Tag: love

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Social Context, Bryant Magdaleno

“Janie asked inside of herself and out. She
was back and forth to the pear tree continuously wondering and thinking. Finally out of Nanny’s talk and her own conjectures she made a
sort of comfort for herself. Yes, she would love Logan after they were
married. She could see no way for it to come about, but Nanny and the
old folks had said it, so it must be so. Husbands and wives always
loved each other, and that was what marriage meant.”

Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006, pg 23.

Within the text Janie is internalizing the thought of marrying Logan, so with the help of Nanny’s talk to her she creates this thought of social expectation upon herself to justify in her mind her marriage. Janie thinks that love should be and is part of marriage as husband and wife, and the circumstance would not stop this idea of love even if it would be a delayed reaction from her marriage to him . Janie creates this social context on how the outside world would view them as married couple, to her and others they must be in love with each and thus she forces upon herself this idea no matter way they start she will learn to love him. Its within her social context of the idea of marriage and how she images it to be played. The reality she later faces bring her to a harsh realization that the within the social context of her marriage that she does not love Logan which later bring her to break this concept she used to justify her loveless relationship.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought” (Woolf 61).

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Benediction Classics, Oxford, 2017, pp. 61.

Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”, A Moment of Connection to Literature

“She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling–Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!” (Woolf 38).

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott. Mrs. Dalloway. A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., 2005.

Clarissa recalls her past affection and feelings for Sally Seton, connecting their strength to Shakespeare’s Othello. She insinuates that her love for Sally was as deep and passionate as Othello’s for Desdemona (at the start of the play), furthering the reader’s understanding of the nature of their relationship.