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Overview
In The End of the Novel of Love, an acclaimed and provocative collection of criticism, Gornick applies the same intelligence, honesty, and insight that define her memoirs to an analysis of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century. She examines the work and lives of several authors she admires—including Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus—to ultimately posit that love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness.
Spanning the depths of common experience and the expanse of twentieth century literature, Gornick crafts an argument that is as defined by discourse as it is by the power of her language, which is gracefully poised between objective knowledge and subjective experience. In these eleven essays, she comes to see that, for most writers, like most readers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation. The End of the Novel of Love is a strikingly original and thought-provoking collection from a canonical critic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374538262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2020 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 453,886 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman--at last--melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one--among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway--where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins.
The response of these intelligent fictional women--Gwendolen Harleth, Lily Bart, Diana Warwick, Clarissa Dalloway--to the prospect of married love goes against the grain. Not only because we all know that love is the most formative experience a human being can have and marriage, any marriage, at least in its beginnings, reminds one of its promise, but also because the idea that a woman, any woman, could really want anything other than to be safely settled in the world with a husband has, until very recently, been unthinkable.
So what is it with Gwendolen, Lily, Clarissa, and Diana?
In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot pits the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (shrewd, vain, ambitious, hungry for a place in the world) against Henleigh Grandcourt, the aristocrat who wishes to marry her, apparently setting in motion the classic struggle between a woman and a man who are evenly matched: in this case both cold, smart, and determined. In the bargain, Gwendolen seems malicious: she taunts and manipulates the arrogant lord as if the exercise of sexual power in and of itself is a necessary plesure. But slowly, steadily--it takes Eliot 200 pages to get them married--we are moved deeper inside Gwendolen and we see that her behavior is meant to be off-putting. She is desperate to keep the action going, delay the moment of decision. We see that she is buying time. She dreads marriage. "It was not," Eliot observes of her, "that she wished to damage men, it was only that she wished not to be damaged by them."
Beneath the prettiness and the shrewd frivolity lies an astonishing maturity. Behind her young eyes Gwendolen is growing older by the minute. She thinks of her impending marriage, and she feels the steady pressure of her husband's will bearing down on her. Nothing, she knows, can avert that. Even if Grandcourt's courtship indicates real feeling, that he is actually in love with her and intends to deliver on his promises, she knows that her freedom is going--forever. The insight panics her. What to do, what to do. The question beats against her thoughts. Her mind becomes a cage. She cannot think. Her heart, already cold, hardens. Then her resistance collapses. She grows weary, so weary. One last time she cries out. All she wants is to be free! She would give anything to not marry, not marry at all. But of course Gwendolen would not give anything, she can't give anything, because Eliot cannot imagine her giving anything. All Eliot can do is justify her fears. She makes Grandcourt a monster who holds Gwendolen a prisoner inside her privileged life. Four years after the marriage Gwendolen stares into the endless future and wishes only for death--his or hers, it matters not which. She is twenty-two years old.
Edith Wharton's Lily Bart and Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway are variants of the woman who looks with clear sight on the life that follows the wedding, and goes cold at what she sees. Lily Bart, like Gwendolen Harleth, is a woman divided against herself in a world of social rigidities that are not negotiable. Lily can neither face the decision to marry a bourgeois nor can she bear excommunication from the only world she knows. She keeps the action going longer than Gwendolen, sabotaging herself time after time until, finally, all that is left to her is a compromised marriage to an upstart Jew or suicide. She chooses suicide. Clarissa Dalloway, on the other hand, thinks she will save herself by refusing to marry the man she loves (as the force of his personality will, she knows, subsume her), taking instead a man so empty of will and emotion he does not object when she removes herself to a cold white sexlessness inside the marriage: another form of death-in-life.
Each of these three novels was written by a brilliant woman with the taste of iron in her mouth. Each of them gives us a sobering portrait of what it feels like to be the creature trapped, caught, stopped in place. Yet no one of these novels penetrates any deeper than the others into the character's desire to be free: all that is achieved here is the look and feel of resistance. But what exactly is it that is wanted? What is the struggle all about? Where is the line of inner division drawn, and of what is the capitulation composed? Some necessary distance on the subject is lacking. Or fullness of experience.
George Meredith, in his late fifties, had the experience and the distance. Meredith knew better than Woolf, Eliot, and Wharton what a woman and a man equally matched in brains, will, and hungriness of spirit might actually say and do, both to themselves and to one another. (Virginia Woolf thought him the most grown-up of Victorian novelists.) He knew how the conflicts would work themselves out: in him and in her. He understood her brilliantly. Diana of the Crossways--published in 1885--gives us a protagonist for whom love is the enemy the way Lawrence understood it to be the enemy, only this time we have the information from a woman in whom the need to own her soul is more imperative than the need to love. Meredith knew that a woman might better be driven than a man to the extremity of forgoing love. This was a piece of intelligence he possessed to a larger degree than almost any other writer of his time, and this is largely how he came by it.
In his early twenties Meredith married Mary Ellen Nicolls, the daughter of the poet Thomas Love Peacock. She was a widow six years older than he, a woman of independent opinion with a strong taste for the world. Sophisticated, passionate, as egotistical as he, she delighted and tormented him. They lived together for eight stormy years; then she had an affair and left him; when she repented and wanted to reconcile he stiffened in humiliated rage; three years later she was dead. Her name did not cross Meredith's lips for the rest of his long life, but he never forgot her. Or, rather, he never forgot himself with her. The memory of his own bad behavior haunted him, and what men and women could do to each other in love became his great preoccupation. In life Meredith was stubborn and angry but in his writing he acted on what he knew. In 1862 he wrote 'Modern Love', an astonishing poem based on his marriage to Mary Ellen. He wanted to trash her but he was a great poet; he could only stand back and see the situation whole. He saw that it was being locked into each other psychologially that had made them both act so badly. Love, he concluded, was not a benign experience: not for him, and certainly not for her. Someday he would write a novel on the subject.
Diana Warwick is one of the first women in an English novel both beautiful and intellectually gifted who needn't be dismissed as vain, shrewd, and ambitious before we can get on with it. From the beginning, hers is the sympathetic point of view. When we meet her she is young, lovely, appealing in speech and manner, belonging by right of birth and expectation to the aristocracy but alone in the world with no money (very much like Lily Bart), in a position of need that only marriage can rectify. Marry she must, and marry she does.
Bold in the naivete of her good looks and high spirits, Diana takes the first presentable man who comes along, Mr. Warwick. The marriage is her education. She sees quickly that she has yoked herself for life to a man of narrow mind and pinched feeling whose company depresses and isolates her. At the same time she discovers that she is unwilling--no, unable--to accept her situation, settle down to it. She finds in herself a passion for political talk and, in London, develops friendships among those in public office; one especially with an MP old enough to be her father who values her conversation to an inordinate degree. Diana's husband feels the sting of her independence. He broods on it, then falls into a rage, brings suit against her, naming the MP as corespondent. But he cannot prove his case. The Warwicks separate and, with her reputation barely intact, Diana sets herself up as a political hostess and begins writing novels and articles to make a living. Soon her books are being reviewed, and every MP in town wants to have dinner at Diana's.
She blossoms into a glorious creature. Her mind grows tough, honest, wise, her speech witty, her insights luminous. She is unsentimental. She takes in her own experience. After the separation, alone for the first time, in "lodgings," Diana receives her friend Lady Emma, who is appalled, and asks if she can really like this. Diana replies, "I do. Yes, I can eat when I like, walk, work--and I am working! My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent! Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality!"
The independence allows her to see herself as never before. In speaking of why her husband brought suit against her, she says, "He has not cause to like his wife.... We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and hit upon crossways. From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him. By resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel.... I despised him too much, and I showed it. He is not a contemptible man before the world; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection. I could not--or did not--conceal my feelings. I showed it."
She becomes a gifted conversationalist. Meredith lets us see her through a long description of the talk at her dinner table. Diana is a creator of the talk not by virtue of a saloniste's manipulation of her guests, but through her own high participation. The description is one only a man who needs good conversation could have written. Meredith loves Diana because she talks! He pays her the highest compliment by saying of her evenings, "They rose from the table at ten, with the satisfaction of knowing that they had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the civilized world, who mean to practice philosophy, making the hour of the feast a balanced recreation and regeneration of body and mind."
As Diana's intelligence strengthens it takes in ever harder truths. She begins to see that her independence is intimately related to the clarity of her thought, and she comes to believe that the increasing goodness of her mind is linked to passions held in check. Passionate feeling, she is persuaded, is the undoing of a woman's independence. Diana gazes with a cold, clear eye--remarkably cold--at her calculation of life's cost. In London it is said of her that she is cold by nature. We, too, see her as cold, but not by nature.
Enter Percy Dacier, rising politico, and Diana's match in age, temperament, ambition: also cold, very cold, and for reasons that are similar to Diana's yet not equal in value. These two fall in love. From the beginning the emotion means something different to each of them. Percy is enchanted by Diana's brains ("She quickened a vein of imagination that gave him entrance to a strangely brilliant sphere, above his own, where, she sustaining, he too could soar"), but determined as well to arouse her senses ("He did not object to play second to her sprightly wits in converse, if he had some warm testimony to his mastery over her blood"). Diana, in turn, experiencing desire, feels all her stifled longing surface ("Had she beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her days--and all doomed to waste?"), then is quickly reminded of her tenuous position in the world.
Percy rises in Parliament and Mr. Warwick becomes desperately ill. With hope in the offing, their feelings begin to get the better of them. One night, after the others have left Diana's house, Percy doubles back to tell her a political secret that had been entrusted to him that very day. Diana becomes excited. The secret eroticizes them. Unexpectedly, he takes hold of her. She feels herself yielding. He betrays a sense of triumph: she is magnificent, but he must see her subdued. She pulls back instantly. Her passion struggles with her fear. Fear becomes hatred. She sends him away. Then, in one of the most extraordinary scenes ever written, she goes out into the street at midnght, takes a cab to the office of the most powerful newspaper editor in London, and leaks Percy's secret. Next morning--with the story in the paper--Percy comes to her. She confesses. He stares at her. "You sold me to a journalist." Her mouth opens and shuts without a sound. It is only now that she realizes what she has actually done. She has nothing to say. They part forever. The second most extraordinary scene ever written.
Why does Diana do it? Why does she betray the man she loves and dishonor herself? What has driven her to become an antisocial protagonist? a corrupted heroine? a stunningly not-nice girl? Whom does she fear, Percy or herself? Conquest from without, or subjugation from within? And why does it matter so much? What is really at stake?
The scene in which Diana rushes off to the newspaper office at midnight is the crucial one in the book. When we arrive at it we know it was inevitable, from the beginning, that the dazzling Diana herself would bring about the death of love. For her, no other course is possible. The scene is immensely complicated, its meaning still open to debate. Here's how I read it.
After Percy leaves her, Diana rushes about the room in a sudden fever, plunged in crisis, reviling herself. Who is she, what is she, she can't really write, doesn't really make money, has nothing of value, no one respects her, why should anyone respect her, she is only a woman alone, an actress, an adventuress, a poseur. Her head throbs. She is overcome by the memory of Percy's embrace:
She pressed her hands on her eyelids. Would Percy have humiliated her so if he had respected her?... The lover's behavior was judged by her sensations: she felt humiliated.... Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had suffered.... She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly--I gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as my enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air of intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away, exposing me to myself, as well as to him.
She casts wildly about for solace and solution. What is it she needs? What will give her comfort? Money, she answers herself. That's it. Money is what she needs. If she had money, none would dare take liberties. What has she got to sell? ... Her writing she knows will never succeed ... Percy's news! ... After all, he didn't really say it was a secret....
With that she calls her maid and begins to dress. The maid puts on her furs: "Not paid for! was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one. But she had to seem the precipitated bankrupt ... and she succeeded."
Out in the street they hail a hansom. Inside the cab Diana keeps up a stready stream of words: "She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself." Excitement is the key word.
In the newspaper office she waits while men rush back and forth, ignoring her presence. She is not really disturbed at being ignored. She is, in fact, more excited. One feels continuously her mounting excitement.
Then, suddenly, the dirty deed is done and the high is over. Coming out of the editor's room, "She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or relieved of it, but she seemed animated." Later at home she has tea, and then it is as though "Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedition, and had not a thought. In spite of the tea at that hour she slept soundly through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly til late into the morning"--when Percy comes to see her.
In this scene a writer of great intelligence lays out a no-win situation. His character is driven to perform an act that goes against every value she and her world hold in common. This she cannot do if she is fully conscious of what she is doing--as which of us could?--so what we have on the page is a Diana in a state of semiawareness, acting badly, as though in a dream, anesthetizing herself to commit a kind of self-mutilation that seems to her like necessary surgery.
It is not so much that Diana fears the imposition of Percy's will on her as that, in the moment she had felt herself falling toward him, she had known she would subjugate herself to love, and once lost to love, she is convinced, she will no longer be able to think--less and less will she have her thoughts, her own thoughts--and that is what she wants. She prizes the clarity of thought she has struggled so hard to gain: her independence is tied to it. She had also known--again in that same moment--that if Percy came after her she would not have the strength to hold out against him. So she decides to do something that will put her beyond the pale: that way the choice will be made for her. She'd rather place herself on the other side of the law (their law) than become a prisoner of her own weakest self. She will be vile but she will be free. Free to enter herself. Love, she knows, is not the way in. Into herself is through the mind, not through the senses. That is what freedom means to Diana.
She is wrong, of course. She will not be free. Free is not through the working mind or the gratified senses; free is through the steady application of self-understanding. Diana is too angry and too frightened to be free. In her panic she savages Percy and deforms herself. Like an animal in a frenzy, she tears loose of the trap, leaving behind a limb. For the rest of her life she will lick a wound covered over by scar tissue. Courage she has in great measure; it is self-knowledge she lacks.
All that fear and anger is the alarming reality that Diana of the Crossways so abundantly lays out. Love, Meredith wants us to know, is a deadly busines: it throws us up against ourselves and leaves us hanging there. No one who engages seriously in it emerges without a sense of having been violated and, most often, of having committed the violation oneself. In a curious way, Meredith is saying, love is not to the point at all: the antagonism one feels within oneself in its presence is far more crucial. Once that is made clear to a writer (and by a writer), love as an end in itself begins to lose influence.
Meredith is to Diana as Flaubert is to Emma Bovary: she is himself. By making Diana the brilliant creature she is, and letting her live fully inside the life of an intelligent woman who craves independence--that is, by making the situation acute--Meredith was better able to get at those elements that unleash the mortified and unknowing self: his real interest, his own wound. Diana is brave and decent, but when gripped by her fears and driven by her hungers, she acts like a cornered animal. With all her intelligence and high-mindedness she cannot bring her stricken emotions under control. She is doomed to act badly. This, Meredith knew, was the deeper truth about human relations.
As the twentieth century has progressed, Meredith's sense of things has grown steadily. What was once a footnote to a doctrine begins to seem like the text itself. A preoccupation with the frightened, angry self dominates the culture, and the need to clarify--to purge the strickenness at the center--has become a commonplace in our system of imperatives. That need challenges successfully the longing to be swept away.
Meredith's great forgotten novel brings these thoughts into focus. The language is of another century as is the social circumstance, but the central interest in Diana's headlong plunge toward herself is of a remarkable immediacy. When Diana's love affair goes on the rocks, we are not at all awash in regret, so absorbing are the real events of her inner life--the excitement of her false independence, the swiftness with which she spins out of control, the ugliness when she feels threatened--and so moving the intelligence with which she tries to take in the meaning of what she has lived. It is the drama of the self we are witnessing--that astonishing effort to climb up out of original shame--and the awful, implicit knowledge that love, contrary to all sentimental insistence, cannot do the job for us. For better and for worse, that effort is a solitary one, more akin to the act of making art than of making family. It acknowledges, even courts, loneliness. Love, on the other hand, fears loneliness, turns sharply away from it.
A great metaphor reflects that portion of the shared experience which promises self-understanding. That we would know ourselves--or see that we couldn't know ourselves, or didn't want to know ourselves--was once the promise of Nature in literature; then of God; then of Love. For the time being, at least, Love seems to have gone the way of Nature and of God. We are cast adrift, radically "alone" now, in literature as in life, groping in the books we write to find the metaphoric elements that will achieve new power. If you would feel persuaded that "the time being" has been in the works for a hundred years, read Diana of the Crossways.
Table of Contents
| Diana of the Crossways | 1 |
| Clover Adams | 19 |
| Kate Chopin | 43 |
| Jean Rhys | 53 |
| Ruthless Intimacies | 65 |
| Willa Cather | 83 |
| Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger | 103 |
| Christina Stead | 113 |
| Grace Paley | 123 |
| Tenderhearted Men | 131 |
| The End of the Novel of Love | 151 |