Parul Sehgal: An ode to envy , an editor for The New York Times Book Review, in her TED Talk, a poetic meditation on an oft-resented emotion. “These stories make us feel terrible because they are designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include to dig that knife in. Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists.”
“When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people’s lives,” says Parul SehgalIndeed, jealousy turns us all into the weavers of emotionally grim tales. But as a life-long scholar of both jealousy and literature, I’d have to agree with Sehgal that the most jealous characters are often the most interesting. Here are my 9 most memorable moments in literature where characters act mad in the name of jealousy:
1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
“It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – in this moment of deprivation – the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively.”
Not long after this passage comes the famous scene, which Sehgal mentions in her talk, in which Swann sits at home after having just left his Odette. Suddenly, for no real reason, it occurs to him that maybe she’s gone to meet someone else. He leaves his house, gets in a cab, and stands outside her house. On a street full of dark houses hers is the only one with light coming from it, “between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice.” He tiptoes up to the window to see who it is — he is tortured and hell-bent on finding the truth. And he sees … two old men. It’s the wrong house.
2. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
“No account whatever had been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with them. … Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to a girl so exceptionally tainted.”
The Spoils of Poynton is a novel famously about chairs and lamps, and indeed the thrust of the plot is premised on possession of all kinds. Mrs. Gereth, the owner of the estate of Poynton, is deeply indignant that another woman — especially her son’s garish and unworthy fiancé — should come into possession of her estate and all the many fineries in it. Her jealousy is the impetus for her to goad Fleda Vetch, the protagonist, into trying to woo her son away from his fiancé.
3. Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms
In Casares’ novella, an unnamed narrator finds himself on an island, where he falls in love with a woman he’s never met whose name is Faustine. He’s obsessed with her, but she won’t talk to him. Not for a lack of trying; the narrator discovers later that the island is an experiment by a scientist named Morel, who had invented a photography machine to capture his friends frozen into the same motions over and over again for eternity. Driven wild by the possibility that Faustine might be dallying with Morel, the narrator decides to hijack the machine to (appear to) be with Faustine forever by inserting himself into the permanent image of Faustine and the other captives on the island. In the closing pages of the novella, he reflects:
“I am obsessed by the hope of removing Morel’s image from the eternal week. I know that it is impossible, and yet as I write these lines I feel the same intense desire, and the same torment. The images’ dependence upon each other (especially that of Morel and Faustine) used to annoy me. Now it does not: because I know that, since I have entered that world, Faustine’s image cannot be eliminated without mine disappearing too.”
4. George Saunders, Tenth of December: Stories
One of my favorite renderings of sexual jealousy – or lack thereof – is in Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead.” The narrator, Jeff, is a prisoner who gets doped (and duped) into falling in love with two different women, with whom he has sex and professes to love equally. When he realizes he is part of the same triangle with another man, and each of the two women has had sex with the two of them (and yet another man), he is probed by the experimenters.
“Well, I feel a little jerked around,” I said.
“Do you feel jerked around because you still have feelings of love for one of the girls?” he said. “That would need to be noted. Anger? Possessiveness? Residual sexual longing?”
“No,” I said.
“You honestly don’t feel miffed that a girl for whom you felt love was then funked by two other guys, and, not only that, she then felt exactly the same quality/quantity of love for those guys as she had felt for you, or, in the case of Rachel, was about to feel for you, at the time that she funked Rogan? … Think deeply on this.”
I thought deeply on it.
“Nothing,” I said.
Saunders so wonderfully renders the dynamics of love and jealousy as chemical applications; once they are removed, the subject of the experiment no longer experiences sexual jealousy the way any normal person might if they found out the object of their professed love had just slept with someone else within hours.
5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita