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6 Women Who Love Too Much . . . or Not Enough . . . or the Wrong Way The Tragedy and Comedy of Romantic Love in Modern Movies I remember feeling a desire . . . that was hard and pure, that contained me and could not be contained, and I remember making that bargain that people always make—anything for this thing. —Dave in “The Age of Grief,” Jane Smiley, 1987 In the Victorian era, angels were in, and “in” meant in print in full force. There were angelic young heroines in novels, such as those by Charles Dickens, who were at once the reward for the hero’s pluck and compensation for his undeserved trouble. In essays and articles in newspapers and magazines all over Britain and America, the inherently loving nature of woman was extolled, her inborn gift for self-denial celebrated. The association was so well known that Virginia Woolf declared, in a famous act of literary execution, that the Angel in the House had to be done away with in order for modern literature to be born. Female goodness, in the form of family devotion, caring for the sick, or public charity, was a theme that harmonized well with Christian ideals of service and brotherly love. In Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s short story “The Angel over the Right Shoulder” (1852), angels materialize in the nick of time in the epiphanic dream of a restless, harassed wife and mother, inspiring her to do her duty and give up the two hours a day she had tried to carve out for her own intellectual pursuits. (Apparently the author herself was not as self-sacrificing as her character, since she was a published writer who chose to work at her craft with several children at home.) When it came to loving, romantically or maternally, the angelic woman 105 106 the glass slipper simply could never love enough, even if it killed her in body or soul. The question of the day was “Is there an Angel in this House?” In fact, women who were good as gold in Victorian texts, from Little Nell in Dickens’sThe Old Curiosity ShoptoBethinAlcott’sLittle Women,werefrequently hurt or died for the delectation of the audience, whose tears spread the warmth of sentimental sympathy for a condition that was vaunted as noble: the (self-) sacrifice of the innocent. It’s not difficult to conclude that those tears were meant to obviate the pressure for change in the status of women; their moist abundance smoothed over the rough edges of odd paradoxes like strong, “spirited,” yet ultimately conservative heroines in popular novels. Behind the many proclamations of woman’s constitutionally superior moral nature was the opposite conviction: that a woman is better suited for self-denial because she has a lesser, and therefore more expendable, self than the hero. As we saw, Hans Christian Andersen’s brave and independent Little Mermaid in the fairy tale of the same name is not romantically loved by her prince, but she does get to renounce her humanity and become a “spirit,” a kind of angel who rewards good children and reminds naughty ones of their unpleasant fate. Critics almost from the beginnings of feminism objected, claiming that the nobility of the “wounded angel” masqueraded as a universal character of womanhood when in reality the idea of self-sacrifice served the social organization of gender at a particular moment in history. By the twentieth century, so much had changed that many women not only wanted rooms of their own but were revealed to have sensual desires of their own as well. Yet in the 1960s, when women ’s movements were gearing up for a new and stronger push toward the social equality of gender, conservative thought could still pull on a particularly resilient , tensile thread woven deeply into the fabric of society: the allure of the selfless female whose loving nature makes it possible for fragile romantic relationships to endure. The “good” woman was no longer semidivine, as in the Victorian age, but had morphed into a girlfriend or wife making a pragmatic decision about keeping a romantic relationship going. Cosmopolitan magazine’s advice in 1969, “Don’t become a man in skirts. Don’t fight. Don’t argue. You are the stronger sex. . . . It is enough that you are . . . that you are there . . . quiet . . . unshakable . . . always ready to give. That is your strength,” was the great-great-granddaughter of Sarah Stickney Ellis’s exhortation in 1839, “What man is there in existence who would not...

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