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| Henry Holiday's Beatrice and Dante Source: Wikipedia |
Slavoj Zizek, a Marxist philosopher in his essay, ‘Courtly love or woman
as thing’, talks about the emergence of Masochism in context to the courtly
love tradition. In the courtly love tradition, a suitor falls in love with a lady, who
is beyond his reach and tries to make himself worthy of her by subjecting himself
to ordeals in order to acquire the lady’s admiration.
The fundamental premise of courtly love is the process of spiritualisation which is far from sensuality. The love for the beloved is platonic in some sense and results in the lover pining for the beloved’s love. In Dante’s La Vita Nuova, his love for Beatrice was an embodiment of spiritual inspiration.
However, this goes with the misconceived notion that in the courtly love
tradition, the beloved is the sublime (superior) object. However, the actuality
is that the lady is nothing but an ‘abstract ideal’ whom the lover wants to
reclaim as the absolute object of desire. The lady is idealized to such an
extent that the actuality becomes erased. She is the ‘absolute inaccessible
lady’ who is reprimanding and beyond the limit of the lover’s conduct. In this
tradition, the lady is distant, ideal and absent, so that the she becomes a cold and inhumane partner.
Hence, in Courtly love tradition, the beloved is the quintessential
object of desire rather than real substance having no tangible significance.
She embodies no real competence, concrete virtues and wisdom.
Jacques Lacan, a post-Freudian philosopher says that the woman is far
from any kind of purified spirituality. In fact, she mandates the lover to
perform capricious ordeals which are difficult to subdue. The lady functions as a mirror on to which the lover projects his
narcissistic ideal. In other words, the lover sees his true self in the beloved;
she is the manifestation of his own ideal state. The beloved fulfills the role
that the lover wanted to perceive. In this way the beloved becomes persona grata
for the lover.
The Courtly Love tradition and masochism are linked to each other by the
concept of inaccessibility that the man perceives. According to Freud, the
man’s value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes
easy. When there’s no hindrance or obstacle to claim the love, the intensity
of the desire falls. Hence, the object of desire coincides with the force that
prevents its attainment. Therefore, as Zizek says-
"Courtly love appears as the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting up obstacles to its attainability."
The lover always seeks the beloved as a thing
of target or as an object of desire causing him to strive. The lady lies in the
center of this structure however insignificant in the context of her
moralities.
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| Courtly Love Image Source- Wikipedia |
A masochist is the person who attains pleasure (sensual) from
experiencing pain. In masochism, it is the victim that writes the screenplay
and stages his own servitude. He is submissive but in actuality he is the one
who orders and the woman is the virtual dominatrix who complies. Masochism is a
theatrical violence and the victim is the stage director. It is the masoch who
decides the color of the dress she has to wear, size of the heels, color of her
lipstick etc. The only way in which this theatre can break is by not responding
(feelings, emotions, expressions etc).
Therefore, they develop master-slave relationship. Hegel, a German
philosopher in his book, ‘The phenomenology of the spirit’ talks about the
master-slave relationship. Hegel says that the human desire is fundamentally a
desire of recognition. Human beings desire to be desired by the others; each individual
subject derives its identity from the other. The only way through which the
identity of master is stable is through the firm identity of the slave.
Therefore, there exists a dialectic tension (attracting and opposing at the
same time) between the two bodies. The lover seeks recognition from the
beloved. The beloved is a capricious and utterly ruthless master. The master
subjugates the slave to various ordeals and soon ends up being dependent on the
him to survive, making the slave the ‘actual object of work’. In the similar
way, in the courtly love tradition, it is the poet (vassal) who decides the
capriciousness of the beloved making her a ‘thing’.
Therefore, the Court poetry is the postponement of pleasure, seeing the
picture through vassal’s perspective.
