All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Such patterns find their partial equivalents in so-called honour killings today in which daughters (and mothers), who stand in for paternal and familial reputation but count for little in their own right, are expendable in the purification of family virtue.

  King Lear unleashes tragedy by partitioning his territory in response to public and competitive testimonials of love from his daughters–an exchange of money for love, one might say. While the elder two, Goneril and Regan, greedy and worldly, know how to flatter, the youngest, his favourite Cordelia, is tongue-tied. She simply can’t traduce the intimate nature of her feeling in a public contest: her love is more ‘ponderous’ than her tongue: it weighs too heavily for easy speech. Heaving her heart into her mouth is an impossibility; all she can say, her words echoing marriage vows in a scene in which her future husband is present, is ‘I love your Majesty/According to my bond, nor more nor less.’

  When Lear, insatiable in his demand, asks for more, she responds in judicious fashion that his claim on her is inappropriate. He is asking for more than natural affection can give.

  Good my lord,

  You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I

  Return those duties back as are right fit,

  Obey you, love you, and most honour you.

  Why have my sisters husbands if they say

  They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,

  That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

  Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

  Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,

  To love my father all. (I. i. 98–106)

  Vain, tyrannical, incapable of giving up the power he so ostensibly seeks to shed, Lear avoids his favourite’s plea, abdicates love, throne, and eventually reason. He disowns her. Perhaps he thinks her suitors won’t have her without her dowry and she’ll remain all his. When the King of France is moved to take her just for herself, Lear proclaims to Cordelia: ‘Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.’ His private love has turned to public hate, and his curses on her will fall on many heads, his own amongst them. Casting out Cordelia, Lear too becomes an outcast, a poor naked wretch on a blasted heath. The insatiability of his love brings on her death.

  If murderous passions within the family are now mostly not enacted on a grand scale–though the sordid, abusive and traumatizing instances of parent and vulnerable child incest provide their demotic underside–it’s clear that emotions in the family run the whole gamut from love to hate, and all the affection, kindness, pride, envy, jealousy and grief in between. These emotions also hurtle across the generations. How our parents behave towards one another and towards siblings and ourselves, as well as what they say–inevitably not quite in keeping with what they do–impacts on the love patterns, the conscious and unconscious wishes, that we then proceed to enact in a variety of ways. Growing up, the child identifies with parts of one or t’other parent–absent or present–rebels against the identification, yet often holding on to it in some way, then finds it revivified at one moment or another in life’s ever variegated journey. His status amongst his siblings, his loves and rivalries, play into these patterns.

  In his memoir My Lives (2005), Edmund White evokes that shaping trajectory through family life. His mother, Delilah Mae Teddlie, had lost her own father when she was still a child, and thought that this had instilled in her ‘a floating, but permanent dread, of being abandoned by a man, a crucial man, or just by men, men in general’. Her husband left her for his mistress when little Edmund was just seven, though the marriage had endured for twenty-two years. She then took a post as a state psychologist testing children who were ‘very bright or very slow’, work she had long been training for. She also tested Edmund and his sister frequently, detecting in her son ‘signs of a great soul and highly advanced spirituality’. A larger-than-life character, who the children later determined bore a kinship to Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Du Bois, she was prone to rages, fits of weeping and self-dramatizing. She also loved her bourbon and her extravagant clothes, and was always on the lookout for the right man. Young Edmund was her most constant one, and would daily tie her girth into a gargantuan girdle and act as her reader on long car journeys–‘hopeful, deep books, that would sometimes cause her to look dreamy’. She hoped and feared for a ‘strange destiny’ for her son, giving him Nijinsky’s Life when he was nine or ten.

  Having grown up during the fifties when homosexuality was seen as an aberration to be cured, young Edmund continued to be obsessed by men and drawn to betraying them. Somewhere in his reading of and visits to a variety of analysts, he came across the theory that

  homosexuality was caused by an absent father and a suffocating mother. Perhaps my mother herself had been the one to suggest that my father’s absence had queered me, for she was always eager to work out the multiple ways in which his desertion had harmed us all… I was sent to live with my father for one year back in Cincinnati, but he ignored me–and I had sex on a regular basis with the neighbour boy.

  His father was a man who, though privately eccentric, even violent, ‘wanted to appear, if not actually be, irreproachable’, so despite his view of psychoanalysis as a form of ‘soak-the-rich charlatanism’, he paid for the teenage Edmund to see an analyst. Needless to say, his sexual orientation didn’t change: it was society, rather than him, that needed to, and eventually did.

  Neither, for many years, did his ways of loving change–or not altogether–though he had in part internalized a childhood moment of homophobia. Like his mother, who suffered from self-loathing and was prone to make drunken, coquettish demands, ‘I alternate between low self-esteem and a prickly sense of my own importance.’ Like her, he sobs for long periods when a lover leaves him. And like her, he is always ‘pursuing one man or another’, though his love affairs last longer.

  More tales from family life

  Amy, by contrast, grew up with parents who were enmeshed in that unusual constellation, a lifelong love affair with each other. In her narrative, she and her sister hardly count: they are barely visible witnesses to their parents’ ever manifested ardour. Always holding hands, their first allegiance is to each other and is palpably physical. So she and her sister form a parallel, secondary universe and find their succour in one another. They play, they chat, they imagine, they shore each other up, they wonder at their parents’ indifference to them. If neither girl becomes the apple of her father’s eye or mother’s favourite, they’re not unhappy. They often think of their parents as ‘simple’, as their children, rather than the other way round. When she grows up, a rebellious Amy is interested only in intellectual love. She marries a mathematician. Sex is unimportant. When she and her husband have a daughter, unlike her parents she is devoted to her child. Yet soon she is quite happy to leave her for long periods in the care of others. And when she travels for work reasons, her closest links are with other women. Sometimes these are sexualized, particularly after she and her husband divorce. It is with other women in her circle of friends that she finds her strongest bonds. They give her the kind of attentiveness her childhood relationship with her sister helped to put in place.

  When Paula, twenty-six, describes her childhood, it is also a narrative of parents in love, herself on the outside looking in, bringing them her accomplishments which in the course of time grew considerable. Her mother, once an actress, was and continues to be by Paula’s own account rivetingly beautiful, flirtatious, ever the centre of male attention, including her adoring husband’s. Paula, an only child, joined her father in that adoration. In a sense she made the choice of not competing with her mother in the womanly stakes. Instead, she opted for her father. He became her companion, her pal, her fellow spirit, the person with whom she discussed life, interests, books: together they treated her mother as the incarnation of the feminine. Growing into adolescence, Paula actively rebelled against her mother’s wiles, her mantra that a woman must hold back and play hard to get, her sexualized conception o
f womanhood. She felt plain, ill at ease in her female skin. She wore boyish clothes, had cropped hair. She shunned flirtation and sexualized play. She didn’t know how to engage with boys, except as friends; though she participated in a number of the kind of casual sexual encounters that tend to characterize the urban young, she never fell in love. She was a self-avowed feminist. Yet her father remained the measure for her of what a man, indeed what a human being, should be. He was the most important person in her life, and she sensed that when she was paid attention by boys of her own age he felt eclipsed, displaced. When she recently at last fell in love, it was with a young man she clashed swords with intellectually. But she continues to worry that she has somehow betrayed her father, let him down. She still hasn’t introduced her new love to her parents.

  Proprietary and adoring, fathers’ relationships with their daughters can run far more smoothly than relationships with their sons, at least until adolescence brings other men on to the scene and they begin to have to consider their little girls as sexed women. The moment that girls leave home can prove a thorny rite of passage for them both. Indeed, fathers love their daughters so much that in order to replace them, they may seek out other younger, adoring women. This may well end by turning their daughters against them and propelling the girl at last into an identification with her spurned mother, a mother she may have violently rebelled against and hated during her early teenage years. Now bound up masochistically with her mother, the daughter may later repeat aspects of the family tangle in her own life.

  Peter and Sophie’s story reveals some of these familial processes at work.

  Peter grew up in a large Canadian family. He was the second-youngest of four boys, a defiant son of a stern, high-ranking clerical father and a mother committed to good works. Both parents expected best behaviour from their children. In the busy family, little enough attention was paid to him and he sought it out in a variety of alternative ways, bad and good, the first often reaping the reward of instant interest in the form of blame and discipline. Rebellious, always at loggerheads with paternal dicta, he became a fine public speaker, and in the late sixties a student leader. Though more radical than his father, he internalized the paternal rectitude. He needed to be good and he sought approval for his goodness in crowds and in individuals. Over the years he became a prominent and much respected figure in the world of NGOs and human rights.

  Sophie was the elder of two daughters in a military family, where regular habits and a certain coldness of relations were the order of the thoroughly regimented day. Her father abandoned the family, without any articulated explanation, when she was seven. He returned when she was fourteen and, though it was never spoken of, everyone knew that he had set up with another woman during those missing years. Stiff-lipped, her mother grimly accepted him back, though never ceased to criticize and upbraid, often by her mere expression of sullen discontent.

  A clever and pretty young woman, Sophie blossomed at university law school during the late sixties. She never, however, managed to keep her always serious boyfriends: two left her in turn and promptly married others. On the rebound, she consciously made herself over, changing her prim clothes for the velvets and bright colours of the day. It was then that she met Peter, the most popular man in her circle. Something meshed. They were in love. They set up house together and eventually had two daughters, Sophie working only part-time in order to tend to them.

  An intriguing set of relations developed within the couple. According to Peter, who travelled a great deal for work reasons, Sophie from almost the beginning of their partnered life grew suspicious of him, habitually accusing him of engaging in affairs, of being a philanderer. Though he wasn’t at the outset, he became one. If recrimination was the name of the game, he half told himself, he might as well inhabit the persona he was given and reap its benefits. Much later, it became clear to him that he had needed the blame, the reproach, the constant allegations, the repeated diminishing of him, just as Sophie seemed to need his guilt and the repeated reasons for finding fault. She created a circle of haughty perfection around herself: it gave her the power to counter Peter’s power and popularity in the wider world. Despising that, she shored herself up.

  And so it went on, with increasing rigidity and lessening satisfaction on both sides, until the children left for university. Then Peter fell in love with another woman, easier in her ways, comfortable in her body, happy to take pleasure in him and his achievements. This time he decided to leave his wife. He could no longer bear what had become the joyless trap he and Sophie had fallen into. But if there are fifty ways to leave your lover, there are few clean breaks. Sophie just wouldn’t allow their relationship to end, holding on to property and to the power that the potent tie of continuing blame and recrimination gave her. Almost in mirror image of her mother’s behaviour during her childhood, she now proceeded to turn the children against Peter, so that they too unleashed the full force of their scorn on him.

  Both partners were in part repeating patterns of love and hate established in childhood. More aware of them now, Peter is struggling to break out, particularly pained at the way these patterns have also entangled his daughters.

  Bobbie’s story is different. Ever alert to her New England family’s constraining paradoxes, secrecy and general coldness, she vowed not to repeat the maternal saga of rectitude and self-abnegation in the face of a loveless marriage. A feminist in the seventies, defiant, she lived her life to the full. Eventually settling into marriage, she had a daughter. It seemed to suit both partners for the father, who was freelance, to be the stay-at-home parent. When the marriage ran dry, Bobbie and her partner parted amicably, against her own mother’s vocal wishes. She still felt and was young, and she engaged in a series of intense, short-lived affairs, always telling at least part of the truth of them to her daughter Natasha, a bright and beautiful girl, who was herself by now adolescent and engaging in sexual encounters.

  Natasha’s father had remarried and proceeded to have other children who, she felt, had displaced her in his affections. Her beloved grandmother, who had helped look after her in her childhood, had died when she was fifteen. When her grandfather followed, Natasha began to develop an eating disorder: food, that bearer of mother-love, had grown tainted and she would have none of it. Once bubbly, she became austere, pure, as squeamish about female sexuality as her grandmother had been. She would, it seemed, neither compete with her mother in the sexuality stakes nor take in food, which had become as ambivalently dangerous as her mother. The latter now, paradoxically, gave up everything to tend to Natasha. Defiantly ill, Natasha had all the love and attention she both wanted and rejected. She was, she felt, the only adult in the family, while once again being a small child.

  And finally, Marion. She had grown up in London, one of two children of an academic father and an artistic mother. When Marion was thirteen her mother, whom she describes as flaky and all over the place, upped and left the family to pursue her talents and a bohemian lifestyle. She also became a vociferous lesbian. In rebellion, Marion pursued fatherly ideals. She grew into a studious young woman and diligently followed a scientific path, making a name for herself in her chosen field. She left the UK for the US, where she married and had a child, bringing him up with textbook correctness; while ambitiously, though always with an unhappy edge of nervousness, making her way up the professional hierarchy. Just after her mother, with whom she maintained distant and disapproving relations, died, Marion left her husband and child. Despite the radicalism of the act, she blossomed, suddenly growing beautiful. Her loves were now other women.

  A cautionary note. There are many ways of telling such stories other than by focusing on family patterns internalized in childhood and perpetuated with variations through generations. But our post-Freudian twenty-first century, with the Christian narrative at its helm and abetted by countless writers and novelists, has an (auto)biographical impetus. It is through such individual narratives of the percolations of love and lack in the fami
ly, and perhaps redemption in the setting-up of new ones, that we largely make meaning of our lives. But if the telling of stories can give the early underpinnings of life a deterministic weight, there is no absolute necessity to this, any more than there is to hereditarian or genetic discourses or explanations based on physiology or chemistry. People do break through and out. With a little self-awareness, they make new patterns out of old.

  Siblings

  The horizontal line in families is as formative of our loves and hates as the vertical one. The passions of children for their siblings run deep: the Egyptian myths of Isis and Osiris with their tales of murderous rivalry as well as incestuous love provide a world of early paradigms alongside the biblical stories of Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel.

  First-borns, certainly early on, can loathe the baby who arrives to displace their pre-eminence. Writing to Freud, Carl Gustav Jung reported a conversation with his four-year-old daughter, Agathli, on the evening before his son’s birth. ‘I asked her what she would say if the stork brought her a little brother. “Then I shall kill it,” she said quick as lightning with an embarrassed, sly expression, and would not let herself be pinned down to this theme.’

  My own family lore has it that just after I was born, my brother tried to smother me with a pillow, so intense was his loathing for this squalling creature who had usurped his centrality in the family. No particular monster, he was only enacting the passion St Augustine had so astutely observed and which finds so many instances in police annals. A friend’s four-year-old daughter, when her little sister was born, was so palpably troubled that she did her best to imitate the newcomer who had stolen her place at mother’s breast and lap. She lost her considerable grasp of language and lolled about sucking her thumb, only regaining age-appropriate speech when her sister began to speak. Another friend’s child decided to give her loathed and crying sibling a good shaking. Translating into the real a gesture she often performed with her doll, she shook her and heaved her out of her high-chair, concussing her in the process.