Love What Is Love? What Is Love?

Love

What is love?

What is love? Yikes! What a difficult question to answer. Not only because there are many types of love: true love, romantic love, plutonic love, brotherly love, etc., but because love can also be an ineffable emotion, something that defies articulation or delineation. So, to some extent, attempting to define love is an exercise in futility. But that doesn't mean that we don't recognize it when we see it (Stewart). Therefore, it is the purpose of this essay to examine certain depictions of love in literature to see if they help one define what love is.

One would be hard pressed to find a more iconic example of love than the love shared between Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Their love is so deep, so strong, so extreme that they each make the ultimate sacrifice to be next to one another in the afterlife. So, love as defined in Romeo and Juliet, is like a double-edged sword, it has the capacity to bring two people to new emotional and spiritual heights, but it also has the capacity to make them do crazy things. Earlier in the play, speaking of love, Romeo says, "What is it else? A madness most discreet, / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet" (Shakespeare). What does he mean? Well, one can conclude that love is a deceiving form of madness because of its two-sidedness; it's both noxious (like a poison) and invigorating (like a sustaining sweet). In short, love is both dangerous and wonderful. To be in love means to have succumbed to this volatile state.

To turn to another example of love in literature, one can look at the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The love that Catherine has for Heathcliff is so consuming that it displaces her own independence. She's no longer the girl she once was. She exclaims to 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" (Bronte 143). Catherine is so in love with the brutish Healthcliff that her own identity has been compromised; she sees the world not through her own mind's eye, but through his. She is an embodiment of the man she loves, his reflection and his double. Love in this book is a force for self-abnegation. To be in love means to have completely surrendered to someone else.

If love is an agent for selflessness in Wuthering Heights, it takes on a completely different agency in Stendhal's The Red and The Black. In this book, love is depicted as a form of lust and as a means to obtain material gain, "Alone, far from the sight of men, and by instinct totally unafraid of Mne. De Renal, Julien, after so much constraint and clever diplomacy, had given in to the pleasure of being alive" (59). Julien pursues his paramour, Mne. De Renal, because of her social status (her rich husband is his employer) and because, well frankly, it feels good. The two of them fall in love, if only for a fleeting moment, because of the carnal appetite they both possess. This shows how love can be born out of a physical attraction, an impulse to please sexual urges. Of course, Julien's love for Mne. De Renal is also complicated by his obsession with material wealth. Being of a lower station, he frets over his humble background. His constant anxiety about not being good enough (not enough self-love), ultimately leads him to his demise.

Another interesting interpretation of love is described in Oscar Wilde's poem,

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The poem is about Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who was found guilty of slitting his wife's throat. He was later executed for the deed. This affected Wilde deeply, and he wrote, "Yet each man kills the thing he loves / By each let this be heard. / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word. / The coward does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword" (4). Here, in these lines, Wilde is saying that -- for men -- love is an emotion that compels them to harm that which he loves (in most cases a woman). For Wilde a man is love is like a rabid dog, one that will sooner or later bite its owner. In other words, a man in love can't help but to act irrationally. And, on the whole, Wilde is saying that there is a destructive aspect to love.