“Jaloezie is een aangeleerde emotie”

“Jaloezie is een aangeleerde emotie” names Steef’s claim that jealousy is learned rather than inevitable, and can therefore be unlearned. The phrase becomes a turning point in the narrator’s attempt to understand how his fear of losing his wife may be helping to make that loss real.

The Claim and Its Logic

Steef links jealousy with shame: both are learned emotions, he argues, and what has been learned can be undone. He extends the claim into a broader moral diagnosis, attributing all the world’s evil to jealousy. The narrator finds force in this reasoning. Jealousy, as he reflects, is fear of loss; its paradox is that trying to guard against loss through jealousy can bring about the very separation it fears.

The Narrator’s Jealousy

The narrator gives the idea a specific, painful application. He is jealous of everyone who receives love from his wife: her friends, her family, the children in her class, their dead child, Steef and Rebecca, and Hetty. The list ranges from family and friends to a child who has died, showing how broadly his possessiveness reaches. He sees the result as a vicious circle: his jealousy is bound up with the prospect of losing his wife, and he resolves to break that cycle.

An Unsettled Resolution

The resolution arrives as a thought the narrator tries to put into words, but Eva does not understand what he means. She suggests discussing it the next day, when they are both sober. His decision to change is therefore inward and provisional in this scene: it has been formed, but not yet shared or tested between them.