L’amour et l’amitié Cours

Jane Austen no doubt knew about the myth and must have had it in mind when she wrote Sense and Sensibility. The novel centres on two sisters, Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, and their love stories which develop parallel to each other, creating contrasting mirror effects that enable Jane Austen to compare both young women's approaches and attitudes towards love. Contrary to her wiser elder sister Elinor, Marianne is an archetypal romantic who believes in absolute love between two perfectly suited people. A passionate soul, Marianne has a very specific idea of what the love of her life should be like. He should be totally enamoured, see the world through her eyes and read her sonnets to her heart's content. Marianne truly believes that there exists such a man, which is why she easily falls prey to Willoughby, an experienced womaniser who has seduced many naïve and gullible young women. As soon as he has figured out what appeals to Marianne, he starts acting like her ideal man, claiming to love poetry and promising everlasting love to her, while in fact only coveting her virtue.

Ang Lee's 1996's adaptation of Jane Austen's novels reveals Willoughby's real intentions by showing his purely physical attraction to Marianne right from the start. The two characters meet after Marianne fell off her horse and sprained her ankle. Willoughby comes at the drop of a hat to carry her back home after closely examining her bare leg. But his arms don't so much hold as ensnare her. Indeed, far from rescuing her, he puts her – and her virtue – at risk. Her infatuation proves almost lethal, as no sooner does Marianne finds out about Willoughby than she suffers from a delirious fever. Through her illness, Jane Austen exposes the dangers of passion, which she seems to regard as sick. She demonstrates to the reader that soul-mates are a fallacy. Marianne was blinded by her ideal and deluded by her imagination, which led her to fall in love with an ill-intended man and to oversee more genuine feelings in the person Colonel Brandon. Even if Marianne doesn't love him as he loves her, she eventually marries out of reason, whereas her more sensible and clear-sighted sister gets to marry the man she loves. Jane Austen inflicts a rather harsh punishment on her heroine to warn the readers against passions and delusions. She criticizes romantic love and romance to establish herself as a serious author who writes serious novels. 

Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, published in 1996, reads like a modern-day version of Jane Austen's 1813 Pride and Prejudice. Through the confessions of a 30-year-old Londoner desperately looking for Mr Right, Helen Fielding explores love and loneliness as experienced by young adults in the late 20^th century. Bridget's quest leads her from one delusion to the next, leaving her highly disappointed and slightly cynical, but no less resilient. Although single, the heroine finds comfort in the other aspects of her life; her friends, her family and her job. A self-reliant young woman, she makes the most of her economic and emotional independence. As did her Austenian forerunners, Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet. Fielding shows us how her character gradually becomes less naïve and gullible, as she, along with the reader, learns from her mistakes. Only when forearmed and forewarned against the "Venus fly-trap" does Bridget find true love with Mr Darcy, an up-to-date but no less uptight version of Jane Austen's arrogant protagonist. In Fielding's novel, it is Bridget who makes the boldest move and proposes to him after many twists and turns through which the two lovers discard their prejudices and grow fonder of each other. Bridget teaches the readers that love is not all a woman needs, which is excellent news because a good man, if there exists any, seems hard to find. Because Fielding's novel mocks and questions long-established misconceptions about women, her heroine Bridget has become a role model and feminist icon for many women of all ages. 

The insufferably shallow but cunning Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton goes out of her way to marry into high society and climb up the social ladder. She only has her best interest at heart and can think of nothing else but rank, money, parties and expensive dresses. She marries, divorces and remarries as one good match leads her to another, but is never rich or distinguished enough to her liking. Contrary to Elizabeth Bennet, Undine Spragg's pride lies in her ability to find men best suited to her fancies and ambitions. Far from judging or punishing her heroine, Edith Wharton points out that women too are ambitious and can turn an institution that has constrained and restrained them for centuries to their own advantage. Despite her economic dependence on men, Undine is a free woman in so far she acts to serve her aspirations and achieve her social ambitions, regardless of whether her family or friends might approve or not. In this respect, she is the mistress of her own destiny. 

In Vanity Fair by Thackeray, Rebecca Sharp (Becky) is an orphaned girl in reduced circumstances who dreams of becoming as wealthy as her boarding-school friend, Amelia. A very clever and artful seductress, she does her utmost to make her dream come true and climb up the social ladder, going as far as gambling with other people's emotions for the sole purpose of increasing her wealth or securing her social position. The author seems to vindicate her heartless heroine because her place in society was initially determined by birth, not talent, which forced her to go all length to lead the life she wants and become her own woman.

In his controversial, path-breaking novel Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy challenges marriage as a moral and social norm by exposing the dire and tragic consequences of both marrying and "living in sin." It is marriage that causes the protagonists' downfall. The main character, Jude Fawley, aspires to an academic career well beyond his reach as a lower-class orphan. He first marries Arabella Donn, after she had him believe she was pregnant with his child, which causes him to give up becoming an Oxford professor to take up odd jobs and feed his family. No sooner have they married and settled under the same roof than they split up to go their separate ways. Jude is left bankrupt. He nonetheless decides to try his luck in Oxford, where he meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead – note her foreboding surname –, a free-thinker and agnostic very averse to marriage. This will bring him no nearer to achieving his ambitions, quite the opposite. After some considerable time, she and Jude decide to live together and pretend they are married, a lie hardly anyone believes wherever they go with their children, born outside wedlock. Sue and Jude end up rejected and ostracised and their offspring mere pariahs. With insufficient income and no stable home, the two outcasts find themselves in such a bad way that their eldest son commits suicide after taking his siblings' lives. The reader can't but feel that they are being suppressed as cumbersome abnormalities because born in sin. This heart-wrenching radical outcome throws light on the terrible consequences of transgressing moral and religious norms. Jude and Sue's tragic love story shows us how society, through morality and religion, directs the course of people's lives and limits their freedom to choose the life they want to lead and the person they want to love in their own terms and conditions. 

Shakespeare's play Much Ado about Nothing humorously deals with jealousy, morality and trust. Hero and Claudio are engaged to be married, but their engagement is abruptly broken off by rumours spread by a jealous suitor accusing Claudio's betrothed of being promiscuous and unfaithful. The astutely named Hero – who will prove the more heroic of the two – is publicly rejected, humiliated and abused by Claudio, who was fooled into believing the rumours without even giving her the benefit out of the doubt. Claudio's rash reaction was probably prompted by prejudice and the common assumption that women are lustful and weak and therefore prone to being seduced. Through his character's complete lack of critical judgement and empathy, Shakespeare doesn't test Hero's but Claudio's trustworthiness, and reveals his – men's? – inability to trust his own heart and the woman he claims to love. He turns out to be the more dubious and unfaithful of the two, after all. To punish him, Hero fakes her death, which enables Claudio to inquire and find out he should never have doubted her. It is a triumphantly alive Hero that emerges from her grave to be reunited with Claudio, who has learnt to think better than crediting rumours and stereotypes. Mozart, the genius composer, taught audiences a similar lesson in his opera Cosi Fan Tutte, which means "they [women] all do it" in Italian. 

The Piano (1993) by feminist film maker Jane Campion is the story, set in Victorian times in New Zealand, of a married woman and talented musician who trades her body in exchange for her piano, left on a beach after her arrival on the island. She becomes physically and emotionally involved with her lover and transgresses all the strict moral rules of her time to become a disreputable but free woman. She gets punished, but manages to escape, thus being justified in choosing her impulses, her heart and her music, which define her as a full-fledged individual, over a respectability that would force her to be someone she is not. 

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, the heroine Dorothea Brooke loses her first husband Casaubon half-way through the novel and is free to remarry whoever she chooses – or so she and the reader think. Her late husband, being very jealous and a bigot, had had his will altered to make sure his wife wouldn't be able to wed his rival, a painter called Will Ladislaw, of obscure origin and untoward religious beliefs. Indeed, should she decide to marry him, she would lose the property and money she had inherited after his death. And this is not all; not only would Dorothea become destitute, but she would also become a social pariah because the people within the village close-knit community would surely disapprove. Rumour and prejudice were quick to brand Ladislaw, who is an outsider making deals with the dodgy local banker, as dodgy and therefore unsuitable. Through this story, Eliot highlights the fact that to choose to live according to one's heart might prove a very hard decision to make. Being free sometimes results in alienating one's community or family, and being rejected. Fondly as two people may love each other, their feelings may not be strong enough to overcome these difficulties and their relationship is quickly put an abrupt end to. Not so Dorothea's and Will's, as both characters tie the knot, ignoring the concerns and warnings voiced by her closest relatives: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done - not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will Ladislaw." Dorothea Brooke chose to be her own woman and to marry the man she loved against society's supposedly better judgement. Ladislaw's claim that "poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for" never rang truer than in the reduced but happy circumstances the young couple find themselves in at the end of the novel.

Philip Roth, known for his controversial and provocative novels shaking conventions to fight political correctness and social hypocrisy, tells us a similar though darker story in The Human Stain. When the novel begins, the protagonist, university professor Coleman Silk, has been forced to retire from his job after being unjustly accused of racism for using the word "spook" to refer to absentee students. This misunderstanding seems to turn into an unpleasant farce when the reader finds out that Coleman himself is black, and that it is skin colour and social origin that divided him from the woman he loved. Indeed, her family never approved of their relationship, which forced them to eventually break up. Their impossible love can be interpreted as symbolic of how difficult it is to come to terms with a turbulent history that created deeply scarring differences and inequalities. The bitter irony resulting from this absurd situation through which Coleman, initially a victim, becomes a perpetrator of racism, throws light on the harmful hypocrisy of discourse which tells people what not to say or do. As demonstrated by Roth in his novel, nobody feels free today to say something without checking themselves to avoid offending those who have unduly suffered from hatred and abuse. The book title refers to the label of shame that will stick for ever on Coleman Silk's skin, because he is not like everyone else and doesn't think the same way as them. 

D.H. Lawrence's story of a dwindling aristocrat's wife, Lady Constance Chatterley, who is having a secret affair with the gamekeeper and is thoroughly enjoying it, is quite scandalous. The title itself, Lady Chatterley's Lover, must have been shocking back in 1928. By brazenly drawing attention to a married noblewoman's infidelity and sexuality, Lawrence indeed seems to vindicate his heroine's misdemeanour and to invite every woman to follow suit. What struck people as immoral at the time was probably not so much the fact that a woman should be unfaithful as the author's daring use of explicit language to give fairly graphic descriptions of her erotic outings in the forest with her lover. Lawrence also shifted the perspective to focus on the heroine's emotions and sensations, as she explores her own body and desires. What felt so inappropriate and disturbing was that women should be shown to have the same needs as men, who had so far been the focus of novels in which sex plays an important role. Constance Chatterley and her lover only meet in the woods belonging to Lord Chatterley's estate, a way for Lawrence to suggest that their affair comes as a natural thing, since the two lovers act according to their mutual desire. Instead of representing male and female characters striving to resist their impulses, the author presents us with a man and a woman enjoying a happy and healthy existence after allowing nature into their lives and bodies. Lawrence reminds readers of the nature-side in them which shouldn't be repressed. 

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov must have shocked even more readers than Lady Chatterle. It relates the very unconventional love story between a mature literature professor called Humbert and his step-daughter, the eponymous Lolita aged 12. The opening lines of the novel give reader a spicy taste of what they are going to read: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child." Nabokov's novel tends to suggest that love is as wayward as it is lawless and transgressive. 

Waugh's novel's Brideshead Revisited chronicles, Charles Ryder's – the main character and first-person narrator – years as a student in Oxford, where he makes the life-changing acquaintance of Sebastian Flyte and is sister Julia, two eccentric but melancholic aristocrats. What started as a fascination which drew the inexperienced narrator to the Flytes's circle ends up as half friendship, half love. Charles soon becomes very attached to Sebastian and Julia. Charles's fond feelings for Sebastian borders on homosexuality, as the narrator insists that he "loves" – his very word – Sebastian, with whom he spends most of his first college year partying. As an adult, he gets involved with his sister Julia, leaving the reader to wonder whether it is really her that he loves or just the twin-like resemblance she bears with her brother. The narrator's scarce and subtle references to his most private feelings and emotions increase the ambiguities of love and friendship at the heart of the story. They also suggest that Charles himself may be confused, or even uncomfortable with what he feels deep down. Using friendship as a cover for his actual feelings may also be a way to stay in denial. 

Never did the course of friendship run smooth. This has been confirmed by Harry, Ron and Hermione countless times. Throughout the seven books in which the reader see the three friends meet difficulty upon difficulty and grow up with each new challenge, their friendship is put to the test and threatened by rivalry, love and injustices. But it is never weakened. The three protagonists show us that to be friends is to be stronger and to hold on faster in adverse circumstances. As Hermione points out, friendship is more important. Indeed, it is as united friends that they summon enough courage to defeat the most evil creatures and malevolent characters. It is also thanks to their friendship that they manage to juggle the rough and smooth and get over losses, failures, heartaches to become the sensible and sensitive adults the reader is presented with at the saga's epilogue. These three friends support, comfort and scold one another when needed. Like love, friendship can inspire people to greater heights. 

Huckleberry Finn relates a young boy's erratic journey in the southern American states during which he befriends a run-away slave who becomes his travel companion. Both friends are described holding on to and helping each other. With this book, Mark Twain probably hoped to change people's mentalities and attitudes towards Black people. He almost certainly expected his younger readers to identify with Huck and thus be induced to see slaves and coloured people in a different light, as their equals. This moving story of an unlikely friendship is a lesson in tolerance and acceptance, which strongly suggests that it is through friendship that people may best learn to relate to and respect one another, regardless of what differentiates or divides them. 

In Never Let Me Go, the three protagonists, Kathy the narrator, Ruth and Tommy, are clones who grew up completely isolated from the rest of the world in a boarding-school called Hailsham. They have been created to later serve as organ donors to improve the other people's health and life expectancy. The reader finds out at the end that it is friendship – and love – that humanizes these clones in others' eyes and in their own, through their ability to grow attached to other people. Being best friends helps them put up with their terrible fate. They care for each other in more ways than one, not just as friends but also by nature of their specific function in society. Before becoming donors and dying slowly, they have to work as carers whose job, is to help the donating clones recover after each donation and until they breath their last. As a result, these clones prove to be more generous, selfless and empathetic than any genuine human being will ever be. They form a close-knit community, a small-size society of friends united by love and trust, much deeper bonds than self-interest, hubris or progress, which connect most people in this day and age.