All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (36 page)

At first Othello resists Iago’s own ‘green-eyed monster’: he is not intrinsically an envious soul and will not easily succumb to the venom Iago skilfully injects. But the poison of suspicion has only to be lodged for it to spread, whatever Othello’s conscious determination. As her maid Emilia states, when Desdemona exclaims that there is no cause for Othello’s jealousy:

Once Desdemona’s handkerchief comes into play–the purported ‘evidence’ of her tryst with Cassio–jealous passion overcomes Othello. It literally drives him mad. His words break up and he falls into a ‘trance’, only then to be prodded further, by ‘honest Iago’s’ insidious ploys, into murdering Desdemona.

Othello may be a noble soul, his tragedy–as he says of himself before taking his own life–that ‘of one that loved not wisely but too well’, his jealousy wrought by another who had him ‘perplex’d in the extreme’. And indeed, the dynamics of the play are propelled by the unbridled envy of Iago. But–and this may be an interpretation too far–Othello himself is contaminated in that emotion. That evidential prop which is the white handkerchief is no mere ‘napkin’: Othello gives it a provenance that brings us back to that crucible of the emotions, the nursery. It was his mother who gave the handkerchief to him on her deathbed. It has magical properties, through its connection to her. The thought that Desdemona, now herself in possession of this magical object steeped in mother love, would pass it on to a rival she speaks so highly of is what spells her doom. The passionate rivalries of infancy have been brought into play. And with them love turns into murderous hate.

In
Anna Karenina
, Tolstoy gives us several possible configurations of jealousy and envy.

Dolly’s is perhaps the most common of these, and is nonetheless violent. Learning of Stepan’s infidelity with their former French governess, Dolly suffers from sleepless nights. She all but locks herself in her room, gives up the running of the household and is poised to leave her husband, though she simultaneously knows that, because of the children, she cannot. Nor can she give up on loving him, despite wanting to punish and shame him, to take revenge. She screams at Stepan who is trying to make it up with her: ‘You are vile, you are loathsome to me!… Your tears are just water! You never loved me; there’s no heart, no nobility in you! You’re disgusting, vile, a stranger, yes a total stranger to me!’

Like a child cast out from the parental pride of place, the confirmed centre of attention and emotion, Dolly is racked by jealousy at the arrival of a younger and more beautiful object who she feels has displaced her. She is also humiliated: the object of Stepan’s love is a mere governess, a woman of lesser rank. She is doubly humiliated because the woman is a familiar, someone in her own home. Envy for the younger woman’s attributes is compounded by the degradation of Stepan’s idealized image in her eyes. Like the powerful parent in the displaced child’s eyes, Stepan will never quite attain his idealized or powerful status again. But Dolly will, of course, forgive him and go on, in part swayed by Anna’s conviction that Dolly’s status remains for Stepan superior to that of the governess.

Despite our radically different times, contemporary surveys on jealousy iterate Tolstoy’s understanding. In one such, respondents were asked, ‘Are you a jealous person?’ Fifty-four per cent responded in the affirmative, but the 46 per cent who had answered no to the question described their experience of betrayal in the same terms as those who had judged themselves as jealous people–and in much the same way as Tolstoy portrays Dolly. Those who considered their partners’ choice of love object to be of lower social rank and a passing liaison tended to forgive them and were often stimulated into taking a new interest in their relationships.

In another instance of jealousy in
Anna Karenina
, Levin, recently married to his beloved Kitty, receives a visit from her brother-in-law Stepan and the handsome young Vasenka Veslovsky, the object of jealousy. The scene Tolstoy sets up is redolent of the play of jealousy and rivalry triggered by a family atmosphere which always brings old childhood feelings to the fore. To make this clear, Tolstoy has Levin hoping that the sound of the carriage will announce the arrival of his beloved and respected father-in-law, indeed something of an admired father to him: he is palpably disappointed. Levin’s own brother, an old rival, is also present, as are other members of Kitty’s family, including Dolly. At dinner, before the arrival of the two men, Levin and the pregnant Kitty had been particularly amorous and in the merriest spirits. But no sooner do the two newcomers arrive than everything changes.

Levin sees Veslovsky warmly kissing Kitty’s hand, and, in that slippage unconscious responses are prone to, reacts by thinking darkly, while Stepan kisses his wife Dolly, ‘Who did he kiss yesterday with those lips?’ He hates the manner in which the sisters’ mother welcomes Veslovsky, ‘as if she were in her own home’. His own brother suddenly seems unpleasant to him. In particular, he is enraged by Kitty’s ‘special smile’ to Veslovsky. He leaves abruptly. By the next day, his jealousy has progressed by leaps and bounds and he suspects that Kitty is already in love with the handsome young man. He imagines himself as a deceived husband, ‘needed by his wife and lover only to provide them with life’s conveniences and pleasures’.

One could conjecture that Levin’s speedy descent into jealousy, in part sparked by the family configuration, is also due to the knowledge he carries within himself of his own past, filled with a colourful variety of liaisons. His own buried guilt and knowledge have him projecting passions of a similar kind on to his imagined young rival and his wife. Levin’s jealousy here is, of course, quickly eased. His suffering and sense of humiliation are dispelled. Meanwhile, Kitty quietly rejoices at the palpable strength of his love that has expressed itself in this way.

Anna’s unbounded jealousy of Vronsky shares a structural pattern with Levin’s. She, too, is guilt-ridden–far more markedly so since having abandoned her beloved son and her husband. She projects her own excessive passions, her own inner dividedness, on to Vronsky. She imagines the loved and now hated Vronsky constantly betraying her with other women who endanger their union. This is a replay of the way she betrayed her own with Karenin, whom Vronsky made ‘disgusting’ to her, just as she imagines she is to Vronsky now. The power of her emotion is compounded by envy. She is not only jealous of the imagined other women Vronsky may have, but also envies the power he has as a male to walk freely in the world while her own ostracized position chains her in passivity. She both wants to be Vronsky and to be the object of his once undiminished passion.

Anna’s case elaborates the truth of that old conundrum that the opposite of love is not hate, that equal and opposite passion often spurred by jealousy, but indifference. Karenin tips quickly into indifference. His emotions, Tolstoy stresses, have been stultified by a parentless childhood. His initial sense of rivalry towards Vronsky, his inability to challenge him to a duel, his wish to see Anna dead, are all sparked by social humiliation. But as soon as he finds a way to assuage that sense of humiliation–first by the power that resides in forgiveness, then by allowing a God who governs all into the frame–his jealousy of Anna and of his rival abates. His love, his very being, has little of a passionate base and passes quickly enough into indifference.

The fall-out of the adultery for Seryozha is more severe. When Anna first falls in love, the boy, without quite understanding the circumstances, feels that he has a rival in Vronsky. He is hostile towards him when they meet: he senses how everyone in the household, apart from Anna, treats Vronsky with ‘horror and loathing’. Faced by Seryozha’s uncertainty towards him, Vronsky, too, is filled with an ‘inexplicable loathing’. Child and lover battle for primacy in Anna’s love and Vronsky wins, at least in the initial foray. Meanwhile, the boy is faced by his father’s cold severity, since Karenin hates Anna in him. With his father, Seryozha is mute, his mind jumbled, his aliveness stifled. When his mother steals in to see him on her secret visit, the child is overwhelmed by joy. But her second disappearance, a double betrayal, makes him ill. Absence and the passage of time, which place him in a school environment, then combine to make his feelings for his mother into a secret and shameful place. He experiences this as a girlish place of sentiment that needs to be repressed. In the last scene in which we see him with his uncle Stepan, Seryozha is unable to feel anything for Anna, except a confused embarrassment. He doesn’t want to, perhaps no longer can altogether, remember her, nor the emotions she aroused in him. Tolstoy, with a dark irony, has him rush off and play with trains in which people fall, just as his mother will.

Children are the innocent pawns in the trials of love and death that adultery can produce. The Greeks have them enact savage and unconscious revenge: Oedipus slays the father who tried to murder but only succeeded in banishing him, then marries his mother. Orestes and Electra murder their adulterous mother and her lover in revenge for having murdered their father. In jealous rage, Medea murders her betraying husband’s next bride-to-be, and also the four children she herself has borne him.

At best, we moderns usually–though not always, given the incidence of domestic murders–live out our passions internally, in fantasy, but they take their toll on us and through the generations, nonetheless.

Amongst the many configurations that our emotions can take, it is clear that some lovers need triangulation, an imagined adultery (or third presence), a suspicion of betrayal, for passion to exist. Indeed, for them, echoing Saint Augustine’s much cited ‘He that is not jealous is not in love’, passion can be born only in jealousy. In Proust’s great novel it takes only a missed appointment, an absence when presence was anticipated, a chance remark opening the gates to a host of imagined other lovers of whatever sex, for a moderately tedious relationship to be transformed into an obsessive passion. ‘There is no doubt that a person’s charms are a less frequent cause of love than a remark such as, “No. This evening I shan’t be free”,’ Proust writes.

The pattern of jealous love that Marcel, his narrator-hero, enacts is deeply rooted in childhood emotions and rituals. The peace, the sensuous beneficence–one might say the post-orgasmic calm–that he can obtain only from his mother’s kiss, and then only briefly since she partly belongs to another (his rivalrous, also loved, but frightening, father, who won’t let her stay long), never materializes when there are guests present in the childhood home. But little Marcel is explicitly aroused by that ‘hostile, inexplicable atmosphere… that used to float up to my bedroom at Combray, from the dining room in which I could hear, talking and laughing with strangers amid the clatter of knives and forks, Mamma who would not be coming upstairs to say goodnight to me’.

The world of strangers stimulates desire, which in Proust’s world is always pan-sexual–roving freely across nostalgic memories, hawthorn flowers, men, women, even children–and able to find its object, though only temporary satisfaction, in each and any. The underlying dynamic is the same whether the object choice is hetero-or homosexual, narcissistic or perverse. ‘Envy, suspicion, rivalry, nostalgia’, as Malcolm Bowie points out, ‘these are the elements which, in varying combinations, give any sexual life whatsoever its characteristic grain and coloration.’

Marcel’s relationship with Albertine, subject of
The Captive
and
The Fugitive
, begins as a mere summer infatuation with a band of adolescent girls met on holiday. But when Albertine, whom he is about to give up, mentions that she has been friends with the two women the boy Marcel had spied in a transgressive lesbian scene, passion springs into being. Albertine suddenly develops a past in which she was loved by others and a future in which others will also play parts. She becomes an undiscovered country that the narrator must possess in every detail. He takes her home to Paris with him, promises marriage, monitors all her activities, effectively imprisons her, and yet she continually eludes him. Time, with its shifting kaleidoscope, the new it brings in each moment of its passing, is simply not on his side. He knows that total possession, total knowledge of the other is impossible, all the more so here because what Albertine experiences in her lesbian loves is not available to him as a man. Yet the desire to know persists.

For Proust, love and knowledge are ever entwined. The obsessive detective work and the rampant fantasies that jealousy brings into being, the need to know and possess everything about the other, past and present, is akin to the voracious curiosity of the child faced by the mystery of adult sexuality. It also parallels the curiosity of those other searchers after knowledge, the philosopher and the scientist. The Proustian lover is a taxonomist of desire.

Amongst the structures of love he designates, one harks back, albeit in a different register, to Plato’s Socrates in his pursuit of Diotima. The love Marcel initially feels for Albertine is less about her specificity as a person than for that occult force of which she is an emanation and with which she puts him in touch.