A Lover Is Not a Real Person

… 

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

  For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

  When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

  And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men

  In a suit of shabby grey;

A cricket cap was on his head,

  And his step seemed light and gay;

But I never saw a man who looked

  So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked

  With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

  Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

  With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,

  Within another ring,

And was wondering if the man had done

  A great or little thing,

When a voice behind me whispered low,

  "That fellow's got to swing."

Dear Christ! the very prison walls

  Suddenly seemed to reel,

And the sky above my head became

  Like a casque of scorching steel;

And, though I was a soul in pain,

  My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought

  Quickened his step, and why

He looked upon the garish day

  With such a wistful eye;

The man had killed the thing he loved

  And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves

  By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,

  And some when they are old;

Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

  Some with the hands of Gold:

The kindest use a knife, because

  The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,

  Some sell, and others buy;

Some do the deed with many tears,

  And some without a sigh:

For each man kills the thing he loves,

  Yet each man does not die.

Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

… 

“For each man kills the thing he loves, yet each man does not die.” 

This is one of Oscar Wilde’s most iconic lines, and for good reason. Whether or not the reader has loved before, this line somehow rings true – we can feel it in our bones that something about this line is inherent to the act of human loving. But that’s a little macabre, right? We’re talking about love, and isn’t love supposed to be beautiful? Happy? And, well, loving? 

Not necessarily.    

One of the most deeply human aspects of loving is knowing full well that it could (and very well might) lead to catastrophe, and choosing to love anyways. We proffer ourselves to disaster and embrace our fate with open arms. How is this normal? Or, more precisely, why is the threat of imminent danger something that is almost universally recognized and accepted about being a lover? 

Within medieval literature, the archetypal lover is many things – sensual, playful, amorous, the list goes on ad infinitum. There is one thing, however, that the lover has never, and will never, be: as a consequence of conforming to the whims of another for the sake of love, the lover will never be authentically themself. Thus, the words of Oscar Wilde ring true even in medieval literature: “each man kills the thing he loves” because, by definition, the lover must suffer a sort of ego-death, a loss of self identity, in order to become the aspirational lover valued so heavily by medieval writers. After all, if the entire point of being a “lover” is to get someone else to love you, what better way to do so than to cater your entire personality to fit their image of an ideal partner? It’s virtually foolproof. Except for that small, pesky problem of rendering yourself fundamentally incapable of retaining personal identity or agency, it’s a great idea.

This idea of the death of self identity when adopting the title of “lover” is even present in literature as old as the Bible. In Genesis, it says that when a man marries his wife, “he shall leave his father and mother... and they shall become one flesh,” (Gen. 2:24). In Matthew, he writes regarding marriage and lovers that, “what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mat. 19:6). Even Mark’s gospel contains a reference to the married lovers being “no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:8). Though these verses are specifically in reference to lovers who have been married, as premarital “loving” (among other, similar things) is categorically outlawed by Christian doctrine, the idea of deindividuation they present continues as a prominent vein throughout the literature of the following centuries. In this case, when the lovers become one being, the death of the self could not be more obvious. It’s not even an ego death. It is literally the theological teaching that, once a lover ties themself to another, they are no longer their own person. They will be forever bound to the desires and whims of another, till death do they part. 

Continuing into actual medieval romance literature, the romance between Chrétien de Troye’s gallant Yvain and noble Laudine exhibits this same loss of identity. When Yvain has to leave his beloved Lodine behind to go on a lengthy quest, he “was so distressed at departing from his beloved that his heart did not leave” because it had “attached itself so strongly to the heart of the lady left behind that he did not have the power to draw it away” (The Knight of the Lion, 288). It’s tragic, really. If to love deeply is to automatically invite this sort of pain into one’s life, why even bother? What’s the point of living without a heart? Can one even live if their heart resides with another? This may be the most primal example of the lover inevitably killing the one they love: by metaphorically stealing their heart. To be a lover, especially in medieval literature, one has to both recognize and accept that, by loving another, they are giving up themself. In the eyes of medieval writers like Chrétien, it is not possible to love truly and to also retain personal identity. According to his logic, if you’re not willing to completely give up your heart (and yourself) for the sake of your partner, is it even true love? Modern readers would say that, yes, of course it’s true love, just done in a healthy, boundary-enforcing way, but that was not the medieval perspective. In fact, that’s precisely the opposite view: to medieval writers, the lover could never be their own person, a real person, because, to their understanding, love was never healthy. Love was often referred to as a sickness to be remedied, a madness to be cured, and so the concept of healthy love was a non-issue. In the same story, Chrétien compares love and its consequences to “a violent whirlwind...in Yvain’s head,” causing him to “[go] mad,” and if that’s not telling about the sorry state of healthy boundaries in medieval love, then I don’t know what is (The Knight of the Lion, 290).  

Finally, in a collection of poems attributed to but not actually written by Ovid, we can see the de-individuation of the lover most clearly. For example, in comparing loving to an art form to be learned, the author of the Pseudo-Ovidian poem “De Amore” (or “On Love”) reinforces the idea that the lover is not a real person by illustrating the “art” of how a lover should forge his falsified identity to ensnare his target. The author writes that a lover “should do what gives her [his desired] pleasure, as the situation itself shows him,” a teaching that strongly reinforces the lover’s shedding of personal identity for the sake of conforming to whatever manufactured persona will most quickly get him in his paramour’s good graces (De Amore, 349). 

Ultimately, the medieval lover is not a real person because they can’t be. Love was thought of as the literal merging of two beings from the very beginning of early Christian thought, and the loss of identity on behalf of the lovers is simply a continuation of that belief. To conclude, I think the closing words of Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” again, say it best:

…

“In Reading gaol by Reading town

  There is a pit of shame,

And in it lies a wretched man

  Eaten by teeth of flame,

In burning winding-sheet he lies,

  And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,

  In silence let him lie:

No need to waste the foolish tear,

  Or heave the windy sigh:

The man had killed the thing he loved,

  And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,

  By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

 

Works Cited:

1. The Bible, New King James Version, Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:6, and Mark 10:8

2. Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Lion

3. Psuedo-Ovid, De Amore and De Remedio Amoris

4. Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”