Friday, January 19, 2007
Last Thursday, we talked about the romantic relationship between Faust and Gretchen in Goethe's Faust during the European Lit seminar. According to Dr T's calculations, after studying Philosophy and Divinity and what have you to the level of Doctor and "leading students by the nose" for many years, Faust should be around 43. And Gretchen's supposed to be 14. So a guy of 43 has a child with a girl who's a child. Shocking, isn't it?
Not really, if you consider that such preposterous age gaps between husband and wife were not considered perverse before the mid-20th century or so. And this brings to mind what my class used to say when we were studying Lit in JC: the basic lesson that Lit teaches us is that it's always the older guy who gets the young girl.
A brief survey of my 'A' level Lit texts furnishes us with enough examples. Pope's Eloisa to Abelard is about a young girl of 18 who married a 40 year-old guy who was her religious teacher (!) and who had dumped her once he got castrated (!!). In all due contrition he became a priest and compelled his wife to enter the convent, where she pined every day for him. To me, Abelard is the epitome of the species called the Spineless Male Wimp.
Then there's the marriage of the humbug industrialist Bounderby and the young Louisa in Hard Times, the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility and the marriage between the old schoolmaster Phillotson and the sadomasochistic maniac Sue in Jude the Obscure.
Although some of these literary marriages are really horrendous affairs, I'm not against the idea of marriage between older men and younger girls. I belive that if two people have enough common interests and have affinity with one another, age shouldn't be a large obstacle to 'love' (in the discursive rather than essential sense, but I run the risk of sounding like Robyn Penrose here). Moreover, as most girls who have grown up in girls' schools will tell you, older men can be far more attractive than guys one's age. They're usually more mature, more sensitive to one's needs and more intelligent. But then again, 43 and 14 just seems a little too close to paedophilia for comfort.
kaoru said at 6:15 AM
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