Desire in literature

Renaissance and Baroque drama offers a view into gender dynamics of the
time. What is seen is a development in the allowed expression and manifestation of
desire by females, beginning from a point of near silence, and arriving at points of
verbal statement and even physical violence. Specifically, in La Mandragola by
Niccolò Machiavelli, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, and Fuenteovejuna
by Lope de Vega, there appears a chronological progression, whereby using desire
and its expression as a metric in conjunction with modern concepts of gender and
sexuality to measure a shift in relation to what is and is not allowed to be expressed
by women.

Sexual pleasure, for the male writer, has been accompanied by pain for centuries. Italian poet Dante Alighieri presents a paradoxical treatment of lust by exploring pain and pleasure in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory" in The Divine Comedy. Over four hundred years later, Dante's sexual ideology would evolve into misanthropy and misogyny in T. S. Eliot's poetry. The poetry's aggression towards women begins with "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock," escalates in "La Figlia che Piange" and "Gerontion," and reaches a violent pinnacle of misanthropy in "Sweeney Erect." Although T. S. Eliot attempted to emulate Dante's passion, his contorted visionary work chose the language of renounced, rather than consummated, sexual desire. Eliot's poetry seeks to mimic Dante's philosophy on love and pain expressed in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory," but all that emanates is a sense of pity, loss, and disgust.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the problem posed by homosexuality in Dante's Commedia. I look at several topics and questions : A) What are the implications of homosexuality in regards to both justice in the polis and to divine justice in the next world? B) What are the poetics of queer variance? C) What are the oedipal issues surrounding the Dantean father-figures VIrgil, Brunetto Latini, and other males? D) What is the role of the pedagogic Eros in promoting a strong national bond and social ethos? E) Where does Dante situate "sodomites" (and, by extension, what role does desire play) in the schemata of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and why is this important? All of these questions are interrelated and have a bearing on Dante's notion of the good society and divine justice.

Often overlooked in the nineteenth century Gothic novel are the complicated social issues existing within the text. In Emily Brontèe's Wuthering Heights and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, the authors each create villains who represent the preoccupation with appropriate sexuality and conventional gender roles existing in Victorian England. Brontèe's Heathcliff and Stevenson's James Durie embody all that is immoral and non-normative in society with their depraved behavior ; however, because of the authors' craftiness with language, the authors, through their villains, manage to magnetize the other characters and subsequently emasculate those men in the text who emulate the Victorian ideal of masculinity. By focusing their novels on the plight of the Other and his disruption to the homogeneous rules regarding sexuality and gender in the nineteenth century, both authors articulate a profound understanding of the societal fears regarding these issues existing in their time.

The heroine of Charlotte Brontèe's Jane Eyre is torn between her physical desire to remain close to Mr. Rochester and her psychological need for distance from him. Jane's need for distance tends to dominate her desire for closeness, and this internal conflict is reproduced externally in her relationship with Rochester, with Rochester's desire for physical proximity conflicting with Jane's desire for distance. These internal and external power struggles create a healthy sense of tension necessary both to Jane, and to her relationship with Rochester because it prevents either of them from being fully satisfied, and ensures that both remain in a perpetual state of self-inflicted suffering. The suffering these characters impose on themselves and each other is necessary for the preservation of desires, which would be destroyed by fulfillment. Through my reading of the novel we gain a greater understanding of how the pain of unfulfilled desires becomes synonymous with pleasure, and the beneficial role pain, tension and unfulfilled desires plays in the text.