On a wind-chilled winter afternoon, 15 young women and 10 young men gather in a warm room behind the University of Chicago’s medieval walls to talk seriously about a topic not given much scrutiny in academia: courtship, the quest for love and marriage.
Their models are not characters from film or TV but from 16th Century literature–Rosalind and Orlando, the would-be lovers at the center of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
The students are guided by scholars Amy and Leon Kass, who have spent much of their 38-year marriage discussing literature and life. Amy Kass says their new course, “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship,” is designed “to promote a higher kind of sex education, one that prepares hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage.” She’s not kidding.
In the Kasses, central casting could not have asked for a more dignified or charming pair of cultural revolutionaries. They designed the course by selecting great books of Western literature with the radical hope that the readings and discussion will inspire students in their personal lives and clear a path in the wilderness of love.
“Our intuition,” says Leon Kass, “is that many young people lead lives of decent aspirations, but they get no help from the popular culture and little help from the academy. We view the courtship course as a healthy alternative.”
The Kasses met at this university, where the “great books” canon has long been taught, in the late 1950s. Amy was an undergraduate in history, Leon a medical student. They have two married daughters with daughters of their own. The Kasses exude a genuine warmth to students, while insisting on a formality that has faded at most universities: Everyone in class refers to everyone else as “Mr.” and “Ms.”
The Kasses understand that they are swimming against a tide of contrary trends. The capacity of young couples to sustain the bonds of matrimony may be society’s sweetest ideal, yet popular culture has probably never been more hostile to the notion of romance as an overture to wedding bells. Nearly half of U.S. marriages end in divorce, despite a bull market in couples therapy. Tabloid talk shows such as “Jerry Springer” thrive on displays of relationship meltdown. The portrayal of family life in sitcoms has moved from “Ozzie and Harriet,” as the proverbial nuclear unit of the 1950s, to “Everybody Loves Raymond,” in which family life itself is the source of conflict rather than the solution to challenges that in the older programs came from outside the home.
Nowhere have tremors of the heart registered more deeply than on the campuses. A generation ago, many young women arrived at college with the goal of finding a husband. Today, most female students expect to find a career. Young men, in turn, are often uncertain about their roles. Many of those caught up in the vast, unscripted drama of modern romance are children of divorce, cynical and overcautious about trusting their hearts to anyone. Where college at one time offered young people the best opportunity to find a potential mate, today it is marked by tough questioning about the possibilities of love and lasting relationships.
The courtship class has one textbook, “Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar” (University of Notre Dame Press), a thick anthology the Kasses edited. The selections draw from the Bible, Homer, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Plato and Jane Austen, as well as 20th Century figures such as C.S. Lewis and the columnist Miss Manners. The book is organized around such questions as “Why Marry?” “Is This Love?” “What About Sex?” and “What Can Married Life Be Like?”
In the introduction, the Kasses write that “courting” is a 16th Century term meaning “to pay amorous attention, to woo, with a view to marriage.” Courtship is not the same as “flirting and seducing . . . trysting and having an affair, and to speak in modern idiom, `hooking up’ or even from having or being in a `relationship’ : These activities, whatever their merits, do not aim at marriage.”
On this day, the students are circling the would-be lovers in “As You Like It,” assessing Shakespeare’s illumination of the values inherent in the rituals of courtship. Should Rosalind, a well-born maiden with a solid mind, find a worthy suitor in Orlando, a muscular nobleman of little learning?
When they meet early in the play, it’s love at first sight. As the plot unfolds, Rosalind tries to get a handle on what Orlando’s really like. As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, discovery will come through costumed concealments and role reversals. When the lovers next meet, in the forest, Rosalind is disguised as a young man, which allows her to draw information out of Orlando.
“The disguise enables her to test and discipline Orlando’s love,” says Amy Kass. “The courtship is absolutely masterful. When Orlando arrives late, she puts him through the paces. Is Orlando a man for marriage?”
“I don’t know if he’s the marrying type,” replies student Caroline Duke. Several young women nod, with comments about Orlando having been late for their first date earlier. They know why she wants her guy to be on time.
At one point, Orlando is with his brother in the woods when they encounter a lioness. Orlando battles the wild beast, protecting his brother, who has long manipulated him and thwarted his chances at getting an education and achieving independence.
“Orlando saved his jerk brother from the lioness,” explains a male student. Two other young men nod, registering a sentiment about Orlando: He has shown his good character, and Rosalind should cut the guy some slack.
“He’s choosing to act on his virtue, and that’s what Rosalind wants,” reflects a female student. Another echoes, “He’s capable of forgiveness, in spite of what his brother did to him.”
“He displays himself as a man of principle,” intones Amy Kass, “and that is lovable.”
Leon Kass poses a question: “Is enough known about Orlando to support a decision about whether Rosalind should marry him?”
“This woman has tested him,” replies a young woman, “and he has passed.”
“I would never marry Orlando!” another woman retorts . “He’s a dreamer.”
Student Susan Gaunt rises to Orlando’s defense. “He figured it out . . . he passed (Rosalind’s) minimum quality-control threshold. She needs common sense, practical virtue.”
Student Brad Glaza turns the issue around. What should Orlando–any man considering marriage–look for in a woman? “I need more shared experiences, common ground, shared love, a friendship, what it is that sustains a marriage for 50 years.”
Amy Kass observes: “Each of these characters has come to a self-knowledge. Not until you acknowledge that you’re lacking can you reach this level.”
Traditional courtship rituals were premised on the virginity of young women; young people now are more sexually experienced and skeptical about what it takes for a relationship to work. Leon Kass confronts these realities by insisting on the value of a traditional mating ritual.
“Classical courtship begins by holding back sexual desire, and uses desire’s energy to inspire conduct that will demonstrate devotion and gain devotion,” he tells the class. “Courtship provides time to learn about character. Can they be friends? Can they sustain a union when the ardor cools? Courtship enables a couple to develop habits of the heart. Dependability. Fidelity . . . those are the goods of courtship if it has marriage as its end.”
The Kasses are part of the neoconservative critique of American society, an intellectual movement that arose in the 1970s, led by Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Midge Decter and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others. They viewed the 1960s protest movements as having gone too far, to the point of undermining important social institutions. The 1990s “culture war,” much of it waged by leftist scholars critical of the Great Books teaching methodology, has created a splintered intellectual environment in many universities.
Other U. of C. professors take a different approach to sexual politics but express respect for the Kasses’ take on it. “The University of Chicago is known as a place that does not respond to fads, and the Kasses are much in keeping with that model,” says Lauren Berlant, director of the Center for Gender Studies.
The mild-mannered Kasses hardly fit the mold of ideological provocateurs. In the 1970s, Leon Kass made the shift from medical science to ethics and a road that led to his appointment as Addie Clark Harding professor on the Committee on Social Thought. Amy Kass, who has a PhD in education, is senior lecturer in the humanities; she leads a national project on education for civic leadership supported by the Lilly Endowment, and writes on American autobiography and Homer.
In an interview outside of class, the Kasses bemoan the lack of contemporary works that echo older courtship themes of sexual restraint, and getting to know a potential partner’s traits of friendship and virtue as building blocks for lasting love. Not that there aren’t exceptions. Amy Kass cites several August Wilson plays as showing “what it takes to make a marriage last and how one relates to a spouse who has been disloyal.” Leon cites the recent films made from Jane Austen novels as good examples. They mention other films–“When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail”–as suitable modern courtship tales. But these are rare contemporary narratives the Kasses find helpful in illuminating courtship issues. Neither teacher can think of a recent novel that celebrates sexual restraint in a romantic context. The popular culture is consumed with speed of information, wealth, instant gratification and unbridled individualism. As Tina Turner sings, “What’s love got to do with it?”
“One sign of hope, a spark for this whole project is that we haven’t met a student who didn’t want to be taken seriously by one person,” says Amy Kass. “What they don’t imagine is marriage as providing this.”
“So many students are protecting themselves as a resistance to fear of disappointment,” says Leon Kass. “Once (they) get past the culture’s opinions and into the (course) readings, they’re able to enter sympathetically into the experience of the lovers.”
At a recent American Enterprise Forum, Amy Kass observed, “Beneath the students’ self-protecting cynicism are deep longings for friendship, for wholeness, for a life that is serious and deep and for associations that are trustworthy. The young are mainly just scared, and no one has offered them hope or proper guidance.”
Perhaps the most controversial selection in the Kasses’ anthology is the chapter on “Relationships” from the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 best seller, “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, wrote a polemic about the fading influence of classical learning in American universities. He blamed easy sex and the divorce culture for creating “souls without longing.” Bloom also criticized students for a tepid niceness, a lack of passionate convictions, a convenient “rhetoric of self-fulfillment.” He wrote: “This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature–spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone.”
Gathered at a campus coffeehouse, several of the Kasses’ students groan when that passage is read aloud.
“I thought it was filthy sophistry and rhetoric,” declaims Christine Keagy, a humanities major. “Bloom was communicating a view supported by self-help books and talk show media.”
But Walker Lambert, an English major, shakes his head: “Everyone is nice . . . too nice. I’d much rather get involved with someone who’s angry or passionate, anything but nice. There’s been a death of passion.”
Leah Ulrich, a math major, agrees with Bloom’s observation “about a general sort of meaninglessness in relationships.”
“Kids my age date a lot of people–and have no intention of marrying any of them,” she says. “That’s not even something you think about. You can say you love them. There’s all this serious language and you spend lots of time with them, but it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no goal to it.”
“I think what you just said,” replies Lambert, “is one of the biggest problems of our generation, the fact that no one attaches meaning to anyone. People say they love whoever they want and have sex with whoever they want, but what it all comes down to is you end up in a void of meaninglessness.”
All this talk would seem to confirm Bloom’s bleak view of the sexual revolution and its impact on young people. And yet, according to opinion polls, young people today have a high level of concern about civic values, helping the poor and protecting the environment.
Leon Kass, who worked with Bloom on curriculum matters, does not consider himself or his wife to be intellectual descendants of the late professor. “He was really interested in how liberal education was in decline, that one didn’t see so many young people coming to college hungry for knowledge. And he blamed this in part on easy access to satisfaction for sexual desire.”
The Kasses are more interested in helping their students find lessons in literature on how to lead good lives, and on habits of the heart that transcend sequential relationships. They chose Bloom’s chapter on relationships for their anthology “to provoke students into self-examination,” explains Leon Kass.
“Many students were angry about what he said about them–especially what he said about the effects of divorce. But many others agreed. We find our students eager to be taken seriously by another person, and searching for a life filled with deep friendship, lasting intimacy and wholeness–a life that for many of them could be gained by marrying well.”
Great literature can work in mysterious ways. Keagy, who scorns Bloom’s judgments of her generation, is a student in ethics and moral philosophy. “I wanted to know how virtue, being a good person, is related to love,” she reflected in the coffeehouse. “Which causes which? Is it being a good person that causes you to be in love, or being in love that causes you to be a good person?”
The linkage of virtue and love is alien to popular culture. Sex has all but supplanted virtue in an equation with love. The old-fashioned idea of being good, following one’s values in the quest for meaningful love, leaves many young people feeling exposed, vulnerable, unwilling to reveal much about their emotions for fear of being hurt.
And yet the quest for a bridge between virtue and love remains one of humankind’s oldest stories. As champions of these tales, Amy and Leon Kass are countercultural figures, leaning against the prevailing winds.
