Lives
I was struck by this account of an old-fashioned maiden aunt. I used to identify rather strongly with characters in books seemingly destined to be maiden aunts, like Natasha's cousin Sonya in War and Peace. I can see the lament here that the aunt has never been in love, or never been able to say "I was adored once too"—but, I wonder, do we still really think a life without romantic love a life not fully lived? (It's an honest question; I don't know the answer.) A few possibilities occur to me: there are many forms of love, so it's a different thing to say that one hasn't experienced romantic love and hasn't experienced any love at all; I'm certainly a believer that friendships can be quite passionate, so that exists as an strong emotional substitute; and, if your possibly nunlike aunt did have all sorts of secret passions, people she loved who didn't love her back, they could have made her quite miserable, so maybe she's better off being more phlegmatic or even-keeled, sustained by rosaries and dreams of heaven. The nephew's concern is about her life as a whole, rather than merely the romantic part, but that's what I wondered about, reading that. She seems a bit of a blank, but she also seems sweet, and, as far as I can tell, unscathed.
Update: Sonya was the secret or not so secret passions sort.
Update ii: You wouldn't count a rosary bead clutcher as a liberated modern fish-without-bicycle woman, which is why she seemed so maiden auntish. So the question is, perhaps, whether we actually believe in liberated singlehood. After all, even Gloria Steinem married in the end. (Christian Bale's father, no less.) And beyond that, whether the more archaic forms of singleness represented some liberation, or whether there was always such implicit condemnation in the conception of the condition that you couldn't carry it off. It's interesting too, to consider how the homosexuality of the viewer, in this case, colors the perception of the life. Because presumably it's more difficult for the gay person to understand the asexual solitary life, because so often part of the process of understanding the gay story is to go back and read lots of secret passion in seemingly asexual lives. That uncle who was a bachelor farmer: probably gay! &c. So you might have a more difficult time relating to someone who appears to have nothing going on, in this sense.
Update: Sonya was the secret or not so secret passions sort.
Update ii: You wouldn't count a rosary bead clutcher as a liberated modern fish-without-bicycle woman, which is why she seemed so maiden auntish. So the question is, perhaps, whether we actually believe in liberated singlehood. After all, even Gloria Steinem married in the end. (Christian Bale's father, no less.) And beyond that, whether the more archaic forms of singleness represented some liberation, or whether there was always such implicit condemnation in the conception of the condition that you couldn't carry it off. It's interesting too, to consider how the homosexuality of the viewer, in this case, colors the perception of the life. Because presumably it's more difficult for the gay person to understand the asexual solitary life, because so often part of the process of understanding the gay story is to go back and read lots of secret passion in seemingly asexual lives. That uncle who was a bachelor farmer: probably gay! &c. So you might have a more difficult time relating to someone who appears to have nothing going on, in this sense.
posted by fortuna at 12:38 AM
70 Comments:
If I remember correctly my experience of reading that novel, I had a crush on Sonya, in so far as literary crushes are possible.
This is one thing nunneries were so good for, Catholic women could always marry God instead of a man. And unlike with unrequited love, God's love would be experienced in return- bargain!
Romantic love is the one that's supposed to solve all your previous neuroses, so I think it's the more messed up ones among us who absolutely need it in order to feel fulfilled.
I'd like to think that behind each placid face great secret passions bandy about. But probably not. Also, yes, literary crushes are possible.
I wouldn't think literary crushes (or blogcrushes, for that matter) were very different in kind from crushes simpliciter, since they're all founded on incomplete, idealized, stylized, etc. conceptions or presentations.
It's not me you want; it's my puppet, dancing for Weiner.
But in the literary case the stylized presentation is all there is. (There is also, hopefully, a bit more awareness that the object of the crush will never reciprocate.)
What are you talking about? I know Gilbert Blythe will be mine one day.
I had an aunt who never married whose situation I'd classify as much more desperate and said than Aunt Betty.
And Alice, yes, I was thinking that: you don't have an unrequited crush on God!
"said than" s/b "sad than"
Re: the update, is it particularly liberated not to want men, as opposed to not needing them? Maybe some segment of people lead sexless lives, but that seems less conscious choice, more predilection. I mean, Miss Emily was a feminist, right?
I guess I was thinking that he characterized her as a semi-tragic figure at the edge of their lives—partly because she never had any visible love life—and I was wondering if the same still holds true even for someone with a more modern air. It seems to me it does, at least somewhat, as though the fish without a bicycle thing didn't actually take.
Probably not answering your question. I was thinking of it more from a feminism vs. therapy angle, I suppose. On the one hand, there was a great feminist push to separate women from men to the point where, no, you don't actually need a man—all relationships should occur in the realm of choice. But then it seems like there is a counterveiling therapy lens: most people don't buy the single and happy self-presentation, and assume the person has intimacy issues of some sort.
Maybe the fish without a bicycle line is based around a different understanding of "need" -- that women don't or shouldn't need men to keep them, financially, or something. Not necessarily meaning "need" in the sense of emotional need.
I've got an uncle, a committed heterosexual bachelor, who's situation is a little sad. He has a good time, and he's got some fairly committed friends, but one senses something missing. What with the substance abuse, however, his situation is probably best for all parties. I get a big kick out of this uncle, actually.
In other words, I guess I think it's silly to say that women don't need men or men don't need women in a lot of different ways. The fish & bicycle line is best understood as well-meaning hyperbole.
whose, that is.
I mispelled countervailing.
You may be right, but I think there's also a sense in which the 70s hardline feminist did encourage women to separate from men emotionally as well—in order to rewrite the contract, and take out the dependency/patronizing, &c., you had to be prepared to go without. It's preferable to be alone than to be with someone who doesn't respect you. Lots of divorces in that era. Of course, lots of experimentation in new kinds of relationships, too. But I think there was some understanding that there was a sort of brinksmanship involved—one which you would think would lend more respect to the single woman.
My unmarried aunt was an alcoholic and smoked 2 packs a day and died in her 50s. She was also a nurse in Belfast at the height of the Troubles and treated a few bomb victims in her day. She was fine-looking, but convinced she was hideously ugly.
I like "counterveiling therapy lens." It's against the solitary life of the veil, and yet it possibly obscures our vision (provides the counterveil over the lens) or clarifies it (it's against the veil over the lens).
When I saw "do we still really think a life without romantic love a life not fully lived?" I thought "of course" which may be very atavistic of me, or just reflect my male privilege, that I expect romantic love not to require the sort of self-sacrifice that the "fish without bicycle" line was perhaps a reaction against. But also, that there might be a difference between a life that had never had any romantic love and one in which you finally decide to remain single. Having experienced romantic love, and decided that you could do without it, seems less tragic and incomplete than never having loved at all.
This is a fascinating question to me since I am single by choice. I formulated my no-relationships policy back in the nineties, and even though I lapsed a couple of times, that doesn't mean that the policy isn't sound.
A while back I went through my old diaries, and reading them, it was remarkable how clearly romantic relationships had always made me unhappy, and how much more content and complete I felt when I was single but had good, supportive friends around. What's annoying to me is that people sometimes react to the choice to remain single the same way they react to my choice not to have children: "how can you say 'never'?" "maybe you just haven't met the right person", etc. There's this sense of disbelief. They imply that I'm really dissatisfied with my state and am merely rationalizing. Worse yet, they sometimes clearly pity me.
Culturally, the archetypes for unpartnered women are the spinster aunt or the crazy cat lady, or whatever. In my life, on the other hand, I've known some very impressive older women who (as far as I knew) were single by choice and they certainly didn't deserve anyone's pity.
Yes, it was really a very deep word choice.
Counterveiling, I mean.
I think I have written before about how passion is often a desire to understand a mysterious, elusive person, or difficult in some way, and in those cases the pain of it is sort of built-in. You want this person who is retreating from you or opaque to you largely because of that quality.
I used to divide people into those who sort of sought pain in this way, and the sensible ones who didn't, and I could see if you were one of the former just giving up. Although now I'm more inclined than before to think you can break out of the pattern.
I don't know how I feel about never trying at all; I would tend to think it's not that common a phenomenon—that is, to go without even the private unexpressed experience of love.
Maybe the fish & bicycle line was a kind of noble lie, necessary to inspire women to demand better relationships, though not entirely true.
My uncle has, to my knowledge, done nothing as laudable as treating bomb victims. But by three o'clock most days he's earned himself a lovely rosey tint, he's got a loud, satisfying laugh, and he knows how to use a rocking chair. Also, he is the only person I have met who can argue about football in a truly entertaining way.
that's rosy, of course.
Fortuna, I think you've defined a narrow sense of passion. Surely, some people have passion for the graspable; it doesn't all end badly, at least not right away.
Or you've defined passion narrowly, to put it in a way that makes some sense. There is a kind of attraction to the mysterious, but that can be sort of a cheap parlor trick. I'm thinking there's something else driving most love affairs.
On my mother's side of the family, there were 4 brothers,including my grandfather, and 1 sister that lived in the house my great grandfather built their entire life. There were four of them who never got married. It is kind of odd that so many of them never got married and lived in a big house with their siblings all their life. I doubt they were particularly lonely though.
I would say that, switching pronouns a bit, I'd answer yes to this question:
do we still really think a life without romantic love a life not fully lived?
but that doesn't mean I'd apply that answer to others' lives.
Also: you mean Sonya will never return my affections? I am saddened. I would say that a literary crush to me would be more like, if I were a character, I'd hope to be matched up with my crush than that I, non-fictional character, feel that crush.
I would also say that I've noticed the tentativeness of this comment, with so many "I would say"s, and I'm not going to change it.
I don't mean to. I should perhaps specify a subset of "hothouse quality" romance or passion. Rife in literature and cinema.
I think two different people could view the same experience in different ways. There are degrees of graspable, or absence in presence. The person right next to you who is emotionally distant. People who blow hot and cold, &c.
Joe, I used to have a vision of living with all my friends in a big house and playing soccer together.
eb, I probably projected qualities of literary or cinematic characters and lived them out that way, as well as imagining living in stories. ("Oh, he's just like Telemachus!")
I think I see what you mean. I had come to think of the hot & cold act being more a function of courtship. And the opaqueness more a function of crushes, or unrequited loves. I guess in my more cynical moods, I think those things are all there is. But I'm not feeling cynical today.
dagger, FWIW I had you in mind as an example of someone who had tried and rejected romantic relationships and was in that way admirably independent rather than tragic or incomplete. (Not that I won't still try fixing you up with Emerson someday.)
living with all my friends in a big house and playing soccer together
Wouldn't it have to be a very big house?
Joe O appears to be descended from a character in The Accidental Tourist.
Wouldn't it have to be a very big house?
Is this a sweet comment, noting the large number of friends I have, or a little bitchy one, noting that I appear to have said I wanted to live in a soccer stadium?
As a single, unpaired woman who is not in a romantic relationship (and hasn't been, not for a long time), one thing that really pisses me off is that attitude that I'm a "poor thing" because I don't have a Significant Other.
You know, I look around - I know people younger than I am who have divorced (messily) three times. I know people who had to leave abusive relationships under hair raising circumstances. I know people who do nothing but take and take from their Significant Other and never even think to thank the person for all they do for them.
Maybe I just have had too many friends with seriously dysfunctional relationships, but it does piss me off when people imply that my life is somehow less worthwhile because I'm not in the throes of passion on a regular basis. Because Love doesn't solve all of life's problems, no matter what some people want to believe, and having "someone" doesn't mean you're always going to be happy and everything's going to be perfect. (And, conversely, if you don't have "someone" you're better off dead because you're not livin' anyway).
And I hate the implication that any other kind of love - the love of friends, the love of family - is somehow a lesser kind of love, that Romantic Love is the only real and true kind of love and everything else is what people content themselves with when they can't get Romantic Love.
So I don't know. I think there are some people who are constitutionally better suited to being alone.
And hell, maybe I'll become a Crazy Cat Lady in another 20 years. But for now, please don't give me the pity-face* because I'm not joined at the hip with someone.
(*generalized "you" - going out to the world - not "you" the person writing the blog or the comments)
I was thinking both of a friend who is determinedly single, and of my younger self, when I thought pretty seriously that I might like to be alone. It's turned out not to be the case, but I think that period of reflection, and the lack of fear about being on my own, was useful.
And by the way, commenters, Sheila is praising you at her site. (Hi Sheila!)
SB should not follow that link.
Is this a...
Guess.
No no, I have resigned myself to the fact of my greatness.
Hey, I've seen Tillsammans.
I'm amazed, teo.
I'm not a total philistine.
On the substantive issue, I wonder what role friendship plays in this sort of thing. I would expect people who are happy being single would generally have large circles of friends to rely on for emotional support etc. (Excepting, of course, people who are happier without any significant human contact at all, but I am skeptical that there are many such people.) I think romantic relationships may be more important to people who are less inclined to form close platonic friendships. I may just be generalizing wildly, though.
There seems to be a sort of person who relies on his significant other to organize social life. Or who finds it easier to relate to the rest of the world one she's established a secure base. Tia talks about that a bit, the intimate dyad.
I wasn't actually amazed.
You had every right to be, though.
Yeah, the intimate dyad is the sort of thing I'm thinking of. That's basically the kind of relationship my parents have (at least from my dad's perspective). I would imagine people who are drawn to that rarely decide they're happier alone.
Tia does think a friend can play that role, though. I have talked about one friendship I have that occasionally felt a bit like a marriage.
Still sounds pretty lonely. Gender may play a role here.
Anne - as you know, I've been reading along here, really intersted in this conversation. Some of it made me think a bit of Christabel Lamotte in Possession - and how Byatt makes the case that perhaps, for that character, lesbianism was not so much a sexual orientation (at least not for her) - but a way to be independent, to not have to NEED marriage or a man. Those two women could be married to their work, and the world would leave them alone.
Of course it all ended terribly anyway - with Christabel being the worst kind of maiden aunt - pitied, scorned, and forgotten ...
Bah. It's all quite depressing.
I myself have always had very passionate female friendships - and they most definitely classify as intimate relationships. I'm the only single one left in my core group ... but it's interesting to watch how the switch has occurred:
There is usually a bit of time when I, the single friend, would feel a bit abandoned when a good friend of mine would get married. Just a little bit - not like a self-pitying thing - it was just I missed my friend. But then, inevitably, a couple years into my friends marriage - and maybe she has a couple kids, whatever - my friend would suddenly NEED to weave back in the importance of outside friendships into her relationship. If that makes sense. Even when you ARE paired off, it seems that maintaining "outside" friends is really important.
I was so caught up in the heterosexual love stories that I wasn't thinking of that so much in the last, oh, four readings of that book. Maybe on the fifth!
I would like it if things like non-necessarily-lesbian Boston marriages came back into fashion. To solve issues of loneliness and companionship, and have it accepted that some people find it more congenial to set up their lives around a non-sexual relationship.
Actually another Byatt novel is my strongest model for this (I hadn't been so affected by Christabel and Blanche as a model, perhaps because it ended so badly): Frederika Potter moves in with Agatha Mond in Babel Tower. They are two single mothers, sharing child-raising, and Frederika is on the run from an abusive husband. Since the Frederika books are (ever so slightly) autobiographical, I wonder if Byatt ever had a bit of a Boston marriage herself. Or if she just sort of dreams of it.
My best friend, a gay man, has often said he wants to grow old with me. So we won't have to face those years by ourselves. It definitely has appeal. I've not given up yet on finding a mate - but it's certainly not on my radar.
And yes, Fredericka's choice there seemed quite appealing - and makes a lot of sense. Especially in this day and age - when the whole extended family community thing doesn't really exist. Not the way it used to anyway.
Oh - and I was DEFINITELY more taken with the heterosexual stuff in Possession (the descriptions of their first sex together in the little inn in Yorkshire or wherever they were ... Yowza.)
I got the sense that Blanche was definitely more of a lesbian, in the modern sense. Her jealousy, her need for Christabel ... she seemed to be having more of a marriage-type thing going on there, and Christabel was much more concerned with just being able to be financially solvent and independent of her family. I can't imagine Blanche, for example, falling for another man. She seems pretty hard-core.
And as for intimate dyad guys: I think I have mentioned my dad's relationship with his best friend, Ed. They were both divorced fathers, and when they first became friends, my dad lived in DC and I lived in NY with my mom, and Ed lived in NY and his daughter, Vanessa, lived in DC with her mother. So my dad would stay with Ed when he was visiting me, and Ed would stay with my dad when he was visiting Vanessa. Ed had some job in DC for a while, too, so there was some period where they were living together for a few months. And they were totally like a married couple—the odd couple, my dad big and burly and a slob, and Ed the most dapper, neat little man you could imagine. He always deplored the state of my father's apartment, and would whip it into shape (I can picture him in an apron in my dad's kitchen). Whereas when we would stay at Ed's apartment(s) on the Upper West Side, I would swoon at the beauty of his rooms, filled with African art, and all sorts of treasures from his travels. (He had trained as an anthropologist, and then was a dean at Columbia).
Ed was a very open, caring, utterly lovable guy, more than capable of generating as much intimate dyad warmth as any woman.
Apparently Possession is controversial in lesbian circles, because of the treatment of Blanche and Christabel. But I suppose Christabel was a 19th C version of the Lesbian Until Graduation. It's not like that doesn't go on.
From the article you linked to:
//The premise of Possession (which, incidentally, was also a premise of the novel on which the movie is based) trivializes the findings that lesbian historians have made over the past 30 years.//
I rolled my eyes when I read that. Puh-leez. Trivializes it?
Puh-leez.
I'm not very articulate on why this annoys me so much. I guess it's because the assumption that life is simple, or black and white, people are classified neatly, labeled - that runs through that article. Like: You either are gay or you are not. But life is sometimes a bit more complex than that.
Not too wacky about the reductive tone there.
No, I didn't think you would be. And Blanche is not treated trivially at all.
I think Blanche is fully three-dimensional - even down to her vindictiveness - going to Ash's wife with the letters she found, etc.
And I felt such sadness in learning, from the modern-day scholar, that very few (or none??) of Blanche's paintings survived.
Like - she is a forgotten woman. Totally forgotten.
Blanche is fully three-dimensional
To be fair, she's talking about the movie, and nobody is three-dimensional in the movie. "Presumably by calculating lesbian academics" seemed OTT to me, though.
Whoops. Don't read my last comment if you're susceptible to Buffy spoilers.
Matt responded to you in the LUG thread, by accident.
Right, I saw that. I waited to see if he would repost here, then gave the warning myself. Though not so effectively. Do you have magic comment-editing powers?
I don't. I can only delete.
Deleting's fine. Others might yet be spared.
New revamped version of comment, edited for spoilers:
One thing that bugged me about Possession (the movie; Byatt virgin here) was Blanche's apparent use in an instance of the lesbian death trope. Poor Blanche. Poor what's-her-name, Anne Heche's co-seismologist in Volcano.
It's a tough call here. I mean, a jilted lover is going to do what a jilted lover is going to do, especially during Oscar season. But would avoiding the appearance of the trope have inevitably diminished the work's artistic merit?
I should have left in a deleted comment, so things make sense. Oh well. Do I go on a deleting rampage now?
And I didn't mean to pose as you, just wasn't sure whether to put it under my own name.
This is very complicated.
No to rampage, yes to benign impersonation.
I went and looked for my new "last" comment AOTW. Yes, I am Joss Whedon.
Everything makes sense now.
Or so the mullahs would have you believe.
Oh no! Spoilers for Volcano!
A poem for you.
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