The Rise and Fall of Romantic Love

The rise and full of romantic love....now, how was that again? I've been re-reading Keats for finals and enjoying it! Yes: and Troilus and Criseyde, and listening to Elton John and.....oh, that's right, I see that The Great Gatsby is in town at last. It all rather attests, to, if not a continued rise, then at least a sustained interest in romantic love. But that isn't what the lecture was about exactly, I know: yet by the lecture's end it had not been made clear how romantic love had fallen. Juliet Mitchell gave us the pleasure of witnessing the feminist movement at its articulate best, but if she was striking out for feminism it was only a glancing blow; a blow weakened by the incredible diversity of her polemic.

The lecture began with a feminist perspective of romantic love; a brief synopsis of the twentieth century feminist reaction against the typical view of women entrapping men. Romantic love is, rather, an artificial institution, and romanticism a cultivated tool of male power. Cultivated by whom? In the twentieth century, especially, by writers of romantic fiction who pose the question: can woman attain the lover she adores? Juliet Mitchell's question was more to the point: can we seperate love in its essence from its particular place in unegalitarian societies?

Her review of feminist writers ranged from Firestone, who sees love as the pivot of women's aggression, to do Beauvoir and Greer. In her chapter on love (which Mitchell considers the best part of the book) Greer sees romantic love as a perversion of vocal love, and accounts for it in social class terms. Greer also gives an analysis of an important historical change around 1500 where romantic love, from being 'adulterous', becomes harnessed as a means to marriage. Thus, said Mitchell, in the nineteenth century romantic love had become an eloquent ideology for reinforcing the status quo.

The major work on romantic love, she considered, was written by Dennis de Rougemont in 1940. In this book he traces romantic love back to a twelfth century heresy where it occurs, in epic and lyric forms, as an anti-sexual, anti-procreation, anti-marriage convention: mystical, in its search to go beyond the self, and associated with death. She then quoted Maucusse who described romantic love as a feminine subversion with its origins in the twelfth century when women broke through into the literature, in particular that dealing with courtly love.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, said Mitchell the male was the subject of passion. After 1500 women became the object of romantic fiction, and in the twentieth century romantic love has shifted to become the opiate of the trapped sexual object, and woman is asked to identify with the sexual object.

This in turn introduced the subject of psychoanalytic theory which was, she explained in part a repetition of her previous lecture. Borrowing from the work of Freud, she talked of the bisexual pre-Oedipal child, and of how romantic love is about the self, and is erotic. Thus (it followed from the lecture) Eros and the 'death drive' are closely intertwined in the literary treatment of of romantic love, and that for a woman — unlike a man — romantic love does not end in death.

Next came an ingenious exercise in scholarship — an examination of ideas as they present themselves in Wuthering Heights. Essentially about romantic love, this book posits for once, woman as romantic lover. Catherine loves Heathcliff with the passion of a romantic lover, and as the romantic half of herself — the subject. But Catherine slips into the fate of romantic fiction, and has to marry. Thus, the first half of the book looks forward to the twentieth century debasement in popular fiction — the conventional happy ending — whereby both man and woman are object; and the second half looks back in time — to man and woman as subject — and looks towards death. In Wuthering Heights we have, thus, a juxtaposition of two types of romantic love. Why is there this distinction? Because of roles given to male and female. A girl must become lovable for her father, and tries to repeat this pattern when she meets another man (i.e. the narcissism of becoming a sexual object). The boy, too, takes his mother as love object, but comes to imitate his father, and so does hot have to re-use his early narcissism.

Dr Juliet Mitchell, women's liberationist

In conclusion she said: "Since the idea that men and women were equal came in towards the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, there have I think then been two types of romantic love afloat in the world. The original one of man's idealistic search for the eternal feminine part of his bisexuality that can only be completed in death, and the other version, the modern version of a woman's realistic romantic search for a mortal husband.

"Emily Bronte reminds us that if women cannot be lovers as subjects of their own search for self, then in any true sense if we are going to pretend equality men cannot be so either. The end of the dramatic novel is some form of emasculation of the mind. A false equality, which is what we have, has introduced romantic fiction that ends in marriage; romantic fiction that makes woman the sexual object makes also man sexual object. In the now popular romantic novels of today nobody is romantic subject. A false equality, I think can only equalise downwards."