Love A Powerful Emotion - Essay Example

Love – A Powerful Emotion Love may be described as a passionate feeling that a person feels for someone else; it brings about emotions of personal attachment and helps to represent kindness, compassion as well as affection for another being, usually for the good of that other being. Since the past, literature has formed itself over some of the greatest love stories of all time. It is the primary aspect of most interpersonal relationships among people and most people fall in love with others in order to spend their lives together, understand each other as well as stand up for one another. Nonetheless, most people tend to mistake love for a feminine emotion because men are not able to handle feelings as well as women can. Love has been associated with the domestic sphere, as the question suggests, and that is why, more often than never, it is considered to be an emotion that a woman is more likely to handle than a man. This therefore makes it a historically and materially less valid topic to write about. Love however, can be both masculine as well as feminine because different kinds of people and characters are brought up in different settings and are taught to love one another with the same emotions. ‘Maurice’, written by E.M Forster, is a book about a young boy who has spent all his life around other boys and men; he is never exposed to girls as he attends an all boys school as well as an all boys college, and thus, when his family expects him to fall in love with and get married to a girl, he finds it tough to do so because he begins to love people of the male gender. Some forms of love are said to be more feminine than others such as the passionate as well as tentative love which may be observed through the writings of E. M Forster. In order to understand a more manly form of love, one may take a look at John Fowles’ ‘Collector’. Clegg helps to display a very dominant and persuasive form of intimacy within the book which may be associated with men in today’s day and age. Love is not only subject to whether it is masculine or feminine, but also to how it is sexual in nature. Sexuality usually helps to demarcate feminine love from the masculine one within literature as well as movies and music. In most literature, authors play around with images which are masculine or feminine in nature in order to depict manliness or womanliness and help people understand what kind of love they are trying to talk about. Clegg, in the Collector, is a typical man with a dangerous and unhealthy obsession as the idea of love whereas his counterpart, Miranda Grey, holds the idea of love close to her heart in a more conventional manner. She might have an obsession for Clegg, however, it is not a strong dominant one, it is a more timid and docile one. Her affection turns desperate towards the second part of the book as more aspects from her personal diary are told by the author. She is fixated by the idea of being with a man called ‘GP’ despite having been kidnapped; instead of looking for escape routes, her mind only travels to those conversations where she is eager to understand how the man feels for her and whether or not he is ready to reciprocate in the same manner. The acts of sickness, dirtiness, and all that our human bodies have to expel made Miranda less desirable to Clegg. We see this in part two of the book where Miranda writes in her journal ‘I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, and always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants’ (Fowles, John, The Collector) In this manner thus, love may be understood to be extremely vast in nature, making it very tough to mark it as either masculine or feminine. Even though the emotion might be a more fragile one, easily understood by women, it cannot be marked as something less valid to write about. Stating this itself demeans the idea of a woman being able to express her emotions and affections to another being. This emotion warps itself within the domestic sphere of a person’s life; a mother or a wife is the main character within a household who are able to impart the feeling of love and care to the men. They help to nurture them and bring them up, making them feel loved along the way and this helps authors and readers alike to form the notion of love becoming a very stereotypically familial feeling. This stunts the growth of literature as well as art within society, because it stops love from being felt in other spheres of life. There are a number of stories, poems and novels written on how big wars began because of feelings of love and betrayal; war is a very manly aspect of life and since times immemorial, several forms of literature have based themselves on wars taking place due to men not being able to contain their feelings of love for the women folk that they want to belong to. For example, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet depicts a war between the two suitors for Juliet, just to win her love; the Indian epic Ramayana also talks about how Ram’s love for Sita made him start a war with Ravana. Despite this, there are many authors around the world who still believe that love is a womanly feeling only because men are not as romantic as women are and they do not dwell within the domestic sphere as well as women do. However, at the same time it is ironic to note that most of the beautiful love stories written in the past have taken their forms from the words and might of men like William Shakespeare and Erich Segal. Historically women have been portrayed as passive, emotional and useful for homemaking and rearing children. Most of the stories that have been written about women as harbingers of love have displayed their affection in the form of either angels (angelic, pure, kind beings) or fallen (impure, corrupt, prostitutes and harlots). It is in this way that love in literature is not at all emasculating, after all it is men writing about love in the way they want it to be; pure or impure. In totality, there are many different forms of love that have been written about; romance is not only subject to the emotions of a woman. For example, in Maurice, love amongst two men has been shown most beautifully, linking a different feeling of love altogether. Bringing this aspect of two gay men again helps to see how even the most masculine can feel such feminine side of emotions. In the recent day and age there are various different kinds of love that a person may see in the world around him; there are people who live together for all their lives and learn to love each other for better or for worse, and at the same time there are people who disrespect the idea of an institution of marriage and break up with their lovers within no time at all. Thus, there is love within families, friends as well as children in the domestic sphere and there is also the idea of love which is actually lust for people who are not able to deal with the idea of emotions and feelings. Most relevant literature from the past helps people today understand the idea of an unconditional form of love where two people sacrifice and devote everything just to have each other by their side. This form of love is definitely present today and cannot be given a specific detailing of being manly or womanly in nature because it is an aesthetic aspect of feelings. Another book, ‘The Toyshop’ written by Angela Carter, is a novel which follows a young girl Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself and the surroundings that she is living within, with respect to her body and sexuality, as well as her feelings and emotions. This piece of literary fiction is a very strong and grasping novel on love as the strongest emotion that there is; and how it can be portrayed in a masculine manner by the most innocent of girls. Melanie might be a girl, but she is strong and has dark fantasies that she wants fulfilled. In fact, she ends up scaring Finn a little by asking him to reciprocate the kind of obsession she had for him. In this manner, the author has helped the audience to understand how women are capable of experiencing strong emotions such as men; earlier only men were said to have wild fantasies and desires; however sexuality cannot be given a gender and thus holds strong for both aspects of society. ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’, written by Nadeem Aslam is another love story going across religions and helping readers to see how love goes beyond all kind of faith and is the strongest emotion that there is in the world. It cannot be surpassed by anything, and thus can never be called a ‘less valid’ emotion to be written about, in any sphere at all. The book follows the trial of Kaukab’s Muslim brother in law who was killed along with his wife to be, because they were living together, which was regarded as a sin in the Muslim community. Furthermore, stories of different families living within the same region unfold as the story then goes on to talk about the brutal exorcism of a Hindu and Muslim union of two people in love with each other, not accepted by the rest of society. Another story follows a mother asking her new son in law to rape her daughter because she refused to sleep with him after their marriage. All these examples paint a very gory and vivid picture of forced and emasculated love which ceases to exist among the characters. Those that love each other have been torn apart, and those that do not, are forced to live and be with each other against their wishes. All these examples help to show how love is actually an existential cloud hanging over the people, waiting to be used as a useless emotion and nothing else. However, it is, in reality, something very fragile, intricate and delicate; something that cannot be played around with. For love, is one of the most deep and thoughtful emotions that only a few people feel for each other. It makes people understand being selfless and devoting their lives to caring for one another. It brings out the best of emotions within people and keeps them happy; at the same time it helps them to understand different kinds of pain, which are important in life to become strong. Furthermore, love may also be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species. Therefore, since times immemorial, love has been talked about as a feminine emotion because of the delicacy with which is it presented forth to people; however, most men are the ones that handle love in such a fragile manner and understand their better halves in women. Most men around the world have written some of the best love stories that have torn people’s hearts and helped them understand the meaning of being unconditional; how then can love be called a feminine emotion? It is neither emasculated in nature, nor completely womanly, because it consists of various aspects like understanding desire and sexuality. All these attributes of love cannot be given a gender specific role to follow because they are unique to themselves and general to the people. Works Cited Forster, EM., 1971. Maurice. London: Edward Arnold Fowles, John, 1963. The Collector. 1st ed. United Kingdom: Jonathan Cape. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps For Lost Lovers. Alfred A. Knopf. Carter, Angela, 1967. The Magic Toyshop. Heinemann. Read More