Love in Hamlet, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, and 'We Real Cool' - Essay Example

July 20 Love in Hamlet, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, and “We Real Cool” In the twenty-first century, we assume that love has been a driving factor in literature as well as in life for all of human history. The desire to be in a relationship, and the struggles one must overcome to be with a partner, are indeed major themes which can be traced back hundreds, if not thousands, of years in various texts from all over the world. However, the theme of love is not as simple as all that: The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, is one of the earliest known pieces of literature, and the main relationship in it is the presumably non-sexual one of Gilgamesh and his male companion Enkidu; in other examples, religion and faith play a much stronger role than love between humans. By contrast, in our times, even with the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and of marriage equality in New York and other states, the love portrayed in literature often follows the so-called 'traditional' set-up of a man and a woman. There are also other ways in which literary portrayals of love have changed over time – for example, Shakespeare's works glorify love but modern works sometimes downplay its role in our lives. What does this signify? The different portrayals of love in the following three texts can, at least in part, be attributed to the time of their writing: Hamlet, in 1600, reflects a world in which love was idealized but often not really part of reality. Marriages were arranged according to property ownership and convenience – and what could be more convenient than the late king's brother taking over his role, wife included? The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, written by Katherine Anne Porter in 1930, presents love as important but not a driving force. Granny's stream-of-consciousness returns repeatedly to her being left at the altar, but also to her own strength as a successful single mother at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ultimately, though, her lost love pales in significance when compared to her 'jilting' from God. Finally, in 1960, Brooks' poem “We Real Cool” shows love as a reticent issue, masked by more important, wilder behaviour. This leads one to ask: now, fifty years after “We Real Cool”, what role does love play in modern literature, and is it as reflective of our reality as Hamlet, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, and “We Real Cool” were in their times? This paper will look at the relationships of these texts in terms of language and context to show that love is an evolving force in literature. Love in Hamlet, like every other theme in the play, is a multifaceted and complex presence: Hamlet's adoration of his mother, tempered by vicious disgust, has been interpreted as his “sexual desire” for her, stimulated by “his sense of his mother's guilt” (Jardine, 38); his relationship with Ophelia is also one of destructive love, and his words to her oscillate wildly between kindness and hatred (“Get thee to a nunnery, go!” Shakespeare, III.i). Some critics have argued that Hamlet's perception of his mother as weak - “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (Shakespeare, I.ii) – influences how he sees Ophelia. Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia is clouded not just by his misogyny, but by his complete self-absorption: his melancholy takes precedence over her love for him, causing him to be cruel and sending Ophelia into a madness fueled by the loss of her father and her partner. However, the older couple in the play, Gertrude and Claudius, appears to be a genuinely happy one, if the reader examines the text closely and refuses to take Hamlet's interpretation of their marriage as read. Claudius is an effective king who deals diplomatically with events ranging in scale from the military threat from Norway to Hamlet's depression (Shakespeare, I.ii); Gertrude is a caring mother who independently invites her son's friends to Elsinore to alleviate his sorrow (II.ii); together they are a passionate couple who, in Hamlet's own words, spend time “honeying and making love” (III.iv). Only Hamlet's insistence that Claudius murdered his father spoils their bliss, and although it proves to be true, it does not cause Gertrude to turn against her new husband. Gertrude and Claudius represent the ideal of a contemporary seventeenth-century relationship: they marry for convenience but fall in love. Given that their world valued marriage as a capitalist commodity – a book on “the evolution of the modern society and capitalism” in the sixteenth century is called The Marriage Exchange (Howell, vii) – the reigning couple of Denmark provide a realistic example of functional love in a tragedy bursting at the seams with dysfunction. By contrast, the mother-son relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet is one to which no one would aspire. Feminist interpretations of Gertrude's relationship with Hamlet go deeper than Hamlet's own conception of his mother, mentioned briefly above; Margaret Atwood's short story “Gertrude Talks Back” suggests another dimension to the play, by characterizing Gertrude as a fully-rounded person with her own desires and drives. It ends with the revelation that “It [the murder of King Hamlet] wasn't Claudius, darling. It was me.” This interpretation of Hamlet does imbue an inappropriately modern slant on the work, but encourages a reading of the play which takes into account Gertrude's motives beyond Hamlet's guesses at such. Ultimately, the suggestion that Gertrude is the one with King Hamlet's blood on her hands enhances the young Hamlet's feeling of betrayal, and makes him even more alone. In the end, only Hamlet's relationship with Horatio is unspoilt by betrayal. In the final, bloody scene of the play, where many relationships are given unsatisfying closure on the deathbed of one or both of its members, the only true example of grief is Horatio's: “Now cracks a noble heart – Good night, sweet prince” (Shakespeare, V.ii). The scene features the deaths of four main characters: Gertrude, who drank the poison intended for Hamlet; Laertes, who is stabbed with his own poisoned sword; Claudius, who is forced to drink the poison he had intended for his stepson; and finally Hamlet, who fell victim to just one of Claudius' several murderous plots against him. Although Hamlet reconciles with his late fiancee's brother in their dying moments, the sincerity of this is undermined by his anger against Claudius – an anger so overwhelming that the script does not show him mourning his mother. Love between friends holds fast even when familial relationships crumble. In The Jilting of Granny Weatherall the theme of love is the undercurrent which buoys the title character through her final moments. As a young woman, she was left at the altar by her first love; however, this story is not just about love. A story about Granny Weatherall's love life would not have focused so heavily on her successes as a single widowed mother and a businesswoman. Although Jilting is about love, it is about the kind of love that lurks in the background of an entire life, only coming forward in the last few moments before death, when there are no longer any other pressing worries. It is a story about life without love, and about how success is eminently possible without the support of that particular kind of relationship. It is a story of hope to those who have lost their first love, and a story of reassurance to those who feel that a loveless life is by necessity an empty life. In spite of the marital denotations of the title, love is no more than an incidental topic on the periphery of a story about a brave, strong woman. For example, Granny Weatherall loved her second partner, her husband, and on her deathbed her mind turns to him first: “Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I didn’t do so badly, did I?” (Porter) The most enduring effect of the jilting on Granny Weatherall is that she no longer feels secure in her family's love for her. This leads to a sensation of intense “grief” (Porter) on her deathbed, when God fails to provide her a sign that she is loved. Had she recognized, for example, Cornelia's overbearing officiousness, or Jimmy's advice-seeking, for the love that it clearly is, she would probably not have died in such a tragic mindset. On balance, though, this fleeting moment of grief is a small price to pay for her achievements. The oddness of Porter's title is another hint that the entire short story is somehow sarcastic, and that the author's intentions are far removed from a reader's first perception of her meaning. When George jilted her, Granny Weatherall was neither a granny, nor – presuming she took her husband's name at marriage, and that she kept it once widowed – a Weatherall. The jilting of Granny Weatherall, therefore, is not this jilting. Then what could it be? Granny's dying sense that God has jilted her is so powerful that “she could not remember any other sorrow” (Porter). George is irrelevant in the presence of God – his abandonment of his fiancee sixty years ago is nothing more than a foreshadowing, if a self-fulfilling one. However, this takes us further away from the presentation of love that this paper is concentrating on – love between humans. Porter appears to suggest that religion is both more important and more disappointing than love. In the early twentieth century, as theism was gradually becoming less deep-rooted amongst large swathes of society, love also lost its hold – at least over literature. Marriages were more often the choice of its participants rather than the economic arrangements of families, and as such the ideals espoused by Shakespeare were no longer such popular subjects for literature. Thirty years later, familial and sexual love were so absent from literary consciousness that a poem of youthful sin ignored it entirely. In “We Real Cool”, love plays a background role, obscured by bold declarations of the speaker's 'cool' actions. However, it is telling that a tract of youthful sinning encompasses school-leaving, drinking alcohol and listening to jazz, but not sex. There are certain behaviours which usually go together, and it seems unusual that relationships would not figure in this list of unwise choices. Brooks has said that the speakers of the poem are young men, which makes this omission even stranger according to social tropes regarding men and their apparently perennial desire for sex. The structure of the poem goes some way to explaining this: each sentence in the poem is split between two lines, with each line ending with a softly-spoken “We”, reflecting the pool players' “basic uncertainty” in regards to their choices (On “We Real Cool”). However, one critic argues that “We/Jazz June” indicates sexual intercourse, either physically with a woman called June – in which case, if we conflate sex with love, love has become something that men do, and that women have done to them – or metaphorically, with the summer of life (On “We Real Cool”). The 'living for the moment' mentality is, possibly, explained with sexual metaphor, although it seems more fitting that the metaphor is actually musical. Whatever Brooks intended, the sheer ambiguity of the line supports an interpretation which shows love as increasingly irrelevant in literature as it becomes central in life. Hence, in “We Real Cool”, love is passe, and not cool. Three decades before, we see love becoming less of a part of our daily existence, not an ambition but an event, which does not affect one's capability at life. Three hundred years previously, the best subject of literature was love: love as motive, love as grief, love as aspirational and love as incidental. It is no coincidence that this was in a world which pushed love (and other emotions) to the sidelines of reality, prioritizing economics instead. Equally, the growing of love into an accepted, and even expected, part of our lives in the twenty first century is perversely reflected in the fickle mirror of literature, which appears to reveal a growing disinterest in love over the twentieth century. The converse relationship between love in literature and love in life over the past four hundred years appears to be that as love becomes a grander force in reality, it fades more and more into the background in literature. This is because literature is always fantasy: writers cannot write reality. We live our lives and fantasize about other lives; those talented with words make these 'other' lives into literature. When these fantasies become a part of reality, there is no need for them to be sidelined into literature – into books to be read and dreamed over during the more mundane periods of our lives. From Hamlet through The Jilting of Granny Weatherall to “We Real Cool”, someone unfamiliar with human society would see the decline of love and wonder why we ever abandoned it – but the truth is that love has become more important to us, so it is no longer relegated to fantasy. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. “Gertrude Talks Back.” Talking People. Accessed July 19, 2011. Web. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “We Real Cool.” Poets.org. Accessed July 18, 2011. Web. Howell, Martha C. The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print. Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. “On We Real Cool.” Modern American Poetry. Accessed July 18, 2011. Web. Porter, Katherine A. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall. Morrisville. Accessed July 18, 2011. Web. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Project Gutenberg. Accessed July 18, 2011. Web. Read More