The word “woo” isn’t used much anymore. Not just because the word itself sounds old-fashioned, but because the relationship scene has changed quite a bit in the last hundred years.
The new social flexibility has removed much of the love ritual, which is great if you don’t want to be traded to the neighboring villager for a goat, but less so when you’re trying to figure out how long to wait before you. call someone back Or what to say when you call. Or if there is something to call about in the first place. Or, we dare to speculate, if the call could somehow result in marriage, children and a fixed 10/30 mortgage.
Suffice it to say that the relationship between modernity and love is “complicated.” If you’re having trouble with today’s mating rituals, toast these awkward 20th-century suitors: J. Alfred Prufrock, Holden Caulfield, and Kurt Cobain. In addition to being tongue-twisting, evasive male lovers, all three figures emerge during particularly rich and happy times in American history, which certainly doesn’t help if you’re already feeling like a loser.
J. Alfred is the original guy who awkwardly falls for the girl at the party. Her entire 132-line “love song” is speculation on whether or not to get close to his love interest, whose identity she doesn’t even have the guts to divulge. There are several alternative interpretations of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, including the following:
- Prufrock approaches the woman he loves, loses his temper, and gives up without saying anything.
- Prufrock wanders the streets of the city imagining approaching said woman, then anticipates rejection and gives up without saying anything.
- Prufrock spends the entire poem at home, where he imagines himself wandering the city streets imagining his fantasy self approaching said woman, being rejected, and then giving up without saying anything.
- Prufrock isn’t even in love with anyone specifically and just likes to torture himself.
Friends, welcome to modernism. It doesn’t get any easier from here.
Fast-forward thirty years to The Catcher in the Rye: the heyday of Ford Mustangs, hamburger joints, the nuclear family, postwar purposelessness, and incredible pressure to conform. Then imagine trying to get out.
Although Catcher may not strike you as much of a love story as the disillusioned ramblings of a naïve seventeen-year-old, once you strip away all the critiques of falsehoods, pettiness, adulthood, and popularity, you’re left with… not much. of whatever. That’s why we can’t ignore the fact that the two areas of Holden’s life that remain unscathed are his (deceased) little brother, Allie, and his (absent) crush, Jane. These are the rules by which Holden measures everything.
Of course, Holden never works up the courage to call Jane, any time she tries, but she violently attacks her roommate after suspecting she’s “buying him time” (possibly coerced). As far as Holden is concerned, that’s quite the display of a knight in shining armor. Unfortunately, the fact that the book ends with Holden in some kind of institution gives us the distinct impression that things with Jane never quite work out.
Fast-forward another forty years to the disjointed and abandoned love story of the 1991 smash hit Smells Like Teen Spirit. In it, Cobain describes a woman, “too bored and self-assured,” which automatically makes her mind jump to “a bad word.” He then says “hello” several times before asking “how low?” You are a smooth talker, you.
Then comes the chorus, which assures us that “with the lights off it’s less dangerous.” In case you’re still not feeling uncomfortable, Cobain recites the following elements as if they somehow go together: “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido.” Yeah. Nothing gets a girl in the mood like a pejorative racial term, a pigmentation disorder, a bloodsucking bug, and talking about old sex drive. We can’t say we’re surprised that the song ends with a famously repeated “denial.”
For someone so romantically inept, it’s only fitting that Cobain be dubbed the “self-hating icon of the inarticulate generation” by the UK Telegraph. On the other hand, if they think the 1990s were the only disjointed generation, the joke’s on them.
