Self-Control and Uncontrollable Passion in Stendhal's Theory of Love

Abstract

This article explores Stendhal’s understanding of self-control and willpower (and their loss) through a close reading of De l’amour . Although recent criticism has tended to dismiss the author’s scientific claims for the text, Stendhal addresses aspects of self-control also discussed in recent research in the cognitive and behavioural sciences. Bringing both these accounts and the cultural histories of emotion and gender into dialogue with Stendhal’s text, the article identifies a key conceptual tension. Firstly, Stendhal asserts that passionate love is an almost entirely uncontrollable phenomenon. While this view draws on the ancient topos of ‘love as illness’, Stendhal also analyses issues such as self-deception, boredom, gambling, reverie, and temperament to help explain the limits of conscious volition in love. Secondly, he simultaneously suggests that love is impossible without self-control, for reasons related to the temporal dynamics of love and the honour ethic, although self-control has quite different cultural meanings for nineteenth-century male and female subjects. The article concludes that, for Stendhal, self-control is like a ladder without which love cannot develop but which must ultimately be discarded. The dialectic of control and the loss of control also highlights tensions between the honour ethic and the still influential code of sensibility.