Jealousy in art

Most famously, perhaps, Schahriar's destructive jealousy in One Thousand and One Nights is what precipitates Scheherazade's creative outpouring of stories.

In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) jealousy becomes a game of reflections and speculations, a potent denial of sexual stereotypes, and, like many novels written by women, an angry rejection of the violation of the individual caused by the gaze of the jealous lover.

Anthony Trollope uses both He Knew He Was Right (1869) and Kept in the Dark (1882) to analyze not only double standards used to judge how men and women behave but also the relationship between mind and body.

[1] In art, depicting a face reflecting the ravages of jealousy was a frequent studio exercise: see for instance drawings by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) or Sébastien Leclerc the Younger [fr], or in a fuller treatment, the howling figure on the left in Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (probably 1540-50).

[5] While popular images of jealousy tend to the lurid, it remains a source, both in literature and in painting, of highly creative artistic strategies that have little to do with the negative and destructive sides of the emotion itself.