women histories, incest sexual abuse. institutionalized. But what if ...

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The underlying assumption of this
new book by literary critic Vivian
Gornick is that love—despite all we've
been led to believe—is certainly no salva-
tion, and may not even be life-enhancing
at all. She explores this unfashionable
notion in a series of sharp, insightful
essays: readings of the stories and novels
of Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, and Christina
Stead; reflections on the life and death of
Clover Adams (the wife of Henry Adams);
and an examination of the love affair
between Hannah Arendt and Martin
Heidegger.
Gornick is concerned with the
subtle power struggles inherent in inti-
The following are excerpts from two
chapters of The End of the Novel of Love
by Vivian Gornick published by the
Beacon Press
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin began writing in 1888. She
was thirty-eight years old, the widow of a
New Orleans cotton factor. The stuff
poured out of her: swift, sure, immediate,
without hesitation and without revision...In
no time at all she was established.
Her stories were set among the Creoles
and Cajuns of rural Louisiana, and she
was welcomed into American literature as
a delightful regionalist whose work was
wonderfully mimetic.
For more than a decade Chopin
worked on as a popular, well-known
writer. Then, in 1899, she published The
Awakening. This novel came as a shock
and a scandal. It was not delightful. It was
realistic in the European style.
More Zola than Zola, it was said.
winter 1998 - 50
A Life of One's Own
The End of the Novel of Love
by Vivian Gornick
reviewed by Mahin Hassibi, M.D.
mate relationships. Her essays focus on the
ways in which one partner in a marriage
slowly comes to dominate the other, or how
the life-long intimacies between parents
and children generate anger and anxiety
instead of affection. She shows how fre-
quently attachment leads to bondage, and
how often women's youthful fantasies
about love, family and fulfilment give way
to the realities of "unlived" lives.
For Gornick, it is essential that
women understand there are worthier goals
than success in love. Achieving a clear
understanding of one's own thoughts and
Too strong for the children, it was said.
Should be labeled moral poison, it was
said. Chopin was stunned. Why was this
book being received so differently from her
other work? After all, there was nothing
here that she hadn't said, one way or
another, before. It was all there in the stories.
Surely people had seen that, hadn't
they? No, it was explained, they hadn't.
The stories had only implied what she was
not saying openly.
Depression set in. She stopped
writing. No doubt, given time, she would
have come out the other side, but as it happened
there was no time, hi 1904 Kate
Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage and
died. She was fifty-four years old. She left
behind three novels, eighty-five stories,
and a reputation as an "odd one" in
American letters.
During her marriage Chopin had
discovered that the strain of sensuality in
herself was serious and the power of erotic
love immense. It was a piece of under-
feelings; becoming independent in
one's actions; asserting one's active
will—all contribute to becoming oneself,
to defining a life on one's own terms,
rather than by one's position in a relation-
ship. Gornick is willing to face the bleak
realization that love—erotic or
filial—cannot do the job for us. This short,
well-written, engaging book leaves the
reader with the task of finding out "how to
connect yet not merge, how to respond yet
not be absorbed, how to detach but not
withdraw."
Dr. Hassibi is professor of clinical
psychiatry at New York Medical College
standing that became integrated into her
inner life, and her stories were marked
from the beginning by a startling adultness
about sexual love.
Two things in her work made this
adultness palatable to American readers
in the 1890s: the sex was among Creoles
and Cajuns (for which read people not like
ourselves), and it was never made explicit.
She had discovered something else
as well: that under the best of circumstances
marriage was an opposition of
wills. One or the other of the married couple
was always being gently, subtly, lovingly
pushed out of shape; dominated; made
to do the bidding of the other. Usually —
but this was not her theme — it was the
woman because it was the woman who
came to married life the least experienced,
untried, and unknowing. Women, more
often than men, awakened from the long
dream of adolescence to find themselves
bound in perpetuity into their lives without
any realization of how they had gotten