Greetings... I hope none of you have fallen prey to rakes since we last spoke. Then you would have to drink poison to escape from your guilt... (for a detailed account of the effects of drinking poison, please see Socrates).
So, what exactly does love have to do with the seduction texts we've read? For one, choosing to put love in the narratives helps make them, well... narratives. In many of these texts, love serves as a plot developer, which allows the seduction "accounts" to take on a stronger story-like quality. Additionally, rather than simply describing typical characteristics of rakes so women can recognize and avoid such men, adding in romantic details potentially makes the narratives more engaging--especially for women (at least in theory). Because women were characterized (and still are characterized) as the "sentimental" sex, adding in sentimental details could have been an attempt by the men (presumably) who wrote the narratives to appeal to the interests of women in order to encourage them to read their advice.
On the other hand, in the seduction narratives we have read, women are victimized by their love-- emotional vulnerability is often what eventually causes a woman to loose her virginity. Therefore, these texts seem to inadvertently discourage being overly sentimental. In a sense, these narratives are an extension of the behavioral advice texts we read earlier in the semester; they are still a means of attempting to regulate female behavior and in order to promote submissiveness and to encourage women to maintain their "most important asset": their virginity.
I don't think a dependence on love was seen as a rejection of the patriarchal structure. I understand that such a dependence could potentially undermine the authority men had in arranging marriages, but it's not just women that seek romance in a relationship: men fall in love too.
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3 comments:
Hmmm...I think I owe you a phone call. I'll get right on that. :)
You made some really good points. I agree that it's important to remember that while these texts have an instructive function, they are fictional accounts meant to engage and appeal to the reader. You mention that the woman is "victimized" by love; I think that the women in these texts were "predisposed" to fall by their emotional vulnerability. The male authors continue to portray them as fragile creatures easily led into temptation. Even though the women are deceived by rakes and think they're acting out of love, there's still a fairly unforgiving emphasis on their weakness. In that aspect, the seduction narratives continue what we've seen since the beginning of the semester. (I'm ready for a change!)
I think you make a really good point about these texts being an off shoot of the behavioral texts we read earlier. Really all of the seduction texts are there to instruct the women readers and try to stop them from ending up like the women in the stories. They showed virtually every kind of trouble a young woman could get herself into and the punishment for transgressing was always death. I think they make a very convincing argument—if I was a young woman back then, I think I would have been so scared of men that I never would have left the house!
I definitely agree with the claims you made in your post this week. I think what you said was true, that the love element in these stories makes them stories. Women would be even more drawn to these narratives because, like you said, we're the sentimental sex. I thought it was interesting what you said at the end about the dependence on love and how men fall in love too. I guess sometimes we forget that!
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