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the transcendent.
    What Dante did with the idea of Beatrice underscores the fundamental narcissism of unrequited love. It is much more about the lover than it is about the beloved. It may feel submissive, but it is also egocentric—all about what extreme feeling for another can do to transform the self . As Dante writes in La Vita Nuova : “Thus pallid and void of all power, I come to behold you, thinking to be made whole.”
    Beatrice never made Dante whole by requiting his love. But his quest for wholeness through her gave him privilege—a subject to write about, a way to exalt himself through his feelings for a woman he barely knew. His desire was about asserting himself in the world through his fantasy love. As medieval studies scholar Howard Bloch put it, “The gaze is not upon the woman so much as on the reflection of the man in her eyes.” What the beloved says or does to the lover becomes less important than what he can make out of the idea of her. In Dante’s case, what he made out of Beatrice made his career and cemented his place in literary history.
    Granted, the lady got a few benefits out of being adored. Scholars point out that in the glow of courtly love, women becamemore than a means to gain property and perpetuate a bloodline.They could bask in the respect, compliments, close attention, and sensual pleasure of being adored. They had the right of refusal, something unimaginable in the marriage agreements their parents carefully negotiated. However, the object of affection in courtly love had no quest of her own. She did not have the privilege of asserting herself through unrequited passion. Being wanted is an inherently passive position. Her only privilege was the new view from her pedestal—but the surroundings hadn’t changed. Medieval portrayals of women who did quest for impossible love make it clear that their infatuations were inappropriate, not enriching or heroic. In Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Lancelot has no inclination to bask in the attentions of Elaine of Astolat. He chastises her for trying to make him feel “constrayned to love.” Before she perishes of heartbreak,she arranges for her funeral barge to greet him at Camelot and prepares a letter explaining how she died. Her dramatic self-destruction is arguably a kind of masochistic self-exaltation—but a far cry (to put it lightly) from an ennobling quest or literary fame. The privilege of the unrequited lover was unlikely to extend to the medieval woman.
    That’s no shock, given the era. But as ideas of unrequited love and human equality evolved, this gender disparity has had considerable staying power. The nineteenth-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, known by the pen name Stendhal, took up the cause of unrequited love in postrevolutionary Europe. He was famous for being a serial unrequited lover, a man who, though he had a reputation as a plump womanizing dandy, glorified desire over consummation. His love affairs were rocky and transient; most were one-sided.He had a reputation for being sexually impotent, andthe protagonists in his novels wrestled with timidity in romance. He never wed. In his autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard (Henry Brulard was one of several pseudonyms he used),he took stock of all his loves and proclaimed that “my victories . . . did not bring me a pleasure even half as great asthe deep sorrow caused me by my defeats.” Unrequited love, for Stendhal, was a vital experience. He saw himself as picking up where courtly love left off. He may have begged his lovers to let him sit beside them, but he was just as enamored with the effects of not being with them; absence fueled his longing and imagination.
    As he wrestled with his fiercest and longest passion, for Countess Mathilde Dembowski, he wrote On Love , the treatise that would ensure his place in history with its apt and poetic description of how passionate love affects the way the lover sees the beloved—and how the lover