Love is a significant value that people have in their lives. Many forms of love are in people's relationships with others, whether it is romantic, platonic, sexual or a mixture of all the above. When someone experiences love intensely for the first time, the feeling can send them into a euphoric shock. A common concept that young lovers feel is that their relationships are transparent and their love is unconditional. However, Simon Mawer points out that budding relationships progress to eventual collapse due to sexual frustration and a want to avoid confrontation, consequently leading to the questioning of the existence of any emotional connection whatsoever. In the novel The Glass Room, Mawer introduces multiple characters with different relationships with one another. The protagonists of …show more content…
After the birth of the child, Viktor distances himself from both his wife and child, not showing any emotional attachment to either of them. During the child’s baptism (which Viktor opposes), he says to Hana, following her compliments about the child, that “My contribution was minimal. But vital” (51). While Viktor is appreciative of having a child, Viktor does not see the child as more than a product of his sexual endeavours with Liesel. Liesel accuses Viktor’s uptight and prudish behaviour on her pregnancy; confessing that she hates his change in personality and perception of her. This particular shift in their relationship is following the birth of their second child; that these changes are subtle and it is difficult to blame difficulties with post-pregnancy illnesses or Viktor’s behaviour changing, being “…a distance of mind even when there was no distance at all of body” (87). Liesel and Viktor’s dynamic is not unusual and is common in couples who are expecting. A man’s physical attraction towards his partner during and following pregnancy diminishes, but does not disappear entirely. A study
This quote from Minot summarizes the love affairs in her short story "Lust" and T. Coraghessan Boyle's short story "Carnal Knowledge." The protagonists in these stories go to great lengths to please their significant others hoping to find loving, fulfilling relationships. They make sacrifices and relinquish certain degrees of power to find happiness, only to discover that this happiness is temporary. Both authors use literary techniques to enhance these themes. The short stories "Lust" and "Carnal Knowledge" maintain that relationships that lack an honest, loving foundation and a lack of balance of power end abruptly and cause pain and loneliness.
Young love , a thrilling time for many . A time in where blinded young-lings cross a field unknown . A field in which one must undergo challenges and temptations . Here we have a young girl that encounters a young man , a typical boy meets girl scenarios , So it would seem . The desire to be loved can drive a person to do the craziest of things ; we are all walking proof of that . As young children one learns to express emotion through every gesture and every facial expression , through that process one realizes ones self hatred with rejection . Living in a world in which we strive to be accepted and crave to be desired . In society each gender faces different experiences ; as a man one expects a provider , a leader , a hunter and as a women
A healthy relationship is the ideal relationship where trust and confidence is built upon. However an unhealthy relationship consists of miscommunication and discomfort. In Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle, a relationship between a parent and child may be unhealthy, as mentioned in the text, “‘Don’t you see?’ said Billy, pointing at his Dad, “He pissed himself” Billy started laughing” (83). This signifies the relationship between Billy and his Dad. Billy the son, who has no father love, became amused by his father’s imperfections. He finds entertainment through the humiliation of others, such as his father. Which may affect Billy’s future, knowing that his relationship with his father is unhealthy, which may lead to unhealthy relationships in the
The concept of love is a very ambiguous, controversial, idea that is nearly impossible to come to a singular consensus on. In this essay I will be describing and comparing two philosophical views on the concepts and ideas behind love. Through the works of Todd May and Plato, different approaches to the concept of love will be illustrated as well as determining the similarities and differences between the two perspectives.
We all feel unhappiness at some point in our lives. It’s human to feel like you want more or something is not good enough for you. You want more out of life. You want to do something to make you happy. In The Glass Menagerie Tom, Laura, and Amanda Wingfield all expierence unhappiness through out the play in their own way. They are a family but their goals and dreams are quite different from each other. Their dreams and goals lead to their unhappiness because they seem impossible to reach. One reason that holds them back from being happy is the decade they are living in. The story is taking place in the 1940’s right after the great depression. Times are tough so dreams and future goals have to be moved to the back of the to do list while you
Love, however, is not the only factor that creates and maintains a relationship. Love has the power to bring people together, but can also break them apart. In addition, it can lead to irrational decisions with terrible consequences. In this short story Margaret Atwood shows the powerful effect that love has on people’s lives. At first glance, the short stories in "Happy Endings" have a common connection: all the characters die.
In his story “What We Talk About When We talk About Love,” Raymond Carver expresses his idea of love through his characters and storyline. After reading this story, I am able to connect a type of love with each individual character in the story. Love is taken and given in many different ways, such as affection, gifts, affirmation, or physical time. Carver uses alcohol in his story to spark the conversation about love and also end the conversation about love. The sun is also used to symbolize the coming and going of happiness and love throughout the story. There are three types of love that can be drawn from this story: cynical love, spiritual love, unconditional love, and young love. The title of the story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” gives us great insight on what the subject of the story will mostly be. By looking at the title, we can see that not only are we talking about what it means to love in general, but also what the author truly believes the meaning of love is. Raymond Carver defines different degrees of various forms of love through symbolism in the characters and plot of the story.
In the first reading on Klein’s “Excerpts from Envy and Gratitude”, she made contributions to understanding the effects on the psyche of early experiences of frustrations and separation in relation to the maternal body. Klein focuses on he focus on mother infant relation and extreme and violent affects such as the feelings of anxiety and separation. Klein talks about how infants suffer a of anxiety and that this is caused by the death instinct within, by the trauma experienced at birth and by experiences of frustration. She talks about the breast, which she refers to as the partial object, as being an important source of nurture and frustration, where one can get pleasure but also be denied it. The infant splits both his ego and his object
Much like Lorraine Hansberry, Madeleine L’Engle believes that “the growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.” Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, and Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias use the idea that even through struggles their characters show that love always endures. Although loving someone, who is not particularly loveable, is one of the most difficult parts of being human, it is possible by remembering that addictions can be reversed, blood is forever, and a ring is more than just an object.
One of the micro perspectives is Lee’s styles of love, which was created by John Lee after interviewing several heterosexual men and women and reading romantic works of fiction and nonfiction. Lee’s perspective breaks love down into six separate categories. Relationships may be based on one or more of the following categories. The first is Eros, which is passionate love. The second is Storge, where we find mutual love, trust, respect and companionship. The next in Lee’s categories is Pragma, practical and sensible love. Ludus is the fourth category and it contains playful, casual, and carefree love. The fifth category, Agape is love that is kind, altruistic, and patient. The last of Lee’s categories is Mania, the type of love that is obsessive, intense, and possessive. The majority of relationships contain aspects of more than one category and the types of love we have can change over time and with different types of relationships. In Lee’s categories we can also see aspects of the types of attachments formed as babies. It is possible that those that fall in to the Mania category had anxious-ambivalent attachments to their
Innocent, as the father, was only able to watch as Marisol “cursed the scientists for drawing too much blood in that one, prodding this one, and not allowing the other to sleep long enough. She’d become distant and sad. [Innocent] was allowed to visit, but she rejected [him], only asking for her ‘babies’” (57). Marisol’s motherly instincts take over, and her one and only desire is to see her “babies,” and that desire overtakes any desire she may feel to see her husband. Innocent, in turn, feels neglected as her husband and the isolation of the two continues to grow stronger and
The next new perspective on love comes from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet One Hundred and Sixteen”. “Sonnet One Hundred and Sixteen” “sets forth an ideal of true love as something permanent and never changing” (Kastan 17). Integrated throughout the poem are various circumstances in which true
When most people think of love, they imagine a beautiful concept, one of which is and should be a part of life. Some will imagine the unconditional love of God, others will picture a spouse or family members, and some may even think about materialistic things. While there are many ways in which love can be defined as, it usually has positive connotations. This is not necessarily the case in Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces, at least through the character Orual. Love is a major theme in the novel and is portrayed in both a humanly and a divine way. The humanly love which Lewis displays is mainly shown through Orual and is demonstrated as a perverse love. The divine love is presented through Psyche and is portrayed as selfless. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis differentiates perverse love and selfless
In “The Chaser”, Alan, seeking for the love potion, visits the old man in a “tiny room, which contained no furniture but a plain kitchen table, a rocking chair, and an ordinary chair.” and “opening the drawer in the kitchen table, and taking out a tiny, rather dirty-looking phial.” ( Collier 2/41). Relating to “The Chaser”, in “The Story of an Hour”, “There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair………. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air…… The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly” ( Chopin 4). Mrs. Mallard finds that her husband is supposedly dead and she is grieving in a room. The enclosed rooms represent the vague idea of love. The idea of the enclosed rooms, essentially binds love to a single, unexpandable idea. This unexpandable idea means love has one exact definition. In this case, the idea of love within in a relationship is dominance. In “The Story of an Hour” and “The Chaser”, love is seen as a possessive relationship with the possessed unable to express their idea of love. Alan and Mr. Mallard want control in their relationships, while Mrs. Mallards and Diana feel that a relationship should have equality. Furthermore, the window in “The Story of
Love exiles the heart from the being, sometimes begrudgingly, and at other times in the full light of day. It’s masterful in a myriad of ways; transfixing, then transforming the lover, completely removing them from anything previously palpable and familiar. Bewitchingly, love alters the conscience and authors its decisions. It is the facilitator of exile from oneself, and is brilliantly woven into the lives of the characters in D.H. Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums and Carlos Fuentes’s Aura; albeit sometimes in antagonistic ways.