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January–November 1793: Marie-Jeanne in Love

Siân Reynolds

in Marriage and Revolution: Monsieur and Madame Roland

This chapter examines the love affair responsible for the breakdown of the Roland marriage. In late 1792, Marie-Jeanne Roland falls in love with a Girondin deputy and he with her. His identity is ... More

This chapter examines the love affair responsible for the breakdown of the Roland marriage. In late 1792, Marie-Jeanne Roland falls in love with a Girondin deputy and he with her. His identity is known only to a handful of intimates during the principals’ lifetime, and remains secret until the discovery of letters in the nineteenth century: François-Nicolas-Léonard Buzot, six years her junior. The affair is never consummated, but Mme Roland confesses to her husband. Fallout from the attachment on both Roland and old friends is discussed. Mme Roland plans to return to the Beaujolais with her daughter in May.Less

Romantic Love and the Denial of Difference: Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit

Katja Garloff

in Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

This chapter moves into the early Romantic period, when the increased social interaction between Jews and Christians in the Romantic salons led to much-discussed interfaith love affairs that found ... More

This chapter moves into the early Romantic period, when the increased social interaction between Jews and Christians in the Romantic salons led to much-discussed interfaith love affairs that found their way into literature. When in 1799 Friedrich Schlegel, the leading theoretician of German Romanticism, published Lucinde, the clearest example of the Romantic love ideal in German literature, it was widely assumed that the novel was based on the author's relationship with Dorothea Veit, the oldest daughter of Moses Mendelssohn. It is argued that Schlegel's transformation of love into a model for society hinges upon the elision of religious difference in favor of sexual opposition, an elision that explains the striking absence of references to Jews and Judaism in the novel. The second part of the chapter reads Veit's own novel Florentin (1801), in which love conspicuously fails to secure the hero the sense of home and identity he desires, as a critical response to Lucinde and a subversion of the Romantic love ideal. In resisting the homogenizing force of romantic love, Veit continues the political project of Mendelssohn, who sought to harness the powers of love for Jewish emancipation while guarding against forced assimilation.Less

Toward the Present and the Future: Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Barbara Honigmann

Katja Garloff

in Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

This chapter shows that even Scholem's “Jews and Germans,” despite its explicit rejection of the past Jewish love for things German, relies on tropes of love to conjure the possibility of a future ... More

This chapter shows that even Scholem's “Jews and Germans,” despite its explicit rejection of the past Jewish love for things German, relies on tropes of love to conjure the possibility of a future German-Jewish dialogue. Another famous German Jewish thinker, Hannah Arendt, is more outspoken in her valorization of love as a mode of sociopolitical intervention. In her biography of a Jewish salonnière of the Romantic era, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Arendt affirms the love of the pariah as a form of solidarity that is rooted in shared experiences of marginalization. Finally, the chapter turns to the decade after the 1990 unification of Germany, when the theme of interreligious or intercultural love enjoyed much popularity both in mainstream feature films and in contemporary German Jewish writers. Barbara Honigmann, for instance, dramatizes failing Jewish-Gentile love affairs to show how memories of the Third Reich continue to disrupt German-Jewish relations in the present. But this is not a negation of love as a trope of interreligious or intercultural mediation. Love remains an important trope in Honigmann, one that allows her to imagine a new kind of German Jewish diaspora.Less

Collaborations: Love and War in the Heat of the Day

Allan Hepburn

in Intrigue: Espionage and Culture

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, where a woman is implicated in a love affair with a spy. She is recruited via her sentiments, not via her rational beliefs, which ... More

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, where a woman is implicated in a love affair with a spy. She is recruited via her sentiments, not via her rational beliefs, which indicates that commitment need not mean choosing sides consciously. Memory and haunting reinforce the espionage paradigm of pasts that rear up to afflict those who have collaborated, knowingly or unknowingly. Because loved, a spy is not necessarily reliable.Less

Elegance and Compassion in Heian Japan

William M. Reddy

in The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE

This chapter examines the understanding of sexual partnerships and the practice of love in Heian Japan (794–1185). For aristocrats of the Heian period, sexual partnerships, insofar as these were ... More

This chapter examines the understanding of sexual partnerships and the practice of love in Heian Japan (794–1185). For aristocrats of the Heian period, sexual partnerships, insofar as these were this-worldly endeavors, participated in the inevitable frustration of all this-worldly desires. However, there was also a tendency to see sexual partnerships, like other social roles, as a matter of interest to the gods. Gods and spirits might intervene to advance a partnership they favored. The discussions include the Heian spiritual world; kinship and marriage among the governing elite; Heian literature; Heian subjectivity; the celestial splendors of the Heian elite; spiritually meaningful love affairs; and the sublime loves of Genji.Less

Attraction and Politics in the Great Depression: Representative Oscar Stanton DePriest

Alison M. Parker

in Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell

In the early 1930s, several years after her husband’s death, Terrell had a love affair with a married Oscar Stanton DePriest, the first black U.S. Representative from the North. Not just any man ... More

In the early 1930s, several years after her husband’s death, Terrell had a love affair with a married Oscar Stanton DePriest, the first black U.S. Representative from the North. Not just any man could be a good partner for her. It had to be someone who could weather comparisons to Robert Terrell—a man of high professional status, with charisma, intelligence, and good looks. Oscar Stanton DePriest (1871–1951), Republican representative from Illinois, fit the bill. Their relationship was an opportunity for Terrell to create another collaborative political and civil rights romantic partnership. Elegant, well-educated, and cultured, she offered him access to Washington’s black elite and the opportunity to be associated with one of the most famous black women in America. In turn, DePriest offered Terrell a chance to be at the center of black national political power with one of the most famous black men in America. As compatible fighting spirits, neither succumbed to prejudice and discrimination without a struggle. A further bond was that both remained Republicans in the 1930s and beyond, even as many black voters began to shift their allegiances to the Democratic Party.Less

Forbidden Fruit: Illicit Love Affairs between Jews and Gentiles in the Novels of Julian Stryjkowski

Regina Grol

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 13: Focusing on the Holocaust and its Aftermath

This chapter addresses the illicit love affairs between Jews and Gentiles in the Galician novels of Julian Stryjkowski, a Polish Jewish writer. In most of his oeuvre, Stryjkowski exhibits a ... More

This chapter addresses the illicit love affairs between Jews and Gentiles in the Galician novels of Julian Stryjkowski, a Polish Jewish writer. In most of his oeuvre, Stryjkowski exhibits a pronounced loyalty to his Jewish heritage, and several of his novels are dedicated specifically to the reconstruction of the pre-First World War Jewish milieu of the region where he was born and lived. Together, Stryjkowski's four Galician novels constitute a subtly evoked return to a segment of Europe now vanished, and they focus heavily on the Jewish community. The author reconstructs the reality of Jewish life with such sympathy and meticulousness that one never doubts its authenticity. He is faithful to details of custom and tradition, to nuances of speech; he traces the changes effected in the Jewish community by political movements and explores the characteristics and conflicts of the group with exceptional powers of social observation. Poles and Ukrainians, by contrast, are marginal presences in his works. Indeed, the thrust of his writing appears to be to underscore the separateness of the Jews in Galicia, the gulf that existed between them and their Christian neighbours prior to the First World War.Less

An Alternative to the Classical Form: Neorealism and Modernism

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

If film noir can be regarded as a deviation from the classical narrative, Italian neorealism offered other elements for a real alternative to it. Italian neorealism was a complex cultural phenomenon ... More

If film noir can be regarded as a deviation from the classical narrative, Italian neorealism offered other elements for a real alternative to it. Italian neorealism was a complex cultural phenomenon in postwar Italy integrating literature, journalism, and cinema. One of neorealism's main contributions to modernism was its suppression of the hierarchy between the narrative background and the narrative foreground, which thereby loosened up the narrative structure. There are two essential traits of neorealism that make it an antecedent to, rather than a part of, modernism. One is its fundamental social, sometimes clearly political, commitment; modernism instead focuses on abstract, universalistic concerns. The other trait is neorealism's total lack of subjectivity and reflexivity, both of which belong to modernism's major aesthetic strategies. This chapter, which examines neorealism and modernism in modern cinema, looks at modernism in Michelangelo Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair (1950) as well as neorealism in Roberto Rossellini's films.Less

Love Is Divine

William C. Carter

in Proust in Love

This chapter talks about the culmination of Marcel Proust's long quest both in love and in the writing of In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of his transposing of his love affairs and ... More

This chapter talks about the culmination of Marcel Proust's long quest both in love and in the writing of In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of his transposing of his love affairs and infatuations into the novel, he looked to the letters of Alfred de Musset—his favorite poet in his adolescence—for inspiration. Proust's Narrator became a representative of the utopian figure of the artist, of successful men and women, who saves himself from aimlessness and also gifts his readers with the insight of his experience of his loves. This chapter thus takes a conclusive look at Proust's novel and how the events and relationships in his life have revealed truths to its readers. All this resulted in the literary success of the novel, that Edmund Wilson praised it for being the literary equivalent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.Less

The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne—for Himself

in Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne is a work of fiction that delivers the standard elements in profusion, beginning with an exotic setting (ancient Persia) and a beautiful princess (Alinda) ... More

The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne is a work of fiction that delivers the standard elements in profusion, beginning with an exotic setting (ancient Persia) and a beautiful princess (Alinda) menaced with arranged marriage. The main action then gets underway with a desperate love affair, an elopement, and a shipwreck on the shores of barbarous Thrace. After passing through a complex amorous intrigue involving a lustful Thracian lord and his unscrupulous sister, the tale concludes with the bloody suicides of both the heroine and the husband who has betrayed her (Leontin). In this book, Marie le Jars de Gournay makes several provocative contributions—much against the grain of the genre, which tended to wallow in standard female (and male) stereotypes—so as to produce a text that may fairly be labeled feminist in its broad trajectory, as well as in significant particulars.Less

Estelle Oldham's Mississippi Frontier Family

Judith L. Sensibar

in Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

This chapter examines the Mississippi frontier family of Estelle Oldham, William Faulkner's wife. It describes Lem and Lida Oldham's extreme demands on their eldest daughter Estelle and her need to ... More

This chapter examines the Mississippi frontier family of Estelle Oldham, William Faulkner's wife. It describes Lem and Lida Oldham's extreme demands on their eldest daughter Estelle and her need to try to meet them and analyzes the influence of this situation on Estelle's love affair with and marriage to Faulkner. This chapter also mentions that Estelle and Faulkner's marriage started badly, with her public humiliation in their honeymoon and attempted suicide.Less

The Most Terrifying City in the World

Deirdre David

in Olivia Manning: A Woman at War

This chapter starts by describing that in late 1934, with an introduction from one of her father's naval friends and despite a high level of unemployment in the capital, Olivia Manning finally found ... More

This chapter starts by describing that in late 1934, with an introduction from one of her father's naval friends and despite a high level of unemployment in the capital, Olivia Manning finally found a job that took her away from Portsmouth. She stayed in London for two years, worked as a typist, furniture-painter, and general office person, and moved from one cramped bed-sitting room to another, and lived through a passionate and wrenching love affair. This chapter also affirms that Olivia's insecurities about her writing sometimes strained her affection for Stevie Smith. Much as she often claimed to love her, she proclaimed her ‘arch-bitchiness’ to their friends, and was jealous of her success.Less

Double Murder in Cretone Castle

in Love & Death in Renaissance Italy

This chapter portrays the story of the Savelli double murder, which is by design no less formal than a sixteenth-century castle garden, with its thyme and marjoram, dill and sage, arugula and mint, ... More

This chapter portrays the story of the Savelli double murder, which is by design no less formal than a sixteenth-century castle garden, with its thyme and marjoram, dill and sage, arugula and mint, in tidy plots inside geometric little hedges. In the story, both space and time, as they are laid out, have shapely boundaries. Though the story traverses by flashback, time divides, stage by stage, as in a play or film. First there is a secret love affair, slow and furtive, cream-smooth at the outset and later curdled by suspicion and anxiety. Second comes an awful killing, swift and furious. Third comes a frozen time, with everyone locked in by fear, confusion, and blocked grief, until stage four, the sudden thaw, a spate of social resolution that is set moving by the arrival of a grieving prince and that lets all actors, both dead and living, resume their ordained courses. Space too has its elegant, evanescent geometry of concentric circles around the bodies of the unquiet dead.Less

An Old Love

Phyllis Birnbaum

in Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army

This chapter focuses on Yamaga Tōru, Kawashima Yoshiko's first love. Yamaga reenters the story in China around the time that Yoshiko was managing her restaurant in Tianjin. He had adapted to changing ... More

This chapter focuses on Yamaga Tōru, Kawashima Yoshiko's first love. Yamaga reenters the story in China around the time that Yoshiko was managing her restaurant in Tianjin. He had adapted to changing times and resurfaced as a kind of cultural plotter for Japan's Special Service Agency. Known for speaking excellent Chinese and as a lover of Chinese culture, Yamaga was a ruthless and tight-lipped undercover agent. He was responsible for collecting information from the Chinese artistic world, an assignment suited to his particular skills. His acceptance into arty social circles was facilitated by his passion for Chinese actresses, who reciprocated the admiration. According to Yamaguchi Yoshiko, who had known Yamaga since her school days, Kawashima Yoshiko and Yamaga resumed their love affair when they found themselves in China at the same time.Less

Men and Other Travails

Andrew L. Erdman

in Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay

This chapter describes Eva Tanguay's relationship with a mysterious suitor, the so-called Wanderer. Eva's love affair with the man was a dizzying detour from her usual love-'em-and-leave-'em routine. ... More

This chapter describes Eva Tanguay's relationship with a mysterious suitor, the so-called Wanderer. Eva's love affair with the man was a dizzying detour from her usual love-'em-and-leave-'em routine. Not only was the Wanderer her sexual partner, but her new beau catered to her every other need as well: whispering the right things in her ear, promising to protect her with masculine bravado, fetching her what she wanted, and surprising her with unexpected delights. She soon found herself musing fancifully of abandoning the stage for her new love interest. However, the day came when the suitor had to leave Eva and move to another place. Thus, she became distraught at the idea that she might not see him during a nearly year-long vaudeville contract.Less

Introduction

in Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

Marie le Jars de Gournay's only work of fiction, the raison d'être of her first published volume, falls under the generic rubric of histoire tragique. The forerunner of the Gothic form, the histoire ... More

Marie le Jars de Gournay's only work of fiction, the raison d'être of her first published volume, falls under the generic rubric of histoire tragique. The forerunner of the Gothic form, the histoire tragique had for some decades been a popular kind of romantic and sensational narrative, typically involving tangled erotic relations and invariably ending in disaster. The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne delivers the standard elements in profusion, beginning with an exotic setting (ancient Persia) and a beautiful princess (Alinda) menaced with arranged marriage. The main action then gets underway with a desperate love affair, an elopement, and a shipwreck on the shores of barbarous Thrace. In processing it, however, Gournay makes several provocative contributions—much against the grain of the genre, which tended to wallow in standard female (and male) stereotypes—so as to produce a text that may fairly be labeled feminism.Less

Jane Gillooly (on Suitcase of Love and Shame)

Scott MacDonald

in Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema

When she learned that an item called “Suitcase of Love and Shame” was available on Ebay, Jane Gillooly jumped at the chance to see what might be in that suitcase. The audio tapes she discovered there ... More

When she learned that an item called “Suitcase of Love and Shame” was available on Ebay, Jane Gillooly jumped at the chance to see what might be in that suitcase. The audio tapes she discovered there chronicled the secret love affair of a married man and his lover during the early 1960s. In Gillooly’s film these tapes become a secret window into a particular era and its ways of thinking, talking, loving, and documenting itself. Much has been made of the camera’s ability to create a voyeuristic viewer; Suitcase transforms the audience into “audioistic” voyeurs. Gillooly’s reworking of the tapes is accompanied by evocative imagery, often filmed in the locations described on the tapes.Less

To the Center of Things

James Dempsey

in The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The Dial moved from Chicago to New York in 1918 and got into financial trouble. Thayer, having loaned the magazine a good deal of money, became the owner along with James Sibley Watson, a Harvard ... More

The Dial moved from Chicago to New York in 1918 and got into financial trouble. Thayer, having loaned the magazine a good deal of money, became the owner along with James Sibley Watson, a Harvard friend. E. E. Cummings had also moved to New York, where he began an affair with Elaine Orr. She bore him a daughter, Nancy. Thayer, meanwhile, began a relationship with Alyse Gregory. Thayer and Watson decided to forgo politics in their magazine and to devote The Dial to art, literature, and criticism.Less