All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (50 page)

In
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Freud, ever emphatic about the jealousy of older siblings towards new arrivals, describes an early formative and intense quasi-sibling relationship with a nephew who was a year
older
than himself.

Where some may re-enact early family bonds in a variety of constellations and splittings, other sibling ties may run so deep that in certain circumstances they stay together for life. In traditional societies it wasn’t unusual for unmarried or widowed sisters to set up home with siblings, either as adjuncts to their families or as part of a lifelong pair. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra remained her closest friend and confidante until her death. Charles Lamb and his older sister Mary formed a lifelong near-symbiotic couple and writing team. She was his ‘never-alienable’ friend. He took care of her after she murdered her mother in a fit of mania, and watched over her recurrent illnesses. She in turn ran their home and the vibrant literary
salon
they held, while tending to him when his alcoholism got the better of him.

In societies where mothers died young leaving behind a brood of children, siblings often enough–and particularly, it seems, if they had been separated in childhood–formed abiding ties of love. The theme of sibling incest, of course, runs through Egyptian myth and history. In literature and recorded life, it seems to reach a peak in the Romantic moment. Two kindred souls unite, sometimes also in body, forming a love bond in which the natural world, raised to mystical heights, conspires. Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s bestselling
Paul et Virginie
, which Madame Bovary reads, tells the pastoral love story of two young people raised as siblings. Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, had a passionate affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and fathered a child by her, an episode which fuelled the secret past of his rakish hero Manfred, who longs for his Astarte. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great Whig historian and politician, was deeply attached to his two sisters, Margaret and Hannah. On 6 April 1831 he wrote to Margaret, ‘the affection which I bear to you and Hannah is the source of the greatest enjoyment I have in the world. It is my strongest feeling. It is that which will determine the whole course of my life.’ Margaret’s wedding not long after this letter so affected him that, even after a year had passed, he was writing to Hannah in terms of deep dismay. ‘Whether I am in London or Calcutta, she is equally lost to me. Instead of wishing to be near her, I rather shrink from it. She is dead to me, and what I see is only her ghost’ (23 December 1833).

Shelley, who had no sisters, invented libidinal soulmates in
The Cenci
(1819) and
Epipsychidion
, where brother and sister unite in a transcendent union. This is the oceanic feeling raised to poetic heights.

William Wordsworth and his unmarried sister, Dorothy, created a comparable lived bond. Like Mary and Charles Lamb in their loyalty to one another and in their literary intermingling, the sibling psychology at work had its own pattern. The Wordsworths’ mother had died when Dorothy was seven and William eight. There were two younger brothers and another older one. Dorothy, the sole girl, was immediately sent off to live with relatives and never again saw her father, who died when she was twelve. Throughout that period she yearned to return to a home that took on increasingly idyllic proportions. Neither her mourning nor her profound longing was ever altogether acknowledged, and a sense of emptiness trailed her days, undermining her perception of her own value.

When the siblings were reunited, at first only during the boys’ school holidays, William and Dorothy began to take on increasing importance for each other. Gradually, a symbiotic closeness developed, fuelled by their temperamental similarities, their conversations, their walks, their love of nature. When they set up house together in Grasmere, this in some measure reconstituted that early childhood home, for which both longed. The journal Dorothy kept was both a way of controlling her passionate nature, of subduing it, and of training herself, like a mystic, in the observation of the natural world around them. Her writing fed directly into her ‘beloved’ William’s poetry, which she, both muse and amanuensis, noted down and transcribed for him. Intimately bound to him, when William was away Dorothy felt a threatening void open up inside her. She longed for him, yearned, with the same ardour and reverence she had for the natural life around them. This yearning which looks forward is also nostalgia for a lost state; the absences of past and present are confounded.

‘It was a strange love,’ Virginia Woolf, who knew not a little about sibling patterns, notes in her essay on Dorothy:

In ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth describes something of the twinship that his sibling, as attuned to nature in their ramblings as he was and perhaps even more dedicated to precise observation, provided:

For William, arguably a great narcissist, Dorothy evokes facets of his former self: her response to the sublime aspects of nature is directly akin to his when he first experienced the scene.

Sibling intimacy, emotionally if not actually incestuous, here takes on what Camille Paglia calls ‘a supersaturation of identity’: two become one, blend into one another, in an apogee of romantic love. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, as Frances Wilson, Dorothy’s biographer, notes, that the obsession with sibling incest in the culture of sensibility is ‘at some level related to a wish, not on the existential level of a desire for mating with actual relations, but on the level of memory and nostalgia for a primal state in which no revulsion from incestuous acts or longings was felt’. A nostalgic yearning for an originary home, a childhood oneness, underpins all romantic passion: the twinned souls of brother and sister may give it its ultimate expression.

However, brother-and-sister merging is no easier to maintain in the quotidian than any other kind. The skewered power relations between a Dorothy, who is both vulnerably sensitive and ‘wild’, and her idealized poet brother call to mind, as Frances Wilson so aptly sees, the relations between Narcissus and Echo. Dorothy’s subordinate state, her inability to conduct an independent life, has a double effect on her ways of loving–one common enough to her time, but one which also still lingers on, despite our own moment of greater equality. On the one hand, like many mothers, she admirably deflects personal desires and aspirations into altruistic care: she lives for and through her brother, whose narcissism embraces her. But this means letting go of him so that he can court and eventually marry her friend Mary–a treacherous psychological business, leaving her alternately tied up in painful knots, then emptied out. Nor, in tandem, is it easy for him to throw off her controlling ties, both emotional and literary. After his marriage, some have argued, Wordsworth never again matched his greatest work.

Dorothy’s sometimes hidden, sometimes open, resentments boiled over or burned inwardly. Tormented while he courted Mary, she suffered from terrible migraines, grew very thin and was repeatedly ill, sometimes in synchrony with William. Talented, by many accounts exceptional, she breaks down when William and Mary finally marry. Though she may lose herself, in her mad state the one thing she never forgets is William’s poetry. With few other social choices and fewer psychological ones open to her, Dorothy carried on living with her brother’s family and made herself indispensable, a veritable second wife to William. Idealizing her nephew, she took out her bitterness, it seems, on the niece that was named after her, undermining the girl’s evident intelligence and criticizing her pride, until this little woman, too, bowed under, and became yet another ‘wife’ in service to the adored family poet.

Adult sibling love, libidinal if not overtly sexual, can, like other kinds of love, tumble into hate, acknowledged or obscured.

In our own times, when siblings rarely cohabit during their elsewhere partnered lives, such passionate relations are rarer, though they may simmer beneath the surface. Older brothers rarely feel benevolent, at least at first, towards younger sisters’ admirers. Sisters, particularly in youth, replay childhood rivalries and often enough steal each other’s boyfriends. When parents are present, even with mature siblings, the intense emotions of childhood surface: this is what can make Christmas or other ritualized family gatherings such an ordeal. Infantilized once more in the company of parents, early patterns of jealousy, rivalry, envy and demands for love may resurface and erupt, taking everyone by surprise. The death of parents, the divvying up of possessions, exacerbate matters once more. A mother’s necklace, a father’s preferred painting, can take on a near-magical value, as aged toddlers scrabble over the relics of favouritism.

Good-enough parenting, the kind that allows siblings to remain affectionate, extends well beyond the grave and seems to demand the wisdom of Solomon.

Grandparents

If the family is the environment in which children first gather their sense of others–our earliest social space–then some sense of the rich palette of the real is a useful part of it. One of the reasons children so love their grandparents is that they introduce into the family an added vertical dimension, a sense of history and time, as well as a parent-plus.

For parents, grandparents may present tricky terrain to negotiate, particularly as they grow older, crotchety and dependent. Lear-like they may still insist on their primacy, and the debts of love grow heavy. But for children they introduce a rich, new, sometimes usefully quirky element into family life. Grandparents can bring a breath of much desired freedom to children suffering from a sense of enclosure within the vigilant family nest.

Recalling her grandmother, Nell Dunn writes: ‘Ever since I first remember seeing my maternal grandmother I knew I was like her: that narrow face, those worried eyes. When I was about seven, she asked me who was the most important person in the world to be friends with. She eventually told me the answer was, “Yourself”. I loved being with her and with my mother and my sister.’ Outings with Granny are visits into an eccentric world of others. On one foray into a grand house, Dunn meets a woman who is always horizontal, because lying down ‘preserves a woman’s beauty’. Stories from earlier generations trickle down, describing strange, superannuated customs, other social codes, war and exile.

Though I found my own ageing mother a handful and bridled at her sense that she always knew best–that she carried on being mother even when the generational power balance had been reversed and she was the one who needed looking after–she was much loved by my children. I suspect they were more than a little pleased that their own mother wasn’t an ultimate authority on everything. They listened to their gran’s endless stories, loved the food she so carefully prepared for them and carried on visiting her even when dementia had got the best of her mind. Her tales gave them a lived sense of history stretching deep into that foreign country that the past is. Eventually, and in part through her, they learned a little about human vulnerability and the duty of care.