Mysteries of love

(Crf. Thompson, Maglioni, New Literary Links. From the Origins to the Romantic Age, Teacher’s book, CIDEB, p.54)

· We can link this back to the idealised woman of courtly love presented in certain sonnets, such as those of Shakespeare, Sidney and particularly Petrarch and Wyatt (See HOTLINK, From Courtly Love to Postmodern Love) where the woman is a sublime object who cannot be approached, and the poet hates himself for not being worthy of her, or because she will not look at him, an idea that persists in much contemporary rock and pop music.

· We see variations on this idea in the medieval inspired paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones where the woman's enigmatic indifference to the painter's gaze is particularly marked. This kind of love is based on two fundamental principles. The first is the privileged role given to the gaze, of looking and being looked at, and the distance that such looking and being looked at necessitate. (Although Shakespeare in 'Sonnet 130' is irreverent enough to bring in other senses such as smell in delineating the qualities of his love). The second is its one-way, unreciprocated nature. In courtly love it is only the subjective experience of the lover which is of any meaning or value.

· In a way the figure of Michael Furey in Joyce's 'The Dead' the boy who dies for love of Gretta evokes the figure of the unrequited lover of courtly love who is willing to sacrifice himself for his beloved lady, but in Joyce's story we see this love not from the perspective of Michael but from that of the woman, Gretta, whose life is devastated by his passion, which has left her with a terrible burden of guilt.

· The other type of love invoked by Lawrence in Women in Love is that of Ursula and Birkin based on an idea of fusion -fusion of souls, fusion of bodies - which refers to another discourse on love. We notice that the great love scene between Ursula and Birkin happens in a kind of cosmic darkness, during a sea journey. We lose sense of all coordinates, both physical and geographical. Here, the moment, as it is experienced by the two lovers, is everything. It is a moment they both enter into as free and open entities, a moment that has no guarantees - a pact that only exists as it is being formed.