Crazy Love

This chapter argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871) and Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1873) dramatize the difficulty, but also necessity, of theorizing desire and love as simultaneously social adhesives and solvents. My Wife and I and The Gilded Age depict the emotionality of the free love movement, embodied by the radical reformer Victoria Woodhull, as an assault on property and responsibility—a form of “emotional insanity.” Together, they reveal a fraught engagement with love as a force capable of holding groups together and shattering existing institutions. An afterword to this chapter further discusses how this tension anticipates and complicates later efforts (by Le Bon, Freud, et al.) to denigrate the supposed irrationality of the crowd, as well as recent critical efforts to celebrate the putatively unmediated emotions of popular political movements.