Twelfth Night is the first of many books I can fully understand, and I can relate with.
This year my understanding of romanticism change completely, I now get the real significance, which has nothing to do with my previous notion of it; and along the year I had to read a variaty of novels and plays that were based on the new (for me) definition:
"...some Romantic writers were fired by opposition to the rationalism
of the Enlightenment, some by the ideals of
the French Revolution, others by admiration for
“sublime” natural phenomena—mountains, rivers,
storms—and still others by the mysteries of Orientalism
and the East."
(MaunderA. Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism)
In this play, romanticism has the meaning that I have always known, it made it so much easier to understand, I have seen this story many times before in the different movies that I have seen along the years. I´m used to seen this "romanticism" I was raised to believe in these love stories, where the guy is in love with a girl and the girl is in love with another guy; and the happy endings in which the the guy marries the girl and have children and everything is perfect.
However life has show me that there is no happy ending, that love is not just flowers and chocolate, that people fight and have problems and that having children is not something magical, and we are making a big mistake if we really believe in the prince charming; the idea of love created by all these movies is just fantasy. In this play Orsino is a great example of it, he is in love of the idea of love, a fantasy.
We still have to know what love really is about.
Hey OjosPardo, whoever you are.
ResponderEliminarA great thing about growing up, I think, is realizing stuff. It's cool to be able to throw away all the things we were taught to believe, especially things that have to do with the way we deal with life. Love is one of them. It's incredible how families, for example, teach little girls how to become mothers from a very, very young age: just look at all the little girls who already own baby dolls, strollers, mini stoves and stuff. In a similar way, little girls (and boys too) are taught that love is a fairy tale, with princes who will save them from whatever they need to saved, princes so handsome that it gets scary at some point. I think there's where we're doing a bad job (we as a society): we're teaching our children that love is a superficial thing that is related to how pretty someone is, how strong and handsome they are. Of course we're not going to teach a 4-year-old that love can be shitty, but we should definitely tell them about what can go wrong: there's always a way to prepare them for whatever is coming. They'll soon become adults and will be able to choose what to believe in (of course if they don't stick to the Disney type of love).
Even though I grew up watching telenovelas (thanks, mom) I guess it's up to us to create this concept of love, based on our own experiences and beliefs. I can't say there's a wrong view of love, but it's kind of messed up to believe that we're Cinderella and our prince is gonna show up when we least expect it.