Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Vinken, Barbara

Titel

Wounds of love: modern devotion according to Michelet

Ist Teil von

• Clio (Fort Wayne, Ind.), 2007-03, Vol.36 (2), p.155

Ort / Verlag

Fort Wayne: Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Both texts, therefore, can be read as a conventional defense of the feminine dependency of women in their very own interests-not least as an argument against an independent professional life for women that would grant them financial autonomy.5 Such a reading, however, would fail to reflect the systematic transposition of the mystical discourse of love into the bourgeois discourse of marriage, which is one of the most characteristic aspects of the texts and which most closely links L'amour and La femme to Michelet's historical work. From a Freudian point of view, two concepts are pertinent: the sex of the woman, described as a bleeding love-wound, anticipates the concept of "castration," and this so much the more in that it is seen as the displacement of a masculine wound, that of the heart of Jesus, onto the body of the woman; the idolizing adoration of this wound entirely bears the stamp of a fetishization.33 The wound of love is peculiarly overinvested, since the woman has it-or rather, is it-as part of her nature.