So Serious Saturday #1

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Argumentative Essay

            Love as a singular experience means that it is not shared; however, this is not for lack of trying
on the lovers’ part, but because their loved ladies will not be the mirror that their lovers have projected feelings onto. Both passively and actively, with the strategy dependent on each different lady, the ladies refuse to share in a love they can only reflect and acknowledge, because they cannot share in the singular experience.

            The woman in La Belle Dame Sans Mercy by Sir Richard Roos fights against the idea of shared experience. Not only does she refuse to be loved by the lover, and consequently says that the feelings that he feels are his alone and not mutual, she refuses the language he uses. The lover uses all the love topoi; that is, he claims what thousands of other men have claimed, which is to be a servant, a prisoner, and a petitioner of love. She tries to correct him, saying that she will not accept what she considers false words. She calls them “malbouche”, in fact, attempting to say that his mouth is saying things badly, that he cannot, in fact, be feeling exactly as other lovers have, so he must be lying; because he claims to feel commonly owned experiences as his own, she rejects him because she thinks he is a losengier and a liar. In rejecting him, she rejects the idea of commonplaces of love, the oxymoron of love for a loved one, a singular love.

            Not all women stamp ferociously on a man’s heart. The high noble lady bird of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles never responds to the petitions for her metaphorical hand in courtship. That is not a fair assessment; she has no hands, but flighty wings. She blushes in response to the first of the petitioners, apparently flattered by his advancements. She may have had an opinion, but there is no telling after the other birds chime in with their opinions, verdicts, and speeches. They seek to turn a private affair into a public matter up for parliamentary discussion. She cannot hope to enjoy a singular experience of love without it being ruined by the universal experience of a public debate. She rejects everyone else’s projected normative by passively becoming a non-reflective surface, the lady becoming a wall blocking hope her own response  until next Valentine’s day.

            The second lady loved in Charles of Orleans’ English book contains a strange mixture of active and passive strategies which might make her the cruelest to her lover of the ladies viewed so far. Charles meets her in a narrative section, and she blushes when he mentions a writing correspondence. Like the flighty bird of Chaucer’s Parliament, this female is disconcerted by the exchange of words, and here also the anticipated exchange of words which is expected to, and certainly does, make use of many love topoi. In the ballad section, letter after letter is sent to the loved by the lover, but still the loved one makes no reply, passive in the love exchange that Charles seeks. Eventually, she responds to his commonplaces and his words calling for her response. When he makes his complaint, she makes a reflection of his feelings shine back at him, which makes him joyous – temporarily. He discovers her deceit and bemoans it heartily, even using the word “deceit” multiple times and comparing the woman to unstable Fortune, the allegorical figure. The loved woman is not heard, most importantly, which makes Charles the lens we see her through.  She could only respond or not respond to his advances, and she responded by reflecting the feelings flung at her. She could not share in his singular experience of love, a fact he cannot understand from within his own singular, narcissistic experience.

            One who is loved by a lover has two strategies: respond or not respond. Not responding postpones the inevitable, while responding involves either a debate about the experience of love or a lie, a mere reflection of the lover’s own love upon the surface of the object the love has been projected onto. In the end, only the lover can love his own object of love, while the object becomes a responder to the love which she cannot enter.