The word “love” is amour in French, amor in Spanish, and amore in Italian. They share “am” at the start, which is the Latin root for love. Thus interestingly, love is self, is as Antoine Saint-Exupery has explained, the “process of my leading you back to yourself.” It is first planted in everyone through their early experience of being unconditionally loved as a child. Storge love then enables them to cultivate their own loving relationships, whether philia, eros, or self, and help their loved ones and themselves understand who they are. But love is as complicated and mysterious as the self, and without proper nurturing, it easily disappears and leaves lasting negative impacts on those failed to love. In the novel Hard Times by …show more content…
“If I had been stone blind...I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving” (219). The absence of love in their early childhood not only blinds them from recognizing emotions but also desensitizes them and obstructs them from developing feelings. The seed of love planted in Sissy’s heart and the seeds of discipline planted in the Gradgrinds’ head bear fruits later in the children's own relationships.
The consequence of unaffectionate environment quickly shows as Louisa denies Sissy’s love for her. After her father advises her to consider love “simply as one of tangible Fact” (102), Louisa becomes “impassive, proud and cold--held Sissy at a distance” (107), completely ignoring the previous wonder she had about Sissy. As Louisa blindly follows her father’s advice, marries Bounderby, and takes pride in separating herself from Sissy’s fancy and care, she becomes aloof and unresponsive like her mother. The news of her mother’s illness is hastily delivered as a simple fact, and she also receives it as one. “There’s a pain somewhere in the room” (202). Her feelings are so numbed that she cannot even sense her own pain that her cold mother senses. Even after her baptism in the rain and her confrontation with her suppressed emotions in her nadir, Louisa is unable to relearn how to love. She is never married and has “no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood...or fancy dress” (300). In contrast, Sissy’s unconditional love for Louisa never diminishes
Love is a powerful emotion that every human being has experience at least once in their life. There are numerous connotations that refer to this emotion, but there is only one kind of love that can make a person change completely in unexpected ways. It is the kind of love that consumes the soul and everything within. Mixed with excitement, adventure, heartbreak, happiness and joy; it is a big ball of feelings, all concentrated in one simple, yet extremely complicated necessity to have, protect, please and give all of oneself to that one person. In certain occasions, love can grow very intense and, consequently,
As a child grows, extra care and attention is very essential in order to build the foundation of love and a strong bond. Especially, in today’s society,children are often judged by the act of their parents but in this memoir, written by Miss Jeannette Walls shows how unstainable and dysfunctional relationship Jeannette had with her parents but she still managed to use her tough upbringing for confidence and resourcefulness.
Poets have written love poems for centuries with the first said to be around 1000BC. But what is love? It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘ to have attachment to and affection for’. However, after studying various love poems, I have found that love is portrayed in many different ways. It can be possessive, hateful and pure and the fact that William Shakespeare said ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ suggests that love is more complicated than a simple dictionary definition.
Abby Alcott, Louisa’s mother, was a highly educated young woman, rare for her time, but like her husband, made poor decisions that would ultimately hurt the family’s well-being severely. Abby worked as a nurse for families living in poverty, who could not afford health care from paid doctors. However, Mrs. Alcott was very careless about her nursing and never bothered to ask what she was treating. Her carelessness caused her to bring home smallpox and scarlet fever to her husband and four daughters. The Scarlett fever Abby brought home would eventually lead to the death of one of her daughters, Beth (Steven 112). Her parent’s financial carelessness lead her to “beg[in] writing to make money for her mother and three sisters”(DeSalle). Louisa also at one point in her childhood vowed that she would one day become rich so she could provide for her family, in the way her father had not.
Detached from love, being the “unloved”, and not knowing how to seek or expel love are all problems that are relevant to the lives of many. Through the plot of Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “Carpathia,” and Susan Minot’s “Lust,” it is evident that love and its psychology plays a major role in one’s self worth and ability to love and accept it in
The two passages written by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, spoken by two different men who are asking for a lady’s hand in marriage, have two very different motives for marriage. As the audience keeps reading and analyzing the passage rhetorical strategies the speaker’s intent becomes clear. The two men reasons for marriage are entirely different, as are there attitudes toward the objective at hand. In the paragraph written by Jane Austen, the speaker gives the woman three reasons to why he would like to marry. Firstly, he believes it will make happy to be married, secondly it’s a good example of matrimony, lastly his patroness Catharine DeBourgh advised him to get married as soon as possible. These reasons show the reader the speaker only
The love story is one of the oldest and most cherished traditions in any world culture. The prevalence of romantic works throughout history, whether Greek myths, Jane Austen’s dramatic narratives, or today’s dime-a-dozen romantic novels, ultimately encourages us to believe in the power of true love. We identify with the archetypal star-crossed lovers, who combat established convention in order to assert their romance, because we too yearn for our own “happily-ever-afters.” When used in conjunction with reason, love is the highest form of compassion – without it, we could not possibly interact productively with one another or develop as individuals. But when we take a new perspective and examine love as an independent,
Ever wondered how love can bring you happiness and pain and make you sane and crazy at the same time. How this emotion can change you and make you accept things you are not used to. How this emotion can overpower you in many ways in which you did not know existed. In Lancelot by Chretien de Troyes, the power of love is a commanding driving force that can dominate a person’s mind, body, and soul and one who is courageous enough to love sometimes undergoes serious consequences. Consequences that are driven from the power of love that harm and cause hardship to the one who is determined to seek love.
Love is perhaps one of the most contested issues in the world. No one has a precise definition of what love really should look or feel like. Most people have resorted to use their own experiences in love to effectively derive its true meaning. Through these experiences, philosophers have argued that the definition of love varies greatly depending on whether it was given by a man or a woman. This is however not the case. As proven by the narratives of Beauvoir and Sartre, the definitions of love derived from the experiences of both men and women are quite similar. Consequentially, Beauvoir’s account of the woman in love sheds important light on Sartre’s conflicting thought about love. By first highlighting the concepts of love as stated by Beauvoir, this text seeks to establish how Beauvoir’s account of love lays a vital foundation for Sartre’s.
In this short story, Louisa’s internal independence plays a major role in who she is as a woman. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman describes Louisa as an introvert because she is someone who enjoys being alone. She spends fourteen years of her life being isolated at home, waiting for her fiancé to come back from his job in Australia. During those years, she learns how to be by herself through the hard times and the pleasant ones “Louisa’s feet had turned into a path, smooth maybe under a calm, serene sky, but so strait and unswerving that it could only meet a check at her grave, and so narrow that there was no room for any one at her side” (Freeman 66). This demonstrates how she is so use to not having anyone by her side. This is why she creates her own path through all the dark times she had to face on her own. In many ways this can foreshadow the ending of the short story. This shows how she always counted on herself and
Would you rather be prosperous and disheartened or common and jovial with your life? Joe Gargery showed that wealth doesn’t define one’s personality but personality defines ones wealth, Miss Havisham shows that wealth is everything but that emotions don’t matter, and Jaggers shows that some gentlemen have dispirited lives despite all of their riches. Characters in the novel such as Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Jaggers represent that life is not always perfect whether someone is rich or poor. In the novel, Great Expectations, Charles Dickens uses the element of fortune and social class to show the dynamic of how wealth doesn’t guarantee contentment.
In the Greek Era, many philosophers tried to define love, especially one that was timeless. Throughout literature, there have various perspectives on love. In The Iliad, which was during the Greek era, there was greater importance on honor than love. In The Confessions, which was written during the early Christian age, there was a great importance for love of God. In Gilead, which is a modern novel, there is great importance for love in general, especially that for family. Out of all the Socratic definitions of love in The Symposium, Diotima had the most universal definition of love, which was “the desire to possess the good forever” (206A). To possess the good forever, one must reproduce with their body or reproduce with their soul. Diotima’s idea of the desire to possess the good forever through reproduction of the body and of the soul is present in all three sections of literature including The Iliad, Confessions and Gilead.
Love is one of the most confusing emotions that one can experience. It is simple yet complicated, unconditional but demanding, overused and unique. It is hard to explain what its means to feel love, to feel loved, or to be in love, however, there are aspects of love that are easily expressed. For example, ones unquestionable affection to the one they love, or the hardships and sacrifice that is endured for loved ones, and the underlying fact that once it is experienced it is not easily dismissed. The play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller describes love in just these ways, and, most of all, as the ultimate moral value that is the eternal bond that keeps people together. One can
Love is a powerful emotion that can cause people to act in abnormal ways. In the novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, the main character Florentino Ariza falls passionately in love with Fermina Daza. He immediately spends hours composing poetic love letters to Fermina as his entire life becomes dedicated to loving her. Fermina’s father, who greatly disapproves of the relationship between the two, decides to take his daughter to travel throughout the Caribbean. After many years of separation, when Fermina finally sees Florentino for the first time since she had been back in Hispaniola, all of her love immediately disappears after realizing she does not actually love Florentio. From that day on, Florentino would live for over a century in
In M. Scott Peck’s work, The Road Less Traveled, he says “Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words” (81). He also seeks to define love as “The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's personal growth” (81). For Peck, he recognizes that the nature of love is so mysterious that a true satisfactory definition of love has yet to be created and suspects his own definition to be inadequate. He also recognizes that love is categorically vast in that it is divided into eros, philia, agape, and others.