|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
To Live for Love: Women and Pasion in the Nineteenth Century: Emma Bovary, La Regenta, and Anna Karenina
| Article
# : |
15672 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1989 |
9,955 Words |
| Author
: |
Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
This is an essay in the old criticism of the even older notion of individual character: "old criticism" in George Steiner's sense of that admiration which, in the past, made critics step back from a work of art to look upon its moral purpose; "individual character" in John Bayley's sense of there once having been in literature such a thing as "the supremacy of personality."
The personalities in our case are three nineteenth-century female protagonists, the women themselves rather than the novels in which they appear: Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary, Leopoldo Alas' La Regenta, and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. All three are novels about adultery but also about the nature and evils of society in France during the 1840s, and in Spain and Russia during the 1870s. Our concern here, however, will be not so much with the social or political aspects of the novels nor with the protagonists as embodiments of that eternal problem, "the woman question" (as it was known then), but with three distinct individuals who, in entirely different ways, literally "lived for love." The question to be asked are: What was the meaning of such love in their lives and, especially, what was the nature of such love? In their own distinct and extraordinary ways, the three novels illuminate this century's obsessions with love and sex.
That happy love has no history in Western literature may possibly explain why adultery is our most enduring, if not our oldest, theme. It is traceable all the way back to Helen and Paris in the Iliad, David and Bathsheba in the Bible, through the medieval myths of Tristan and Iseult, through, to name just a few, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, up to Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. After that, a theme that had dominated the European imagination for centuries almost disappears--or does it? The decline of the theme in Western literature coincides not only with the decline of marriage in Western culture but with the democratization and eventual vulgarization and trivialization of the passion myth.
Today, so-called passion between man and woman is beamed at us from every source, accessible to all and so to none. Whether visually, aurally, or in print, the myth has about as much meaning and power as the toothpaste, starlet, or story line being pushed. In our permissive age, the passion myth will reemerge not as a force between individuals but as the force that draws the group together, as that sinister mutation of the twentieth century, the collective passion of political ideology, which so far
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
