A Vindication of Love

May 4, 2009
Nehring's opening assertion that she “argues by provocation” and aims “to anger” reveals the rhetorical nature of her argument that our tepid age needs a return to true Eros. Just what she advocates is unclear, since her examples range from the chaste passion of Emily Dickinson through the frenzied sexuality of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the open relationship of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nehring does regret the collateral damage of this last pairing (“a couple of cases of insanity” and one suicide among their other lovers) and acknowledges that most of her case studies demonstrate excesses not to be emulated. That reduces her call for boldness in love to familiar clichés: absence makes the heart grow fonder; play hard to get; and defy social conventions in love (what is more of a postmodern cliché than advocating “transgression”?). Nehring, who has written for Harper's
and the Atlantic
among others, is a keen, empathic reader of literary texts, drawing attention to undervalued love writings like the letters of Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand, and offering an astute reading of Dickinson's much-debated “Master letters.” But overall, she is more preachy and patronizing than provocative.