All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  In her subtle essay on the long, often rebarbative, friendship between two of America’s founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Judith Shklar probes the way different kinds of political regime colour the nature of friendship. Despotisms and civil unrest, she argues, foster the ‘one soul in two bodies’ kind of friendship, such as Montaigne describes in his amitié parfaite with La Boétie. The friends form a ‘private polity’, a ‘moral universe’ in which ‘freedom and spontaneity reign while oppression and hypocrisy are the universal rule in the larger society’. If your friend is in trouble with the law, since there is an affinity between friends not just of feelings and opinions but of personality, the claims of friendship trump the claims of the state. ‘To love one’s friends more than one’s rulers may be morally and emotionally the one way to have a worthwhile life at all.’

  Free societies, in which friends may in the course of a lifetime take up different political causes, produce potentially combative friendships. Many may fail irreparably in the contest between private affection and political will or expedience. Adams and Jefferson, though temperamentally altogether dissimilar, maintained a friendship that was forged in politics and later became personal, despite a falling-out that lasted a dozen years. After both had retired, the two old gentlemen began a correspondence which, though it skirted an intimacy that the more passionate Adams may have wished and the more restrained Jefferson resisted, built an ever closer friendship grounded in ‘affection, common memories, shared experiences, and continued lively interest in books and ideas’.

  At its start, Jefferson having joked of his ‘senile garrulity’, Adams responds: ‘My Senectutal Loquacity has more than retaliated your Senile Garrulity.’ They discuss politics, grandchildren, walks, books, and agree to disagree on religion and much else. They could love one another despite their divergent views. Towards the end, on 15 February 1825, Jefferson, ever the composed eighteenth-century gentleman, signs off a letter with ‘Nights of rest to you and days of tranquillity are the wishes I tender you with my affect[iona]te respects.’ They died on the same day, the Fourth of July 1826, fifty years to the day after their finest hour, the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  Female Friends

  It may come as something of a surprise at a time when the ability to relate is specifically gendered female that women were long thought–by men, of course–too frivolous, fickle and lacking in that refined moral sense which would permit the highest forms of virtuous friendship, based on steadfastness and intelligence. But gradually, intimate friendship, like all affairs of the heart, was feminized. By the Victorian era, men’s friendships largely revolve around the companionship of clubs, pubs or workplace, or the solidarity of politics, soldiering or trade unions. The dominant image of an emotionally reticent and competitive masculinity, armoured in duties and cares, in part fearful of any homoerotic current, leaves less space for Montaigne’s idealized amitié parfaite, with its mutual intimate outpourings of mind and heart.

  Amongst women, this note of intimate revelation continues into our own time. Both the first and second waves of the women’s movement gave a particular emphasis to female friendships, bonding women in a solidarity of shared bodies, shared problems and shared interests. The ‘sisterhood is powerful’ moment of the 1970s both allowed and encouraged women to love one another in a new way, by also learning to love themselves. Shaking off the stigma that historical secondariness had imposed on them, they revealed their fears and lacks, the shaming matter of their needs, the details of sexual and power relations, in consciousness-raising groups or in female friendships which sometimes extended into sexual terrain. Solidarity was forged.

  By the 1980s women were widely considered to be more emotionally aware and articulate, more capable of reciprocity, and just better at the whole domain of relationship, than men. This female ‘specialization’ in emotion, held to have grown out of women’s childhood conditioning in the need to please and nurture, to listen and be attentive to others, to intuit and empathize, to mask their own needs and desires and put the other first–all characteristics Simone de Beauvoir attributed to women’s secondary status–did indeed make them more attentive to friends and the whole tangled business of relating to others.

  In Between Women, Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach characterized the social agility that attends an encounter between two women who find they share a mutual interest.

  Their conversation takes account of the emotional climate of the subject matter. Thoughts and feelings about work, children, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, about mothers, entertaining, cooking, politics, sex, music, about aspirations, sports, fashion, suffuse their conversation. Their emotions are intrinsic to the contact. They make up a patois–a distinctively women’s language. Confidences are readily and easily shared, assumptions made about difficult emotional states, disappointments acknowledged, and solutions sought. Women unguardedly confide in each other with an ease that often astounds men. Sharing is not a concession, a particularly difficult struggle, an extraction; rather it is part and parcel of women’s relating. It is second nature, a habit, a way of being. Not sharing feels odd, a holding back that feels almost like a betrayal.

  Compassion, sympathy and identification, the authors note, are core elements of all women’s relationships, which are often considered to be primary ones, outlasting sexual entanglements or even marriage. But this special ability to relate doesn’t inevitably trump envy, jealousy and anger whenever lovers, competition or problems at work enter the picture. These, indeed, are the subjects that Between Women, written at a time that was already considered ‘post-feminist’, explores. A single woman may envy her married friend’s stable family and children, while the latter envies the first’s sexual adventures. In the workplace, competition is rife. A woman hitherto supported by her colleagues is shunned or attacked, once she proves successful. A powerful public woman can provide a role model, someone to emulate, but can also arouse hostility in other women, quick to vote or talk her down. Single women or indeed single parents, who depend on friendships far more than coupled ones, find themselves lonely and aggrieved over too-long weekends and holidays spent on their own. The attendant anger, often hidden, is hard to bear.

  Sadly, too, sociologists have recently observed that once women are as much engaged as men in the workplace and in careers, the business of juggling work, family and friends becomes as difficult for them as it has long been for men. Gender stereotypes are rarely altogether stable, nor wholly consistent.

  Friendship, though not always as intensely as passion, has ever been subject to our unruly emotions and riven by conflict and split loyalties. Long tied to lives which centred on the home, with a primary duty to father, husband and children, women would sometimes engage in intimate friendships only to betray them–then, when circumstances changed, take them up again. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Celia abandons her tyrannical father to stay true to her best friend, Rosalind. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the friendship between Hermia and Helena is ruptured by love entanglements. Rivalry in the marriage market and abandonment of friends on account of the calls of sexual passion, or estrangement through the cares of marriage, are constant themes in life as in literature. For women who didn’t marry or whose marriages were ended by the death of the husband, long-lost or ever present friends might provide fine living companions. ‘Boston marriages’–committed partnerships which may or may not have had an active sexual component–became common as soon as women developed some legal and financial independence. Henry James’s novel The Bostonians (1886), in part inspired by his sister Alice’s experience, gave birth to the term used to describe a relationship in which two ‘new women’ engage in a friendship which is also a living arrangement.

  Jane Austen’s life and work provide a panorama of female friendships. After her father died, she, her sister, mother and Martha Lloyd, a long-time friend, set up quarters together–an arrangement which provided companionship and also helped stretch their a
lways limited finances. When young, the teenage girls had frolicked, danced and read together, and also schooled themselves in that feminine religion of self-denial. Jane was later at times in awe of Martha’s selfless virtue in ‘physicking little children’ and providing ‘mental physick’ for the ailing old, though she never could altogether restrain herself from gentle mockery of her own and others’ all-too-human ways: she might have garnered a rather good scene out of the fact that, ten years after her death, ever single Martha, at the age of sixty-three, married Jane’s widowed brother Frank.

  Female friends tumble through Jane Austen’s fiction, taking a trait here and there from the women in her own entourage. Her older and adventurous cousin Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide, whose French husband met his end on the guillotine, brought foreign climes to the parsonage. Her character echoes in the slightly corrupt urbanity of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park and in the vivacity of an Elizabeth Bennet.

  Lizzy herself has an intimate friend in Charlotte Lucas, a serious young woman, slightly older, with whom she shares confidences and argument. In part, the women rely on this kind of exchange to work out who they are and what they think. But their views on marriage and the suitability or not of partners diverge: when Charlotte, already twenty-eight and facing the prospect of a single and impoverished future, accepts an offer from fawning Mr Collins, a man Lizzy knows she doesn’t respect, the two women fall out. Lizzy’s aunt, older and wiser, provides the receptive ear of friendship and sound advice and support in Charlotte’s stead.

  Displacing her own ambivalence about marriage, Jane Austen’s Emma concentrates on finding a husband for her new friend Harriet, mistakenly importing her own class bias–and her naivety about passion as well, perhaps, as an unconscious jealousy–into singling out unsuitable partners.

  Amongst Austen’s juvenilia is the burlesque, Love and Friendship, written when she was fourteen and signalling the centrality of friends, despite the overarching importance of marriage to the women’s lives. Here, she takes several digs at the culture of over-heightened sensibility. When the heroine, Laura, elopes with penniless Edward, she is more than grateful, having been ‘deprived during the course of three weeks of a real friend’, to find Sophia at the house where she and her new husband arrive:

  Sophia was rather above the middle size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely features, but increased their Beauty.–It was the Charectarestic [sic] of her Mind–. She was all Sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Friendship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts–.

  The satire, of course, takes as its butt the self-indulgent sentimentality and spurious instant emotion of the popular novelettes of the time, as well as the effusions of fashionable teenagers in their friendships. Some things at least seem not altogether to have changed. Austen’s understanding and views on female friendship are no more uniform than they are on love and marriage. Sometimes malice and envy dominate, as in Miss Bingley’s hypocritical friendship with Jane; sometimes there is genuine engagement, as between Charlotte and Lizzy.

  In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf bemoaned the fact that literature largely gives us women ever and always ‘lit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex’. Men’s fantasies of women, as objects of love, of sexual attraction, or of hate, inevitably dominate novels by men. She asks us to imagine how impoverished literature as a whole would be if men were only lovers, and never ‘the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers’. She allows, however, that Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë gave us more capacious women, women as friends.

  Indeed, Charlotte Brontë offers a portrayal of a singularly formative friendship–the one between schoolgirls. The intimacy between Jane Eyre and Helen Burns, who is fourteen to Jane’s ten at their school, Lowood, delineates that process of identification with a friend which is so crucial to the eventual shaping of the woman she becomes.

  Orphan Jane comes to Lowood, having suffered the injustice of her Aunt Reed’s punishing treatment. Lonely, spirited, desperate to be loved, Jane’s rebellious soul is partially tempered by gentle, daydreaming Helen, who has deep faith in a benevolent almighty Father, a parent for the lonely or orphaned children the girls are. From her faith Helen draws a talent for endurance. After Brocklehurst, the vindictive headmaster of Lowood, shames Jane in front of the whole school by depicting her as a lying ungrateful wretch, she reveals her sad trajectory of arbitrary sufferings to her new and supportive best friend. Helen’s recognition of Jane as the wrongly calumnied being she is, soothes and bolsters her. In the process, Jane also learns how to be a little more like her friend. When Helen dies in her arms, it is as if Jane has taken into herself some of her loving friend’s qualities. Helen’s good-natured patience will abet Jane’s survival in a world which is less than amiable to impoverished single women. What Brontë brings to light in this depiction of a friendship between schoolgirls is the way in which friends shape the individuals that we are.

  Shaping Friendships

  Psychoanalysts think of personality as being constituted through a series of identifications. Like Jane with Helen, the subject–unconsciously and rarely without ambivalence–assimilates an attribute or an aspect of another and is thereby partly transformed according to the model the other provides. Growing up, the child takes in various properties of its parents–gestures, habits of mind, ways of seeing the world and their own bodies and genders. Close friendships with admired others play a significant part in this process of shaping personality. If the friend, or indeed a lover, dies, is lost for ever, the incorporation of the friend (or lover) can have a more fundamental impact: they become part of one. The death of La Boétie seems to have had this kind of effect on Montaigne. Montaigne internalized his friend and continued to carry on ‘a conversation’ with him throughout his life. They had indeed become one.

  In The Psychology of Women, the analyst Helene Deutsch draws on the case of a woman she names ‘Mrs Smith’ to explore the workings of a particular kind of remedial identification between friends. Mrs Smith was incapable of bringing a pregnancy to term. She had had numerous miscarriages and suffered a stillbirth when a baby was born a month too early. The problem, as Deutsch saw it, was that Mrs Smith’s ‘identification with her aggressive mother had filled her with almost conscious horror’: this made taking on female matter problematic. Also, her mother had wanted a son, and the birth of her daughter had been met with long-term hostility.

  Mrs Smith was eventually able to have a child, but only by the intercession of a friend with whom she could identify–a friend who had a mother whose maternal warmth embraced both of the younger women. In her memoir, Deutsch makes it clear that Mrs Smith is in fact herself. By a happy coincidence, she and her friend, ‘a goddess of serenity’, had become pregnant at around the same time. An identification with her meant ‘my motherhood changed its character. Through a psychological impact on biological forces, my desire for a child was fulfilled.’ Her friend gave birth one month later than she had expected, just when Deutsch’s pregnancy had reached full term.

  We develop, become the adults we are, with and through others–both real and imaginary. Even when they have real playmates, toddlers invent imaginary friends who sustain them. They become partners in pretend play, serve as vehicles for elaborating their fears and desires, provide a repository for secrets and wish-fulfilments, as well as help them to differentiate between right and wrong. They also help them to deal with problems and with loneliness: fantasy, after all, is one of the ways humans have of making good the stresses and strains of everyday life. One little girl who played the piano a lot was accompanied by Mozart, Beethoven and a musical retinue when she went off to preschool. A three-year-old boy, who had just had a baby sister, invented an older brother for himself, who kept him fine company while his mother focused on the new arrival.

  In a recent UK study, eighteen hundred children we
re asked about their past or present experience of fantasy friends. Forty-eight per cent had one or had had several. These children, as well as many observed by other researchers, displayed greater creativity than their peers, were more competent at language, were better able to imagine the minds of others and read their expressions–were in other words better at making ‘real’ friends and better at relations with adults. They also had a better grasp of symbolic thought, important to their subsequent intellectual abilities.

  In one gender-based study, researchers found that while girls tend to ‘have’ a companion, boys tended to ‘be’ their companions. In other words, rather than having Spiderman as their friend, they became him. Boys also tended to make their imaginary companions better at everything, stronger, more powerful; while the little girls made their friends less strong and powerful, and then helped them. Since children take their cues from the culture around them, it’s unsurprising that even where imaginary friends are concerned they fall into our time’s stereotypes: women today are still valued for the care they can provide, while what is demanded of men is action and power.

  Our epoch affords increasing possibilities for virtual make-believe. Individuals well past toddlerdom can fantasize any number of personalities for themselves while interacting with cyber-friends. We celebrate numerous remakings of the self, masquerade the performance of various gender identities and metrosexuality. In this environment, some psychoanalysts have begun to say that they are seeing an increasing number of ‘as if’ personalities in their consulting rooms: people who mimic others wholesale, imitate what they latch on to outside themselves, rather than identifying in an imaginative and reciprocal way. In other words, they don’t engage. They simply repeat or double others, passively don personae without ever building up any emotional links. In one case, a man becomes a lawyer after having befriended a successful advocate. When that relationship ceases, he happens on a sailor and joins the merchant navy, and so on, without ever querying or doubting his choices and actions. Breakdown can ensue when the object of their imitation disappears. This distortion of personality is akin to what Winnicott calls a ‘false self’–a self built in utter compliance with the environment, with deprivation at its genesis. If ‘human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’, as T.S. Eliot says in the first of his Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, too much fantasy leads to its own forms of suffering.