All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  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.

  Oh beware my Lord of jealousy;

  It is the green-eyed monster which doth suck

  The meat it feeds on…

  At first Othello resists Iago’s own ‘green-eyed monster’: he is not intrinsically an envious soul and will not easily succumb to the venom Iago skilfully injects. But the poison of suspicion has only to be lodged for it to spread, whatever Othello’s conscious determination. As her maid Emilia states, when Desdemona exclaims that there is no cause for Othello’s jealousy:

  They are not ever jealous for the cause,

  But jealous for they are jealous: ’tis a monster

  Begot upon itself, born on itself.

  Once Desdemona’s handkerchief comes into play–the purported ‘evidence’ of her tryst with Cassio–jealous passion overcomes Othello. It literally drives him mad. His words break up and he falls into a ‘trance’, only then to be prodded further, by ‘honest Iago’s’ insidious ploys, into murdering Desdemona.

  Othello may be a noble soul, his tragedy–as he says of himself before taking his own life–that ‘of one that loved not wisely but too well’, his jealousy wrought by another who had him ‘perplex’d in the extreme’. And indeed, the dynamics of the play are propelled by the unbridled envy of Iago. But–and this may be an interpretation too far–Othello himself is contaminated in that emotion. That evidential prop which is the white handkerchief is no mere ‘napkin’: Othello gives it a provenance that brings us back to that crucible of the emotions, the nursery. It was his mother who gave the handkerchief to him on her deathbed. It has magical properties, through its connection to her. The thought that Desdemona, now herself in possession of this magical object steeped in mother love, would pass it on to a rival she speaks so highly of is what spells her doom. The passionate rivalries of infancy have been brought into play. And with them love turns into murderous hate.

  In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy gives us several possible configurations of jealousy and envy.

  Dolly’s is perhaps the most common of these, and is nonetheless violent. Learning of Stepan’s infidelity with their former French governess, Dolly suffers from sleepless nights. She all but locks herself in her room, gives up the running of the household and is poised to leave her husband, though she simultaneously knows that, because of the children, she cannot. Nor can she give up on loving him, despite wanting to punish and shame him, to take revenge. She screams at Stepan who is trying to make it up with her: ‘You are vile, you are loathsome to me!… Your tears are just water! You never loved me; there’s no heart, no nobility in you! You’re disgusting, vile, a stranger, yes a total stranger to me!’

  Like a child cast out from the parental pride of place, the confirmed centre of attention and emotion, Dolly is racked by jealousy at the arrival of a younger and more beautiful object who she feels has displaced her. She is also humiliated: the object of Stepan’s love is a mere governess, a woman of lesser rank. She is doubly humiliated because the woman is a familiar, someone in her own home. Envy for the younger woman’s attributes is compounded by the degradation of Stepan’s idealized image in her eyes. Like the powerful parent in the displaced child’s eyes, Stepan will never quite attain his idealized or powerful status again. But Dolly will, of course, forgive him and go on, in part swayed by Anna’s conviction that Dolly’s status remains for Stepan superior to that of the governess.

  Despite our radically different times, contemporary surveys on jealousy iterate Tolstoy’s understanding. In one such, respondents were asked, ‘Are you a jealous person?’ Fifty-four per cent responded in the affirmative, but the 46 per cent who had answered no to the question described their experience of betrayal in the same terms as those who had judged themselves as jealous people–and in much the same way as Tolstoy portrays Dolly. Those who considered their partners’ choice of love object to be of lower social rank and a passing liaison tended to forgive them and were often stimulated into taking a new interest in their relationships.

  In another instance of jealousy in Anna Karenina, Levin, recently married to his beloved Kitty, receives a visit from her brother-in-law Stepan and the handsome young Vasenka Veslovsky, the object of jealousy. The scene Tolstoy sets up is redolent of the play of jealousy and rivalry triggered by a family atmosphere which always brings old childhood feelings to the fore. To make this clear, Tolstoy has Levin hoping that the sound of the carriage will announce the arrival of his beloved and respected father-in-law, indeed something of an admired father to him: he is palpably disappointed. Levin’s own brother, an old rival, is also present, as are other members of Kitty’s family, including Dolly. At dinner, before the arrival of the two men, Levin and the pregnant Kitty had been particularly amorous and in the merriest spirits. But no sooner do the two newcomers arrive than everything changes.

  Levin sees Veslovsky warmly kissing Kitty’s hand, and, in that slippage unconscious responses are prone to, reacts by thinking darkly, while Stepan kisses his wife Dolly, ‘Who did he kiss yesterday with those lips?’ He hates the manner in which the sisters’ mother welcomes Veslovsky, ‘as if she were in her own home’. His own brother suddenly seems unpleasant to him. In particular, he is enraged by Kitty’s ‘special smile’ to Veslovsky. He leaves abruptly. By the next day, his jealousy has progressed by leaps and bounds and he suspects that Kitty is already in love with the handsome young man. He imagines himself as a deceived husband, ‘needed by his wife and lover only to provide them with life’s conveniences and pleasures’.

  One could conjecture that Levin’s speedy descent into jealousy, in part sparked by the family configuration, is also due to the knowledge he carries within himself of his own past, filled with a colourful variety of liaisons. His own buried guilt and knowledge have him projecting passions of a similar kind on to his imagined young rival and his wife. Levin’s jealousy here is, of course, quickly eased. His suffering and sense of humiliation are dispelled. Meanwhile, Kitty quietly rejoices at the palpable strength of his love that has expressed itself in this way.

  Anna’s unbounded jealousy of Vronsky shares a structural pattern with Levin’s. She, too, is guilt-ridden–far more markedly so since having abandoned her beloved son and her husband. She projects her own excessive passions, her own inner dividedness, on to Vronsky. She imagines the loved and now hated Vronsky constantly betraying her with other women who endanger their union. This is a replay of the way she betrayed her own with Karenin, whom Vronsky made ‘disgusting’ to her, just as she imagines she is to Vronsky now. The power of her emotion is compounded by envy. She is not only jealous of the imagined other women Vronsky may have, but also envies the power he has as a male to walk freely in the world while her own ostracized position chains her in passivity. She both wants to be Vronsky and to be the object of his once undiminished passion.

  Anna’s case elaborates the truth of that old conundrum that the opposite of love is not hate, that equal and opposite passion often spurred by jealousy, but indifference. Karenin tips quickly into indifference. His emotions, Tolstoy stresses, have been stultified by a parentless childhood. His initial sense of rivalry towards Vronsky, his inability to challenge him to a duel, his wish to see Anna dead, are all sparked by social humiliation. But as soon as he finds a way to assuage that sense of humiliation–first by the power that resides in forgiveness, then by allowing a God who governs all into the frame–his jealousy of An
na and of his rival abates. His love, his very being, has little of a passionate base and passes quickly enough into indifference.

  The fall-out of the adultery for Seryozha is more severe. When Anna first falls in love, the boy, without quite understanding the circumstances, feels that he has a rival in Vronsky. He is hostile towards him when they meet: he senses how everyone in the household, apart from Anna, treats Vronsky with ‘horror and loathing’. Faced by Seryozha’s uncertainty towards him, Vronsky, too, is filled with an ‘inexplicable loathing’. Child and lover battle for primacy in Anna’s love and Vronsky wins, at least in the initial foray. Meanwhile, the boy is faced by his father’s cold severity, since Karenin hates Anna in him. With his father, Seryozha is mute, his mind jumbled, his aliveness stifled. When his mother steals in to see him on her secret visit, the child is overwhelmed by joy. But her second disappearance, a double betrayal, makes him ill. Absence and the passage of time, which place him in a school environment, then combine to make his feelings for his mother into a secret and shameful place. He experiences this as a girlish place of sentiment that needs to be repressed. In the last scene in which we see him with his uncle Stepan, Seryozha is unable to feel anything for Anna, except a confused embarrassment. He doesn’t want to, perhaps no longer can altogether, remember her, nor the emotions she aroused in him. Tolstoy, with a dark irony, has him rush off and play with trains in which people fall, just as his mother will.