Courtly Love as Adultery vs. Marriage as Enlightened Friendship
STUDENT:
Wollstonecraft seems to believe that love is detrimental to the personal power of women. I think very differently. I believe that marriage should have a strong element of friendship as well as passionate love. True love cannot be achieved without equality and respect, therefore Wollstonecraft's philosophy is very compatible with romantic love in my opinion. The problem, I think, is that she is falling into the patriarchal tendency to de-value feminine traits such as emotion and connectedness and emphasizing the masculine ideals of rationality and independence. Is she truly feminist or rather encouraging women to reject their femininity in order to gain power?
TEACHER:
Glad to see you thinking about these issues. Interaction like this will help you as a student, to develop skills of social interactions with instructors, and to raise your grade. Keep it up.
That said, it's important to recognize Wollstonecraft's attempt to be perfectly honest and realistic. She's very clear about the fact that husbands and wives can be either friends or lovers, but that it is not possible to be both. Of course our culture doesn't believe this. But that doesn't indicate that our culture is right. It seems no culture has ever entertained so many impossible and contradictory fantasies about marriage as our own. Married couples are expected in our culture to be best friends, soul mates, true lovers, successful business partners and model parents - all at the same time. Impossible! And the pathetic absurdity of modern marriage reveals itself most clearly in our current fantasies and fascination regarding "extreme" couples: two people who are so into each other that they regularly enjoy hot love well into their 70s, as well as tabloid stories about prodigious adulterers who must and can maintain a huge stable full of illicit partners even though their own spouse is considered incredibly hot.
According to Wollstonecraft's terms, even courtly love is relatively sane and healthy in comparison with the utter madness of our own culture. We may prefer either Wollstonecraft's view of gender relations (friendship between married peers) or medieval courtly love (passion within an adulterous liaison). Or we may prefer neither. But would should be clear is that both Wollstonecraft and courtiers, for all their differences, are correct to agree on this much: you can have it either one way or the other, but not both. Courtiers opt for amorous passion over sober friendship, whereas Wollstonecraft opts for sober friendship over amorous passion. The two views are indeed utterly opposed. But, wrong or right, each clearly states its values and as a consequence neither appears to be either absurd or hypocritical. Whereas our culture appears to be both.
All that said, I'm not sure why you would think Wollstonecraft is falling into line with patriarchy. The standard reading of her, one which I have never seen disputed, is just the contrary. Wollstonecraft is for very good reasons considered one of the very first modern feminists, and that because her writings offer a strong challenge to patriarchal beliefs and practices regarding women. This is precisely why she so adamantly opposes whatever remnants or modifications of patriarchal love she finds still alive in her own culture. Because courtly love is intimately tied to notions of hierarchy. Generally, courtly love entails debasing a woman by treating her like a child even though she is an adult, and then exalting that woman by putting her on a pedestal and treating her as an idealized object even though she is a real person. Wollstonecraft would see this practice as perversity added upon perversity.
Recall that Wollstonecraft's feminism is, by contrast, largely based in the naturalness of gender roles, something she inherited from Locke and Rousseau. Whether feminism and gender studies today agree with her or not, Wollstonecraft states quite clearly that she believes there are biological differences between men and women. Nevertheless, she seems to argue that they are deferences of degree rather than kind. Men in general may be stronger than women, for Wollstonecraft, but that does not mean she believes that men are inherently strong whereas women are inherently weak. There should not, for Wollstonecraft, be too scales or standards to which women and men are held. Rather, each should be seen as partaking of a general human nature which can manifest itself in an infinite variety of ways. Because men and women share a common nature, Wollstonecraft argues it should be possible for them to treat one another as peers in a relationship, rather than master and slave, or lord and vassal. Friendship, which Wollstonecraft understands soberly in terms of ancient Roman philosophy, is far superior to the excesses of passionate courtly love, because it is reasonable, enduring and civilizing.
Directly rejecting anything Wollstonecraft would consider natural, courtly love is, on the other hand, by its very rules pledged to strive after the ideal, the impossible. Courtly love dedicates itself to the artificial inflammation of the highest human passions, and the doomed effort to make the transitory passions permanent. The commitment to such repeated and failed attempts to achieve impossible passion will invariably manifest itself in violence, the exemplary instance of which is medieval chivalry - jousting, adventuring and crusading. It's is Wollstonecraft's repugnance to such residues of "gothic" culture which makes her a true child of the Enlightenment and not a Romantic. Were we read Romantic writers this semester, we would soon discover their renewed interest in medieval culture, in certain key cases in the form of courtly culture and Catholicism, both of which Wollstonecraft - herself rather Roman in disposition - would have found decidedly morbid.
Wollstonecraft seems to believe that love is detrimental to the personal power of women. I think very differently. I believe that marriage should have a strong element of friendship as well as passionate love. True love cannot be achieved without equality and respect, therefore Wollstonecraft's philosophy is very compatible with romantic love in my opinion. The problem, I think, is that she is falling into the patriarchal tendency to de-value feminine traits such as emotion and connectedness and emphasizing the masculine ideals of rationality and independence. Is she truly feminist or rather encouraging women to reject their femininity in order to gain power?
TEACHER:
Glad to see you thinking about these issues. Interaction like this will help you as a student, to develop skills of social interactions with instructors, and to raise your grade. Keep it up.
That said, it's important to recognize Wollstonecraft's attempt to be perfectly honest and realistic. She's very clear about the fact that husbands and wives can be either friends or lovers, but that it is not possible to be both. Of course our culture doesn't believe this. But that doesn't indicate that our culture is right. It seems no culture has ever entertained so many impossible and contradictory fantasies about marriage as our own. Married couples are expected in our culture to be best friends, soul mates, true lovers, successful business partners and model parents - all at the same time. Impossible! And the pathetic absurdity of modern marriage reveals itself most clearly in our current fantasies and fascination regarding "extreme" couples: two people who are so into each other that they regularly enjoy hot love well into their 70s, as well as tabloid stories about prodigious adulterers who must and can maintain a huge stable full of illicit partners even though their own spouse is considered incredibly hot.
According to Wollstonecraft's terms, even courtly love is relatively sane and healthy in comparison with the utter madness of our own culture. We may prefer either Wollstonecraft's view of gender relations (friendship between married peers) or medieval courtly love (passion within an adulterous liaison). Or we may prefer neither. But would should be clear is that both Wollstonecraft and courtiers, for all their differences, are correct to agree on this much: you can have it either one way or the other, but not both. Courtiers opt for amorous passion over sober friendship, whereas Wollstonecraft opts for sober friendship over amorous passion. The two views are indeed utterly opposed. But, wrong or right, each clearly states its values and as a consequence neither appears to be either absurd or hypocritical. Whereas our culture appears to be both.
All that said, I'm not sure why you would think Wollstonecraft is falling into line with patriarchy. The standard reading of her, one which I have never seen disputed, is just the contrary. Wollstonecraft is for very good reasons considered one of the very first modern feminists, and that because her writings offer a strong challenge to patriarchal beliefs and practices regarding women. This is precisely why she so adamantly opposes whatever remnants or modifications of patriarchal love she finds still alive in her own culture. Because courtly love is intimately tied to notions of hierarchy. Generally, courtly love entails debasing a woman by treating her like a child even though she is an adult, and then exalting that woman by putting her on a pedestal and treating her as an idealized object even though she is a real person. Wollstonecraft would see this practice as perversity added upon perversity.
Recall that Wollstonecraft's feminism is, by contrast, largely based in the naturalness of gender roles, something she inherited from Locke and Rousseau. Whether feminism and gender studies today agree with her or not, Wollstonecraft states quite clearly that she believes there are biological differences between men and women. Nevertheless, she seems to argue that they are deferences of degree rather than kind. Men in general may be stronger than women, for Wollstonecraft, but that does not mean she believes that men are inherently strong whereas women are inherently weak. There should not, for Wollstonecraft, be too scales or standards to which women and men are held. Rather, each should be seen as partaking of a general human nature which can manifest itself in an infinite variety of ways. Because men and women share a common nature, Wollstonecraft argues it should be possible for them to treat one another as peers in a relationship, rather than master and slave, or lord and vassal. Friendship, which Wollstonecraft understands soberly in terms of ancient Roman philosophy, is far superior to the excesses of passionate courtly love, because it is reasonable, enduring and civilizing.
Directly rejecting anything Wollstonecraft would consider natural, courtly love is, on the other hand, by its very rules pledged to strive after the ideal, the impossible. Courtly love dedicates itself to the artificial inflammation of the highest human passions, and the doomed effort to make the transitory passions permanent. The commitment to such repeated and failed attempts to achieve impossible passion will invariably manifest itself in violence, the exemplary instance of which is medieval chivalry - jousting, adventuring and crusading. It's is Wollstonecraft's repugnance to such residues of "gothic" culture which makes her a true child of the Enlightenment and not a Romantic. Were we read Romantic writers this semester, we would soon discover their renewed interest in medieval culture, in certain key cases in the form of courtly culture and Catholicism, both of which Wollstonecraft - herself rather Roman in disposition - would have found decidedly morbid.