The Ideologies of Love

...Although they were highly respected, and Weber's achievement and success were monumental, they paid a price in personal sacrifice and pain for their values (Weber and Else stayed with their spouses, and had to conduct their liaison with utmost secrecy...

...Centered in Schwabing, a kind of German Montmartre, the movement became the locus of radical opposition to the prevailing patriarchal ethos of Bismarck's Germany, with its insistence on power, discipline, work, law, order, and social responsibility...

...How, one asks again and again, was Frieda "Woman" rather than just a woman...

...Members of "the world of men," they prized rationalistic thought and social action, subordinating personal desires to the idea of duty...

...She became the "post-tragic" woman, who refuses unhappiness or renunciation, who tries to be faithful to her sexual, instinctive self...

...Reviewed by Eva Hoffman This is a generous work, marked by a largess of vision and attitude that are admirable at a time when scholarship too frequently seems to be strangled by self-imposed constraints...

...This book is an implicit answer to the excesses of narrowly circumscribed criticism????new, Freudian, Structural, or any other prefabricated and exclusive variety...

...Weber and Lawrence seem an unlikely pair to bring together within the covers of the same volume?the one a German, an academic scholar, a pillar of his society respected and even idolized in his own lifetime...

...It was enacted and disseminated by the "erotic movement," which crystallized around the brilliant, unruly figure of Otto Gross, a one-time disciple of Freud...

...Because it is difficult to keep track of the complexly interwoven threads, the experience of reading the book is often frustrating...

...Frieda left her first husband for Lawrence and transmitted to him Gross' philosophy...

...In other words, he is not wholly a determinist...

...Attempting nothing less than a humanistic interpretation ol controversies which have been part of the imaginative and intellectual life of the last hundred years, Martin Green has amassed a prodigious amount of material, and he has shaped it into biographies, evocations of milieus, explications of philosophical systems, vignettes of minor characters, literary commentaries, and chronologies of facts (the whole middle part of The von Richthofen Sisters is a cataloguing of important historical and biographical events that took place during the century...

...there it reappears transformed but undiminished in grandeur...

...Indeed, the distances and discrepancies between the two men raise doubts about the validity of the juxtaposition that are never completely dispelled...

...Especially on the matriarchalist side of the spectrum, descriptions remain too abstracted, gaping, lacking in specificity and vividness...

...One can only applaud such a resolution to rejuvenate a badly dessicated methodology...

...It allows readers the pleasure of discovering another, little-known Bloomsbury, and the spectacle of watching people bring their consciousness and moral energy to the task of reforming themselves in fundamental ways, going beyond the givens of their time and culture...

...Born in the 1870s, daughters of an officer in Bismarck's Prussian Army, they serve as a means of compressing and highlighting certain key issues...

...and the categories imposed on the material expand to the point of dilution...

...Lawrence's impotence, on the other hand, the strains in his marriage to Frieda, are glossed over as secondary to the pair's triumphant affirmation of sexual happiness, and the overflow of that affirmation into Lawrence's writing...

...To present a new setting for Lawrence's work and personality, to propose a longer, more sweeping view of his development and significance, is one of the purposes of The von Richthofen Sisters...

...Both the von Richthofen sisters had "remarkably ideological" affairs with Otto Gross, and their reactions to him are indicative of their later allegiances...

...Green's Epilogue includes what amounts to a quiet manifesto, stating that "the study of literature, nowadays, badly needs to be set back inside a new and living context . . . not a history of ideas context, but a context of the history of sensibility or imagination...

...But the rewards, once the pattern emerges, are well worth the effort...

...I, for one, was grateful for the relative absence of psychological jargon masquerading as instant explanation, and for the seriousness and dignity accorded people's experiences and choices...

...In fact, Lawrence's fiction provides the matriarchalist vision with its proper place...

...They also provide the vital link between Max Weber and D. H. Lawrence, the pivotal, representative men in Green's landscape of values and ideas...

...Else, more restrained and traditional, could not give entire credence to Gross or his doctrine...

...The vantage point Green uses to encompass the men is a version of the "two cultures" dichotomy, with anti-theses not of science and the liberal arts, but the still broader categories of patriarchalism and matriarchalism...

...It is an imposing enterprise whose humane, widely aware catholicity suggests fruitful directions for scholarship...

...The patriarchalist-matriarchalist designations throw large concepts into clarifying relief, but they often seem forced or insufficient when applied to particular individuals...

...Unfortunately, Green's terms of organization are not entirely satisfying...

...Theirs is a familiar 19th-century story of public glory coupled with private repression and loss...

...Sometimes precision is sacrificed to the broad vistas...

...There is not enough of Frieda's or Lawrence's personalities, of the texture of their lives or the dynamics of their relationship...

...Frieda, the pinnacle of erotic womanhood for Gross, found his ideas a perfect garb for her personality, a liberating impetus to self-assertion and expression...

...The difficulties of Weber's marriage, the affliction of his neurosis, Else's guilts, are all given some emphasis...

...If it is a flawed work, it is flawed by its magnanimity rather than by its limitations, and that makes for provocative reading and thinking...

...the other an Englishman, an artist hostile to academic thinking, an iconoclast more often attacked and mocked than understood...

...Green contends that through the mediation of Frieda's inspiring presence, matriarchalism released in Lawrence the full fertility of creative genius, and this perspective adds an important dimension to the understanding of the novelist's work...

...Reading him against the background of living people and their concerns gives a renewed meaning to the vague concept of influence, and narrows the gap, made too wide by other critical approaches, between the problems of experience and literature...

...Were all these Magna Maters (Alma Mahler and Isadora Duncan are included among them) really in touch with extraordinary life-forces, or did the erotic movement, coming as it did out of a tremendously repressive era, when any sexual relaxation must have seemed like a discovery of new lands, get things out of proportion...

...Words like "Magna Mater," "Demetrian," "life-values," "the world of Woman," are reiterated, not developed or differentiated, and aside from supplying considerable fuel for a feminist critique, they finally evaporate into mystification...

...All this wealth creates its own problems...

...Implicit in his reading of his subjects is the refreshing assumption that consciously embraced philosophy has real impact on the shaping of the self and the course of life...

...and while the claim may be exaggerated, the Schwabing milieu certainly appears to foreshadow later changes, preoccupations and upheavals (like the home-grown phenomena of "sexual revolution" and hippiedom...

...Green's stress, however, is on their voluntary participation in that story rather than its inevitability, on the availability of other possibilities, other moralities...

...She and Weber were essentially patri-archalist, albeit in a more enlightened way than Bismarck and his admirers...

...One wishes Green had raised some of these questions, that he had appraised more searchingly the implications of eroticism, the consequences of its enactment...

...Green sees in the erotic movement the germination of a bloodless but effective revolution in values and sensibilities...

...Green's picture of Schwabing is among the most interesting sections of his book...

...At the turn of the century matriarchalism existed as a creed, based on the writings of the Swiss jurist Johann Jakob Bachofen, and affirmed the ascendancy of the "female mode being," eroticism, individual love-relations, and instinctual vitality...

...He acknowledges the importance of familial and cultural influences (actually, his outlines of family backgrounds tend to be too long), yet believes that personality is informed as much by ideas, ideals and ideologies as by inaccessible goblins prancing around in the unconscious...

...Else and Frieda, the sisters of the title, are not the study's real subject...

...He is shrewder about the limitations and costs of the patriarchal sensibility, bringing to it a greater skepticism...