Sincere Love and Scholarship:

BSR: Can you introduce your most recent project, a multimedia nonfiction essay and art exhibition?

Manuela Mourão: From The Heart began when my husband and I were about to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, and I started reading our love letters again. When we were in graduate school, I would spend Christmas and Summers back home in Portugal. There was no email, there was no Skype, the telephone was very expensive. So we sent letters. Rereading them became a ritual–I’d read one a day, out loud so I could share it with him. And then I thought that I could use them to make a painting, to preserve their significance and to even maybe update it. 

I asked my husband to write me a new letter starting with the words that I gave as a prompt: “The first time I saw you…” And I wrote him one with the same start. Those two letters were the first that I actually used on the canvas. 

What drew you to love letters? 

I revisited Letters of a Portuguese Nun for this project because they crystallized the trope that became very famous in literature. From Rousseau to Rilke, the Portuguese letters were repeatedly imitated. It was a text that had a lot of impact in European literature, and on the concept of love itself.

As critics have pointed out, in the 19th century, sexual repression was a powerful form of repression that had pretty negative consequences for people. In the 20th century, the analogous thing is the repression of authentic, sincere love. One is supposed to be detached, ironic, cool. And that has had negative consequences too. When I re-read Roland Barthes’s Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, I was drawn to this notion that contemporary society is derisive towards authentic love. 

Barthes argues that in resisting that derision, by affirming sincere love, the lover is performing an act of resistance and subversion. You can imagine a love letter can do that. I argue that this kind of sincere love still exists and the love letter can carry on its affirmation. Perhaps the New York Times’ “Modern Love” section is the contemporary, 21st century take on that. “Modern Love” is modern because it accepts that love is complicated. People are still interested in sincerity, even if they’re cool, even if we’re going to apps and swiping right—is it right or left that you swipe? 

You swipe right.

Okay, so you swipe right. But even though our culture is like that, we also have these eruptions of sincere feeling. The great success of “Modern Love” tells us that there’s still a tremendous pull to that idea of sincere feeling. For this project, I use the love letters of  nineteenth-century writers whom I study and teach in a series of paintings. I read their letters precisely as affirmations that challenge the prohibition of authentic love–and many of those loves were somewhat forbidden. 

For example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an invalid from a very young age, and Robert Browning sent her a letter saying he loved her poetry. It took a year of correspondence, but finally she allowed him to visit. She lived basically in her room at home, and she was protected by the family. Her father was very patriarchal and tyrannical and forbade his children to marry. Barrett Browning had to elope when she finally accepted that it was true that Robert Browning loved her. They ran away to Italy, and she never saw her father again. He disowned her completely. It was a forbidden love, but those letters are kind of an affirmation despite all odds. 

Another one is Charlotte Brontë and her love letters to a professor and director of a boarding school in Belgium. She and her sister Emily traveled there and stayed there for a year to learn how to run a boarding school, because they were supposed to come back to England and open their own. She fell in love with him, but he was married. He didn’t give her the time of day, but she wrote him some passionate letters. The culture would have claimed that, as a Victorian woman, she should have been ashamed of it, should have stifled it, but an intense feeling is registered in her letters.

There’s one you did for Oscar Wilde, too, right?

Oscar Wilde! Of course, you know, it’s so very well known that he basically destroyed his entire life when he sued the father of his lover, Lord Alfred. He insulted him by sending a card to Oscar Wilde’s club and leaving it there calling Oscar Wilde a sodomite.

Alfred Douglas, his lover, did not have a good relationship with his father and instigated Wilde to sue him for defamation. So, recklessly, he does. And what happens, of course, is his life— where he is on the one side, a family man, but on the other side, a man in love with another man who writes very decadent work like The Picture of Dorian Gray— is exposed. The Picture of Dorian Gray was then used in court to condemn him, and so he’s disgraced. After that, he goes to jail and undergoes two years of forced labor. It is in jail that he writes De Profundis. They would only give him one sheet of paper a day, but he writes this magnificent meditation on love and on life. It’s also a complaint to Lord Alfred Douglas as to how he treated him.

I did Emily Dickinson, too, who fell in love with her sister-in-law. After her sister-in-law married her brother and moved next door, Dickinson also has to deal with this and writes her poetry and these letters to her, Susan Gilbert. All of these stories are affirmations of sincere love and resistance to prohibition, derision, irony.

 How does your scholarship intersect with your creative practice? 

I usually try to formulate an art project that allows me to illuminate some aspect of my scholarship by exploring it less as a structured argument and more as a visual representation that is more open. More poetic and suggestive.