Jealousy in Art - Literature

Literature

Literary works use a variety of devices to explore its possibilities and reveal its wider implications. Most famously, perhaps, in the 1001 Nights Schahriar’s destructive jealousy is what precipitates Scheherazade’s creative outpouring of stories. In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) jealousy leads to such a distortion of the world that the sufferer is driven to madness. Shakespeare's later play, the Winters tale (1613) is predominately about the jealousy felt by Leontes' and his supposed adulterous wife. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla (1821) is more concerned with the interplay between jealousy and the theater, between reality and masks. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) jealousy becomes a game of reflections and speculations, a potent denial of sexual stereotypes, and, like many novels written by women, an angry rejection of the violation of the individual caused by the gaze of the jealous lover. Anthony Trollope uses both He Knew He Was Right (1869) and Kept in the Dark (1882) to analyze not only double standards used to judge how men and women behave but also the relationship between mind and body. Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) offers a compelling exploration of jealousy acting as a front for repressed homosexuality. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), especially the section concerning Albertine, represents the claustrophobic nature of the passion of jealousy through the tropes of imprisonment, illness and death, while Michal Choromanski’s Jealousy and Medicine (1932) creates a landscape and a climate that recreate to the full the physical experience of jealousy. Freud’s reading of jealousy and his emphasis on repetitive structures inspires Iris Murdoch’s A Word Child (1975) in which the London subway symbolizes endless repetition of the same.

Other novelists have used jealousy to explore the relationship between writer and reader, as well as that between fiction and reality. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1965) develops the image of the window blind (in French “la jalousie” means both the emotion and the window blind) to lock the reader into the jealous person’s mind, while in Julian Barnes’s Talking it Over (1991), the writer’s jealousy of the reader’s attention is as much a part of the story as the sexual jealousy it also examines. A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) is in part an analysis of the ways in which writing and reading operate to silence other voices.