The Dangers of Love

My head is like an ITunes jukebox full of music ready to play for any situation.  For American Lit this week, one song specifically came to mind:  ‘What is Love’.  After all our talks in class about violence and love, lyrics like ‘What is love/baby don’t hurt me/don’t hurt me no more’ just followed naturally.

Writers like Edgar Allen Poe and his ‘zombie women’ prove the dangers that can often lie dormant in a relationship where love reigns.  In the relationships the narrators in Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella not even the old adage ‘love conquers all’ could survive.  One of the questions Suzanne listed at the beginning of the class was ‘Is love rational?’ After the readings we’ve done in the last two weeks the only logical response can be a resounding no.

In my opinion, all love does some kind of damage to the people it ensnares.  At the very least, love can make people blind to the faults of the person they’re with, either for a short time while the bliss of being in a new relationship is still in bloom or throughout the entirety of their time together.  As much as I hate to say it, I can see parallels between Poe’s twisted narrators and some of the relationships I’ve been in during my lifetime, usually placing me on the same pedestal at the narrator and not the unfortunate brides.  Several of my first relationships began under dubious circumstances where I couldn’t “for my soul, remember how, or precisely where, I first became acquainted” with the boy in question (Poe 569).  Dating in through middle school and high school what I knew some of the people I dated very well, others not very well at all.  Like Wendy in The Shining I stayed with people who were emotionally, but not physically, abusive to me at times.  I put up with a “best friend” for a number of years who once kicked me in the arm hard enough to bruise just because I changed the radio station off a song he liked that I didn’t.  Like the narrator who states “a recollection flashes upon me that I have never know the paternal name of her who was my friend and betrothed” there were things I simply didn’t know about certain people I dated that I probably should have made it a point to find out before dating them such as middle names or what they were allergic to, though never anything as drastic as not knowing someone’s last name (Poe 569).  I grew bored in certain relationships as the narrator in Morella does who “longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella’s demise” (Poe 588).  My boyfriends no doubt painfully “conscious of my weakness or my folly” that led me to sabotage my own relationships, find faults in them that may never have even been there and leave them before they could hurt me (Poe 588).  It would be too easy to blame my fears of abandonment and commitment on my absent father and have it at that, but I know that would be partially a lie.  Almost every man in my life, be it father, friend, or boyfriend, has shown me I’m nearly impossible to want to stay with for long, that after a time they could “no longer bear” to be near me (Poe 588).  They left, one by one, two or so friends returning and standing fast since then.  Around high school I decided to stop waiting for everyone to leave and counterattack – I would leave first.  I’ve broken up with every boyfriend I’ve ever had save one.  I’ve lived my life as a pessimist with the theory that “the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstacies [sic] which might have been” (Poe 581).

The female character to which I most relate, I think, would be Ligeia.  Once upon a time I dated a boy (names with asterisks have been changed for the sake of privacy) was named Paul*.  There was nothing really that special about him except that he was a perfectly ordinary straight edge boy from our tiny high school town.  Like Ligeia, I was significantly more intelligent than my partner, which created a fair share of distance between us the longer we dated.  I couldn’t have known the crazy the lay beneath the surface of Paul’s seemingly-normal façade.  When we dated, he did everything in his power to keep me away from my other male friends because he thought I was spending too much time talking to my guy friends and he wanted me to myself.  By the time I actually managed to corner one of my guy friends to inquire why they were all avoiding me, Gabe*told me he’d threatened they to stay away from me.  As a counterattack I started spending hours a day ignoring him talking purely to my best female friends, merely hoping he would get the point and realize how crazy he was being.  Instead, he started doing the same thing to my female friends.  All in all, he wanted me to himself.  Creepy much?  Needless to say that relationship didn’t last long – although instead of emaciating myself to death like Ligeia did, I broke up with him in an elevator in Disney world.  Happiest place on Earth just got a little less shiny for me, let me tell you.

This gives me the perfect segue into my next topic:  Disney set our generation up to fail when it came to love.  In class we talked about how we’re taught to look for the perfect relationship like our favorite characters had growing up.  We were shown as little girls that once you’ve found your Prince Charming who would fight your dragons or scale your towers to save you that everything would be happily ever after.  Is it any wonder the divorce rate is so high when people have been taught that love conquers all your problems?  When things get tough, when the fairytale honeymoon period of a relationship ends and reality begins again, people can’t cope.  If the happiness and butterflies die, people don’t know what to do.  More people need to reevaluate their opinions of what love should be, and of whom they should be looking for.  We can’t all marry Prince Charming and be whisked off to rule a country.  We all want our fairytale, our happily ever after, the stuff of songs and poetry.  We all want to know if we’ll get our perfect ending, just like the girl in the song ‘Happily Ever After’ by He Is We:

Some fairytale analysts say that stories like Cinderella are bad for kids.  They say behind all the magic and hoping “you are left with a tale of wishes-come-true-regardless,” to which one analysts responded “If that were so, wouldn’t we all be married to princes” (Dundes 303)***.  Further, characters like Cinderella that most of us grew up with are perfect examples of “insipid beauties waiting for Prince Charming” which presents “the majority of American children with the wrong dream” (Dundes 303)***.  I agree – when I was a child, I didn’t dream of career success, but of a husband who may or may not have been a prince.  My views, thankful, had changed.  Waiting for a Charming Prince sounds so tiring.

 For me, I’ve changed my ideals of love so many times I don’t even know where they began and how they’re going to end.  When I came to college, the last thing I wanted was to look for a boyfriend.  Sure, I noticed a few people I thought were cute or that I might be capable of being interested in, but I’d given up the ideal I’d held all through high school – to find someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  I’d reached a point where looking for the ideal partner was tiring me out and the lyrics from the song ‘Dogs Days Are Over’ by Florence + the Machine started to feel like they applied to my life: Leave all your loving, your longing behind/You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive.  Love, and the search for it, was wearing me out and killing me slowly with longing for the perfect person who would make everything that had ever been bad in my life worth the pain.  But as I entered college, I made the decision to change and let go of my Fairytale dreams, my secret Disney princess complex, in favor of being single.  If I found love, I found it, but I was done looking for love and a boyfriend. 

                In class, we talked about how people needed to give up their ideals about what love should be in order to find it: and that’s exactly what happened to me.  I gave up on ever finding the perfect man to love me and make it all better, and then found my boyfriend.  Or, more accurately, was introduced to him by one of my closest friends that I’ve made here at Otterbein.  Love, clearly, is best left to chance.  Looking for it is like looking for a rainbow when it’s not even raining – you’ll find imitations and man-made ones, but never the real deal.  I think Beth said it best when she said “Love simply is.”

Can we ignore the obvious grief the narrators in Poe’s writing go through, though?  Grief and what happens after death is something that I feel varies not only from one religion to another or one culture to the next, but from person to person.  In history, different peoples from all around the world had all manners of strange customs relating to death.  In some cultures, there is a “prohibition against uttering the name of the dead person” for mourners (Freud 54)*.  Even stranger to me, it used to be the practice that “if the name of the dead man happened to be the same as that of an animal or common object, some tribes think it necessary to give these animals or objects new names, so that the use of the former names shall not recall the dead man to memory” (Freud 55)*.  Queen Victoria had a hobby of "collecting dead flowers taken from the grraves of deceased royals" which started when she took "some that grew on her late husband Albert's last resting place and it jsut sort of took off from there" (Shaw 191).  All cultures have their own customs on how grieving should or can proceed.  For example, the Catholic side of my family holds big wakes and funerals with large dinners afterwards.  Not being Catholic myself (and I apologize to any offended family that might read this) and not being able to see anything as somber as a funeral as a social event, I don’t grieve the same way most of my extended family does, such as they did when my Nana passed this summer.  I won’t lie – I was disgusted.  Everyone seemed so excited to see each other when we were at the church waiting for the funeral to start like they were at my graduation or at birthday parties.  It took everything I had in me not to strangle someone.  Most people only act on emotions when someone dies, and sometimes people forget that this means others will react different.  While most of my family wanted to talk about their grief, I wanted let alone.  I needed to handle it on my own time, and in fact the final blog didn't come for me until I got back to college and found a picture of my Nana and me in my computer files.  Grief is something you can't force onto someone, "people find their own level of involvment and should do so voluntarily" (Kubler-Ross 93).  In the same way, the characters in Poe’s zombie bride stories all grieve their losses in different – yet disturbing if you ask me – ways.  Below I have posted a music video by Panic! At the Disco called ‘The Ballad of Mona Lisa”.  The video - which also contains a fantastic song if you ask me – is centered on a traditional Irish wake ceremony as the setting. 

        Memories, like love, are violent in the things they do to their owners.  In The Shining, Jack seems to be haunted with the memories of times he’s lost his temper, something the Overlook taps into when it leaves him the scrapbook and alcohol showing him his failings.  Through the book we learn of times he’s lost his temper which come up repetitively.  He’s haunted especially by the memory of what he did to Danny.  His son is haunted by memories that will come to be shown to him by Tony when he’s waiting for his father to get home from the job interview at the beginning of the book.  Danny is also haunted by the word divorce ingrained into his memories from his parent’s thoughts.

               One thing both The Shining and the works by Poe we’ve been reading have most in common is their commentaries on the dangers of domestic tyranny.  As the ‘head of the family’, Jack feels he has to provide for his family.  Feeling like she didn’t have anywhere else to go if she left Jack and thinking that Danny loved his father more than her, Wendy stayed with him even after he broke Danny’s arm.  When Danny and Wendy had locked Jack up, he shouts for Danny to “mind your daddy” and “open this door or I’ll bash your fucking brains in” keeping the terror he’d be wreaking on his family while the hotel possessed him alive (King 378).  In Ligeia, not only are her eyes fetish objects over which he obsesses, but his possessive love actually seems to contribute to her wasting away.  As Jacqlyn so aptly put it in class, “he was feeding off her rather than she was starving herself” then comes back to haunt him, her ‘resurrection’ a final rebellion from a repressed woman.  

               At the times we were reading these pieces for class, I was also reading Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez for GLBTQ book club.  In the book, Jason’s dad is a perfect example of domestic tyranny.  A drunk, foul, violent man, Jason’s father dominates over his mother who at the beginning of the book is quite meek, breaks Jason’s things like his radio, and in one scene even tries to hurt Jason.  In real life, domestic tyranny is still alive and well just like it was in Poe’s time.  Domestic violence is still a huge problem worldwide.  In high school, my best friend Daisy* was dating a boy I didn’t like.  I thought he was a dumbass, too immature, but not exactly a bad guy.  She always defended him when I spoke badly about him, so a lot of the time we didn’t discuss their relationship.  Once they broke up, she confessed he’d actually been hitting her and that she’s been so ‘in love with him’ (totally Stockholm syndrome if you ask me) she hadn’t been able to bear leaving him.  Thankfully I’ve never been in a physically abusive relationship, but I have been in some emotionally damaging relationships and verbally abusive friendships.  And yet, instead of staying, I found a way to leave these people.  I feel horrible for people like Wendy in The Shining who feel like they can’t leave.  What could be worse than being trapped by an obsessive, possessive, abusive ‘love’?

* Quote taken from Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud

** Quotes taken from Death: The Final Stage of Growth by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

*** Quote taken from Cinderella: A Casebook by Alan Dunges