The culture of love - Stephen Kern

In "The Culture of Love" Stephen Kern asserts that love itself merits its own history. Kern examines love over a period of profound change that bridges the years from "Jane Eyre" to the mid-1930s. The great 19th century novels of the Brontes, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Hardy and the modern classics of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce serve as sources of insight into the contrasting ways of loving. Paintings and sculptures by Jessica Hayllar, Courbet, Gerome, and William Frith, in juxtaposition with works by Kokoschka, Picasso, Magritte, and Picabia, offer evidence of historic transformation as well.;Kern draws on philosophy, especially the work of Heidegger, to interpret change across this period. He takes as his theme certain basic elements of love: embodiment, desire, language, sex, and power, along with specific situations: waiting, proposing, jealousy, wedding, ending. This is an original history of love, informed by the author's interpretation of literature and art. He shows how the courting ground expanded beyond the parlour to places where women study or work, how both men and women became more willing to disclose their past loves, even how modern lovers explored new possibilities of kissing beyond the sudden, blind and disembodied Victorian kiss.;"The Culture of Love" reveals the language of Victorian love, constrained by cliches and rhetorical formalities, and it explores innocence and the price often paid for it. In contrast to recent studies that have emphasized the richness of Victorian sexuality, at least in the privacy of the home, Kern argues that, compared with the sexuality of the early 20th century it was also anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, less satisfying, deadly serious, and abruptly over. Above all, he affirms the value of authenticity in love: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of the heroism, but in exchange they became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own".