Saturday, October 21, 2017

Terrace House, a Deeper Dive: Taishi and the Death of Courtly Love

Taishi came to Terrace House with a wooden sword and a heraldic motto: "Shinuhodo No Koi". There's ample evidence that he sees himself in his arc through Aloha State as being on a quest to find a romantic ideal: a love worth dying for. He transforms the show to be the setting for his quest, and the show is willing to follow because it's all about the points of view that housemates have about romance. However, Taishi's idea of love is a one-sided corruption of an ideal of courtly love which is patriarchal and ill-suited to a meeting of equals to begin with.

The ideal of a knight and his lady in the West arose as reaction to severe restrictions on marriage particularly among the nobility of Europe. Marriages were arranged and purely transactions intended to increase the status and power of families and clans. Of course, extra-marital affairs flourished, and were policed by society and the Church. But alongside those traditional family values the troubadours began to sing of a revolutionary new kind of love: one that required no physical consummation and acknowledged an individual agency for both men and women that had been previously forbidden by the culture.

The romantic love of the troubadours was one of selfless service of a knight to his lady. Through the formal process of winning a lady's heart both the knight and lady were able exert choice and control of their emotional lives that they were not available in their familial lives. The knight would perform deeds of valor to win tokens and boons of affection from a women with whom he could not otherwise interact. As a result, even in the romances of that period the emotional interactions were over-examined and overblown.

Taishi is not seeking that kind of love, really, though he might see himself as doing so. Note well that he seeks to find that love worth dying for instead being or becoming a love worth dying for. He is looking outside himself for a transformation that has to occur within himself. Robert Bly (in his book Iron John) calls the ideal that Taishi seeks "the golden-haired one" - it is a projection of the ideal feminine attributes within the man onto the perceived persona of another. There is nothing inherently wrong with that projection: it's a stage of development that almost all men must go through as they learn to have mature relationships with the real human woman in their lives (and, of course, most women go through a similar process in their relationships to men).

And so Taishi's approach is a corruption of courtly love in that he does not sacrifice his interests for the sake of a lady. Instead, he tests each woman to see how well his projections fit his ideals, and when they do not he moves on to the next woman. He often creates wonderful romantic settings for the tests, but it's ultimately never about that warm, living human being (even Anna!) he's taking out. Instead, it's all about whether he can fall for this person with only the barest acknowledgement that they might want to fall for him or that it might matter if they do (Laruen and again Anna).

Courtly love is, ultimately patriarchal. In the world of courtly love, men get to act and women get to react. It is not a meeting of equals opening outward to greater complexity and nestling inward to greater intimacy as equals. Taishi seeks to perfect the way he acts (holding doors and seating his dates) so that his dates might react in ways that match the feminine ideals that are inside himself. I'm not saying that his objectification of the women he takes out would prevent him from getting to know them as people, but it certainly would make doing so much more difficult.

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