Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770, the son of a father who sang for a living and whose alcoholism made his family’s life a fright and a misery. Discovering his son was a musical prodigy, he decided to capitalize on it and use him as a cash cow—or calf. After all, Mozart had been paraded around Europe and made a fortune for his parents. He ordered young Ludwig to spend all day at the piano. Sometimes he returned home after all-night binges, staggering drunk, and dragged the boy out of bed, demanding that he practice in the dark. When Ludwig made mistakes, as any boy would, his father beat him. Considering the emotional Molotov cocktail of lovelessness, physical abuse, and a childhood shackled to a piano, it’s a wonder Ludwig developed any regard for music at all. Add to this the fact that he was reported to be quite ugly, slovenly, and understandably shy, and it doesn’t sound as if he had much chance. His mother, though devoted to her children, was brutalized by her husband and always miserable; she died young of tuberculosis. Ludwig was only eight years old when he gave his first public concert, and by fourteen he was assistant to the court organist. With his mother gone and his father out of work, this position allowed him to support the entire family, though barely. But he was no gentleman. Short, blockish, unrefined in manner, with a pockmarked face and a heart scarred by neglect, he was a bad-tempered and intolerant young man, who became easily excited and fought fiercely. He didn’t put up with insults or criticism (both of which his music inspired), and he didn’t suffer fools. Coming as a sequel to the deprivations of his childhood, his growing deafness was excruciating. Not because of his composing—he could hear the music in his mind whether he heard the actual sounds or not—but because of the even greater distance it put between him and the world. He became a tortured spirit, a phantom of life’s opera. Just imagine in what self-eviscerating pain he wrote these words: “O ye men, who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do ye wrong me, you do not know the secret cause…. For me there can be no recreation in the society of my fellows, refined intercourse, mutual exchange of thought; only just as little as the greatest needs command may I mix with society. I must live like an exile…. O providence—grant me at last but one day of pure joy—it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart—O when—O when, O Divine One—shall I feel it again in the temple of nature and man—Never? No—O that would be too hard!”
As his deafness devoured him, he began to compose with even more urgency. He fell vertiginously in love, often and foolishly, inevitably choosing young, beautiful highborn women who never returned his love. The “Moonlight” sonata he dedicated to his own Juliet, Giulietta Guicciardi; but it was her cousin, Therese, who inflamed him enough to write the “Appassionata.” Was she the “Immortal Beloved” he addressed in a letter found in a secret drawer after his death? “What tearful longings after you,” he wrote, “you—my life—my all! farewell. Oh, continue to love me, never misjudge the faithful heart of your beloved L.—Ever yours—Ever mine—Ever each other’s—” Was it an unmailed letter, or a copy of one he had sent? Or was it a fantasy written in an idle hour? We remember Beethoven as a heroic figure, triumphing over his deafness to create electrifying music of great power and passion. We remember him as a rebel and visionary, not as a moody dreamer who was at loose ends emotionally, lonely and tormented, frustrated by unresponsive ladyloves whom he idealized, terribly susceptible to rejection and slight, attuned to life’s sensations, and painfully withdrawn. But Romanticism glorified just that sort of sensitive spirit.
A RETURN TO COURTLY LOVE
Reacting against the bridled hearts of the rationalists, the nineteenth-century Romantics cherished a delicate responsiveness to the world, an aesthetic readiness that at times led to physical weakness, pessimism, or despair. Love poetry flourished that was neither bawdy nor witty but shy and soulful, bursting with asexual rapture. Infatuated with the Middle Ages, when emotions were ceremonial and the Good and the True rode to battle in the name of Virtue and Beauty, poets once more unearthed courtly love. No matter that it had begun among feudal knights and ladies as an adulterous game based on born-again Platonism. In a modified form, it still fitted their needs.
Courtly love is actually a form of decoration. What’s being decorated is lust. Over and over, succeeding generations have discovered courtly love as a way to cleanse sexual attraction of its carnality. In an era of shame-worship we naturally assume that social conventions exist to hide our animal origins, but suppose their purpose is the opposite—a way to draw even more attention to them? The female baboon has a rump and genitals which swell to balloonlike proportions and flush fiery red when she’s in heat. I’m ready, she announces, man oh man, am I ready! And here’s the target. Courtly love and other such games are similar in that they decorate the process, highlighting the ripeness and availability of the female. Consider the bee. A bee can hone in on the (to us invisible) large, bright, ultraviolet target of a black-eyed Susan, and stay on the glide path until it reaches its goal. In complex human societies, where the target isn’t always clear or available, there are many distractions. Elaborate courtship guides one steadily closer and closer to mating. Many a woman has waited for her knight in shining armor to arrive from an unknown direction and treat her with dignity, worship, adoration. Like Rapunzel, she could then let down her hair and allow him to climb into her bedchamber. Her days are pitted with boredom. She feels self-doubt, and a sense of inferiority. Then a benevolent Other arrives who will heal her life, smooth it out, applaud her finest points, and crown her with garlands of praise. She has felt the arrows of sexuality being crafted inside her, a secret quiver. At last a lover arrives, his heart a target; he praises her supple, bowlike body, and he begs her to let fly.
Why do we need a duvet cover for the warm, rich, feather comforter of sensuality? Why hide it beneath artifice? Why try to purify it? Why turn it into a ceremonial stalking dance? What’s wrong with good, old-fashioned, common or garden lust? Why does it embarrass and shame us? For one thing, lust can lead to love, and love is a conspiracy of two that often results in treason. When people fall in love, they break the tight bonds of kinship and leave their families to found a new family with its own bonds, its own values, its own country and kin. “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son,” a father often says with a buoyancy too automatic to be believed. He knows only too well that he is losing a daughter, who will relegate him to the category of fond friend, who will stop obeying him, and in whose life he will no longer be paramount.
Even if all that weren’t true, love games would still appeal to us because they test our wits, and remind us of childhood. In fact, they’re the principal way adults play. Humans love sports—pitting their strength, nerve, and cunning alongside a teammate or against an opponent on a field of glory, in the hope of winning and being rewarded. Love is a demanding sport involving all the muscle groups, including the brain. The goal of love games is intense physical pleasure, and its special challenge is that the rules are always changing, there is plenty of misdirection, the goal sometimes disappears behind a fog of guilt or misgiving, other players (such as in-laws or rivals) can unexpectedly appear on the field, one’s advantage can reverse at a moment’s notice, and power often changes hands before the game is finished. What is chess, polo, baseball, or war compared to that?
In this tournament of wills, complete with armor and jousting, control is the wager and the damsel in distress is one’s self-esteem. The wilder children of Romanticism—Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Goethe, and others—mastered and adored it, but they were the exceptions who defined the movement. Two lowercase casanovas, Byron and Shelley, fueled the literary hearts of the nineteenth century, professing free love and utter availability to whim, to the moment, and to one’s unique response to life. But a large, powerful middle class had already begun making up its mind about life’s important issues—religion, economics, morals, and even what and how to feel. Women were supposed to be delicate, modest, and susceptible to shock. Romantic lovers fell tempestuo
usly in love, indeed they spoke of love in terms of torrents and gushings and floods. (There’s so much liquid moving around in Romantic poems it’s a wonder the games weren’t called on account of rain.) But their love claimed to be nonsexual, chaste, and true. How else could it be, when nice girls were supposed to be pure, sweet, nurturing, and frail? How could they possibly defile such motherly creatures? Women no longer came with large dowries and inherited lands. And while, for women of a certain economic class, industrialism freed them from traditional labors—teaching the children, making clothes, cooking, and baking—it also made them utterly dependent on their husbands. It wasn’t seemly for the middle-class wife to go out, to socialize, volunteer, or attend school. If a wife didn’t need to work, and she didn’t bring wealth with her, what role did she fill? Mainly a child bearer and symbol, she fitted a romanticized ideal that no one could live up to, just as medieval ladies couldn’t live up to their knights’ ideals. Women were to stay at home and tend the children; men returned home after work and spent time with them and the children. All the important decisions affecting the family were made by the man, the lord of the manor, whose home, modest though it might have been, was his castle. When romantic love sifted through the new dreams of the middle class, it became domesticated, simplified, tidy, sexless.
DOMESTIC PARADISE
The Victorians found peace in worshiping the family itself as a living idyll, and looking to the home as a realm of freedom and stability. In that sacred state, it fell to women to be the civilizing force in the family, instilling morals, guarding the good, and encouraging spirituality. This honor was also a terrible burden. Statues to morality dare not bend. How could any woman live up to the perfection required of someone who was dispensing a moral education? Prudery reached an all-time high, because paragons of virtue could not utter or be exposed in any way to indecency. Courtly love had included the cult of the queen, and Queen Victoria herself, a prim matron, fitted the bill nicely. She became its symbol.
Calling a fig a fig was thought to traumatize a woman, so candid words were replaced by euphemisms. At dinner, a woman would be offered the “bosom” of the chicken. If she rode horseback, it had to be sidesaddle, because she dare not hold anything so lusty as a horse between her legs. Noah Webster, who canonized the American vocabulary by compiling its first dictionary, was a terrible prude and a religious fanatic who worried a great deal about delicacy. He altered offensive words, changing “testicles” to “peculiar members,” for instance. Under the entry for love, the example of usage he gives is solely religious. There are many legends about Webster, but my favorite recalls the moment when his wife caught him kissing the chambermaid. “Why, Noah, I’m surprised!” she is supposed to have said. To which he replied, like the bona-fide schoolmaster he was, “Madame, you are astonished; I am surprised.”
A woman visiting a doctor’s office might use a doll to show the place where she felt pain. During childbirth, a doctor worked blind, his hands underneath a sheet, lest he see the woman’s genitals. Since the avenues of love and evacuation are so close together, the whole area became taboo. Filth in every sense—moral and literal—was disgusting and had to be scrubbed out of the home, the body, and one’s life. Romanticism had idealized women as benevolent, chaste mother figures. That made sex with them incestuous, wicked, and dirty. Any woman who tried the spirited flirtations of the eighteenth century was thought a trollop. A woman could only wait for a man to notice her, and then she could only accept him or refuse him. Havelock Ellis, a sex researcher of the time, reported instances of couples married for years who had never seen each other naked. A wife’s role as a sex partner was to lie still, act helpless, and be unaroused, while her husband performed his bestial act. In fact, many people, including doctors, claimed that women simply didn’t feel sexual pleasure. To enjoy sex with a willing and enthusiastic partner, one who was allowed to act that way, a man had to visit a brothel. So it comes as no surprise that prostitution and pornography flourished during the Victorian era, as did masochism, perversion, and venereal disease. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austrian psychiatrist and forensic doctor, first described masochism in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), naming it after a contemporary fellow-Austrian, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote novels about men who liked harsh, dominating women to humiliate and physically hurt them (preferably while wearing leather or fur). In this classic scene from Sacher-Masoch’s short story “Venus in Furs,” the cruel but sophisticated Wanda ties up her lover Severin and then stands menacingly in front of him:
The beautiful woman bent on her adorer a strange look from her green eyes, icy and devouring, then she crossed the room, slowly donned a splendid loose coat of red satin, richly trimmed with princely ermine, and took from her dressing table a whip, a long thong attached to a short handle, with which she was wont to punish her great mastiff. “You want it,” she said. “Then I will whip you.” Still on his knees, “Whip me,” cried her lover. “I implore you!”
The idea of the femme fatale, the woman who wielded pain and gave the man a dose of guilt, the “beauty fresh from hell,” as Swinburne put it with relish, contrasted appealingly with the submissive woman at home, the monument to sacred motherhood. Commenting on the guilt-clad morals of the time, Gustave Flaubert quipped: “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he’ll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.”
We use the word puritanical to describe a repressive attitude about love and sensuality. But it was the Victorians rather than the Puritans who dressed women in the fashion equivalent of a strait jacket and hushed up lovers’ sighs. Their fiction of “the happy family,” where Father rules and a grateful mother is the lady of the house, was a social ideal picked up later by the film industry and handed whole to the twentieth century.
Paradoxically, just when the moralists were adding castor oil to the tonic of marriage, militant women were fighting for the right to be equal at work, at home, and in bed. They wanted to dress comfortably, play at sports as men did, educate themselves, and do meaningful work. Marriages were little but sepia halftones. Freud, Havelock-Ellis, Balzac, Flaubert, and others recorded lives of quiet desperation, but their own lives weren’t free of neuroses and marital mayhem. Despite their singular open-mindedness, I doubt they would have guessed the extent to which love and sex would fascinate and obsess the twentieth century. From our current turn-of-the-century perspective—which now includes Masters and Johnson, psychoanalytic theory, and the goals of the women’s movement—this kind of obsession all seems normal, even traditional, since it’s what many of our parents experienced as well. Birth control, the mass media, a growing respect for women, a greater separation between the religious and secular worlds, the sexual revolution, and biological nightmares such as AIDS have all reshaped our moral world. It may happen now that we marry for love, but for many centuries people didn’t find that necessary; new generations may not find it possible. Other eras had other matters on their minds—salvation, honor, inheritance, knowledge, war, a plunging birthrate. We treasure love. It quenches, vexes, guides, and murders us. It seeps into the mortar of all our days. It feeds our passions, it fills our fantasies, it inspires our art. What will future eras make of this?
MODERN LOVE
When I think about the essence of being modern, the changes in attitude that led to the life we now know, three things come to mind: choice, privacy, and books. As a child of the seventies, I find it almost impossible to fathom a time when people couldn’t make choices in their lives—whimsical choices, let alone solemn ones. Personal freedom has a long, slow history, based in part on the growing size of the world’s population, which gave people a chance to be anonymous. If they couldn’t be exempt from the moral law, they could at least toy with exemption in private. Despite arranged marriages, people stole the freedom to love whom they chose, without shame; then to choose wh
om to marry; and in time they even made the shocking leap to wishing to marry someone they loved. As wealth and leisure grew, houses began to have specific rooms for specific uses, including a bedroom where couples could be unobserved. Soon, young marrieds wanted a place of their own, separate from their in-laws. They wanted to be “alone together,” a new idea based on a newly won sense of privacy.
The invention of printing aided and abetted lovers. Once people became more literate, they could take a book with them to some quiet place and read to themselves and think. Reading changed society forever. Solitary contemplation began to emerge as commonplace, and readers could discover in romantic and erotic literature what was possible, or at least imaginable. They could dare controversial thoughts and feel bolstered by allies, without telling anyone. Books had to be kept somewhere, and with the library came the idea of secluded hours, alone with one’s innermost thoughts. Lovers could blend their hearts by sharing sympathetic authors; what they could not express in person they could at least point to in the pages of a book. A shared book could speak to lovers in confidence, increasing their sense of intimacy even if the loved one was absent or a forbidden companion. Books opened the door to an aviary filled with flights of the imagination, winged fantasies of love; they gave readers a sense of emotional community. Somewhere in another city or state another soul was reading the same words, perhaps dreaming the same dream.