A Vindication of Love by Cristina Nehring
Jan. 4th, 2010 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaCristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century might be better titled: A Vindication of Women in Love: An Polemic for Pro-Love Feminism in the 21C since the central argument is the right for women to love passionately, disastrously, and in any way their hearts might lead them without damage to their intellectual clout or moral character.
Nehring claims that love has become, "...a poor and shrunken thing. To some, it remains an explicit embarrassment, a discredited myth, the deceptive sugar that once coated the pill of women's servility. To others, romance has become a recreational sport. Stripped of big meanings, it has become simply another innocuous pastime...
Love at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been defused and discredited... We live in a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in a culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.(p 7)
Further to this, she blames not just the patriarchy, but the legacy of 20C feminism in which penetration politics reframed the debate in terms of intercourse. Pro-sex feminists vs anti-penetration feminists, neither of which really allow for the possibility of attachment: love or romance, particularly with members of the opposite sex.
Nehring claims that, "The reputation of a male thinker is either untouched or improved by an erotically charged biography. The reputation of a female thinker is either subtly undermined or squarely destroyed," and uses as examples famous artistic or intellectual couples, such as Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir and the criticism that tends to center around her romantic choices rather than his. Nehring argues:
The most ardent agents of women's advancement have often been the most ardent entrepreneurs of love. They knew that, far from representing an act of weakness or docility, women's love---like men's---is struggle. It is conquest and self-conquest. Far from proving incompatible with a muscular intellectual life, it is a natural counterpart. Strong thoughts engender strong emotions. A woman accustomed to reasoning for herself is unlikely to leave the courting, desiring, sacrificing, swaggering, or indeed self-dramatizing to the opposite sex. She is unlikely to shrink from a fight. (p11)
Love, Nehring says, "can be a form of strength, of emotional entrepreneurship, of creative enlargement. In fact, love can be a form of feminism." (p11) (emphasis hers).
But don't be fooled by all the politically charged rhetoric at the beginning of the book. Most of the book (which is passionately, if not particularly well argued) consists of first of a defense of love itself, peppered with mini-biographies of famous women in love, and divided into aspects of romantic love: wisdom, inequality, transgression, absence, heroism, failure, art. I feel she proves her points, but less through the air-tight mesh of argument than through specific examples and passionate rhetoric.
The book gets off to a weak start with her chapter 'Cupid Doffs His Blindfold: Love as Wisdom.' This chapter seems to exist primarily to dismiss the notion of romantic love as a recent, post-Christian invention. She uses a lot of examples from Plato early in the book, which is problematic because of the notable absence of womenin Plato's work. With only brief mention (like Plato) of Diotima the early examples in this book focus around Phaedrus and Alcibiades. Nevertheless, these examples function as a defense of passion, of love as both wisdom and madness, and as love not just as sight, but as clairvoyance and as the supreme means of acquisition of knowledge in the world. Using Socrates as her authority (who doesn't?) says we must never be persuaded by, "an argument which says that the temperate friend chosen rather than the driven one.' The sanity of friendship my be reassuring, but the madness of love is, 'the gift of the gods most conducive to our benefit.' It is a chance we have," says Nehring, "trapped as we are in the prison of our private preoccupations, to see into the heart of the person at our side." (p35-6). Ah, using Plato to argue against 'platonic' relationships.
I was further irritated by the title of her second chapter, 'The Power of Power Differentials: Love as Inequality.' This is hardly new ground and I thought---as I rolled my eyes at the chapter title and opening paragraphs---if I am going to wade through a bunch of BDSM-lite about women on top I am going to stop reading the book right here! However, lucky for both her and me, this chapter is where the book heats up and starts to assert her argument not just for passionate, often unequal, love, but for a woman's right to participate in it.
First asserting that it is naive to assume that relationships between 'unequal' persons is always that of a victim/perpetrator, Nehring argues that the complexity and diversity of power differentials is lost when viewed in this context. Further, she says that this viewpoint is particularly damaging to women: "It is only in the one-sided victim rhetoric of our day that youth and beauty and indeed femininity become sources of subjugation and never of strength." (p57) She calls out the various strengths and weaknesses of each position in relationships where frequent power differentials exist, such as student/teacher and defines the power deferential as being less about a fixed position of dominant authority over a weaker subordinate position, but a roll between the two that creates the heat. If love is the great leveler, she says, "it works better when there is something there to level in the first place." (p52) So age and experience are often leveled by youth and beauty,
... as anyone knows who has ever loved a person of lesser years or greater physical attractiveness. To have time on your side is to have the scales tipped in your favor. Potential itself is a form of power, unlived life is a form of power. So is street wisdom; so is liveliness, good breeding, local savvy, or muscular force. In the ghetto, a ghetto-kid has more clout than a CEO. In the streets of Athens, a local waiter wields more authority than a famous foreign writer. On a university campus, a beautiful young woman my well possess more power than her bespectacled advisor. Power is as various as the color bars of the rainbow. Most pundits who promounce n it today treat it as though it had a single hue. (p50-1)
Her examples in this chapter range from chivalric love to fairy tales, later settling on more recent literary examples. Here she is on fairy tales (she uses, specifically, animal-husband variants, of which 'Beauty & the Beast' is the best known example.)
What makes these stories so compelling is that while the power differential shifts back and forth it is always retained. The idea, in other words, tis not that a particular sex, or a particular party, has power over the other, but that one party, either party, be stronger. And the relationships can flip, with the woman, for example, starting with less power than her partner and finishing with more... The only indispensable quality is inequality.* (p62-3).
Perhaps the most shocking (or snicker-worthy) examples of power differentials are Emily Dickinson's 'Master' letters (which I had never encountered before) and on the voracious appetites of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Dickinson's letters are filled with the playful language of servitude. To whom did she write these letters? How did they emerge? What kind of life did the Belle of Amherst really lead?
And, while it does little to illustrate the point at hand, you might appreciate the following anecdote relating to one of Millay's most oft-quoted verses:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends---
It gives a lovely light!
Nehring points out the obvious metaphor for a brief and passionate life, but then adds that, "the poem may also be read as an anatomically precise description of a night she spent in her twenties with the most celebrated literary critic of her time, Edmund Wilson, and with his friend and fellow editor at Vanity Fair, John Peale Bishop...." (p78)
The best defense of inequality, however, comes in Nehring's own words:
For all the egalitarian rhetoric about searching for one's 'other half' [yes we're using Plato against Plato, again, which she at least acknowledges this time,] it is not ultimately another half we seek. We do not want something that is a part of us. We want something bigger---someone intriguingly greater. The surprise is that person need not make us feel smaller....
...power discrepancies help us recognize the divine in the human being at our side. They allow us to see god in another and to play god for another. At the end of the day, few of us want to feel that our passion is simply fair exchange, even-steven remmuneration for favors performed, charms displayed. We long to be generous in love; we yearn to give every last drop of blood and swear---as long as we feel we are giving it to someone who is, in at least some sense, our superior. It is to gods that human beings make their most lavish sacrifices, not siblings. (p66-7)
It is also BY gods that we are demanded our most lavish sacrifices. I keep being reminded of Jane Hirschfeld's
'Into Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining,' a poem about an unexpected gift the sole purpose of which appears to be sacrifice. The poem ends, "that you came to love it, that was the gift./Let the envious gods take back what they can."
The most compelling chapter for me in the book---the one bristling with stickies---was the chapter 'Anonymous Except for Injury: Love as Failure.' Nehring begins it with an epigram from Jorge Luis Borges:
Only what we lose belongs to us.
Nehring begins the chapter with the 'Competitive Suffering' of Abelard & Heloise. This doomed 11C couple met first as pupil and teacher. Ultimately, Abelard's love for Heloise destroyed his scholarship, then his reputation. She gets pregnant, and while Abelard asks for her hand in marriage and is accepted by her family, Heloise refuses:
"I looked for no marriage bond... I never sought anything in you but yourself... God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all earth on me... it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his Empress, but your whore... What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles... pen or stylus and spindles? [She preferred] love to wedlock and freedom to chains. (p195)
Heloise's refusal ends up being the couples undoing. Her uncle---furious that Abelard does not honor his favorite niece with marriage---has him castrated. (Of course you might too should your former tutor spirit away your favorite charge, disguise her as a nun, and hide her in an abbey for regular ravishment.) Abelard ends his life in a monastery, asking Heloise to take the church's vows as well. She---who would have willingly followed him into a whorehouse---ends in an abbey. Their correspondence (and his ultimate, cruel, rejection of her love for more spiritual pursuits) has become the stuff of ages.
"In our cult of success," Nehring writes, "we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur...
If the soul is a garden, as Voltaire once suggested, a complete soul will never be spared bitter fruit... For every sweet plum there will be a toxic berry. For every cluster of roses there will be a tangle of thorns. 'All things the gods give to their favorites abundantly,' Goethe wrote later in life, 'all joys abundantly, and all pangs abundantly.' (p218)
Nehring describes the tragedies, slipping from the troubadours to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as "sentimental and self-indulgent," but warns that we must not battle such louche overromanticization of the dark side of love by completely discarding it:
It contains a nugget of truth---if only a nugget---that has been forgotten in our own day: the stronger your sentiments, the greater your chance of failure. Failure happens more often to the brave than the docile. This is not emotional snobbery, this is reality. The higher your aim, the greater the chance of missing your target. The more you have to invest, the more you also have to lose. Failure is no shame, by this token, but a badge of courage, an insignia of wealth. (p217)
And then she gives us Margaret Fuller, the lone female voice of the Concord Transcendentalists who gave the American public German literature, herself the first translator of Goethe in the US.*** Fuller---though she criticized of Goethe as well---championed Young Werther at a time when most American critics saw this piece of work as evidence of European weakness and depravity. In her words, "Werther must die because life was not wide enough or rich enough" for him. Werther perishes out of strength, not frailty, because he is too good for this world" (ah the 19C death cult!) not because he is too weak for it.
Nehring describes Fuller's intensity in her relationships by giving us this passage from Fuller's travel narrative Summer on the Lakes. Fuller describes her heroine, Mariana, whose emotional intensity at once tantalizes and terrorizes men:
Like Fortunio, who sought to do homage to his friends by building a fire of cinnamon, not knowing that its perfume would be too strong for their endurance, so did Mariana. What she wanted to tell, they did not want to hear; a little had pleased, so much overpowered, and they preferred the free air of the street, even to the cinnamon perfume of her palace.
Nehring offers the following analysis:
Mariana fails because she is too potent. Her suitors can take her in small doses, but not the doses natural to her, not in the doses she wants to give. A little of Fuller's energy always pleased her interlocutors; the whole of it put them into flight. It was too much for them, too sweet, too pungent, too intoxicating... Their natures were not strong enough to inhale Fuller's undistilled emotion. (p231) (Sound like anyone you know? Lest we forget, it is the phoenix that rises from the ashes of a cinnamon pyre.)
My heart aches for Fuller who never seemed to be able to find anyone in her circle to match her intensity or intelligence. The fact that she never let this silence her or dampen her enthusiasm is a heroic struggle in itself. Indeed, Fuller thought women had a special capacity for suffering, pointing out that it was the women who stayed with Christ in the hours of his suffering, while his disciples abandoned him. "...women could no more stay from the foot of the cross than from the Transfiguration," she wrote. "They would not be exiled from that dark hour..." but instead demanded to learn from it. (And I ask again, since homoerotic studies of the text eclipse the presence of women as much as the original interpretations: are we Xrist's bitches, or his brides?)
This is the lesson I take from this chapter and from Fuller's life. To suffer is inevitable. It is not something to be sought after, as those persons who read (and still read) Young Werther and after it attempt to model their lives. But once suffering is experienced the question remains how to create meaning from it, how to remain compassionate, open-hearted, even in the face of disappointment and loss. (If not outright atrocity.) This, in my opinion, is at the very essence of what it means to be human.
Nehring's greatest strength in her polemic is her passionate argument for engagement with love and through it the world around us. The book starts a little sticky and semantic, but it frees itself into something much larger: passion as a vehicle not only through which to experience other people, but as a way of engaging the world at large, and ultimately a commitment to the way in which we conduct our lives. Once she gets to Wollstonecraft, to Fuller, and even Frieda Kahlo (who many may argue lived a life that eclipsed her art) we see women whose total lives reflect the sum of their commitment to their passions. Women whose outsized passions transcended their physical presence on this earth.
Nehring argues that this is our right as women:
Love, for the strong-hearted and strong-minded woman, is a game like all others---albeit perhaps the most important game. Historically, it has been her particular arena ---not because she could not have excelled in others, but because she was often excluded from others (politics, the arts, military.) What was hers was heroism in the cause of love, combativeness on the field of emotion. This is hers still. And it remains the noblest field of action for men and women alike---the field with the most affecting victories and, on occasion, the bloodiest fall outs. (p149)
She considers this a heroic struggle, and somewhat jokingly, quotes one of the earliest self-help books, Ovid's The Art of Love in her insistence that love is not for losers, nor for the lazy:
'I was a lazy man,' he testifies in the tone of sinner reformed, 'with a bent for bedroom and slippers, doing what work I did half lying down in the shade... love for a beautiful girl took me out of the doldrums; when the order came, I sprang to arms in her camp/So you see me alert and waging my wars...' The moral, 'If you want to forswear idleness, then fall in love.' (p132)
She adds, "Those whom even love cannot shake from their habitual aversion to risk and inertia are those who are truly irredeemable."
I loved this book: it was precisely the shot in the arm I needed after a discouraging year. There is a lot that could be said to refute all of the above. And rarely does Nehring acknowledge the clamor of critics. But her arguments surprised and moved me and made me rethink some of my general assumptions about relationships, and why so many of the recent, safe bets---when I got precisely what I thought I was looking for---have lacked a certain level of both heart and heat. I heartily recommend it as a Valentine's Day gift for the passionate women in your life.
Because I couldn't fit everything I wanted to into the above, (and because I have to return the book to the library), see my notes below. These are mostly for my benefit, but might amuse or interest you.
* Nehring notes that the animal husband stories usually follow this pattern: Inferior Male (Beast) meets Superior Female (Beauty), transforms into Superior Male (Prince) and weds her. "The power shuttles back and forth, but the asymmetry is preserved at all costs." (p65)
*** Fuller: who numbers among her accomplishments, in addition to being one of the most important literary critics of her day, the first female member of the New York working press, the first editor of The Dial, the first American woman to report on a foreign war, and the author of Women in the 19C a tract on gender equality.
--------------------
p 11 - "It never bothers the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the cold and crude companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou, thou art enlarged by thy own shining.. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
p 13 - "The tragedy of the self-supporting... woman does not lie in too many, but too few experiences." - Emma Goldman. (And how!)
p 14 - "'When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything,'" said G.K. Chesterton in the early 1900s. Umberto Eco has expanded on this point, 'We are,' he wrote in the British Telegraph, 'supposed to live in a skeptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. The 'death of God'... has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the... church---from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub Christian superstitions of the Da Vinci Code. ['God Isn't Big Enough for Some People,' The Telegraph, February 27, 2005.]
p 40 - In order to be inflamed intellectually, we need to be enlisted emotionally. In the absence of emotional engagement, most people do not interrogate themselves about topics for which there is no immediate or pragmatic urgency. When neither our jobs nor our self-interest require to reexamine a knotty subject, chances are we won't. The laws of inertia militate against it. To consider afresh our views of capitalism, of patriarchy, or propriety, we have, in most cases to be rattled. We have, at least, to be stirred. And what more stirring incident is there in human life than to fall in love?
Socrates identifies an essential point in Symposium: to fall in love is first to study the person who has awakened your affections, second to study yourself, and third to study the world around you... The thirst for knowledge about another human being leads almost inevitably to the thirst for knowledge about other things. Sometimes they are things your lover likes or needs. Mostly they are things you simply did not notice before your senses were stirred by affection.
What Socrates is saying above all else in Symposium is that: love makes us think. Love makes us explore. Love makes us blaze through new subjects and new cultures; it makes us hatch new visions. And in that way it does, in fact, transcend its human object. Sometimes that object is just a rung on the ladder---a stepping stone to higher places. At other times it is the altar itself.
p144 - The emotionally and intellectually dull do not fall in love hard or long.
p144 In her chapter on 'On My Blood I'll Carry You Away: Love as Heroism' Nehring describes love as a loaded gun in the hands of the beloved, then revises her description to a steering wheel: "the love affair not as Russian roulette but as a drive through a darkened country with an inebriated stranger":
It can be magical; you can end up in places you never expected, embracing in the tall blades beyond the roads bend, or you can end up dead in a ditch. Not through anybody's malice, but merely because of a temperament insufficiently alert, a sensibility a little dull, an instance of timing a bit unfortunate. (p144)
She goes on to describe the experience in more ecstatic terms before arriving at her point:
Almost everything in modern society militates against our falling in love hard or long. It militates against love as risk, love as sacrifice, love as heroism. As presented to us in dating books, matchmaking sites, and advice columns, love is---or ought to be---an organized adult activity with safety rails to the left and right, rubber ceilings, no-skid floors, and a clear, clean, destination: marriage. Anyone who embarks one something more ambiguous, more dangerous and difficult to predict is counted all but pathological---especially if she is a woman. For even in today's unprecedentedly safety-proofed social culture, men are still accorded a nominal amount of adventure. They are permitted to recognize the 'thrill of the chase' they are allowed to pursue [lovers] who cause them a bit of trouble and turmoil. It is chalked up in men to high spirits, predatorial adrenaline, to chutzpah, competition, and courage. But when women do the same thing---when women set their sights and stake their bliss on partners who are obviously elusive---it is chalked up to low self-worth... the notion that women who go after challenging men have bad self esteem while men who go after difficult women have great testosterone has become endemic. (p144-5)
p178 - Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke's insistence that the poor should seek solace in the afterlife: "Surely one can help them in this life without depriving them of the one to come!"
p185 - Nehring on critiques of Wollstonecrafts behavior: Clearly there is some misunderstanding about what constitutes feminism; what constitutes heroism. Perhaps it is not the proverbial stiff upper lip that does the hero make, but the trembling heart---the trembling and oversensitive heart that feels its fear and advances anyway.
p188 - ...perhaps this is what the game of love is really about: playing injured. Not avoiding injuries, but playing with injuries. It is not the woman who never despairs that is strongest. It is not the man who protects himself most assiduously who is bravest. It is the person who risks everything, loses everything, and risks everything over again who is a true hero.
p194 - But a love affair cannot be measured by its 'success,' whatever exactly 'success' is. In pragmatic present-day America, success, of course, usually means marriage, and people have a terrible tendency to write off the relationships that did not end with it as more or less regrettable. This is a resounding error. It is also a historical irony given that in the era to which experts still trace 'our' notion of romance---the era of the 12C troubadours---marriage was considered the antithesis of romance. Adultery was romantic, adultery was spiritual, adultery was idealistic; marriage was just an arrangement of physical and financial convenience, a workmanlike solution to pressing quotidian problems.
p225 Fuller, appalled by Bettina Brentano's bald flattery and by Goethe's highhandedness in the correspondence Brentano published under the title 'Goethe's Correspondence with a Child' critiqued it in The Dial with the following:
Observe this young idolators... Have you chosen a bright particular star for the object of your vespers? You will not see it best or revere it best by falling prostate in the dust. Stand erect, though with an upturned brow...
p231 Fuller to Emerson: "What a vulgarity there seems in writing for the multitude."
p233 - It will not do to romanticize failure. But neither must we criminalize it, demonize, or disdain it. To be heroic is to be endangered. As bruises are a part of battle, failure is a part of love. If we have no wounds, chances are we haven't put up a fight. Chances are we have loitered timidly on the sidelines of the great skirmish.
p234 - What is important in absorbing or living these tales is only this: to retain faith in love. "Happy the survivor if in losing his friend, he loses not the idea of friendship," writes Margaret Fuller. "Be not faithless thou whom I see wandering alone amid the tombs of thy buried loves. The relation thou hast thus far sought is possible..." It is possible---and it is closer to your grasp, you who have suffered, than it is to the gresp of those whose thick fingers never burned.
p236 - There is nothing harder for a passionate woman than to wait. - Simone de Beauvoir
p237 - Horace Walpole: love is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
p263 - Neither in loving, nor painting, in writing nor seducing, neither in directing a film nor in navigating a marriage, can we tell the future. "Freedom," as Satre says, can only ever be "what you do with what's been done to you." All art involves responding to the unknown, integrating the undesirable, and expecting the unexpected.
p273 - the right to be romantic
p275 - the new era of revived romantic hope
Insert anecdotes, "How being a lover is like being a warrior." - the time my Beloved Professor called me on all the eye-rolling I did in class on this topic and assigned extra reading and writing on this subject.
And my first experience reading "Feminine Mystique."
What was said about Wollstonecraft & Beauvoir w/regard to love. Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin in writing a biography of his wives passionate life and many accomplishments opened her to criticism.
p 1 - Re: Wollstonecraft: No sooner had her corpse cooled than the stoning began. The thirty-eight-year-old author had been a "whore" a "hyena in petticoats." Venerable poets suggested she had wished to mate with an elephant. Women's rights advocates damned her "imprudence and impolicy." Nineteenth-century suffragettes dismissed her as a "silly victim of passion" and strained to sever their cause from hers. Twenty-first-century feminists still frequently assail her "misogyny" or simply pass her over in embarrassed silence.
See also the notes for this section for further analysis and references to the effect that 'contemporary feminists still essentially view Wollstone craft as 'an unstable woman whose life proves her error.' (p293) Eye-opening.
p 294-5 notes re: Beauvoir's 'stoning' after her death in 1986. Once a heroine of women's liberation , Beauvoir suddenly became the 'antagonist.' Feminist essays on her started to 'display a quite extraordinary antipathy to their subject.' Before long, they either disappeared altogether or turned, 'peculiarly nasty, condescending, sarcastic, sardonic, or dismissive.
By the time Deirdre Bair published the first full-length biography in 1990, Beauvoir's personal life with Sartre had come in for such harsh criticism that Bair was accosted at readings and upbraided during interviews by people who seemed to hold her personally responsible for Beauvoir's slavish behavior with her lovr. "Why should we even continue to read Simone de Beauvoir's writing when the life that produced the theory was such a lie?" they demanded in so many words. "She told us she lived a perfect feminist life... she inspired us, and now we don't have that inspiration anymore. We believed her and she let us down." Feeling 'like a slowly deflating balloon' Deirdre Bair published a painful New York Times Magazine piece entitled, 'Do as she Said, not as she Did' (Nov. 18 1990) In many ways, the recent history of Beauvoir's criticism is the history of "Electras trying to murder their sexist mother." (Celine Leon, 'Beauvoir's Women: Eunuch or Male?' in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir.')
Nehring claims that love has become, "...a poor and shrunken thing. To some, it remains an explicit embarrassment, a discredited myth, the deceptive sugar that once coated the pill of women's servility. To others, romance has become a recreational sport. Stripped of big meanings, it has become simply another innocuous pastime...
Love at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been defused and discredited... We live in a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in a culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.(p 7)
Further to this, she blames not just the patriarchy, but the legacy of 20C feminism in which penetration politics reframed the debate in terms of intercourse. Pro-sex feminists vs anti-penetration feminists, neither of which really allow for the possibility of attachment: love or romance, particularly with members of the opposite sex.
Nehring claims that, "The reputation of a male thinker is either untouched or improved by an erotically charged biography. The reputation of a female thinker is either subtly undermined or squarely destroyed," and uses as examples famous artistic or intellectual couples, such as Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir and the criticism that tends to center around her romantic choices rather than his. Nehring argues:
The most ardent agents of women's advancement have often been the most ardent entrepreneurs of love. They knew that, far from representing an act of weakness or docility, women's love---like men's---is struggle. It is conquest and self-conquest. Far from proving incompatible with a muscular intellectual life, it is a natural counterpart. Strong thoughts engender strong emotions. A woman accustomed to reasoning for herself is unlikely to leave the courting, desiring, sacrificing, swaggering, or indeed self-dramatizing to the opposite sex. She is unlikely to shrink from a fight. (p11)
Love, Nehring says, "can be a form of strength, of emotional entrepreneurship, of creative enlargement. In fact, love can be a form of feminism." (p11) (emphasis hers).
But don't be fooled by all the politically charged rhetoric at the beginning of the book. Most of the book (which is passionately, if not particularly well argued) consists of first of a defense of love itself, peppered with mini-biographies of famous women in love, and divided into aspects of romantic love: wisdom, inequality, transgression, absence, heroism, failure, art. I feel she proves her points, but less through the air-tight mesh of argument than through specific examples and passionate rhetoric.
The book gets off to a weak start with her chapter 'Cupid Doffs His Blindfold: Love as Wisdom.' This chapter seems to exist primarily to dismiss the notion of romantic love as a recent, post-Christian invention. She uses a lot of examples from Plato early in the book, which is problematic because of the notable absence of womenin Plato's work. With only brief mention (like Plato) of Diotima the early examples in this book focus around Phaedrus and Alcibiades. Nevertheless, these examples function as a defense of passion, of love as both wisdom and madness, and as love not just as sight, but as clairvoyance and as the supreme means of acquisition of knowledge in the world. Using Socrates as her authority (who doesn't?) says we must never be persuaded by, "an argument which says that the temperate friend chosen rather than the driven one.' The sanity of friendship my be reassuring, but the madness of love is, 'the gift of the gods most conducive to our benefit.' It is a chance we have," says Nehring, "trapped as we are in the prison of our private preoccupations, to see into the heart of the person at our side." (p35-6). Ah, using Plato to argue against 'platonic' relationships.
I was further irritated by the title of her second chapter, 'The Power of Power Differentials: Love as Inequality.' This is hardly new ground and I thought---as I rolled my eyes at the chapter title and opening paragraphs---if I am going to wade through a bunch of BDSM-lite about women on top I am going to stop reading the book right here! However, lucky for both her and me, this chapter is where the book heats up and starts to assert her argument not just for passionate, often unequal, love, but for a woman's right to participate in it.
First asserting that it is naive to assume that relationships between 'unequal' persons is always that of a victim/perpetrator, Nehring argues that the complexity and diversity of power differentials is lost when viewed in this context. Further, she says that this viewpoint is particularly damaging to women: "It is only in the one-sided victim rhetoric of our day that youth and beauty and indeed femininity become sources of subjugation and never of strength." (p57) She calls out the various strengths and weaknesses of each position in relationships where frequent power differentials exist, such as student/teacher and defines the power deferential as being less about a fixed position of dominant authority over a weaker subordinate position, but a roll between the two that creates the heat. If love is the great leveler, she says, "it works better when there is something there to level in the first place." (p52) So age and experience are often leveled by youth and beauty,
... as anyone knows who has ever loved a person of lesser years or greater physical attractiveness. To have time on your side is to have the scales tipped in your favor. Potential itself is a form of power, unlived life is a form of power. So is street wisdom; so is liveliness, good breeding, local savvy, or muscular force. In the ghetto, a ghetto-kid has more clout than a CEO. In the streets of Athens, a local waiter wields more authority than a famous foreign writer. On a university campus, a beautiful young woman my well possess more power than her bespectacled advisor. Power is as various as the color bars of the rainbow. Most pundits who promounce n it today treat it as though it had a single hue. (p50-1)
Her examples in this chapter range from chivalric love to fairy tales, later settling on more recent literary examples. Here she is on fairy tales (she uses, specifically, animal-husband variants, of which 'Beauty & the Beast' is the best known example.)
What makes these stories so compelling is that while the power differential shifts back and forth it is always retained. The idea, in other words, tis not that a particular sex, or a particular party, has power over the other, but that one party, either party, be stronger. And the relationships can flip, with the woman, for example, starting with less power than her partner and finishing with more... The only indispensable quality is inequality.* (p62-3).
Perhaps the most shocking (or snicker-worthy) examples of power differentials are Emily Dickinson's 'Master' letters (which I had never encountered before) and on the voracious appetites of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Dickinson's letters are filled with the playful language of servitude. To whom did she write these letters? How did they emerge? What kind of life did the Belle of Amherst really lead?
And, while it does little to illustrate the point at hand, you might appreciate the following anecdote relating to one of Millay's most oft-quoted verses:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends---
It gives a lovely light!
Nehring points out the obvious metaphor for a brief and passionate life, but then adds that, "the poem may also be read as an anatomically precise description of a night she spent in her twenties with the most celebrated literary critic of her time, Edmund Wilson, and with his friend and fellow editor at Vanity Fair, John Peale Bishop...." (p78)
The best defense of inequality, however, comes in Nehring's own words:
For all the egalitarian rhetoric about searching for one's 'other half' [yes we're using Plato against Plato, again, which she at least acknowledges this time,] it is not ultimately another half we seek. We do not want something that is a part of us. We want something bigger---someone intriguingly greater. The surprise is that person need not make us feel smaller....
...power discrepancies help us recognize the divine in the human being at our side. They allow us to see god in another and to play god for another. At the end of the day, few of us want to feel that our passion is simply fair exchange, even-steven remmuneration for favors performed, charms displayed. We long to be generous in love; we yearn to give every last drop of blood and swear---as long as we feel we are giving it to someone who is, in at least some sense, our superior. It is to gods that human beings make their most lavish sacrifices, not siblings. (p66-7)
It is also BY gods that we are demanded our most lavish sacrifices. I keep being reminded of Jane Hirschfeld's
'Into Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining,' a poem about an unexpected gift the sole purpose of which appears to be sacrifice. The poem ends, "that you came to love it, that was the gift./Let the envious gods take back what they can."
The most compelling chapter for me in the book---the one bristling with stickies---was the chapter 'Anonymous Except for Injury: Love as Failure.' Nehring begins it with an epigram from Jorge Luis Borges:
Only what we lose belongs to us.
Nehring begins the chapter with the 'Competitive Suffering' of Abelard & Heloise. This doomed 11C couple met first as pupil and teacher. Ultimately, Abelard's love for Heloise destroyed his scholarship, then his reputation. She gets pregnant, and while Abelard asks for her hand in marriage and is accepted by her family, Heloise refuses:
"I looked for no marriage bond... I never sought anything in you but yourself... God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all earth on me... it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his Empress, but your whore... What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles... pen or stylus and spindles? [She preferred] love to wedlock and freedom to chains. (p195)
Heloise's refusal ends up being the couples undoing. Her uncle---furious that Abelard does not honor his favorite niece with marriage---has him castrated. (Of course you might too should your former tutor spirit away your favorite charge, disguise her as a nun, and hide her in an abbey for regular ravishment.) Abelard ends his life in a monastery, asking Heloise to take the church's vows as well. She---who would have willingly followed him into a whorehouse---ends in an abbey. Their correspondence (and his ultimate, cruel, rejection of her love for more spiritual pursuits) has become the stuff of ages.
"In our cult of success," Nehring writes, "we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur...
If the soul is a garden, as Voltaire once suggested, a complete soul will never be spared bitter fruit... For every sweet plum there will be a toxic berry. For every cluster of roses there will be a tangle of thorns. 'All things the gods give to their favorites abundantly,' Goethe wrote later in life, 'all joys abundantly, and all pangs abundantly.' (p218)
Nehring describes the tragedies, slipping from the troubadours to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as "sentimental and self-indulgent," but warns that we must not battle such louche overromanticization of the dark side of love by completely discarding it:
It contains a nugget of truth---if only a nugget---that has been forgotten in our own day: the stronger your sentiments, the greater your chance of failure. Failure happens more often to the brave than the docile. This is not emotional snobbery, this is reality. The higher your aim, the greater the chance of missing your target. The more you have to invest, the more you also have to lose. Failure is no shame, by this token, but a badge of courage, an insignia of wealth. (p217)
And then she gives us Margaret Fuller, the lone female voice of the Concord Transcendentalists who gave the American public German literature, herself the first translator of Goethe in the US.*** Fuller---though she criticized of Goethe as well---championed Young Werther at a time when most American critics saw this piece of work as evidence of European weakness and depravity. In her words, "Werther must die because life was not wide enough or rich enough" for him. Werther perishes out of strength, not frailty, because he is too good for this world" (ah the 19C death cult!) not because he is too weak for it.
Nehring describes Fuller's intensity in her relationships by giving us this passage from Fuller's travel narrative Summer on the Lakes. Fuller describes her heroine, Mariana, whose emotional intensity at once tantalizes and terrorizes men:
Like Fortunio, who sought to do homage to his friends by building a fire of cinnamon, not knowing that its perfume would be too strong for their endurance, so did Mariana. What she wanted to tell, they did not want to hear; a little had pleased, so much overpowered, and they preferred the free air of the street, even to the cinnamon perfume of her palace.
Nehring offers the following analysis:
Mariana fails because she is too potent. Her suitors can take her in small doses, but not the doses natural to her, not in the doses she wants to give. A little of Fuller's energy always pleased her interlocutors; the whole of it put them into flight. It was too much for them, too sweet, too pungent, too intoxicating... Their natures were not strong enough to inhale Fuller's undistilled emotion. (p231) (Sound like anyone you know? Lest we forget, it is the phoenix that rises from the ashes of a cinnamon pyre.)
My heart aches for Fuller who never seemed to be able to find anyone in her circle to match her intensity or intelligence. The fact that she never let this silence her or dampen her enthusiasm is a heroic struggle in itself. Indeed, Fuller thought women had a special capacity for suffering, pointing out that it was the women who stayed with Christ in the hours of his suffering, while his disciples abandoned him. "...women could no more stay from the foot of the cross than from the Transfiguration," she wrote. "They would not be exiled from that dark hour..." but instead demanded to learn from it. (And I ask again, since homoerotic studies of the text eclipse the presence of women as much as the original interpretations: are we Xrist's bitches, or his brides?)
This is the lesson I take from this chapter and from Fuller's life. To suffer is inevitable. It is not something to be sought after, as those persons who read (and still read) Young Werther and after it attempt to model their lives. But once suffering is experienced the question remains how to create meaning from it, how to remain compassionate, open-hearted, even in the face of disappointment and loss. (If not outright atrocity.) This, in my opinion, is at the very essence of what it means to be human.
Nehring's greatest strength in her polemic is her passionate argument for engagement with love and through it the world around us. The book starts a little sticky and semantic, but it frees itself into something much larger: passion as a vehicle not only through which to experience other people, but as a way of engaging the world at large, and ultimately a commitment to the way in which we conduct our lives. Once she gets to Wollstonecraft, to Fuller, and even Frieda Kahlo (who many may argue lived a life that eclipsed her art) we see women whose total lives reflect the sum of their commitment to their passions. Women whose outsized passions transcended their physical presence on this earth.
Nehring argues that this is our right as women:
Love, for the strong-hearted and strong-minded woman, is a game like all others---albeit perhaps the most important game. Historically, it has been her particular arena ---not because she could not have excelled in others, but because she was often excluded from others (politics, the arts, military.) What was hers was heroism in the cause of love, combativeness on the field of emotion. This is hers still. And it remains the noblest field of action for men and women alike---the field with the most affecting victories and, on occasion, the bloodiest fall outs. (p149)
She considers this a heroic struggle, and somewhat jokingly, quotes one of the earliest self-help books, Ovid's The Art of Love in her insistence that love is not for losers, nor for the lazy:
'I was a lazy man,' he testifies in the tone of sinner reformed, 'with a bent for bedroom and slippers, doing what work I did half lying down in the shade... love for a beautiful girl took me out of the doldrums; when the order came, I sprang to arms in her camp/So you see me alert and waging my wars...' The moral, 'If you want to forswear idleness, then fall in love.' (p132)
She adds, "Those whom even love cannot shake from their habitual aversion to risk and inertia are those who are truly irredeemable."
I loved this book: it was precisely the shot in the arm I needed after a discouraging year. There is a lot that could be said to refute all of the above. And rarely does Nehring acknowledge the clamor of critics. But her arguments surprised and moved me and made me rethink some of my general assumptions about relationships, and why so many of the recent, safe bets---when I got precisely what I thought I was looking for---have lacked a certain level of both heart and heat. I heartily recommend it as a Valentine's Day gift for the passionate women in your life.
Because I couldn't fit everything I wanted to into the above, (and because I have to return the book to the library), see my notes below. These are mostly for my benefit, but might amuse or interest you.
* Nehring notes that the animal husband stories usually follow this pattern: Inferior Male (Beast) meets Superior Female (Beauty), transforms into Superior Male (Prince) and weds her. "The power shuttles back and forth, but the asymmetry is preserved at all costs." (p65)
*** Fuller: who numbers among her accomplishments, in addition to being one of the most important literary critics of her day, the first female member of the New York working press, the first editor of The Dial, the first American woman to report on a foreign war, and the author of Women in the 19C a tract on gender equality.
--------------------
p 11 - "It never bothers the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the cold and crude companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou, thou art enlarged by thy own shining.. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
p 13 - "The tragedy of the self-supporting... woman does not lie in too many, but too few experiences." - Emma Goldman. (And how!)
p 14 - "'When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything,'" said G.K. Chesterton in the early 1900s. Umberto Eco has expanded on this point, 'We are,' he wrote in the British Telegraph, 'supposed to live in a skeptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. The 'death of God'... has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the... church---from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub Christian superstitions of the Da Vinci Code. ['God Isn't Big Enough for Some People,' The Telegraph, February 27, 2005.]
p 40 - In order to be inflamed intellectually, we need to be enlisted emotionally. In the absence of emotional engagement, most people do not interrogate themselves about topics for which there is no immediate or pragmatic urgency. When neither our jobs nor our self-interest require to reexamine a knotty subject, chances are we won't. The laws of inertia militate against it. To consider afresh our views of capitalism, of patriarchy, or propriety, we have, in most cases to be rattled. We have, at least, to be stirred. And what more stirring incident is there in human life than to fall in love?
Socrates identifies an essential point in Symposium: to fall in love is first to study the person who has awakened your affections, second to study yourself, and third to study the world around you... The thirst for knowledge about another human being leads almost inevitably to the thirst for knowledge about other things. Sometimes they are things your lover likes or needs. Mostly they are things you simply did not notice before your senses were stirred by affection.
What Socrates is saying above all else in Symposium is that: love makes us think. Love makes us explore. Love makes us blaze through new subjects and new cultures; it makes us hatch new visions. And in that way it does, in fact, transcend its human object. Sometimes that object is just a rung on the ladder---a stepping stone to higher places. At other times it is the altar itself.
p144 - The emotionally and intellectually dull do not fall in love hard or long.
p144 In her chapter on 'On My Blood I'll Carry You Away: Love as Heroism' Nehring describes love as a loaded gun in the hands of the beloved, then revises her description to a steering wheel: "the love affair not as Russian roulette but as a drive through a darkened country with an inebriated stranger":
It can be magical; you can end up in places you never expected, embracing in the tall blades beyond the roads bend, or you can end up dead in a ditch. Not through anybody's malice, but merely because of a temperament insufficiently alert, a sensibility a little dull, an instance of timing a bit unfortunate. (p144)
She goes on to describe the experience in more ecstatic terms before arriving at her point:
Almost everything in modern society militates against our falling in love hard or long. It militates against love as risk, love as sacrifice, love as heroism. As presented to us in dating books, matchmaking sites, and advice columns, love is---or ought to be---an organized adult activity with safety rails to the left and right, rubber ceilings, no-skid floors, and a clear, clean, destination: marriage. Anyone who embarks one something more ambiguous, more dangerous and difficult to predict is counted all but pathological---especially if she is a woman. For even in today's unprecedentedly safety-proofed social culture, men are still accorded a nominal amount of adventure. They are permitted to recognize the 'thrill of the chase' they are allowed to pursue [lovers] who cause them a bit of trouble and turmoil. It is chalked up in men to high spirits, predatorial adrenaline, to chutzpah, competition, and courage. But when women do the same thing---when women set their sights and stake their bliss on partners who are obviously elusive---it is chalked up to low self-worth... the notion that women who go after challenging men have bad self esteem while men who go after difficult women have great testosterone has become endemic. (p144-5)
p178 - Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke's insistence that the poor should seek solace in the afterlife: "Surely one can help them in this life without depriving them of the one to come!"
p185 - Nehring on critiques of Wollstonecrafts behavior: Clearly there is some misunderstanding about what constitutes feminism; what constitutes heroism. Perhaps it is not the proverbial stiff upper lip that does the hero make, but the trembling heart---the trembling and oversensitive heart that feels its fear and advances anyway.
p188 - ...perhaps this is what the game of love is really about: playing injured. Not avoiding injuries, but playing with injuries. It is not the woman who never despairs that is strongest. It is not the man who protects himself most assiduously who is bravest. It is the person who risks everything, loses everything, and risks everything over again who is a true hero.
p194 - But a love affair cannot be measured by its 'success,' whatever exactly 'success' is. In pragmatic present-day America, success, of course, usually means marriage, and people have a terrible tendency to write off the relationships that did not end with it as more or less regrettable. This is a resounding error. It is also a historical irony given that in the era to which experts still trace 'our' notion of romance---the era of the 12C troubadours---marriage was considered the antithesis of romance. Adultery was romantic, adultery was spiritual, adultery was idealistic; marriage was just an arrangement of physical and financial convenience, a workmanlike solution to pressing quotidian problems.
p225 Fuller, appalled by Bettina Brentano's bald flattery and by Goethe's highhandedness in the correspondence Brentano published under the title 'Goethe's Correspondence with a Child' critiqued it in The Dial with the following:
Observe this young idolators... Have you chosen a bright particular star for the object of your vespers? You will not see it best or revere it best by falling prostate in the dust. Stand erect, though with an upturned brow...
p231 Fuller to Emerson: "What a vulgarity there seems in writing for the multitude."
p233 - It will not do to romanticize failure. But neither must we criminalize it, demonize, or disdain it. To be heroic is to be endangered. As bruises are a part of battle, failure is a part of love. If we have no wounds, chances are we haven't put up a fight. Chances are we have loitered timidly on the sidelines of the great skirmish.
p234 - What is important in absorbing or living these tales is only this: to retain faith in love. "Happy the survivor if in losing his friend, he loses not the idea of friendship," writes Margaret Fuller. "Be not faithless thou whom I see wandering alone amid the tombs of thy buried loves. The relation thou hast thus far sought is possible..." It is possible---and it is closer to your grasp, you who have suffered, than it is to the gresp of those whose thick fingers never burned.
p236 - There is nothing harder for a passionate woman than to wait. - Simone de Beauvoir
p237 - Horace Walpole: love is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
p263 - Neither in loving, nor painting, in writing nor seducing, neither in directing a film nor in navigating a marriage, can we tell the future. "Freedom," as Satre says, can only ever be "what you do with what's been done to you." All art involves responding to the unknown, integrating the undesirable, and expecting the unexpected.
p273 - the right to be romantic
p275 - the new era of revived romantic hope
Insert anecdotes, "How being a lover is like being a warrior." - the time my Beloved Professor called me on all the eye-rolling I did in class on this topic and assigned extra reading and writing on this subject.
And my first experience reading "Feminine Mystique."
What was said about Wollstonecraft & Beauvoir w/regard to love. Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin in writing a biography of his wives passionate life and many accomplishments opened her to criticism.
p 1 - Re: Wollstonecraft: No sooner had her corpse cooled than the stoning began. The thirty-eight-year-old author had been a "whore" a "hyena in petticoats." Venerable poets suggested she had wished to mate with an elephant. Women's rights advocates damned her "imprudence and impolicy." Nineteenth-century suffragettes dismissed her as a "silly victim of passion" and strained to sever their cause from hers. Twenty-first-century feminists still frequently assail her "misogyny" or simply pass her over in embarrassed silence.
See also the notes for this section for further analysis and references to the effect that 'contemporary feminists still essentially view Wollstone craft as 'an unstable woman whose life proves her error.' (p293) Eye-opening.
p 294-5 notes re: Beauvoir's 'stoning' after her death in 1986. Once a heroine of women's liberation , Beauvoir suddenly became the 'antagonist.' Feminist essays on her started to 'display a quite extraordinary antipathy to their subject.' Before long, they either disappeared altogether or turned, 'peculiarly nasty, condescending, sarcastic, sardonic, or dismissive.
By the time Deirdre Bair published the first full-length biography in 1990, Beauvoir's personal life with Sartre had come in for such harsh criticism that Bair was accosted at readings and upbraided during interviews by people who seemed to hold her personally responsible for Beauvoir's slavish behavior with her lovr. "Why should we even continue to read Simone de Beauvoir's writing when the life that produced the theory was such a lie?" they demanded in so many words. "She told us she lived a perfect feminist life... she inspired us, and now we don't have that inspiration anymore. We believed her and she let us down." Feeling 'like a slowly deflating balloon' Deirdre Bair published a painful New York Times Magazine piece entitled, 'Do as she Said, not as she Did' (Nov. 18 1990) In many ways, the recent history of Beauvoir's criticism is the history of "Electras trying to murder their sexist mother." (Celine Leon, 'Beauvoir's Women: Eunuch or Male?' in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir.')
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Date: 2010-05-26 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-27 03:49 am (UTC)If you do read it, I hope you enjoy it. We can chat about it any time you'd like.