Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

10. Women and Love: Some Dying Myths

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. 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 ''"Loveisdisappearing....Onlysomestupidfoolswillstill 102 WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER 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 WOMEN AND LOVE 163 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...