Love Stories: The Discourses of Desire in Literature and Culture, 1800 – the Present Session Three

Agenda  Romanticism and Victorianism. Poetry and painting  Modernism  James Joyce, ”Araby”  Katherine Mansfield, ”Bliss”

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Reader ( )

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard ( )

John William Waterhouse, 1894

John William Waterhouse, 1916 ”’I Am Half Sick of Shadows’”, Said The Lady of Shalott”

William Holman Hunt

John Sidney Meteyard

William More Egley

John William Waterhouse 1888

Arthur Huges

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Theorising Desire – According to Catherine Belsey. ”Reading Love Stories” Two key assumptions of romance:  Human beings are divided into mind and body  Human beings are incomplete until united with their soul mates

Theorising Desire – According to Catherine Belsey. ”Reading Love Stories” (cont.)  In romances ”true love offers to unify mind and body” (23)  However, romances celebrate ”the elemental otherness of desire as a constituent of true love” (28) in metaphors of the destruction of subjectivity [remember Keats!]  ”True love, then, is not so much a union of mind and body as an alternation of their dominance” (30)

Richard Ellmann, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ”Introduction,” Faber & Faber, London, 1975: Frank as these letters are, their psychology can easily be misunderstood. They were intended to accomplish sexual gratification in him and inspire the same in her, and at moments they fasten intently on peculiarities of sexual behaviour, some of which might be technically called perverse. They display traces of fetishism, anality, paranoia and masochism, but before quartering Joyce into these categories and consigning him to their tyranny we must remember that he was capable, in his work, of ridiculing them all as Circean beguilements, of turning them into vaudeville routines. Then too, the letters rebuke such obvious labels by an ulterior purpose; besides the immediate physical goal, Joyce wishes to anatomise and reconstitute and crystallize the emotion of love. He goes further still; like Richard Rowan in Exiles, he wishes to possess his wife's soul, and have her possess his, in utter nakedness. To know someone else beyond love and hate, beyond vanity and remorse, beyond human possibility almost, is his extravagant desire.

Modernism ”To Nora, Dublin 2 December 1909”. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. […]Jim

”To Nora, Dublin 2 December 1909”  Nora and Jim and the body and mind problem  The ”either-or” logic of the sequence

James Joyce, ”Araby”  Joyce’s Dubliners  Is ”Araby” a love story?  Does Joyce “[…] anatomise and reconstitute and crystallize the emotion of love […]”?

Katherine Mansfield, ”Bliss”