ABSTRACT
Romantic love reattached copulation to pair-bonding through the sanctification of strong romantic emotions. Individual choice was still paramount, but sex was only acceptable within a marriage meant to last for life. The Romantics’ idealization of deep emotion contributed to fewer unwanted pregnancies but compelled women to obsess with the small number of men who are capable of arousing the strongest erotic and romantic affect. Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Sweden’s best-selling nineteenth-century novelist, saw how individual choice in combination with late-Romantic ideology made socially subjugated women vulnerable to predatorial seducers. In The Magic Goblet (1840–1841), she offers an exceptionally precise characterization of a Don Juan-like hero–villain whose personality is marked by Dark Triad traits, a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Such men’s antisocial deception became easier to get away with on modernity’s large, mobile mating markets. The Magic Goblet conveys why these men come across as so irresistible, especially within a mating regime that portrays emotion as truth. The Gothic romance argues for the necessity of a greater reliance on reason in matters of mating.
