The Female Eunuch (23 page)
This confusion typifies all literature on the diagnosis of true love. Sentimental bias militates against the subjugating of love to any ra- tional or wilful control, while anarchic passion is regarded with deep suspicion. Generally, as in the above sample, the most appropriate match must be transmogrified into the most gratifying. The real difference between true and false love, which are both compounds of lust and fantasy, is that true love leads to marriage. Provided it does that, a significant downgrade in the level of excitement is toler- ated but not admitted. Adultery and fornication are still more excit- ing than marriage, but our culture is committed to maintaining the contrary. We are actually committed to the belief that this mania is an essential precondition to marriage…
IS IT A SIN TO MARRY BEFORE
FALLING IN
LOVE
? was the banner of an advertisement for Taylor Caldwell’s
Let Love Come Last
.
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Paradoxically love sanctifies both marriage and illicit
encounters. ‘Love conquers all.’
The irrationality of love is fondly celebrated in those pulp stories of women who gave up cold career and ambition for the warmth of a husband’s pressing love. Efficient career woman X holds out against junior buyer Y’s love for her for months until he acts cold and she gets jealous, or until he has an accident and she rides in the ambulance with him. After all ‘When love calls—who can really
deny it?’
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Love is here either compared to a necessary human function (
cf
. Nature calls!) or to a person summoning to a pleasant duty, another survival of older forms of analogue. Nevertheless the crises in such a story were aimed to reveal to the unconscious sufferer that she was in fact in love, just as the leper finds out by pouring boiling water over his numb feet. Some such testing is allowable, and even prescribed for those who doubt that they are really truly in love. ‘Love is never really love until it is reality-tested.’ Trial separations can be useful in proving the durability of an obsession. Some experts in this kind of homeopathy have devised questionnaires which the patient must apply for himself, a fairly unreliable procedure at best. The questions may range from ‘If he left you, could you bear to go on living?’ to ‘Do you find his breath unpleasant?’ A more common procedure is to advise the love-lorn, a term which has sinister con- notations if only anyone ever understood it, what love is
not
, which is no guide to what it
is
.
Love is not mere thrill or passing pleasure. It is not escape from loneliness or boredom, nor is it a comfortable adjustment for prac- tical convenience or mutual benefit. It is not a one-way feeling, and it can’t be made two-way by wishing or willing it so.
The adolescent lover following this rule of thumb may be excused for feeling a little confusion. Certainly, many
poets and others have burnt with one-way love; the establishment of parity in love is quite impossible. It is impossible to know if pleasure is passing before it is past, and if it is not an escape from loneliness and boredom, or a comfortable mutual arrangement, there would seem to be little point in setting it up as a desideratum at all. The positive description supplied by the same author is not less daunting:
Love is many things, It’s a little child’s satisfied response to attention and tenderness and it’s also the older child’s affectionate curiosity. It’s the playfulness of adolescents and their romantic flight of ima- gination. Then again it is the earnest, mature devotion of mature marriage…
Love is delicate, elusive and above all spontaneous. It thrives on honesty and sincerity and naturalness combined with mutual re- sponsibleness and concern. At the beginning it just ‘happens’ but to flourish and endure it requires the full capacity of the open heart
and soul.
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This is one man’s attempt to counteract the dangerous mythology of falling in love as a basis for marriage, but it is not convincing. Such a vague but deeply committed view never inspired a single love poem. The lure of the psychedelic experience of love which makes the world a beautiful place, puts stars in your eyes, sweeps you off your feet, thumps you in the breast with Cupid’s bird-bolt is not lessened by such bad prose. The magical mania still persists as a powerful compulsion in our imagination. ‘Was he very much in love with her?’ the second wife asks of her dead rival. ‘He was crazy about her,’ they say of the man who killed his faithless wife, and the jury recommends mercy. ‘I knew he was a murderer but I was in love with him,’ says the lady who married the man in the condemned cell. Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen ges- tures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating
and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness. ‘We were not made to idolize one another, yet the whole
strain of courtship is little more than rank idolatry.’
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It may seem
that young men no longer court with the elaborate servilities that Mary Astell, the seventeenth-century feminist, was talking about, but the mystic madness of love provides the same spurious halo, and builds up the same expectations which dissipate as soon as the new wife becomes capable of ‘calmly considering her Condition’. In the twentieth century a feminist like Ti-Grace Atkinson makes a similar point more crudely: ‘Love is the victim’s response to the
rapist.’
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Not all love is comprehended in such a description, but the sick- ening obsession which thrills the nervous frames of the heroines of great love-affairs whether in cheap ‘romance’ comic-papers or in hard-back novels of passionate wooing is just that. Women must recognize in the cheap ideology of
being in love
the essential persua- sion to take an irrational and self-destructive step. Such obsession has nothing to do with love, for love is not swoon, possession or mania, but ‘a cognitive act, indeed the only way to grasp the inner-
most core of personality.’
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Perhaps it is no longer true that every young girl dreams of being in love. Perhaps the pop revolution which has replaced sentiment with lust by forcibly incorporating the sexual ethos of black urban blues into the culture created by the young for themselves has had a far-reaching effect on sexual
mores
. Perhaps young girls have al- lowed an actual sexual battle to replace the moony fantasies that I certainly fell for in my teenage years. Nevertheless, it is only a per- haps. Dr Peter Mann’s researches at the University of Sheffield show that twenty-five to forty-five-year-old women are avid readers of romantic fiction, especially housewives and secretarial workers. Some buy as many as eighty books a year. The market is bigger than
ever before.
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Romance still lives
! cried the
Woman’s Weekly
, ‘famed
for its fiction’, as recently as August 1969.
For all their new freedoms, the majority of ‘young people of today’ still dream the same dreams, find life as adventurous and appreciate the best values as have the generations before them.
…Kathy, on the lawn that evening might have been modelling an illustration for a Victorian love story. Her white dress, of some filmy material, was high at the throat and went down to her black satin slippers. She had a black velvet ribbon round her small waist and wore an old gold chain with a locket, and her black hair was parted in the middle…‘She’s going to her first ball,’ her mother said to me…‘She’s wildly excited.’
…For every sad daughter whiffing in marijuana in some darkened discotheque, there are thousands like Kathy, ‘wildly excited’ in their
first formal dance frock.
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This apparently is romance. The stress placed by the male author of this piece on the dress which is appropriate to romance is typical of the emphasis which characterizes such lore. The dance is the high mass in which Kathy will appear in her glory, to be wooed and ad- ored. Her young man will be bewitched, stumbling after her in his drab evening dress, pressing her cool hand, circling her tiny waist and whirling her helpless in his arms about the floor. He will com- pliment her on her beauty, her dancing, thank her for an unforget- table evening.
Debutantes still come out every year, in their virginal white, curtseying to the Queen, the Mayor, the Bishop, or whomever, pacing their formal patterns with down-cast eyes. The boys ask politely for dances while the girls accept prettily, or try to find pretexts for refus- ing in the hope that someone nicer will ask. Their beaux ought to have given them flowers. But every girl is hoping that something more exciting, more romantic than the expected sequence of the so- cial event will happen. Perhaps some terrifyingly handsome man will press a little closer than the others and smell the perfume of her hair. Perhaps after supper, when they stroll upon the terrace, he will catch his breath, dazzled by the splendour of her limitless eyes. Her heart will pound, and her cheeks mantle with delicious blushes. He will say wonderful things, be strangely tender and intense. She may be swept into his masterful arms. Nothing more sexual than a kiss, no vulgar groping embraces, only strong arms about her protecting her from the coarseness of the world, and warm lips on hers, sending extraordinary stimuli through her whole body.
In the romantic world, kisses do not come before love, unless they are offered by wicked men who delude innocent girls for a time, for they will soon be rescued by the omnipotent true lover. The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent mar- riage. Otherwise it is a kiss that
lies
. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called
Sweethearts, Romantic Secrets
and so
forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. Many a young man trying to make out with his girl has been sur- prised at her raptness and elation, only to find himself lumbered with an unwanted intense relationship which is compulsorily sexless. When it happens it will be wonderful, unforgettable, beautiful. It will be like Mimi and Rodolfo singing perfect arias at their first meeting. Perhaps they will not fall in love all at once but feel a ten- derness growing until one day POW! that amazing kiss. The follow- through would have to be the constant manifestation of tenderness, esteem, flattery and susceptibility by the man together with chivalry and gallantry in all situations. The hero of romance knows how to treat women. Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical. Some heavy breathing. Searing lips pressed against the thin stuff of her bodice. Endearments muttered into her luxuriant hair. ‘Little things mean a lot.’ Her favourite chocolates, his pet names for her, remembering her birthday, anniversaries, silly games. And then the foolish things that remind him of her, her per- fume, her scarf, her frilly underthings and absurd lace hankies, kit- tens in her lap. Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence—women never have enough of it. Most men know nothing about this female fantasy world because they are not exposed to this kind of literature and the commerce of romanticism. The kind of man who studies this kind of behaviour and becomes a ladies’ man whether for lust or love or cupidity is generally feared and disliked by other men as a gigolo or even a queer. Male beauticians and hairdressers study the foibles of their customers and deliberately flirt with them, paying them compliments that they thirst for, hinting that they deserve better than the squalid
domestic destiny that they bear.
If
Sweethearts
and the other publications of the same kind with their hallucinated love imagery are American, it is unfortunately true that they find a wide distribution in England. There are also trash weeklies called
Mirabelle, Valentine, Romeo
and, biggest of all,
Jackie
selling upwards of a million copies a week to girls between ten and sixteen years of age, which set forth the British ideals of ro- mance. The girls are leggier and trendier, with tiny skirts, wild hair and sooty eyes; mostly they avoid the corniness of the psychedelic kiss. The men are wickedly handsome on the lines of the Regency Buck, more or less dapper and cool, given to gazing granite-jawed into the glimmering eyes of melting females. The extraordinary as- pect is the prominence given to fetish objects. Romance appears to hinge on records, books, knick-knacks, and, in one case which ap- pears to the detached observer to be almost surreal, a park-bench. Kate and Harry are sweethearts. They sit on a bench in the park and exchange dialogue thus:
‘Oh, Kate, I love you more than anything on earth.’
‘And I love you more than anything in the whole universe, darling.’
The bench becomes enormously important in their relationship and when the council decides to move it Kate dashes to Harry’s office in the Town Hall with a demand that they sit in, on it. Harry does so until his boss, the borough surveyor, tells him he’ll lose his job if he holds out any longer. He gives in, leaving Kate to defend her bench alone. She takes it as an indication of the shallowness of his love for her. But one of the people involved in the moving of the bench, obviously a lover because of his granite jaw and Byronic hair, takes his place beside her. ‘We’ll save this bench for you, for the past and all the lovers to come.’ The last frame shows our heroine peering dewily at him through tear-dimmed eyes, her baby pouting lips a hair’s breadth from his rugged prognathous contours. ‘But you’ll lose your job
for nothing. Do…do you really think we can beat them?’ says her balloon. ‘I know we can beat them,’ his balloon rejoins. ‘People can do anything if they try hard enough and love well enough. Let’s
try…’
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The end
, to say the least.