Romantic Passion

III. Cultural Expressions of (Romantic) Love:
 

• "Presently romantic passion (or romantic love or infatuation) is defined as any intense attraction involving the idealization of the other within an erotic context.  The idealization carries with it the desire for intimacy and the pleasurable expectation of enduring for some unknown time into the future." (4)
• "Romantic passion draws on...several psychological processes that range from erotic stimulation, emotional attachment, and subjective idealization" (4 underline added).
• core properties: "1) the desire for union or merger; 2) idealization of the beloved; 3) exclusivity; 4) intrusive thinking about the love object; 5) emotional dependency; 6) a reordering of motivational hierarchies or life priorities; and 7) a powerful sense of empathy and concern for the beloved" (5).

1. Romantic love compared with courtly love, realist and modernist views (from The Nature of Love 3: The Modern World.  Irving Singer.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987)

• Romantic love and courtly love--"Romantic love deviates from courtlly love by interpreting beauty or goodness in terms of the erotic experience itself, with the result that sexuality takes on greater significance.   ...In Romantic love, the elevation of the male occurred through an idealization that often had nothing to do with the beauty of women.  This new ideal was the modern concept of heroism: self-sacrifice in the interest of humanity, the nation, a revolutionary cause, the demands of one or another art.  ...Seeing in everyone and everything [not necessarily a beauty or a lady] the ability to become love's alter ego, romanticisim develops a segment in the theme of magic that had previously been neglected.  ...love itself is now magical"  (p 14, 16, 18-19; underline added)

 
• problems with Romantic love, compared with realist view.  "If love is the search for an unknown, if it does not presuppose much knowledge about another person, it two people merge through an experience that reveals divinity but has no objective basis in what they are as a particular man and woman, it seems strange to say that they mutually or reciprocally love each other.
• Romantic love as a haven from social reality
vs. Modernist's view; e.g. Freud's view of libido (sexual impulse); Proust "What I here call love is a reciprocal torture."

"Victorian love was more patient, more polite, more self-sacrificing, and more Christian than modern love.  It conformed more to parental influence and was structured more in deference to public rituals.  It may ave been more explosive, but it was not as authentic as modern love, and that is my argument." (9).

• Where does "Romantic love" come from? --social factors and psychological factors

• Functions of Romantic Passion

1. Examples in Romantic Poetry:

• Romantic Love and Female Types

Literature and other arts continued ...to be dominated by men in the romantic period, and so it is primarily woman as viewed by man that has given us the various images of woman in romantic art.
These range from the idealized simple, domestic, virtuous girl and mother to the ethereal beauty, inspirer of lofty ideas, to the she devil, temptress or femme fatale who seduces and ruins innocent young men.
All these types may inspire romantic love, an all-consuming passion that can never be fulfilled (if it is, it usually leads to disillusionment and a new object) and often causes the hero extreme misery or even death. (The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities 4th ed. Vol II.  Mary Witt, et al.  pp. 298-99)

• other examples: The Sorrow of Young Werther, opera Carmen, La Boheme, Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde
• Liebestod in Romantic Love

Why is death a consummation or even an intensification of their love?  Avoiding sex, the beauty's aging and becoming ugly and their love's becoming dull and plain? 

• Pre-Raphaelite painting:

A Huguenot exhibits three stereotypical characteristics of love in mid-nineteen-century art.  First, it is emphatically narrative.  Its exquisite lovers exchanging intense gazes are posed to emphasize the poingnancy of this particular moment on the eve of a massacre which actually took place in Paris on Aug. 24, 1572, and which promises to end the man's life.  Secondly, the danger to love comes from without, ...The implied moral is that love would reign supreme if only the external obstacles of ...could be surmounted....  Thirdly, there is no pictorial significance attaching to "the between," the space between the lovers.  It is, in the language of art criticism, "negative space," incidental to the relationship between the lovers.  from The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns.  Left  John Millais  A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, 1857

Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt, Love, 1985  "Klimt's positive and deficient love set in a minimally narrative time frame and more exclusively aesthetic space marks a transition between 19th-century story-telling and later, more explicit, renderings of encounter" (54)	Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1908 or 1911  Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna

• Modern Culture: "Araby" (Joyce); Women in Love, "The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock" etc.

Wassily Kandinsky, Between Two, 1934.  In this painting the protruding curves of the male and female froms closely approach one another's boundaries, indicating the powerufl attrative and repulsive forces between them. (57-58)

Edward Munch, Eye in Eye, 1894  contrasts sharply with conventional "love-at-first-sight" images popular in the 19th-century (p. 55)

• Contemporary Examples in Taiwanese popular culture