Description Of Love in Araby, The Fortune Teller, and The Lady with the Dog

Love is an extremely powerful emotion and can drive people to do some amazing things, while at the same time, can drive people crazy in a very bad way. In “Araby”, “The Fortune Teller”, and “The Lady With the Dog”, love is expressed in multiple ways under different circumstances. These feelings of love relate and derive from the same feelings of anxiety the characters get when thinking about what they want and what they could have. This drives them to the love they feel.

In the story “Araby”, the narrator is infatuated with a girl he has never met. He is experiencing intense anxiety about approaching the girl he is in love with. He fears he will never gain the courage to express how he feels toward her and let her know the love he feels so strongly for her. The boy longs for adulthood and is tired of the boring repetitive nature of school and childhood, as alluded to in this quote, “I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.” In this quote, the boy had just talked with Mangan’s sister, and now is entirely uninterested and bored by the demands of the classroom. Instead, he wants to think of Mangan’s sister, wants to think of the upcoming bazaar, wants to think of anything but what he’s doing at the moment. This scene shows the boy’s future frustration with the tedious details that prevent his desires from succeeding, and it also illustrates the boy’s difficulty in defining himself as an adult, even in the space of the classroom structured as a hierarchy between master and student. Just as dull lessons get in the way of the boy’s thoughts, by the end of the story everyday delays damage his hopes to purchase something for Mangan’s sister at the bazaar. In both cases, lack of differentness prevents the boy from fulfilling his desires. This scene expresses the boy’s navigation between childhood and adulthood. He sees the normal boredom of school as easy, unengaging, and repetitive. The desire he feels, on the other hand, is inspirational and freeing. His thoughts wander everywhere, instead of remaining attached to where they should be. Longing for the freedom of adulthood, the boy remains chained to the predictability of childhood. Much like longing to love this woman, he instead is chained to the loneliness of being afraid to talk to her.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is “sick” but it is really mental illness. Her husband says that it is a curable illness like a cold that can be cured with rest, but from his actions of not wanting anyone to see her or talk about it, she is mentally ill and is depressed. Her husband’s relationship is very distant as he is spending a lot of his time in town and with patients. He wants to love her but he doesn’t understand her mental state especially with it being taboo at the time of the story. The husband represents facts a logic and thinking with his head, he is very straightforward and thinks about the science. Whereas the narrator is thinking with the heart. She is creative and wild and spontaneous and is always thinking and writing things down. She thinks very sporadically. The case for the narrator having won by thinking with her heart can be made with two main reasons. First, we don’t know how the husband would have reacted to her insanity, we were not sure if he would have gotten angry or physical, but instead he simply fainted. Because of this she is not denied any longer to continue creeping around. She is completely unbothered by him. Along with this, in the narrator’s mind, she has achieved liberation. Regardless of whether or not she gains back her sanity or whether he ever wakes up, she believes that she is free, which is a win. Today the world is dominated by head thinkers. People in power are trying to think and logically solve what will be the correct decision on paper in every situation. Many decisions i believe are made incorrectly due to the fact that the one making the decision will not take what their heart is telling them and only chooses to think about the situation logically.