Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, 1939.

Back in the days when I was coming into the bloom of womanhood, the boys used to tell me that they knew what I needed. Though the heyday of parlor psychologizing may have passed, that’s still the trouble with it. They don’t ask. They know.

In the column before this one, I mentioned reading books by philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum who writes about emotional intelligence. I was very glad to make her acquaintance, since she seems to fill in some of the blanks on the great map of experience that philosophers hope to describe and explain.

In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions, MCN observes a reciprocal relation between our theories and our emotions. On the one hand, theories shape emotions, but also we meet realities that only feelings can discern. 

Here’s one example: my Self-Defense for Women teacher taught us to pay attention if we feel reluctant to get into an elevator holding only one passenger. Aggression has an odor, which we may be sniffing fearfully, even if we think our reluctance unreasonable.

I also liked MCN’s reminder that we are not stuck with our present furniture of concepts and percepts. Ordinarily we’re capable of revising both. We do live and learn!

So I read along eagerly. Till I came to her account of developmental psychology. There she reports what she finds to be the present consensus about stages of human development, from earliest infancy to adulthood. I’ll tell you what they say, as she reports it. Among animals, we have an atypically long and helpless infancy. We need protection, food and comfort, yet we can’t control who gives it or for how long. Also, before much time passes, we’ll want our care-givers to get back and allow us the space to explore and master our surroundings.

It’s complicated, but so far so good. But then, two ugly emotions obtrude: shame and disgust. Shame seems primordial. She connects it to our vulnerability. [This doesn’t ring true to me. I’m vulnerable from my neuropathy; it hampers my walk; but I don’t feel shame about it. From the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, as well as from personal memory, shame seems to me connected to sex; but what do I know? MCN has got the report from the experts.]

Now what about disgust? This is the reaction to a perceived contaminant which we want to flee or expel. And, she reports, it’s not natural! It occurs in connection with stuff deemed offensive by parents and society. [That doesn’t ring right to me either. Cats seem rather modest about excretia. If disgust were merely conventional, wouldn’t there be some societies that just relish rolling around in it?]

Next on the upward climb toward adulthood, we meet two more bad guys: jealousy and envy. In jealousy, we want to get rid of the competitor; in envy, we’ll settle for getting in front of her.

So what does the happy land of maturity look like? Once there, we accept boundaries, we allow ourselves to trust, we feel gratitude, empathy, wonder at the richness of the world of experience, and lo! a sense of justice. This seems a rather fine silk purse to get out of the primal sow’s ear … 

I hate to say it, but this whole developmental story didn’t ring bells with me. Looking back, I can’t recall wanting to kill my rivals. (In fact, I stopped winning foot races once I noticed that some people had to lose.) I can’t recall wanting to be the center of the universe. And I didn’t want to wipe competitors off the face of the earth. 

Here’s a case in point: in Hilltop, the summer place where my family went in New Jersey, the landlady’s son-in-law owned a pet monkey named Benny whom he hoped would make his fortune someday in Hollywood. This son-in-law was named Lenny. My mother, who didn’t have a good memory for names, would ask the landlady, “How’s Benny?” when she meant to inquire after Lenny. Anyway, I didn’t like Benny one bit. He would pee on people from the treetops. But I don’t recall wanting even Benny wiped off the face of the earth! So, maybe I’m in Heavy Denial. How would I know?

Anyway, moving right along, let’s look at one of MCN’s examples of emotional life, this one drawn from Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights. In this romantic English tale, appearing first in 1847, an adopted darker-skinned child, Heathcliffe, grows up to take revenge on his adoptive family’s natural children, who bullied him in childhood. Through the novel runs his early passion for his foster-sister Catherine, who – despite the intensity of their bond – marries for social prestige and safety. The whole novel is marked by excess: Heathcliff’s willful schemes of revenge, the suffering he brings down on rivals, the lovers’ never-quenched, lawless longing for each other, and the peace that settles over the survivors only after the deaths of all who first set the drama in motion.

It’s hard to see what can be learned from this tale of passions going to the end of their string. However, to my surprise, MCN settles on Heathcliff as the novel’s hero! In his “entirely unguarded love” she finds “a deeper sort of generosity and the roots of a truer altruism. …The capacity to throw away all self-centered calculation is at the heart of real altruism and authentic … morality. …The novel suggests that only in this deep exposure is there true sacrifice and true redemption.”

I beg to differ.

The love between Heathcliff and Cathy has its ferocity because it plays out under an iron sky. 

Passion without transcendence

morphs into cruelty.