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3 The True and Real Thing Victorian and Modern Magazine Cultures of Romance Love, in particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny. —Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Falling in Love,” Cornhill, 1877 Our stereotypes of the Victorian age lead us to expect certain sharp distinctions betweennineteenth -andtwenty-first-centuryviewsonthenatureoflove,genderroles, sex, and morality: namely, that Victorian women were corseted prudes, culture was genteel and moralistic, and love grew in the context of sweet, mannered, Austenish courtship. As with many stereotypes, some of this is partly true, enough so that immersing oneself in the Anglo-Victorian world of magazine love, as I did, can seem like landing on an unexplored planet: one only wonders how so much could have changedsoradicallyinsucharelativelyshorttime,historicallyspeaking. But from a different perspective, the opposite seems just as true: more than one might have thought, the relationship of gender to romance in our time and theirs remains startlingly similar, withstanding our own new ideas such as feminism , the sexual revolution, and the post-Freudian emphasis on psychological well-being. While sexuality and gender have been radically transformed in Western culture since the turn of the twentieth century, some of our assumptions about romantic relations have proven nearly impervious to alteration. The Meaning of Love What is “real” love? That’s an easy question, according to the wisdom guru Deepak Chopra. Writing in a column for O Magazine (2010), Chopra responded 50 The True and Real Thing 51 to an inquiry from one Roger, a sincere single male who had “doubts about marriage ” because “I see couples that do not love each other and decide to live together for other reasons than love itself. When I fall in love and I feel the other person does not feel the same way about me, I keep telling myself that it is an emotion I should not identify with. . . . How can a woman and a man be in real love?” Chopra’s reply, called “How to Feel Real Love,” frames these worries as “coming down to one question: Can I trust every infatuation I fall into?” His reply to Roger (but really to his own question, which is not quite what Roger asked) is simple but spiced with the gusto of perfect confidence: “The answer is no,” he states flatly. Infatuationisa“giddybeginning”with“runawayemotions,”butitdoesn’tlast.Real love is proceeding to the “next stage,” he says, which turns out to be the first of successive “deeper stages of connection” with someone who responds to you in the same way. Whereas infatuation “takes place on a cloud,” real love is “down to earth,” and about the “mundane business of figuring out how to relate . . . sharing onecloset,decidingwhowillliveinwhathouseandrememberingtogetskimmilk instead of whole.” Chopra identifies Roger’s “problem” on the basis of these assumptions : Roger is “addicted to infatuation” and therefore “resist[s] moving on to the more realistic phases of love.” His diagnosis is that Roger suffers from the pathology of being “stuck in adolescence.” Chopra is just as sure about the cure: ‘Your present need isn’t for Miss Right. It’s for a bit of growing up.”1 Deepak Chopra didn’t invent this idea, of course. I call this the “stages theory” of romantic love, and we can see it emerging in magazines more than a century ago as the chief ideology of Anglo-American romance. Nearly all my students, like most of modern culture, seem to agree on this idea: If we have romantic feelings for someone but they don’t lead to an enduring relationship, they aren’t “real”; if they do, they were the first immature stage of what is real love. The new twist in the twentieth century and beyond is the language of psychology, not yet available to the Victorians: the right love is mature, whereas Roger’s “infatuation ” shows that he is “stuck” in adolescence. This is the sign of a developmental pathology, but one easily fixable even for an “addict” like Roger—that is, if he listens to the magazine’s advice guru and grows up by redefining what love is. What many scholars know often comes as a shock to my students: this isn’t at all a universal belief and wasn’t always the accepted definition of romantic love even in Western culture. It’s fascinating to see this widely held contemporary idea in the early phase of its development in the nineteenth century, when the modern concept of romantic love was still forming. Before Shakespeare’s time, love was often associated in...

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