Women, Love, and Power

Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Elaine Baruch

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9780814786093
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Elaine Baruch is not only among the most quiet-voiced and fair-minded of feminist writers. She is also among the most far-ranging in her scholarship, equally at ease with the writers of the Renaissance and Freud, the medieval troubadours, and our contemporary polemicists... instructive, absorbing, and persuasive.
--Diana Trilling

A lively mind is at work here and a keen and witty writer too.
--Irving Howe

This is a fine collection of essays... making many imaginative conjectures and amusing connections.
--Times Literary Supplement

In these essays what emerges is a history of romantic love... Highly recommended.--Library Journal

Arguing that romantic love need not be a tool of women's oppression, feminist critic Baruch... contends that unacknowledged male fantasies about love motivate much literature by men... rewarding, provocative.--Publishers Weekly

Utilizing both Freudian and non-Freudian psychoanalysis as well as feminist criticism, Baruch examines literary works by women and men from medieval and Romantic periods as well as cultural observations on the twentieth century and how they have influenced attitudes toward love.

1
Introduction

THIS 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, idealization, 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 1960s and 1970s, 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 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 adulated feminine beauty and sometimes fetishized it, as in the sonnets of Petrarch, this is certainly not always the case. The greatest love poet of the English Renaissance, a period that prized feminine beauty, never describes the way a woman looks: John Donne. Nor has literature (outside of Utopian literature) concerned itself with reproduction. Still the term object itself is in many ways objectionable, indicating passivity in both the grammatical and the existential sense. Psychologically, it is also problematic since it implies a subject of desire to which the object is not equal. Since that subject is generally male and the object female—despite the claim of the object-relations school of psychology that it deals with both sexes—some contemporary feminist analysts would like to change the terminology in the interest of equality. In the meantime, however, it would be well to remember that in love, the “object,” meaning the person longed for, is sometimes more important than the subject, more important than life itself for many a male lover, in literature and sometimes in life, despite the disclaimer of Shakespeare’s Rosalind (another realist) in As You Like It:

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (1V, i)

Nonetheless, much—perhaps too much—of women’s fantasy life in men’s view has centered on love, not that men wanted it otherwise:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

So wrote Byron, in Don Juan (canto I, st. 194).

And so most of us believed, including feminist critics who lamented the fact in the late 1960s and 1970s. The general feminist position on heterosexual love in the seventies (and to some extent today) was that culturally determined inequalities in the sexes prevented authentic love from taking place. Feminists also believed that women’s mistaken overvaluation of love kept them from concentrating on what was more likely to give them satisfaction: work and participation in the public world.

“A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure,” wrote Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), one of the most influential books of the women’s movement. “For love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression today.”¹ In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had already claimed in The Second Sex:

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself. The innumerable martyrs to love bear witness against the injustices of a fate that offers a sterile hell as ultimate salvation.²

Implicit in Beauvoir’s lament was her assumption that men knew how to love and that theirs was a model for women to follow. This despite her disdain for men’s mythologizing. But in their later deconstruction of love, feminist critics questioned whether men could love at all. “(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity,” wrote Firestone (127). Only through something approaching temporary insanity could men think they were in love at all and render “void the woman’s class inferiority” (132). Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch also noticed the linguistic as well as temporal fragility of men’s being “in love.” “In love, as in pain, in shock, in trouble. Thus love is a state, presumably a temporary state, an aberration from the norm.”³

While Firestone assumed women could love, Greer claimed that “love is not possible between inferior and superior, because the base cannot free their love from selfish interest, as the desire either for security or social advantage . . .” (146).

In their attack on male love as selfish and domineering, the radical feminists get support from unexpected quarters: Nietzsche, for example. As Irving Singer puts it, “Far from being selfless and sacrificial, sexual love is for him the best illustration of self-interest and the universal will to power. . . . Nietzsche calls attention to the relentless quest for domination that motivates the lover’s need to possess.”⁴ Way before Nietzsche it is fascinating to see that the same complaints about love or the deficiencies of men as lovers voiced by feminists and indeed women in general appear in Plato’s Phaedrus, where Lysias complains that the lover is selfish and exploitative, jealous and faithless, hurtful and unreliable. Because he is in a state of temporary madness, he might always leave when he recovers; in the meantime he wants to reduce the beloved to a state of dependence, intellectually and economically. What is perhaps most surprising is that these complaints are not about heterosexual but homosexual love. Is this because men make deficient lovers no matter what the sex of the love object? Or is it because domination and subordination stem as much from differences in age, economic status, and education as they do from sexual difference?

Unlike the feminists, Plato did not reject love altogether. Rather he made a distinction between true and false love and argued for a love governed by reason not passion.

But for us, in the 1970s, anti-love books for women (men didn’t seem to need such warnings) became a major genre, as popular in our own time as homiletic literature admonishing the reader against sin, particularly the lures of sex, had been in earlier periods. Love became the new sin for women, with “Thou shalt not love” a new commandment. For a while love went underground. Impoverished and ignored, it watched its sibling, sex, the prodigal son, get fatter and fatter during the seventies. But recently love has been revived. Even the so-called age of narcissism began to long for intimacy in a world that seemed increasingly bare of meaning. And some feminists too began to lament the death of love.

Julia Kristeva, the literary critic and psychoanalyst, was one of the strongest early voices. In an interview conducted in 1980 in France, before her book Tales of Love (Histoires d’amour) appeared, she said:

the space of freedom for the individual is love—it is the only place, the only moment in life, where the various precautions, defenses, conservatism break down and one tries to go to the limit of one’s being. . . . The love relation is a situation where the limits between the Ego and the Other are constantly abolished and established.⁵

When I noted that “People like Kate Millett in Sexual Politics or Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex say that love is a myth propagated by men for the control of women, that, in effect, what it has done is to perpetuate the hierarchy of the sexes and make women accept their oppressive place within the family,” she responded that love has a history, “an evolution which is not necessarily progress”:

. . . it is obvious that in certain situations and some of the time, it has been possible that it is a means of blackmail by one sex of the other—and essentially by the male in the history of humanity as we have experienced it in relation to the female. But that is a vision, perhaps, through the wrong end of the telescope, which doesn’t interest me very much because if you look at things that way, the whole of culture oppresses women—a madrigal or Shakespeare is antiwoman. . . . Now love is a moment in the life of a speaking being who, all the while caught in the body, opens oneself to the symbolic dimension. I love the other . . . who gives me the possibility of opening myself to something other than myself. This can take place through an imaginary fusion with this outer body, but if it is experienced not in a merely narcissistic way but as the governing principle of my whole subsequent existence, what I call love is openness to the other, and it is what gives me my human dimension, my symbolic dimension, my cultural and historical dimension. So if one says that it’s patriarchy which produces that, long live patriarchy. (143–44)

This is a compelling if ironic defense of patriarchy.

Later in the decade the appearance of AIDS, for all of its horrors, helped the cause of love and fidelity as opposed to widespread sexual experience, for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Though there may not be a connection, several books by psychoanalysts and philosophers appeared in the late 1980s that lauded the joys of romantic love. In contrast to the earlier feminists, the current praisers of love often see no gender differences in connection with the chubby cherub, or discount those they do find. This may be because, like Denis de Rougemont earlier, author of the influential Love in the Western World, they do not always consider the two genders.⁶ Psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann, for example, subtitles his book The Anatomy of Loving, published in 1987, The Story of Man’s Quest to Know What Love Is.⁷ That indeed is the problem, for his book is little concerned with women’s quest. P...