All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (35 page)

An increasingly demanding Anna and an increasingly trapped Vronsky quarrel bitterly, and at the slightest provocation. They say what would be best unsaid. After what is their final quarrel, the words, ‘I want love and there is none’, go round and round in Anna’s mind. In their repetition, the thought of death surfaces. She imagines Vronsky’s feelings after she is dead, how her death will punish him. In that brilliant stream of consciousness Tolstoy gives a delirious Anna as she rushes towards Vronsky and death, the world metamorphoses into an ugly, dirty place in which contact with others is impossible. ‘He has long ceased loving me,’ Anna thinks. ‘And where love stops, hatred begins… I have become his unhappiness and he mine.’ So she jumps on to the train tracks to her death. That death is also a murder enacted not only on herself, but on Vronsky. In the wake of Anna’s suicide, he leaves for certain death on the battle front in Serbia.

One way of thinking of the various kinds of love Tolstoy gives us, outside the socio-legal contract which demarcates legitimacy and illegitimacy, is to posit some fundamental ways in which two can become one. In one template, two different beings become one by an act of possession or incorporation. One eats the other up, cannibalizes, dissolves the other’s difference into him or herself–like Stepan’s sweet rolls, or the babe at the breast, or Proust’s Marcel feeding off his mother’s goodnight kiss. The other’s resistance to incorporation or refusal of it, like Vronsky’s resistance to Anna, unleashes hatred or the possessive jealousy that sends the lover in vigilant pursuit of the other, wanting more and more of the caresses, the proofs of love that grow less and less.

Another model of love–though the two are rarely absolutely distinct, but rather fluctuate into one another–functions through identification. We become one with another by identifying with them or with one aspect of them which becomes both all of them and what we want to become in and through them. Madame Bovary’s adulteries are based on this kind of passionate identification, which is also in her case a kind of mimetic envy: through Rodolphe she wants the ease, finery and glamour of the upper-class world he represents; in Léon, the poetry, sentiment and romantic chivalry she has always desired.

As for Levin, in Kitty he sees a kind of purity, a truth and truthfulness he feels he lacks. By becoming one with her, he also takes on what she has. Her forgiving him for his past debauchery on the eve of their nuptials means that he can forgive himself, become truthful, attain, though gradually, an inner peace. When she strays from that spiritual perfection he identifies with her–for example, through her infatuation with Vronsky he is abased, humiliated, and his love momentarily turns to hate.

Anna’s attachment isn’t founded on identification, but is far more elemental. It is carnally incorporative–one might even say cannibalistic. There is nothing in Vronsky that she wants, except all of him. She wants him, not his qualities. That is why, when she commits suicide, she is killing him, too.

Adultery today usually wreaks somewhat less havoc than in societies where divorce was rare and women bound by constraining convention. Anna and Emma are not modern women, free to pursue life paths they choose and to play an equal role in marriages they are free to leave. But the toll in individual pain remains great, and those rampant nether passions of hatred and jealousy as biting as ever.

The Green-eyed Monster

Love and hate

Love and hate walk hand in hand, the poets have long told us. As Oscar Wilde mournfully repeats in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, each man or woman in various measures ‘kills the thing he loves’:

Freud postulated that there exists an inherent ambivalence in our passions. Love and hate, seeming opposites, live side by side, feed off the same fuel. We want to possess. We want to take in the beloved fully. It needs only the slightest resistance on her or his part to provoke hatred. That resistance can manifest itself as the attention paid to a third party. Jealous hatred erupts. As Sartre put the paradox: inherent to the object we want to love is that she chooses us freely. There is no love, if that freedom doesn’t exist. But if she has freely chosen us, she could also choose another, perhaps already has. And that fact, or even the suspicion of that fact, thrusts jealousy and hatred into play.

In his late and dark romance
The Winter’s Tale
, Shakespeare shows us this inherent ambivalence in love in stark action. King Leontes is happily married to Hermione, his pregnant, virtuous and outspoken Queen, already mother of his son. His dearest and oldest friend, King Polixenes, has been visiting from Bohemia. As the play opens, Leontes is trying to convince him to stay on. Polixenes insists he needs and wants to return home. But when Leontes exhorts Hermione to persuade him and she succeeds, everything shifts with sudden abruptness. In the flick of a gesture, Leontes suspects an affair between his wife and his best friend. Love turns to instant hatred, a murderous, jealous rage, a vindictive madness which will listen to no reason. He doubts whether even his son is his own and brutally interrogates the child. He issues a secret command for Polixenes to be executed. He has his virtuous wife imprisoned. The poisonous plague of Leontes’ ambivalent passions will run its course, in time. Eighteen years later, reparation is made. But in the interim, his son has died as a result of his actions.

It is out of the proximity of love and hate that the ‘green-eyed monster’ jealousy is born. The fact or even suspicion of betrayal may unleash it in a marriage. But the hint of any third party in our passions may equally let it loose between the adulterous or secret lovers themselves.

Secrecy

In that continuity of emotions we see throughout history, passion waxes ever greater in the presence of the real or imagined antagonism of others from whom love must be kept secret. Secrecy propels the twosome into a hothouse, marking them with a sense of criminality, whether self-imposed or imposed by their policing watchers–who may be real, imagined or internalized. Indeed, triangles in whatever configuration can both invent and augment passion. Coded signals that secret lovers engage in, covert glances, freighted double meanings–all add a frisson to passion. Adulteries flourish because they exist in an endangered space dedicated solely to passion, from which the rest of the pressing world is barred. Once secrecy is removed, passion often wanes.

Within the marriage, the adulterous partner’s secrecy creates greater and greater distance between the couple. The safe terrain for talk–in which slips about the secret lover won’t emerge–grows ever more restricted, until children and the weather are all that is left to the spouses. While the temperature rises in the hothouse of secret passion, it cools markedly, even if unintentionally, in the home.

Even in our permissive times, adulteries are generally carried on in secret; the secrecy is often one of the conditions of their rapture and also of their eventual rupture. A romantic sensualist, Madame Bovary carries the secrecy through to her doomed end. Anna, a woman of greater moral heft, cannot live with the lie for long and braves convention. But once that secrecy is divulged and the doors of the secret room opened to other social relations, love quickly changes.

What makes secrecy so potent a stimulant to passion? The answer may lie in the fact that love and sex, both before and after we have experienced any couplings, are such active components of our secret fantasy lives. Indeed, the very whiff of the whole murky terrain of sex amongst adults can establish a space of secrecy, a closed door, within a child. Henry James’s precocious Maisie in
What Maisie Knew
closes a door within herself on the couplings of the adulterous adults around her so that she can maintain her innocence, while still intuiting the ‘corrupt’ facts of life and letting them rumble on within her. This kind of inner splitting can easily persist into later life, establishing secrecy and the forbidden as the prerequisites for sexual passion. Sometimes this may entail secrecy from oneself. Like sleeping beauties, women, even today, often enough need to be awakened into desire, taking their stimulus from the desire of the other and attributing it to that other person. Meanwhile, both men and women accompany sex acts with their legitimate partners to the secret unfurling of fantasies–those third parties who may make the act itself more pleasurable or possible.

Secrecy is, of course, also about keeping others out, establishing a guarded perimeter. First of all against the spouse, ever a key player in illicit loves. Without that dangerous third presence to provide a sense of imminent danger and permanent rivalry, the heat of the adulterous passion can fizzle out. Indeed, the sense of the other at the gate is essential. Only in its shadow can the lovers literally be ‘out of control’, beyond the regulation that governs marriage. Secrecy itself acts as a transgressive liberation. Yet the hovering of the other at the perimeter also provokes a host of attendant hostile emotions and ambivalences. Jealousy, envy, greed and grief stalk the worlds of secret adulterous lovers and of those against whom they guard themselves.

Beasts in the nursery

These primal emotions in both betrayer and betrayed catapult the players back into the nursery of their lives, where powerful nameless beasts roamed, provoking tantrums, rage, gestures, feelings, omnivorous appetites which had few of the pacifying restraints of language. Jealousy may be the most unbridled of these passions. And it comes in as many shapes as love itself, sometimes inspiring it and keeping it alive, at others murdering both love and lovers.

Like some contemporary psychologist, Saint Augustine noted in his
Confessions
, ‘I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but, whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy.’ The child is jealous of the rival who displaces him with his beloved mother, wants to be him, and is also envious of the milk and love he is getting in his stead. Teasing out Augustine’s childhood scene further, one could also conjecture that the child values and loves his mother more in the light of her love for another; or, in that mimetic faculty that love and jealousy are also prone to, loves her
because
another, whose characteristics the child admires, also loves her. Passionate relations ever combine a host of other internalized relations. As the old adage goes, when we make love there are always at least four people present.

In the influential child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s schema, the dynamics of envy and jealousy find a primary place amongst the earliest of childhood psychic structures. The infant’s first relations with the world are with his mother and her breast (or the bottle which is its stand-in), source of nourishment and thus of love and life itself. Taking the breast in, the baby takes in the whole of his mother–what Klein calls ‘introjection’–and she becomes part of him. He takes in both what is good, that is gratifying and life-giving, and what is bad or frustrating and destructive. The experience is in part dependent on the child’s constitution, in part on the mother herself and the environment. Helpless, the baby is also inevitably shadowed by anxiety, which grows greater if the breast is not available or if evidence of maternal love and warmth is erratic.

Envy comes into being when the baby feels that ‘the gratification of which he was deprived has been kept for itself by the breast that frustrated him’. It is an ‘angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable–the envious impulse being to take it away and spoil it’ by putting bad parts of the self into it, first of all excrement, and thereby to destroy it. Jealousy, for Klein, is based on envy, but involves a relation with at least two other people: the love, the good that the subject feels is his due, has been taken away by a rival. It does not, as envy does, necessarily involve despoiling the loved one, though it can. The slippage between the feelings is frequent enough.

Configurations of jealousy

Shakespeare’s tragedy
Othello
makes jealousy the stalking partner of envy. Even before we meet Othello, we learn that he has incurred his ensign Iago’s invidious enmity by preferring Cassio to him. The act has unleashed the fatal envy that poisons everything. Before bringing Othello on stage, Shakespeare also lets us know that the Moor has taken Desdemona away from her father, Brabantio, by stealth–not unlike, one might say, an adulterer invading the play’s primary and regulated twosome. Jealousy is therefore already embedded in the dynamic of the play’s relations. Brabantio impugns Othello with having used a magic potion to woo Desdemona away. In fact Othello has won her with that other convention of romance–storytelling, ever a swaying prop in love’s seductive armoury.

Envious Iago bears Othello a double hatred: ‘it is thought abroad, that ’twixt my sheets/He has done my office’. Even though Iago doesn’t quite believe it, the publicly held suspicion of his cuckoldry adds fuel to his malice. Plotting against Othello, whose ‘free and open nature’ makes him easy prey to ‘lead by the nose’, cunning Iago pours his contemptuous poison into his ear, insinuating the need for suspicion and jealousy of Desdemona and Cassio by warning Othello against the self-destructiveness of the very passion he has implanted in him.