-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 5
After the free-love ardor of the 1960s sexual revolution cooled down, a brave new vision of marriage emerged from its ashes. This has come to be known as “companionate marriage.” In such a partnership, spouses have a mutual interest in career and home, and share in raising children. They talk over dinner, take turns doing dishes, fret together over the children’s schooling, and arrange the occasional date night. To many Americans, the Obamas’ recent studiously scheduled outing together would represent the apogee of a successful equitable marriage. To Cristina Nehring, author of the ambitious polemic A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century, one suspects, it would represent all that is wrong with marriage today.
Nehring yearns for a revival of a messier ardor. In her view, we have domesticated love past all recognition, turning what is rightly leonine, destructive, and majestic into a yawning, chubby house cat. Hers is no modest project. She wants nothing less than to radicalize our framework for love, mainly by restoring its chaotic potential: “Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing,” she writes. “Among the many rights we must reclaim in love is the right to fail.” A Vindication of Love is not a book that will persuade every reader to jump off the couch and into the arms of a dark, smoky-eyed stranger, but it will rearrange your tidily laid out mental furniture while you’re not looking. For at its core is a well-taken point: With its emphasis on equitable marriage, “choice feminism” has endorsed a tyrannical habit of trying to subordinate passion to reason. And along the way it has demonized obsession. What, Nehring asks, is so wrong with being crazy in love?
At the core of this polemic lurks the age-old dilemma of how we resolve our desire for security with our need for passion. Nehring’s answer is simply: Let go of security and embrace the radical alertness that comes with the fullness of feeling. In a fresh reading of literary and historical figures from the Wife of Bath to Emily Dickinson, Nehring sets out to show us the many benefits of throwing ourselves headlong into love—not least, she reveals, deeper powers of insight. Charting the love lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Margaret Fuller, she argues that these women’s capacity for heedless love is directly tied to their intellectual penetration. “We reason deeply when we forcibly feel,” as Mary Wollstonecraft put it. And she should know, as Nehring explains. After falling for a series of brilliant, difficult men, Wollstonecraft had a child with one who married her only for political security. Her subsequent attempted suicide has long been seen by left-leaning thinkers as a blot on her feminist C.V., but Nehring persuasively claims that Wollstonecraft’s erotic passions are bound up with the ferocious sense of justice that made her a great political thinker.
Meghan O'Rourke is a founding editor of Double X and the author of Halflife, a book of poems.
SNL: Equal Opportunity Objectifiers
Jon Hamm spent most of the Saturday Night Live episode he hosted last night shirtless.
Confessions of a Woman Comedy Writer
Allison Silverman accepts one from New York Women in Film & Television (and tells us why it's rare).
Comments
tiffany
By: tiffany77 | Thu, 09/24/2009 - 00:55
Tiffany rings Tiffany rings tiffany rings sterling silver rings sterling silver rings Tiffany Pendants Tiffany Pendants tiffany Pendants Tiffany Necklaces Tiffany Necklaces tiffany Necklaces silver necklaces silver necklaces
links london Friendship Bracelets
By: linksoflondon | Tue, 09/22/2009 - 20:32
links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Sweetie Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Charms links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london Friendship Bracelets links of london jewellery links of london Friendship Bracelets
Richard Wilbur's answer to Jack Gilbert - and Nehring
By: mandolin | Sun, 06/28/2009 - 11:40
the last two stanzas of "For C.," a poem from Wilbur for his wife Charlie:
We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
The whole text is here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171779
Did Megan not notice that
By: Bo | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 23:56
Did Megan not notice that Nehring is pretty close to nuts?
http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/archive/03_03_13/04_eros.html
"“Teacher-student chemistry is what fires much of the best work that goes in universities, even today,” said Nehring. “It need not be reckless. It need not be realized. It need not even be articulated or mutual. … In most cases, it would be counterproductive for it to emerge, itself, into the limelight. That said, it occasionally does. And when it does, it must not be criminalized.”"
She's gotten attention in a dull drab field by pushing herself as Passion's Plaything.
same goes for commitment phobes
By: Liz Lazar | Sat, 06/20/2009 - 03:46
The domesticating disease may be mostly a bourgeois affliction.
When the official narrative leaves you out, you just do your thing.
You don’t chose that vulnerable terror space but you’re home there, maybe with the kids...maybe a babydaddy or two in the wings. I haven’t read the book, but it seems to present a valuable (and perhaps accidental) corrective not only to those who have tamed love into an unrecognizable thing, but also for those who have sidestepped the beast entirely.
Why not assume this same abandon when commencing the domestic leg of the journey?
Jump in, have the kids, have the spouse, the whole catastrophe. Let's not plan it within an inch of its life. The prenuptial arrangements break more than the bank. Once the commitments have been made, then the stakes are raised and only then can we fall from grace. But this is the suffering that the author is actually encouraging. Ultimately, it's practice for death. Make a mess. Lose. lose big. Love bigger.
Fail. Be humiliated. But be alive.
It's the illusion of control at the center of these
domesticated marriages that shrink love.
But same could be said for the fear to commit...