Our Greatest Need: What Is It?

Aesthetics: What a Woman Needs Most

Through the magnificent way Aesthetic Realism explains art, people can learn how we want to be in our lives. "All beauty," Eli Siegel explained, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Women need to learn from art how to put together opposites in themselves such as sweetness and strength, passion and exactitude, the intimate and the wide. A woman who has been loved for nearly 400 years I believe because of the way she puts these opposites together is William Shakespeare's Juliet from Romeo and Juliet.

In an Aesthetic Realism Class, when I said that I didn't like myself for how I was often too managing of my husband, particularly after I'm very much affected by him. I said I wanted to be sweet with him, but I didn't see it as strong. I was surprised when Ellen Reiss read passages from Romeo and Juliet and asked me if I thought Juliet was sensible in her feeling about Romeo. I had felt Juliet was beautiful, but I had never thought about whether she was sensible. Miss Reiss suggested I study Juliet and ask, "Was Juliet wise or stupid?" These are some of my findings.

When Juliet first meets Romeo at a ball at her home, she sees qualities in him that she is swept by—he seems both fervent and gentle, passionate and kind. And while being a critic and wanting to see if she can trust him, she doesn't hold herself back, she is not coy or insincerely restrained. When the Nurse tells her he is a Montague-the family her own family hates and who have been bitter enemies of each other for many years—it doesn't change her mind: she is very logical, and later, speaking to the night air as if it were Romeo, says:

Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

And she says:

And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

I believe Juliet is wise because she is glad to have met a person she feels she can love for who he is, and she has a response that is accurate and full. Juliet is precise—she is questioning of Romeo. She isn't ga-ga over a man—she asks him "Where do you stand?"

O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronouce it faithfully.
Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won,
I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou mayst think my havior light;
But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.

Even though she doesn't know what his response will be, Juliet is not hidden and calculating with Romeo. She is straightforward; she is passionate but her mind is still keen. She sees this as a beginning, and says when they part, "This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,/May prove a beauteous flow'r when next we meet." And she says in one of the greatest, most famous passages in the drama:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Here, Juliet is showing what Aesthetic Realism says is love itself: proud need. And so different from the hurtful advice given by women's magazines—to plot to have a man make you the most important thing in the world, an empress, while you strategically and contemptuously withhold yourself, saying "You need me, but I don't need you—Juliet says she is so grateful she needs Romeo to be herself, her "bounty is as boundless as the sea," and "the more I give to thee/the more I have, for both are infinite." The opposites of self and world are here sheerly. She says the more she gives the more she has, and she is sweet and critical, tender and strong, passionate and so exact. I admire her enormously for this and want to be like her.

In "Love and Reality" Eli Siegel writes: "We love because we desire to be entirely ourselves, everything we can be." And in order to be everything we can be, we need to like the world in its wideness and intimacy. This, the education of Aesthetic Realism makes possible; it is the joyous study women all over the world need.

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