Rosemarie Rowley

HEATHCLIFF COMES HOME – LOVE AND ITS IMPAIRMENT IN THE MODERN ERA

Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on Apr 16 2009

by Rosemarie Rowley

This essay is based on a Paper delivered at Poetry and Sexuality Conference, University of Stirling, Scotland, 2004

Love is eternal, yet loves shows itself different in different ages. We first heard of romantic love through the troubadours, who idealised a lady in a non-sexual way. What could be more different from the modern take? Yet some elements of the unattainable persist.
If we look at the history of Romantic love in our Western culture, perhaps nothing so much epitomises it as some stories of the l9th century, the story of Keats and Fanny Brawne, and how she treated him abjectly, and how the more he became an object of amusement and contempt to her, the more he loved her. It was that kind of love, it seems, or the abyss. Some Romantic writers, therefore, preferred the abyss. It was the all or nothing theory of Romance.
“Wuthering Heights” a l9th century classic love story, by Emily Bronte, shows the failure of Cathy to incorporate her love of Heathcliff into her ordinary, everyday reality as a middle-class woman.
Their love cannot be realised in the society they live in. Heathcliff is the quintessential outsider.

But what if the lovers do marry and find fulfilment? Wordsworth has been rightly criticised for his love poem to Mary Hutchinson, who became his wife, whom he described as a “lifetime’s ornament.” Feminists have objected to this poem, because, apart from domesticating their love, it renders Mary as a passive figure, almost a creation of the imagination of the poet, a sort of untruth she will live out in their life together.

The absence of equality is also the absence of mutuality. So the fulfilment of love since that time, it seems, has to depend on a lie, living out a false idea of the self. Without equality, there are outsiders who cannot access the love and happiness portrayed by the middle classes.
What has happened is that since the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason, the passionate heart and the cool mind cannot live together, each sex must be typified as one or the other, and must flourish at the expense of the other. Kathleen Raine, in her essay on Donne, reference below, discusses this important and central insight of the division between love and reason which is crucial as to how we arrived at our situation today, where the whole person escapes under the glass, under the microscope, passion takes over until it exhausts itself and its subject, and reason says one thing, love another. This is because the division of the mind into subjectivity and objectivity, or a priori and empirical, means that the emotions are looked upon as merely subjective and irrational, while we become empirically the object of our experience, rather than the author of it.

To my mind, the result is that Eros, the god of love, is cut off and becomes the mysterious unattainable sublime, and if love is discussed rationally, love is often personified as a naughty imp.

The story of Heathcliff belongs to the nineteenth century, but to understand it, we have to look at what has happened to the idea of love through the ages, particularly how love was thought of in the Victorian period, and how it develped as love in the modern era, and what gets in the way that love.

The beginning of the modern era is also the beginning of the mass-educated reader, and since then, the struggle has gone on, to incorporate the spiritual and mental aspects of the beloved into the idea of romance.

To go back to the nineteenth century, the great poet Wordsworth tried to domesticate his love for his wife. She does not emerge as a whole person. However, in a sonnet dedicated to a beautiful evening when he walked with his sister Dorothy, there is a hint of a more equal relationship:

Dear Child, dear Girl, that walkest with me here
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine.

So this form of divinity, or exalted humanity, was only possible if there was mutual equality, and sex did not exist between the couple.

Love between man and woman was either domesticated, or impossible.

Perhaps this is because modern developments, following on the French revolution, with its ideals of brotherhood love between man and woman is cordoned off, with the sublime, into another area. This is because equality was not extended to the sisterhood, and thus fulfillment as the love between equals was impossible.

This view held for along time, as James Joyce wrote, almost a century later:

Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse
– as noted by the protagonist of the story, James Duffy, in A Painful Case – this story draws on Nietzsche and was written after a romantic encounter doomed to failure, because the man had no faith in the woman, and dreaded intimacy, a line, which incidentally James Joyce had borrowed from his brother Stanislaus’ notebooks.

It seems, following on the Enlightenment, and the gradual development of science along with strict sexual morality in the Victorian era, that the love between equals as man and woman had to go through the shock of the modern era, and thus an an over-compensation has taken place, and objectivity, not subjectivity, is the case, often we find in these texts that sexual love and friendship are opposed.

Since the Enlightenment, with its enthronement of reason, and following that, the gradual enfranchisement of men, what people were looking for was something noble, something above reproduction, which in the past had often been a lifetime’s quest (or penance!).

So what of this exalted love that cannot be consummated through sex? Is it (purely) a 19th century preoccupation that arose out of the Romantic movement, reacting to the Enlightenment, that privileged emotion over reason? And what was more romantic than the French revolution? – initially, at least. Because it neglected to procure fundamental equality between men and women, and identified fraternity – between men – as a legitimate goal, it did not make a case for women being treated as equals, hence it has been a reductionist kind of love, as far as the love between men and women is concerned.

So, in the century following the revolution there was a confusion between romantic love and love based on equality, often identified as fraternal love – this found its apotheosis in the romantic novel of the 19th century, “Wuthering Heights”. Fiercely identified with each other – “I am Heathcliff” – says Cathy – they are one, adopted brother and sister, in fact unrelated, but indeed, remained in this fraternal situation – as equal beings.

But because their love cannot be consummated without damage to the ideal, they are denied full participation in life until the end of the book when their love is identified as belonging to the spiritual realm, and achieves its ultimate expression, the impossibility of love between equal souls, as the heroine wanders around the hero’s grave, where at last there is peace among the heather and the harebells, as if all were restored to Nature.

The liberation and possible equality of women did not come until much later, and when it did, it was seen as belonging to the realm of social patterning, when the sciences, which depended on empiricism, were in the ascendant. The 19th century preoccupation with supreme and unattainable love began to seem dated, and by the end of the century great changes were taking place which eventually became the theory of science in the physical world – and with the physical sciences in the ascendant, love became in practice soley concerned with sexuality.

So, after the end of the Victorian era, the culture was ripe for modernism. With modernism, objectivity was the standard. Along with the shock of modernism, came the shock of physical science, and so the idea of love became, in practice, sexual, as influenced by the great scientists of the time in psychology, notably Freud. But the idea of romance was still firmly held in the culture.

Within this new framework and its development, we still have a binary idea of romantic love in our culture, the pure ideal which can never be consummated, and also, the love that has been consummated, and cannot be integrated, or domesticated, without killing it off.

Romantic love has remained very strongly in the pop culture, and reached its zenith with the love songs of the mid-twentieth century, particularly in that latter day manifestation of romanticism, the pop –song, where all the heroes are outsiders and can never be incorporated into real life. By necessity, they die young, usually tragic deaths. These drug-caused deaths are in some sense a self-fulfilling prophecy, their heroes, like Hendrix, or Cobain, would have failed as romantic heroes if they actually had not died young. So they die rather than give away their romantic allure.

Therefore, it seems that once we have achieved sexual consummation, the love will die, simply because it is a desire that has died by being been fulfilled. The lover dying is simply the embodiment of this idea.

But perhaps it is that love between equals has not yet found a place – until the present times.

Up to now by having a sexual relationship, and deciding to live out this idea, were we then substituting sex for love?

Since the early part of the 20th century, when love was seen as an experience, chiefly as a result of reading Freud, some now have looked upon it essentially as a physical appetite, a desire, even at this present time being considered an appetite, being thought of as a meal, once eaten, then forgotten, as if it everything was completely arbitrary, of no lasting value beyond what is contained in a passing moment.

Yet despite this fact, promoted through sensational journalism usually, love and sex in modern times is considered all-important, there are many examples of constant lovers and constant love.

However, philosophy, psychology and science have yet to catch up with love. If we believe Freud that sexuality is at the root of all behaviour, as millions did in the 20th century, we are left with the conclusion that all love is merely sex dressed up and hungry, what has become of the idea of love in modern times? What happened to love after the Romantic and impossible 19th century? Perhaps a look back at Modernism will provide some clues.

Modernism, in its widest sense, is modern thought, character or practice. It was believed it came into being, as Freudian analysis did, just before the first World War, around 1910, with the invention of the aeroplane, the advancement of the motor car, and all things mechanical. The idea was to replicate the machine, to find the “objective correlative”, as T. S. Eliot described it. This was essentially a different way of looking at things, as if in shock. Eliot was one of the great proponents of Modernism in literature, (he tried to reconcile Modernism and Tradition) along with Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, and notably Gertrude Stein, who arrived at a gobbledygook kind of language. In painting, its most famous exemplar was Picasso. There is a very interesting essay on Modernism on the web, by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe who writes:
The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.
Modernism has rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. This is not to say that all Modernists or Modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that Modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age.

A series of these excellent and accessible essays by Witcombe on modernism and art can be read at:

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/

So what has happened to love in the modern era? The idea of love, which was developed by the troubadours and forms the basis of Provencal poetry, continued to exist down the ages, until the split brought about by reason and the Enlightenment, forcing apart the ideal and the real.

Love, with Modernism, underwent severe analysis and dissection in the 20th century, through psychoanalysis, replication, and pornography.

The idea of the body as a sacred object had existed since medieval times, but there was also surrounding it a veil of prohibition, so art became a way of appreciating the body without infringing on the ordinary lives of men and women, who continued, as humans do, to fall in and out of love. With the Romantic movement, we had the development of the ideal as almost unattainable, but it did lead to the general acceptance of love. Now we with Modernism, we have the opposite problem, sexuality is accepted, but love is difficult to achieve. And this is reflected in real-life situations.

More and more people end up living alone, having been conditioned to desire the perfect body, the ultimate experience, the artefact which in effect is unattainable, when what is required for love is inwardness. And objective love takes a heavy toll. Never before, at the same time, have we had such a proliferation of images as we do with the modern phenomenum of pornography. Never before have young men and women being exposed to so much. We think it acceptable that the average man now sees more naked females in his lifetime, and the average woman more naked males, than any other person might have done throughout the history of the species. We may even consider this normal. So what of love? Has this affected people, or has the shock worn off?

We do know from everyday experience that love exists, this was the premise of the film “Love Actually” by Richard Curtis, which told the story of different kinds of love and lovers in our day.

This essay, which I have entitled Love and Impairment in the Modern Era is an attempt to reflect on love as an idea, theory or belief, and how it might affect our culture – so we might append the words: “Love as Portrayed in Public, or in Art”, that is, cultural ideas about love. It can be no more than an outline, reaching as it does across different epochs in history to find a common basis underneath, what Kathleen Raine has called “the underlying order” in her book of essays published by Temenos Academy in 2008. Kathleen Raine has been on a spiritual search to rediscover ancient wisdom and restore philosophy from its material and mechanistic basis to its original inspiration and spirituality.

Popular culture gives us many clues as to the philosophy in which we are embedded and which surrounds us. In many cases, though not in Curtis’s film, we tend to see love as portrayed as entirely utilitarian, something which might be of use to us. In today’s popular culture, the idea of love is used in order to sell things, so through making love banal, and trivialising it, it can come across as sentimental, sickly, and expendable, or in life, interchangeable with commodities like stuffed Teddy Bears and Valentine Cards, all of which, we know right well, will not console us for a loved one’s absence.

Or is it, by objectifying love, as the Modernists objectified art and experience, if we see love as being entirely outside ourselves, as a separate quantifiable object, a species of appetite, have we reduced its human possibilities? How to explain the present day devotion to Monsters, to Shrek, the Muppets, the Teletubbies, but as an absence of the ideal in love, looking instead to a non-threatening cuddly form, far removed from the dangers of desire for another human.

Love still exists as a mental concept, which goes along with a sense of incompleteness – which means that the Greek idea, finding your other half, still has currency, and when we find this person, it is our mate, and having met him or her, we sign up to a mortgage, and ride off into the sunset and a happy ending. This is the positive side of the popular love image in the culture.

Or else love, on the negative side, is perceived, along with other passions such as fear or hate, as a failure to redeem us, the great romantic fallacy of impossible yearning and expectation, guaranteed loss, and hopelessness. This negativity is also a by-product of modernism.

What has happened is that since the nineteenth century, and the advent of modernism, sex went from being private to public, from being secretive to being part of common discourse.

In the post-modern era, the sixties generation were the first to believe that love was truly important and that it could be realised and incorporated into everyday experience. Those obscure 19th century objects of desire vanished in the great pop revolution of the sixties. However, after the initial euphoria that sex was not after all, necessarily a bad experience, and could be separated from economics, sexual experiment took priority over love, and sex became more elevated than love.

Shakespeare had written about this sex in action, giving us memorable lines – what he called “Lust” in a famous sonnet (An expense of spirit in a waste of shame) – he distinguished it from love. And he distinguished different kinds of love.

However, in our day, the marketers who moved in after the sixties wanted to tie up love to commerce, so consumption of love and commerce were united in the marketplace, by the promotion of sex and sexuality, and then, with the commercialisation of sexuality into the everyday, or the quotidian, was combined the modernist objectification, or reification of love, and its aftermath in our day, the trivialisation of love.

Love as an artefact started in the 1970s, when commercial interests took over this spontaneous coming together of young people in the 1960s, which has been described as the love generation. It was described as such because they believed in love itself, and sex, without any objectification whatsoever. What they wanted was openness, and an end to hypocrisy, but what they achieved was sensationalism, anarchy, and an utterly confused public.

This means although desire has been legitimated, its consequences have not been. So the hippies were only a brief window, and there was general failure to incorporate love into the everyday, except as artefacts for the couple. The view of love and sex did not question Freud enough.

Since Freud, many were persuaded that sex is what life is about, and love is only a disguise, or an excuse, for a primitive sexual impulse. However, we know that Freud was flawed in many respects, not least that that he invented the Oedipus theory.
Freud, in his work, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” gives us an important clue as to how adult experiences are displaced onto childhood memories, what he calls “screen memories”. He recalls that a nursemaid used steal his pocket money (she was later convicted of stealing from the family) and in his dreams this intimate relationship with an untrustworthy maternal figure was conflated with his dreams about his mother, who obviously became a figure of yearning – of the most emotional kind. Therefore Freud’s adult experiences coloured this early memory and perhaps placed undue emphasis on the emotional longings he had has a child and configured them as erotic memories. Freud was brought up in his infancy by nurses– so in fact, the famous sublimation was indeed repression in his case. Freud thought his condition was universal, when in fact most children grow out of the intense attachment to their mother which takes place in infancy, but fades in the process to become an individual consciousness.

Freud’s theory is fatally flawed, not only in his theory of the Oedipal attraction, but in his fundamental theory of the unconscious. In positing the unconscious as the cause of all that was conscious, action or emotion, there is no way we can validate or prove this, since it is unconscious and therefore unknowable. Some people have tried to systemise what is presented as the unconscious, and with the exception of Melanie Klein, are not convincing in any respect.In the nineteen ‘twenties, Westermarck advanced his theory on the impossibility of young children who were raised together ever having sexual feelings for each other, so we know that Freud was wrong in his view of child sexuality. Westermarck gives examples from observation of bird and animal life.

Because Freud believed in infant sexuality, we now have the problem where adults convince themselves children want to be sexually abused, hence child abusers seldom show remorse for their actions, having in some sense, been justified by those influenced by a reading of Freud. So therefore to implicate children in sexual desire is wrong, untenable and has adverse effects in the way we perceive children to be, and has a bad influence on the whole culture.

In the past, the non-sexual way of perceiving people certainly protected children, as far as we can ascertain, but of course there is no way we can arrive at a completely accurate picture since these actions take place in private and what we have done following Freud is allowed unusual cases to typify the norm. However, throughout history, children have been treated as innocent beings, and our culture may be the first to sexualise children, which has serious repercussions. This is not to say that some instances of sexual abuse of children did not occur from time to time.

Professor Ivor Browne, in his autobiography “Music and Madness” charts with great clarity the development of Freud’s theories and how he arrived at his mistaken view of child sexuality.

Richard Webster has reviewed the evidence in his 1993 book “Why Freud Was Wrong”, though he said some of Freud’s categorisations were useful, in that a framework was provided.

Freud is very flawed in other respects, he had no place for the rational, believing all was sublimation. Nor did he believe in love, believing it was all sexual, belonging to wish fulfilment and the unconscious.

In Iris Murdoch’s novel, “A Severed Head” mentioned below, Freud’s incest theory and psychoanalysis are reduced to bedroom farce.

In the progression of ideas in regard to adults, the acceptance of sexuality this may have been a good thing initially, but too often this cultural acceptance at times could lead easily to a free-for-all, or over-availability and over-exposure of what was once intimate and mysterious. Nearly all pornography leads to the lowering of the human impulse to love, since sex is basically a function at the purely physical level, while love, while love animates the whole being, accessing all areas.

Are the hippies responsible for this? Some would think so, but Freud pre-dated the sixties events. The movement was heavily influenced by Freud’s pleasure principle, and Marcuse’s following on by his study of “Eros and Civilisation”, The permissive society is also thought to have been caused by huge numbers of parents reading Dr. Spock, a non-authoratarian guide to bringing up children, much in favour after the War.

What started out as a movement for freedom, standing for the fertility of mind and spirit after the bomb, soon came to an early demise. The hippies wanted to do away with hypocrisy and social convention, they tried to live openly and honestly, but they posed serious problems to the mainstream culture. Perhaps the greatest harm was done by the press, who sensationalised the drugs and sex elements, lumping them together, and this was gradually incorporated in the form of product and money-making schemata, so the tendency was to normalise shock elements, in a context of consumerism.

In the post-hippy rip-off, while the public were fed titillating pictures of young people romping naked in various Edens, along with the shock horror stories – from this juxtaposition of innocence and wickedness, came the market force of safe sex, and safe love in the form of little cuddly animals- a tufted teddy, imitating wildness, yet inviting caress, so the modern love crusade went, from elevated love lyric by Dylan and Joplin, to ersatz violence, vapid meaningless pop, and narcissism in the place of fame.

Historians of this period have mentioned that giving away food, like the Diggers did, or not aspiring to be in the White House like the young man interviewed at Woodstock, were perhaps praiseworthy aims, and were signs that the culture was becoming anti-materialistic.

However, the economic basis of rich America – its military build-up – was threatened at a time of war, which took place in a far away country, but affected millions of young people at home.

After the peaceful messages from Woodstock came a heavy reaction, that US nation had to be saved through moneymaking, and arms manufacturing the prime source of wealth. And the press backed this up all the way, by proliferation of the shock horror stories that were not typical, but were rather unfortunate, and isolated incidents.

In fact, away from sensationalism, the hippies were ready to make their swords into ploughshares, but the capitalist bosses of America still needed to make their living. What kind of a market, they wondered, would it be, if people gave away goods, and decided to do without? Hence the name of hippy was vilified, the CIA flooded the peace movement with drugs, then criminalised the drugs, and went on to criminalise the entire generation who stood for fertility and imagination after the devastation of Hiroshima.

After the fertility of the hippy imagination, as the hippy ethic was made fade away by sensationalism and sheer inanition, all was left was the difficult and ongoing problem of drugs which affected the whole culture in a negative way. So far this has been a major problem for western liberal culture, indeed, for all societies since that time, and has proven very difficult to eliminate. Young people especially can become victims of illegal drug taking and criminal gangs.

As regards the way society has dealt with love, the reification of experience became the hallmark of society from the 1970s onwards.

I have mentioned Freud, now his symbiotic twin, Marx came to live in the Academy where they have dwelt, like a hydra-headed deity, for the past thirty years.

We were, even in the sixties, living in a scientific age. After all, that was what led to the discovery of the birth control pill, leading to sexual freedom. But the real problem with love, even in a scientific age is that there are no objective criteria, yet we want the “proof” of objectivity. For those on the outside looking in, they were back in the same situation that Heathcliff found himself in when he peered through the windows of Thrushcross Grange and saw Cathy and Edward Linton in their domestic setting. His love for Cathy was no longer possible, as it could not be incorporated in the society. It was purely imaginary, subjective. And since the separation of love and reason in the Enlightenment, love was thought of as mere subjectivity, random, irrational, without virtue, and unreliable, incapable of being realised in human society, apart from marketing executives out to make a quick buck.

As regards the influence of Marxism, objectivity had a major role – any person who came to young adulthood in the sixties, had encountered the idea of subjectivity as “false consciousness”, therefore if you were a socialist, the idea of love between the sexes was construed as being selfish, and bourgeois, and illusory, and as was the case in China for decades, was discouraged and officially denied. The consumerism of the late sixties, followed on by decades of ultra-consumerism, when love itself was sold as an artefact, seemed to endorse rather than question this view.

From the Marxist point of view, if you spoke of love, particularly in a romantic way, you were being complicit in an unjust society, conferring a special distinction on one person and thus slighting another, making someone else a token of your undisguised bourgeois tendencies to ownership, property, and all kinds of propriety emanating from these centuries long habits. Jung Chang, who had grown up in China, in her memoir, “Wild Swans” tells of being pregnant on the marches but receiving no consoling arm from her husband, who directed his dispassionate gaze at all marchers alike.

The converse, or reality therefore, and the outcome of Marxist philosophy was, that you might as well love one person as another, since fundamentally being equal, they were the same, if not identical, and therefore losing one person’s love, you could easily find a substitute, and enact in some way your economic destiny with them. Or have sex, without commitment or love. This was part of the propaganda machine.

In Russia, immediately after the Revolution, there were huge efforts to bring the idea of the family to an end, because in the idea of family, with notions of hereditary, were inbuilt notions seemingly so unjust they could not be tolerated by any programme for human equality.

However, despite this, people experienced the ancient passions of love, lust, anger, jealousy, and betrayal, albeit in a disguised form, and if you committed the unforgivable bourgeois sin of preferring one person over another and somehow choosing them, you were implying therefore, that some were more worthy of love than others, in order words, you were advancing the idea of inequality in a strictly totalitarian state.

In the West, the revolution had been won on the cause of making the political personal, now, the big money corporations moved in to add to the semantic confusion. Banks, never the friendliest of organisations, as everyone knows, now appropriated the language of personal relations as the language of their commerce. Love and friendship had to find their expression in places least noted for love and friendship – the banks. The relentless personalisation of business, the banal slippage from “service” to “friendship” is indeed the rock on which our young people were stuck.

Perhaps the most precious endowment of a young person is their first original feelings of love and friendship, and presenting in advertising tends to make these feelings false and unworthy and this may have done a lot of harm to young people. . After all, the biggest claim young people can make is their very weakness, their naïveté, that makes us love them both as we would like to be, and what we would like to retain. But in each case the language was appropriated by the very institutions which care least for them! Is it any wonder that young people became cynical?

Love, therefore, was looked upon as useless currency by the power brokers of these regimes, and in the west, was a means of selling goods to the multitudes, and hence, the longer we traded on ideas of “love” with which to endow our need to travel from A to B, the nearer we all came to catastrophe, not only emotionally, but in our very physicality in the real physical world we live in, in the sense of how heavily industrialisation in general and transport in particular, was bearing on the environment, just because it has “normalised” love as consumption. Perhaps the idea of the motor car has a love object is the most obvious example of this transfer of attachment from a person to a thing.

In this culture of the “thing”, the “artefact” , what we rightly identify as the consumer culture, it is almost impossible to detach ourselves from it and see what is happening to us. We are bombarded with visual images, words, usually explicitly connected with sex, or near-pornography.

The result is desensitisation, men in particular, creating conditions which seek even more stimulation, and seeking it through violence (catered for in many movies since Robert de Niro exploded on the screen in the ‘seventies and actually tried made us sympathetic to a sniper asssasin – and also familiarised us to child prostitution) – this, and other films of the seventies, continued to cross boundaries and to impinge on the culture in a destructive way, resulting in hype, confusion, and its conflation of love, sex and death. So, what has mattered to human beings – love – since history began, is being shown to be a mere commodity with variables. This is the objectification of what should be part of the inner person.

So it was by externalising love, or portraying it in its parts, that we have most betrayed the idea of love. Is this not far removed from our own experience as adolescents, from when we “fall in love”.
“Falling in love” is a state when we actually discover our real selves. It is only in our culture it is rapidly linked to consumerism, and promoted in such a way that very often, and early on when a child is likely to most vulnerable and suffer damage.

Instead of treating love holistically, we may seem to be like Eliot, searching for “objective co-relatives”, as if, like him, we believed in utter determinism, and in the futility of hope. But indeed we are lost if we deny the reality of love, love which brightens our human condition and give us meaning.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present,
All time is unredeemable
- Four Quartets

Is Eliot saying our past determines our future? If so, we are in a bad situation. We may also say, if we seek love, therefore, it is absent, and therefore being absent at one moment, it is forever absent, and therefore any search for love is futile.

So if we follow this path, refusing faith, and embracing positive determinism, we are in fact, depriving ourselves of our true reality, our spiritual nature, our real selves, which does not reside in the objective and observable, everyday world, even if this quotidian reality can be contiguous to it, and is sometimes, alas, mistaken for it.

Or, like Beckett, we may believe that requited love is a short circuit. We may joke that its main promise is that it will not be fulfilled.

If we go ahead, and find love, and we fulfil it, we are fortunate, does this mean we are signed up to the mortgage, the love objects, the dotted line, simply because they are part of our survival? In this way, survival and love are linked together – they do have the possibility of procreation, but without love, they are meaningless, and lead to boredom and frustration of the life impulse itself.

So sometime in the 1970s, where Freud and Marx intersected, usually in the academy, the idea of love was jettisoned entirely, except in the most crass commercial way. In fact, the Americans, as usual, were well to the fore. They had, indeed, invented the word “relationship”. This implied, that apart from the two people involved, there was a separate entity, and object, between them, which could be looked at dispassionately, prodded, played around with, and discarded or incorporated into whatever way they viewed each other. This is of course, useful in analysis, and analysts finding it pays well, can prolong this entity, and give it endless life as a discursive object, while the person receiving the therapy has endless funds to pay them.

So instead of the big ideals, love and idealism, sacrifice and inspiration, we had an “it”. It became common currency to declare you had a “thing” with someone – it was vague, all encompassing, did not need elaboration of any kind, but somehow conveyed the idea that there had been some sort of sexual passion, or consummation, and that it had been viewed amicably, usually in retrospect, part of the new idea of experiencing oneself, which indeed, is the hallmark of modern culture. At times it even conveyed love, you could confess to still having a “thing” about someone, which would not involve talk about passion, or unfettered desire, but some indication of some constant, unwavering affection that could not be explained away, and to which everyone nodded, sympathetically, in recognition, but also in a helpless understanding that it was all hopelessly but somehow, nice for having existed and suggested possibilities that love actually could happen at times, and could not be explained or theorised about, at all.

Still, it was all very far removed from the actual experience of falling in love, a feeling which happens in every culture, if at times not possible to express or declared. The very formulaic chick lit books of Mills and Boon shows a deep need of people to believe in love, while at the same time being objective, that is, sceptical. So along with this scepticism and objectivity, there is the huge phenomenon of hunger for love stories. In his sceptical era, chick lit has sold by the millions and billions. So the search for love does exist, and has become completely commercialised. Is this any harm? Is it mere escapism, or is it possible people still want to experience the romantic love they dream of and which our society objectifies?

Desire and sexual fulfilment had been endorsed and authorised as we have seen, by Freud, supplemented by Marx to a form of utilitarianism and commodity fetishism, finally rounded off by Derrida and his followers as an appetite of a socially constructed, therefore artificially constructed persona, which meant therefore, that desire could be fed, literally by any passing consumer object?

Is this what was known as love in ancient times, save that we now has the possibility of satisfying and maximising our desires, and having satisfied them, were sated? This did not make sense either.
Perhaps there are some books which deal with love in the modern era which could help us make this vital distinction.

Two of these come to mind – “The Magus”, by John Fowles, and “A Severed Head” by Iris Murdoch, both published first in the sixties, when the love era began to take off.
Here was something, the inexplicable, the un-sayable, the not to be defined, the reality of the love which I and my contemporaries were searching for.
Early on in “The Magus” the protagonist, Nicholas, an unsuccessful poet from Oxford who ends up teaching English in Greece, makes the interesting observation:
In the modern era, it is love, not sex, which raises its ugly head.
It is the modern experience of objectivity, and the hero fails to realise that true love is subjective, personal, and irreplaceable.
These stories spoke of a sudden awakening, the shock of discovery, and quest, the realisation of an authentic self almost independent from desire. And this realisation of an authentic self, which is so difficult in the modern world of replication, is intrinsic to love.
This awareness and discovery of the real, or authentic self, is crucial to our understanding of love in modern culture.

The norm is alienation, which would be in accord with Marx’s theories, save our alientation is not only from work and society, but a fundamental alienation from our true selves, and nature.

What do these stories have in common? They seem to undergo a primordial awakening – almost as if they realised that they had been sleep-walking through their whole existence, and now, suddenly, were awake. It was as if they recognised, a real self as distinct from the social everyday self they had been familiar with
This awakening to the primordial state seemed to have happened initially, through some sort of stress, and to have resulted immediately in some sort of severance.
In “The Magus” it is the shock of his casual love affair with Alison, and then the initiation through meeting the old man, Conchis, the Magus, which takes Nicholas on his journey to rediscovering his authentic feelings for Alison, which had been buried under a layer of selfishness and casual sex.
In “A Severed Head”, the hero, Mathew, an homme moyen sensual, is awakened by the trauma of his mistress having an abortion. He has had to recognise his failure, and he is then initiated into the mysterious love of Honor Klein (whose name, rather mischievously translated as Small Honour, or Honor of little consequence). Of course we realise then that the theme of the book is the old one of True Love, and Honour, and the pursuit of these by the hero.

There is a parallel development in psychology, in the clinical features of what is named Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which occurs after a person has experienced a violent episode, such as a sexual assault, or being a victim of a war event. Through its connection with war, it is also known as Survivor Syndrome.
Many theories describe PTSD as a disorder in autobiographical memory and emphasize scheme violation and incomplete processing of the traumatic event in the development of the condition. Trauma memories are fragemented, poorly integrated in the person’s life story, and processed in ways that make them different from other biographical memories.

Professor Ivor Browne describes this condition as a failure to integrate an experience of violation. His discussion of the PTSD symptoms is excellent and trustworthy.

In both the novels mentioned, it is through shock, similar to post-traumatic stress, that causes the initial dislocation in memory, and also the shock of awakening, experienced first as unity, which may be lost, experienced then as a severance, leading to a search, then unity.

So both bring us back to a more ancient idea of love, and it is through the idea of severance that the story works: indeed, the title of Murdoch’s novel – “A Severed Head” – may be an apt commentary on our actual culture, how the head, or thinking part, is separated from the feeling part, a state of affairs, Eliot noted which occurred at the time of the Reformation, and which he called the dissociation of sensibility, a term known to all students of English Literature.

In “The Magus” the theme is also severance, in this case, the severance of the individual from his real, or authentic self, and his personality which exists as a series of masks, and his quest, through love, to find that self.
They are unaware of the major event of their lives. They recognise their needs as appetites, for food, sleep, and sex, but their overwhelming experience is a crushing boredom, or a failure to engage with others, which usually leads to a catastrophic decision, such as abortion. Then, to a few, there happens the awakening, which suddenly comes upon them, and makes them aware, as if for the first time, of the real selves, their own identity, their needs, which is usually played out against the modern landscape, in terror, hurt, humility, rage and strangeness.
In “A Severed Head” Martin is suddenly awake through the love that happens to him: He falls suddenly and inexplicably in love with Honor Klein, a lecturer, and in several beautiful passages describes her mystery and her fascination for him. She is no alluring twenty-something, not especially attractive, but a real woman with a job. What is chief among the wonderful experience described is the feeling of awakening to the true self.
In the other novel about love also written in the ‘Sixties, “The Magus” Nicholas is enmeshed in casual sex and has lost his true meaning in life. Then meeting Conchis, the wise old magician or magus of the title, Nicholas is teased and tortured through the symbolic appearances of Lily and Rose, the Victorian representations of purity and beauty, until he realises, almost too late, his real passion for Alison, whose child-like availability, he had taken for granted, much as he took for granted the every day beauties of common flowers, like those loved in previous times. . When he meets those examples of Victorian love, Lily, symbolising purity, and Rose, symbolising ripeness and fulfilment, and he comes to self realisation in chasing these human chimera and in his true authentic self his real love for Alison. Throughout the book, there are scenes, set by Conchis, which mimic Greek myth, such as when Lily is accompanied by a man wearing the head of a jackal. The jackal in fact, comes from Egyptian myth, and often accompanied Isis, and was her guardian. In Greek myth, he became Cerberus, the three-headed dog, who guarded the gates of hell. In a way the theme is that of innocence before the fall, sexuality in modern times representing a kind of false consciousness of the relationship between male and female.
So what these books share, in their portrayal of severance, is how a modern person is removed from the reality of their true selves, and how, through love, they awaken to their true selves, at the same time as they realise the beauty, or real separateness of the other. That the failure to honour the other became almost an amputation at a physical level, and when they did realise their failure, it was like being restored to the whole, or to the real actuality of love between persons, such as that often idealised by others as true friendship. Therefore love as equals, or love between equals, which was the aim of revolutions, which was missing at times between men and women in our culture, with its care for the other, its lack of reproof, and its totem privacy about sexual union – now appears as a total surprise.
For a long time in our modern history, we may have achieved equality at the cost of love. As long as we have the simultaneous confusion of sex and objectivity, and sensationalism by the media, we find it hard to go on the inward journey of our true selves in order to harmonise with our external selves, and incorporate into society love and equality.
As mentioned above, Kathleen Raine has written of love and how it has become a devalued word. In her essays she writes that we must seek the underlying order if we are to achieve wholeness. Her essay on John Donne accurately maps where the split in western consciousness took place.

As long as we have unlimited pornography, we are also denying women their mystery, and we are denying males opportunities of heroism, making the female form accessible without any kind of love, commitment, quest, search or honesty. This is because the modern era is one of objectivity, shock and displacement. The previous era, the 19th century was the era of contrarieties, of religion and science, and romanticism its way of dealing with the sublime. The era to follow ours is already making its presence fact – all that objectivity and knowledge is being put to good use in new definitions of love and partnership.

As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, some commentators have seen in “Wuthering Heights” the story of the non-incorporation of the outsider, the supposition is that the dark orphan bought at Liverpool can never become part of the settled, legitimate community, and therefore passionate love must exist outside the norm. This had been accepted at a huge level, and has been unresolved since the sixties and the love generation. Since then, we have created a nation and a culture of outsiders, of people feeling they live outside the norm, and if they do aspire to family, that the cost to them is high. A recent novel by Philip Casey, “The Fisher Child” (2002) tells the story from a contemporary point of view, and with a fresh perspective on what seemed an adamantine problem – the need to honestly deal with our roots and our honest reactions to difference in our origins. As novelist Mary O Donnell writes:After the birth of their (black) baby girl, Dan’s blind rage in the face of the seemingly impossible is one of the central emotional notes in the narrative, and thus begins a journey in which he is compelled to look at his own past and how this past has impinged on his present. Nothing is comfortable. No character in these pages is allowed the easy option. Complacency is the great moral failure that almost overwhelms Dan time and again. Gradually, he explores stories and situations which – one imagines – he would never have envisaged. He learns about his own ancestors’ involvement in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, about inexplicable rages and passions equal to his own, and he comes to understand the great, arduous journeys of those forced to flee abroad to America and to Montserrat.
The tectonic overlapping of black and white, of love and what? prejudice? complacency? past and present? continues beyond the novel’s closing words. This goes right back to “Wuthering Heights”.

However, now as I revise this essay, first written in 2004, and now in April 2009, I see change has arrived truly, with the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Indeed, his parents were truly remarkable in that they envisaged hope in their situation of mixed racial origins. And the news continues to get better. As I re-write this for my posting, April 2009, not only has Barack Obama marked a new departure for America in Europe, and a visit to Baghdad, he has also received overtures from the remaining Marxist state of Cuba. Fidel and Raoul Castro have seen a transparency, and a return to community values in the presidency of Obama. He stands for the best of society in our culture of equality, the decent, hardworking person who wants to live a life of love and commitment in the community. But above all he stands for authentic and responsible love.
Love between people from different backgrounds in society has produced a great man, who himself has succeeded in bringing together the notion of the exotic and the family, work and culture, respectability and love, the outsider who has become insider.
It is possible that Marx finally has had his day. It is no news now that Freud has been discredited. Many of the great modernists will live on in the originality of their expression and the humanity of their quest. But the tide has turned, and change has come.
The idea of objective correlatives, which marked the beginning of the modern era, has now caught up with the essential variety and malleability of human nature, and we are once again renewed, and within reach of the eternal human values.

As the Romans said “Amor Vincit Omnia.” – love conquers all – indeed, the best dream of the sixties has become reality: we have overcome. The nightmare of history is over.

(c) Rosemarie Rowley, 2004, 2009

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis – by Richard Webster. ISBN: 9780465091287. Published in: 1996
Eros and Civilisation, by Herbert Marcuse, Beacon Press, ISBN-10: 0807015555
ISBN-13: 978-0807015551
Envy and GratitudeMelanie Klein, Contemporary Classics, Virago, London
The Origins of Sexual Modesty by Edward Westermarck, London, British Society for the study of sex psychology, pamphlet 8 , 1921
The Underlying Order and other Essays, by Kathleen Raine, Temenos Academy, 2008, ISBN 978 0 9441934 6 0
The Magus by John Fowles, Vintage Classics, 2004, ISBN 978-0099478355
A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch, Vintage Classics, 2006, ISBN 978-0099285366
The Sovereignty of Good (essays on philosophy) Iris Murdoch Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, London, ISBN 0 7100 6952
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” v. 6 (Paperback) ed. James Strachey, Vintage; New edition, 2001, ISBN-10: 0099426579, ISBN-13: 978-0099426578

Wild Swans by Jung Chan, Flamingo, Harper Collins, London, 1993 ISBN 0 00 637492 1
A Painful Case from Dubliners by James Joyce, Wordsworth Classics editions, Hertfordshire, 1993, ISBN 1 85326 048 7
The Fisher Child Philip Casey, Picador, 2002, ISBN 978-0330483025
Music and Madness autobiography by Ivor Browne, Atrium editions, Cork University Press, Cork, Ireland, 2009 ISBN 978-0-9552261-8-2
Recollective qualities and organization of traumatic memories D. Berntsen et al., Journal of Applied Cognititve Psychology 17:675-693 (2003)

There are many editions of poets like Keats, Wordsworth and olther romantic poets – also available on line as they are out of copyright

T. S. Eliot quotation is from “Four Quartets”, Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot 1909-1962(2002) Faber and Faber, London,

Sigmund Freud has written “The Interpretation of Dreams” (Wordsworth Classics) “The Unconscious”. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” and “Civilisation and its Discontents” ( Penguin books published recently)

“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte is available in many classic editions. Emily Bronte wrote the poem below to her real life beloved, also her dream beloved, on his death from consumption. She herself died at the age of 30.

Remembrance

COLD in the earth–and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Sever’d at last by Time’s all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth–and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lighten’d up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.

But when the days of golden dreams had perish’d,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy;
Then did I learn how existence could be cherish’d,
Strengthen’d and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion–
Wean’d my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

Emily Jane Bronte

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