Love and sexuality on two plays - Essay Example

The play presents how love is manifested in many of the characters and how they are differently played. For Tartuffe, love was all a pretention. Although he seemed to be sincerely infatuated with Orgon’s wife, Elmire, he was also quick to leave her without fighting for the woman after he was found out of his double-cross. Orgon on the other hand appeared to have shaky foundations when it comes to his feelings toward his wife and children. Whatever made him very suspicious of his own family is not clear but surely, he was a man who did not have strong affirmations from his wife and children.

One might even question how he expressed his love for his daughter, forcing him to marry a man he did not love and to break bond with the person she was formerly engaged to. On the contrary, the man Orgon did not trust, Valere, showed his faithfulness to the end despite the shame he was put into by the family. Although he was formerly engaged with Orgon’s daughter, Mariane, before the father broke his vow and asked the woman to marry Tartuffe instead, the young man still professed goodness to the father when the deceiver was finally unmasked.

Another story that shows how love is expressed is the Japanese play entitled “The Love Suicides at Amijima”. . However, being bankrupt, the former cannot redeem the woman. In addition, there are other hindrances to their affair such as the wife of Jihei, his father and mother-in-law, his brother as well as his children. Jihei and Koharu showed that they can die in the name of love, as they have done by the end of the story. The wife, Osan, on the contrary showed how much she loved her husband by writing Koharu, imploring her to leave her husband alone when she determined that his husband was decided to commit suicide with her.

Nevertheless, her conscience’s call played a part in showing how much she loved her husband also because in the end, she confessed about her letter and showed that she wanted to help her husband redeem the prostitute. For the two women, love was a sacrifice but for the man, it was to fulfill his desire to be with the woman he wanted. He disregarded his own children and spent all of his wife’s savings to redeem the woman she loved for them to embrace the death that will bring them together forever.

In addition, for a time, Jihei despised his lover because he thought she just played along with him, committing to a love she never had. However, when he found out about his wife’s letter, his passions for the prostitute became even stronger that led him to commit suicide with Koharu. The two aforementioned love stories are tragic because they reflect how supposedly wonderful stories could end so wrong. Many people have been hurt along the way. In “Tartuffe”, Mariane was considered like a property whose feelings were not well-considered by his own father.

Her beloved Valere was also hurt because his engagement with Mariane was broken by her father for her to marry a man he did not love. However, in the end, Orgon was hurt himself