Love Expression in A Room With a View

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Imagine being required to marry someone because of the family you belong to instead of being able to meet someone, fall in love, and marry them. In 2011, no one I know could imagine being told by their parents or expectations of their society who you have to marry whether you like them or not. Forester writes about love in A Room with a View. He believes love is important, even though, the book is set in an English society about 100 years ago, where love is not important, at a time when people are encouraged to strictly follow the rules and ethics of their place in society. Civilized people believe love and romance is less important than following the rules and expectations of a prim and proper existence.

Some characters such as Mr. Emerson believe that all the rules of the society are wrong and that people should freely express their love. “We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them, that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice” (27). This is an unusual opinion of Mr. Emerson to make, it is not following the customs of English society about 100 years ago. Mr. Emerson believes that love is more important than anything else.

Mr. Emerson believes people should express love and passion and that it is an important part of a relationship as we see in the next quote. “’Leave them alone,’ Mr. Emerson begged the chaplain, of whom he stood in no awe. Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there? To be driven by lovers— A king might envy us, and if we part them it’s more like sacrilege than anything I know” (61-2). Mr. Emerson passionatel...

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...’ I said: ‘Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand’” (192). Here Mr. Forester is suggesting that love is more valuable, honest, and important than in any relationship than the social classes and social expectations of the time.

In this story there is an ongoing struggle between following the rules and expectations of a strict society to marry the proper person, or get to be in a relationship that includes love and romance. In real life, people would like to choose who they are going to marry and would like to have love and romance in their marriage. It would have been really hard to live in this restrictive English society. I am glad it is 2011, and that I can date and marry anyone I want to, anyone I love. I agree with Mr Emerson that love is reality, and love can be trusted.

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