How Love is Expressed in the Hunchback of Notre Dame

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Throughout the novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, many forms of love appear. There is true love that comes from the heart and is pure and on the other hand there is a lustful love which is not love at. Another love that is shown throughout the book, is love obsession, where one falls in love with someone and puts them before everything. In the Hunchback one can observe these loves and how they compare to one another as well as which one is best and why. In the end we will be able to see that even though there are many forms of love, many of them do not come from the right place and have the right intentions. As a result one will suffer from expressing the wrong types of love. The first love is a lustful love. This is where one is more attracted to the person’s body rather than the person themselves. Lust, according to the Webster dictionary, can be described as a very strong sexual desire. This is what Phoebus was feeling when he meets Esmeralda. He desires her looks, but not her heart. He was not really feeling love but just tricking her. As a result he was stabbed, almost died, and caused Esmeralda to be hopelessly in love with him even though he did not love her back. Another love that is presented in the Hunchback is a love that comes from desperation and/or frustration. It is when one falls in love with someone simply because they were the first person they ran into to get away from their problems. The problem with this love is that the person who expresses it is not truly feeling love. There are so many problems in their life that they think that by loving someone they will be able to escape their problems. That someone was Esmeralda for Claude Frollo. She happened to be there when he was frustrated and as a result became... ... middle of paper ... ...er way and never betrayed her. He did all this even though he knew she would never love him back. That is true love. From the things written above one can see the different forms of that were taken from the book, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It can be observed how much one can about love from the books we read. One can also learn the greatest form of love and how to express it. One has learned that it is impossible to love without showing it. Out of all the loves mentioned above, true love is the best and the only real love. If one truly loves he/she will find themselves having room to love even more. For one can never love too much. Love is something that one should do every day and continue to do for the rest of one’s life. One needs to do whatever it takes to keep on loving. For in the words of William Shakespeare "If music be the food of love, then play on."

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