The Birth of Pleasure

Why do humans experience so much pain before finding pleasure in love? Gilligan, who revolutionized gender studies with her examination of girls' moral development (In a Different Voice, 1982), offers some tentative answers. She opens with a quotation, "The power of love upsets the order of things," and throughout the text considers that disturbing power. There are two roads, one leading to life, the other to death, Moses said after descending from Mt. Sinai; by urging followers to choose life, he said in effect: Choose love. But, Gilligan (Humanities/NYU) wonders, what is the best route to find love? The allusion to Moses is just one of hundreds of allusions, as Gilligan seeks a part of the answer in stories. Adam and Eve at odds with God; Cupid, wounded with his own arrow for love of Psyche; teenager Anne Frank writing in her diary while hiding from the Nazis; the doomed love of Almasy and Katharine in The English Patient--these are among the stories from which Gilligan derives or tests her concepts