What kind of owl laughs?—I guess maybe laughter applies to the bubbling hitch in their "who's" sometimes.
"She was no longer unimportant, little, old maid Valancy Stirling. She was a woman, full of love and therefore rich and significant—justified to herself. Life was no longer empty, and death could cheat her of nothing. Love had cast out her last fear."
For all its romance, the phrasing here emphasizes all the harsh realities of the sentiment. Love as social capital, as escape from poverty. Love as the snare that creates a woman as she exists in the world; love as what binds a person with womanhood, binds her to a man.
At the same time, though, I can't help but think about Courtly Love Undressed by E. Jane Burns, which cites "Throwing Like a Girl" by Iris Marion Young in its third chapter. The ideas I'm bringing up are moreso Young's, but the Burns book was my real introduction to the politics of heterosexual romance, even if the book itself is tied up (sewed up?) in the laughably nonsequitur topic of French courtly love song in the High Middle Ages. It treats on the many ways women, fictional and real, utilize clothing—gifting it, sewing it, donning it—as ways to move into a the position of "amorous subject" rather than fetishized object or mirror for a man's desire. And I think about that a lot. I think about becoming a subject that experiences the world rather than an object to whom things happen.
Becoming a subject is empowering, but it is also humiliating, as is described in tales of courtly love. Male suitors are wretched. They are often described (or describe themselves) as trapped or wounded by their female lover who spurns them. But the woman remains disadvantaged by her lack of interiority: often she wounds or kills her amors by doing nothing at all but be beautiful.
(Obviously this isn't always the case, or else Courtly Love Undressed wouldn't exist lol)
I'm sure there are nuances to this. But I am starting to fashion myself as an "amorous subject" these days, as someone who experiences all this humiliation, but also as someone who experiences the pride of unselfish feeling, the real delight of living in a body. The joy of being a woman looking away from herself.
I want more than anything else to be loved and desired—but—isn't loving and desiring so much more fun, so much more fulfilling and exciting? It's hard work but it makes me feel like a person. It makes me feel real. And love is a complicated, political thing. Loving and otherwise feeling doesn't exist in a vacuum for anyone, and especially for women. But that subject position can be one facet of it, right?
