Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Arguing that romantic love need not be a tool of women's oppression, feminist critic Baruch asserts that in courtship patterns of the future, women will be as overtly aggressive as men in sexual initiation. In 14 rewarding, provocative essays (half of which originally appeared in Dissent, the Yale Review and other journals), she contends that unacknowledged male fantasies about love motivate much literature by men: Romantic poets who use woman as a narcissistic mirror, medieval troubadours glorifying a lady-in-waiting as omnipotent child. She contrasts the role of woman as savior in the male dystopias of Orwell and Zamyatin with the multicultural, androgynous, sexually liberated ``village of the future'' in Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time. Other pieces deal with Ibsen's Doll's House , misogyny in the film Fatal Attraction and the revival of romance in the age of AIDS. (May)