Jealousy

Jealousy is the emotion most people are most ashamed to admit, and that shame is the first thing the reading sets aside. Jealousy is not a character flaw to be hidden; it is the body's report that a bond it depends on feels threatened, and the writers worth following have read it as testimony about attachment rather than as evidence of smallness.

The reading is densest in the literature of love and its triangles. The fiction that turns on a third party — the novel of the affair, the marriage with a rival in it — reads jealousy as a structural feature of attachment rather than a moral failure. The erotic canon Vela reads holds jealousy honestly, as one of the weathers that desire moves through rather than something desire is supposed to be above. The contemplative inheritance carries its own register: the Hebrew scriptures name a jealous God, and the reading follows that strange, load-bearing metaphor — possessiveness as a sign of covenant rather than of weakness.

Jealousy is not the same as envy, possessiveness, or insecurity. Envy wants what another has and the self lacks; jealousy fears losing what the self already holds. Possessiveness is jealousy hardened into a claim of ownership; jealousy at its most honest knows it cannot own the beloved at all. Insecurity is the soil jealousy grows in but is not the feeling itself. The four are kin and the reading keeps them apart, because envy and jealousy face in opposite directions — toward what is missing and toward what might be lost.