Examining the meaning, history, and value of jealousy, Toohey places the emotion at the core of modern culture, creativity, and civilization—not merely the sexual relationship. His eclectic approach weaves together psychology, art and literature, neuroscience, anthropology, and a host of other disciplines to offer fresh and intriguing contemporary perspectives on violence, the family, the workplace, animal behavior, and psychopathology. Ranging from the streets of London to Pacific islands, and from the classical world to today, this is an elegant, smart, and beautifully illustrated defense of a not-always-deadly sin.
Examining the meaning, history, and value of jealousy, Toohey places the emotion at the core of modern culture, creativity, and civilization—not merely the sexual relationship. His eclectic approach weaves together psychology, art and literature, neuroscience, anthropology, and a host of other disciplines to offer fresh and intriguing contemporary perspectives on violence, the family, the workplace, animal behavior, and psychopathology. Ranging from the streets of London to Pacific islands, and from the classical world to today, this is an elegant, smart, and beautifully illustrated defense of a not-always-deadly sin.
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Examining the meaning, history, and value of jealousy, Toohey places the emotion at the core of modern culture, creativity, and civilization—not merely the sexual relationship. His eclectic approach weaves together psychology, art and literature, neuroscience, anthropology, and a host of other disciplines to offer fresh and intriguing contemporary perspectives on violence, the family, the workplace, animal behavior, and psychopathology. Ranging from the streets of London to Pacific islands, and from the classical world to today, this is an elegant, smart, and beautifully illustrated defense of a not-always-deadly sin.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300190489 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Jealousy
By Peter Toohey
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Peter TooheyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-19048-9
CHAPTER 1
What is jealousy?
What is jealousy? The Swedish playwright August Strindberg's Night of Jealousy (1893) offers one kind of answer. On first glance the painting is an impenetrable blur of darks, greys and whites. It's all raging seas, slashing rain and thunderclouds – an analogy, you could say, for someone in the midst of a jealous rage.
Many who have been badly jealous might instantly believe that, yes, that's how it really feels. Strindberg has got the turbulence, anxiety and pain down cold. But couldn't this abstract evocation of jealousy do duty for just about any strong feeling? Grief, anger, depression or desperation could all be easily ascribed to it. What the painting conveys to me, then, is the difficulty involved in trying to represent an emotion like jealousy. If it weren't for the title of the painting, and Strindberg's own note on the back of it to his soon-to-be-wife – 'To Miss Frida Uhl from the artist (the Symbolist August Strindberg). The painting depicts the sea (bottom right), Clouds (top), a Juniper bush (top left) and symbolizes: a Night of Jealousy' – I doubt anyone would have a clue as to what Strindberg is getting at.
But using words to explain emotional experiences isn't easy, precise or definitive either. It's difficult to know what you're feeling and to name it. ('I'm feeling emotional' is another way of uttering the difficulty of naming what you're feeling.) But more than that, feeling an emotion precedes our ability to speak about it. Small children can feel emotions long before they are able to say what they are. Emotions are not dependent for their existence on a person's capacity to nominate them, let alone to understand them. Some aspects of our experience of emotions will always evade descriptions and definitions. And language is a very imprecise mechanism for communicating our inner states to others: how often have you heard 'What do you mean?'
Jealousy, though, is an especially difficult emotion to talk about.
The first reason for this is because it is a very slippery descriptor. The term 'jealousy' has no cast iron status in terms of what it designates. If you were to translate Deuteronomy 5:9 – 'for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me' – into today's English, the word 'jealous' mightn't appear at all; you might choose something like 'demanding' instead. 'Jealous' does not have exclusive rights over the naming of the feeling associated with that word. 'Demanding', as well as 'possessive', 'covetous', 'begrudging', 'emulous' and 'invidious', as well as the slangy 'hogging', 'hater', 'green' and 'well jel', all make a claim.
The enthusiastic use of 'well jel' by many British youngsters, especially since it was popularized by the TV programme The Only Way Is Essex, points to one of the commonest ways that 'jealousy' is used – incorrectly, in the eyes of many. Check Twitter and you'll see what I mean. Users across the globe apply the meme and hashtag #welljel constantly – my cursory glance suggested it was around once every ten minutes. At the time I was writing this paragraph (when the northern hemisphere's summer months were approaching), 'well jel' was applied to upcoming holidays in the sun ('have fun on that boat! Well jel!'), followed closely by unusual, exciting, and for this writer impenetrable experiences ('Well jel me. That's when Lionel Ritchie was at his best'), or items of clothing ('you have so much swag I am well jel'), or appearance ('Has some serious cheekbone envy after watching Angelina Jolie in Maleficent!!! #welljel') and even food ('I went for Jerk Chicken wid rice & peas & brown sauce ... #welljel'). Are they really talking about jealousy? My point is that all this 'jealousy' would more likely be termed 'envy'.
Envy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is 'A feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck'. The verb means 'Desire to have a quality, possession, or other desirable thing belonging to (someone else)'. Jealousy is more commonly associated with sex (your heart's desire is cheating on you), personal relationships, and protecting your posessions or rights. As Peter van Sommers outlines, 'Envy concerns what you would like to have but don't possess, whereas jealousy concerns what you have and do not wish to lose'. Envy is classically thought of as being dyadic (you and the thing) whereas jealousy is triadic (you, the thing or person, and the rival who threatens to take them from you). I'll return to – and ask questions about – the details of these definitions later, but this is the common view. Look back at those tweets' focus on commodities, good looks and good luck. It is, in the widely accepted understanding, envy, isn't it? So why are these people not 'well env'?
This interchangeability and imprecision may not be simply the result of ignorance and confusion among teenagers today. Envy and jealousy have a long history of trading places. For instance, between the late fourteenth-century Wycliffe's Bible and the 1611 King James version, lines from the Song of Solomon 8:6 transformed from the breathtaking 'loue is strong / As deth, enuy is hard / As helle', into 'love is strong / As death, jealousy is cruel / As the grave' (my emphases). Both versions agree on the force of their chosen word, whether it's 'envy' or 'jealousy', and there is no difficulty for the reader of either version in understanding the meaning. The Latin in the Vulgate's version of this passage is aemulatio, cognate with 'emulous' in English, and it can mean 'jealous' or 'envious'. The Latin invidia also translates as either term.
Invidia, and the oscillation between envy and jealousy, is at the heart of Roman retellings of the Judgment of Paris, one of the most famous tales from Greek mythology, popular from as early as the eighth century BCE. The story tells how Zeus arranged a marriage banquet and, wanting to keep the party calm, did not invite the goddess Strife. Snubbed, Strife came anyway and brought trouble with her: a golden apple on which was inscribed 'for the most beautiful woman'. She threw the apple into the midst of the celebration. Hera, wife of Zeus, Athena, daughter of Zeus, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, all insisted that the apple was addressing them personally. Zeus appointed Paris, the son of Priam, king of Troy, to arbitrate their claims. The goddesses each tried to bribe him: Hera promised him the realms of Europe and Asia, Athena promised him wisdom and ability in battle, and Aphrodite promised him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Aphrodite triumphed (this is the moment that Cranach immortalizes in his painting). The louche Paris abducted Helen from her husband, Menelaus, and slipped back to Troy. Menelaus gathered a huge Greek force to get her back, resolutely supported by the jealous Hera and Athena. So, while jealousy started and supported the Trojan War – not only Menelaus's jealousy over losing his wife to Paris, but Hera's and Athena's jealousy of their rival's success in the contest – it seems to have been something more like envy that really kicked it all off: it's Strife's envy of the other gods' jollity that leads her to gatecrash the party, and the three goddesses' envy of one another's beauty that makes them so competitive. Envy and jealousy are both part of the same picture and seem very hard to separate. Little wonder the Twittersphere is discombobulated.
Talking about jealousy is difficult for another reason: the considerable stigma attached to the emotion. As Roland Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse, states, 'As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subjected to banality.' Many people are deeply reluctant to admit to feeling the emotion strongly. Pride and shame make people instinctively self-censor. Confessing your jealousy could be taken as a sign of weakness or be disapproved of by others. Vicious jealousy is suppressed, pre-empted or transmuted into more acceptable emotions when it is described. So if the jealous person cannot admit his jealousy directly, and is always seeking other names for it, it follows that it's an emotion that lends itself to metaphor. The linguist Anna Ogarkova has explored the various metaphorical uses of jealousy and envy in modern English and shows that they are distinguished only by intensity. Jealousy attracts the more powerful and violent linguistic associations. Jealousy is often thought to be the more powerful emotion of the two. You don't say 'I'm jealous of your success' without putting the listener on guard. But if you recast the thought and say, 'How I envy you!' the switch rids the admission of its tacit tenor of poisonous rivalry. It assumes a tone of wry admiration.
For the Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster, however, envy is the more powerful and the more repressed of the two emotions. This is because the person envied may be entirely innocent, as well as oblivious. Elster thinks envy is unique, 'because it is the only emotion we do not want to admit to others or to ourselves'. Elster provides a very interesting historical account of envy, arguing that despite the huge variances in moral principles and social norms across time and space, in no society would an individual consciously confess to envy in its pure, Aristotelian form: 'hostility towards the nondeserved fortune of another, and justify[ing] aggressive or destructive behavior in terms of this emotion'. Really? In Shakepeare's Othello, Iago's confession of his envy, when he says that Cassio 'hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly', surely tests Elster's argument. Again, it goes to show how confusing 'jealousy' and 'envy' can be, and how weighed down they are with perplexing moral subtexts.
The idea that jealousy is a weakness has deep roots in Western history. 'Thou shalt not covet' was carved on the two stone tablets by the finger of God. And listen to St Paul in Galatians 5:19–21: 'the works of the flesh are evident ... hatred, contentions, jealousies ... those who practise such things will not inherit the kingdom of God'. Christianity has laid down a judgment of the emotion of jealousy that has had a very long life. I'm sure St Paul would have clapped Gustav Klimt on the back for his Good Book version of the memento mori, a depiction of Jealousy as a cadaverous woman with a serpent draped around her neck. Mix with der Neid, Klimt is saying, and you too will waste away. The spiritual death is none too far from the loss of the soul to which St Paul points.
I suspect that it's this religious tradition that's behind the austere renunciation of the emotion in Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex. In his opinion, civilized people have moved or should have moved beyond jealousy: 'if jealousy has been a beneficial influence at the beginning of civilization, as well as among animals ... it is still by no means clear that it ... becomes a desirable emotion in more advanced stages of civilization.' Others deride it too. For the French philosopher Alain Badiou, 'jealousy is a fake parasite that feeds on love'. I guess he is not necessarily immune, but he doesn't think much of the emotion. More suffer an odd aphasia about their own feelings and conduct. Not long after suffocating Desdemona, Othello describes himself as a man 'not easily jealous'. James Joyce's modernist masterpiece, Ulysses, is a novel about Leopold Bloom's day spent desperately avoiding thoughts of his wife Molly and her affair – refusing to admit his jealousy, even to himself. Joyce knew a thing or two about the emotion: he wrote a number of jealous letters to Nora Barnacle after discovering she was carrying on with another man early on in their relationship. Nonetheless, Joyce claimed that men did not feel jealousy but merely an offended sense of proprietorship. This is not simply a problem for literature: the inability and the reluctance to name jealousy bedevils the many psychological studies on it that rely on self-reporting or self-rating. And these are the studies that still form the basis of many investigations into the emotion. Would you admit to it?
* * *
If the reporting of feelings is so unreliable, perhaps the circumstances in which jealousy arises could tell us something about the nature of the emotion.
Alain Robbe-Grillet appears to me to succeed in doing just that in his 1957 novel, La Jalousie. He seems to distrust feelings and language, and avoids all description of the emotion, or indeed any emotion at all. Yet he manages to recreate the near psychotic mind-set of a very jealous husband, without ever mentioning the word 'jealousy' apart from in the title – and even that is ambiguous, referring either to the emotion or to a jalousie or louvre window, through which the narrator spies on his wife.
This remarkable nouveau roman is told from the perspective of an unnamed, eerie, impersonal third-person narrator, whose presence is inferred only from the number of chairs at the dinner table or on the verandah. By implication he is the master of the house on a tropical banana plantation. He silently watches as A ..., his wife, negotiates an affair with Franck, the owner of a neighbouring plantation, reporting on the tiniest details of her movements. The jealous narrator is evoked as someone who is passionately engaged in his compromised situation, yet on the look-out, from a distance, for proof of his partner's sexual defection, searching constantly for clues and for signs. Robbe-Grillet captures perfectly the obsessively studious psychology of the jealous individual. Like many jealous people this narrator struggles to be objective in the pursuit of evidence of betrayal, and constantly replays what he has seen and what he suspects: the clock seems to have come to a standstill, and if it does move time seems to be circular. It's impossible for the reader to tell the difference between what has happened and what the narrator has imagined, as we only have what he sees to go on. The main character in this unsettling and honest narrative is jealousy itself, and the reader is in the midst of it.
Johannes Vermeer's beguiling painting, The Concert, plays on a similar eerie stillness. This strangely motionless yet emotionally powerful work reveals layer upon layer of jealousy. In the simple scene, the woman on the right appears to be singing, while on the left a woman is plays the clavecin, and a man in the centre facing away from us accompanies the women on a stringed instrument. The painting is thought to be about love and seduction, but why? And where is the jealousy? Vermeer hints lightly at that emotion through the paintings within the painting. Above the singer's head is The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen (a painting used more than once by Vermeer, and owned by his family), showing a prostitute playing for a client while an old brothel madam demands payment. There's the sex. Above the woman at the clavecin is a painting of a rugged landscape, perhaps a dead tree, said to be in the style of Jacob van Ruisdael: elegiac, uncorrupted nature, perhaps. And the music instructor? Such individuals have often been depicted as being concerned with more than merely their students' education, though this one, who looks at neither woman, does not seem guilty. The scene that he faces is said to be of Arcadia, which was full of jealous trysts. What's going on? Perhaps the plainer clavecin player, head apologetically bowed, envies the fecundity and looks of the pregnant-looking singer. The music teacher, the social inferior in this scene, may envy the ease of the lives of these two smartly dressed young women. Or the two women could be locked in a love triangle and jealously competing for the tutor's attention. The painting, balanced and poised, charges the atmosphere and leaves the emotions to be gleaned on their own terms. To see it as a depiction of jealousy does allow us to make some sense of its strange magnetic power, though it offers no clear answers.
Focusing on the situation in which jealousy occurs, then, may prove helpful for identifying what jealousy is, and for coming to a definition of the emotion which doesn't rely on slippery reported feelings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jealousy by Peter Toohey. Copyright © 2014 Peter Toohey. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, viii,1 What is jealousy?, 1,
2 The meat it feeds on, 23,
3 Ears mishear and eyes magnify, 49,
4 Beyond the Bullaburra triangle, 80,
5 Utopia, 99,
6 The invisible made visible, 117,
7 A feast for all the family, 137,
8 Meeting at the Dingo Bar, 162,
9 Rattling the cage, 185,
10 Turning your back on it, 205,
Readings, 224,
List of illustrations, 243,
Acknowledgements, 248,
Index, 250,