20 Master Plots (30 page)

C
haucer said it before Shakespeare, and it has been said many times before and since: Love is blind. We believe in the power and strength of love to overcome all obstacles. It is the supreme achievement of human emotion. In the perfect world there is only love, and all the petty meanness that holds human beings down to such an earthly plane is left behind. Love is a transcendent state, and we spend our lives seeking it.

In our romantic imagination we believe love has no bounds. We are familiar with the strangeness of it: how it matches together those who seem unmatchable, how it creates its own miracles. We know its power to soothe and heal. Love is more powerful than any other human strength.

But we are earthbound. We're imperfect creatures who can only aspire to the perfection of a world filled with love. In the meantime we must suffer with our shortcomings as we muddle through our lives, taking our turn to try grasping the brass ring.

The truth is that we have written volumes on the rules of love. Although our hearts know love shouldn't have any tethers, we learn the lessons of what constitutes "proper" love every day and diligently pass those lessons on to our children. We define love and make judgments about it. One shouldn't marry above or below one's station. One shouldn't marry outside one's own faith. One

should marry only a person of the same race. One shouldn't fall in love with a person from another social class or a person who's already married or a person who's too old or too young. Our society makes these demands, and most of us abide by them. But the power of love—or just the idea of being in love—is enough to make some cross "the line" and enter forbidden territory. And since fiction often acts as our social conscience, there are plenty of stories to warn us about the penalties of crossing that line. Occasionally a story comes along that flies in the face of social taboos and shows that love can sometimes be more powerful than the disapproval of an entire society. Love sometimes thrives in the cracks.

The first written version of
Romeo and Juliet
appeared in 1476, more than a hundred years before Shakespeare wrote his play. In fact, Shakespeare's version is the fourth, and it wasn't the last. Gounod made it into an opera and Jean Anouilh wrote a bitter and realistic version of it called
Romeo and Jeanette.
The story has a powerful hold on our imagination primarily because the two lovers defy their feuding families' prohibition that the Montagues and Capulets should have nothing to do with each other. Although their love is real, so is their tragedy.

The love between
Heloise and Abelard
follows the same tragic path. Abelard, a French scholastic philosopher and theologian, fell in love with and seduced his student, Heloise. She got pregnant and had a son, after which the pair was secretly married. When Heloise's uncle, who was the Canon of Notre Dame Cathedral, found out about their illicit love affair, he had Abelard castrated.

Society has always been uncomfortable with people who are particularly ugly or grotesque. We pretend they don't exist, and we deny that they have feelings and desires like the rest of us.

Victor Hugo created Quasimodo, the hunchback bell ringer in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I doubt there's anyone in literature who's uglier. (One of his eyes is buried under a huge tumor, his teeth hang over his lower lip like tusks, his eyebrows are red bristles, and his gigantic nose curves over his upper lip like a snout.) But Quasimodo is as beautiful on the inside as he is ugly on the outside.

His passion is for Esmeralda, a beautiful gypsy dancer, a woman clearly beyond his reach. And yet he becomes her protector and champion against the hypocritical archdeacon of Notre Dame who denounces Esmeralda as a witch when she won't surrender herself to him sexually. Like most impossible loves, it ends in tragedy: It's a love that cannot be realized except in the heart and imagination of Quasimodo. But he avenges her death by killing the archdeacon.

ADULTERY

The most common type of forbidden love is adultery. Some of the classics of modern literature that deal with the subject include
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy, and
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert. Despite that these are all novels written by men about women with cheating hearts, they're still first-rate works.

Madame Bovary
is about a woman who feels trapped married to a husband who has no romantic imagination. Love hasn't been the many-splendored thing she'd read about, so she decides to go out in to the world and find it on her own. Emma Bovary is afflicted with a bad case of sentimentality, and she thinks the world awaiting her outside her door (outside her little Norman village, actually) is like a Harlequin romance waiting for her to step into it. She leaves her husband and starts her search.

What she finds isn't what she expected. Love with strangers turns out to be something other than what she hoped. By the end of the book, Emma poisons herself and dies an agonizing death.

Anna Karenina doesn't seem to have any better luck. She isn't a naive, star-struck woman like Emma Bovary. But she's love-struck by a handsome young officer and impetuously leaves her husband and child to run off with him. Eventually, however, her lover leaves her to join his army buddies when they go off to fight a foreign war. Disconsolate, Anna throws herself in front of a train. (Tolstoy got the idea for
Anna Karenina
after he saw the body of a woman who killed herself the same way.)

Hester Prynne of
The Scarlet Letter
starts out marked as an adulteress by the puritanical society of seventeenth-century Boston. She's forced to wear a red "A" on her breast so everyone knows who and what she is. Even worse, she has had a child, Pearl, out of wedlock.

The Boston clergy, being the sanctimonious stuffed shirts that they were, are intent on finding out who Hester's lover was, but she refuses to tell them. Her husband comes back from a long trip abroad and assumes a disguise so he can carry out his revenge against his wife's lover. He suspects a respected young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. He bears in on Dimmesdale, trying to get him to confess. Finally Hester, Arthur and their child try to escape, but they're caught. In the final scene, Dimmesdale climbs up the stairs to the pillory with Hester and Pearl and has his own red letter embroidered on his chest. He escapes the husband's nearly satanic vengeance, and dies in the arms of his beloved. Again, forbidden love has ended in tragedy.

The character triangle in stories about adultery is always the same: the wife, the husband and the lover. The strict moral codes of the nineteenth century would never allow an adulterous affair to be a
happy
one, and since the wage of sin is death, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Arthur Dimmesdale all die. In the case of Bovary and Karenina, they find that the passion they've been seeking is a lie. In the case of Hester Prynne, the love is real, but it comes at the cost of shame and death.

Writing about adultery wasn't always such stern stuff. Before we became so serious-minded, it was often treated casually. The French
fabliaux
(short, humorous tales written between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries) and English Tudor drama often played on the theme of the cuckolded husband. "The Miller's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
is a wonderful example. The story reads more like a Marx Brothers script than high-brow literature. (Alison, the young wife of an old fart, scorns the attentions of the local parish clerk, but has the hots for the young stud at the local boarding house.) If you tried to write that story today you'd get angry letters from the church, women's groups, and all the crusaders of the world who think it's in bad taste to write such scurrilous trash that, to their mind at least, would encourage widespread immorality. Scurrilous? Of course it is. It's also an important part of our literary past. The world still prizes the scurrilous humor of Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Bocac-cio, Ben Jonsson and William Shakespeare.

The person committing the adultery is often the protagonist. The betrayed spouse is often the antagonist and frequently seeks revenge. The plot easily reverses itself and has the adulterers turn into murderers by killing or trying to kill the spouse, as in
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Or, as in the French film
Diabolique,
the wife joins forces with her husband's lover to kill
him.
In most cases the point of the plan to kill the spouse is to free the lovers to marry (although in
Diabolique
the point was simply to get rid of an insufferable man).

INCEST

Other, darker forms of forbidden love deal with incest. We remain uncomfortable with this taboo, and I doubt the comedy has been written that deals lightly with the subject. Incest is one of nature's strongest and most terrifying taboos. Poor Oedipus, the great riddle solver, ends up marrying his own mother. When he finds out, the horror is so great he puts out his own eyes.

The subject comes up infrequently, but it's always considered aberrant behavior. We can forgive Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary for their sins, but we can't forgive the crime of incest, whether or not it involves the passion of love. In William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury,
one of the major characters, Quen-tin, is a moody, morose boy whose only passion is his sister, Candace, who returns his love.

HOMOSEXUAL LOVE

The theme of homosexual love has often been treated as forbidden love. In pre-Christian times, homosexuality wasn't seen as deviant behavior, but with the scriptural admonition against homosexuality and the rise of a puritanic frame of mind, we became less tolerant. Our literature reflects this intolerance by making stories about homosexual lovers tragedies. The best case in point is Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice.
The main character, an older man named Aschenbach, falls in love with a fourteen-year-old boy, Tadzio. The action takes place during a scourge of cholera, and

Aschenbach is so taken by Tadzio that he can't leave the city and eventually dies of the disease.

The connection of homosexuality with cholera and death suggests strongly the connection between the two characters. Aschenbach's "unnatural" love for Tadzio leads directly to his death. Mann includes obvious symbols of Hell, including being ferried across the river of death, which supports the connection even more.

MAY-DECEMBER ROMANCES

Rather than use these older, more traditional stories that dote on a heavy-handed morality, I have chosen to explore a more modern story that frees itself from the convention of these other tales.

Harold and Maude
was written by Colin Higgins. It is the story of a twenty-year-old rich boy who's in love with death and whose hobby is staging mock grisly suicides for the sake of his mother. Harold also likes to go to the funerals of complete strangers. At one such funeral he meets a seventy-nine-year-old woman, Maude. Harold is charmed by Maude's vitality and wit. He visits her in her apartment (which is an old railroad car) where she teaches him the meaning of life and love. She exposes him to the joys of the five senses — everything from learning yoga and how to play the banjo to drinking oatstraw tea and eating ginger pie. Maude is a free spirit; she hates conformity and has no patience for a repressive society.

Harold is thoroughly taken with Maude. Gradually he falls in love with her as he develops a positive attitude toward life. The two become lovers. In one fleeting scene, we glimpse a number tattooed on Maude's forearm, so we know she's survived the horrors of a concentration camp. The brilliance of the scene is that it says so much by saying so little. There's no discussion about it. Maude doesn't launch into the horrors of Nazism and concentration camps. She doesn't get on a soapbox and deliver any of the dozens of "survivor" speeches we've heard so many times. She doesn't have to. Her actions as a woman who has a fierce attachment to life say everything in the context of that one shot of her tattoo.

Harold announces, to his family's utter horror, that he plans to marry Maude. He plans to propose to her on her eightieth birthday. Harold has been transformed by Maude's power of life; it has converted him and brought him out of his fatalistic depression. But when he goes to Maude on her birthday, he finds that she's taken an overdose of sleeping pills and is waiting for death.