The Passion by Jeanette Winterson - Essay Example

December 12, 2005 The Passion of Henri With a book en d The Passion, one would expect passion to beat the heart of Jeannette Winterson’s story. However, the way in which she approaches her subject, through the experience of two main characters, Henri and Villanelle, gives this novel a unique perspective on the idea of passion as something “in between” everything else that nevertheless cannot be denied. While each character portrays the idea of passion in their own unique way, Henri’s passion can be traced almost chronologically as the story progresses. From beginning to end, Henri exhibits three different manifestations of what passion means starting with the blind passion he has for Napolean, through the living passion he feels for Villanelle and finally being consumed by his passion for living. As a poor farmer’s son living in a small village in France, Henri opens the story explaining that passion is a relatively unfamiliar emotion to the people with whom he grew up. “We’re a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy …” (7). However, he also adds his people are “in love” with Napoleon, something that isn’t obvious in their feelings for each other. Napoleon is the first and nearly the only person to whom Henri affords such a strong emotional attachment. Despite the problems the soldiers face in trying to build barges to ferry them over the English Channel to invade that country, Henri still says “I think if Bonaparte had asked us to strap on wings and fly to St. James’ Palace we would have set off as confidently as a child lets loose a kite” (21). Although greatly bothered by the needless loss of two thousand men when practicing in a storm at Napoleon’s insistence, Henri still describes him quite innocently as having a face “always pleading with us to prove him right” and how “his smile pushed away the madness of arms and legs that pushed in at my ears and mouth” (25). Henri begins a diary after this incident recognizing that this blind passion he has held for his leader is starting to change and wanting to be able to look back upon having such strong feeling, yet still retains his passion as evidenced when Josephine offers to take him into her service instead: “I was horrified. Had I come all this way just to lose him?” (36). However, as he knew he must, Henri finally loses his emotion for Napoleon after eight years of following him and finding themselves still caught in the midst of war, watching men starve and freeze to death and villagers much like the people he left at home despising the French as he once despised the English. “In their simplicity I saw a mirror of my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far” (81). In understanding where this feeling came from and knowing it to be little founded on the man he followed, Henri was finally able to break away from Napoleon to find a new love. This new love he found in Villanelle. Making his decision to leave Napoleon’s camp in the zero winter of Russia, he discovers his friend Patrick in the kitchen with Villanelle, who he’s meeting for the first time. Talking about where she got the chickens the two of them are eating, Villanelle tells Henri the snowflakes are all different, echoing thoughts he’d had earlier. “I did think of that and I fell in love with her” (88). Although this love is also given with little knowledge of who this woman was, Henri already knew more about her than he’d known about Napoleon when he gave up his heart to the emperor. Villanelle is described as a vivandiere, a sexual servant to the officers of the army who were earlier described as having a very difficult life. Nevertheless, Villanelle had already demonstrated an ability to look out for herself in obtaining the food, the ability to appreciate life as it came and still laugh at it and the knowledge that Napoleon’s campaign was a losing, wasteful effort. In this love, too, Henri is more realistic about what this love means: “She seemed carefree and the shadows that had crossed her face throughout her story had lifted, but I felt my own just beginning. She would never love me” (99). She is the first and the last woman he makes love with, the first time as they make their escape from the French army. “When I think of that night, here in this place where I will always be, my hands tremble and my muscles ache. I lose all sense of day or night, I lose all sense of my work, writing this story … it is always the same moment I think of. Her hair as she bent over me, red with streaks of gold, her hair on my face and chest and looking up at her through her hair. She let it fall over me and I felt I was lying in the long grass, safe” (103). More than helping him feel safe, Villanelle provides Henri with a glimpse into his own heart he hadn’t had before. “Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does” (122). This feeling of safety, this feeling of being understood, is something Henri wants very much, but realizes at the same time that holding a passion for someone who cannot return the feeling in turn only perpetuates his own pain. “I’m not looking, I’ve found what it is I want and I can’t have it. If I stayed, I would be staying not out of hope but out of fear. Fear of being alone, of being parted from a woman who simply by her presence makes the rest of my life seem shadows” (122). It isn’t until Henri kills Villanelle’s husband on a night when he threatens to send her back to the French army that Henri is given the chance to wield the power in one of his passionate relationships. Knowing he cannot have her and knowing at the same time that he cannot leave her, he confesses to the police that he himself committed the murder. Being convicted insane, Henri is moved to the insane asylum located on an island and his portion of the story is written from here. Without the distractions of the outside life, now that he is safe, Henri begins to realize that although his passion for Villanelle is still complete, to be reminded that she does not share his feeling is too painful for him. “There was a time, some years ago I think, when she tried to make me leave this place, though not to be with her. She was asking me to be alone again, just when I felt safe. I don’t ever want to be alone again and I don’t want to see any more of the world. The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map” (152). Henri has discovered his passion for other people has been eclipsed by the passion he has for the world around him and the small world of the asylum is more than large enough for his enjoyment. Any more would be too much. “When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. … Then, when I had regarded myself for the first time, I regarded the world and saw it to be more various and beautiful than I thought” (154-55). He talks about walking down the stairs slowly, feeling the texture of the walls, allowing the sun to warm his face, breathing carefully to appreciate the smells around him and digging in the dirt with his hands to feel the earth as it bends within his grasp. “There’s time here to love slowly” he says of the asylum and realizes that no one around him understands the depth of his passion because they are too preoccupied with things happening elsewhere. “I wonder where they go and what their lives are like, but I wouldn’t change places with them. Their faces are grey and unhappy even on the sunniest days when the wind whips at the rock for its own delight” (157). Having started his life feeling a passion for a leader he didn’t understand, Henri progressed to a passion for a woman who was able to teach him what love was and then used those lessons to lose himself in an all-consuming passion for the world around him that absorbed every part of his being and left no room for distractions. Although he still loved Villanelle and treasured the small gifts she gave him, such as a glimpse through his cell window or the reflection of her hair on the straw, the pain of knowing she could never love him as he loved her was a distraction from the appreciation of the air, the earth and the materials of the world around him that he couldn’t afford. Some might have considered him completely insane at the end, but in many ways, Henri had found a way to follow his ultimate passion, something most would kill for. Works Cited Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Read More