Love Through the Ages - Wider Reading - Love and Transgression
Illicit Love
These wider reading texts depict relationships which transgress the conventions of socially acceptable behaviour. Relationships which develop across social or racial divides or that occur outside the confines of marriage have, at various points in English history, been considered illicit. Many types of love, such as that between adults and teenagers or between same-sex couples have encountered a change in attitudes; the former was once considered advantageous to both parties but is now widely condemned while the latter, which is now seen as perfectly healthy, was until 1861 a crime punishable by death and not legalised until 1967. The texts below depict love which is illicit at the time of the text's production or setting.
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence The subject of an obscenity trial in 1960, Lawrence's last novel relates the infamous story of Lady Constance Chatterley and her affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Lady Chatterley, young, rich and middle class, is left deeply unsatisfied by her marriage to Clifford Chatterley, a nobleman rendered paralysed and impotent during WWI. It is through her passion for the working class Mellors that Connie achieves both sexual fulfilment and a spiritual rebirth. |
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Style/structure: third person, vernacular English |
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Themes: class, sex, passion, nature vs culture, marriage as a trap, rebirth, adultery |
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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
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Forbidden Love
These wider reading texts depict relationships in which either one or both lovers has been forbidden to liaise with the other. Usually such love affairs are not transgressive in the eyes of the reader and therefore the lovers' plight evokes pathos.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007) When her mother dies Mariam's father gives her in marriage to Rasheed, a man thirty years her senior. When Mariam fails to provide him with an heir, Rasheed becomes abusive and eventually takes a second wife, Laila. The narrative is divided between Mariam and Laila, depicting their experiences under the Taliban and at the hands of the increasingly cruel and despotic Rasheed. |
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Style/structure: dual narrative |
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Themes: marriage as a trap, patriarchy, friendship, loyalty, discrimination, endurance, true love |
Secret Love
These wider reading texts depict lovers who decide to keep their relationship a secret, often to escape the condemnation of society.
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Set in 1954, this courtroom drama uses the supposed murder of a local fisherman and the subsequent trial of the main suspect, the Japanese American Kabuo to explore the treatment of outsiders in a small, island community. Through flashbacks a story of forbidden love emerges in the form of a secret and forbidden relationship between the investigating American journalist and the Kabuo’s Japanese wife Hatsue. |
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Style/structure: prose, non-linear |
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Themes: prejudice, race, honour, family, forbidden love, unrequited love, passionate love |
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Incest
These wider reading texts depict love between members of the same family. Treatment of this theme within English literature varies from the disturbing and tragic to the incidental and comic.
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The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter (1967) A coming-of-age novel which begins when the 15 year old protagonist Melanie wears her mother's wedding dress to explore the garden in moonlight. The next morning it transpires that her parents have been killed in a plane crash and she and her brother are forced to live with tyrannical uncle Philip, his victimised wife Aunt Margaret, and her brothers Francie and Finn. When Philip uses his life-sized puppet shows to control and intimdiate his niece, it is with Finn that she finds freedom and escape. |
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Style/structure: coming-of-age, allusive, magic realist |
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Themes: sexuality, incest, power, control, rape, fantasy, freedom |
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