Atlantic writers meditate on the twin drives of eros and thanatos.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this. The dying seem driven to meditate on love, and love suffuses the scene of an ideal death: lying in bed surrounded by family, reassured by the promise of enduring affection.
Unsurprisingly, The Atlantic has featured numerous writings on love and death over its lifetime. Only three years after the magazine’s founding, Louisa May Alcott published a short story in which a wife’s suicide attempt catalyzes her husband’s transformation from a self-absorbed recluse to a sincere and adoring lover. The near-death occasion serves as a sort of warning of mortality, putting the story’s narrator in mind of the centrality of love.
In 1882, the magazine featured “Love and Death,” a poem by Charlotte Fiske Bates, who imagines the torment and the comfort of love after loss:
But now, warm lips to greet me in an hour
Dismissed the wish for hers, long turned to dust;
The past surrendered to the present’s power,
And I, to-day, grudged not the grave its trust.
Instead of that, the thought flashed like a bolt,
Shocking my sense of faith and love sincere, —
Nay, like a crime from which I would revolt, —
“ The day has come you would not have her here.”
I had been sure, with grief at awful height,
That other love could never, never be ;
Both law and gospel giving ample right,
I start to-day at time’s strange alchemy.
Bates’s imagined widower is stunned—and discomfited, and compelled—by the reawakening of love in the aftermath of grief. But perhaps death doesn’t cancel love at all. More than a decade after the magazine ran Bates’s poem, Sir Edward Strachey, an English author with a penchant for Christian theology, published a long dialogue on love and marriage. Between lines from Coleridge and Shakespeare, Strachey’s speakers conclude that the end of a life is no occasion for the extinguishing of love:
To sleep together at the foot of the hill which the old loving hearts had climbed together long years before is a pleasant thought, yet surely pleasant only to those who look to share the fast-coming joy of a waking from that sleep to be shared together in that better land.
Some works are more suspicious of the idea of love as a comfort despite the fact of mortality. Raoul de Roussy de Sales, a particularly pessimistic Frenchman, took American women to task for their misconceptions about love in 1938. The American woman, he wrote, “seldom accepts the idea that maladjustments and misunderstandings are not only normal but bearable once you have made up your mind that, whatever may be the ultimate aim of our earthly existence, perfect happiness through love or any other form of expression is not part of the programme.” The triumphalist view of love propagated by movies and music didn’t have the strength to structure a human life, in his characteristically bleak imagination.
Sales isn’t the magazine’s only skeptic of love’s power to heal and revive. In Joyce Carol Oates’s 1971 short story “Normal Love,” a woman obsesses over a grisly murder and her husband’s waning love as she enters her 40s. “There must have been confusion at the end, madness, not love or hate,” Oates wrote, reflecting on the frenzied brutality of murder and the spiraling bewilderment of the narrator’s own putatively ordinary life.
But love need not sow perfection to serve as comfort in the face of death. In a psychoanalytic meditation on love triangles published in 1988, the sexuality researcher Ethel S. Person considered love’s capacity to motivate passions—even destructive ones—after death. “The mutual jealousy and hatred of lover and spouse can survive even the death of the beloved,” she wrote. “For example, a betrayed wife may forbid the appearance of her husband’s mistress at his funeral.” Love and its vagaries can outlast death, and—sometimes—ease the pain of loss:
Some lovers do manage affectionate relationships with their rivals, and treasure ongoing relationships with them. While some wives use the occasion of a spouse’s death to exact revenge on a rival, others initiate closer ties with the mistress. Together they share memories of their lost love.
A proper Freudian, Person must have understood eros and thanatos: love and death, twin drives with twin destinies, the fate of all living things. It isn’t clear which triumphs in the end. But I would place my bets on love.
Love and Death in the Archives
15
0
15.02.2024
Atlantic writers meditate on the twin drives of eros and thanatos.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this. The dying seem driven to meditate on love, and love suffuses the scene of an ideal death: lying in bed surrounded by family, reassured by the promise of enduring affection.
Unsurprisingly, The Atlantic has featured numerous writings on love and death over its lifetime. Only three years after the magazine’s founding, Louisa May Alcott published a short story in which a wife’s suicide attempt catalyzes her husband’s transformation from a self-absorbed recluse to a sincere and adoring lover. The near-death occasion serves as a sort of warning of mortality, putting the story’s narrator in mind of the centrality of love.
In 1882, the magazine featured “Love and Death,” a poem by Charlotte Fiske Bates, who imagines the torment and the comfort of love after loss:
But now, warm lips to greet me........
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