Happy Valentine's Day from the (still) cold land of France!Since I blog the second week of every month, I always have the honor of presenting Valentine's Day musings when February rolls around. Lucky you.
It seems the last couple of Valentine's Days, I wrote about writing letters and writing and love in general. Why don't I talk about reading this time? Which literary couple in love do I love to love?
It would be easy to pick a duo from a Jane Austen novel. What could be said about Elizabeth and Darcy that hasn't already been said? It would be way too cliche to even think about Romeo and Juliet. (Plus, I think Romeo was kind of a wuss, frankly.) I must admit that thinking about Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester makes me laugh. Okay, Mr. Rochester locks up his cuckoo wife who periodically escapes and goes around scaring Jane out of her wits, he then tries to set up a creeper arrangement with Jane even after she finds out he's still married, only to have her, in the end, turn around and take his one-handed, blind old self back? In a way it's sweet, I guess, but it makes me laugh. Jane is much more noble than I. Antony and Cleopatra, Guinevere and Lancelot, Gatsby and Daisy, Janie and Teacake . . . the list of literary couples can go on and on.
However, there is one couple I absolutely love, but not because they're a functional, lovely symbol of romance and fidelity. Their love was actually pretty tortured and obsessive (though they do have a happy ending of sorts). They are Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. What I love about this couple is the way they speak about their love. There's something so hauntingly beautiful about it.
Catherine tells her maid Nelly of her love for Heathcliff:
"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
Heathcliff pleads for Catherine after she's died:
"Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
For Heathcliff and Catherine, it was more than "I love you." It was "I am you." Whoa. Who are your favorite literary couples?
"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
Heathcliff pleads for Catherine after she's died:
"Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
For Heathcliff and Catherine, it was more than "I love you." It was "I am you." Whoa. Who are your favorite literary couples?
I'm must say Odysseus and Penelope, if I may delve so deeply into literary history. It's been several years since I read the Odyssey, and my copy is still packed away somewhere, but I remember being impressed by Odysseus' intense longing for home despite all the adventures and goddesses he met with between Troy and Ithaca. And Penelope is the legendary faithful wife keeping her host of suitors at bay for--twenty years, was it?--by telling them she would choose one of them as soon as her weaving was completed. But devious as she was, she ripped out her day's work every night to begin it again. I loved the image of Odysseus and Penelope's bed built around the olive tree that was sacred to themselves. When Odysseus finally returns, in the disguise of a beggar, he proves his identity by describing the bed to Penelope. And while she might have suspected the man's identity before, she is convinced he is her husband by this detail.
ReplyDelete"The royal pair mingled in love again
and afterward lay revelling in stories:
hers of the siege her beauty stood at home
from arrogant suitors, crowding on her sight,
and how they fed their courtships on his cattle
oxen and fat sheep, and drank up rivers
of wine out of the vats. Odysseus told
of what hard blows he had dealt to others
and of what blows he had taken--all that story."
~Books 23, lines 337-46