WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ROMANTIC LOVE?
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman
In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud summed up the views of two diverse cultures on love, his own and that of the ancient Greeks: The most striking distinction between the erotic life of...
...This is about as far from romantic love as one can get, for whether contractual or "free," romantic love is never purely physical...
...As long as we remain narcissists, we remain romantics...
...He never loves in spite of himself...
...AS ROMANTICISM develops in the 19th century, however, a strange phenomenon emerges...
...Like the Greek youth Narcissus, men and women today seek the elusive ideal in their own perfection...
...Although they no longer so readily polarize women into good and bad as the Victorians did, men are still effecting a split between their tender and sexual feelings, except that now they direct all tenderness inward toward themselves and turn outward only for sensation, a la Roth, Mailer, Bellow, and company...
...To the end, she is accountable...
...For the Victorians, sex itself was the great prohibition...
...Thanks to the new breed of feminists, however, the appeal of the double is fast disappearing...
...What is striking about it now is how we have come full circle...
...Remove all impediments as we have done today, and one removes romantic love...
...The two women were interchangeable...
...The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor even an inferior object...
...In the 19th-century, men, perhaps even more than women, were under the sway of the soul-mate ideal, which often finds literary expression in the brother/sister incest theme...
...The analyst has taken women's place as the source of illumination...
...The sexual revolution has assured women along with men an assembly line of moving parts, found not in the factory but at the bar counter...
...Searching for an elusive ideal, he clasped her imaginary form in the wind, and saw her phantom everywhere, her reality nowhere...
...As far away as we are from Goethe's romantic hero Werther, whose suicide over unrequited love for Charlotte led to a wave of real-life imitators, we are perhaps even further from Chateaubriand's Rend, whose melancholy longing afflicted generations of Europeans...
...We would be foolhardy, however, to think that by rejecting the glorification of women .we are achieving the mature genitality that presumably escaped other ages...
...Through all his adventures, the romantic Don Juan seeks the ideal woman...
...Perhaps we are moving toward a third possibility, wherein, like Ovid's Roman swingers, we glorify neither the object nor the instinct but rather, in the words of one New York psychiatrist, see everyone as either an opportunist or an opportunity...
...In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud summed up the views of two diverse cultures on love, his own and that of the ancient Greeks: The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object...
...No longer do men look to women as inspirational guides and saviors, as they still do in Wagner's Tannhiiuser, Lohengrin, and even in Ibsen's Doll's House (in the Krogstad / Linde relationship...
...Shelley is the great spokesman for this fantasy of the mirror image, which admittedly still exerts an influence on us and has caused many a woman, in her willingness to be some man's glorified object, to become his mere shadow and echo...
...We have gone further than the Greeks in that males as well as females are now replaceable...
...Even Phaedra and Medea, for all their suffering, do not qualify because they are less enthralled by their lovers' qualities than they are obsessed by the gods...
...In trying to reach the illusion, we sometimes drown or put our head into an oven, which gives to our self-love the compelling intensity of Tristan's and Isolde's passion, made permanent in the lovers' death...
...But cry as we will for liberation, other people are less equals to us than gadgets, mere appliances to turn us on...
...Whether in the Middle Ages or the 19th century, romantic love depends on obstacles: internal, external, or both...
...It is a commonplace that romantic love was born in the 12th century, in the canzons of propertyless knights singing the praises of their unattainable (i.e., married) ladies...
...Should one object prove defective, it is easy to pick up another...
...they seek it in their inner selves, a phantom even harder to grasp than a reflection in a pool...
...Romantic love may thus not be dead at all, for the last and most difficult impediment to overcome is our own imperfection...
...Among the Romans, romantic love is perhaps present in some, although by no means all, of Catullus' lyrics to Lesbia and in Virgil's Dido...
...Even when romantic love enters into marriage, as it does in the Renaissance, it is subject to impediments, for example, in Romeo and Juliet, where the social forces in the form of forbidding 93 parents impinge on eros...
...They are women possessed, externally and internally, by a fearsome, destructive power, that of sex...
...The romantic lover may be inspired by an outside force, but he always feels his beloved is worthy of veneration...
...Many would say "good riddance...
...Usually the impediment involves some kind of sexual prohibition, as in the myth of Tristan and Isolde, in which one of the lovers is married...
...Although Dido, too, is a victim of the gods, one feels that, unlike her Greek counterparts, she is never beside herself in her love...
...I discount the Greek romances as sources because their relationships are strictly physical, whereas romantic love always glorifies the object spiritually as well as physically...
...IT IS NOT that we have gotten rid of pedestals, however...
...Agamemnon would have been as satisfied with Achilles' slave girl, Briseis, as he was with his own, whom he was forced to give up...
...In 19th-century love theory, man searches for his other half, not a complementary physical half as in Aristophanes' account of our split bodies that were originally one in The Symposium, but a soul mate who can vibrate with him in imaginative sympathy...
...While it is possible to view the adulterous love literature of the Middle Ages in terms of the Oedipal conflict, exemplified in the knight /son, lady/mother, lord /father constellation, and to view 19thcentury romanticism, with its emphasis on nature, death, and unattainable objects as a desire to return to the breast-feeding mother, contemporary literature offers old problems in new bottles...
...However, there are precedents for the glorification of the object even among the Greeks, albeit in some unexpected places: in the lyrics of Sappho, for example, which are often unequivocally lesbian, and the love dialogues of Plato, in which the homosexual component looms large...
...We are like 92 Helen and Paris, who were never the slaves of each other, but only of Aphrodite...
...What we have done is to eliminate the middleman or woman...
...This passage was added as a footnote to the essays in 1910...
...The object on the pedestal is now ourselves...
...Feminists, in particular, view romantic love as a tool of patriarchal control...
...While in medieval love stories it is external obstacles that impede the love relationship, even the historical one of H6loise and Abelard, in romanticism it is often the absence of the love object herself that is the obstacle...
...while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuse for it only in the merits of the object...
...The great love stories of the romantics are about unattainable or nonexistent objects, which at base is a sign of a low regard for the instinct...
...It is simply that the object on the pedestal has changed...
...What is more, some contemporary women, the "post-Sherfey females," now aware of their theoretically limitless sexual capacities, quest after sensation in even more numerical fashion than their brothers...
...Instead of glorifying the object, a salient characteristic of romantic love, we too now emphasize the sexual instinct...
...His contemporary counterpart, however, seeks only the ideal sensation...
...That is why even his sexual impulses are doomed to frustration...
...Ironically, in light of the description that I quoted earlier, it was Freud himself who gave the coup de grace to romantic love, for his recognition of the reality of sexuality behind the official pronouncements on feminine purity finally pushed the lady off the pedestal...
...Even the seducer in romanticism is different from ours...
...It is impedimented love...
...In what is perhaps the most famous romantic example of all, that of Tristan and Isolde, whether in the 13th-century Gottfried or the 19th-century Wagner version, the lovers do not refer to the love potion as the source of their love...
...In his essay "On Narcissism," Freud had said that the love object is a projection of ourselves idealized...
...In this respect, at least, she is romantic...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
