Irène Reweliotty

Irène Reweliotty appears through brief quotations that give a personal voice to the book’s analysis of women’s idealized love. Her words illustrate a longing not simply for a particular man, but for a figure who embodies masculine authority and can seem to offer a way beyond the diminished position assigned to women.

The Ideal of Male Love

In the account of adolescent desire, the girl first wishes to identify with men; when she gives up that aspiration, she may seek to share in male power by being loved by a man. Reweliotty’s anticipation of the men she will love, especially the first, makes this sequence personal. The emphasis falls on men as a category and on the promise attached to the first lover, rather than on the individuality of a known partner.

Submission and Superiority

Reweliotty’s later words sharpen the pattern: she asks when the man who can dominate her will arrive, then says that she loves feeling him to be a man and better than herself. The statements link romantic fulfillment with an unequal relation. In the book’s interpretation, the beloved’s superiority is not merely an individual trait; it reflects a social order that casts men as sovereign subjects and women as dependent, inessential beings. Love can therefore become a chosen form of self-effacement, experienced as devotion even when it reproduces subordination.

Narrative and Thematic Role

The book uses Reweliotty’s brief expressions as evidence for a broader argument about gendered expectations, not as a full account of her life or a developed relationship narrative. Her words contrast the imagined ideal lover with the ordinary men whom women may later find contingent and disappointing. They also show how a woman’s own language can register the tension between desire and inequality: she speaks directly, but describes fulfillment through the lover’s power and her own lesser status. The evidence identifies no further biography, partner, or outcome for Reweliotty.