Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality

Abstract

Love at First Sight:The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality Christopher Matthews (bio) In mainstream twentieth-century culture, the phenomenon of love at first sight—as romantic trope, Hollywood staple, biochemical wonder—has resided squarely in the realm of what we might call a feminine epistemology. In his 1955 study of the "logical forms" people use to justify their actions, philosopher E. A. Gellner noticed that the "question [of] whether there is such a thing as 'love at first sight'" was "frequently and with interest discussed in the pages of women's journals"—if, that is, his "reading in dentists' waiting rooms [was] at all representative" (158). Mustering a masculine, vaguely scientific authority, Gellner bemoans the naivete of treating the topic as "an empirical question" (158) and, modeling the correct approach, demonstrates that on logical grounds love at first sight could never really exist. Not surprisingly, despite such a confident closing of the case, the culture of "women's journals" has continued to proliferate theories about love at first sight, in articles such as "Love at First Sight," "The Truth about Love at First Sight," and "Love at First Sight: Does It Really Exist?" in Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Seventeen, and Teen throughout the 1980s and 1990s.1 Like romance generally, a familiarity with love at first sight has been marketed to (implicitly heterosexual) women as a necessity for emotional and sexual literacy: women's expertise at femininity, such marketing implies, requires a mastery of both the pleasurable romantic drama and the tricky empirical problems of acquiring a male mate. In the modern division of sexual labor, women are still addressed en masse as amateur specialists of the heart, practicing an inconsequential mastery in the antechambers of male professionalism. If we were to seek this mastery's genealogy, we might expect to arrive somewhere near the Victorian drawing room, that segregated space of women's discourse. But in nineteenth-century Britain, love at first sight in fact emerged as a question of masculine epistemology and sexuality. Understood as a specifically male experience of desire for [End Page 425] women, the pleasures and dangers of such love required men's attention, their affirmation or skepticism. While never a centerpiece of debate within the professions, love at first sight nonetheless gained a certain currency, and an aura of legitimacy, within male-centered segments of literary and visual arts culture of the mid-century—a culture that became an important resource for later narratives of scientific and psychological exploration. Beginning in the 1840s, love at first sight emerged as a valorized trope, particularly in compact literary and visual forms—lyric poetry, short fiction, and narrative painting—that could accommodate and/or mirror the accelerated intimacy of love at first sight. Short stories entitled "Love at First Sight," "The First Time I Saw Her," or "A First Love," as well as essays entitled "Falling in Love" and "Modern Love," appeared in major British and American periodicals from the 1840s to the 1880s.2 Those decades saw love at first sight represented similarly in poetry, from Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich (1848) and "Natura Naturans" (1849) to Henry Austin Dobson's "Incognita" (1866) and Coventry Patmore's "The Girls of All Periods" (1878), as well as in Abraham Solomon's paintings entitled First Class—The Meeting: "And at First Meeting Loved" (1854).3 While such works typically put on display the irresistibly modest woman in public, the real object of their attention is the nature of the development, responsiveness, and moral valence of male desire. The attractive woman is not necessarily a static object—these narratives in part dramatize the procedures and ethics of sexual attraction between men and women—but mid-century portrayals of love at first sight most directly explore and celebrate the spectacle of male heterosexual desire, its origins and processes. Examining a shift from skepticism to valorization over the course of the century, I will argue that the trope of mid-century love at first sight constructs male heterosexuality as a performance of simultaneously instinctual and moral passion. Jeffrey Weeks has written of "the difficulty of finding either a noun or an adjective to act as...