Courtly Love and Masochism

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.

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.