The tragic contradiction between romance and society is most forcibly portrayed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and of course Romeo and Juliet. The female protagonists in such stories are driven to suicide as if dying for a cause of freedom from various oppressions of marriage.
The tragic contradiction between romance and society is most forcibly portrayed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and of course Romeo and Juliet. The female protagonists in such stories are driven to suicide as if dying for a cause of freedom from various oppressions of marriage.
Later modern philosophers such as La Rochefoucauld, Hume, and Rousseau also focused on morality, but the desire was central to French thought, and Hume himself tended to adopt a French worldview and temperament. Desire in this milieu meant a very general idea termed “the passions,” and this general interest was distinct from the contemporary idea of “passionate” now equated with “romantic.” Love was a central topic again in the subsequent movement of Romanticism, which focused on such things as absorption in nature and the absolute, as well as Platonic and unrequited love in German philosophy and literature.
Hundreds of popular authors, poets, artists, and musicians have written, painted, or composed their books, paintings, and masterpieces of music about love. They have greatly
enriched the culture of mankind and from love, we could see the beauty of life. What is the drive behind them? I believe it is the sublimation of the sexual drive which Freud termed as libido.
- Properties of romantic love include these:
- It cannot be easily controlled.
- It is not overtly (initially at least) predicated on a desire for sex as a physical act.
If required, it may be the basis for a lifelong commitment.
Anna Karenina(Tolstoy’s novel) is a married woman with a son. She fell in love at the first sight with a man. Both the man and woman are handsome and beautiful. Without a doubt, they had been attracted to each other by their physical appearance. They had been entirely controlled by their libido. In the beginning, they thought they could love each other without having sex but later it was the sex that made them crazy. Finally, due to jealousy, Anna Karenina committed suicide and to her, this was a kind of lifelong commitment.
In the novel “A Tale Of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens, Sydney Carton sacrificed his life for the husband of his beloved Miss Manette under the French Guillotine. Miss Manette had never loved him but only treated him as a friend whom could be confided with. The last moment before he was beheaded by the Guillotine, he had shown not the least the fear of death. Instead, he had comforted and given support to a woman who was next to him to be beheaded. He looked sublime and prophetic – written in the last paragraph of the novel. The libido in him had been sublimated for a good course. He felt the greatness in him.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) one of the greatest painters in human history, had once defenced himself against the charge of irreligion: Such carping critics would do better to keep silent. For that is the way to become acquainted with the Creator of so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love so great an Inventor.
For in truth great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all. His investigations extended to practically every branch of natural science, and in every single one, he was a discoverer or at least a prophet and pioneer. He pointed out that the sun does not move. Leonardo had prescribed the study of nature as a rule for the painter. The passion for the study had become dominant, and he had no longer wished to acquire learning for the sake of art, but learning for the sake of learning.
He did not love and hate but asked himself about the origin and significance of what he was to love or hate. He has investigated instead of loving. The stormy passions of a nature that inspires and consumes, passions in which other men have enjoyed their richest experience, appear not to have touched him. He had craved for knowledge and lost himself in admiration and filled with true humility. Freud believed that the instinct to investigate is due to sexual reinforcement. Through sublimation, the sexual drive has been replaced by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual.
Waugh’s Decline and Fall