Love's Coming-of-Age
Edward Carpenter, 1896
Why does passion so often destroy what it loves, and marriage turn into a cage? In 1896 Edward Carpenter answered: love is still a child, and inequality, silence and fear keep it from growing up. A book about how two people can be together freely and as equals.
Who it is for
For those who want a relationship between equals, who are thinking about marriage or are tired of jealousy and habit. And for everyone curious how love and freedom were argued about at the end of the nineteenth century.
Only he who holds himself back a little receives the full beauty of things, and only he truly possesses who is willing, when need be, not to possess.
The God of Love Is Still a Child
The little god of love is usually drawn as a child. Edward Carpenter thought this was fair: just watch how wilfully he behaves among people. But in 1896 the English writer and thinker noticed signs of a new order in the relations between men and women. He gathered a book of essays about what love will become when it finally grows up. Hence the title: love's coming of age.
Carpenter's main idea is that the relationship of two people should be ruled by inner laws, not outer ones. Not fear of the neighbours, not financial gain, and not a stamp in a document, but respect, honesty and freedom. Without freedom, he says, there is no real love, and without love there is no real freedom.
Ahead lie these questions: why desire is directed at a person rather than a thing, what silence about love does to children, why a man who has conquered the world often remains a schoolboy in love, what cages society of his time locked women into, what inequality does to both, and how a marriage becomes either a living union or a mummy.
This is a book of its century. Carpenter builds his reasoning about the nature of the sexes and about the body on the science and habits of the late nineteenth century. These views are kept only where his thought cannot be grasped without them, and they are labelled as his own. Yet his questions about equality, freedom and trust sound as if they were asked yesterday. If you want to understand your own relationships without ready-made rules, that is already an honest step: many prefer to live by someone else's habits and never ask themselves anything.
Desire Is Directed at a Person, Not a Thing
Hunger and desire, Carpenter writes, are the two most ancient needs of a human being. But there is a huge difference between them. Bread feels nothing, and you can take it for yourself without a pang of conscience. But the object of desire is always a person with their own rights. Once you understand that the other is your equal, a simple wish turns into a hard question: how do you get what you want without using the one you love?
Carpenter describes a young man seized by passion. At first it carries him, like a swimmer through rapids, and he does not think where it will take him. Then he suddenly sees that his impulse may harm the one he loves, and that neither his conscience nor society will accept it. Inside him the struggle of an ancient instinct with a later, human self flares up. Carpenter does not consider this struggle a disgrace. From it, in his view, grows a love more mature than mere desire.
From here comes his best-known image. A child sees a beautiful flower, at once tears it off, and within a couple of minutes ruins both the shape and the scent that attracted him. Carpenter believes bodily desire has a similar illusion. Whoever holds himself back a little gets more, and real intimacy begins with the readiness to lack something.
But he was not an ascetic. The body and passion, in Carpenter's view, are not dirty, and long attempts to suppress them exhaust a person and end in a breakdown. Asceticism and debauchery, he says, are two sides of one shield: where one is stronger, the other rises. Renunciation of pleasure is good as an exercise, but not as a goal. And intimacy built only on kinship of minds, without bodily warmth, is rarely deep or lasting in his observation: it withers like a plant with poor roots.
Pleasure, Carpenter says, should come as a companion of life, not become its goal. Disappointment is born not from pleasure itself but from the chase after it. That is why he advises lovers a lively moderation: it moves their joy out of the fleeting world, where joy is quickly replaced by satiety and indifference, into one that lasts longer.
About the author
Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was an English writer, poet and social thinker, author of the poetry cycle Towards Democracy. He wrote about equality between the sexes, reform of marriage and freedom in love.
All books by this author: Edward Carpenter
Terms from the book
- Jack
- Asceticism: Voluntary renunciation of pleasures and bodily joys for a spiritual goal. Carpenter considers it a useful exercise, but not the aim of life.
- Satiety: A state in which something has become so plentiful that it no longer delights and begins to weary.
- Java: An island in Indonesia. In the late nineteenth century it was a Dutch colony, where European families also lived.
- Pistil: The female part of a flower. In its lower part, the ovary, the rudiments of future seeds ripen.
- Ovary: The lower, swollen part of the pistil, where the seed rudiments are. After pollination a fruit develops from it.
- Co-education: Teaching boys and girls in the same classes. In Carpenter's time in England they were more often taught separately.
- Cricket: An English team game with a bat and a ball, popular in English schools of the nineteenth century.
- Ephraim: In the Bible, one of the tribes of Israel. The prophet Hosea reproaches it with the words “Ephraim is a cake not turned”, that is, baked on one side only.
- Ellis: Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), an English doctor and researcher of human sexuality, author of Man and Woman, which Carpenter cites.
- Jill: The heroine of the same nursery rhyme, who rolled down the hill after the fallen Jack.
All terms
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