"Much Regrafted Pain": Schopenhauerian Love and the Fecundity of Pain in Atalanta in Calydon (Arthur Schopenhauer ) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Love and pain are rooted deeply in Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865), and the two share such an intimate, delicate bond that they are inextricably linked. Much of the criticism dealing with the play, though, has looked primarily at such issues as its classical roots, its nineteenth-century antitheism, and its prosody, as Richard Mathews notes. (1) The resonance of emotion in the play also captures critical attention, and, in fact, few can write about Atalanta in Calydon without at least cursory mention of love in its various incarnations--whether romantic, sexual, or maternal Many critics regard love in the play as an attempt to reassemble the pieces of a sundered soul, and, in its failure, love is viewed as the progenitor of pain, as divisive, and ultimately as a destructive force. (2) I argue, however, that love is not the cause of human misery (existence is) because the "love" Swinburne presents in the play is influenced strongly by Schopenhauer's conception of love; moreover, it is presented within the context of Schopenhauerian pessimism--an understanding of humanity and the nature of the world wherein we are driven by a blind will to live and duped into maintaining the species, which in turn continues the inevitable suffering and torment that defines human life. For Schopenhauer, the love and sexual desire that appear to be individually motivated are actually part of an instinctual mechanism serving the species as a whole) I use the word "love" throughout this paper because it is the term Schopenhauer and Swinburne use. My exploration of love in Swinburne's play is not to be taken as saccharine or sentimental (nor is my use of the word intended to convey a narrowly defined small "r" romantic love). Rather, "love" will connote Schopenhauer's idea of "sexual impulse" and the "soap-bubble delusion" that motivates reproduction and thus the continuation of the species. Schopenhauer himself addresses the potential confusion of the nature of the "love" being discussed. Of love, he writes: In The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee explains Schopenhauer's defense of love as a worthy topic of investigation: