Transgressive Love Research Articles

Spaces in Between in the Myth of Myrrha: A Metamorphosis into Tree

Abstract Within the larger context of metamorphoses into plants in Greek and Roman mythology, the paper aims to analyse the myth of Myrrha and her metamorphosis into a tree, focusing on the triggering cause of the transformation as well as the response given to her newly-acquired form of life. Myrrha’s transformation into a myrrh tree takes place as a consequence of her transgressive incestuous act of love with her father, Cinyras. Her metamorphosis occurs as a consequence of sinful passion – passion in extremis –, and she sacrifices her body (and human life/existence) in her escape. I will look at Ovid’s version of the myth as well as Ted Hughes’s adaptation of the story from his Tales from Ovid. My discussion of the transformation into tree starts out from the consideration that metamorphosis is the par excellence place and space of in-betweenness implying an inherent hybridity and blurred, converging subjectivities, a state of being that allows for passages, overlaps, crossings, and simultaneities. I am interested to see in what ways Myrrha’s incestuous desire for her father as well as her metamorphosis into a tree can be “rooted” back to her great-grandfather Pygmalion’s transgressive love for the ivory statue Galatea.

Perdita and Oedipus: A Tale of Two Adoptions

The paper proposes Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (WT) as foundation narrative for attachment‐informed psychotherapy, and a counterpart to Oedipus Rex (OR), covering similar psychological territory but in a strikingly different way. Both start with a father's rejection of a baby and its rescue and adoption by distant shepherds. Both revolve around murderousness and desire in a mother–father–child triangle, but in WT the prime mover is filicide rather than parricide. WT points to the positive aspects of the care‐giving dynamic. The main characters of WT, in contrast to OR's phallocentrism, are the rejected Queen Hermione, her handmaiden Paulina and Perdita herself. Their relationships are characterized by attachment security: this gives Paulina the courage to confront and instigate mentalizing in Leontes, the psychotic king, and for Perdita to find her sexuality through her transgressive love for Florizel. The environmental benefits of adoption are highlighted as WT's tragi‐comic dynamic moves from chaos to renewal and rebirth: Hermione survives the ‘attack on the good object’; Leontes recovers from his jealous hatred and subsequent depression; ruptures are repaired. WT depicts secure attachments as bulwarks against loss, and the key to resilience in the face of trauma.

ПРОИСХОЖДЕНИЕ И ФУНКЦИЯ АРХЕТИПА "КАУЗАТИВНОЙ ДЕТАЛИ" В РАЗВИТИИ И КРОССКУЛЬТУРНЫХ ПЕРЕХОДАХ ЛЕГЕНДЫ О ТРИСТАНЕ И ИЗОЛЬДЕ

The famous Celtic love-triangle story has its specific “syntax” in which the motif of the irrational beginning of the transgressive love fulfills a plot-forming (or a predicative) function. In Deirdre legend this impetus is represented by the image of a black raven who drinks fresh red blood poured on the white snow. This scene reveals in the maiden’s mind the image of her future lover (compare with the “black-red-white” episode in “Tain bo Fraich”). In late story on Diarmaid and Graiine the transgressive lover is described also having black hair and red cheeks (and white teeth), but the motif is transformed into an ornamental detail and losses its plot-forming function. The oral version of the story, preserved in folk-tradition, supplies this loss by the introduction of the motif of a spot of love (ball seirce) that has Diarmaid, making him irresistible to any woman. In the Tristan-story the same (or rather – analogical) plotforming motif is transformed into a “love-potion” given by Isolt’s mother and drunk by mistake by heroes. This magic drink of love really echoes the sleep-drink prepared by Grainne, but it is not so easy to say what motif is initial because of supposed oral versions of Tristan–legend in British Islands. The main narrative element of the story-frame is presumed to be a magus (druid, old hag, Isolt mother etc.) who fulfills the functions of Fate. In the modern Polish novel “Tristan 1946” by Maria Kuncewiczowa (1967) the function of “love-potion” fulfills a disk with Cesar Franck’s symphony. The novel has the same “narrative syntax” but the action moved to the postwar Europe and the strategy of the author represents a kind of a game with the reader who must guess all allusions.

Love and its Obstacles

Love and its Obstacles Gardner McFall (bio) Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult D. Nurkse Alfred A. Knopf www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549019/love-in-the-last-days-by-d-nurkse/ 104 Pages; Print, $27.00 For nearly thirty years, D. Nurkse has written seriously and prolifically about common human experience (marriage, divorce, the birth of his first child, death of his parents, illness, surgery) as well as world events (the draft, the Iraq War, 9/11), but his recurring, most powerful preoccupation has been love, which is masked and distilled in his eleventh volume, a book-length poetic sequence, Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Choosing to reinterpret the twelfth century story of the tragic lovers Tristan and Iseult during the "last days" (presumably human kind's last days) allows the poet to posit the supremacy of love across time as well as the nature of the last days, with its harsh intolerance for passionate, transgressive love. It also shows that love burns fiercest with obstacles in its path. While it helps to have a copy of Joseph Bedier's The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (tr. Hilaire Belloc [2005]) and Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (tr. Montgomery Belgion [1956]) when reading the book, it's not imperative since, as de Rougemont states: "There is no reason to have read Beroul's Tristan or M. Bedier's, and no need to have heard Wagner's opera, in order to undergo in the course of everyday life the nostalgic domination of such a myth . . . The myth operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever." Still, several points in de Rougemont's book concerning the Tristan myth are borne out in Nurkse's twenty-first century retelling: 1) "Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself;" 2) Passion involves suffering; and 3) "Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league." In Love in the Last Days as well as Bedier's version of the story, Tristan and Iseult's passion derives from a love potion they mistakenly drink as Tristan sails to take the Irish princess Iseult to marry his uncle and liege, King Mark of Cornwall. Yoking imagery to theme, Nurkse ascribes to the potion a flavor of "honey and bile," foretelling the couple's love and doom, though he suggests the pair is attracted to each other before they ever taste it. Tristan says: "Her high cheek bones made me slightly seasick. / I concentrated on her faults, as Ovid advises. / A mole on her cheek. But that was what fascinated me." De Rougemont calls the philtre "passion's alibi," the excuse for their ship-board affair and adultery at court. Although Tristan and Iseult's love is transgressive by conventional standards, which gives the story its tragic arc, Nurkse's volume pits love against the law; the reader can easily conclude that love is a higher calling, holding within it the possibility of love's existence beyond time, in eternity or Avalon, the enchanted island where the lovers presumably reunite after death. Love inthe Last Days, dedicated tothememory of Marc Bloch, comprises thirty-nine poems, mostly monologues, divided into a prelude (told by a harper), four sections dedicated to the advancing story, and a coda which returns to the harper, who is tortured to death for being "a chronicler of heretic adulterers." Most of the monologues are Tristan's, though Iseult speaks in several, one of which is titled "Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me." Nurkse gives monologues to the animals, landscape, and inanimate objects so the volume never bogs down in ponderous narration, but advances through a bristling juxtaposition of perspectives. Any person, creature, or thing in a position to have a view about the lovers has a voice, including Iseult's servant Brangien; the Leper to whom the king gives Iseult as punishment for her infidelity; Tristan's horse Beau Jouer that carries the lovers into Morois; Tristan's loyal dog Houdain; the...

Tainted love: Gothic imaging of nurses in popular culture.

To discuss representations of nursing in popular culture using the Contemporary Gothic theory. Nursing is stereotypically known as a caring profession. Caring in both the natural and professional perspectives is inextricably attached to love and love, we are told, is universal. In popular culture, however, there are numerous examples of nurses being portrayed in ways where love-its expression and its practice-has been transgressed or tainted. Exploring this dark side of nursing, even if fictitious, is significant because it illuminates social and cultural tensions. Discussion paper. CINAHL, Scopus and Humanities International Databases were searched for terms related to nursing, love, abject and the gothic, published between 1990-2016. Four popular culture texts which ranged in genre and gothic elements were selected for analysis. The types of transgressive love these nurses express to patients ranges from the obsessive and the pornographic, to the monstrous. We suggest this positioning illuminates a hidden reality that nursing work is at once intimate and personal but also hidden, profane, repellent, horrifying and feared. Nursing's allure for storytellers may rest in its association with the abject. How nurses find redemption, satisfaction and meaning in these locations is relevant for how we can imbue our lives and work with greater humanity. The Contemporary Gothic is a useful tool in exposing and exploring ambiguous, challenging and taboo aspects of nursing in society. Such and analysis helps to explain phenomena-including nursing itself-which exists in the shadow of dominant and often stereotyped discourses.

The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence and Transgressive Love in Historical Writing on World War II and the Holocaust

The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence and Transgressive Love in Historical Writing on World War II and the Holocaust

Paradise Lost: Reconciling the Semiotic and Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Love

Paradise Lost: Reconciling the Semiotic and Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Love Stephanie Li (bio) In the foreword to the 2005 edition of Love, Toni Morrison recalls a playmate from her childhood, a girl with “eyes full of distance” who she later learns was sexually abused by her father despite the full knowledge of her mother (ix). Morrison describes how her memory of the girl’s adult sadness evolved into an exploration of characters possessed by the “clear sense of having no one on whom one can safely rely” (xi). The three main female characters of Love, Heed, Christine, and Junior, are such women, women without “fathering and mothering” who consequently “give themselves over to … the man who looms even larger in their imagination than in their lives” (xii). Morrison concludes by identifying what saved her from such damaging adulation of patriarchal norms: It was not just a feisty mother, a supportive father, and insatiable reading habits that kept me later on from giving myself over to a life of girlish submission—some form of smiling or frowning female resignation. It was the comfort of learning from those countering sources that there were weapons—other kinds of baseball bats: defiance, exit, knowledge; not solitude, but other people; not silence, but speech. (xii) As speech rescues Morrison, arming her with powers of resistance and joy, silence is what destroys the childhood love between Heed the Night Johnson and Christine Cosey. They embrace “girlish submission” as the only way to gain the affection and money of Bill Cosey, Christine’s grandfather and Heed’s husband. However, silence is not what first defines their deep, transgressive love for one another. Rather, silence reigns only after their friendship, a type of self-enclosed Eden, is destroyed by Cosey through his sexualization of both girls. By juxtaposing Heed and Christine’s private “idagay” language against the patriarchal law of the father, the novel demonstrates how Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic—a state of undifferentiated plenitude based in the fusion of female bodies—is ruptured by violent entrance into [End Page 27] the symbolic’s oppressive hierarchy. Love undermines the Lacanian conflation between language and the law of the father by presenting idagay, a female-identified language developed by the two girls, as a discourse independent of the constraints of patriarchy. However, idagay must not be understood as a singular good or a simplistic escape from the alienating discourse of the symbolic. Though free of the divisive effects of patriarchy, idagay reflects the totalizing and ultimately isolating unity that characterizes the friendship between Heed and Christine. Their relationship fails to allow for individual subjectivity, that is, for the dynamic and generative possibilities of human difference. Morrison’s exploration of how semiotic impulses can be mapped onto language demonstrates the need for a mode of communication that moves beyond the engrained dichotomies and antagonisms of gender associated with the symbolic’s power to name and categorize. Such liberating language is described by what L, the novel’s ambiguous narrator, calls humming. Like L’s own unarticulated name, this discourse is one of indirection and possibility. Just as “L” contains multiple meanings—love, loss, lesbian, language, loneliness, to name a few—humming revels in the ambivalent experience of longing rather than in definitive acts of fulfillment and closure. Humming represents Morrison’s response to the constraints of the patriarchal signifier; it is a language that reorders semiotic drives into expressive form, embracing the plenitude of desire. The Semiotic Paradise of Heed and Christine Much of Toni Morrison’s fiction examines human attempts to capture and create paradise. In Jazz, Morrison portrays the beguiling magnetism of New York City in the 1920s as it welcomes migrants from the South with new jobs, new freedoms, and a future of limitless possibilities. Aboard a train bound for the city, Joe and Violet Trace literally dance into a world where “History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last” (Jazz 7). Full of promise and freedoms only waiting to be discovered, “the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it” (8). However, these fantasies ultimately erode...

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'SWILLIAM RUFUS

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaperfeatured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure inLong Ago(74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision inSight and Song(1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

"The Sabbath of the Heart": Transgressive Love in Lady Morgan's India

The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) by Sidney Owenson (Lady Morgan after her marriage 1812), presents tragic love story between Western cleric and an Indian princess, fraught with all the tensions and pressures that contraries of culture bring to bear on forbidden love. The Missionary was Romeo and Juliet religious garb, crossing sacred boundaries climate hostile to both of them. Such transgressive love is powerful metaphor for cultural conflict, which Owenson uses to represent the crisis faced by non-European woman love with celibate Christian and Western missionary. Much of it is set the valley of Kashmir, India, during time of political conflict and religious tempest when idealism, nationalism, patriotism, and radicalism collided with an oppressive European hegemony over an ancient people from civilization alien to Western understanding. Percy Bysshe Shelley called The Missionary a beautiful thing (qtd. Wright 43), and the Indian setting and themes probably influenced Alastor. From the example of Shelley, one can see that India held powerful allure for British writers of this time as its exotic world clashed with the West. India, as Julia Wright observes, in The Missionary is contrivance for addressing colonialism and the attendant issue of religious intolerance while apparently dislocating them from Owenson's main sphere of influence, nineteenth-century Ireland ... (19). Joseph Lennon, however, sees Ireland and Indian culturally connected, identifies an Irish Orientalism and Celtic roots the East. By the time Owenson wrote The Missionary, India presented special problems for Westerners and epitomized similar problems closer to home. Lady Morgan uses the religiously inscribed transgressive love experience as the crucible to examine the effects of colonialism. The Missionary provides distorting mirror of conflicting religious practice and custom, those of the imperialists against native beliefs and patterns of behavior. Lady Morgan writes her Dramatic Scenes. ''Those who would live by the world, must live it, and with it: and adapt themselves to its form and pressure' (v) (qtd. Canuel 123), an appeal of religious tolerance by those who live secular world. Referring to Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish. Girl, Mark Canuel argues that religious intolerance this period served writers as way of exploring and understanding a feeling of separation with community--a separation from communal feeling that is itself communal ... (268). In The Missionary, community is vexed issue, and the religiously oriented characters of the novel, Princess Luxima and Hilarion the Missionary, seek to define themselves and their worlds and find their mediating communities and means to validate their relationship maelstrom of challenge and threat. Thus, Lady Morgan scrutinizes her novels topical, politically charged religion as means of creating fictions that resonated for her readers then and now when scholars and critics are challenged by the representation of non-European people, places, and cultures British Romantic literature. Transgression has special meaning novel published 1811, novel that deliberately poses several different worlds and circumscribed communities, which have unique and often conflicting patterns of mores and codes of behavior and sanction. Sydney Owenson had never been to India, though she was reputed to have been diligent the research to substantiate her novels, and the authorial foot-notes The Missionary exemplify her scholarship, particularly her sympathetic portrayal of Hinduism, as Michael J. Franklin has argued (General Introduction, 25). The Missionary opens Portugal, under the despotic rule of Spain, then relocates to India, the province now called Kashmir, as ideologically tense between Muslims and Hindus two hundred years ago as it is the modern world. …

Out of Place: Family Dysfunction and Displacement in Valentine

Il me semblait que la Vallee noire, c'etait moi-meme, c'etait le cadre, le vetement de ma propre existence. (1) In the preface to Valentine, George Sand reflects on the Berry region where she grew up and the sense of place it has given her. Valentine, published on the heels of Indiana in 1832, is Sand's first novel set in the Vallee noire, a location both real and imagined that will become a setting of choice for the novelist, notably in her romans champetres. (2) While the descriptive part of her novel was praised, admits Sand in the Notice, the romance plot was more controversial. Valentine indeed reprises some of the contentious themes central to Indiana, such as the perils of ill-assorted unions, (3) adultery and a perceived Saint-Simonian discourse on feminine emancipation. The novels thwart expectations that the romance should lead to the consolidation of the wholesome patriarchal family. The apparent discrepancy between the novel's decor and its plot is perhaps not as accidental as it may at first appear. In sharp contrast to the author's own sense of rootedness, the characters in Valentine all suffer from being out of place. Physical displacement reflects their alienation from a clear sense of self and from the family. The novel, set in the late 1820s in the Berry countryside, (4) intertwines several romantic plots among the members of two families of different social strata, most prominently the tragic story of transgressive love between Valentine de Raimbault, an aristocrat betrothed to M. de Lansac, and Benedict Lhery, a peasant of means. Valentine and Benedict are torn apart by divergent social classes as symbolized by their opposed dwellings, the chateau and the farm; the lovers, however, have much in common. Both feel displaced and are racked by feelings of obligation, debt and rivalry toward their families; and both dream of new forms of solidarity in self-made or elective community. Beneath the romance in Valentine lies an insightful reflection into the impact of historical transformation on the family, leading to a portrait of family life as an experience of exclusion rather than of belonging. Valentine registers changed expectations in relationships among parents, children and spouses, and challenges to parental and male conjugal authority, which stemmed from the French Revolution. Despite its pastoral setting, the French Revolution is a constant, if implicit, referent in Valentine, and the novel reflects on changes in the social structure borne out of the post-revolutionary era. (5) The Revolution transformed identity in part by changing relationships to the land. The emigres, for example, were dispossessed and their lands converted into biens nationaux; meanwhile, social mobility accompanied the creation of new landed gentry. By challenging the traditional roles of women and men, reevaluating the institution of marriage, reconsidering illegitimacy and fostering a sense of individualism, the Revolution broadly impacted the family. As Claudie Bernard has shown, the Old Regime model of the aristocratic familia, tied to its lands, to its traditions, and to a network of relations, gradually ceded way to a New Regime or democratic family unit, nuclear rather than extended, autonomous rather than relational or affiliative. Valentine draws on these changed relationships between land and family to represent the physical displacement and familial dysfunction of its characters. Criticai readings of Valentine have often drawn on the polarized topography of the novel to map the opposition between the two families, the Raimbaults and the Lherys. Micheline Besnard, in her semiotic analysis of the novel's places, was the first to discuss in depth how topography figures social, individual and even corporeal identities. Observing that the novel's main characters separate themselves from their expected social environments, she argues that les personnages peuvent se definir par rapport a l'espace auquel ils appartiennent, ou qu'ils fuient, ou qu'ils recherchent (41). …

The Politics of Love: Propaganda and Structural Learning in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister

Given her influential and decidedly liberal feminist social agenda, Aphra Behn's political convictions during the struggles of the 1680s between Parliament and Charles II have struck several critics as incongruously reactionary. This essay proposes a partial resolution to this apparent contradiction by examining how Behn employs the psychology of transgressive love to model the relation between the king and his subjects. By drawing selectively from the different sets of inferences present in the conceptual spaces of passionate love and autocratic power, Behn produces an unstable but potent conceptual blend. The emerging “liberal royalism” is driven by desire and characterized by an emotionally irresistible reciprocal attachment.

Translation as Metaphor in Hildesheimer's Marbot Eine Biographie

Translation as Metaphor in Hildesheimer's Marbot Line Biographie Julia L Abramson On February 22, 1980, in the literary supplement of the Ham- burg weekly Die Zeit, Wolfgang Hildesheimer published an article describing a character whose biography was to appear the follow- ing year. As if to prevent confusion regarding Marbot Eine Biographie, the article's captions give to understand that the text to be pub- lished is not a historical treatise, but rather a historical novel, a gefalschte ... Biographie (Die Warheit 42). Another rubric refers to Hildesheimer's proclivity for skurrile Fiktionen (43) and ist announces that here as elsewhere in his work, Wirklichkeit absurd, Wahrheit ein Spiel The subject of this falsified biography. Sir Andrew Marbot, was born in England in 1801 and committed suicide in Urbino, Italy in 1830. As a boy, he preferred the company of his refined mother and maternal grandfather over that of his father, who was interested only in hunting and sports. Though he did not kill his father, Marbot pursued a passionate affair with his mother. As an adult, his energies were channelled either into this romance or into the pursuit of his second love, the analysis of paintings. In the course of two European Grand Tours, which doubled as periods of self-imposed exile from England and his mother, he encountered such luminaries as Goethe, Byron, Turner, Delacroix and Schopenhauer. Marbot mulled over the works of these and other Romantic-era artists and intellectuals, finding in them a reflection of himself or matter for dispute. Marbot himself invented a singu- lar method of understanding paintings. Realizing that the subli- mation of his transgressive love for his mother fueled his own analytical studies, Marbot searched to understand paintings through the psychology of their creators. While the Zeit article may have stimulated interest in the book to come, it also warned readers that Marbot Eine Biographie con- cerns a fictional character thrust into a historical world. It may be more suitable to speak of the character Marbot's insertion into the real world, rather than into a historical world, since the latter suggests a vision of the real world but only in a former time.

Amour courtois, société masculine et figures du pouvoir

Mon projet est ici de reprendre l'analyse de l'une des configurations de cette relation amoureuse que les critiques modernes ont coutume, depuis Gaston Paris, de nommer amour courtois, et que les auteurs médiévaux appelaient fin ‘amor. La configuration qui sera étudiée ici, c'est celle qui dans le nord de la France a connu sa parfaite représentation à travers les couples de Lancelot et Guenièvre d'une part, de Tristan et Yseut d'autre part. Par rapport aux autres types possibles de l'amour courtois, celui-ci se caractérise par le fait qu'il unit un jeune homme célibataire et une femme mariée qui est d'un rang social supérieur : c'est la relation amoureuse spécifique de la littérature des troubadours.