Author champions failed, risky, combative love

Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century

By Cristina Nehring

HarperCollins, 328 pages, $33

Cristina Nehring wants you to fall in love -- headlong, heedless maybe even hopeless love.

In this attention-getting debut book, the American critic and essayist sets out an extravagantly romantic argument while backing it with solid historical and literary examples.

According to Nehring, love in the 21st century has been domesticated by the sturdy commonsense of middle-class marriage, trivialized by an ironic distrust of feeling, dampened by therapy culture, and tamed by political correctness.

Forsaking its dark and dangerous power, love has become just another "lifestyle choice." As a corrective, Nehring champions failed love, risky love, combative love, transgressive love.

She argues for the aphrodisiac effects of distance and obstacles, from the non-stop tragedy of the Tristan and Iseult tale to the violent real-life separation of medieval scholars Heloise and Abelard.

She reveals the paradox of the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in spinsterly New England solitude while channelling a fierce energy into impossible attachments to upstanding family men.

Nehring also revisits the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, who in 1792 wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the key documents in feminist history.

Her writings were revolutionary, but she dismayed many modern scholars with her life, especially her supposedly un-feminist tendency to throw herself away on worthless men.

Nehring turns this model on its head, suggesting that what made Wollstonecraft daring in love made her daring in thought. "I think most deeply when I strongly feel," declared Wollstonecraft.

The same could be said of Nehring, who displays a provocative, passionate intellectual style. She's a flirt, in fact, who likes to point out that the erotic dimensions of discourse have a pedigree going back to Socrates.

Like Camille Paglia, Nehring too often views herself as the lone voice crying in the wilderness of academic orthodoxy.

While she identifies as a feminist, she frequently positions herself against feminism in general, making almost everyone else out to be a repressive anti-sex no-fun-nik.

Nehring sometimes exaggerates or reduces the arguments of her opponents, and she can be a bit of a cherry-picker with her biographical and literary sources. Is it really fair to compare a 21st-century self-help book with a Grimm's fairy tale, for example?

"I argue by provocation. I embrace generalization," she admits in her introduction. "My intention is not to be statistically or sociologically bulletproof."

This is a deft way to dodge potential criticism, of course, but we should give Nehring her due. Her ideas are sometimes fast and loose, but they are never boring. Vindication might be flawed. It's also well worth arguing over.

Nehring concludes her polemic with a melodramatic declaration: "As I write these words, I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents."

She may be a grown-up scholar, but there is a teenage edge to her arguments. Like an adolescent, she displays a ferocious determination never to settle.

But at times she lacks subtlety, missing the not-so-sexy truth that some of the quieter passions run very deep and that long marriages -- even those that appear conventional -- might not be so static and stodgy after all.

There is also an interesting biographical footnote to the book -- and Nehring is the first to defend connections between a writer's life and work. The author, who divides her time among Paris, Los Angeles and Chania, Greece, wrote Vindication while she was pregnant with her first child. (The child's father, with whom she has since split, is shown in Nehring's photo page on the HarperCollins website as a classic brooding bad boy.)

It could be that Nehring will find that mad love -- and its messy aftermath -- loses some of its appeal when a child is in the picture.

Still, the core of the book -- the brave belief that love, at it most profound, is a transforming force -- will stand up.

When we love we do not escape from the world, Nehring believes. We encounter it, with renewed intensity, curiosity and feeling.

Winnipeg journalist Alison Gillmor writes a pop culture column in Saturday's Detour section.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 26, 2009 B10