The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  DESCARTES’S DEMOTION OF THE HEART DID NOT GO UNCONTESTED. His chief antagonist was his younger contemporary Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who was also a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Pascal never abandoned the heart, always considering it superior to the brain. He separated heart from brain, feeling from thinking, in an oft-quoted statement: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” Without denying the value of reason, Pascal pointed to a different kind of knowledge perceived instinctively by the heart and inaccessible to rational thought. Pascal’s heart remained open to the mystery of love in both its human and divine forms.

  The rivalry between heart and head only quickened during the second half of the seventeenth century. The English empiricists Thomas Hobbes and John Locke attacked the heart and promoted the brain, in conjunction with the senses, as the primary determinants of human behavior. Before they were done, Hobbes, Locke, and, later, David Hume had reversed centuries of thinking about human nature. They imposed a new understanding of how men and women arrive at their thoughts and emotions, in which human beings were understood to be subject to the vagaries of their minds. And what of the heart? Hobbes, in his groundbreaking Leviathan (1651), answered mechanistically: “For what is the Heart but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints giving motion to the whole Body?”

  Locke continued the assault against the heart’s significance. He defined a person not by the contents of his heart but by the workings of his mind. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) he argued that the brain, or mind, begins as a blank slate and gains knowledge through the senses. Humans learn through a combination of sense perception and reflection upon their experiences. Man is defined as a thinking being, an intelligence, a consciousness, and this sets him “above the rest of sensible Beings.” Notably, Locke never speaks of the heart.

  Eric Jager, in his fine Book of the Heart, concludes that the self envisaged by Locke had relocated its core from heart to head, abandoned its religious or romantic underpinnings, and “turned resolutely secular.” I’m not so sure that Locke’s psychology was “resolutely” secular. He thought of himself as a devout Christian and argued that belief in God was necessary for an ethical universe. But as for Locke’s role in diminishing the heart, Jager is certainly right. Locke contributed considerably to the new cartography of the self in Western thought. Along with other seventeenth-century thinkers, Locke gave the heart a sound beating. Henceforth, Enlightenment philosophers as well as physicians would conceptualize the heart materialistically and abandon its ancient metaphoric meanings.

  Chapter 15

  Exposing the Female Heart

  FIGURE 26. Artist unknown, child’s ring token, eighteenth century. Foundling Home Museum, London, England.

  IN 1741 THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL WAS ESTABLISHED IN London for the city’s sizeable number of abandoned children. Along with their babies, mothers often left tokens of love, such as a piece of jewelry or a poem, which could be used in identifying the child if the mother ever came back to claim the boy or girl. Unfortunately, most of the mothers never saw their children again.

  A few of these tokens now preserved at the Foundling Museum, such as the ring pictured in Figure 26, were in the shape of hearts. They spoke for the mother’s heart grieved by the loss of her baby and for the affectionate bond between them that would henceforth be severed by space and time.

  The real-life stories of those mothers and their orphaned children fed the imagination of British writers and led to some of the best-known novels of the eighteenth century. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) by Henry Fielding has as its protagonist a bastard son who had been left in the bed of the local squire and raised by him under the mistaken belief that Tom’s mother was Jenny, one of the servants. After years of rollicking adventures, the secret of Tom’s birth is ultimately revealed to his advantage—his birth mother was the squire’s unmarried sister—and Tom is then able to marry the woman of his choice. Because this is a comic novel, the reader rightfully expects a happy ending.

  But what of Tom’s mother? Her story is less than happy. Single women who had the misfortune of becoming pregnant were often cast out from their families, especially if they came from middle-class circles. (Lower-class country girls were often pregnant at the time of their marriage to the baby’s father, and aristocrats sometimes had the means to cover things up.)

  Given the lamentable situation of the unwed mother, a maiden’s chief obligation was to protect her “virtue.” Many, if not most, eighteenth-century English and French novels of the heart revolved around the theme of seduction, with men hell-bent on ravishing a chosen woman—and generally more than one. In so doing, novelists placed women center stage and, to borrow words from Samuel Boswell in his Life of Johnson, dove “into the recesses of the human heart.” Boswell had written those words to describe the eponymous young women in Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novels, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa: or The History of a Young Lady (1748).

  It is difficult for us in the twenty-first century to imagine the torrential reaction to Pamela when it first appeared. Within a year after its publication there were five printings plus a French translation as well as pirated editions in London and Dublin. Pamela was a media sensation unlike anything that had ever occurred before in British literature. But along with its many admirers, Pamela also had its detractors, such as Fielding, who wrote a burlesque novel, Shamela, in direct response to it. Why the uproar? What had Richardson done to elicit such a response?

  Pamela is an investigation of a maiden’s heart as she determinedly fights off the equally determined advances of her youthful master. It takes the form of a series of letters written by Pamela, a sixteen-year-old girl from a poor family. Who would want to read such unsophisticated utterances? Apparently tens of thousands of readers in England, France, and, eventually, the rest of Europe.

  Pamela’s heart has a starring role in her tale. She invokes it more than two hundred times along with references to her young master, who has “Mischief in his Heart.” Pamela’s parents, too, in letters to their daughter, often speak of their feelings in terms of their hearts: “our Hearts ake for you,” they say, when they begin to suspect the young man’s designs on their daughter. Once Pamela realizes he is intent upon taking liberties with her, she declares to herself, “my heart’s broke, almost; for what am I likely to have for my Reward, but Shame and Disgrace, or else ill Words and hard Treatment.”

  Over and over again, as Pamela tries to ward off the master’s advances, she expresses her pain in terms of her heart: a broken heart, a poor heart, a sorry heart, a full heart, a heavy heart, a sick heart, a throbbing heart, a pure heart, a heart that fails her, a heart that is in her mouth. Her heart invariably contrasts with the “proud,” “false,” and “poisonous” heart of the man who, for at least half the novel, stops at nothing in his efforts to seduce her.

  The hearts invoked in Pamela are significantly different from those in medieval romances. In the first place, Pamela’s heart belongs to a woman and not to the troubadours who poured their amorous cravings into songs and narratives. Though Pamela’s heart will prove itself capable of love, its primary duty is self-protection—to protect her against male desire. Her concerns—which are the same as women’s concerns in most eras and most cultures—are to keep her body intact, unharmed from a would-be intruder. And because she is a sincere Christian who subscribes to notions of virtue that focus on the purity of body and soul, her heart initially stifles any erotic impulses. Richardson knew exactly what he was doing in creating a heroine whose heart was a religious-moral fortress, impervious to attacks upon her chastity. Anything less would have been met with censure from the growing number of middle-class readers who were his primary audience.

  Pamela manages to fight off her master’s designs on her body, even when he climbs into her bed and a vicious female accomplice holds her down. What she doesn’t anticipate is that he will ultimately have a change
of heart and come to realize that he truly loves Pamela. Likewise, she will discover that the master has found his way into her own heart. At this point in the narrative Pamela speaks of her heart in an entirely new language. “I felt something so strange, and my Heart was so lumpish!—I wonder what ail’d me!” “I resign’d myself to this strange wayward Heart of mine, that I never found so ungovernable and awkward before.” “O how my heart went pit-a-pat!” “O my exulting Heart! How it throbs in my Bosom!” Pamela’s heart is evoked, euphemistically, as a barometer of the lustful feelings awakened in her body.

  But even if her heart and his are now in accord, there is the question of their difference in status. The master belongs to a wealthy, distinguished family in possession of several important estates, and marrying his servant is anathema to members of his class, especially to his proud sister. In the end the master sets aside these considerations and asks Pamela to be his wife. With what one imagines were the rousing cheers of Richardson’s delighted readers, she, of course, accepts.

  RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA HARLOW IS LESS FORTUNATE. SHE, too, is the victim of “assaults to her heart” coming not only from the libertine Lovelace but also from her own family. Her affluent parents insist that she marry a certain Mr. Solmes in order to contract a socially advantageous union. When Clarissa defiantly refuses this match because she finds Solmes repugnant, her parents curse her and Clarissa faints to the floor. As she later writes, “There went the dagger to my heart, and down I sunk.”

  A daughter’s refusal to accept her parents’ selection of a husband was, by the mid-eighteenth century, an old story. Shakespeare’s Juliet, one of the most defiant daughters of literary fame, rebelled against her parents’ choice and came to a tragic end. And in Clarissa, 150 years later, the everlasting battle between parental will and youthful rebellion in matters of the heart was still in progress. From their pulpits Protestant pastors, especially those of a Puritan persuasion, enjoined children and wives to obey their fathers and husbands without question. Clarissa, brought up to honor her father and mother, is horrified when she feels forced to disobey them. The urgency of her refusal comes from something even deeper than conventional Christian morality: as she puts it, “the integrity of my heart [is] concerned in my answer.” To marry Mr. Solmes without loving him would go against her heart, the home of her most authentic self. Following the Judeo-Christian tradition the heart is linked to the soul, and Clarissa, like Pamela, is more concerned with her immortal soul than with worldly satisfactions. But unlike Pamela, Clarissa has the double burden of preserving her integrity against both her family’s wishes and Lovelace’s designs on her person.

  Lovelace, whom her family has treated badly, eventually tricks Clarissa into eloping with him and turns her into a literal prisoner. Though he wants to marry her from the start—unlike Pamela’s master, at least early in their relationship—Clarissa consistently refuses Lovelace’s offers. The dynamic between the two of them reflected a society where blatant inequalities of sex, as of class, were taken for granted. But what distinguishes this novel from many others is the claustrophobic intensity of the romantic duo engaged in mutual destruction.

  Lovelace’s obstinate desire to possess this lovely, virtuous, strong-minded woman grows into an obsessive passion. He keeps her imprisoned in a number of establishments, including a brothel. He muses upon “the female heart (all gentleness and harmony by nature)” and hopes that he will eventually be able to prevail upon Clarissa’s. Eventually, driven to distraction by her determined resistance, Lovelace finds the means to drug and rape her.

  Clarissa lies comatose for two days, grief-stricken for a week, and when she finally regains full consciousness, she is more adamant than ever in her refusal to become the wife of such an immoral rake. She tries, unsuccessfully, to shame Lovelace and to open his eyes to the evil he has done her. As she explains in a letter to her friend, Anna Howe, the deplorable actions of her family, followed by those of Lovelace, have almost destroyed her. She will find salvation in renewed dedication to scripture and in writing her personal religious meditations. But after the rape Clarissa never fully regains her physical strength, and she wastes away until an untimely death ends her torments. She goes to meet her maker with the hope that her violated heart will be made whole again.

  And Lovelace, her demonic tormentor? His heart becomes ever more unruly. He declares before Clarissa dies, “My heart is bent upon having her… though I marry her in the agonies of death.… I will overcome the creeping folly that has found its way into my heart, or I will tear it out in her presence, and throw it at hers, that she may see how much more tender than her own that organ is.”

  And after she dies he is still insistent on his right to Clarissa’s heart, this time quite literally. As he states to his friend Belford, “I think it is absolutely right that my ever-dear and beloved lady should be opened and embalmed.… But her heart, to which I have such unquestionable pretensions, in which once I had so large a share, and which I will prize above my own, I will have. I will keep it in spirits. It shall never be out of my sight.”

  If we accept Pamela and Clarissa as partial reflections of English society during the 1730s and 1740s, we come to the conclusion that the female heart was obliged to fulfill two different functions: it had to be both a moral compass and a guide to true love. Women were expected to provide checks on male desire, first for their own good but also for the good of the men who purported to love them. Pamela, through the strength of her character, not to mention her beauty, succeeded in arousing her future husband’s tender feelings long after he had experienced the physical cravings of lust. But poor Clarissa, equally endowed in beauty and virtue, would not live to see the remorse that took hold of Lovelace’s proud heart in the aftermath of her death.

  RICHARDSON’S NOVELS WERE HUGE HITS NOT ONLY IN ENGLAND but also across the channel in France, where they inspired a slew of epistolary novels, the most famous being Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise) (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It eventually surpassed Richardson’s novels in sales, going through about seventy printings by the end of the century. Once again the inner workings of the female heart are at play, as Julie tells her story to her friend Claire in a series of letters. And once again class differences shape the narrative: Julie comes from a noble family, and Saint-Preux, the man who has taken hold of her heart, does not. Though the two hold off as long as they can, eventually Julie, like the original Héloïse, falls into Saint-Preux’s arms and they share the joys of lovemaking. This encounter does not result in a happy ending for the pair. They are obliged to separate, and although Julie eventually marries an older, thoroughly honorable man, she continues to hold Saint-Preux in her heart. Rousseau’s readers, most of them women, identified fully with the young lovers, cried copiously as they followed their tribulations, and wrote hundreds of letters to Rousseau lauding his portrayal of the female heart.

  DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY RICHARDSON, ROUSSEAU, and other sentimental novelists endowed their heroines with tender, virtuous hearts and only a smidgeon of sexual desire, which was ultimately aroused only through the promptings of a determined male admirer. Pamela did not know what to make of her “strange,” “lumpish,” “awkward,” “wayward,” “exulting” heart when it was first awakened. Clarissa resisted her creaturely urges until the end, and Julie, even though she succumbed to Saint-Preux, hid whatever pleasure she took in lovemaking under a veil of modesty and guilt.

  Yet other eighteenth-century male authors recognized that some women possessed passionate hearts and healthy sexual appetites unhampered by virtue and honor. The heroine of Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévôt (1731) is a very young woman of common origin who runs off with a noble youth and lives with him in a state of concubinage, only interrupted by flings with other men whenever she and her lover need money. This scandalous novel inspired at least two successful operas in the late nineteenth century, one by the Frenchman Jules Massenet and the other by Puccini.

&
nbsp; Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos gave us the unforgettable portrait of Madame de Merteuil, a widow whose guiding principle is to have her way with men and to be the one who always ends the affair while remaining respectable in the eyes of society. She shared her “female heart” once with the Vicomte de Valmont, but then the two of them, in a verbal pact, agreed to take as many lovers as possible without falling in love. In Valmont’s case, he found particular pleasure in seducing a virginal girl straight out of the convent as well as a notably virtuous married woman. From behind the scenes Madame de Merteuil pulled the strings, in part to keep Valmont from falling in love with anyone else. In the end, however, Valmont does just that. It is the virtuous matron who gains his heart (surprise!), though not before so much evil has spewed from Madame de Merteuil’s heart that the novel concludes catastrophically for everyone. This brilliant novel—my favorite of the lot, I must confess—at least has the temerity of presenting a female protagonist with a libido equal to that of her male counterpart and a diabolical intelligence superior to his.

  THE ENGLISHMAN JOHN CLELAND TRAVELED FAR BEYOND the pale of good taste in publishing Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749). An openly erotic novel that verges on the pornographic, Fanny Hill is the story of an orphaned country girl who comes to London to enter into service and ends up in a brothel. She manages to escape from the brothel with a young gentleman named Charles, who deflowers her and becomes the love of her life. Even though they are separated against their will and Fanny spends many years as a prostitute, her heart always belongs to him. Like many before him, Cleland tried to distinguish between simple lust and heartfelt love, with Fanny clinging to the love in her heart regardless of her body’s promiscuous behavior.