Greek manners and Gothic morals

I can't get started
"Greek manners and Gothic morals" is the general head I've decided to go with for my Lenten reading project. It's a reversal of an admonition delivered by Mr. Deacon in the second volume of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time:

'... as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man—for I was a young man once, whatever you think to the contrary—"Gothic manners don't mix with Greek morals". Gypsy would never learn that.'

Mr. Deacon is not alone in defining the Greeks as moral and Gothic art as merely mannered.  Gothic here does not mean the actual period but how it has come to be imagined.

Because the Gothic era was imagined to be a period of great social rigidity, Romantic love has largely been imagined as two people against the world; as the story of a couple who pursue their love against the conventions and social mores of their time even unto death.

It's a revolutionary idea—that love could be a heroic act—and it has had a huge influence on western culture. And yet it seems very much out of style. For example, my first exposure to it came heavily laced with irony.

As a teenager, I had appalling musical taste and so I bought David Bowie's record "Heroes" as soon as it came out. It told the tale of a couple kissing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. It featured hokey lyrics like this:

And we kissed
As though nothing could fall
And the shame
Was on the other side

Bowie, in typical fashion for him puts the word "Heroes" in inverted commas on the album cover to make sure we don't assume he really means it. Except of course that he does but he wants the protection of irony. And that is the way with Romantic love nowadays.

How refreshing then to find Cristina Nehring. Her book A Vindication of Love is many things. As the title would suggest she also means to vindicate Mary Wollstonecraft who, as far as I'm concerned, can go unvindicated. She also picks a fight with a lot of feminists such as Laura Kipnis who, quite frankly, don't deserve the minimal respect even a refutation would award them. But all of that is overcome by the central theme:

For those of us as bored by the cult of safe love as we are repelled by the man hating clichés of old-style feminism, it [Romantic love] needs to be reformulated afresh. The purpose is by no means to beatify romantic love, or to reclaim it as a fine hallmark sentiment suitable for swooning schoolgirls. The goal is to embrace its dangers and darknesses as well as the light it sheds so amply, so sometimes piercingly. We must confront the role of transgression, the effect of power inequalities, the place for obsession, the reality of strife, the seduction of chastity, the necessity of heroism, the draw, sometimes, of death. Love is a volatile play of shadow and light. It is a brush with the sublime.

And not a even a whiff of irony about the thing anywhere.

But a few surprises. Notice how Nehring is very clear about not wanting to beatify romantic love. And then notice that chastity makes an appearance. And "the necessity of heroism".

Even as Romantic a poem as The Eve of St. Agnes, which I blogged here a while ago, treats Romantic love as something not quite realizable anymore. The last stanza of that poem tells us that Romantic lovers are of another era. It begins:

 And they are gone: ay, ages long ago

Nehring wants us to consider it as very much something for right now. So here we go ... again.

This series begins here.

The next post will be here.