Communion: The Female Search for Love
Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsessions
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Valentine's Day reading: engaging guides to the roller coaster ride of loveREVIEW BY LINDA STANKARDIf you've ever been in love -- I mean that gut-wrenching, obsessive, world-turning-upside-down kind of love -- you understand how aptly the Valentine's Day image of an arrow through the heart captures the essence of this piercing, often agonizing emotion. In her provocative new nonfiction book Communion: The Female Search for Love, feminist theorist, educator and prolific writer bell hooks points out that the root meaning of the word passion is "to suffer." As anyone who has experienced its excruciating turmoil can attest, being "in love" (or falling out of it, or worse, having someone fall out of it with you) is usually a roller coaster ride from ecstasy to agony and back again. Though intense romantic love is no "box of chocolates" (aside from some sweet moments and the now-famous example of Forrest Gump), hooks observes, "This suffering, rarely chosen, is in its own way a preparation for passion." She explains that many women in midlife "come to love through suffering that awakens us and demands that we take a deeper look at our life." hooks is a proponent of the feminist idea that a woman must come to love herself -- a task she acknowledges is not easy in our still largely patriarchal culture. But once accomplished, hooks finds that self-acceptance and approval empower a woman to look outwardly for a "real love" and not give in to the "fantasy of being rescued." hooks departs from some feminist thinkers in her affirmation of women's continued search for love. She asserts that genuine love is vital, meaningful and attainable once a woman is secure in her own self-knowledge and worth. "Passions we choose are different than those inflicted upon us because we are naïve, ignorant, or desperate," she writes. "Passions we choose awaken and transform us." I think hooks is right about the element of choice, of self-direction, being key to our romantic lives. Like many women, I have spent a lot of time and energy either waiting for or moving towards what I called "my turn" -- a time in life when I wouldn't feel so compelled to "back-burner" my own dreams and desires in an effort to nurture those of others. In Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsessions, writer Rosemary Sullivan points out the dangers of deferring your dreams for too long or in giving away too much of yourself. "Eventually," she writes, "you discover that you have nurtured in another what you should have nurtured in yourself and you are left empty." Occasionally putting another's needs in front of your own is the hallmark of a good human being, but for women, and ultimately the world, the cost can be monumental. If women are always expected to be the unselfish givers, the ones to dim their own lights rather than outshine those around them, not only do they lose self-fulfillment on a personal level, but their contributions to the world will stay forever in a shadowy purgatory of might-have-beens. Sullivan's book is in large part an outcry against this state of things, and she draws from history, literature and film to expose the insidious, pervasive inroads this dynamic has made in our culture. Labyrinth, which has been a bestseller in Sullivan's native Canada, has an unusual format. Sullivan begins with a fictional (and juicy) story of passion bordering on obsession and then dissects her own work, section by section, analyzing her characters' behaviors and emotions and the underlying forces which motivate them. It is powerful reading, and like hooks, Sullivan manages to debunk patriarchal stereotypes of love, sex and romance without diminishing love's grandeur, its powers of redemption, transformation and endurance. "Sex as a physical act," writes Sullivan, "is merely athletics, a momentary relief. What it needs to be powerful is desire and the strongest element of desire is longing. It's in the word," she points out. "De sider-, sidus: from the stars. The longing that reaches beyond space and time." Beyond space and time? So what's a little pain and agony in return for a chance to dance among the stars? Pass the chocolates. Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.
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