Love’s Object, or, Unrequitable Love: Reflections on the literature of Passion between Rousseau and Percy Shelley

Abstract

This discussion of the literature of unrequited love deals with the elusiveness of love’s object in the world, and asks whether that elusiveness may be intrinsic to the passion. If love is dependent upon the imagination, this implies vulnerability to disappointment or unappeasable longing: but it also makes space for the imagination as creative function or power. The unrequited lover in the texts under discussion is significantly also a writer, a maker of letters or books or poems; the artwork is understood less as a displacement of desire than as a model for its instantiation in the world. Texts discussed include Rousseau, Julie; Sterne, A Sentimental Journey; Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon; Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney; Percy Shelley, ‘On Love’, Hazlitt, Liber Amoris; and Plato, The Symposium.