Love Ideal in Two Literary Works

The modern love ideal basically encompasses the concept of a voluntary union. It is a union between two people in which they share tenderness and protect each other from the harsh realities of the outside world. The modern love ideal is also about two people being in love and wanting to share their lives together. This concept of modern love involves demonstrations of kindness, tenderness and affection. Such a love ideal also encompasses marriage and its vows. Among these, the most significant are promising to "cherish" the other individual through good and bad and remaining bound by bond until "death do them part". In Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour and Raymond Carver's Popular Mechanics, we get a quite different view of modern love than this traditional view of the concept promises.

In Carver's Popular Mechanics, we are treated to a couple with one child in the midst of a breakup. The man is packing a suitcase and the story opens with his wife screaming at him in a manner not encompassed by the ideal of love, "I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! She said. Do you hear? ... Son of a bitch! I'm so glad you're leaving!" (Carver 1). There is no sensitivity, no tenderness, and no compassion exhibited between the couple throughout the short story. Instead their relationship seems to be completely devoid of love.

The couple demonstrates no elements of the concept of the modern love ideal. They are rude to one another. They show no re

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tic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values: completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement (1). Carver's minimalist approach here makes a very precise statement: the modern love concept is an illusion. In Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour, we get the tale of a woman who hears the news that her husband has died in a train wreck. In contrast to Carver's story, we get no descriptions of the couple's experiences or the nature of their relationship. Other than walking into the room at the end of the story we do not even meet the husband. Further, there is no profanity or screaming or fighting that goes on in this story. Nevertheless, we do get a similar theme of the concept of modern love being a myth or illusion. When the woman hears the news of her husband's death, we are told "She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance...She went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her" (Chopin 1). We might think before reading to the end of the story that the woman is simply inconsolable in her grief and wants to be alone. However, the narrator informs us her grief is not the same as that of other women upon hea

Category: Literature - L