Desire and love: A comparative study of narrative

I have chosen as the object of my analysis two eighteenth-century French novels, La Nouvelle Heloise and Les Liaisons dangereuses, and two classic Chinese novels, The Golden Lotus and The Dream of the Red Chamber. Les Liaisons dangereuses and The Golden Lotus can be paired together, since both describe the destructive side of sexual desire. La Nouvelle Heloise and The Dream of the Red Chamber are likewise similar in their exaltation of spiritual love. However, these apparent analogies only make the fundamental differences between the Eastern and Western novels more striking. In fact, my analysis emphasizes more the dissimilarities of the paired novels than their similarities. Why is eroticism in French novels generally conceptualized as it is in Laclos's libertine novel, whereas eroticism in Chinese narrative tends to be much less self-conscious? Why does the rhetoric of love play a much more important role in Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise than in Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's Dream of the Red Chamber?;In order to answer these questions, I try to analyze the role played by sexuality in the relationship between self and society in these four novels. According to Georges Bataille, eroticism is a form of transgression against the norms that determine individual behavior in a given society. At the same time, eroticism itself is largely determined by its object of transgression: social norms. Idealized love may be considered a sublimated form of eroticism. In many respects, spiritual love represents an aesthetic vision of individualism in that it asserts the superiority of the beloved (or the mirror-image of the self) to his (or her) society. To a large extent, these two forms of violation reflect the dominant ideological forces inherent in a given culture--either religion, as in the case of Christianity, reinterpreted through different intellectual and artistic movements, such as Neoclassicism, the Enlightenment and Preromanticism, or ethics, as in the case of Confucianism, transformed through Taoist and Buddhist influences. In the west, religion had to be secularized, and in the East, ethics mystified, in order for each to become a counter-example or a reverse mirror-image of itself in the form of individualism. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)...