Love Child

Katie Roiphe

Come si direbbe in italiano? Figlio naturale? Figlio dell'amore? Katie Roiphe traccia la storia di quest'espressione, "The word itself dates back to at least 1805. In The Nuns of the Desert, Eugenia De Acton writes of a 'Miss Blenheim' being 'what in that country is denominated a love-child,' and the term appears again a little later in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems. Another important touchstone in the word's history is, of course, the 1968 Diana Ross and the Supremes song Love Child, with the truly transcendent rhyme 'Love child never meant to be/ Love child scorned by society'." 

Ne commenta le ambigue connotazioni, "Since our bigotries are less openly and exuberantly expressed than they were in past decades, they take refuge in subtle, shifting word choices. Love child is definitely more friendly or tactful than the more Shakespearean bastard but it nonetheless cloaks a certain discomfort with the facts. Love child is both tolerant (that is, more tolerant than other terms) and mocking; it contains within it our contradictions; it passes judgment in an ironic way - indirectly, playfully, but also plainly".  

E il potenziale trasgressivo, "Stepping back, though, what is a tiny bit subversive and possibly appealing about the term is the faint suggestion that the love child has something more to do with love than the baby born in wedlock, who is in a certain sense just doing his job, fulfilling the natural and upstanding function of holy matrimony. On some level, the existence of the love child is testimony to some special energy on the planet ..." slate.