Love and Sex
Love and Sex
This chapter examines the implications of the fact that humans are animals for how they think about love and sexual desire. Constance Naden's finest achievement as a comic poet is the series of four poems grouped together under the title ‘Evolutional Erotics’. These four poems both parody and probe the evolutionary accounts of sexual desire. The power of sexual selection is in the hands of the women. Edna St Vincent Millay's sonnet draws attention to the discrepancy between the idealistic language of love and the reality that romantic relationships are prone to the vicissitudes of everyday life. George Meredith's agonising analysis of the collapse of a marriage, Modern Love, is described. It then considers Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats. For Meredith, Millay, and Gunn it is a fundamental implication of Darwinism that all human desire falls by definition within the scope of human nature.
Keywords: sexual desire, Constance Naden, Evolutional Erotics, Edna St Vincent Millay, George Meredith, Modern Love, Thom Gunn, Darwinism
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
