Jealousy in Proust and elsewhere in literature : Love is a torment

Though Shakespeare wrote the ultimate literary work about jealousy (Othello) and even had a few things to say about jealousy in his comedies and romances (Winter's Tale), for some reason I think of jealousy as part of the literary turf of the French - et pourquoi non? Jealousy is definitely one of the driving influences and themes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and first rears up in the Swann in Love part of "Swann's Way" (Davis tr.). With Proust, jealousy isn't an emotion so much as a perversion - he goes to great lengths describing Swann's love affair with Odette de Crecy, making it clear that Swann is at first and for quite a while not really attracted to her, finds her kind of dull and uneducated, doesn't really care for her friends (the Verdurin little clan), takes a really long time to approach her sexually, and in fact right from the start two-times her with a working-class girl (whom, like Odette, we never see) and who is more his "type." And then Swann falls for Odette and of course once that happens he makes a fool of himself through jealousy - one weirdly comic scene in which he goes to her house in the evening, thinks he sees lights on and silhouettes in her window, knocks on the window, he's at the wrong house! With Proust, jealousy easily expands into near-paranoia, and I'm not sure what to make of all this - except that Proust has a very odd and distorted, extreme, view of love: love never actually happens, the characters, or Swann, at least, move from disdain to possessive and paranoid without an period in which the two are happy with each other. Love, in Proust, is forever a torment - like memory.