Hail Love
... reader clearly sees that Gornick, as a feminist, is telling her female audience that marriage (as a consequence of love) is always and opposition of wills, and that one of the couple, often (if not always) the woman, is invariably shadowed and overruled by the other. Moreover, she even adds, that love has the power to make us prisoners of our own bodies, minds and souls because, as she puts it: “even in harmonious families there is this double life.” What Gornick means is that in marriage we are one, a more subdued version of ourselves, while “underneath” we are “another -secret and passionate and intense-…” Gornick wants to show that even in the times in which these women lived and wrote love was not, as Scialabba says, where “most people [had] their deepest experiences and [met] their most significant fates.” For Gornick, love, clearly, is not anyone’s escape or emancipation. Edna Pontellier married because she thought it would satisfy her, when it didn’t her only escape was suicide. Gornick’s is a warning, she doesn’t want to see Edna Pontellier in any of us. Gornick continues to make her point by evaluation of works independently from the he or she who wrote them. She tells her readers that love can make anyone behave bizarrely. For example, in her essay on “Diana of the Crossways” a novel by George Meredith, she declares that many works written in the last century (XIX) went against the stereotype of the conventional novel where the woman, without exception, succumbs to the flirtatious powers and courtship of her male counterpart. Quite the opposite, these females' hearts “harden” and “some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake” them. In “Diana of the Crossways,” Diana cherishes her freedom and is well aware that love will take that independence away from her forever and so she rejects it selling Percy Dacier’s secret to the press, shamelessly betraying his trust. Gornick appears amused by this shutting-the-door-in-love’s-face attitude Diana takes. In Gornick's essay "Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger," Arendt is “pulled around by her feelings” for Heidegger because she herself cannot completely understand and control these sentiments. When Arendt and Heidegger reencounter after years of having been apart Hannah cannot help but defend Heidegger’s position as a Nazi. Arendt deems it her duty to stand up for Heidegger even though it seemed not only odd, but just plain inconceivable. Gornick herself, has a hard time understanding Arendt’s motives not only for continuing to “love a man who’d been a Nazi, but also go on, in the sixties, to argue in print that he hadn’t really known what he was doing, that he was a political innocent.” It is extraordinary, for Gornick, that Arendt, a smart, educated woman, would, for love, put herself in such a compromising situation. It is evident, hence, that for Gornick, love is not something worth risking anything for. As Diana, we should all choose ourselves over love. Love will not help us get to know ourselves. Diana’s reaction when encountered with love, Gornick apparently believes, was something Diana would never regret because, for her, love is not worth any sacrifice. On the contrary, Arendt’s behavior is one that causes Gornick to turn her sight away from, disgusted, finding it degrading and dishonorable. Gornick's point here is that presently, love will not help us in the act of self-discovery anymore. It used to, she says, but it won't today. About Willa Cather Gornick writes that “she could not have a sexual life” because “she understood that to be oneself [in a relationship] was not a given.” This is Gornick’s point exactly in “Diana of the Crossways” and “Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger.” But what relationship exactly is there between sex and self-discovery? Why did Willa Cather forbid herself of that experience in the name of it? Scialabba answers this question, he says that this “used to be, when marriage was sacred, sex outside marriage was sinful, pregnancy outside marriage was catastrophic, and much of the psyche was terra incognita.” So Cather avoided sex, because it was implicit, in her time, that she had to get married to experience it, and if Cather was certain of one thing, it was that in marriage “an oppression of spirit seemed to overtake people.” On oppression she, like Diana, wouldn’t take. In our time, taboos barely exist, and sex has been commercialized to extremes, however, it is evident that Gornick would agree with Cather’s standpoint. Cather didn’t have sex because she didn’t want to get married, and Gornick stands beside her in this decision, supporting her all the way through and through. In her essay “Tenderhearted Men,” Gornick’s focus changes and examines authors whose works are about lonely and alone men and looks into the “loss of romantic possibility.” Gornick references the works of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Andre Dubus as three authors who nostalgically, almost melancholy, remember the times in which marriage was synonymous to happiness. A time where relationships between men and women were pleasant and delightful. These three men wonder why things cannot be the way they used to, they long for those times to come back. As George Scialabba points out in his review of Gornick’s collection, these three men “don’t, as Hemingway did, blame women; they like and admire women. But they yearn for what is no longer attainable and no longer even desirable: to find in romance ‘comfort against the overwhelming force of life.’” Gornick is telling us love doesn’t provide security and that there is be no point in looking for it because it will not make us feel the way we want it to. Love is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can expect ...