Can an Object Love?: A Short Review
Can an Object Love?: A Philological Essay on Female Subjectivity by Ellen Söderblom Saarela.
(Content warning for discussions of domestic violence and sexual assault.)
The question posed in the title—can an object love?—recalls Plato’s philosophy on objectivity and subjectivity. The subjective refers to the dependence on a consciousness, fallible perception to be true. The objective refers to an independent state of being; it is true regardless of one’s beliefs. Therefore, the subjective beloved relies on the lover’s mind for their worth, their existence. The objective lover exists independently from the beloved. What Ellen Söderblom Saarela refers to, though, when she asks the question can an object love? is the idea that the beloved is an object of desire for the lover. The beloved is not quite a person, but an object on to which desires are projected. The beloved is a smokescreen, a mirror image of what the lover wants—but the true person behind the object they become is not seen.
What happens when the object makes the attempt to love, to become more than an object, instead of simply existing to reflect the lover’s desires?
Saarela’s book Can An Object Love?: A Philological Essay on Female Subjectivity explores the #MeToo movement and Saarela’s own experiences with domestic violence and sexual assault against the backdrop of classical (and modern) history. At the start of the book, she is a PhD student in philology working on her dissertation. She is concerned with feminism, ancient portrayals of gender and love, and linguistics. The book uses auto-theory (a combination of critical theory and memoir, for readers unfamiliar with this term) to tell its story, and it does so splendidly. Never have I read such a personally touching theoretical book.
I first discovered it as part of the Women’s Classical Caucus’s Women’s History Month reading group. It was the title alone that caught my attention. I began reading it blindly which made for a more powerful reading experience. Though it is titled as one essay, it is actually twenty-five essays across six sections. They all relate, telling one narrative that looks both backward and forward on personal and social histories concerning women. She discusses ancient texts as well as modern events such as the progression of the #MeToo movement in Sweden.
Each text that Saarela discusses is carefully selected with the precision of someone who knows the weight of (their) words. From the Symposium and Ovid to Mariah Carey, Saarela interweaves modern and mythical history to discuss the ways women are portrayed as beloved objects and, likewise, how women interrogate this position in their narratives. The way Saarela reads these texts is multidimensional, never reducing any of them one theory or way of reading. As Dr. Paul Miller says in his own review, “Saarela’s readings uncover models of resistance” by women in the ancient texts (notably written by men) that she discusses (118). Sexual, gendered violence becomes decentered by women’s resistances of these harrowing events.
For me, this book made me investigate how I articulate my own experiences. It made me reconsider the way I engage with ancient sources, as someone with research interests in ancient history, writings of women, and feminism. It left me reeling and, in some odd way, a little more healed than I was before I began reading it. Not only is it a powerful scholarly exploration of ancient texts through a feminist lens, but it is also a personal narrative that demands we as readers reconsider how we imagine our own histories.
Whether you have an academic stake in the topics Saarela explores or not, I hope you consider reading Can an Object Love?. I’ve provided a link to an open access copy of it below. I wish to leave you with a particularly memorable passage that has stayed with me as a glimpse into the book:
Works Cited
Saarela, Ellen Söderblom. Can an Object Love?: A Philological Essay on Female Subjectivity. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2024.
Miller, Paul Allen. Review of Can an Object Love?: A Philological Essay on Female Subjectivity by Ellen Söderblom Saarela. The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 32, no. 1, 2024, pp. 117-119.
Further Reading:
Open access edition of Can an Object Love?.