The New Criterion

Of all the cultural inventions of the West, romantic love is surely one of the most curious. The notion that sex and sexual passion, rooted in the material body, can be a vehicle for transcendence beyond the physical is rather bizarre. Even a prototypical Romantic like Lord Byron had his doubts. He chastises Plato, whose writings on the transcendent powers of Eros are some of the earliest precursors to this idea, for his “confounded fantasies”—ultimately, nothing but fancy pretexts for fornication.

However incoherent, romantic love has had remarkable staying power. Today it provides the default attitudes toward sexual passion not just in the West, but elsewhere as well, through a popular culture that has been romantic love’s most successful vehicle. And one can argue that this influence has been, for the most part, baleful. For one thing, romantic love, particularly in the debased form promulgated by popular culture, creates expectations for sexual experience fated to disappointment in the grubby, quotidian work of human relationships, where sexual passion is frequently a destructive, disruptive force—what Sophocles called an “insane despot.” Moreover, the attitudes encouraged by this ideal are, in many respects, those of callow youths, who are already prone to utopian goals, impatience with delayed gratification, and a narcissistic dissatisfaction with reality, which cares nothing about how intensely one feels or desires.

A rich and complex topic, then, is romantic love, comprising social history, philosophy, and particularly the imaginative literature that was the main medium for the transmission of these ideas until the twentieth century. Cristina Nehring, a writer for middlebrow magazines like Harper’s and The Atlantic, takes on this rich tradition in order to rescue romantic love from “the cult of safe love” and the “man-hating clichés of old-style feminism” in order “to embrace its dangers and darknesses as well as the light its sheds so amply, so sometimes piercingly,” and once again experience its power to bestow transcendence, drama, and meaning to our lives. Nehring pursues this goal through an analysis of the ways in which transgression, inequality, obsession, chastity, heroism, and ultimately death define romantic love.

Rehabilitating romantic love is an intriguing challenge, given how widespread and accepted romantic love is in our culture even despite the problems it creates. Unfortunately, Nehring fails to meet the challenge, mainly because of her superficial and reductive understanding of the topic. Vindication’s first problem is a failure to define adequately the idea of romantic love and to sort out what poets and writers say from what particular people actually experience. Throughout the book, Nehring assumes that romantic love is about sex, whereas in the literary tradition romantic love is more often about the solipsistic experience of sexual passion: how it affects the self, disrupts the mind, creates divisions within the soul between mind and body, desire and virtue, and provides an energy for transcending both sex and desire. This “love of love,” as it’s frequently put, doesn’t put a premium on the act itself, which is why it is usually an afterthought when it isn’t ignored altogether. Sex itself is limited philosophically, a question of nerves and hormones, of the bodily pleasure that links us not to the transcendent but to the beasts. Chaucer exploits this division between romantic love and sex in The Canterbury Tales, where the “Knight’s Tale,” a courtly romance about ennobling desire, is immediately contrasted with the earthy obscenity of the “Miller’s Tale.”

The failure to make this important distinction leads Nehring to explain psychologically the conventions that exist merely to set aside the issue of sex and throw the focus on the experience of desire. Her chapters on inequality, transgression, chastity, and absence, for example, end up with portentously vague psychological explanations to account for a literary convention. Thus for Nehring, social inequality between the lover and beloved is not a device for postponing sex the better to explore the experience of desire. Rather, “only where there is sharply etched disunity can there be ecstatically earned unity.” So, too, with transgression, another plot device for ensuring the deferment of sex at the same time as it sharpens desire. For Nehring, “transgression … is ever a prayer for transcendence.”

Another problem that follows from a lack of a precise definition is the confusion of literary characters with people in real life. Throughout the book, such characters are lined up next to historical figures like Mary Wollstonecraft, Frida Kahlo, and Margaret Fuller in order to support some generalization or other. But this procedure is simplistic and reductive, leaving out issues of generic convention, generic development, historical and social contexts and their historical development, and the obvious differences between the requirements of literature and the much more complex experience of life, not to mention the unreliability of letters, memoirs, and diaries as a window into anything other than that particular person’s sensibility and obsessions. As the classicist Peter Green has put it, writing about sex is usually “the image of a minority—often a minority of one … . Any resemblance between that image and practical reality is not only coincidental, but in most cases quite impossible to detect.” In addition, many people filter their understanding of their sexual experiences through the conventions and tropes of literature, creating yet another layer of complexity that requires a much sharper analytic methodology than offered in Nehring’s potted biographies.

Nehring’s amateurish take on her topic is reflected as well in the errors and misrepresentations that recur throughout the book. Shakespeare’s line “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” is not a “sudden insult.” Quite the opposite: it is an assertion of his mistress’s humanity that stale Petrarchan conceits cannot capture. Plato’s Phaedrus is not “about romantic love,” something that didn’t exist in the mid-fourth century B.C. There is no scene in the Odyssey in which “Ulysses … stands before an assembly of glittering individuals and can see only swine.” It is very misleading to say that the ancient Greeks “took for granted that liaisons between male lovers involve age differences that would be considered shocking in our own day”—for Plato and aristocratic poseurs, maybe, but even Plato describes same-sex acts as “against nature.” The Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice is not “impoverished.” Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is not a brief for “recreational adultery,” but rather a sophisticated parody of the didactic treatises that flourished during the late Republic. More seriously, Nehring’s discussions of Dante and Beatrice and Abelard and Héloïse ignore the theological issue of spiritual love that is both pairs’ most important theme.

Given these problems, Nehring fails to achieve a “vindication” of romantic love. Nothing she tells us about this peculiar notion is useful in gaining greater insight into the rich literary tradition concerning romantic love. Nor does it achieve her therapeutic goal of improving the relationships of grownups who live in a real world of compromise, disappointment, and passion’s destructiveness, rather than in the fantasy world of movies, music videos, television shows, advertisements, and trashy novels.