The emotion of passion in the three texts creates a
doomed fatality. This fatality not only destroys the characters who let passion
control their actions but it destroys others thus propelling the narrative into
a dark, twisted realm that we as readers know will end disastrously for certain
characters.
In the poem Lamia, Lamia’s
passionate love for Lycius is the central point of the narrative of the poem
but it destroys characters along the
way, turning them into victims of passion. Their love for each other ultimately
leads to their deaths, but the emotion of love itself also creates a sense of
pain and anguish. At the wedding party, when Lamia disappears as her true
identity is revealed she is described as being ‘deadly white’ and being
‘withered at their potency’ and ‘empty of delight’. Lycius’ death is described
in blunt, harsh language ‘no pulse, or breath they found/ And in its marriage
robe, the heavy body wound’. The words ‘found’ and ‘wound’ are full – rhymes and symbolises a sense of
destruction and terrible fate. It contrasts with the use of the light, half
rhymes used when describing Lamia such as ‘white’ and ‘delight’ and so seems
much more delicate than the contrasting full rhymes used. It adds to the
mystical image Lamia is portrayed as, making her passion seem alluring to the
other characters in the poem. Nevertheless, it is not just in death that Lamia
and Lycius’ love is somewhat painful - In line 289, Lycius is described as
being ‘swoon’d, murmuring of love, and pale with pain’. However, Lycius and
Lamia are not the only characters who die or feel pain as a result of their
passionate love. Hermes is described as being ‘smitten’ and ‘breathing upon the
flowers his passion’ when he is on a conquest to find his love. His passion to
find love and Lamia’s desire and passion to be with Lycius lead to their
negotiation where Lamia reveals the invisible nymph to Hermes. As an invisible
nymph, free from the passions of love, she is described as being ‘free as the
air’ and ‘nimble’. When she loses her invisibility to
Hermes she is described as having ‘languid arm’, ‘fearful sobs’ and
‘self-folding like a flower’. The fricatives used when Keats is describing the
nymph makes her sound gentle – she lives a free and happy life but when passion
overrules both Lamia and Hermes, she loses this sense of freedom and so harsh
– sounding adjectives are used to describe her transformation. The simile of
‘self – folding like a flower’ makes us think that she is delicate and fragile.
We feel pathos for her character to be destroyed by such a powerful force of
emotion, that in some way we see Lamia’s and Hermes passion as being selfish. Similarly, Keats in his own life had suggested
the pains of passionate love in a letter to Fanny Brawne when he tells her ‘if
the remembrance of you did not weight so upon me’. Lamia, in this sense, could
be reflecting the fact that Keats’ passionate love causes pain, essentially causing
some fear in the reader.
Wuthering Heights also shows how passion can destroy
others however passionate love is not the only fatal emotion to the characters
in Wuthering Heights. Passionate
jealousy is a result of the passions of love and so it is inevitable that as
Heathcliff fights for his love for Catherine with his rival Edgar Linton,
revenge is soon to follow. It is also important to note that even Catherine’s
and Heathcliff’s love for each other is so passionate that it makes them feel
some type of resentment towards each other. Catherine for example says to Ellen
‘I gave him my heart…since he has destroyed mine, I have not the power to feel
for him’. It is significant that both
the words ‘destroy’ and ‘passion’ are used - Dracula’s ‘devilish passion’ in
Stoker’s Dracula is described in a similar
way. The ‘devilish passion’ in this case reflects the power of Dracula. As
readers we are more inclined to feel fear at a monster that is described as
being ‘devilish’, which connotes evil. Essentially the combined characteristics
of passion, evil and power will only inevitably fatality for the characters –
however in this case, Stoker chooses for the feeling of passion to destroy the
villain, unlike Bronte and Keats who uses passion to destroy an innocent
character (for example the nymph) or for every character in Wuthering Heights.
However, Heathcliff is not the only character to feel
jealousy. Hindley also expresses jealousy at Heathcliff’s attention of his
father, saying that ‘he swears he will reduce him to his right place’. Catherine’s
and Heathcliff’s uncontrollable, passionate love for each other leads to
destruction for the Linton’s and the Earnshaw’s. Their love destroys the next generation in
the novel, however it is also the one emotion that lasts the longest in the
entire novel, even surpassing Heathcliff’s need for revenge ‘I don’t care for
striking. I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand!’, which is the other
emotion that also propels the narrative forward. However, how Bronte wants us
to perceive their passionate emotion is different to that of Keats. Bronte,
living in a Victorian society wants us to be shocked at the transgression of
what is Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s love for each other. It breaks society’s
rules and is unrestrained and so for the Victorian reader, we can see how this
may have created fear. In Keats’s Lamia
however, he is more concerned with how such a powerful emotion can destroy
beauty, which he portrays in a negative fashion.
