Did women really think they could only love once?
May 7, 2017 5:49 PM   Subscribe

I've been struck by a meme in 19th-century literature: women could love only once in their lives. In Trollope women pine for the man they loved (knowing they can never love again); in Goncharov's Oblomov the heroine, having "wasted" her love on the titular sad-sack, agonizes because now she can't love a worthy man. I can accept antiquated ideas in old novels (a man whose honor is impugned must fight a duel), but this seems so bizarre I'm wondering if people actually believed it or if it was an artificial assumption to provide plot motivation.
posted by languagehat to Human Relations (29 answers total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are you taking into consideration the idea that women didn't have the right to divorce, or if they had the right, not the access to it? Women pined because they were stuck with someone else, even if that guy had left them, literally or figuratively.

There were also enormous class, economic, racial, and/or religious distinctions, so even an unmarried woman may have been pining because the object of her dreams was literally unreachable. She may have been "ruined" by the man she got stuck with, or had a prior relationship with. That would have also rendered the possibility of a future relationship with the man of her dreams impossible.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:03 PM on May 7, 2017 [11 favorites]


This concept persisted at least until the novel Barren Corn by Georgette Heyer, published in 1930.
posted by bq at 6:08 PM on May 7, 2017


I wonder if this was a romantic cover up or even euphemism for the idea that women were tied to a man through sex forever whether married or not as in the plot of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In other words, I imagine this might be about chastity.
posted by Waiting for Pierce Inverarity at 6:21 PM on May 7, 2017 [39 favorites]


I think also since women didn't really have sexual/romantic agency, it's not like they could go around choosing new options based on who they liked. They'd have to wait for The One to pursue them. Think about how hard it is to find love even when you have a lot of options. Now reduce the chances of meeting to very few and you have a recipe for romanticizing the whole process.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 6:27 PM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I don't think it's a trope of 19thC literature, I think it's a trope of first love literature. Every single young person who's had his or her heart broken is entirely convinced they will never love again.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:38 PM on May 7, 2017 [29 favorites]


Best answer: This is a fascinating question because to some extent, I think, people's inner lives are shaped by the tropes they're immersed in. So, probably some people believed this (and some still do, in fact -- the "soul mate" concept is still around.) But there are counter examples in 19th C novels and the ones that come to mind are by women. In these novels, women love more than one man in different ways as their lives progress. You could say that Catherine Earnshaw loved her husband Linton but in a very different way than she loved Heathcliff. Dorothea loved Casaubon for a while before becoming disenchanted with him and falling in love with Will; and Jane Austen, in a lighter register of course, is full of young women happily bouncing between loves. So I think this is a complex idea and I would guess that it was a strong Romantic discourse of the sexist variety, but not totalizing.
posted by flourpot at 6:41 PM on May 7, 2017 [23 favorites]


My vote is a romantic/literary convention that, like today, many people internalized and turned into a real life belief. During the 19th century, the idea resurfaced that it was somehow more virtuous not to remarry after being widowed (death and widowhood becoming enshrined and fetishized), and I think that lifelong torch-carrying for a first love gone wrong was an extension of this.

Also, like DarlingBri points out, the trope is still with us in YA, romantic, and literary fiction. Tons of romance novels still use the "never got over you" plot, although in that case the characters reunite and stars are uncrossed.
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:43 PM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've seen in multiple real-life contexts Catholic women who would not marry again, out of the question, even though they might be, say, widowed.
posted by rhizome at 6:57 PM on May 7, 2017


Women frequently love twice in Trollope - Can You Forgive Her is pretty much all about that.
posted by Mchelly at 7:01 PM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


My vote is a romantic/literary convention that, like today, many people internalized and turned into a real life belief.

probably maybe, yeah, but those conventions don't come from nowhere, for no reason, and this particular one isn't one that can be traced to some one wicked genius who shaped the minds of a generation, like Goethe making all the sad boys of his time throw themselves into mill ponds. it takes hold because of some powerful recognition felt by the reading public -- an idea about love like that has to be either really attractive in some way on a base level or function as an amplifying mirror, because the reading public loves a mirror.

like the way modern people like to talk about "limerence" instead of falling in love, because they read about it somewhere. but such a dreary idea wouldn't have taken such an evil hold if it didn't speak to some very real aspect of the modern character.

or like the way people five-ten years ago liked to puzzle over and scoff at at young girls for liking sex vampires, as though they couldn't imagine the average girl had vast reserves of weird sexy danger notions just waiting to be monetized, because the taste for them must have been inexplicably implanted by mass marketing. but it was there the whole time and no mystery to those who had it.

these are all related, of course; danger and pathos are what make a romantic ideal so ideal, whatever it happens to be. vampires sap your vital energies; vile seducers steal your marriage prospects and leave you a ruined husk with or without a bastard; your false lover eats up all your pure love and you have none left to give to anyone else whether you get free of him or he dies or not. so does your true lover, but you aren't supposed to mind.

but that's why the false lover on whom a woman throws herself away is such a powerful idea, because it's scary.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:02 PM on May 7, 2017 [37 favorites]


I'm with Waiting for Pierce Inverarity. I can't imagine that the idea of wasting their love is anything other than a gentle way of saying that now that they're not a virgin no man would want them. (Which was probably not a totally out-there concern.)
posted by 256 at 7:45 PM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


like the way modern people like to talk about "limerence" instead of falling in love, because they read about it somewhere

You know, not that I spend a lot of time reading pop psychology, but I swear, I have only ever seen discussion of "limerence" on Mefi. Makes me grit my teeth, it does, even though I recognize it's gesturing in the direction of a legitimate concept.

I can't imagine that the idea of wasting their love is anything other than a gentle way of saying that now that they're not a virgin no man would want them

Very, very few of the sort of women literary characters in question in this era would have had premarital sex, though the engagement was a dangerous liminal period, as in the not-very-distant past sex after engagement would've been relatively unremarkable. A kind of, er, emotional virginity might nonetheless be wanting in the previously-loved girl:
The young man was sincerely but placidly in love...he suspected, in the depths of [his fiancee's] innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But they were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as Thackeray’s heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.
May Welland could not possibly ever have been jilted, or even in serious love before. The Age of Innocence is, of course, actually a post-WWI novel, but I think it's referring to a nineteenth-century expectation.
posted by praemunire at 8:03 PM on May 7, 2017 [14 favorites]


While studying my family genealogy, I learned that Americans in the 19th century, stayed married, serially, and were rarely unmarried. I watched one ancestor, my Great Grandfather on my Father's side, marry his first wife, he married another woman, within a month of her passing, who was my other great grandmother, who died within a year, and somewhere in there married my other great grandmother, who also died just after having my grandmother and her sister, and then married again. The great, great grandmother who was married to him, did not have children with him, dying less than a year into the marriage, but she had already been widowed. My great grandmother was married no less than three times.

In that age, people on the American frontier took care of the children of widows and widowers, through marriage, women, especially spent little time unmarried.

So the longing for the perfect one, the greener grass, the one that got away, the honey she never tasted, etc, has to be a literary device. And these first marriages were often at age 15 or 16 for the women. Staying at home unmarried for any length of time after 15 was a luxury for the prosperous.
posted by Oyéah at 8:11 PM on May 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


Never Loved Before means comparisons are impossible, which is a comfort not just to the nervous husband but to the woman who can't marry without being legally and emotionally consumed by her husband. The long-nineteenth heroines who Love Twice are generally feisty in other ways, are the not? Dorothea, Madame Max Goesler, etc.

So some of the particularly long-nineteenth flavor of the idea would be a new sentimental desire that wives enjoy their subjugation, and some might be because women were actually being driven out of the public sphere.
posted by clew at 11:04 PM on May 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Mod note: A couple deleted. Please stick to the question of whether the One Love trope for women was mostly a literary device, or if it was common belief in the 1800s – and keep in mind that Ask Metafilter is not a discussion, chat or debate area, but a place to ask and answer questions directly. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:45 PM on May 7, 2017


In Charlotte Bronte's novel the heroine famously falls in love with two men, and pretty much describes at the end how she still is kind of in love with the first one. This prompted some criticism from fellow authors, which, as the linked books suggest is partly responding to perceived 'coarseness' and partly due to its breaking away from the literary convention at the time, especially in the novel. The literary convention might also come from a desire to avoid 'coarseness' but it might also be a question of structure, reaching towards the sublime, improving the moral aspect (you become a better person through suffering than through getting over it), and so on.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 3:43 AM on May 8, 2017


Best answer: I was just reading Sense and Sensibility, and this is one of Marianne's ideas: that a true lover can love only once in their life, and any other love is a pale imitation/not real, etc. etc. It's clear in the book that this comes from her extensive reading.

Clearly, Jane Austen didn't believe this, because she mocked Marianne's sensitivity every time it showed up on the page, and, in the end, married her off to Colonel Brandon. I'd like to believe that Austen's characters are drawn more from life, and less from this is how characters in other books behave. But, perhaps not; she did write an entire novel to satirize the Gothic tradition.

But I do think that a trope like this did influence many people, and it was believed to a greater or lesser extent. Representation matters.
posted by JawnBigboote at 5:30 AM on May 8, 2017 [12 favorites]


Praemunire's reference to The Age of Innocences is very apt, and Edith Wharton brutally described the alternative to this virginity of heart and spirit in her short story, "The Other Two," which was published in The Descent of Man and Other Stories in 1904. When Waythorn marries a charming twice-divorced woman, he thinks of her as "fresh and elastic," but he gradually comes to view her as used and stretched out:

She was "as easy as an old shoe"--a shoe that too many feet had worn. Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many different directions. Alice Haskett--Alice Varick--Alice Waythorn--she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.
posted by timeo danaos at 5:31 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Best answer: It's almost never about premarital sex. However it is about a major privileging of love, because as the Romantic era goes forward it love within marriage becomes even more important. It's not only important to marry someone you love, it's important to love the person you marry. It becomes necessary and virtuous. Young women are told that they mustn't marry someone for money or position--that's immoral--but only because they really and sincerely love them. (Sometimes older women, or women who are penniless and must provide for orphaned siblings, are "allowed" to marry someone they're not in love with.)

But of course women always have to tread carefully because there's no divorce or spousal cruelty laws; but they must marry (in most cases) lest they be an old maid. So they also must never fall in love with someone who doesn't love them back.

So for example in Austen prudent women are supposed to manage things like this:

1. Meet eligible man.
2. Whatever the attraction of this man, refrain from falling in love with him until he's proven himself to be 1. morally worthy and a good person and 2. capable of supporting a wife (so, for example, Colonel Fitzwilliam in Pride and Prejudice is out.)
3. Allow oneself to esteem eligible man.
4. Watch for signs eligible man respects you and might fall in love with you.
5. Accept proposal after admitting your love to yourself.

(Because after all think of all the problems suffered by people in Austen who have fallen in love with men who aren't in a position to marry them right away.)

But that doesn't really work with the whole "Noooo, real love is romantic and passionate and at first sight and you can't be prudent about it."

But if you are in charge of teenage girls in the nineteenth century that's a huge problem, because you don't want them to make dumb decisions, even if that dumb decision is "I will not allow myself to be courted by other possibilities because I can never love again".

Look at Rosamond in Middlemarch. Rosamond falls in love with Lydgate, who does not think seriously of marriage. Now Rosamond is a deeply flawed character and full of vanity, but she is at least really in love (however much pride is mixed in there.)

It causes gossip in the village--not that she is behaving improperly, but that they must be secretly engaged because her love is so obvious (though being secretly engaged without telling her parents is improper.) Her aunt comes to chide her because Lydgate can't support a wife and hasn't actually proposed to her, but Rosamond "has allowed her affections to be engaged without return". Rosamond has turned down two very eligible proposals and her future is at risk. Her aunt goes to see Lydgate and tell him not to "interfere with her prospects". Lydgate is ticked off because he never thought of marriage and knows he can't support a wife, but when he goes to see Rosamond he falls in love with her because she's in love with him, and he's touched by her feeling. (This is the wrong way around of course! Prudent women fall in love with men because men are in love with them!) And then of course their subsequent marriage is awful.
posted by Hypatia at 7:27 AM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]


Best answer: This was a concept that was intentionally seeded into the minds of girls and women through conduct literature, some regular literature, women’s magazines, and holiday annuals (a genre we don’t really have anymore) in order to make them less likely to object to their total (and relatively recent, at the time) lack of power or agency. Keep in mind that as recently as the beginning of the 19th century, middle-class women were still often treated as capable business partners in family run industries/businesses. Cutting them out of those structures and relegating their authority to the domestic sphere was a cultural shift that didn’t happen by accident. There’s a book called “Good Girls Make Good Wives” about how much adolescent literature targeted at girls was designed to make them shape their personhood around a central future husband, and to stop wanting anything else, ever, for the rest of their lives. There was even a movement to get girls to stop reading adventure stories, because sometimes they made the mistake of yearning for adventure, which was obviously “bad” for them.

When you see female characters believing in this concept in 19th century literature (like, actual literature, not just trash novels of the time), it is usually to critique the concept, and to point out how overtly political it was, and how destructive. Trollope has characters who buy into it, but the narrative structures of his novels usually showcase how toxic the belief is, and how many men use it as an excuse to be trash.

All of the Brontes critique this concept, but especially my fave Anne, whose novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a LONG savaging of how this belief messed women up and ended up with them trapped in violent and abusive situations with very little recourse or access to support.

Closer to the end of the century, George Meredith wrote The Egoist, which is an impossibly long and agonizing exploration of gaslighting packaged as “romance”, with an entire community complicit in the attempt to remove a woman’s right to know her own mind. There are endless scenes of the main dude (and egoist) Sir Willoughby Patterne cornering and berating (he calls it wooing) his fiancée, Clara Middleton, attempting to force her to promise that if he dies first, she will never love another man. He has breakdowns at the thought of her being a widow and learning to love again, because it would make him a cuckold in death. Also, all of these scenes are sarcastically contrasted with characters talking about “savages” in other nations, even as this dude psychological tortures a girl who is like “I promise to love you as long as you are alive? Why are we still talking about this?”

Anyway, long and short- think of it like rape culture in the 21st century. It was a prevalent and extremely overwhelming cultural notion, but people who actually looked at it with any humanity or insight usually condemned it as monstrous.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:46 AM on May 8, 2017 [24 favorites]


I think it was considered good storytelling, more than realistically depicting true life.

Example -- ok Lucy Maud Montgomery was writing in the early 20th century, but the romantic tropes are not too different. A thing that always bothered me was that when Walter dies in combat in WWI, Una, who secretly loved him, knows that she will never love again and will be single and lonely forever, and has to carry this pain all by herself. And this terrible "knowledge" is depicted as this great romantic thing as well as burden.

But the series is chock-full of other female characters who do remarry, even admirable protagonist characters like Rosemary West, who marries her husband years after her first, unconsummated, lover dies at sea. And of course the unromantic secondary characters remarry constantly. As someone pointed out above, small farming communities were not easy places to run bachelor households and women were in high demand as wives, particularly as women were constantly dying from childbirth or being worked to death.
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:47 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


this seems so bizarre I'm wondering if people actually believed it or if it was an artificial assumption to provide plot motivation.

The example that I have about this from my reading is by (the other) Jessamyn West. She has a book of poetry called Love is Not What You Think and also wrote a lot of historical fiction about "frontier times." Her analysis of this issue was that the trope was more like "the first time you love someone you are really truly in love with THEM, but for all love thereafter you are more in love with the idea of being in love than with the person you are with." I'll try to track down the exact phrasing but this informed the way she would write characters living in the late 19th century.
posted by jessamyn at 9:29 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Socrates described humans as having been split into two parts by the gods and love as finding your other lost half. So... it's an old idea.
posted by xammerboy at 9:52 AM on May 8, 2017


Socrates described humans as having been split into two parts by the gods and love as finding your other lost half. So... it's an old idea.

The idea of having a soulmate isn't really what this is, though. This was a pervasive idea that a woman could love one person, but after that she was "spent" and couldn't ever have another romantic partner no matter what the circumstances. It was closer to the concept of being "damaged goods" than that of soulmates-- and, shocker, it only ever applied to women, not to men.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:17 AM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


Response by poster: > and, shocker, it only ever applied to women, not to men

Yes, I should have mentioned this in my post, but this struck me forcibly: men can fall in love over and over (Trollope has a lot of fun with this), but women supposedly had just the one love to spend.

> I don't think it's a trope of 19thC literature, I think it's a trope of first love literature. Every single young person who's had his or her heart broken is entirely convinced they will never love again.

But this is not what's going on here. It would be one thing if the novelist had a character thinking "I'll never love again!" and making it clear this is just a passing young-love thing, but it's not like that—the novelist may not be endorsing the concept, but it's treated seriously as a thing that carries weight and that grown-up people believe. I think a fiendish thingy's rape culture analogy is useful.

Thanks for all the great answers; I don't usually mark more than a couple of Bests, but y'all are so well-informed and eloquent!
posted by languagehat at 11:11 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


I feel like I’m reading a whole different set of Trollope novels than you – and am not sure how to reconcile it. Just to go back to Can You Forgive Her, the heroine was deeply in love with her cousin, engaged to marry him, finds out he’s a cad and breaks it off, then falls for John Grey. She breaks off that engagement not because she doesn’t love him, but out of a sense that she wouldn’t be happy burying herself in the country with him after the excitement of the city. The title’s question refers to whether she was right to jilt him in that way, knowing that she loved him and he her. There’s never a sense that she was wrong to break off the first engagement, or that she didn’t love her new fiancé enough – if anything, Trollope indicates again and again that it was a more mature love and therefore better than a youthful infatuation. In the same book, their aunt Greenow has buried the man she loved – everyone else assumes she only married him for his money, but she never indicates that it was anything but love, and Trollope himself doesn't seem to contradict her – and goes out to find a new husband, choosing the man she likes the best. She’s a comic character, and a widow, so I don’t think it’s a love story for her, but Trollope makes it clear she’s choosing her man to suit her desires. And in the same book we get the story of Lady Glencora, who falls madly in love with another inappropriate candidate, is forced to marry more appropriately – and in the course of the book (and the course of all the following Palliser novels), grows to love him dearly.

I feel like I could go through his books and find half a dozen more examples of women who were either happily married and still find romance again, or who were engaged and broke off the engagement (or had it broken off) to love and marry someone else – Madame Max Goessler, Cecilia Holt, Guss Mildmay (engaged twice before finally landing #3), just off the top of my head.

I do believe this was a trope, but I’m having a hard time using Trollope to reconcile it. He was very alive to the need and even the virtue of marrying for money, and he doesn’t seem to judge any of his characters who break off engagements – whether on their own or due to family interference. He certainly doesn’t doom them to a life of solitary pining for the one who got away.
posted by Mchelly at 11:51 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I do believe this was a trope, but I’m having a hard time using Trollope to reconcile it.

Individual characters in Trollope novels thinking a certain way =/= Trollope making the same claims as foundational truths.

I mean, 75% of the point of "He Knew He Was Right" is Trevelyan's disordered thinking and Trollope exposing him for being fundamentally wrong about everything. Trollope loves showing how incredibly wrong people are by exploring (and exploding) their certainties.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:57 AM on May 8, 2017


Response by poster: What a fiendish thingy said. I'm not saying Trollope never had women loving more than once, which would be silly, I'm saying he sometimes uses a trope that I've seen in other novelists as well.
posted by languagehat at 3:30 PM on May 8, 2017


and, shocker, it only ever applied to women, not to men

Yes, I should have mentioned this in my post, but this struck me forcibly: men can fall in love over and over (Trollope has a lot of fun with this), but women supposedly had just the one love to spend.


I have not read a lot of the "classics" but I have read quite a lot of 19th century pulp, mostly short stories, and I was planning on asking some similar questions regarding what reflected real life and what was a popular fantasy of the times.

In the stories I've read there is a seemingly equal amount of men and women breaking off, starting and stopping various relationships, all with lots of drama. Plenty of men ending their lives or doomed to hermit misery because of the loss of their one true love. I don't know if this because a lot of the stories I've read are supernatural stories or how that compares to more literary novels.
posted by bongo_x at 3:38 PM on May 8, 2017


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