I'm rereading Cyrano de Bergerac, the play. The first time I read it was in freshman year of high school; I had finished the assigned reading and was flipping through the textbook trying to find something interesting to occupy my time - probably was procrastinating on science homework or something. I read Cyrano, and loved it. I loved the clever, witty character of Cyrano, always ready for a fight or a declamation (sometimes both at once), and disoriented only by infatuation. So when I encountered him again today while browsing the bookshelves that house the classics at Barnes and Noble, (wow that was quite a half-sentence) I decided to revisit.
Halfway through, and I still love it.
(SPOILERS: Cyrano dies in the end.)
And I feel like in all my favorite love stories that are considered classics, people die. I'm not talking about Romeo and Juliet; that play has always annoyed me, because it has never, never seemed plausible for me for a couple of people to fall in love and die for each other within a span of a few days. I'm sorry. Just no.
I'm talking about stories like Hunchback of Notre Dame (the novel, of course), and Phantom of the Opera (any version will do; the first I was exposed to was the musical, for which I have a huge soft spot), and A Tale of Two Cities, and Cyrano. And I guess just now I realized why I like these so much.
It's the unrequited lover; it's obvious. (Romeo doesn't count, because he got over Rosaline in a heartbeat, the fickle manwhore.) And you know, it's always a guy. (Unless you're thinking about Esmeralda's love for Phoebus, and..well, Phoebus is a bitch.) I guess there's something decidedly less romantic about a woman pining over a man. Has this ever happened successfully in classic literature? Generally when a woman is the main character, the work is about how (head)strong and independent she is, or how she gets the guy by being (head)strong and at least mostly independent. Women assuming the roles of men, whether in life or in literature, is a modern and still not entirely thought-out concept; for instance, I rather doubt that 'progressive' feminist novels could possibly have a woman pining over a man in any way. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong, if you can; I don't have a tendency to read feminist literature.)
And also, another thing that I guess I just realized. Quasimodo is ugly. The Phantom is ugly, or at least disfigured. Cyrano thinks he's too ugly for love. Sydney Carton..well, he's just an emo fuck who thinks he's too much of a pile of shit to be loved by Lucy.
Oh, boys. Love yourselves. I certainly love you.
<3
Olivia
PS. That was a bit of an anticlimactic ending to this post; I was probably thinking about writing more, but everything's gone out my ears. I'm so tired. I've had a hell of a weekend.
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