Eight lessons in love

by Mark Spilka

The title of this book is deliberately ironic. Domestic violence is not about love as we understand it, but about the need for men to reassert their threatened or lost command in a relationship. Eight Lessons in Love is a critical study of fictional treatments of that ironic problem, offering a radical new way of reading and teaching those works as drastic lessons in power and control. Drawing on his recent experience as a volunteer group co-counselor of male batterers, and on his lifelong experiences as a scholar, editor, and critic in the field of fiction studies, Mark Spilka has developed a way to apply present professional understanding of domestic violence to fictional attempts to cope with the theme. This critical sampler includes Spilka's essays on the stories included: James Joyce's "Counterparts," Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," John Cheever's "Torch Song," George Eliot's early novella Janet's Repentance, D. H. Lawrence's "The White Stocking," Ann Petry's "Like