The Search For Real Love - Confounded By The Hopelessly Fabulist Romanticism Of A Medieval Dreamer

The poet Petrarch (1304-1374) is credited with the creation or at least discovery of romantic love.  Petrarch was an Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Until he was smitten by ‘Laura’, the woman of his 366 sonnets, he contented himself with academic treatises on political philosophy, moral theory, and social order. After spotting her in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, however, he was never the same.

There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his "Secretum", she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man. 

Petrarch wrote: "In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death… extinguished the cooling flames.

 

Petrarch was consumed by love for ‘Laura’ but guilt and the ponderous weight of his former priesthood and the mores of the times – not to mention that ‘Laura’ was married – prevented consummation. He wanted her and at the same time was repulsed by his immoral desires. “He channeled his feelings into love poems… and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women”.

Petrarch’s sonnets all idealize ‘Laura’.  In his verse she became a perfect but untouchable woman – a saint, the perfection of female beauty, and a goddess.  In the following sonnet, Petrarch expresses his ineffable, unattainable love for her and the permanent grief caused by her death.  His was idealistic, unrequited love; and his poems expressed the persistent romantic notion of compulsive, but often unattainable desire.

Henrietta Parsons knew all about Petrarch, his love poems, his late adolescence, and his codifying the love ballads of 11th century troubadours into a genre. Petrarch didn't exactly invent romantic love - the conditions in the early Renaissance, knights, fair maidens, courtship, and the emergence of the sybaritic court, were right; and the songs of the iterant musicians limning the beauty of sexual intimacy were just the thing to set the poet dreaming. 

Romantic love needed a beginning.  Before the idea emerged, marriages were arranged, brides and grooms were chosen for their reproductive and economic potential, for their social status, and their well-being.  Marriage was a contract to assure viability in hard times and not something vulnerable to the vicissitudes of subjective choice.

Kings were no different.  Henry VIII was not interested in love and romance but a woman who would give him a male heir. Other kings, courtiers, and varied royalty were no different.  Marriage was an official affair with invariable parameters set long ago.  Emperors, sultans, shahs, and shoguns were governed by the same rules of practicality.  No one, high- or low-born could afford the vagaries and uncertainties of romantic love. 

Be that as it may, Henrietta was lonely, unloved, and forgotten.  Well past the days of her youth and entering an age of dubious sexual interest and decreasing fertility, she despaired.  She had dressed too often in the sequins, ribbons, and frills of a princess to dismiss the idea of a Prince Charming.  She had read too much romantic fiction to see love in the most unexpected places in the most unsuspecting circumstances.

The battlefield, however, was littered with bad marriages and contentious divorces.  Over half the marriages in the United States ended in dissolution - and those were first marriages.  The rate for successive ones was almost as high. Women and men who thought they had learned from the first debacle had not.  The configuration of sexual desire - to whom we are attracted - is set early on, some calculus of father-love, mother-jealousy, natural sensitivity, reserve, or hostility.  So it is not surprising that women fall into the same disastrous marriage pit again and again. 

Yet Henrietta, despite her romantic fantasies, was a very disciplined and determined woman. The had been imbued with the concept of romantic love - that is, that it does exist far beyond the poetic dreams of a Renaissance journeyman.  There is something almost spiritual in the union of two perfectly matched people.  

D.H. Lawrence came close to expressing the idea of this iconic union, but stopped at the physical.  Coming together, mutual orgasm between one who dominated and one who willingly submitted opened psychic doors and allowed the release of untapped energies and passions. 

Love was absent in this calculus as it was in Tantrism, the precursor of Lawrentian spiritual epiphany; or the philosophy of ying and yang and the necessary complementarity of the sexes.  Henrietta wanted both Tantric expression and Petrarchan romance to complete her puzzle. 

Whistlin' Dixie, of course.  Such perfection occurred only on drugstore shelves - magazines and dime-store novels filled with promise, romance, and emotional completion. Everywhere else in real life, such intimacy, romantic desire, and blissful fulfillment was absent. 

The Andersons, the Parsons' next door neighbor fought like banshees.  They 'flayed each other to the marrow' as George says to Martha in Edward Albee's play about drunken sexual brutality, the insistent, cruelly present desire to resolve disputes and return to camaraderie if not love. Was this a condition of love, Henrietta wondered? Having to go through a gantlet of abuse, bloody antipathy, and hurtful spite?

William Eakins, the Parsons' neighbor on the other side of the house, was a serial adulterer, and when the Eakins' bedroom windows were open in the summer, Henrietta could hear Martha sobbing inconsolably, waiting for her aberrant husband to return. 

Irma Carlson committed suicide by asphyxiation in a closed garage because her husband tortured her.  He never resorted to physical violence, but he disassembled the poor woman emotionally piece by piece for years until the torment was intolerable. 

Heidi Ballard loved her husband dearly, but he was a vaporous, infinitely passionless man who married because it was what one did, a kind of social anchor to a regular, predictable life.  Why she fell for such an empty vessel was another story altogether, but the misery of unrequited love was first on the list. 

There is always romance at the beginning, something befuddled by sexual desire, notions of beauty, innocence, and charm; but after a few years of sharing the same bed, the same dinner table and the same television channels, the blush came quickly off the bloom of the rose. 

So, what's a woman like Henrietta to do?  A woman with not inconsiderable intelligence, sensibility, and emotion; a woman who desperately wants a life companion but is discouraged by the detritus around her; but a woman who still believes that some modicum of happiness can be found with another. 

Women will try anything to increase their chances.  What is the gender spectrum but an opening of many doors.  The combinations and permutations are limitless, and a woman should be able to find a partner among them.  Yet the whole idea of some randomly ascribed sexuality, some invented, self-serving psycho-social category defeated the whole purpose of romantic love. 

Lesbianism offered a convenient outlet; but in all recorded history, in all ancient and modern fiction, and in all potent sexual affairs, it was only the fireworks between men and women which lit the sky.  That was what Tantrism, Lawrence, and ying and yang were all about. Something preternatural and predetermined. 

It would be a fitting ending to the story of Henrietta Parsons if Mr. Right walked into her life, they fell in love, married, and lived happily ever after; but of course that only happens in romantic fiction.  These days you've got work at marriage to make a go of it, such are the competing demands of profession, individuality, and married life; and work does not a Garden of Eden make.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the only writer who really understood the Henrietta Parsons of the world.  Jay Gatsby was a dreamer, perhaps the only man that Nick Carroway, the narrator and Gatsby's friend knew who had an undiminished idealism and romantic hopefulness. 

The Gatsby story ends tragically but the lesson is not lost.  There is hope for the romantically driven, motivated by something more profound than anything Petrarch could have imagined, something that one should hold on to and never give up. 

Perhaps Henrietta was a Jay Gatsby, at least one hopes so, although at the same time wishing that her end is more satisfying and satisfactory.  It probably will be, because for all her heady romanticism and almost impossible idealism, she was imperturbably wise.