Read Online All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
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sips a Coke, and when she opens her eyes Jack Agnew, the man she never met, but instantly knows, the man who met a lurid end, is before her. He is older, but authoritative, attractive, something of a working-class hero. ‘Love never dies,’ he says to her, and though she protests inwardly, she is giddy with an amorous flare-up of the cells, a surge of old intentions.
‘Carried Away’ is one of Alice Munro’s remarkable stories. With deft strokes, it distils the essence of a lifetime, which here is the quintessence of romantic love. Wooed by letters and language, those forms which seem to leap directly to women’s hearts–even today, when they may take the form of texting–Munro’s small-town heroine falls in love with a man she has never seen, but who fires her imagination. Jack’s revelation of his watchful attentiveness and the specialness she has acquired in his mind–both sensuous and idealized by her association with the books he loves–give a new significance to her life. The first also has an immediate carnal effect. Though Louisa has her own share of contemporary scepticism, though ‘she would have said love was all hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that’, at the prospect she still feels ‘a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant prostration’.
Munro’s astute depiction of her heroine’s ‘flagrant prostration’ evokes the traditional psychosexual posture of women in relation to love. It is incited from without, provoked by the attention of another. It excites an initial submission.
Women’s age-old susceptibility to talkative seducers, to the forceful rakes and Casanovas of story, may in part be due to the way women’s desire is only consciously stirred through the desire of another. Until that imaginative process is set in train, she remains secret, even to herself. If to some this may reek of male mumbo-jumbo, it’s interesting to note that women researchers studying female sexual arousal in laboratory conditions have also found a distinct split between women’s conscious or reported desire and their bodily state of arousal, a split not found in men. As one of the researchers, Meredith Chivers, stated, ‘I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element.’
In Munro’s story, it is the desire the letters from Jack set in motion, the intimate link they establish, compounded with the proximity of death which turns this ordinary man into a hero, that seals a transforming tie. Life, for Louisa, is raised beyond its daily banality. Even though, or perhaps because, Jack disappoints her and she suffers, the bond is not broken. It lasts beyond his sensational death, sparks her marriage, and at her own end, is reignited in her imagination. Her love adds a singular, one might say, a civilizing dimension to a life that might otherwise feel petty and banal.
The goods passion can foster are laid out early, if rarely, in Western history. In Phaedrus Plato engages in a discussion of passionate love, quite unlike that described in The Symposium. In the latter the aspiring intellect alone is drawn, through the pursuit of beauty, to the higher philosophical plane that Diotima, his ‘instructress in the art of love’, defines as love’s goal. In Phaedrus, Eros is in full unruly play amongst humans–those souls who have lost their wings. Yet the sensual receptivity passion provokes results in a complex aspiration that leads to the good life.
When one who is fresh from the mystery… beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god; and but for being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity. Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him: for by
‘Carried Away’ is one of Alice Munro’s remarkable stories. With deft strokes, it distils the essence of a lifetime, which here is the quintessence of romantic love. Wooed by letters and language, those forms which seem to leap directly to women’s hearts–even today, when they may take the form of texting–Munro’s small-town heroine falls in love with a man she has never seen, but who fires her imagination. Jack’s revelation of his watchful attentiveness and the specialness she has acquired in his mind–both sensuous and idealized by her association with the books he loves–give a new significance to her life. The first also has an immediate carnal effect. Though Louisa has her own share of contemporary scepticism, though ‘she would have said love was all hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that’, at the prospect she still feels ‘a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant prostration’.
Munro’s astute depiction of her heroine’s ‘flagrant prostration’ evokes the traditional psychosexual posture of women in relation to love. It is incited from without, provoked by the attention of another. It excites an initial submission.
Women’s age-old susceptibility to talkative seducers, to the forceful rakes and Casanovas of story, may in part be due to the way women’s desire is only consciously stirred through the desire of another. Until that imaginative process is set in train, she remains secret, even to herself. If to some this may reek of male mumbo-jumbo, it’s interesting to note that women researchers studying female sexual arousal in laboratory conditions have also found a distinct split between women’s conscious or reported desire and their bodily state of arousal, a split not found in men. As one of the researchers, Meredith Chivers, stated, ‘I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element.’
In Munro’s story, it is the desire the letters from Jack set in motion, the intimate link they establish, compounded with the proximity of death which turns this ordinary man into a hero, that seals a transforming tie. Life, for Louisa, is raised beyond its daily banality. Even though, or perhaps because, Jack disappoints her and she suffers, the bond is not broken. It lasts beyond his sensational death, sparks her marriage, and at her own end, is reignited in her imagination. Her love adds a singular, one might say, a civilizing dimension to a life that might otherwise feel petty and banal.
The goods passion can foster are laid out early, if rarely, in Western history. In Phaedrus Plato engages in a discussion of passionate love, quite unlike that described in The Symposium. In the latter the aspiring intellect alone is drawn, through the pursuit of beauty, to the higher philosophical plane that Diotima, his ‘instructress in the art of love’, defines as love’s goal. In Phaedrus, Eros is in full unruly play amongst humans–those souls who have lost their wings. Yet the sensual receptivity passion provokes results in a complex aspiration that leads to the good life.
When one who is fresh from the mystery… beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god; and but for being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity. Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him: for by
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