|
|
|
|
Post-Modern Love |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Gregory Wolfe |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1987 |
| Size: 2,787 Words, 16,862 Characters |
|
THE MISALLIANCE
Anita Brookner
New York: Pantheon, 1986
191 pp., $14.95
LOVE UNKNOWN
A.N. Wilson
New York: Viking, 1987
202 pp., $ 16.95
"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." Those words, written by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract, have haunted the modern mind for over two hundred years. And like so many powerful and appealing ideas, Rousseau's dream of freedom has become part of the cultural air we breathe. Though we have long since forgotten Rousseau's notion of the "state of nature," where primitive men lived in a presocial condition of perfect harmony, we are willing to believe that somehow morality and social institutions have imposed artificial constrictions on our behavior. If only the outmoded, prudish Victorian morality could be jettisoned, so the argument runs, we could express and satisfy our desires naturally and spontaneously. By adding a dash of Freud to these Rousseauistic ideas, it can be claimed that only those individuals who are "repressed" fear the freedom and robust healthiness of natural man.
From Noble Savage to Yuppie
Nowhere is this line of reasoning more clearly evident than in our opinions about sexual behavior. In the 1960s, when the phenomenon we call the Sexual Revolution began, the hippies took Rosseau at his word and attempted to live as noble savages in communes. There was, of course, something noble about the sincerity and commitment of the hippies in their search for the good life. But sincerity often covers a multitude of darker and less virtuous motives. If drugs, venereal disease, possessiveness, and jealously ...
Read Full Article
...n alternative view: Scrupulous as he is, his struggle to become selfless frees him to experience the Beatrician moment of true love. Wilson also suggests that the love unknown may also be a divine love searching us out in all our restlessness. Obliquely, he intimates that our final fulfillment is to be found, in the words of an old Anglican prayer, in One "whom to serve is perfect freedom."
(1,728 of 16,862 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
