The End of the Novel of Love

By VIVIAN GORNICK
Beacon Press
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CHAPTER ONE  

In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman--at last--melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one--among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway--where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins. 

The response of these intelligent fictional women--Gwendolen Harleth, Lily Bart, Diana Warwick, Clarissa Dalloway--to the prospect of married love goes against the grain. Not only because we all know that love is the most formative experience a human being can have and marriage, any marriage, at least in its beginnings, reminds one of its promise, but also because the idea that a woman, any woman, could really want anything other than to be safely settled in the world with a husband has, until very recently, been unthinkable.

So what is it with Gwendolen, Lily, Clarissa, and Diana? 

In Daniel Deronda George Eliot pits the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (shrewd, vain, ambitious, hungry for a place in the world) against Henleigh Grandcourt, the aristocrat who wishes to marry her, apparently setting in motion the classic struggle between a woman and a man who are evenly matched: in this case both cold, smart, and determined. In the bargain, Gwendolen seems malicious: she taunts and manipulates the arrogant lord as if the exercise of sexual power in and of itself is a necessary plesure. But slowly, steadily--it takes Eliot 200 pages to get them married--we are moved deeper inside Gwendolen and we see that her behavior is meant to be off-putting. She is desperate to keep the action going, delay the moment of decision. We see that she is buying time. She dreads marriage. "It was not," Eliot observes of her, "that she wished to damage men, it was only that she wished not to be damaged by them."

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