“Love is
love” declares the sign on my neighbor’s lawn.
It is a generous sentiment, reminding us that love is valued no matter
who loves whom, and regardless of how and why they love.
Yet it
contains a thousand complexities, not least because it joins the many
contradictory memes that we repeat to ourselves about love. Consider the following:
Love is
wonderful.
Love is painful.
Love hits like a thunderbolt.
Love takes time and patience.
Love is morally uplifting and the foundation of society.
Love is socially disruptive and must be tamed.
Love is forever.
Love is variety.
Love is consummated in sex.
Love transcends sex.
Love demands everything.
Love demands nothing.
These
and many other ideas about love jostle and clash with each other. All have a
kernel of truth. All may be manipulated
for self-regarding reasons. And all are
potentially at play when people love (or say they love) one another. We understand one or another meaning
according to our fantasies—and sometimes to our peril. “Captain Smith and Pocahontas/had a very mad
affair,” sang Peggy Lee in 1958, and many Americans then and since have liked
to imagine that a beautiful Native American girl fell in love with the man who
helped the Jamestown settlers to prosper in the seventeenth century. But, as the real Pocahontas herself later
explained to Captain John Smith, the moment in which she supposedly saved him
from death was the culmination of a ritual of adoption that the Powhatan
Indians had orchestrated. It was meant
to signal their desire for alliance and friendship as well as to demonstrate
their political superiority. Her “love” had nothing to do with a young girl’s
sudden crush.
Few of
us learn so explicitly as John Smith did what sort of love “I love you”
entails. Luckily, most of us live in subsets of our culture, I call them
“emotional communities,” that generally agree about the meaning of love and
other feelings in one or another context.
Pocahontas was clear when she confronted Smith; she had no romantic
illusions about him, and (a Powhatan princess herself) she knew very well what
the ritual was meant to express. Yes,
her “rescue” was an act of love, but not of the romantic sort. It was meant to seal a political alliance.
Although
we have lost the idea today, the English of Smith’s time knew as clearly as the
Powhatan that love could mean simply “affiliation.” As Smith once told Chief Powhatan, “The vow I
made you of my love, both myself and my men have kept.” But Smith also knew about romantic love, for
that was a European invention still in vogue in his day (and for many people in
ours as well). That romantic sort of
love was not part of Powhatan culture.
“Love
means affiliation.” “Love means life-long devotion.” These are memes that hide
centuries of change and elaboration. In
their longer form, they are fantasies—inventions that we have and use to mold
our own feelings and set our expectations, and also to change and sometimes
wiggle out of. By “fantasy” I have in
mind the sort of thing that Arlie Hochschild means when she speaks of the “deep
story” behind the stated discontents expressed by members of the American
political right. Or that E. Angus and L.
S Greenberg are thinking of when they advocate a form of psychotherapy that
intervenes and changes the narratives that people use to understand their
feelings and identities. Fantasies are the reasons why Iiro P. Jääskeläinen and
his colleagues use neuroimaging to unravel “how narratives influence the human
brain, thus shaping perception, cognition, emotions, and decision-making.” When I speak of fantasies, I mean what Joan
Didion summed up in her striking essay opener: “We tell ourselves stories in
order to live.”
All
fantasies have histories, but it is impossible to talk about their “ground
zero” origins. We may, rather, speak of
climates in which such narratives flourished and see how they took on different
meanings as they encountered—and influenced—a variety of people and social
groups at various times. It is not true
to say that “love is love” if by that we mean that it is universal, always
around, always felt in the same way. It
is also not true to say that love is entirely socially constructed, a figment
of the Western imagination. Love has
always been and remains a kind of negotiation between the two.
Many of
the stories of love show up best in literature, but that makes them no less
real and important than those in lived experience. Narratives reflect and set forth models of
beliefs and behavior —whether discovered in poetry, heard in churches or
temples, read in novels, or depicted in frescoes; watched on TV, YouTube, or
Facebook; heard on podcasts, sung in songs, read about on Twitter, or
publicized via influencers on Instagram, WeChat, Tumblr or TikTok.
Ours is
not the first era to deal with love’s many dissonant voices and contradictory
impulses. Indeed, the leisured classes
in ancient Athens, for example, were well aware of a great variety of seductive
ideas about love. Plato even staged (in
writing) a fictional drinking party at which various guests held forth on their
favorite idea of love, each speaker hoping to outdo the other.5 This Symposium exerted an enormous influence
on subsequent thinking about love. And
it very usefully set forth some of the many theories—convictions, really, since
people rarely suggest any tentativeness about love—circulating in the ancient
world. Plato made clear that there was
no consensus on the matter and yet also indicated how high the stakes were. In pre-Revolutionary French society,
similarly, a number of very different fantasies of love were deliberately set
forth and passionately debated at salons of the wealthy: the gallant love of the courtier, the
manipulative love of the libertine, the rigorously non-sexual love of
friendship.
Many
narratives of love inundate Western culture today. They shape, often unconsciously, how we think
about our own feelings and assess the feelings of others. In Love: A History in Five Fantasies I strive
to bring to light not only the bare outlines of some salient fantasies of love
but also their long histories. It is
hardly useful just to say what a particular fantasy is. It is far more helpful
to see that our many stories of love have had different moments and contexts
for flourishing and waning; that their significance has changed over time; and
that their continuance today must be assessed, judged, and accepted or rejected
according to the circumstances of the world we live in. In short, histories make visible the
half-hidden stories that continue to shape our contemporary ideas about love,
show us what still makes sense now, and help us decide what we might want to
jettison.
In my book, I begin my exploration with the idea that love is the union of two people of like minds. I continue with the story of love’s power to transcend, to take us out of ourselves to a higher realm. I then take up the idea that love implies freedom instead of obligation, and follow that with the fantasy that true love is obsessive. Love’s insatiability is my final fantasy.
Taken
together, the many threads separated by chapters in my book form a richly hued
tapestry. Yet it is an unfinished
tableau, for just as the fantasies of love I study have endured over the long
haul, so we may expect them to twist, turn, and change in unexpected ways in
the future. Love is a trickster. But I won’t have that printed up to put on my
lawn.
The Many
Memes of Love. By Barbara H. Rosenwein.
The Montréal Review, October 2021.
Love is painful.
Love hits like a thunderbolt.
Love takes time and patience.
Love is morally uplifting and the foundation of society.
Love is socially disruptive and must be tamed.
Love is forever.
Love is variety.
Love is consummated in sex.
Love transcends sex.
Love demands everything.
Love demands nothing.
In my book, I begin my exploration with the idea that love is the union of two people of like minds. I continue with the story of love’s power to transcend, to take us out of ourselves to a higher realm. I then take up the idea that love implies freedom instead of obligation, and follow that with the fantasy that true love is obsessive. Love’s insatiability is my final fantasy.
“Happy
Valentine’s Day,” says the card; “You Make My Heart Happy,” says another.
Normally I wouldn’t give these sentiments a second thought. But having just finished writing a book on
love, I was now slightly taken aback to see the word “happy” so
unproblematically associated with love.
For within at least one long-lasting Western tradition, love is anything but happy. This goes back at least to the fourth century bce philosopher Plato.
Normally Plato lets his hero Socrates have the last word in his dialogues. But in his Symposium, he sabotages that strategy. His dialogue takes place at a drinking party. Various luminaries from an earlier generation forgo the usual flute girls and competitive drinking in order to compete in praising love. Their speeches are brilliant, but just as the one by Socrates seems (as usual) about to triumph over all the others, a very drunken young man crashes the party. It is Alcibiades, who (when he hears what the men have been talking about) insists on giving his own speech. He is not going to praise love. He is in love, and he proceeds to tell the others what that means.
He couldn’t be more miserable. He’s crazy about Socrates, but no matter what he does, he can’t get the man to respond. He’s furious, jealous, and obsessed. Whenever he hears Socrates speak, he says, “my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” He wants nothing more than to be near Socrates, yet when he is, he is in anguish.
Plato wasn’t quite saying that this is how love should be, though he certainly knew that that is how it is, at least sometimes. But some fourteen hundred years later poet-musicians in the south of France began praising the sort of love that Alcibiades rued, calling it “true” love or (in their vernacular language, fin’amor: fine love). True love was passionate and erotic yet restrained. It endowed the men who practiced it (troubadours)—and women too (trobairitz)—with nobility and virtue not by inheritance or blood but through the depth of their emotion and devotion. Fine love committed the lover to serve the beloved no matter what. “Good lady,” sings twelfth-century poet Bernart de Ventadorn,
I ask you nothing at all
Except to make me your servant,
For I’ll serve you as I would a good lord,
And never ask for another reward.
He doesn’t mean it, though, and he is miserable because she doesn’t seem to give a fig for him.
If Bernart’s pledge sounds a bit like vassalage, it should. That was the context of such songs. One might object: how much real feeling did they express? After all, they were only songs. But consider that they spoke to the values and feelings of the real people who retained troubadours at their courts. Poetry and song are, even today, vessels into which we pour our emotions.
They are also mirrors in which we see ourselves. And they are models that help us shape our feelings even as we struggle to mold them our own way.
Medieval romances elaborated on the feelings of longing, rapture, and pain that love engendered as well as the themes of sacrifice and service. In Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of the story of Tristan and Isolde, their love is so intense that it must culminate in an eternal embrace realized only in death.
The idea that love should be painful and turbulent long survived the Middle Ages. In the Romantic period, indeed, true love became so violent that it ended in bitter suicide. This was the conceit of Goethe’s Werther. The eponymous hero is supposed to take his friend Albert’s fiancée Lotte to a dance. From the first moment he sees her, he is thrown into rapturous confusion: “I don’t know whether it’s day or night.” Every word she speaks thrills him; every touch whirls him around. After she weds Albert, Werther writes passionate letters to her. When the outfit he wore at their first meeting wears out, he buys another to match. Sinking into bleak depression, he borrows Albert’s pistol and kills himself. And Lotte? Does she do the same? Not quite. But, since she returns Werther’s love, her life will be bleak forevermore, and when she dies, writes Goethe, the two “will meet and love each other forever.”
Werther was fiction, but its effects were real-world. Young men sported yellow waistcoats meant to recall Werther’s outfit, and women wore the scent of “Eau de Werther.” There were even copy-cat suicides. A man in love should be tormented; a woman in love should go to any length for her passion: such was the conceit of the Romantic era. In countless nineteenth-century operas, the lovers die tragic deaths because of their tragic love for each other. Often, as in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, their mutual demise is preceded by the unhappy heroine going wildly, gorgeously mad.
The greatest novelists of the Romantic period borrowed the tropes of painful and obsessive love—and problematized them. Emma Bovary’s lively imagination (as depicted by novelist Gustave Flaubert) is a tissue of love fantasies constructed on the shards of the fictions of her day. She was particularly affected by Paul and Virginia (1788) a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The two young lovers in that story live on an island, far from the corrupting effects of civilization. Emma’s thoughts dwell on their idyll. She thinks she is in love before she weds, but when her marriage does not live up to her fantasies, she seeks lovers elsewhere. When they disappoint, she takes arsenic, enduring a death more tragic than even Lucia’s. For Emma Bovary, both love and lack of love bring suicidal despair.
It is true that the 1920s brought with it a new appreciation of “the cool.” Hot, tempestuous love was belittled. In a piece for Esquire Magazine in 1934, Henry Morton Robinson called romantic love a childish myth that caused nothing but misery. And yet that myth continued, and does so today. Caroline Polachek’s pop song “Ocean of Tears” (2019) hopes for sublimity while anticipating torture. Her persona laments the “ocean of tears” that separates her from the one she loves. A YouTube live performance of the song in 2020 has 2.8K Likes and nearly 51,000 views.
The love implied by “Happy Valentine’s Day” is anodyne, neither hot nor cold. It’s perfectly appropriate for a greeting that will go, indiscriminately, to friends, family, and co-workers. But let’s not forget how much it leaves out.
Anyone for Existential Torment this Valentine's Day? By Barbara H. Rosenwein. History New Network, February 13, 2022.
For within at least one long-lasting Western tradition, love is anything but happy. This goes back at least to the fourth century bce philosopher Plato.
Normally Plato lets his hero Socrates have the last word in his dialogues. But in his Symposium, he sabotages that strategy. His dialogue takes place at a drinking party. Various luminaries from an earlier generation forgo the usual flute girls and competitive drinking in order to compete in praising love. Their speeches are brilliant, but just as the one by Socrates seems (as usual) about to triumph over all the others, a very drunken young man crashes the party. It is Alcibiades, who (when he hears what the men have been talking about) insists on giving his own speech. He is not going to praise love. He is in love, and he proceeds to tell the others what that means.
He couldn’t be more miserable. He’s crazy about Socrates, but no matter what he does, he can’t get the man to respond. He’s furious, jealous, and obsessed. Whenever he hears Socrates speak, he says, “my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” He wants nothing more than to be near Socrates, yet when he is, he is in anguish.
Plato wasn’t quite saying that this is how love should be, though he certainly knew that that is how it is, at least sometimes. But some fourteen hundred years later poet-musicians in the south of France began praising the sort of love that Alcibiades rued, calling it “true” love or (in their vernacular language, fin’amor: fine love). True love was passionate and erotic yet restrained. It endowed the men who practiced it (troubadours)—and women too (trobairitz)—with nobility and virtue not by inheritance or blood but through the depth of their emotion and devotion. Fine love committed the lover to serve the beloved no matter what. “Good lady,” sings twelfth-century poet Bernart de Ventadorn,
I ask you nothing at all
Except to make me your servant,
For I’ll serve you as I would a good lord,
And never ask for another reward.
He doesn’t mean it, though, and he is miserable because she doesn’t seem to give a fig for him.
If Bernart’s pledge sounds a bit like vassalage, it should. That was the context of such songs. One might object: how much real feeling did they express? After all, they were only songs. But consider that they spoke to the values and feelings of the real people who retained troubadours at their courts. Poetry and song are, even today, vessels into which we pour our emotions.
They are also mirrors in which we see ourselves. And they are models that help us shape our feelings even as we struggle to mold them our own way.
Medieval romances elaborated on the feelings of longing, rapture, and pain that love engendered as well as the themes of sacrifice and service. In Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of the story of Tristan and Isolde, their love is so intense that it must culminate in an eternal embrace realized only in death.
The idea that love should be painful and turbulent long survived the Middle Ages. In the Romantic period, indeed, true love became so violent that it ended in bitter suicide. This was the conceit of Goethe’s Werther. The eponymous hero is supposed to take his friend Albert’s fiancée Lotte to a dance. From the first moment he sees her, he is thrown into rapturous confusion: “I don’t know whether it’s day or night.” Every word she speaks thrills him; every touch whirls him around. After she weds Albert, Werther writes passionate letters to her. When the outfit he wore at their first meeting wears out, he buys another to match. Sinking into bleak depression, he borrows Albert’s pistol and kills himself. And Lotte? Does she do the same? Not quite. But, since she returns Werther’s love, her life will be bleak forevermore, and when she dies, writes Goethe, the two “will meet and love each other forever.”
Werther was fiction, but its effects were real-world. Young men sported yellow waistcoats meant to recall Werther’s outfit, and women wore the scent of “Eau de Werther.” There were even copy-cat suicides. A man in love should be tormented; a woman in love should go to any length for her passion: such was the conceit of the Romantic era. In countless nineteenth-century operas, the lovers die tragic deaths because of their tragic love for each other. Often, as in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, their mutual demise is preceded by the unhappy heroine going wildly, gorgeously mad.
The greatest novelists of the Romantic period borrowed the tropes of painful and obsessive love—and problematized them. Emma Bovary’s lively imagination (as depicted by novelist Gustave Flaubert) is a tissue of love fantasies constructed on the shards of the fictions of her day. She was particularly affected by Paul and Virginia (1788) a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The two young lovers in that story live on an island, far from the corrupting effects of civilization. Emma’s thoughts dwell on their idyll. She thinks she is in love before she weds, but when her marriage does not live up to her fantasies, she seeks lovers elsewhere. When they disappoint, she takes arsenic, enduring a death more tragic than even Lucia’s. For Emma Bovary, both love and lack of love bring suicidal despair.
It is true that the 1920s brought with it a new appreciation of “the cool.” Hot, tempestuous love was belittled. In a piece for Esquire Magazine in 1934, Henry Morton Robinson called romantic love a childish myth that caused nothing but misery. And yet that myth continued, and does so today. Caroline Polachek’s pop song “Ocean of Tears” (2019) hopes for sublimity while anticipating torture. Her persona laments the “ocean of tears” that separates her from the one she loves. A YouTube live performance of the song in 2020 has 2.8K Likes and nearly 51,000 views.
The love implied by “Happy Valentine’s Day” is anodyne, neither hot nor cold. It’s perfectly appropriate for a greeting that will go, indiscriminately, to friends, family, and co-workers. But let’s not forget how much it leaves out.
Anyone for Existential Torment this Valentine's Day? By Barbara H. Rosenwein. History New Network, February 13, 2022.
The top
song on Billboard’s Rhythm & Blues chart in 1967 was Jackie Wilson’s (Your
Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. Once (he sang), he had been
‘down-hearted’. Then he found a special girl. Now he’s flying high.
Next,
compare the feeling of love in Wilson’s song with that of Odysseus in Homer’s
epic the Odyssey. The eponymous hero doesn’t want to fly. When the beautiful
goddess Calypso tries to keep him as her bedmate, he turns her down even though
she promises him immortality – a place with the gods. He wants to go home, to
his wife. He wants to be grounded – quite literally, since the nuptial bed on
which he and Penelope make love is constructed around a deep-rooted olive tree.
And then
there is the love that the philosopher Carrie Jenkins has for her husband and,
at the same time, for her boyfriend, sharing her time with one or the other.
She considers hers a form of romantic love, but she knows very well that it is
not the sort celebrated by Wilson or Homer. She calls it polyamory.
These
examples hardly begin to cover the vastly different feelings that the simple
word ‘love’ is supposed to cover. Such variations should call into question the
Basic Emotions Theory accepted by the majority of psychologists today. They
maintain that there are six or so emotions, most often listed as happiness,
sadness, anger, surprise, disgust and fear. These are universal and hardwired,
the hard-won products of long evolution. Other emotions are compounds of the
basic ones or are not emotions at all.
Note
that love is not among them. Love has no one recognisable facial expression,
whereas (argue Basic Emotions adherents) each basic emotion is signalled by an
invariable facial expression. Some cultures may try to disguise that
expression, but it will nevertheless leak out via ‘micro-expressions’.
The
Basic Emotions Theory dates back to a study undertaken in the 1960s by the
psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace V Friesen to test their hypothesis that
emotions were universally understood ‘in the face’. They chose as their
subjects the non-Westernised Fore tribespeople of Papua New Guinea. At first,
they simply showed photos of faces posed to express the six basic emotions. But
the Fore respondents couldn’t figure out what they were being asked to do.
Therefore, Ekman and Friesen had first to make up a story to go with each
emotion. For example, the story for the photos of faces sporting a wide grin
was: ‘His (her) friends have come, and he (she) is happy.’ After hearing the
story, 100 per cent of the Fore adult subjects chose the Happiness face rather
than two faces showing (or, rather, posing) Disgust and Anger. And so it went –
similarly (if less successfully) – with the other emotions. The researchers concluded
that emotions were constant across cultures – basic and universal. This idea
pervades numerous psychology labs today. As the scholar Ruth Leys points out in
The Ascent of Affect (2017), the theory is particularly attractive to
scientists because it leaves out intentionality – something too variable and
messy to measure.
But the
scientists who use posed faces are overlooking the fact that the original study
was obliged to introduce intention – via the stories. What did the lady with
the large smile intend? To greet her friends. It was the story that animated
the inert photo, not the facial expression per se.
Intentionality
is at the heart of the emotion of love; what a person means when he or she
‘loves’ must be expressed in words, tones of voice and gestures. Faces may play
a role, but not necessarily. Before Ekman and Friesen, love had most certainly
been considered an emotion. Indeed, by leaving it out, the two psychologists
were bucking a long tradition that made love not only an emotion but sometimes
also the premier emotion. In the 4th century BCE, love was one of 12 passions
named by Aristotle (though he knew that he was leaving out many others). In the
13th century CE, Thomas Aquinas made love the prime mover of every emotion. And
in the 1960s, Magda Arnold, a pioneer of cognitivism, classified love as a
positive ‘impulse’ emotion. For all of these theorists, love was paradigmatic
of all the other emotions.
The
chief opposition to the Basic Emotions thesis today is led by ‘psychological
constructionists’ such as Lisa Feldman Barrett and James A Russell. They argue
that both emotions and cognitions are ‘conceptualisations’. As the human brain
monitors our internal and external environments, it makes sense of what it
perceives by learning repeated patterns and their labels. In the
English-speaking world, the brain learns to associate certain sensations and
ideations with ‘love’. In other cultures, different patterns are reinforced,
connected to different feelings and perceptions, and therefore differently
understood and named.
Psychological
constructionism helps explain why the Fore were initially confused when
presented with some photographs. It also supports the findings of
anthropologists that, in other cultures, emotions are not only sorted differently
than those in the West but also ‘felt’ in ways Westerners find odd. Thus, the
anthropologist Andrew Beatty has written of the ‘hairy’ hearts of some of the
Nias tribespeople he came to know during a two-year fieldtrip in Indonesia. In
his book Emotional Worlds (2019), Beatty illustrates how two parties negotiated
a bride wealth in anticipation of a marriage by using various emotional
locutions unfamiliar to him: ‘we feel two-hearted’, we are
‘shrivelled-hearted’, let’s be ‘clear-hearted’.
The
contributions of psychological constructionism take us a long way beyond the
Basic Emotions thesis, but they leave out the glue that holds together the
sensations and ideations: the stories. The brain’s sense-making does not entail
simply associating feelings and connecting them with words. It involves finding
and creating narratives. These narratives are both cultural givens and, at the
same time, they are in a continual process of formation; they undergo
modifications (in one’s lifetime, in one’s culture). They crystallise
sensations, experiences, thoughts and actions (or, at least, impulses to
action). They have an arc, if not always a beginning, a middle and an end.
Finally, they imply value judgments: this is the way you/I/we should feel in
these circumstances; this is how we should express it. And, conversely: this
feeling or way of feeling is wrong, it is hateful, it is manipulative.
Stories
are manipulative, for they not only make sense of what we feel but also shape
those feelings, even as we struggle to mold them according to our particular
needs and understandings. In that sense, they are tools of power as much as
they are neutral organisers of the disparate sensations and experiences of our
lives.
Anthropologists
sometimes find love stories in the cultures that they study, but these stories
are generally quite different from those that Western cultures tell – even when
(as happens today) Western narratives have infiltrated them. Western culture’s
influence is no doubt due to its political, military and economic hegemony. But
it is also due to the fact that it invests an extraordinary amount of thought,
energy and emotion into love, amore, amour, amor, Liebe – obviously, the
English term is only a stand-in for the rest. Love is emoted with hearts, posted
on billboards (‘You’ll love our cereal’), promoted on dating sites, printed on
Christmas cards, and celebrated on Valentine’s Day. A Google Ngram of the words
love and anger (anger being many psychologists’ model emotion) since 1800 shows
how love indeed conquers all, especially today.
Frequency
of emotion terms in printed books since 1800
The real
work is ahead. What does love mean in Western culture? Arnold may have been
correct to say that it is an ‘impulse’ emotion, but that is meaningless until
one knows what sets off the impulse, the goal that it has, how it is
experienced and expressed, the feelings it is associated with, and the moral
purchase it claims. And even then, one needs to ask if everyone agrees that the
same motives, goals, performances, feelings and ethical values are at work in
every case.
As I
argue in my book Love: A History in Five Fantasies (2021), Western love is not
– and has not been – one thing, and no doubt the same is true for other
cultures as well. If Jackie Wilson flew high on love, others (around the same
time) were singing that ‘Love ain’t nothing but sorrow.’ And if some (like
Percy Sledge) maintain that ‘When a man loves a woman/Can’t keep his mind on
nothin’ else,’ polyamorists are glad to have several loves. Still others find
love elsewhere, in other stories. These varieties suggest that we live in
emotional communities that evaluate, use, abuse and act out emotions in ways
that make sense mainly within that community.
To
understand the stories that inspire, explain and keep on track these various
emotional communities, it is best to look at the long haul: history. Doing so
means moving away from the prevalent tendency to deny that the past can shed
light on the human heart and brain. That predilection infects not only the
Basic Emotions crowd but also, at least as it is now discussed, psychological
constructionism, which so far does not consider whence derive the ambient
associations between sensations and their conceptualisations. The caretakers
who bring up baby and thus who create his/her/their emotional world in the
psychological constructionist model are themselves products of their emotional
communities. Those emotional communities were not constructed out of nothing
but rather created over time with the bits and pieces – variously accepted,
rejected and rejiggered – of the stories, experiences and performances of the
past.
The past
is another country, but at first it may seem nothing like those that
anthropologists visit. For anthropologists (like psychologists) have living
people in front of them. Historians in the main do not. They have only the
writings and materials left behind by human beings. Yet the difference is not
so great as some imagine. The psychologist has only what her subject says. Or
she may consult her subject’s brain scans, pulse rates and so on; these do not
speak and, like the material culture of the past, must be interpreted. Even
speech is often opaque, hiding as much as it reveals. In a psychology lab,
speech is often highly controlled and directed, and that, too, has problems.
Like the forced choice given to the Fore (to decide which story the photo is
about from only three options – disgust, anger or happiness), constraints
inhibit spontaneity. Anthropologists understand the drawbacks inherent in a
laboratory setting. That is why they live with people for many years to figure
out what they are saying and doing. Even so, Beatty for one, ever alert to
contexts of expression, admits that he never figured out what the Nias meant by
having a ‘hairy heart’.
Percy
Sledge’s inability to think about anything but his girl tapped into a Western
tradition of very long-standing: love as an obsession. Plato knew about it. His
Symposium is set at a party with an illustrious group of guests from an earlier
generation, including Socrates. Foregoing the usual drunken orgy and dismissing
the flute girls, the men (they are all men) agree to take turns speaking about
the nature of love. It’s clear that the discussion is implicitly as much about
one-upmanship as it is explicitly about eros, and it seems to end, as expected,
with the speech of Socrates.
Then,
just as the party is about to break up, in comes a gate-crasher. It is
Alcibiades, roaring drunk and crazy in love with Socrates. Does the company
want to know what love really is? He proposes to tell them. It is feeling your
heart leap in your chest, the tears run down your cheeks. It means admiring,
desiring and being endlessly frustrated. You realise how wonderful your beloved
is and how you can never measure up. You wish you didn’t feel compelled to
stick around, but you have to. You’re a slave. Yes! Alcibiades has ‘no idea
what to do, no purpose in life; ah, no one else has ever known the real meaning
of slavery.’
For I’m more drawn to loving
And better made for its command.
Except to make me your servant.”
Barbara
Rosenwein talks about her new book Love: A History in Five Fantasies (Polity
Press, 2021) today on the podcast.
We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments.
Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships.
If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn’t work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.
Barbara H. Rosenwein is internationally recognized for her work in the history of emotions, a field she helped to pioneer. Her books explore the many ways in which different groups have experienced, valued, and expressed emotions over time. There are no universal, “basic emotions,” but all of us have feelings shaped by (and shaping in turn) the “emotional communities” in which we live. Rosenwein has taught and lectured around the world, but her home is near Chicago, where she lives with her husband, Tom. Host is Jana Byars.
New Books Network, December 7, 2021.
We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments.
Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships.
If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn’t work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.
Barbara H. Rosenwein is internationally recognized for her work in the history of emotions, a field she helped to pioneer. Her books explore the many ways in which different groups have experienced, valued, and expressed emotions over time. There are no universal, “basic emotions,” but all of us have feelings shaped by (and shaping in turn) the “emotional communities” in which we live. Rosenwein has taught and lectured around the world, but her home is near Chicago, where she lives with her husband, Tom. Host is Jana Byars.
New Books Network, December 7, 2021.
Romantic
love, in the present world, has turned out to be one of those commodities, like
fame or money, that fails to live up to expectations of it. Its elusiveness has
apparelled it in a thick coat of mythology that withstands rational dissolution
to the extent that love itself remains an unknown quantity. Where it does
appear, it depends on a process of exchange that imitates capitalist economic
relations, but without the security of satisfaction implicitly written into
commercial transactions. Its compound of grief, hope and passion, driven by
radical inequity and its ecstasies, has powered one of the most enduring
abstract beliefs in human affairs. If the only true love is the unrequited sort
because, tested to its own disintegration, it finds its raging ultimacy, it may
be better after all to have loved and lost, or better to be unremarkably
satisfied with being immune to its ideology.
The publisher who turned down a proposal for a study of romantic love on the grounds that only poets and storytellers truly spoke its language uttered perhaps the last hurrah of the most impervious ideology of them all. For all the rivers of tears in which one waded waist-deep, in hope of arriving at the reward, it is exactly the idealised notion of the reward, the dazzled paradigm of happiness itself — better than drugs, better than money — that keeps the whole show going on. Love is indeed, as the publisher's rejection note claimed, overwhelmingly the principal matter of the stories and songs, pictures and poems, that unite the aesthetics of East and West, but nobody sobbing at the back of the night bus, after an evening spent in the corner watching him kiss her, needs to have read Plato or Stendhal to grasp its corrosive, nauseous force. There is, officially, nothing better. Its astringency, after all, reminds you that you are alive and born to suffer.
The historian Barbara Rosenwein is the latest to wonder whether a typology of the myths of love might be teased out of the centuries-long obsession with its elusive ideal. She distinguishes five of these: the miraculous kinship that unites soulmates; the transcendent rapture of the besotted state; selfless devotion to the loved one; ineradicable yearning that feeds on itself; and the blinkered carnal rampancy of the sex appetite. For all that its elements have propagated into five, there is an unmistakable hint here of Plato's triune definition of the soul, descending from the noble ideals housed in the head to the spirited adventures of the heart, and thence to the importunate hungers of the nether regions — the belly and genitals, their lust for possession.
Outlining a harmonious vision of civic chastity in the Laws, the elderly Plato insisted on the inevitable inequality in sexual relationships, the solution to which was the 'other half' theory of Aristophanes in the Symposium. We have all become detached from a part of ourselves that can be re-encountered, for those who have the necessary sensitivity, in another, a postulate that endures in the modern conception that a significant other 'completes' us. If such an account has anything persuasive in it, it emerges in the unassuageable agonies that await those whose unions have once more broken apart, an emotional analogue of the amputee's phantom limb syndrome. St. Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th-century Cistercian abbot who was author of one of the great medieval texts on love, De Spirituali Amicitia (On Spiritual Friendship), theorises that what ennobles love and amity is a just measure of reason. The ideal of like-mindedness only gains authenticity if the two partners are prepared to adjust to each other as they grow together, a proposition that consigns the naïveté of the Aristophanic completeness myth to philosophy's remainder bin.
Rosenwein may not be in the demythologising game wholesale, but she is keenly alert to the self-contradictions that come with the territory. At the outset of her chapter on Obligation, she rehearses the standard homily that 'When you love someone, whatever you do is an act of love', but only a couple of pages later, is already enlarging on the dreary imperatives that inform today's relationships, from the incautiously literal approach to dating profiles all the way to pre-nuptial agreements: 'When and if what we do feels like drudgery, or when our partner says that what we expect from him or her feels like drudgery, we feel disappointed in love.' But then love — and not just modern love, to be sure, but the entire tear-streaked, turbulent history of love and pain and the whole damn thing — is compounded of disappointment. It's how you cope with the destruction of hope that determines love's authenticity.
On the other hand, keeping hope going against all odds, in the form of love as obsession, is the very pattern of tragic magnificence. Obsessive love, the kind that starts with sleepless nights and ends with restraining orders, Rosenwein shrewdly notes, is the one variety of it that calls itself into question. You know that, like drinking every night, you are probably doing more of it than is good for you, and yet when it comes to any thought of curtailing it, the attempt foredooms itself. In any case, as Rosenwein also declares in a nimble piece of dialectic, 'the very declaration of love is a form of power over others, even as it pretends to be submission'.
By the time the late Victorian era began to psychologise sexual desire, it had transformed what was once a philosophical postulate, Schopenhauer's Will, into the notion of the sex drive. It may be true that all romantic love begins with the adventitious fantasy in which somebody by whom one has become socially fascinated might consent to your laying hands on their body, or — better still — wanting to do the same to you, but there are many forms of love that outgrow the sexual impulse, or are never predicated on it in the first place. Here, Rosenwein is less certain of her footing, not least when she claims of the insatiability of lustful desire that 'its language is exactly the same as . . . all the other forms of love. It declares itself to be love'. This risks a Panglossian benevolence about the manifestations of physical desire, what men in particular are prepared to do in pursuit of it, and is in danger of taking too literally its glib self-sanctification.
What the young already know about the belated sagacities of those elders who can't help enlightening them, is that what remains to conjure away the aridity of age, far more than the achievements of work and material accumulation, is the memory of sensual delight. 'Get it while you can,' was how Janis Joplin put it. In poignant late life, Stendhal, in an autobiography that only saw the light of day a half-century after his death, counted off the number of women he had had sex with, only just making it on to the fingers of a second hand. 'I was not promiscuous,' he sighed, 'not enough so.' Oh well, too late. Judiciously measured, intoxicants will last you a lifetime, sex not nearly so. Somewhere between the two, love might just, as it mutates and sheds its skins, falters and resurges, thereby endure.
Rosenwein's book arrives within two years of another Polity title that might stand as its antithesis, Eva Illouz's The End of Love, originally published in Germany in 2018 under the title Warum Liebe Endet. The modification in the English is important: Why Love Ends not only has the ring of a pop psychology manual, but suggests that the focus is on why relationships come to grief, whereas what Illouz is primarily concerned with is why they barely get off the ground at all. Her argument, pursued not only polemically but through professional sociological methods, constitutes a contemporary romantic-sexual version of Hegel's end-of-art thesis, a summation of the wholesale repurposing of love and intimacy in the generation of dating apps, hookups and one-nighters, in which the assumption of illusionless honesty may be sheer ideology, but is all the more powerful for that.
At the outset of the work, Illouz states the decidedly Hegelian case that what has happened to love since the 1960s represents the progressive realisation of the individual's freedom, an often unnoticed offshoot of the passage to civic and political liberation. The accent is firmly on the 'negative' invoked in the book's subtitle, the notion, inherited from the German theorist Günther Anders, that the affirmation of the self is attained through the negation or parenthesising of the claims of others on it. And not only is the self buffered by its autonomisation, but it is at the same time elevated in its aesthetic discernment: 'Discarding persons is . . . intrinsic to the continuous exercise of taste,' Illouz asserts. If the fungibility and precariousness that have replaced the lifelong ideal induce a sense of emotional vertigo, consider the cheerless testimony of the 59-year-old divorced woman, who tells Illouz, 'I miss being married. The clarity of it. You may be miserably married but at least you know what you have.’
Divorce itself is now more a matter of subjective emotional perception ('I don't feel this marriage is going anywhere') than about objective material factors such as cruelty, infidelity, poverty or alcohol, which reflects the fact that, while romantic partnerships may be susceptible to legalistic consent, there isn't such a contract in existence that cannot be unilaterally torn up by non-negotiable feelings. The sudden death that feelings confer on asymmetrically failing relationships is what has led to the current practice of ghosting, a digital term for brutally disregarding the existence of somebody whose fluid residues you have only recently soaped away. Meanwhile, what particularly aggravates those defining themselves as incels, and has assisted their coalescing into a movement that may resort to acts of terrorism, is that something as straightforward as a sexual contract, to which they feel they have a constitutional right, is not even forthcoming to them to begin with.
None of this helps to sustain what was once the utopian potential of love, that it existed and evolved in a zone discrete from social coercion. The Schumanns may have had to go to court in 1840 to overturn the veto Clara's father tried to exercise over her and Robert's marriage plans, but the court rendered him powerless to stop them. One of the unintended consequences of the sexual liberation of the past half-century is to have dissolved the protective boundaries of love, which has become as permeable by commercial exchange relations and the reifications of mass culture as anything else. 'Sex and love no longer represent the site where the self can oppose society,' Illouz observes in concluding her book. If sex is no longer circumscribed by religious precept or moral normativity, it is nonetheless entirely saturated by consumerism.
Self-accusatory resignation is one of the many ways modern lovers have found to rationalise the corruption of romance. In a lyric of 1961, Noël Coward spoke for many: 'I am no good at love: / I betray it with little sins. / For I feel the misery of the end / In the moment that it begins. / And the bitterness of the last good-bye / Is the bitterness that wins.' The imperative to find people who have the same interests and outlook as you, by which the therapy industry conforms relationships to the banality of bespoke tailoring, helps crush the life out of love too. On opposite sides of the world, in cultures unvisited and unblest, from the security of distance, people are yearning to make online contact with each other, while nobody on your own block gives a tuppenny fuck for your new haircut. The heart wants what it wants, but only after it has wanted what it doesn't want.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Love: A History in Five Fantasies
Polity Press 224pp ISBN 9781509531837 £20.00
Eva Illouz, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations
Polity Press 320pp ISBN 9781509550258 £14.99
There is Nothing Better. By Stuart Walton. Review31, 2021
The publisher who turned down a proposal for a study of romantic love on the grounds that only poets and storytellers truly spoke its language uttered perhaps the last hurrah of the most impervious ideology of them all. For all the rivers of tears in which one waded waist-deep, in hope of arriving at the reward, it is exactly the idealised notion of the reward, the dazzled paradigm of happiness itself — better than drugs, better than money — that keeps the whole show going on. Love is indeed, as the publisher's rejection note claimed, overwhelmingly the principal matter of the stories and songs, pictures and poems, that unite the aesthetics of East and West, but nobody sobbing at the back of the night bus, after an evening spent in the corner watching him kiss her, needs to have read Plato or Stendhal to grasp its corrosive, nauseous force. There is, officially, nothing better. Its astringency, after all, reminds you that you are alive and born to suffer.
The historian Barbara Rosenwein is the latest to wonder whether a typology of the myths of love might be teased out of the centuries-long obsession with its elusive ideal. She distinguishes five of these: the miraculous kinship that unites soulmates; the transcendent rapture of the besotted state; selfless devotion to the loved one; ineradicable yearning that feeds on itself; and the blinkered carnal rampancy of the sex appetite. For all that its elements have propagated into five, there is an unmistakable hint here of Plato's triune definition of the soul, descending from the noble ideals housed in the head to the spirited adventures of the heart, and thence to the importunate hungers of the nether regions — the belly and genitals, their lust for possession.
Outlining a harmonious vision of civic chastity in the Laws, the elderly Plato insisted on the inevitable inequality in sexual relationships, the solution to which was the 'other half' theory of Aristophanes in the Symposium. We have all become detached from a part of ourselves that can be re-encountered, for those who have the necessary sensitivity, in another, a postulate that endures in the modern conception that a significant other 'completes' us. If such an account has anything persuasive in it, it emerges in the unassuageable agonies that await those whose unions have once more broken apart, an emotional analogue of the amputee's phantom limb syndrome. St. Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th-century Cistercian abbot who was author of one of the great medieval texts on love, De Spirituali Amicitia (On Spiritual Friendship), theorises that what ennobles love and amity is a just measure of reason. The ideal of like-mindedness only gains authenticity if the two partners are prepared to adjust to each other as they grow together, a proposition that consigns the naïveté of the Aristophanic completeness myth to philosophy's remainder bin.
Rosenwein may not be in the demythologising game wholesale, but she is keenly alert to the self-contradictions that come with the territory. At the outset of her chapter on Obligation, she rehearses the standard homily that 'When you love someone, whatever you do is an act of love', but only a couple of pages later, is already enlarging on the dreary imperatives that inform today's relationships, from the incautiously literal approach to dating profiles all the way to pre-nuptial agreements: 'When and if what we do feels like drudgery, or when our partner says that what we expect from him or her feels like drudgery, we feel disappointed in love.' But then love — and not just modern love, to be sure, but the entire tear-streaked, turbulent history of love and pain and the whole damn thing — is compounded of disappointment. It's how you cope with the destruction of hope that determines love's authenticity.
On the other hand, keeping hope going against all odds, in the form of love as obsession, is the very pattern of tragic magnificence. Obsessive love, the kind that starts with sleepless nights and ends with restraining orders, Rosenwein shrewdly notes, is the one variety of it that calls itself into question. You know that, like drinking every night, you are probably doing more of it than is good for you, and yet when it comes to any thought of curtailing it, the attempt foredooms itself. In any case, as Rosenwein also declares in a nimble piece of dialectic, 'the very declaration of love is a form of power over others, even as it pretends to be submission'.
By the time the late Victorian era began to psychologise sexual desire, it had transformed what was once a philosophical postulate, Schopenhauer's Will, into the notion of the sex drive. It may be true that all romantic love begins with the adventitious fantasy in which somebody by whom one has become socially fascinated might consent to your laying hands on their body, or — better still — wanting to do the same to you, but there are many forms of love that outgrow the sexual impulse, or are never predicated on it in the first place. Here, Rosenwein is less certain of her footing, not least when she claims of the insatiability of lustful desire that 'its language is exactly the same as . . . all the other forms of love. It declares itself to be love'. This risks a Panglossian benevolence about the manifestations of physical desire, what men in particular are prepared to do in pursuit of it, and is in danger of taking too literally its glib self-sanctification.
What the young already know about the belated sagacities of those elders who can't help enlightening them, is that what remains to conjure away the aridity of age, far more than the achievements of work and material accumulation, is the memory of sensual delight. 'Get it while you can,' was how Janis Joplin put it. In poignant late life, Stendhal, in an autobiography that only saw the light of day a half-century after his death, counted off the number of women he had had sex with, only just making it on to the fingers of a second hand. 'I was not promiscuous,' he sighed, 'not enough so.' Oh well, too late. Judiciously measured, intoxicants will last you a lifetime, sex not nearly so. Somewhere between the two, love might just, as it mutates and sheds its skins, falters and resurges, thereby endure.
Rosenwein's book arrives within two years of another Polity title that might stand as its antithesis, Eva Illouz's The End of Love, originally published in Germany in 2018 under the title Warum Liebe Endet. The modification in the English is important: Why Love Ends not only has the ring of a pop psychology manual, but suggests that the focus is on why relationships come to grief, whereas what Illouz is primarily concerned with is why they barely get off the ground at all. Her argument, pursued not only polemically but through professional sociological methods, constitutes a contemporary romantic-sexual version of Hegel's end-of-art thesis, a summation of the wholesale repurposing of love and intimacy in the generation of dating apps, hookups and one-nighters, in which the assumption of illusionless honesty may be sheer ideology, but is all the more powerful for that.
At the outset of the work, Illouz states the decidedly Hegelian case that what has happened to love since the 1960s represents the progressive realisation of the individual's freedom, an often unnoticed offshoot of the passage to civic and political liberation. The accent is firmly on the 'negative' invoked in the book's subtitle, the notion, inherited from the German theorist Günther Anders, that the affirmation of the self is attained through the negation or parenthesising of the claims of others on it. And not only is the self buffered by its autonomisation, but it is at the same time elevated in its aesthetic discernment: 'Discarding persons is . . . intrinsic to the continuous exercise of taste,' Illouz asserts. If the fungibility and precariousness that have replaced the lifelong ideal induce a sense of emotional vertigo, consider the cheerless testimony of the 59-year-old divorced woman, who tells Illouz, 'I miss being married. The clarity of it. You may be miserably married but at least you know what you have.’
Divorce itself is now more a matter of subjective emotional perception ('I don't feel this marriage is going anywhere') than about objective material factors such as cruelty, infidelity, poverty or alcohol, which reflects the fact that, while romantic partnerships may be susceptible to legalistic consent, there isn't such a contract in existence that cannot be unilaterally torn up by non-negotiable feelings. The sudden death that feelings confer on asymmetrically failing relationships is what has led to the current practice of ghosting, a digital term for brutally disregarding the existence of somebody whose fluid residues you have only recently soaped away. Meanwhile, what particularly aggravates those defining themselves as incels, and has assisted their coalescing into a movement that may resort to acts of terrorism, is that something as straightforward as a sexual contract, to which they feel they have a constitutional right, is not even forthcoming to them to begin with.
None of this helps to sustain what was once the utopian potential of love, that it existed and evolved in a zone discrete from social coercion. The Schumanns may have had to go to court in 1840 to overturn the veto Clara's father tried to exercise over her and Robert's marriage plans, but the court rendered him powerless to stop them. One of the unintended consequences of the sexual liberation of the past half-century is to have dissolved the protective boundaries of love, which has become as permeable by commercial exchange relations and the reifications of mass culture as anything else. 'Sex and love no longer represent the site where the self can oppose society,' Illouz observes in concluding her book. If sex is no longer circumscribed by religious precept or moral normativity, it is nonetheless entirely saturated by consumerism.
Self-accusatory resignation is one of the many ways modern lovers have found to rationalise the corruption of romance. In a lyric of 1961, Noël Coward spoke for many: 'I am no good at love: / I betray it with little sins. / For I feel the misery of the end / In the moment that it begins. / And the bitterness of the last good-bye / Is the bitterness that wins.' The imperative to find people who have the same interests and outlook as you, by which the therapy industry conforms relationships to the banality of bespoke tailoring, helps crush the life out of love too. On opposite sides of the world, in cultures unvisited and unblest, from the security of distance, people are yearning to make online contact with each other, while nobody on your own block gives a tuppenny fuck for your new haircut. The heart wants what it wants, but only after it has wanted what it doesn't want.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Love: A History in Five Fantasies
Polity Press 224pp ISBN 9781509531837 £20.00
Eva Illouz, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations
Polity Press 320pp ISBN 9781509550258 £14.99
There is Nothing Better. By Stuart Walton. Review31, 2021
Poor
Emma Bovary, nourished on stories of ‘love affairs, lovers, mistresses,
persecuted ladies fainting in lonely country houses ... dark forests,
palpitating hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses ... gentlemen brave as lions,
gentle as lambs’, fancied her husband-to-be a ‘white-plumed rider on a black
horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater. Emma’s imagination was held
hostage by the 19th-century bourgeois ideal of revelatory, eternal love within
marriage. She was enmeshed in a particular set of historical circumstances – a
flourishing letter-writing culture, burgeoning female literacy, an emerging
awareness of urban bourgeois fashion among the professional classes – which
created an especially wide gulf between women’s expectations of love and its realities.
‘To be in fantasy is to live “as if”,’ according to Denise Riley, but life may
become intolerable when a metaphor collides with the facts.
So love has a history. Does knowing that make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history may also be – is – a kind of therapy, helping free us from stories that appear to be fixed and true for all time.’ Such stories are the terrain of the history of emotions, which is concerned with people’s emotional lives; with the changing historical expression and understanding of emotions; and with the ways in which emotions have shaped historical change. Rosenwein, a medievalist, is one of the pioneers of this approach. She edited one of the earliest volumes to trace the history of an individual emotion, Anger’s Past (1998), and in Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) examined the emergence of groups – readers of Gregory the Great, or the elites at Merovingian courts – who shared a particular view of the emotions, focusing on the language they used to express their emotional expectations and values.
Rosenwein was reacting against the dominant paradigm for understanding emotion in the premodern past: Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process. For Elias, the Middle Ages were a time of uninhibited feeling, before regulation and refinement were introduced at the courts and dinner tables of early modern Europe. Rosenwein challenged the idea that emotion is an inalienable psychic drive (though one that could be tamed), arguing instead that it is always culturally constructed. This insight – that emotion is itself an artefact of history, subject to change – has been critical for the field.
Rosenwein’s scholarship affirms the possibilities and the limits of language as the medium of historical practice. She has meticulously pieced together the webs of meanings of emotional vocabulary – of anger, grief, love – and the ways those meanings were negotiated over the centuries. She insists that we can’t discover what people’s feelings were, only the way those feelings were expressed in historical texts – mediated, compromised, qualified. ‘We cannot know how all people felt, but we can begin to know how some members of certain ascendant elites thought they and others felt or, at least, thought they ought to feel,’ she’s written, conscientiously.
More recently, historians of emotion have been reluctant to remain so circumscribed by a poststructuralist emphasis on the textual. Monique Scheer and others have argued that emotions are felt and expressed in movement, gesture, in voluntary and involuntary actions like blushing or crying or fainting. Rosenwein has been sceptical of this, arguing that embodied emotion can’t be studied if there is no writing to represent it. Historians have read up on neuroscientific studies of emotion too: Rosenwein can’t resist discussing the mirror neurons of monkeys in an otherwise textual history of the idea of the soulmate.
What part of emotion is biological, and what cultural? To what extent are emotions subject to historical change? Can historians adjudicate this boundary between biology and history without training in the neurosciences? How are they to understand ephemeral and material expressions of emotion if they were left unrecorded? The history of emotions has provided an occasion for historians to debate some thorny problems, to examine our desire to attain proximity to our subjects, and prod at the impossibility of ever doing so.
There is something touching about a bunch of nerdy historians inventing a whole methodology to justify their desire to see people in the past as people. Historians are people too. It’s as well to keep that in mind when reading studies of the history of emotions, because – tangled in knots over these methodological questions – its practitioners can sound like robots. One recent textbook, The History of Emotions, begins: ‘Emotions are at the centre of the history of the human being, considered as a biocultural entity that is characterised as a worlded body, in the worlds of other worlded bodies.’ One person’s biocultural entity is another person’s person. Methodology is necessary, of course, but as the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes, ‘there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.’
Rosenwein has identified five central ‘fantasies’ of love that have had particular staying power, even as their meanings have changed. These fantasies are not feelings but ‘narratives that organise, justify and make sense of experiences, desires and feelings that are otherwise incoherent and bewildering’. These are the stories people tell themselves and others about love: about like-minded friendship, the transcendent love of God, love as obligation in marriage, obsessive unrequited love, and the insatiable love of eros. Rosenwein argues that we need these cultural scripts – about the need for total authenticity in marriage, say, or the consequences of unrestrained lust – to help us make sense of emotions that are by their nature inchoate and confusing.
‘Fantasy’ carries with it a suggestion of the irrational, of something before and beyond language. This is the concept of fantasy that allows Joan Scott in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011) to investigate what is not captured by cultural construction, everything that eludes the conscious expression of ideas in language. By describing historical scripts about love as ‘fantasies’ Rosenwein seems to promise ambiguity, ambivalence and messiness. But for her, a fantasy is a way of naming familiar stories about love that have held particular power over our imaginations. She admits an allergy to the latent.
This
means that her love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins
with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we
might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early
Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she
moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a
smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love?
Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia
Lean has argued, the ‘single emotion’ approach risks landing us with an
intellectual history of Christian, white, European, mostly male, mostly
straight authors.
So we learn that Plato says humans were once shaped like a perfect sphere, each with two faces, two genitals, four legs, four arms, until Zeus cut them in two and doomed them to spend their days seeking out their lost half: a foundation myth of the soulmate. This ideal of like-minded love was applied to friendship centuries later in Montaigne’s writing about his best friend, Étienne de la Boétie: ‘It is no special reason, nor two, three, four, nor a thousand; it is I know not what quintessence of the entire mixture that, having captured my entire will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in his; and that, once it captured all his will, brought it to plunge and be lost in mine with a like hunger, a like convergence.’ In the early 19th-century United States, intimate male friendship was a source of passion and pleasure before marriage. Daniel Webster wished he could return to the days of his youthful friendship with James Hervey Bingham, imagining that they would ‘yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough, we will practise at the same bar and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.’
One fantasy about love is that it allows us to transcend whatever it is that keeps us shackled to the mundane. This idea was especially powerful for medieval religious women. Perpetua was imprisoned for her conversion to Christianity in third-century Carthage. Her father begged her to recant, reminding her of her infant son, who would die without her. But then Christ appeared before her milking a sheep, and offered her a gift of cheese – at which point her baby was spontaneously weaned, allowing her to die free of earthly obligation. The 14th-century French mystic and poet Marguerite Porete devised a visionary ladder of meditation and self-mortification that allowed her to obliterate her selfhood in loving union with God. The idea of the transcendent power of love was perfected by Dante: Beatrice was both a real person and a miracle, the promise of salvation in the form of a beautiful woman. For medieval writers, the love of Christ offered a way to escape the earthly bonds of motherhood, or selfhood, or secular beauty.
So love has a history. Does knowing that make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history may also be – is – a kind of therapy, helping free us from stories that appear to be fixed and true for all time.’ Such stories are the terrain of the history of emotions, which is concerned with people’s emotional lives; with the changing historical expression and understanding of emotions; and with the ways in which emotions have shaped historical change. Rosenwein, a medievalist, is one of the pioneers of this approach. She edited one of the earliest volumes to trace the history of an individual emotion, Anger’s Past (1998), and in Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) examined the emergence of groups – readers of Gregory the Great, or the elites at Merovingian courts – who shared a particular view of the emotions, focusing on the language they used to express their emotional expectations and values.
Rosenwein was reacting against the dominant paradigm for understanding emotion in the premodern past: Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process. For Elias, the Middle Ages were a time of uninhibited feeling, before regulation and refinement were introduced at the courts and dinner tables of early modern Europe. Rosenwein challenged the idea that emotion is an inalienable psychic drive (though one that could be tamed), arguing instead that it is always culturally constructed. This insight – that emotion is itself an artefact of history, subject to change – has been critical for the field.
Rosenwein’s scholarship affirms the possibilities and the limits of language as the medium of historical practice. She has meticulously pieced together the webs of meanings of emotional vocabulary – of anger, grief, love – and the ways those meanings were negotiated over the centuries. She insists that we can’t discover what people’s feelings were, only the way those feelings were expressed in historical texts – mediated, compromised, qualified. ‘We cannot know how all people felt, but we can begin to know how some members of certain ascendant elites thought they and others felt or, at least, thought they ought to feel,’ she’s written, conscientiously.
More recently, historians of emotion have been reluctant to remain so circumscribed by a poststructuralist emphasis on the textual. Monique Scheer and others have argued that emotions are felt and expressed in movement, gesture, in voluntary and involuntary actions like blushing or crying or fainting. Rosenwein has been sceptical of this, arguing that embodied emotion can’t be studied if there is no writing to represent it. Historians have read up on neuroscientific studies of emotion too: Rosenwein can’t resist discussing the mirror neurons of monkeys in an otherwise textual history of the idea of the soulmate.
What part of emotion is biological, and what cultural? To what extent are emotions subject to historical change? Can historians adjudicate this boundary between biology and history without training in the neurosciences? How are they to understand ephemeral and material expressions of emotion if they were left unrecorded? The history of emotions has provided an occasion for historians to debate some thorny problems, to examine our desire to attain proximity to our subjects, and prod at the impossibility of ever doing so.
There is something touching about a bunch of nerdy historians inventing a whole methodology to justify their desire to see people in the past as people. Historians are people too. It’s as well to keep that in mind when reading studies of the history of emotions, because – tangled in knots over these methodological questions – its practitioners can sound like robots. One recent textbook, The History of Emotions, begins: ‘Emotions are at the centre of the history of the human being, considered as a biocultural entity that is characterised as a worlded body, in the worlds of other worlded bodies.’ One person’s biocultural entity is another person’s person. Methodology is necessary, of course, but as the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes, ‘there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.’
Rosenwein has identified five central ‘fantasies’ of love that have had particular staying power, even as their meanings have changed. These fantasies are not feelings but ‘narratives that organise, justify and make sense of experiences, desires and feelings that are otherwise incoherent and bewildering’. These are the stories people tell themselves and others about love: about like-minded friendship, the transcendent love of God, love as obligation in marriage, obsessive unrequited love, and the insatiable love of eros. Rosenwein argues that we need these cultural scripts – about the need for total authenticity in marriage, say, or the consequences of unrestrained lust – to help us make sense of emotions that are by their nature inchoate and confusing.
‘Fantasy’ carries with it a suggestion of the irrational, of something before and beyond language. This is the concept of fantasy that allows Joan Scott in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011) to investigate what is not captured by cultural construction, everything that eludes the conscious expression of ideas in language. By describing historical scripts about love as ‘fantasies’ Rosenwein seems to promise ambiguity, ambivalence and messiness. But for her, a fantasy is a way of naming familiar stories about love that have held particular power over our imaginations. She admits an allergy to the latent.
So we learn that Plato says humans were once shaped like a perfect sphere, each with two faces, two genitals, four legs, four arms, until Zeus cut them in two and doomed them to spend their days seeking out their lost half: a foundation myth of the soulmate. This ideal of like-minded love was applied to friendship centuries later in Montaigne’s writing about his best friend, Étienne de la Boétie: ‘It is no special reason, nor two, three, four, nor a thousand; it is I know not what quintessence of the entire mixture that, having captured my entire will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in his; and that, once it captured all his will, brought it to plunge and be lost in mine with a like hunger, a like convergence.’ In the early 19th-century United States, intimate male friendship was a source of passion and pleasure before marriage. Daniel Webster wished he could return to the days of his youthful friendship with James Hervey Bingham, imagining that they would ‘yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough, we will practise at the same bar and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.’
One fantasy about love is that it allows us to transcend whatever it is that keeps us shackled to the mundane. This idea was especially powerful for medieval religious women. Perpetua was imprisoned for her conversion to Christianity in third-century Carthage. Her father begged her to recant, reminding her of her infant son, who would die without her. But then Christ appeared before her milking a sheep, and offered her a gift of cheese – at which point her baby was spontaneously weaned, allowing her to die free of earthly obligation. The 14th-century French mystic and poet Marguerite Porete devised a visionary ladder of meditation and self-mortification that allowed her to obliterate her selfhood in loving union with God. The idea of the transcendent power of love was perfected by Dante: Beatrice was both a real person and a miracle, the promise of salvation in the form of a beautiful woman. For medieval writers, the love of Christ offered a way to escape the earthly bonds of motherhood, or selfhood, or secular beauty.
Obsessive love, too, has its own genealogy. The ancients despised the powerlessness that came with desire, and prescribed baths and sleeping around and general debauchery to counter the vulnerability of obsession. For the troubadours intense desire was an organising philosophy: their poetry elevated love to the highest of virtues, to be tamed with elaborate rituals and courtliness. Obsession was given a new form in the Romantic novel. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was a cultural phenomenon, with Werther’s obsessive love for Lotte becoming a model for desiring and being desired. When Werther first meets Lotte he is wearing knee breeches, a yellow waistcoat and blue overcoat, and after they become threadbare he buys another outfit just like it. Goethe’s male readers dressed in replicas of Werther’s outfit, and women daubed themselves with Eau de Werther. After Lotte marries another, Werther shoots himself with her husband’s pistol; a rash of copycat suicides followed the book’s publication. Rosenwein is pretty cool-headed about all this, comparing such obsession to contemporary talk about love addiction. The cure? Get a hobby.
Rosenwein’s discussion of marital love centres on the shifting patterns of obligation. In the Middle Ages, she argues, marriage became the only relationship in which earthly love was permitted by the Church. Popular religious dramas taught their audiences to find happiness in domestic obligations, as in a German version of the nativity play:
Joseph (carrying the cradle): Mary, I have considered it well and brought you a cradle in which we can lay the little child.
Mary (sings): Joseph, dear husband mine, help me rock the little one.
Joseph: Happily, my dear wife.
During the Enlightenment, obligation was no longer thought of as sufficient to secure a marriage: love became necessary too. But that didn’t mean it came naturally. Men and women bought copybooks filled with models for declarations of love to help them compose their letters. The exemplary vied with a new need for authenticity in emotional expression. Courting Sophia Peabody in the 1830s, Nathaniel Hawthorne told her that her letters ‘introduce me deeper and deeper into your being, yet there is no sense of surprise at what I see, and feel, and know, therein. I am familiar with your inner heart, as with my home.’ The expectation of total obligation and total transparency made marriage a hard sell to some young women. ‘What an unlucky letter “M” is,’ Violet Blair complained to a friend in Gilded Age Washington, ‘to begin medicine, martyrdom, murder and matrimony.’
‘Always, the examples are all wrong, which is why love theory tends to be so conservative – ProustProustProustBovaryBovaryBovaryAbelardEloiseCourtly,’ Berlant argued in a 2012 lecture. It’s true that the examples given are less interesting than the fact that they can be strung together so seamlessly, less interesting than the fact that there is so much that is mutually intelligible between a 12th-century troubadour’s songs and Taylor Swift’s. It’s not that the scripts and their meanings don’t change: of course they do. Rosenwein’s chapter on marriage, in particular, shows the ebb and flow between obligation and freely given love across centuries of writing about marriage. But these narratives remain troublingly sticky variations on a theme. We are constantly reminded just how conservative the examples are, how repetitive, how unlikely it is that we will be surprised by any of them.
Five fantasies are not very many, really, when we’re talking about ways to organise the imagination. The available plots weren’t enough for Eliza Moode, an 18th-century Philadelphian who wrote to a female friend about a man they knew: ‘Does he think that all the business of our lives is only to learn how to make a sausage or roast a joint of meat and take care of a house and practise in short good economy? All that is necessary, I avow it. But can’t we be that and take charge of our spirits at the same time; must we neglect the most valuable part for fear of offending our masters?’
Rosenwein argues that there is a radical power in writing the history of love, and that it might help us escape such constraints on our emotional imaginations. She urges us to ‘strive to change the narrative we cling to as individuals’, arguing that history’s great power is its ability to show that what we consider natural, inevitable, the only way of telling stories about ourselves, is historically contingent. If those old stories don’t work for us, ‘we may find – or create – new ones.’ The book begins under the sacred sign of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence, understood as an aphorism about the therapeutic value of writing: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’
But history isn’t therapy. A different critical history of love might account not only for the stories and the fantasies, but for their failures, and for the costs of those failures, for all the ways of loving that can’t be reconciled to a handful of narratives. It might explain how the love plot has diminished what is universal and collective to the scale of an individual drama, rather than reaffirm that it is up to the individual to change the story. And anyway, Didion’s sentence begins an essay that excoriates the sentimentality of our narrative impulses: she thought it more honest to look coldly on the irreconcilable and reject the urge to tidy it up into a plot. After a banal rendezvous with her lover, Emma Bovary thinks: ‘It didn’t matter. She was not happy and had never been.’ She wonders: ‘Why was life so inadequate, why did the things she depended on turn immediately to dust?’ A history of love can suggest some answers to her question. But history can’t stop our attachments turning to dust.
Love : A History in Five fantasies. By Barbara Rosenwein.
Polity, 220 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 1 5095 3183 7
Promises, Promises. By Erin Maglaque. London Review of Books, April 21, 2022.
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