Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

1. Introduction

l Introduction HIS 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 T 2 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...