Michael Cox, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

download essay: Passionate Endings

Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him
In my heart’s core (Hamlet, 3.2.68)

Nothing is less in our power than the heart
which is more apt to command us than to obey (Heloise, 105)

Socrates claims happiness is found in the ascension from physical, intellectual and moral love to the pure love of truth and beauty, while our western view of happiness is materially based, that we can (and ought to) attain it, whenever we want. In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau claims that happiness is out there, somewhere, but it is  “a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world” (Rousseau: 137). Freud tosses a wet blanket over the concept of true and everlasting happiness which, he writes, is “at loggerheads with the world”, adding, sourly, “one feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (Freud: 25).

Seeking happiness through external stimuli and gratification, rather than finding it within, we ignore the possibility that felicity is an intrinsic state of expression: joie de vivre.  The physical manifestation of passion, whether a kiss or a fist, is a release of tension, from which we expect to gain satisfaction. If we cannot attain happiness through the expression of our passions in human relations, art and industry, what point is there in expressing them? Either we are engaged in a fruitless cycle of desire leading to more desire, of never quite being fulfilled, or we can locate grace in the here and now, of “pleasures [which] are brief and few in number,” as Rousseau writes, which give “an intenser enjoyment than if I were more used to them” (Rousseau: 143). If it is attainable at all, “our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment…” (ibid: 88).

Abelard and Heloise Surprised by Abbot Fulbert, by Jean Vignaud

I suggest that despite the longing and misery expressed by the real and fictional characters in Medea, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Hamlet, Emma Bovary, and Lolita, passion can and does lead to felicity, and offer the proposition that passion’s expression is its own reward. I put five characters to the test: Medea, Heloise, Ophelia, Emma, and Humbert. Four women, one man: passion speaks loudest through women in these works.

Unquestionably, each character has lost something dear to them, each life ending in abandonment, moral ruination or death. But they also experience something positive in their despair: Medea loses everything: husband, children, citizenship and her life, but she is triumphant in revenge; Heloise loses an intimate physical relationship, but gains spiritually; Ophelia’s sanity is lost, but she dies madly happy; Emma ends her life, but in a way that mirrors the passion with which she embraced life; and Humbert is free to idealize his love for Lolita. What each has in common is a desire for an externalized happiness, one grounded in relationship with another. Alas, to find happiness in romantic love is a Herculean or, perhaps more aptly, Sisyphean objective; everlasting love is a chimera in these texts. That said, each personal journey will culminate in transcendent clarity and grace through misery.

Medea’s rage for the loss of her husband, for whom she gave up everything, saved his life to escape with the Golden Fleece, only to have him take as virgin bride the daughter of Creon, ends in murder. “Is love so small a pain, do you think, for a woman?” she asks Jason (Euripedes: 44). She will not grant him even a father’s desperate plea to kiss his children’s cold lips. Passionate murderer: the felicity in this bloody vengeance is Medea’s triumphant departure in a dragon-drawn chariot. She has both lost everything and taken everything, and left Jason with nothing but this: “[You] will die without distinction, / Struck on the head by a piece of the Argo’s timber” (ibid: 45).

Heloise, who has also been abandoned by her lover, has “taken the veil freely at my command” (Abelard: 20), as Peter Abelard writes in his Calamities. Unmanned by revenge, unable now to satisfy Heloise’s fiercely unapologetic and unabated love, Abelard rejects a eunuch’s half-life and retreats from the sensate world to a wholly spiritual one, but Heloise cannot so easily let him go. While she will tell him that “I have denied myself all pleasure to follow your will” (ibid: 61), she also writes: “For me, / the pleasures we shared in love were sweet, / so sweet / they cannot displease me now, / and rarely are they ever out of mind” (ibid: 79). Abelard’s rhetorical responses to the impassioned letters from his “most beloved sister in Christ” (ibid: 63) are liberal with scripture and advice and parsimonious with affection:  he would have her abjure her earthly passion and transmute it to love of God. Not the romantic response a lover might have wished for, from one whose “hands wandered more to her breasts than our books” (ibid: 12).

Heloise’s passion must necessarily turn upward and inward in her new role as abbess of a convent she did not want. While she is unable to completely refrain from writing of her passion for Peter Abelard, she gradually arrives at a state of equilibrium, in which she accepts her new role and their epistolary relationship, and thus finds grace in accepting a contemplative life.

We can even be happy and troubled at the same time. Take Ophelia, who is led to believe that Hamlet has fallen in love with her—“I did love you once” (Hamlet: 3.1.114)—only to be cruelly rejected and taunted by him. Driven mad by his unexpected reversal, she later drowns in a nearby brook, while Hamlet will protest over her grave that he did indeed love her. There is little felicity in the play, but as we learn from Queen Gertrude, moments before Ophelia slips into the river, “fantastic garlands did she make…” (4.7.166). She was seen floating face up in the “weeping brook,” Gertrude tells Laertes, chanting “snatches of old lauds / As one incapable of her own distress” (4.7.175), until the weight of her sodden garments pulls her under. Singing sweetly, floating downriver, whether suicide or accident, Ophelia, who has already departed the world days before her death, finds a mad happiness in her last moments.

Death is not to be feared, to paraphrase Epicurus and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The manner of one’s death, that is another matter, and there can hardly be a more intense, prolonged and excruciating death in fiction than the final days and hours of Emma Bovary.

Emotionally myopic, Emma’s relations with everyone are binary: husband, lover, child, each is either a hindrance or an accessory to her passions; for her, they do not exist outside of self-reference. What she takes from them are solipsistic, fleeting moments of happiness.

Charles Bovary doesn’t understand his wife’s desires because he lacks the emotional capacity to empathize with her: either he has buried his emotions or he has never learned to express them. His naiveté allows him to be happy in the mundane world of his provincial life, ignorant—perhaps—of her desires, and her adultery. Blind to Emma’s perception that the prime cause of her malaise is himself, the country doctor cannot cure Emma of melancholy.

Midway through the novel she recalls her girlhood at the farm and “summer evenings filled with sunshine” where “bees, circling in the sunlight, would bounce against the panes like golden balls. Happy days, days full of hope and freedom, days rich in illusions!” (Flaubert: 185) It is that place she yearns for, and for a while wonders if perhaps she can still find it with Charles, “and whether it wouldn’t be better to love him, if she could” (ibid: 186). The next paragraph begins, “They were in bed when Monsieur Homais arrived.” Flaubert doesn’t imply they were making love, but they are, at least, in bed together. Marital bliss it is not, however. Unlike Rousseau, Emma is not content with momentary happiness; her passion rises and fades quickly, to be replaced by ennui and dissatisfaction. She finds little solace, not with dashing Rodolphe, nor with sensitive Leon. Emma Bovary wants nothing less than a steady state of summer evenings.

At first reluctant to travel with Charles to Rouen, once she enters the theatre her heart rate jumps, and throughout the opera, despite Charles’ inane questions, Emma is enthralled: here is the world she read about as a girl in the convent. Leaning forward, “her fingernails clutching at the plush on their box” (ibid: 235), she immerses herself in the passion unfolding onstage and internalizes it. As one of the characters steps downstage, “…her face paler than her white satin dress”, Emma remembers her wedding-day, “walking along the little path on the way to the church. Oh, why, why hadn’t she resisted,” she asks herself (ibid: 236). Emma then imagines herself married instead to the male lead, and their “extraordinary, hectic, splendid life, that might have been hers if only chance had so ordained it” (ibid: 237), until real-life romance intrudes, in the person of Leon, who sits behind her, his presence distracting her from the opera and her husband. The next day she gives herself to the shy notary.

Having created a life rich in passion, Flaubert cannot kill off his romantic heroine with an easy, quick end: Emma Bovary must die as she has lived, “in a transport of heroism which made her almost gay” (ibid: 325), impulsively swallowing arsenic. Her suicide is the one time Emma gains a measure of control over her life, authoring the time, place and method of her own demise, and in her final moments, “she seemed to be seized with a sudden joy. Doubtless she was finding again…the lost ecstasy of her first flights of mysticism, and beginning to see visions of eternal blessedness” (ibid: 335). After kissing a crucifix with “the most mighty kiss of love she had ever given” (ibid: 335), she convulses and dies. A gentler, quicker passing would diminish her romantic life. As Emma’s fictional heroines suffered so must she, because she is the heroine of her own story. Flaubert’s deathbed scene is a perfect and perfectly literary end to a literary life.

Across the Atlantic, the well-read, peripatetic pervert Humbert Humbert finds bliss in the body and, to a lesser extent, mind of twelve-year-old Lolita. Shortly after meeting his landlady’s daughter, Humbert finds devious ways to observe the girl, disguising his prurient interest behind the Sunday paper, staring with longing at the “seaside of her school girl thighs” (Nabokov: 42). On the sofa after a playful tussle with a magazine where “she was all over me”, Lolita rests her legs on Humbert’s lap, allowing him to undertake admirably ingenious pleasure “by a series of stealthy movements” (ibid: 58).

Humbert’s manipulative narrative of his affair with the pubescent nymphet leaves us uncertain as to how much to believe, but the pleasure he takes in his lurid descriptions are undeniably erotic. Humbert’s sexual travels with the not wholly unwilling Lolita are his weeks and months of greatest happiness. It cannot last: she escapes, marries, gets pregnant; in other words, has a typically suburban, typically American happy ending.

Not so Humbert Humbert. Even after he finds her married (apparently untroubled by her sordid past), his love is undiminished, and he tries desperately, unsuccessfully, to have her to himself again. Imprisoned, he wavers in a suspended morality between lustful romanticizing and guilt: “I loved you….I was despicable and brutal…mais je t’aimais, je t’amais” (ibid: 284). There is a measure of felicity in the novel’s ending, not because Humbert is safely behind bars, not because Lolita has a new life, but because Nabokov’s protagonist, now freed from the turmoil of trying to contain his lover within and between motels, can idealize “that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love” (ibid: 135).

For Medea, in her bloody revenge; Heloise, in her letters to Peter Abelard; Ophelia, in her love-sick madness; Emma, in her impulsive gesture to end her life; and Humbert, in his continued longing for Lolita, all is not misery. Their impassioned acts result in embarrassment at one end of the scale and death or spiritual/physical entombment at the other, but we have also shown that unbridled emotions can be their own reward; that passion is felicity, its expression the moment when we are most truly alive.

Works Cited

Abelard, Peter, Heloise, and William Levitan. The Letters and Other Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 2007.

Euripides. Translated by Rex Warner. Medea. New York: Dover Publications, 1993.

Flaubert, Gustave. Translated by Alan Russell. Madame Bovary. Penguin Classic, 1951.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. WW Norton, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Lolita. New York: Random House Vintage, 1989.

Rousseau, Jean. Translated by Peter France. Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classic, 1979

Works Consulted

Epicurus, Brad Inwood, and Lloyd P Gerson. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. Quotes, an online resource. http://www.elisabethkublerross.com/pages/Quotes.html (accessed November 2007).

Llosa, Mario Vargas. Translated by Helen Lane. The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

Rusche, Harry. Illustrated Ophelia, an online resource. http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Ophelia.html (accessed November 2007)

Unwin, Tim. Madame Bovary. The Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company, 2007. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3803
(accessed November 2007).