All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (16 page)

Milly Theale, his ‘heiress of all the ages’ in
The Wings of the Dove
, dies when she is betrayed in love: only the tug of that intimate relation which is far more than sex, James suggests, could have kept her alive. Isabel Archer, the fieriest of his young American women, fearful of passion, makes the wrong choice in marriage. The seeming Mr Right is Mr Wrong. The union with the effete, decadent Osmond results in a dead child and her imprisonment in a world of empty forms, not unlike the marriage of Dorothea Brooke to Casaubon, that jealous dried-up old stick of a scholar in
Middlemarch.
Strether, the mature hero of
The Ambassadors,
released to the teeming life of Europe from puritan America, counsels the young artist Bingham to ‘live, live all you can’, by which, of course, he means, love, love all you can–even though it may transgress social conventions. In James, love takes on the high seriousness with which it was treated by the Provençal court poets and, indeed, by George Eliot, the greatest of what seemed to him the ‘old-fashioned’, far too sprawling, too loose and baggy English novelists, from whom he hoped to distinguish himself by focusing on form, on ‘balanced composition’. Yet James remains oddly true to Eliot: only by plunging into the sphere of love, the trajectory of feeling, can the Jamesian hero access a spiritual maturity.

For Eliot, steeped in both religion and philosophy, the heart rather than the head emerges as the organ of epistemology. Love enables knowledge and is itself a kind of knowledge garnered through the stumblings of experience. In
Middlemarch
, her seventh novel, written when she was fifty and at last settled in a vibrant, if at first socially ostracized, ‘marriage of true minds’ with George Henry Lewes, she gives us the benefit of her own accrued understanding. Virginia Woolf called the book ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. Martin Amis has called it the greatest novel in the English language, a view upheld in many contemporary popularity rankings.

Three trajectories of love weave their way through the novel. In their own way, each of Eliot’s central characters is shaped and reshaped in life’s ways through their experience of love: their transformed perspectives on the world at once illuminate and constitute knowledge which is as powerful as that gained from any philosophical inquiry.

Lydgate, her idealistic man of science, contemptuous of the matter-of-factness of provincial life, nonetheless conventionally believes that a pretty, doting young thing is just what a man needs. Through the travails of daily domesticity he realizes that he has mistakenly bound himself to a selfish, materialistic, manipulative airhead who can share none of his reforming zeal. Life, and not science, brings him a measure of wisdom.

No idealist, Fred Vincy is the most ordinary of pleasure-loving young men. He is in love with Mary Garth, ‘the best girl I know’, but his own wayward actions, the debts he haplessly incurs–as he recognizes in his humiliation–prevent her from finding him worthy of love. For her and through her, because she demands the best of him and because she does, despite herself, love him, his imagination stretches to feel the harm he has done to others, and he takes on heft, grows in good.

Dorothea, Eliot’s latter-day St Theresa, is something of a satirical self-portrait of her own youthful, idealistic self. Determinedly serious, Dorothea at first demarcates love as a puritanical school in intellect’s service. Like so many young, intellectual women, fascinated by and susceptible to the sway of theory (or dogma) in authoritative male guise, she ties herself to a man whom she would wish a Milton, but who is in fact a stifling pedant, a narrow, impotent bully. Disappointment, suffering, self-recognition, as well as attraction, lead her to understand the values her second love, Will Ladislaw, describes: ‘To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.’ Dorothea learns through the pitfalls of experience to feel with her head and learn through the heart.

In central Europe, another major writer was contemplating the force and nature of love. In 1907 Sigmund Freud, who had already immersed himself in woman’s terrain–small-talk, superstition, dreams, gossip, and tittle-tattle about love and marriage–to give birth to a revolutionary theory about the wayward workings of the human mind and the primary place of the ‘sexual drive’ in shaping behaviour and imagination, turned his attention to a popular romantic novelette,
Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy
, by a German contemporary, Wilhelm Jensen. Freud’s reading of the novelette became his longest sustained interpretation:
Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva
. It was here that Freud launched his idea of the ‘cure through love’ in which the psychoanalyst takes his cue from the intelligent lover to facilitate a treatment that is in fact better enacted by the psychosexual process of love itself. Freud’s cure is more epistemological than redemptive: love (like his view of the psychoanalytic project) prompts knowledge of the self and of the other. But then, the Bible, taking its cue from Hebraic usage, had already elided the verb ‘to know’ with carnal knowledge, a slippage which is also there in the word ‘intercourse’, whose larger senses include all kinds of conversation.

Norbert Hanold is a young archaeologist who is mesmerized by a bas-relief of a Grecian girl with a striking gait. He falls in love with her and baptizes her ‘Gradiva’–the woman who walks. Gradiva invades his dreams. In a nightmare, he sees her die in Pompeii, buried under the volcanic ash of an erupting Vesuvius. From that moment on, in his delusionary beliefs Gradiva is both buried and alive, past and present. He travels to Pompeii, thinking himself in AD 79, the moment of the eruption, and here he encounters Gradiva in the flesh.

Not a spectre, this Gradiva is in fact Norbert’s old hometown playmate, Zoë Bertgang, another woman whose name bears a ‘walking’ in it. Alert to his state, she sympathetically elicits the entire arc of his delusion and plays along with it. In other words, she shares his fantasies, just as, notes Freud, a real psychoanalytic cure must ‘begin by taking up the same ground as the delusional structure and then investigating it as completely as possible’. A clever young woman, Zoë realizes that Norbert’s hidden love for her is the ‘motive force behind the delusion’. In the unfolding of the story, it becomes clear that she too is trapped at a point in childhood. She is dedicated to her father, who, like Norbert, has time only for his intellectual work. A zoologist, he is obsessed by his specimens, named in the dead languages of Latin and Greek, from which Zoë gets her name. To make good the ‘life’ the name promises, she has to escape the attachment to her father and win Norbert back to life and love. Indeed, her courting or ‘therapeutic’ activity follows from her perception that Norbert’s delusions are distorted expressions of his love for her. ‘It was only this knowledge,’ Freud writes, ‘which could decide her to devote herself to the treatment; it was only the certainty of being loved by him that could induce her to admit her love to him.’

When Norbert touches her hand in order to shoo away a fly, she bursts out, ‘There’s no doubt you’re out of your mind, Norbert Hanold!’ Hearing his name spoken, Norbert is roused from his dream state and at last recognizes his old friend. Zoë now exposes for him how his revivification of buried Pompeii and his infatuation with Gradiva have been spurred by his childhood affection for her. His entire turning to the dead world of archaeology is uncovered step by step, stratum by stratum, and disclosed to have been impelled by a turning away from a dangerous living attraction. It is now up to Norbert to take a step into life: he embraces his own Gradiva, ‘the childhood friend who had been dug out of the ruins’.

Freud applauds this happy ending. He takes his cue, he says, from female readers rather than rationalist critics who might see it as an arbitrary appendage. For Freud, the women are right: love can release inner blockages: Norbert really has undergone cure through love, because of a woman’s unsceptical faith in its powers. And the psychoanalyst takes his cue from Zoë, who has provoked a return of the repressed, washing away Norbert’s earlier struggles ‘by a fresh high tide of the same passions’. Every psychoanalytic treatment, Freud writes,

Zoë/Gradiva, Freud notes, is, unfortunately, better placed than the practitioners of psychoanalysis to effect a cure. Like the doctors, she has made the repressed conscious. Through her, explanation and cure coincide more nearly than they can in the consulting room, since Zoë can return Hanold’s love as it makes its way from the unconscious into consciousness: ‘The doctor has been a stranger, and must endeavour to become a stranger once more after the cure; he is often at a loss what advice to give the patients he has cured as to how in real life they can use their recovered capacity to love.’

So the lover, through intelligence and passion, can reanimate the beloved, while the psychotherapist who stands in for the lover and calls his own ‘affect into play’ must needs stand back and merely point the way for the patient. Many analysts since Freud have used the analogy of the therapeutic encounter as a cure through love. In the analytic encounter, we re-enact all our affective relations, loves as well as hates, and those sticking points on which we’ve become so fixed that we repeat them over and over, without being able to budge. Through the process, we may become a little wiser about our own frailties and lacks, as well as learning how to love a little better.

But if we are to understand that the lover–in Freud’s estimate–has this high calling and that love itself is a transformative experience, which releases and reorganizes the components of the beloved’s (as well as the lover’s) inner experience, is this enough to sustain a happily-ever-after in that institution called marriage, even if Mr Right has met his Ms Right? If there were a simple yes to this question, the growth of the talking cures, with their large clientele amongst the married, might never have been quite so spectacular. If the answer is a simple no, why do we go on believing, or certainly hoping, that the answer is yes? Perhaps it’s simply that the love-and-marriage bundle, a little like Churchill’s estimation of democracy, is clearly far from perfect, but it’s the best we’ve come up with.

Freud himself, after an ardent courtship of Martha Bernays, ‘his dear, sweet girl’, entered on a lifelong marriage. He had met Martha at a family dinner in April 1882. She was twenty-one, he twenty-six, an ambitious but penniless researcher at Brücke’s physiological laboratory in Vienna. A little over a month later, they had their first walk alone together: by June they were secretly and unofficially engaged. The distinction and warmth of her family may have played a part in his choice of her, as he later confided, but that very factor made him fear the family would refuse the engagement on the grounds of his poverty and lack of prospects. The engagement, eventually made public, lasted over four years and several thousand letters: the length of these protracted and one assumes chaste betrothals, the later Freud notes, is a factor in precipitating neurosis.

The voluminous correspondence between Sigmund and Martha, of which only Freud’s side is available, shows him as a jealous and tyrannical suitor, one often tipped into despair and who demands unconditional love from his fiancée, as well as utter veracity about all her relations with others. Even her family relations constitute grounds for jealousy: ‘no matter how much they love you I will not leave you to anyone, and no one deserves you; no one else’s love compares with mine’. Martha meets his demands with tact, but with a spirited resistance too. Her rights and independence are crucial to her. He doesn’t always respond with equanimity, yet he writes, ‘it would be a ghastly loss for us both if I were compelled to decide to love you as a dear girl, yet not as an equal, someone from whom I would have to hide my thoughts and opinions–in short, the truth’.

Undoubtedly, love shifted Freud’s sense of himself. His conquistadorial ambitions were tempered and displaced by a domestic sentimental idyll, a ‘little world of happiness’ which he and Martha would share, ‘filled with beds, mirrors, a clock, an armchair, linen tied with pretty ribbons, hats with artificial flowers’. Over a year into their engagement, he writes:

Sigmund and Martha were finally wed in late September 1886. Their marriage lasted the length of their lives, over fifty years, despite having produced six of those dangerous rivals Freud had foreseen: ‘once one is married… one lives rather with each other for some third thing, and for the husband dangerous rivals soon appear: household and nursery’.

These dangerous rivals, many long thought, were the underlying purpose of marriage, whether sentimental and love-based in its inception or not. Indeed, the now sanctioned notion of an emotional and sexual link between Mr and Miss Right, the idea of a happily-ever-after in a freely chosen marriage, seedbed for the full flowering of each party’s individual potential, are late arrivals on the historical scene.