SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PLAYS, MOST NOTABLY those of Molière, and eighteenth-century English novels like Clarissa Harlowe suggest ongoing parental opposition to their children’s love matches. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century love had become the most notable consideration in marital arrangements, even if socioeconomic concerns also weighed heavily in the decision. This trend can be seen in the history of “Lonely Hearts” ads placed in British newspapers.
The first known ad, published in 1695, listed the female attributes required by a demanding gentleman, most notably wealth. Early ads were forthright in their search for a wife with “a Fortune of 3000 [pounds] or thereabout.” Lest we find this ad unusually mercenary, we do well to remember that a person’s fortune was usually common knowledge and that newspapers often printed at the end of the wedding announcement the sum that a woman brought to the marriage. But from the mid-eighteenth century onward romantic love was emphasized over practical considerations, following the model found in sentimental novels. More and more often during the second half of the eighteenth century the ads placed by men expressed their hope to find a woman with a “feeling” or “tender” heart, attributes considered the province of women, though some men, too, described their own hearts as “full of affection, sensibility, and delicacy.”
AROUND 1700, WHEN THE FIRST LONELY HEARTS ADS WERE published, the Irish came up with a combined image of the heart and hand known as the Claddagh symbol, to be used on wedding and engagement rings. These rings produced in the fishing village of Claddagh near Galway were inscribed with a heart symbolizing love that was placed between two open hands symbolizing friendship and surmounted by a crown symbolizing loyalty. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns an early Claddagh ring in enameled gold that is inscribed with the words “Dudley & Katherine united 26. Mar. 1706.” Claddagh rings became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century and are still made in Ireland to this day.
Products bearing the Claddagh symbol are now popular on a variety of objects such as rings, earrings, pendants, and crystal jewelry boxes. Some of the most elegant items are unisex wedding bands that combine the Claddagh heart with Celtic eternity knots as a joint expression of enduring love and Irish identity.
HEARTS AND HANDS ARE MAJOR LEITMOTIFS IN JANE AUSTEN’S novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), which evoked the sentimental longings and the new conception of marriage among the English gentry. From the famous first sentence—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”—Austen fixates her pen on the marital aspirations, successes, and failures of the Bennett family, consisting of two ill-paired middle-aged parents and their five nubile daughters. It is taken for granted that people will fall in love before marriage or at least be attracted to one another but that money and social position will also weigh heavily in the choice of a spouse.
The male protagonist, Darcy, says as much when he proposes marriage to Elizabeth Bennet. After declaring how much he admires and loves her, he immediately adds that “there were feelings besides those of the heart” he feels obliged to express. Those feelings spring mainly from the vast difference in their socioeconomic situations, he being immensely wealthy and of noble stock, whereas she is of relatively modest circumstances. And then there is the problem of her family, some members of which—namely her mother and her younger sister Lydia—are lacking the graces Darcy would expect from members of his own class. Nonetheless, he offers marriage to Elizabeth fully expecting “her acceptance of his hand” (Chapter 34).
Of course, as any Janeite knows, Elizabeth at first refuses his offer. From the start she finds his “pride” overbearing and wraps herself within her “prejudice” against him. It takes the full novel for them to acknowledge, first to themselves and then to each other, their innermost desires. As their prickly romance proceeds, we witness several other matches where considerations of love and money jostle for primacy. Like Darcy and Elizabeth, Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley ultimately follow the dictates of their hearts and embark upon an auspicious marriage based on mutual love—and his property. But Elizabeth’s close friend Charlotte Lucas accepts the hand of the clergyman Mr. Collins without the pretense of love because, as she says to Elizabeth, “I am not romantic.… I ask only a comfortable home” (Chapter 21). Their marriage is destined for humdrum endurance. And Lydia, the frivolous young sister, elopes with the reprobate officer Wickham, without first insisting upon marriage, but is fortunately saved from disgrace by the interventions of her uncle and Darcy. Lydia had learned nothing from her parents’ bad marriage, which had been based solely on physical attraction and quickly degenerated into mutual disappointment.
What, then, is Jane Austen’s view of the makings of a successful marriage? The amorous heart must certainly be involved when men and women join hands in matrimony, but the heart, alone, is not enough. Darcy’s friend Colonel Fitzwilliam puts it most bluntly: “Not many of my rank… can afford to marry without some attention to money” (Chapter 24). And even love and money may not be enough to achieve the harmony in marriage that Austen’s protagonists aspire to. Intelligence, wit, kindness, compassion, and mutual respect—these are the qualities her most congenial couples possess.
Austen admits that the feeling called love “could not exactly be defined” and that it could just as easily lead one astray as provide the basis for conjugal happiness. In her wariness of love Austen is not a romantic. Yet in all her novels love, or at least inclination (a weaker sentiment than love), plays a primary role in the path toward marriage. Austen’s heroines give their hands in conjunction with their hearts, hoping that their husbands will satisfy their sentimental longings and provide material support. We rarely get to see what happens afterward, as many British novels, from Austen’s time onward, usually close with the wedding.
IN THE PREVIOUS CENTURY MAJOR BRITISH WRITERS, INCLUDING Fielding and Richardson, had written novels of seduction from a male point of view. But beginning with Jane Austen and a few of her female contemporaries, novels of romance and marriage written by women elbowed their way to the forefront of British literature. Later in the century Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot took their place alongside Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. These women brought to the reading public an awareness not only of the heart but also of the hand, for if men could go it alone as bachelors, most women were dependent on a husband to provide a position in society and a roof over their heads. For most women marriage was not just one of several options; it was their only option. If a woman never married, she could expect to face financial hardship and social marginality unless she came from a prominent family with means, and even then she would probably be placed at the least desirable end of the dining table. And even when married, British and American wives would discover that their unions were rarely equal partnerships.
To begin with, the law held that wives had virtually no rights. In the words of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), which provided the basis for marital laws in England and America, “the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” As the popular saying went: “husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband.”
As to material possessions, the law left no doubt as to ownership. “A woman’s personal property, by marriage, becomes absolutely her husband’s.” This included whatever property a woman owned before marriage and her earnings as a wife. Insofar as children were concerned, their legal custody belonged to the father. If she were widowed, a woman was entitled to “jointure”—that is, a third of her husband’s estate. For a woman, to give her hand in marriage literally meant to give her whole person over to the control of another. Of course, it was hoped that love would soften the edges of legal dictates and infuse marriage with mutual regard so that both women and men might be able to consider the
mselves, in the words of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre after ten years of marriage, “supremely blest.”
WHEREAS THE DOMINATING HAND IN MARRIAGE WAS UNDERSTOOD to be that of the husband, who even possessed the right to beat his spouse as long it was only “moderate correction,” the heart was increasingly assigned to the wife. This doctrine of separate spheres of influence was spelled out clearly in Tennyson’s nineteenth-century poem “The Princess”:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
This gendered division, with the “male” brain granted authority over the “female” heart, widened the split between brain and heart that had begun in the seventeenth century. Victorian thinkers and writers like Tennyson were trying to reestablish traditional norms after the excesses of Romanticism, the early nineteenth-century cultural movement that shook up the whole social order.
Chapter 18
Romanticism, or the Reign of the Heart
THERE ARE UNEXPECTED EVENTS IN THE WRITING OF A BOOK that crystallize your thoughts and incarnate the essence of what you want to say. Such an event happened to me in the fall of 2016 when I went to the opera in Paris and saw Bellini’s Norma. Led by the magnificent Cecilia Bartoli, the entire ensemble gave voice to the turbulent emotions that roil within passionate hearts. Predominantly amorous but also maternal, paternal, sororal, fraternal, nationalistic, and vengeful, the overwrought sentiments expressed in Norma could have been unleashed only by a creator steeped in Romanticism.
The composer, Vincenzo Bellini, and his librettist, Felice Romani, were Italian, yet the spirit animating Norma—the overwhelming belief in the priority of emotion—was a pan-European phenomenon. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and continuing through the first half of the nineteenth, writers including Rousseau, the young Goethe and Novalis; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron; Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, and Alfred de Musset turned their backs on Enlightenment reason and unconditionally embraced emotion, most notably love. Not surprisingly, Norma was first produced in Paris in 1831, the year after Victor Hugo’s play Hernani had mobilized Romantics as a force to be reckoned with.
Watching and listening to Norma I was swept away by the torrent of emotions released onstage. Feelings I had rarely known in a theater forced their way into my chest and brought continuous tears to my eyes. At the intermission and again at the end my French friends and I agreed that the experience had been bouleversant (overwhelming). During the opera’s most intense moments the Italian word cor (heart) punctuated the music.
Later, when I read the libretto, it did not surprise me to discover that heart was the key word for each of the major characters. The opera is set in mythical Gaul occupied by Roman soldiers. Initially the Roman protagonist, Pollione, announces to his friend Flavius that he no longer loves Norma, the Druid high priestess. In his words, Norma is “a name which freezes my heart.” He can no longer honor his commitment to her, although she has been his lover and is the mother of his two children, all unbeknownst to her subjects. He now loves another, the virgin priestess Adalgisa.
Norma, asked by her people to attack Pollione and his Roman troops, restrains them and admits to herself, “My heart does not know how to punish him.” While sensing his abandonment, she sings nostalgically of the past “when I offered you my heart.”
When the younger priestess, Adalgisa, comes onstage, she too immediately invokes the heart. Hers was won by Pollione the very first moment she saw him. Now waiting for him to appear, her heart is gladdened at the thought of his caro aspetto (dear looks) and cara voce (dear voice). Thus, the three protagonists offer three very different hearts, each inflamed by love and each in conflict with the others.
By now some readers of this book are perhaps wondering why I am making such a fuss about Norma. Without the music to back me up, I am hard put to convey its powerful impact. “I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you” (to borrow from T. S. Eliot’s “Fragment of an Agon”), so let me try to explain why Norma represents a high point in the history of the amorous heart.
Pollione appeals to Adalgisa’s heart in an attempt to draw her away from her virginal vows as a priestess: “Your heart gave itself to me.” “Don’t you hear a voice speaking in your heart?” He tries to persuade her that the love she feels is more sacred than her religious vocation.
Adalgisa, in a tensely ironic scene, reveals her feelings to the high priestess Norma and asks for her mentor’s guidance: “Save me from my heart.” Norma, recognizing her own story in Adalgisa’s, is initially sympathetic until she learns that Adalgisa’s desired lover is none other than Pollione. Then Norma explodes and cries out, “Just as he has deceived my heart, the impious one has betrayed both your heart and mine.”
Lesser artists than Bellini and Romani might have funneled the plot into spasms of jealousy between the two women. Certainly men throughout history have often represented two women at odds with one another as monstrous rivals. But Norma is not your standard love triangle; instead, Norma and Adalgisa bond together against Pollione. They recognize each other as sister spirits and pledge to fight against a shameful destiny. Together they sing, “I shall hold my head up high, as long as I feel your heart beating against mine.” It’s an amazing operatic moment, with two women, rather than a man and a woman, proclaiming the mutual beating of their hearts. The Romantic heart is capable of expanding from heterosexual to sisterly love.
And that’s not all. In a subsequent scene the resistant Gauls sing of their own hearts, which are filled with rage for the Roman oppressor, and for the need to contain their anger until the time is right for revenge. The heart, predominantly the seat of love, can also know ire and hatred when circumstances call them forth. The human heart is a hothouse of seething emotions, all struggling for release.
How these conflicts resolve themselves provides momentum for the last act. Norma rises to her greatest tragic moment when she sings in front of Pollione, “What a heart you have betrayed, what a heart you have lost.” She identifies completely with her heart: her heart is who she is. And Pollione, to his great regret, recognizes the value of this “sublime woman” when she confesses her treachery to the Gauls, who then condemn both Pollione and Norma to death.
ROMANTICISM WAS A MOVEMENT THAT HONORED THE heart as the ultimate font of love and truth. Whether it expressed itself artistically in opera, theater, poetry, fiction, or passionate behavior, faith in the heart became the credo of countless men and women during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The poet Lord Byron demonstrated his complicated relationship to the heart throughout his life and work. In his oft-quoted poem of 1810 he addressed the young girl he had fallen in love with in Greece:
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest!
This sweet poem, familiar to generations of schoolchildren, relies on the conventional metaphor of the poet’s amorous heart captured by the beloved. In another famous poem, “She Walks in Beauty, / like the night,” Byron writes of her heart rather than his own—one that is pure and innocent:
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Yet his own heart was growing weary from so much love, as expressed in a poem called “We’ll go no more a-roving,” written in 1817 when Byron was living in exile in Italy.
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still
as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
By this period of his life Byron’s love affairs with both women and men had resulted in the scandalous reputation he is still known for. But no one could deny his genius. When the cantos of his great satiric poem “Don Juan” began to appear, some of his contemporaries dismissed him as irredeemable while others lauded him as the master of romance. Sir Walter Scott maintained that its creator “has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string of the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones.”
SCOTT WAS IN A FITTING POSITION TO JUDGE LITERATURE OF the heart. His Waverley novels, written between 1814 and 1832, were replete with love stories set in the Middle Ages and Scottish history, and sixteen of them were subsequently turned into operas. Among the best known, The Bride of Lammermoor told the tale of Lucie Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood, who secretly exchanged rings and vowed to wed, but were impeded by her family. Forced to break her engagement and marry the wealthy Sir Arthur Bucklaw, Lucie falls into a deep depression. On her wedding night she goes mad, stabs the bridegroom, and dies.
The Amorous Heart Page 15