know him. At the end of the play Nora hints at a relationship of equality that might take the place of the oppressive polarization that had characterized the Helmer marriage. It is this vision of equality, perhaps even more than the vision of individualism, that obsesses the modern consciousness. Some couples pride themselves on having achieved equality. Yet the idea of equality may be the biggest fantasy of all. We say we want it when in fact we may want something quite different. Power, for example. Many a man who says he favors equality thinks that in fact he is superior to his wife. What I am suggesting is that the roles of sexual equality may be used as a mask in much the same way that the roles of sexual polarization have been. The matter is further complicated by the anomalous nature of the concept. "Equality" has become a slogan, at once explosive and vague, that may stand for all sorts of incompatible advantages. One of the questions that some feminists are raising in their search for totality is why it is that women, as opposed to men, are always the ones faced with the dilemma of reconciling the conflicting claims of family, state, and individual. Of course, men have conflicts also. While Nora's conflict is primarily that between the family and the self, Torvald's conflict, if he were conscious enough to have one, would be between the state and the self, for men's duty is seen to lie in the state whereas women's lies traditionally in the family. Although Torvald has separated him-

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self from his children almost completely, it is not because he is fulfilling his individuality. The fact is that he is not aware of a self to express. And so it has been with most men, who have been slaves to the state the way that most women have been slaves to the family. Moderate feminists who have found a niche in public life do not see a conflict between the state and the individual only because they are so happy to be part of the state that they overlook its faults. In its desire for a piece of the capitalist pie, this branch of feminism is exceedingly conservative. It is possible to ask whether the solution to the problem of irreconcilable male and female spheres might not lie in reconstructed social arrangements. Ibsen himself, in the same speech in which he denied being a feminist in A Doll House, said: I have always looked on it as a mission to elevate the nation and give the people a higher status. Two factors come into play in this process; and it rests with the mothers by means of strenuous and protracted exertions to rouse a conscious sense of culture and discipline. These must be created in human beings before the people can be raised higher. It is the women who shall solve the problem of humanity. As mothers they are to do it. And only so can they do it. 16

Radical feminists find the answer to the problem of irreconcilable spheres to lie in the complete overthrow of the capitalist system. Theoretically, the Marxist solution would remove the conflict among family, state, and individual by having the state wither away and communalizing the care of children. In practice, however, no socialist country has afforded women economic, political, or social equality, perhaps because the socialism is still patriarchal socialism. A Doll House itself offers some evidence that women and men will effect changes together. A few years before the contemporary movement got underway, Maurice Valency offered a perceptive interpretation of the "miracle" that Nora desires at the end of the play as the unity of those opposing characteristics that have so often disrupted the relationships of men and women: The opposition of irreconcilable viewpoints which brings about the dissolution of this union is then seen to be a reflection of the vast conflict which is bringing about a readjustment of social relations on every level.

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The only possible reconciliation of the spiritual entities which are here displayed in opposition must be, accordingly, in terms of the synthesis which will, in its largest aspect, result in the Third Empire.17

Here is where I think that mythology and literary criticism meet. The play may be ambivalent on many points, but insofar as Ibsen suggests a coming change in worldview—and many respectable critics think he does just that—the play speaks to the feminist insistence that the patriarchal world is doomed and that we are on the verge of entering a new order in history.

Notes 1. Quoted in Folkets Avis (24 Dec.) and cited in Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, "The First Nora: Notes on the World Premiere of A Doll's House," in Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen: Proceedings of the International Ibsen Seminary, Cambridge, Aug. 1970 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1971), p. 86. 2. Ibsen: Four Major Plays, vol. i, A Doll House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Signet, NAL, 1965), 109. All references will be to this edition. Page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text. 3. See the pertinent beginning of an essay on Rodin (4: 377-78), in Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans., intro., and commentary by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), p. 100. 4. A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 81. 5. Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to the Modern Drama, Ibsen and Strindberg (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 156. 6. The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 5, Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, Ghosts, trans, and ed. James Walter McFarlane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 436. 7. Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen: The Farewell to Poetry 1864-1882 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), p. 268. 8. See The Oxford Ibsen, pp. 287-88. 9. The Oxford Ibsen, p. 457. TO. Meyer, Henrik Ibsen, p. 266. 11. Ibid., p. 252. 12. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1972). 13. B. M. Kinck, "Laura Kieler: The Model for Ibsen's Nora," trans. Charles Archer, The London Mercury, 1937, p. 14. 14. The Oxford Ibsen, p. 434.

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15. See Antigone, in Sophocles, Greek Tragedies, vol. i, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1968). 16. See Ibsen's "Speech to the Norwegian Women's Rights League," Kristiania, 26 May 1898. 17. Valency, The Flower and the Castle, p. 155.

10 Women and Love: Some Dying Myths

This chapter was originally published in 1980. While much remains true, it is extraordinary to see how much has also changed, particularly our attitude toward romantic love. I was going to revise the essay in the light of this new development but then decided to let it stand, both as a record of an earlier time and feeling, and as an illustration to us in retrospect of how quickly events in the culture can overturn attitudes toward love. Then too, since we may change our minds again, it is possible that the central theme here will reassert itself.

''"L

ove is disappearing. . . . Only some stupid fools will still make it the chief theme of the world. Romeo and Juliet bore me prodigiously. We have at last learned now to make the sauce without those deplorable fish."1 Verlaine was here speaking about poets. But what he said holds true in some measure for the rest of us as well. Romantic love is dying. And with it is dying the typology of women that nourished it, or at least one form of it. From ancient times, dual and polar conceptions of women have fed the literary and cultural imagination (not always a romantic one, to be sure). They have been those of goddess and witch, virgin and whore, wife and mistress, all of them often having a paradigmatic and even mythical significance. But as Lionel Trilling recognized in his essay "The Fate of Pleasure," Joyce's Molly 161

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and Yeats's Maud are perhaps the last women in literature to carry mythical meaning.2 This is a cultural change of profound significance whose consequences we have yet to realize. Yeats both lived and wrote without resolving the sexual dualisms. In many of his major poems, he expressed an antithesis between beauty, passion, and the dream at one pole, and domestic serenity and order at the other. Maud Gönne, the beautiful Irish revolutionary, was linked in his mind with his love for Ireland, nature, and the great myths of the past, namely those of ancient Greece. But of Géorgie Hyde-Lees, he wrote, "My wife is a perfect wife, kind, wise, and unselfish. . . . She has made my life serene and full of order." 3 Like some of the turbulent romantics of the nineteenth century, Yeats ultimately sought peace, not passion, in women, at least in marriage, But the Mauds of the world do not emigrate easily from the imagination. They settle in, however uncomfortable they may make the other tenants. It is the thought of Maud's Ledean body that drives the poet's heart wild, even in old age. Joyce, the other great Irish writer of the century, also saw women in mythical terms. But Molly represents not so much one side of a duality as a paradoxical unity, embodying the antithetical mythical archetypes: virgin, whore, and wife. Whether collective or essential, Molly as a voice of nature seems one of those residues of racial experience that haunts the darkness of our minds to emerge in dream or literature with hints of all but unspeakable significance.4

So wrote a male critic: W. Y. Tindall. I'm not sure, however, that women would view her in quite this way nowadays. And whatever one may think of it, feminism has taught us all to be interested in the feminine character rather than in the imaginative male response alone. From this point of view, one might question whether it is truly a woman's consciousness that comes through in that final affirmative soliloquy with its rush of flowers and sexual generosity. Despite the enormous power of Molly's characterization, one feels that Joyce's treatment of women and sex is sometimes infantile. As one of his critics and countrymen, Darcy

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O'Brien, put it, "Irishmen continue to have it in for women, even when they have it out for them." Nonetheless, Joyce as well as Yeats could still think of women as leading one upwards and onwards, as well as downwards and backwards. Such power is no longer granted them. Eliot also reworks the ancient myths. However, he does so only in ironic counterpoint to the present, which is so impoverished, it cannot sustain them. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," mermaids and sirens no longer sing to men, but "each to each." I do not think that Eliot would like being the bedfellow of certain contemporary women poets, such as Anne Sexton and Margaret Atwood, but the fact is that they reinterpret the myths in similar ways. In all three, mythical figures no longer reach out to men as they once did but rather have an autonomous existence. However, the meaning of this transformation is quite different in Eliot and the women writers. Feminist poets want to destroy the traditional myths as shapers of consciousness, for they feel that it is a false consciousness that has been created, one that reifies women and deprives them of humanity. For these writers, civilization has always been a matter of discontents. Eliot is also discontented with modern civilization, not because it is like the past, however, but rather because it is unlike it. For him, traditional culture has a positive, one might even say, a transcendent function. The myths in their most powerful form released energy and gave form to human life. In "The Wasteland," that vast burial ground for Western civilization, mythical types appear but only as ghosts or cripples. Cleopatra in the twentieth century is a neurasthenic. The great lovers of the past are reduced to an anaesthetized typist and her "young man carbuncular," bored and unfeeling on her divan, that combination sofa, bed, and clothes wardrobe. The anomie of Eliot's scene points ahead to the new sexual morality and maps out the dark side of its landscape. His is one of the most devastating surveys of the death of love. Yet, even with such a barren terrain before them, it was hard for many to let go of the idea of romantic love. In 1929, Joseph Wood Krutch observed that only when such love has fully disap-

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peared will we know how bleak the world can be.5 I'm not sure that I agree; other ages got along quite well without such love, but perhaps we have now arrived at the point where it is no longer with us. Some authors, to be sure, have hung on gallantly to love, earlier in the century, for the most part, when it was somewhat easier to do so. For Lawrence, sexual love is itself the new religion —perhaps not so new when one considers that in the thirteenth century Gottfried von Strassburg had offered a love religion in his Tristan as an alternative to Christianity. But for Lawrence, sexual salvation requires the putting to sleep of consciousness and rationality, a process that even his strongest devotees are unlikely to follow except in fantasy, where it poses no threat to the self, and his is perhaps less a myth of love than a myth of sex, as Malraux recognized years ago.6 As for the typology, much about Lawrence's women seems new, at first. He tried to incorporate within the wife those elements that had formerly existed only in the mistress, and sought to replace the old Tolstoyan morality with something more life affirming. But one doesn't have to be a feminist to take offense at his concept of "phallic marriage," in which each man rules a small kingdom. It is surely of some significance that those authors who have the most democratic view of men, such as Rousseau and Lawrence, also speak much about love within marriage, but in doing so, they adhere to a most undemocratic view of women. Lawrence's heroines, Lady Chatterley, for example, are mere satellite soul mates for their men. As such their type reaches back to the medieval Heloïse, to Plutarch's description of the wife in "Advice to Bride and Groom," and finally to St. Paul himself. If the polar types are disappearing, not much of this disappearance is due to Lawrence or to any of the few other romantic writers of the century, for they hold on fiercely to a traditional polarization of women and of the sexes in general. Hemingway is a case in point. But it is a lost cause. Most women can only shudder at the utterances of his Maria and Catherine Barkley today. This disappearance of the types is due, at least in part, to increasing interiorization, More and more we are retreating from

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the institutional expressions of our myths into a private sphere where we seek self-validation. This interiorization has much to do with women's influence. I don't mean by this simply the current outcry of feminists against the old typology, although assuredly they have been vocal in this matter. I am talking, rather, about women as creators of a new cultural view. At least until recently, it was generally fashionable, even among women, to speak of women as the mere conservers of culture. But when we look at certain writers, such as Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and even Doris Lessing, we must give credence to Madame de Staël's statement, made almost two centuries ago, that women have been discoverers of the interior self. They have been pioneers of the inner frontier. The more literature retreats from the interpretation of an external world, the less it rests on the conscious processes of the mind, the more women both as writers and characters become important. This is not to say that men have not been great experimenters —one need merely think of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot. However, it may well be that the twentieth-century concept of "spatial form," for example, with its rejection of linear plot progression as in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, or the presentation of multiple consciousness, i.e., the more or less direct rendering of the interior life of different characters, as in Woolf's To the Lighthouse, or the representation of a single fragmented consciousness as in Lessing's Golden Notebook have been forms particularly influenced by and congenial to women. The reasons for this interiorization are rooted in biology as well as culture. Childbearing and childrearing, preparing food and organizing domestic life are cyclical activities. The reality they represent is circular and repetitive rather than linear and progressive as are the activities of most men. Traditionally, the circumstances of their lives gave women a greater interest in the texture of experience rather than in its range. Even when individual women writers did not experience conventional women's lives, they no doubt were influenced by the norms for their sex, as all of us, even the rebels among us, inevitably are. It is this tradition of interiorizing that informs the technique in To the Lighthouse, where Woolf dismisses World War I in one

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bracketed sentence. It is the death of her heroine, Mrs. Ramsay, that is by far the greater cataclysm. In her similarities to the great mythical figures of the past—Eve, Mary, Helen, Penelope— Mrs. Ramsay, the classically beautiful mother of eight, might seem to be grounded in typology. If one were so inclined, one might accuse Woolf of falling back on the usual stereotypes of women as the mere conservers of culture, for her woman artist, Lily Briscoe, is old maidish in Woolf's own terms; she isn't very good besides, for her work will hang in attics only. One wonders just what psychic or social conspiracy has kept women writers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from offering as types their own image, that of the female artist who is successful. What deficiency in ego or desire to dwell on the fictive? Yet such questions turn out to be unjust to Woolf's intent, for if the artist teaches us to see, to unite disparate fragments into an integrated vision, it is the mother, according to Woolf, who teaches us to fuse the smells, sights, and tastes of the moment into the act of living itself, perhaps the greatest artistic achievement. In Mrs. Ramsay's feminine force and energy (presented in traditionally masculine terms), her power over self and others (it is she who imposes form and order on the life and lives surrounding her), Woolf provides a foil to Lawrence's phallic glorification. Woolf's concept of androgyny—that is, the fusion of those aspects of consciousness that have traditionally been assigned to one or the other of the sexes—is one modern answer to sexual polarization and the dualism of types. While women's consciousness has influenced twentieth-century literary types and the general movement toward interiorization in the culture, vast social and intellectual changes, all of them affecting interiorization in some way also, have enabled women to turn from the traditional social virtues of self-sacrifice and chastity to the individual aims of self-development and sexual satisfaction. In the past, society's primary need was to reproduce, a need that both fostered and was supported by the sexual typology of virgin, wife, and mother. The antithetical figures of prostitute, sorceress, and witch represented women's latent rebellion against their sexual restrictions (as well as men's attraction to and fear of female sexuality). All of these types were institutionalized within

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the social structure as a means of achieving social ends. However, now that reproduction is no longer a primary aim, the necessity for these dualistic types has largely disappeared. Moreover, the contraceptive revolution of medical technology has eliminated that chasm between reproduction and sexual pleasure that gave typological structure to our mythology for centuries. Yet the dualistic types are still with us, dying but not gone. And that is because they are rooted not simply in the social structure but in the unconscious as well. To put it another way, one might say that the social structure represents the particular historic manifestation of a "timeless" psychological reality. Some non-Freudians feel that it is possible that the "reality" may itself be changed by a social structure whose revisions are far-reaching enough. This has yet to be determined. But there is some evidence, for example, that technological changes are already affecting our unconscious symbolism. Perhaps other innovations will produce even more extreme modifications in the psyche. By making conscious what was formerly unconscious, psychoanalysis itself has contributed to the dying of the myths. Kleinians posit the origin of polar myths, for example, the goddess/witch dualism, in the child's earliest experiences. When the mother brings food and warmth, comfort and nurturance, the child perceives her as the magical goddess figure. But when she deprives and frustrates as she inevitably must, the mother becomes the witch in the infant's limited world. In his "Contributions to the Psychology of Love," Freud examines the polarity of the wife/ mistress and madonna/prostitute, seeing in the unconscious fantasies of childhood and the prohibitions of adolescence the reasons for the dissociation in some men's erotic life, "divided between two channels, the same two that are personified in art as heavenly and earthly (or animal) love."7 While Freud saw the dualisms as originating in earliest experience, as the result of infantile perception and misperception of biological difference, he believed that the work of reason would depolarize the unconscious and moderate its ambivalences and contradictions—that is, he thought that we could free ourselves from the tyranny of the unconscious. Jung, on the contrary, felt that the mind had a predisposition toward dualism, much the way

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that animals have innate releasing mechanisms. For him, the types are archetypes existing from all eternity. If Jung is right, then no change in social structure or childrearing would seriously affect the typology of women; one would have to change the structure of the mind itself to do so. One wonders why Jung is so popular among feminists, considering that they want to eliminate the types. Despite his pessimism, Freud offers more hope to those who want change. Perhaps most crucial, he felt that in the deepest level of the unconscious, the polarized types were united. (See the end of Chapter 7.) Yet most feminists in the seventies, with the notable and praiseworthy exception of Juliet Mitchell, rejected Freud, deploring that he was "culture bound." The irony is that they themselves grant culture total power over personality, ignoring those biological and psychological forces that might stand as bulwarks against the onslaughts of culture (a point that Lionel Trilling made in another context). Many women theorists are happy with the Marxist interpretation of the dualities simply as an artificially constructed system of rewards and punishments designed to keep woman marginal within the economy. They are happy with it because an economic system is seemingly easier to change than either biology or psychology. According to the Marxist view, ending the economic oppression of women would produce the death rattle of the typology. To a certain extent this has happened. Changing the work people do can change the ways in which they are viewed; sometimes, however, it merely changes the status that is awarded the work, and this has to do with reasons that are less economic than psychological. Furthermore, some of the consequences of increased economic freedom for women had not been forseen by socialists. Engels felt that only with economic equality could there be true romantic love, or "individual sex love" as he terms it. But what has happened is that increased equality has caused not only the disappearance of the typology but that of romantic love as well, a former source of power for women, whatever its detractors may say today. If it is true, as Freud said, that "some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height,"8 it may be that romantic

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love can only thrive in an atmosphere of tension and difference, either that supplied by the prohibitions of the social order, as in adulterous love, or that provided by a polarization of the sexes as in traditional marriage. It is conceivable that the combination of romantic passion and equality in marriage cannot exist. Perhaps it would deny some deep needs of the psyche that we do not as yet entirely understand. It is also conceivable that an entirely different concept of love is possible—and necessary. The charismatic and powerful figures of the past, the Tristans and Isoldes, no longer express our consciousness. The best we can hope for are pseudorelationships of "anonymous selves floating around and occasionally bumping into each other, causing mild annoyance," as critic Ferdinand Mount said about the couples in Updike's Marry Me. 9 The cult of extreme individualism—the backside of romanticism at which we have now arrived—precludes the necessary self-surrender to another that romantic love entails, unless we wish to count surrender to ourselves as fulfilling the conditions. Romantic love also implies the exaltation of one person over all others. In this respect7, too, we are perhaps more romantic than we might have guessed. There is one type we still hold up for admiration—ourselves. Whether this leads to fewer or more problems than our past idealization of others, I leave to the psychiatrists to determine. So afraid are we, women as well as men, of losing our autonomy, that we concentrate on sensations only. The strongest orgasms are those which are self-induced, say Masters and Johnson. What greater testimony to heightened individualism could we hope to find. Many feminists deplore the vaginal orgasm as a mere myth propagated by men to keep women in subjection to them. It is therefore of some interest that one of feminism's sacrosanct literary texts (not that it was written with polemical intent), The Golden Notebook, takes a different stand. In the past, literature had often been subversive. The great romances of medieval literature, for example, were anti-social in their treatment of women and sex. They approved of biologically unproductive types, e.g., Isolde, and placed individual love above social duty. Today, however, it is the norm itself which is rebellious. Cul-

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ture no longer internalizes restraints. For the first time in history, society itself is condoning immediate sexual gratification. Despite the emphasis on sensations more or less violent in such authors as Roth and Mailer, it may be left to literature to resist the triumph of instant and uncommitted sexuality. This may be its new "subversive" position. Whatever one may think of Lessing as a writer, she does represent this phenomenon. Despite her creation of a seemingly new type, that of the "free woman," women who are free of marriage and conventional moral systems, women who are free to work and to engage in the political and creative process, Lessing's women are very much tied to men, so much so that one begins to wonder if the author isn't using the term "free woman" ironically. Contrary to Elizabeth Hardwick's pronouncements on the matter, what Lessing shows is that the old seduced and abandoned heroine is not dead at all as a theme for fiction.10 Precisely because Anna Wulf is free of the biological consequences of sex in ways that Tess of the d'Urbervilles wasn't, Lessing can more readily examine her heroine's existential vulnerabilities. One sees that the possibilities of being victimized do not disappear with the arrival of economic and sexual liberation. For that reminder alone, Lessing is important. At the beginning of the century, Rilke wrote that women hold the Diploma of Proficiency in Love while men carry in their pockets only an elementary grammar. 11 Lessing would probably agree. It will take us a long time if ever to discover whether this difference in aptitude of the sexes lies partly in our genes or solely in social expectations. Perhaps the women in The Golden Notebook are emotionally atavistic, but romantic love is still something they desperately want for their own validation. It is something they never get. As far as a new typology of women is concerned, what we may have here is a case of old wine in new bottles or new wine in old. For all her complaints about men—in some ways women writers are creating a typology of men that is as negative as any misogynistic church father's of women—Lessing does not envisage a world free of them, and she still holds on in some way to a vision of romantic love.

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Though writing considerably earlier in the century, without any conscious feminist ideology, Colette in many ways portrays more feminine power than do most contemporary writers, notwithstanding her emphasis on love and passion. Certainly with regard to dependencies, she provides some interesting reversals of sexual stereotypes. For this reason, she will probably be turned to more and more by those women who seek role models in literature. The younger man and the older woman, one of her major themes, is as new as the latest proposals for relationships in Cosmopolitan and Ms.—to name two disparate but sexually liberated publications — and as old as the mother goddesses and their consorts. Colette's Chéri, set in the world of the demimondaine, presents a beautiful gigolo, Chéri, and his much older mistress, Lea. Though Chéri has his own fortune, his unwillingness to spend it puts him into a position of economic subservience, and much of the characterization of the coquettish lover—even his name sounds feminine— seems to overturn traditional concepts (at least within the Anglo-Saxon world) of male/female behavior. It is the woman here who is the teacher and guide, the man who is the naughty child. In The Last of Chéri, which takes place in the lassitude of postwar Paris, Chéri no longer sees Lea, for with the passage of time, the obstacle of age has become an insurmountable barrier. He is married to a young and lovely wife, but he pays her little attention. His emphasis on chastity, his attempt to preserve himself inviolate, is an attempt to arrest the moment. His fear of time marring his beauty—he feels old at thirty—contrasts forcibly with Lea's acceptance of age, the passing of physical attractiveness, and even of desire itself. In the Chéri novels, Colette has transformed the child heroine into the child hero who cannot transcend his own adolescence. One might say of Chéri, as has been said of Madame Bovary, that he is totally lacking in insight into the self. But whereas Emma only wanted to give love to a man worthy of her, Chéri only wants to receive it. It is the lover here who commits suicide when he realizes that no one can take the place of the mistress who can no longer be his, disguised as she is in grey hair and fat.

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But it is not despair at losing her that causes the suicide. Rather it is his perfection as mirrored by a former beautiful Lea that he cannot bear losing. It is the women in the book who emerge victorious, for they are realists in love as in everything else. Many works prominent in the feminist canon are much more fearful of men and love and even culture, men's domain, and therefore seek to do without them altogether. Among the most popular are Kate Chopin's The Awakening, where the heroine's ostensible route to freedom is suicide; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, in which it is madness; Sylvia Plath's work and life itself, in which it is a combination of both, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, which returns to a pre-technological wilderness. In Kate Chopin's Awakening, published in 1899, the heroine has a sensuous, sexual, and even artistic awakening of sorts. In her sexual awakening, Edna Pontellier is an American Bovary, but unlike her ancestor she is unwilling to live through men alone. She has thus been heralded as a new type and well she might have been, if not for her suicide. Some positive-minded readers today see her drowning as yet another aspect of her awakening, as a form of spiritual transcendence over a benighted social order. Perhaps, however, the main reason for the heroine's suicide stemmed not from any demands of vision or even character or plot, but rather from Chopin's desire to pacify the moralists in her audience for her heroine's adultery, a plan which failed. What we have in The Awakening is a thwarted Bildungsroman built on the old myth of the coming of age of the hero, except that this time it's a hero manqué. In Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing, which made a great stir, the unnamed heroine (Everywoman?) goes through a symbolic death by water but emerges in a reverse of Edna's "awakening" with the resolve never to be a victim again. Francine du Plessix Grey lauded the book for creating a new mythology for women. I'm not sure whether a new mythology can ever be created consciously, particularly when so much of it involves the reapplication of male myths to women, as this one does, with its allusions to birth of the hero myths and leatherstocking tales of self-sufficiency in the wilderness. More important, however, one might

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take issue with Atwood's conception of freedom, since her heroine's devictimization consists of rejecting all forms of "male" technology. One wonders if there is any more extreme way of making oneself a victim. As Jacob Bronowski said with irony, now that technology has helped to give us "a brain two or three times larger than the chimpanzee's we are free [of course] to use that brain to prefer the life—or even the brain—of the chimpanzee."12 In Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, a short but extremely popular turn-of-the-century work by the author who also wrote the brilliant Women and Economics, it is madness that provides the escape from the male world. Current readings seize on the heroine's doctor/husband as the arch symbol of patriarchal oppression and see the heroine as evincing laudable spiritual freedom. Incidently, like her heroine, Gilman suffered from post-partum depression, but for her, freedom took the route of divorce, not madness. In some instances, women's lives offer more evidence of a new typology than do their works. More recently, Plath pursued the theme of madness in life as well as writing that was remarkably controlled to combat the primordial parental betrayal and the presence of disquieting muses. She didn't stop there. Suicide became the writer's raison d'etre, the culmination of her passion for excellence. "Dying/Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well," is a statement in "Lady Lazarus" that proved to be prophetic. Suicide, the murder displaced onto the self, is perhaps the ultimate vengeance on others, but it is hardly an act of spiritual transcendence. Plath's heroine was not a Roman matriarch, although one would scarcely guess this when reading some of the criticism. Rather she was a Romantic with culture lag. It is partly the pain of the awareness of freedom and the inability to achieve it that has given birth to the mad woman and the suicide as prominent types in women writers. They are not new types. They go back to antiquity. What is seemingly new is the attempt of feminist criticism to hold them up as types worthy of emulation. I say "seemingly," for such a view was common enough in Romanticism. The triumph of the irrational that we are now witnessing is

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occurring not solely within women's studies. The affirmation of the bizarre and the deviant, the glorification of impulse over reason is found in the culture at large. We are witnessing an upsurge of what in more religious ages would have been called the demonic. It is therefore not surprising to find that a major way of dealing with sexual polarization, the typology of women, and the problems of love and freedom is by obscuring sexual identity altogether. Unisexual, homosexual, bisexual, androgynous, these are all catchwords of the culture, which may point to a future time when the individual alone rather than any social unit such as the couple or the family is paramount. We have lost our traditional metaphysical and religious model of value, another reason for the death of the dualistic types and for our concentration on figures that once were marginal. From Plato through the Renaissance, the major paradigm of the world was that of a great chain of being, in which all of the creation, from dumb stones to eloquent intelligences (angels in the Christian version), was arranged in a series of interconnecting links, hierarchically ordered. Even the individual psyche was conceived on a hierarchical principle, with reason on top, will underneath, and desire or emotion at the bottom rung. In a modified form, this attitude remains with us even in our pluralistic universe. When we speak of someone acting like a superman or a beast, or of letting one's feelings get the upper hand, it is this invisible ladder that is in the back of our heads, as metaphor if nothing else. But whereas Pascal could see man as "ni ange ni brute," but somehow holding together in a unity the extremes of existence, the possibilities available to us in the modern world are smaller in number. We have not only dispensed with angels, we have rejected devils as well, incorporating into the psyche those elements which were formerly projected onto the world. Now that the old dualisms of sacred and demonic no longer have meaning, we are turning to marginal types, those types that were once forbidden or at least peripheral in the culture. One of the most fascinating literary treatments of the marginal types appears in a book published in 1936: Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, which uses the great chain of being as a structural principle,

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much the way that Eliot uses myth, as a system of allusion to a civilization that is dying. Magnificent in its spectacle and fantasy, with a language and vision at once Elizabethan and dreamlike, the work, once one gets through the complexities of its form, seems to treat less the surreal than the real in our time. It is compelling in its treatment of both love and typology. One last outpost of romantic love—indeed it may have been its earliest settlement, if one takes the works of Sappho and Plato as evidence—is homosexual love, and Barnes provides a provocative survey of its territory. Unlike that great Romantic Stendhal, who believed that love was a process of crystallization, whereby more and more perfections are attributed to the beloved, Barnes sees it as one of fossilization—an example of the difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century love. But fossilization may in fact be the ultimate romanticism, for it reveals a love which finds not only its resolution in death but its very being there. "Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the findings in a tomb." 13 Barnes shows that narcissism plays an even greater role in lesbian object choice than in the heterosexual one. "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own." 14 Contrary to some radical feminists today, the author feels that lesbian love provides no way out of that conflict between love and freedom that they see as central in heterosexual love, for love, of necessity, entails suffering and limitation on the freedom of the self. Yet Barnes is perhaps less interested in homosexual love than she is in the metaphysical implications of all love. Homosexuality may simply be her metaphor for our condition in nightwood, her "wasteland." In her use of the concept of the great chain of being, Barnes sees our transcendence occurring downwards instead of upwards. One of her most interesting figures, Robin, is a descendant of Baudelaire's animal/child women. Unlike them, however, she seeks to be human. Insofar as she is the heroine of the book, she is no longer the other, in de Beauvoir's terms. Rather, she presents the aspirations of all of us. But through her seeming meta-

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morphosis into a dog at the end of the work, Barnes may be saying that the link of the human is no longer available to us on the chain. Our state can only be bestial. Although Barnes found enough vigor in the concept of the great chain to use it as the framework of her book, most people today, if they thought of this "chain" at all, would consider it an old-fashioned and elitist metaphor, part of the scrap heap of culture. The predominant model of the world right now is not that of a vertical chain but rather one of a horizontal continuum. Hierarchies no longer seem natural to us. Since everybody is potentially equal, all differences in roles are viewed as superimposed by the culture. Even the workings of the inner self are structured on egalitarian principles, for equality in the psyche is desired as much as equality in the social order. No longer are different values assigned to reason, will, and desire. Rather, all of these are to co-exist as equal citizens. It is instructive to compare our present model with Freud's construct of superego, ego, and id. If our concept of the self is analogous to our concept of the external world and there is every evidence that this is so, it is obvious that the power of fathers is declining, both externally and internally. No longer do we have to do battle with a fearsome superego. Having grown up in a permissive age, all the elements in the psyche can play nicely together—or at least ought to—and here's the rub, for not everybody can achieve the desired synthesis between reason and feelingj spirituality and sexuality, or, in Jungean terminology, masculinity and femininity, and this inequality becomes the source of a new means of differentiation. In our new view of consciousness, if not of worldly goods and performances, we are inexorably aristocratic. What we now have is a hierarchy of selves. There is another problematic aspect to our concept of "equality." In our attempt to correct the wrongs of earlier periods, we twist ourselves into pretzels to insure the rights of all those formerly deprived, often to the extent of favoring the minority, the deviant, the idiosyncratic. Yet again we are left with hierarchy. When we say that the main quest today is for the human, this quest seems to involve not so much the transcendence of cultural and historic boundaries (as it once did), as those of sex, race, and

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class. It involves granting full voting rights to all those groups or impulses that were formerly classified as suspect and therefore subject to control. In such a scheme, the old typology with its rigidly defined role differentiation is untenable. It is the reason that so often feminists label the types images, that is, merely reflections, illusions, fantasms, or stereotypes, drawing on all that term's overtones of artifice and reification. These examples of name-calling ignore the vitality of the myths as models of consciousness for earlier periods, whatever they may be for our own—once again an illustration of some feminists' inability or unwillingness to make historical distinctions. But however dubious may be their means of presenting it, the resentment of these critics is understandable, considering their position, for the types do have great power, particularly in their mythical embodiments. "Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal," writes Roland Barthes in his Mythologies,15 who also suggests a counteraction to this power that many women writers are now practicing. "The best weapon against myth is perhaps to demythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology."16 I have already stated that I do not think that one can consciously create new myths; nonetheless, reconstituted myths do have some importance, if not as literature, then as sociology, for they force us to examine the power of the old myth. Thus Adrienne Rich writes: A man is asleep in the next room We are his dreams We have the heads and breasts of women the bodies of birds of prey Sometimes we turn into silver serpents17

What we are also seeing is the transvaluation and reinterpretation of old myths. Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères is perhaps the most striking and powerful example of this tendency. Traditional symbols and myths are restructured with such compelling intensity that old meanings are swept away like so much dust. Suns here are female symbols, serpents are orphie symbols of knowl-

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edge, Eve is a seeker of wisdom; the golden fleece and the holy grail represent the male search for the female. Wittig's women are epic and glorious creatures, keenly aware of their own sexuality, the splendor of the vulva. Possessed of bacchantic fury and Amazonian gifts, they take arms against men who have robbed them of knowledge, enslaved them through trickery, treated them like goddesses or witches or drudges, invented their history, and appropriated all language for their own. Wishing to ''break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture, [the women] say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear." 18 They wish to destroy polarities, a product of mechanistic reasoning, that binary system in which woman is earth, sea, tears, humidity, darkness (in contrast to the opposites for man). Theirs is a violent rejection of a male-centered universe. If anatomy is destiny, then their anatomy destines them triumphant in war, with their straight backs, their lissome loins, their aggressive breasts. "When they have a prisoner they strip him and make him run through the streets crying, it is your rod/ cane/staff/wand/peg/skewer/staff of lead."19 In a litany, "They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men," and all their institutions.20 Everything must be razed before a new culture can rise. After this longest, most murderous war, the last possible war in history, women and men will be reconciled. Spring will return, the summer grow green again, lips find their way to lips, but it will be in a different world. In the interim, the romantic, the erotic will be held in abeyance. Such is the case in Margaret Atwood's reworking of the Circe myth. In her "Circe/Mud poems," the author reveals Circe from her own point of view and absolves her from the blame of centuries. It was not my fault, these animals who once were lovers it was not my fault, the snouts and hooves, the tongues thickening and rough, the mouths grown over with teeth and fur

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I did not add the shaggy rugs, the tusked masks, they happened21

But Atwood's transvaluation also deprives Circe of any erotic power. One consequence of remythifying myth today is that sorceresses tend to look less alluring than invaded. I'm not sure, however, that leaving Circe alone on her island would mean increasing her dominion. Robert Lowell, one of the last of our romantics, had his own reinterpretation of the Circe myth. In one of his final poems, "Ulysses and Circe," he wrote: Why am I my own fugitive, because her beauty made me feel as other men? 22

These lines may grant Circe a magic which is in fact more real, more "human" than Atwood's denial of it. We have yet to see whether women's power will increase if romantic love and the old typology disappear completely, for political and economic power may not be forthcoming in place of other forms. The polarization of the sexes that existed in romantic marriage was seemingly a sign of great inequity. In some ways, however, romantic love was an equalizer in an age of hierarchy. By exalting a chosen individual over others, it was able to transcend differences of class and sex. It was even able to validate the forbidden, particularly outside marriage. But it could only exist with types, with barriers.23 Those are what fueled it. Now that everybody is theoretically equal, now that all impulses are respectable, there is no longer any need for it. But what do we have it its place? Self-love and the marginal types? Amazons and warriors? Are these our new mythology? We do not know, for if we knew with certainty what our myths were, they would no longer be myths. What we do know is that the old myths are dying. The allegorization of them is proof of this, for one only allegorizes to save a tradition or to criticize it, not to give birth to it. It is possible, of course, that all of our twentieth-century interiorization, all the isolation of the self from those around it, is a necessary precondition for a new mythology of love and whole-

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ness that is yet to come.24 But it may equally be, in the words of Yeats, that last great mythologizer of the century, that some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born. Notes 1. This quotation of Verlaine is cited in translation by Henri Peyre in his essay "Baudelaire as a Love Poet," in Baudelaire as a Love Poet and other Essays, ed. Lois Hyslop (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1969), p. 7. 2. In Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 63, n. 6. (First published in Partisan Review [Summer 1963]: 167-91. 3. The statement, cited in A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 192, is from a letter to Lady Gregory. 4. William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York: Noonday Press, 1959), p. 233. 5. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), p. 78. 6. André Malraux, "D. H. Lawrence and Eroticism: Concerning Lady Chatterley's Lover," Yale French Studies: Eros, Variations on an Old Theme, vol. n, n.d. 55-58. 7. The statement appears in "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 209. I usually refer to this essay in the S.E., vol. n: 177-90 ("On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love"); however, the (Riviere translation has much to recomment it. 8. Ibid., p. 213. 9. Ferdinand Mount, "The Novel of the Narcissus: New Fiction," Encounter 48 (June 1977): 54. 10. See the chapter "Seduction and Betrayal," in Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 185-218. 11. He makes the point in a letter dated January 1912, cited in Appendix i to the Duino Elegies, trans., intro., and commentary by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), p. 120. 12. Jacob Bronowski, "Science and the New Reformation," The Columbia Forum in (Summer 1974): 4. 13. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, with intro. by T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937), p. 56. See Stendhal, Love, trans, by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). 14. Barnes, Nightwood, p. 143. 15. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans, by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 142.

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16. Ibid., p. 135. 17. The passage is from "Incipience," in Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems igji-igj2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. n. 18. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 72. 19. Ibid., p. 106. 20. Ibid., p. 130. 21. The excerpt is from the collection entitled You are Happy (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 48. 22. The poem is in Robert Lowell, Day by Day (New York: Parrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 4. 23. Although Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their landmark book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) give much attention to the types, particularly the negative ones as sources of creative energy for women, they do not consider the question of love and how it cuts across or reconciles the traditional polarizations of women in some instances. 24. In chapter 14, I discuss a new type of romantic love in marriage that arrived in the late eighties.

11 "A Natural and Necessary Monster' Women in Men's Utopias

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F romantic love has afforded women power at least at some times, in some places, there is one place where that is generally not the case—utopia. The great men's utopias see such love and any power that it gave women as a threat to the state. Feminism, too, as a Utopian movement has rejected love—but in order to increase women's power in the state—an interesting paradox. In the visionary lands of perfected possibilities, it seemed to me there might lie, if not solutions to social problems, at least more cogent definitions of them. It is, therefore, dismaying to find that with few exceptions, women are no better off in utopia than any place else. Even in depictions of ideal states set in some future time where they would not possibly threaten the hierarchies of the present, women's rights are given short shrift and sometimes not recognized as an issue at all. The most extraordinary exception is perhaps the earliest, Plato's Republic, but almost to a man, the others remain problematic. Women in women's utopias are something else again, and I'll have more to say about them later. It is a commonplace that war gives rise to questions on sex roles and the relations of the sexes because of the disruption of the usual norms of behavior. The defeat of Athens by Sparta (known for its liberated treatment of women) in the Peloponnesian War, led to debates on women's "nature" that are still unresolved. It was in this atmosphere of debate and upheaval that Plato wrote his Republic.* Possibly, Plato was treating seriously ideas that were earlier presented satirically by Aristophanes—we cannot be 182

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sure of the dates — and it is with Aristophanes that I would like to begin. Throughout history, the major genre for the examination of women's rights has been, not the utopia or political tract, but rather, comedy, which itself sounds like something of a joke. Sometimes the issues are presented satirically, but they are nonetheless recognized. Although his famous Lysistrata only wants to end war in order to restore a traditional domesticity, Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae (The Women in Assembly), written c. 392, is far more revolutionary, with its women disguised as men who take over the assembly in order to propose a program that would restore a golden age of communal sex and property. The playwright is seemingly against this, suggesting that human nature is too acquisitive to be satisfied with communal goods. Furthermore, he fears that with political power, women would control not only their own bodies but those of men as well. In the play, older women speak of resorting to violence if young men do not service them sexually. (This situation sounds rather familiar if we reverse the sexes, in which case it is known as rape.) What the play implies, without Aristophanes' spelling it out, is that sexually, at least, men are living in a golden age of freedom, while women are living in an iron age of restriction. The comedy exemplifies the different cultural stages men and women seem to inhabit at the same time, a disparity which one finds in serious as well as satirical utopias, to say nothing of the real world, where it still holds true in some measure. And it is in this disparity that we find a good reason for male resistance to female equality, even today: while female equality would mean coming up in the world for women, there is no question that it would involve a tumble down the ladder for men. Yet Plato, so many centuries ago, was able to consider the question of such equality with little, if any, attendant anxiety. The universal division of human labor into male and female roles would seem to suggest that among humans, biology has ever determined destiny. Plato was one of the first and, ironically, also one of the last thinkers, until well into this century, to suggest that biology was not a sufficient basis for role differentiation. Though "science" has traditionally turned to the animal

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world for proofs of male dominance, Plato uses animal analogies to advocate sexual equality. One of the few writers in the Western tradition to use animal imagery in a positive way, he suggests in The Republic, Book V, that human beings might profitably follow the examples of dogs, among whom the females do not simply bear and suckle puppies but rather hunt and guard as well. Like some early promulgator of the ERA, although with far more courage considering his age's exclusion of women from public life, Plato wants differentiation to be based on individual predilection and ability, not on sex. Some twenty-four centuries later, Margaret Mead was hailed as a revolutionary for coming to the same conclusions in Sex and Temperament, but still the differentiation according to sex remains. Pushing his argument to its logical conclusion, Plato states that if the difference between the sexes consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, then both sexes should receive an equal education, designed to train them for the same roles. Amazingly for his time, and indeed for any time, Plato argues for the total political and sexual equality of women, advocating that they be members of his highest class, that of the guardians, those who rule and fight, activities that are still considered the most masculine of preserves. And he is willing to implement his theory with a system of child care that alone is able to free women to be philosophers and soldiers. At first glance it would be hard for any feminist to fault Plato on these matters — although at one point he does grant the superiority of men, perhaps as a concession to his male audience. But his plan is primarily concerned with the state, not the individual, and is predicated on a communalization of wives, children, and property, to say nothing of a controlled system of eugenics, which turns out, it might here be said, to be characteristic of twentieth-century anti-utopias, or dystopias. No property was to be held by Plato's ruling class nor was any mother to know her own child. By these means, the author felt that the usual traits of acquisition and possessiveness would be eliminated. Plato assumes that without opportunity, certain elements of human "nature" would disappear or at least be controlled. It is this aspect of his thought that seems to be faulted in Book IV of Gulliver's

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Travels, which is too often misread as a defense of the Houyhnhnms and an attack on humans. On the contrary, what Swift is implying is that humans are not only creatures of reason, but of passion as well. To deny expression to either side is to run the risk of yahooism at one extreme or inhuman rationality on the other. To many readers, Plato's rigidly defined state with its propaganda, its control of the arts and language, its class structure, leads directly to the Houyhnhnms and to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Interestingly enough, as in The Republic, Nineteen Eighty-Four allows only the lower classes to retain the semblance of traditional family life. This raises the question of how far we would have to go in restructuring the family and the state to achieve Plato's equality of identity, an equality which is based on a masculine norm. Another question is whether we would want this equality once we got it. Would a land ruled by philosophers, even if female as well as male, be an impoverished land without the excitement of love or the color of individuality? It is a question that no society has as yet ventured to answer. The problem with most utopias is that they reveal their designers' will to power. That is why most of us wouldn't like to live there. It is not our will to power that is being expressed. Like advice on childrear/ing, advice on how to bring up the state is perhaps never meant to be taken literally; still, there is a coercive quality to the Utopian landscape that we resist. In some respects, More's Utopia2 sounds like nothing so much as children's camps with their uniform uniforms, uniform bedtimes and risings, communal meals signaled by a bugle, and group recreation after supper. I suppose that if one has never been away from home, such goings-on might seem desirable for a spell. Living permanently in such a setting is another matter, however. Despite the de-emphasis on property—gold is used for chamber pots (Utopia is no summer camp in this respect)—and despite the sharing of work and equality of opportunity—for men— hierarchy remains firmly rooted in a place so taken for granted that readers took little notice of it until recently, that is, in the patriarchal family. 3 Here, More, writing in an age of Christian humanism, departs markedly from Plato.

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From a Christian point of view, male dominance has little to do with anatomy as destiny, at least not in its origin. Few theologians, it seems to me, would argue for Eve's subordination in the garden, although woman's anatomical equipment therein was assumedly the same as it is now. Rather, what they seem to imply is that inequality is the result of the Fall. The Christian utopia (and More's qualifies as such, despite certain problems) professes to eliminate original sin. At the same time, however, it allows it to get through the city gates without so much as a passport, for within the walls women are decidedly subordinate, an indication that in utopia, as in reality, equality is usually an issue that pertains to men only, and a proof that original sin remains. As a microcosm of the Renaissance political hierarchy, in which the king ruled over his subjects, More's family is under the authority of the oldest male. Wives are subordinate to their husbands, and children are subordinate to their parents. When a girl grows up and gets married, she joins her husband's household. The patrilocal custom is never questioned. Girls cannot marry before the age of eighteen; boys not before twenty-two. Premarital intercourse is severely punished on the assumption that anyone who could have free intercourse would never get married, an assumption which is being put to many tests right now. The prospective bride and bridegroom are shown naked to each other in order to prevent unpleasant surprises after marriage, something we seem to have put into practice. Divorce is allowed by mutual consent on the grounds of incompatibility, but no man is allowed to divorce his wife simply because she has grown old. In this latter matter, we differ considerably. Although slaves do the more laborious work of the kitchen, women prepare the meals in the communal dining halls. Wives sit on the outside of the tables so that they may retire quickly to nurseries where they breast-feed their own babies. No communal nursing here, as there is in Plato. Although More, in his concept of the family, is far removed from Plato, who wanted to eliminate it altogether in the ruling class, he is reminiscent of him in other respects. As in The Republic, women as well as men receive periodic military training in the Utopia, and no woman is forced to stay home if she would rather

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join her husband at the front (in a domestic capacity, to be sure). Unlike Plato, More gives no opportunity for women to be rulers unless it be in their capacity as the wives of rulers. However, he does allow women to become priests. Since only elderly widows are eligible for this office, no doubt they would be few in number; nonetheless, the suggestion must have been something of a shock to More's clerical contemporaries. Protestants later were to be more receptive to the idea, but we should remember that Utopia was written before Luther made his demands.4 Contrary to his Greek ancestors, More was willing to give his own daughters a classical education the equal of the most advantaged of men. (It was More's actual family, not his Utopia, that influenced Erasmus's treatises on the education of women.) 5 But unlike Plato in The Republic, he does not seem to be willing to do as much for his women in utopia, where they remain rooted in the most traditional of roles, bearing and caring for children, feeding children and men. It would seem that when men grant women any sort of equality in the real world, it is fantasy that suffers, whereas restriction in the real world, as in the Athens of Plato's own time, leads to fantasy about liberated women. This is perhaps one of the compensatory devices by which men achieve a precarious psychological balance when threatened by women, in utopia as elsewhere. Most utopias posit communism as a condition of the earthly paradise. Bacon's New Atlantis6 does not. Instead, it suggests that the proper method would be enough to restore the pre-lapsarian state, in which men had mastery over nature. Bacon's community of scientists, of course, is exclusively male, and when he speaks of science benefiting man's estate, one wonders if he is thinking of woman at all. Indeed, as if to make up for the loss of dominion over nature, men's dominion over women in The New Atlantis is very strong. Bacon's family structure, like More's in Utopia, is intensely patriarchal. Furthermore, it is invested with a great deal of ceremonial richness, an example of Bacon's love of hierarchy and, one might add, private property. In his Feast of the Family, the Tirsan, or father who lives to see thirty people descended from his body, has a feast paid for by the state. For two days before-

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hand, like some ancient patriarch, or modern godfather, he sits in consultation on the good estate of the family. Obedience is owed him as "to the order of nature." If there is a mother from whom the entire lineage is descended, she is placed at the right hand of the father's thronelike chair but behind a door where she cannot be seen, so as not to detract from the honor owed the father, I suppose. The narrator writes, "I had never heard of a solemnity wherein nature did so much preside." It has generally been the practice of Western thinkers to invoke nature to support their prejudices, but as one can see, "nature" is highly gifted in accommodating itself to different points of view. It is also significant that while female biology has often been advanced as the reason for female subordination—Aristotle called woman a natural and necessary monster—men have tried to control it, appropriate it, or render it negligible. Something of this seems to be going on in Bacon's Feast of the Family. It was examples such as these, of protesting too much, that led Karen Horney to posit her theory of womb envy, a parallel to Freud's construct of penis envy. The question of sexual equality is never treated by Bacon, perhaps because it simply never occurs to him to do so. As if in agreement with Freud's later theory of the need to repress instincts in order to advance culture, The New Atlantis, a scientific utopia, is sexually austere and extremely conservative in its treatment of the sexes. No doubt Bacon felt that the pursuit of progress was an exclusively male endeavor. Although he himself pointed the way to it, Bacon did not forsee that mechanical civilization which would be a decisive element in the liberation of women, nor did he forsee the innovations in medical technology as a way of achieving any equality between the sexes. There is a scientific utopia, written a few years earlier than Bacon's, which, influenced by Plato, does provide a near equality of education for women: Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun.7 There women have many of the same occupations as men, are trained in exercise, and, as a result, are tall and strong of limb. However, wearing makeup or high heels here is punishable by death, for they smack of deceit. Campanella implies that there would be no need for these ruses; nonetheless, the punishment for

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the "crimes" seems extraordinary and prophetic of the great dystopias, such as Zamyatin's We and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.8 It is in the Victorian period that sexual equality again becomes a central issue in utopia, partly because sexual differentiation had become so exacerbated, it forced to the surface issues that could formerly be more easily contained. Once again, biology is the crux of the matter. Different conceptions of biological difference are what enable polarized views of women to be held in the same period. It is the reason why Nietzsche can see woman as a wild animal (a view that is perhaps not as negative as his detractors would have it, considering his excoriation of European man as a herd animal). At the same time, Edward Bellamy makes her a member of his industrial army. It is an irony of utopias that though they often do not tell us much about the future they profess to deal with, they do reveal much about the author's own time. While Plato doesn't speak at all of love between the sexes and More does so only indirectly, Victorian utopias speak about it a good deal. It is in the area of love and sex that they often deal with female equality of the future, an equality which is not one of identity, as in Plato and some current liberationists, but rather that of complementary differences, the assumption being that what is missing in one sex will be supplied by the other. Though in some ways they try to surmount it, these utopias are never far removed from a strong sexual polarization. In Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, a Victorian projection into the twenty-first century, published in 1888, the heroine is far franker about her amorous predilections than were the ladies of the author's own time, for example, but she reveals her Victorian origin in her propensity for blushing, shopping, and retiring early while the menfolk discuss political and economic matters. Yet the women of Looking Backward9 are free from the burden of housework, which has been communalized. They are never dependent on their husbands for support, since the society gives equal economic credits to all of its members (including children). What is more, women are free to pursue careers. To the hero from the nineteenth century, Dr. Léete says, "It seems to us that women were more than any other class the victims of your civili-

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zation (211). . . . All that is changed today. No woman is heard nowadays wishing she were a man, nor parents desiring boy rather than girl children. Our girls are as full of ambition for their careers as our boys" (212). One might think that Bellamy was here in agreement with Engels's statement: "to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor." 10 But though women in Bellamy's utopia are allowed to enter public life, what is fascinating is that Bellamy retains a division of labor according to sex. In order to minimize competition with men, he grants women a giant but separate industrial army of their own. The doctor says: In your day there was no career for women except in an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it. (211)

Women are under the leadership of a woman general-in-chief who has a veto in the president's cabinet but only in regard to "women's work." It is obvious who is still making the rules here, even in utopia: Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the hours of women's work are considerably shorter than those of men, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. (Italics mine) (210)

In our tough-minded age, no doubt some of us may see a certain charm in the deference paid to feminine grace and beauty until we realize that biological difference is interpreted as feminine weakness here, which provides the justification for male domination, couched in the guise of chivalry.

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Furthermore, to insure that careers will not keep women from marrying in this utopia, Bellamy has this precaution: "so far is marriage from being an interference with a woman's career, that the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are entrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex" (213). Finally, we are back with the Victorian angels of the house: "Our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confined. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood" (219-20). It is easy enough to pull apart the seams of Bellamy's supposed equality of the sexes and to scoff at his separate but equal industrial armies; however, we must remember that he never makes claim to an equality of identity. Rather he is speaking of an equality of difference, one that assumes that superior strength in the male, for example, will be compensated for by superior grace in the female. We do not believe that such equality is possible, for we now feel that all difference implies a difference in rank. (It is enough to point to the separate but equal stratagems of our own history in civil rights to see why.) Yet the equality of identity that many liberationists favor today poses problems also, for it assumes that women will enter public life according to rules that have been determined by men for men. But liberation cannot simply be a matter of allowing women to play the game by men's rules, at which many of them can't help but lose; it has to change the rules. What should be stressed is not simply the need for women to enter public life but also the necessity for private values to enter the public sphere. Of course, there is another way of seemingly effecting equality, and that is by eliminating the predominantly male world of industrialization altogether and introducing a mode of life that according to traditional views, at least, is far more feminine. This was William Morris's solution in News from Nowhere.11 Unlike Bellamy's utopia, to which it was an answer, Morris's romance is an anti-industrial arcadra, set in an "epoch of rest," in which the horse seems to be the most advanced means of transportation.

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Nowhere is an idyllic pastoral world of haymaking and boat rides on a sunny Thames, an anti-intellectual paradise where handicraft has displaced technology, and pleasure has replaced competition. In such a world, women's status is high, but I do not know if women today will be pleased by the reasons, for Morris praises women for their "wits," that is, their capacity for understanding the details of daily life—the only life that concerns his conscious primitives. Morris claims that he is presenting a period of "the equality of life" when mastery has changed into fellowship, but what he has to say about women is concerned as much with his own times as it is with the future. He deplores the ugliness of idle Victorian women with their little arms like sticks, their waists like hourglasses, their thin lips and peaked noses, their pretense to being offended at anything. (Obviously, it is only women of the upper classes that he is speaking of here.) In the future, he says, women will be clothed like women, not upholstered like armchairs. Their skin will bear a lively tan and their beauty will be suffused with energy, for they won't be afraid of using their muscles. What is more, they will appreciate the male body. But in his fascinating mélange of Victorian idealism and arcadian fantasy, women still blush readily, although more out of pleasure than shame. (Blushing was considered a "natural" feminine characteristic until into the twentieth century when it was banished along with other forms of sexual repression.) In Morris's future, there will still be "calflove" that is mistaken for life-long heroism and the "inexplicable desire that comes on a man of riper years to be the all-in-all to some one woman" (57). But people will no longer be "artificially" foolish and the victims of sentimentality. Whatever else may be different, this last statement is true for us. As for women's emancipation, Morris's women of the future are free to leave men they do not care for—and to return to them when they change their minds, for his utopia recognizes that a court cannot enforce a contract of passion or sentiment. There is no divorce since property, its major cause, is obsolete in this communal society. But although there is increased sexual freedom for women in Nowhere, there is no freedom from house-

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work, which Morris considers an important occupation. While we might be tempted to agree that housework is undervalued in our world, we are brought up short by his assumption that it is something that comes more naturally to women than to men, as revealed in his use of the Norwegian folktale called "How the Man Minded the House," which concludes with the man and the family cow up on the roof. "Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skillfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her?" (60) we read. Perhaps, but Morris assumes that housewifery is part of a woman's secondary sex characteristics, and this we no longer take for granted. As we might expect, maternity is highly valued in Morris's utopia, and the nineteenth-century plan to emancipate superior women from the bearing of children is dismissed as a "strange piece of baseless folly," an expression of class tyranny. The assumption, as in Bellamy, is that all women will want to be mothers, sometimes for some rather unusual reasons: Surely it is a matter of course that the natural and necessary pains which the mother must go through form a bond of union between man and woman, and extra stimulus to love and affection between them, and that this is universally recognized. (61) What Morris considers "natural and necessary" sounds unnatural and unnecessary to us with our advanced medical technology and knowledge of childbirth in primitive and not-so-primitive societies. That childbearing should have to be painful even in a Utopian society is another indication of the work's Victorian genesis. Morris places his romance in a future arcadia, but as far as biology is concerned, his women are still fallen Eves. It struck me while considering this issue that utopias for men are often dystopias for women. Might it then be possible that dystopias for men are utopias for women? It was with this question in mind that I turned to Brave New World and Nineteen EightyFour. It is important to note that whatever their position on "the woman question," male authors of both utopias and the English dystopias never show women participating in analyses of the large

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cultural questions. (Though Julia of Nineteen Eighty-Four would seem to be an exception, her understanding never exceeds the bounds of her sexuality.) The implication is that women do not understand the import of cultural change. Yet what we are beginning to accept is a relativity of cultural values that sometimes makes the more orthodox supporters in a literary work seem the more radical figures.12 For example, we can be sure, I think, that Huxley was writing with bitterness of the disappearance of home, marriage, and motherhood in his future society, and their replacement by community, sexual permissiveness, and artificial reproduction. And yet, reading him in the seventies, it was the author rather than the inhabitants of his brave new world that seemed naive. Like Mustapha Mond, ruler of his anti-utopia, many of us shuddered about the dangerous intimacies of family life, with its mother brooding over her children like a talking cat, as Huxley so graphically puts it. With her approval of fetal development in vitro, Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex^ surely one of the most radical theoretical books to come out of the women's movement, might easily have taken as her theme song Huxley's parody of filial devotion, sung by those who are no longer born but rather decanted in his brave new world: "there ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of Mine." But her motives would be quite different from his. Huxley wanted to point up the absurdity of rejecting our biology; Firestone wants to show the necessity for doing so in order to gain true equality. She is on the side of his conservatives rather than his rebels. While Huxley feared that sexual freedom would destroy consciousness and passion, many women recently felt that they could gain consciousness only through sexual freedom and the death of passion. They therefore embraced the Huxleyan vision of sexual utopianism, in which the sexual impulse is so diffused, all feeling is filtered out. For Huxley, such permissiveness led to enslavement by the state; to many in the late sixties and seventies, it seemed a route to liberation of the self. According to Huxley and Orwell, following biological urge can be freedom or bondage depending on the social constraints,

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