It's an institution parallel and complementary to marriage, and it evolved to accommodate the sexual double standard that tolerates adultery in husbands but condemns it in wives. Like celibacy, mistressdom offers a fascinating perspective into how women relate to men other than in marriage. Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere. One U. Bel Mooney's husband, British radio present Jonathan Dimbleby, suddenly plunged into a dramatic and obsessive affair with the magnificent soprano, Susan Chilcott, who was terminally ill with cancer.
Against her anguished pleas that her very new lover consider his own well-being and not ruin his life for her, Dimbleby vowed to care for her until she died, and moved in with her and her little son. Less than three months after her last public performance, playing Desdemona and singing sorrowfully, her voice rising to a crescendo, "Ch'io viva ancor, ch'io viva ancor!
Susan died. But a grieving Jonathan did not return to Bel and their tattered marriage unravelled into divorce. My retelling of their story, Bel wrote, "was a reminder that there are no easy generalisations about this subject. Show me a loyal husband and I'll show you one who's never had a real opportunity to stray.
Well, not all loyal husbands lack opportunity, but as Bel Mooney's personal experience suggests, opportunity is all too often irresistible. Remember when President Clinton was under attack for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky? We discovered later that as Reverend Jesse Jackson piously counseled and prayed for Clinton, he was also cheating on his wife with a mistress who was carrying his child.
And Clinton's self-righteous prosecutor, Newt Gingrich, was secretly pursuing a passionate relationship with Callista Bisek, whom he married after divorcing his wife, Marianne.
Both Jackson and Gingrich mistook the waning years of the 20th century for an earlier era, when mistressdom was the familiar handmaiden of marriage. That was clear when Jackson's mistress, lawyer Karin Stanford, successfully sued him for child support. After millennia of protecting marriage by bastardizing the offspring of mistresses, indeed even making it difficult for men to recognize and provide for their "outside" children, our new laws essentially "outlaw" the concept of illegitimacy; they also demand parental accountability.
Gingrich made another kind of mistake: he gambled on keeping his affair a secret but six years into it, he got caught. She can also be a siren, melusina mermaid , wood-nymph, Grace, or Erlking's daughter, or a lamia or succubus, who infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them. Jung generally perceives both positive and negative aspects in every symbol so that, while he asserts that the dangerous, taboo and magical anima may lead a man into a forbidden zone, he also suggests that it is precisely in this forbidden zone that salvation is to be found, just as the whole Christian saga of redemption could never have come about without the initial expulsion from Eden.
Jung writes:. Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World , puts forward the interesting thesis that we are all, and particularly those of us who go in for passionate, unhappy love, under the thrall of a renowned myth of courtly love, the Romance of Tristan.
They are unable to do anything other than fall passionately in love. Nevertheless Tristan continues with his mission and duly hands Iseult over to the King, but the affair between himself and Iseult carries on just as passionately, if not more so, after the marriage. For all the joys they experience together, the lovers are doomed to unhappiness; condemned to death, they escape and live for a time as outlaws. They seem to come to their senses when the love potion wears off after its allotted span of three years; they seek King Mark's forgiveness and Iseult returns to the court.
Yet their deliberately chosen separation seems at least in part a ploy to make their love still stronger. The denouement, as expected, is tragic. Tristan has married another Iseult of the White Hands , having been attracted to her largely because of her name.
The first Iseult had earlier promised him that if ever he needed her, she would come. He falls ill and realises that only she can save him. He sends for her, and gives instructions that if she returns with his messenger on the ship, white sails are to be hoisted.
When the ship appears on the horizon, Tristan, who is too ill to leave his bed, asks his wife what colour the sails are. But she had overheard his earlier instruction and, realising what the white sails mean, is driven by jealousy to tell him that the sails are black. So Tristan, believing that his beloved Iseult has failed him at the last, falls back on his bed and dies.
Then Iseult arrives, sees her dead lover, and dies herself. The unique fascination of the legend, says Alan Fedrick in the Introduction to his translation, seems to lie in the central theme: the unsought passion which draws Tristan and Iseult irresistibly together and which compels them to cut across the moral code and the social and family obligations which are the framework of their existence. In the earliest versions of the story the love potion comes into the narrative suddenly and unexpectedly, and its effect is to bind together two people who have no reason to like each other and whose relations have so far been more hostile than friendly.
De Rougemont declares that the description 'a high tale of love and death' sums up all that is popular, all that is universally moving, in European literature. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed. What lyric poets have always been interested in is not the satisfaction of love, the contentment of the settled couple, but passion — and passion means suffering.
Parting will ensure the intensification and transfiguration of love, at the cost of happiness and even of the lovers' lives. Tristan and Iseult, he says, do not love one another; rather they love love, and what they therefore need is not one another's presence, but one another's absence.
Passion and marriage, he declares, are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and ends make them mutually exclusive. And what I aim at is to bring the reader to the point of declaring frankly either that "That is what I wanted! Tristan is a tale of people like me, full of well-managed deceit, with a hero and heroine who simultaneously believe themselves to be in the wrong, yet also right, and that somehow God is on their side, their love being greater and of more transcendent value than the social conventions they break.
Few are capable of the thirst that would cause them to drink the love-potion, and still fewer are being elected to succumb to the archetypal anguish. But they are all, or nearly all, dreaming about it, or else have mused upon it. Or so I think. There's nothing exciting about sex if you're supposed to be doing it.
Call it conjugal anything and the mystery withers. Sex has mystery, magic, a hint of the forbidden. Disapproval, which may result in exposure and humiliation, will simultaneously represent triumph over the world of convention and the undifferentiated masses.
Even as I write this, I recognise it doesn't make much rational sense, that it's probably immature -- the little girl seeking to draw attention to herself — and may ultimately be self-destructive, about as satisfactory as suffering from an eating disorder or a tendency to cut one's arms. But such things as the desire for punishment, for discovery, are in any case part of the fantasy world associated with sex.
The mistress may have no real desire for her affair to be discovered, but she may like to imagine a dramatic denouement. This can become such an obsession that the unforbidden, the socially sanctioned, that which carries no threat of exposure, consequent humiliation and punishment cannot, act as an erotic stimulant and cannot provide the impetus for the experience of falling in love.
This attitude of mind may also be a way of warding off true intimacy, in that any persistent fantasy may act as a barrier through which no partner can penetrate. So the mistress, identifying herself with Lilith rather than with Eve though she joins with Eve in her desire to taste the forbidden fruit and caught up in the tumultuous and fatal passion of Tristan and Iseult, forever lures man out of the realm of the conventional and socially acceptable into the forbidden zone, out of the Garden of Eden and through the devil's door.
She does this partly because she's addicted to it herself and loves to court disaster, partly because it's her role, anima-like, to lead the man out of innocence into deeper self-knowledge — and partly for none of these highfalutin reasons but because she feels like it, or falls suddenly, inexplicably and inappropriately in love, or just wants to add to her score.
Or else she thinks this time it'll be different and he'll leave his wife. There is somewhere in the whole mistress business the desire to pit oneself against everyone else, to test the strength of one's seductive powers — can I wrest him from his old life? According to Jung, women are in danger of four kinds of mother-complex — maternal hypertrophy, Eros hypertrophy, identification with the mother or resistance to the mother — and all of these are the results of overconcentration on the female parent.
Some form of Oedipus complex — the desire to oust the mother in order to enjoy an exclusive relationship with the father — does seem to come into play in a large number of women who become, or have become, mistresses. Wendy James and Susan Jane Kedgley throw an interesting light on one thing which may be happening here:.
Is it possible, to take this a step further, that women who in their childhood felt they had to earn their father's love are more likely to end up as mistresses, in another situation where the perception on the part of the woman is that if she does not continue to earn his love, the lover will leave?
Whereas wives who, from the mistress's point of view, seem to take their husbands for granted and do not make the same effort to 'earn' love, experienced more unconditional fatherly love in their childhood?
Obviously this is an enormous generalisation to which there are bound to be many exceptions, but I think there may be something in it all the same. Contact us.
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