Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession
Rosemary Sullivan
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 1582431779
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A provocative combination of fiction and reflection by an award-winning writer that explores the question of why women love the way they do. A best seller in Canada.
Every woman longs to be in a love story. But what are they longing for? In Labyrinth of Desire, award-winning writer Rosemary Sullivan explores the many stories upon which women base their (mis)understanding of romantic love. She begins her book with an original and beautifully crafted love story which she then deconstructs, chapter by chapter, skillfully peeling back the layers of meaning and using personal anecdote, history, film, and literature to discover why her heroine, like so many otherwise intelligent and sensible women, falls hopelessly, obsessively, excruciatingly in love with the wrong man. Whether she is exploring the story of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, or of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Sullivan's graceful writing and intimate knowledge of her subject bring these stories to life and asks us all the question: Why do women love the way they do?
Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism
The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire
Whore/whole. Duras has caught the paradox. By living the innocence of her desire, the potency of her sexuality, by ignoring the world’s terms, she begins to recover from the damage of a brutalizing childhood. The man is exquisite, his reverence extreme. For Duras, it is he who is broken by love and she who is healed. At the age of eighteen, Duras left Vietnam and returned to France, where she wrote her novel and became a famous writer. Nowadays, the relationship she described could never be
evolving: animal, Homo erectus, bionic man. Our brain has grown until our body is this little nub hanging off the brain. We walk around hanging off our brains. We need to feel. We need the body back.” We long for the feeling of desire because desire puts us back in our bodies. In the state of desire, the mind dissolves and the body focuses. Think of a cat watching a bird. Its attention is total, its whole body a taut wire humming with one motive only. That’s the kind of absolute, intense
plot that it should keep coming back? In Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron identifies the hook: if two people are made for each other, they will find each other despite distance, time, and common sense. The film opens with Ephron’s character Annie trying on her wedding dress as her mother looks on. Her mother claims to believe in destiny; Annie is cynical. Then destiny intervenes and changes the course of her life. By chance, hearing a guy speak of his love for his dead wife on a radio talk show,
eighty-two with a dog called Fidèle (in case we missed the point), remains faithful to the memory of her dead husband, praying every day in the private chapel where he lies buried. And she gets to tell the young woman what’s wrong with her grandson: “There is nothing wrong with Nicolo that a good woman couldn’t make right.” We discover Nicky is a failed artist. Grandma instinctively knows this girl has the right stuff. She tells her that she is worried about her grandson: “What the artist in him
I used to ask him to tell me the story over and over, even though I knew its every detail. A young soldier at the time, my father had fallen in love with a beautiful woman at a canteen dance. He lost her phone number and couldn’t find her again. Three years later, he met her on a blind date. The point of his story was that he and my mother were fated to meet. Though there was much unhappiness in their marriage, my father never gave up his illusion that few men had loved with such intensity.
