Libido over credo. Life lessons from literature’s Chess of Love.
Developing my own writing career in a webscape replete with #MeToo and, putting it mildly, misguided world leaders; a webscape with whole countries ‘divorcing’ one another with their own portmanteaus bandied about, whilst contrasting this against an exciting time in which world societies have radically reconsidered what love can look like between two people – not to mention having got married myself very recently – has me thinking about ideal behaviour between the sexes. It’s a theme which crops up a few times in my upcoming novel No Mór the Glen. If an ideal exists, what should it look like? After all, today’s literature still uses gynocentric models in which women get fridged all the time for the purpose of male-dominated narratives.
The first kind of Western ideal of love was courtly love. It propounded individualism, the chance to woo and be wooed, over the authority of ‘loving’ (read ‘marrying’) out of duty to the church, state, or to family. Individualised love was, essentially, seen as heresy or even worse. Tristan, after all, paid for forbidden love with his life…
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Josephine Thorn 