We finished Buffy Season 7 tonight. Now I’ve seen all the episodes and I’m glad. I have to confess that Buffy herself kind of annoyed me during this season. She went all serious. The character arc I really cared about was Spike. From the moment that he started on his path toward redemption his character has fascinated me. The idea that love for another person can cause someone to shift their whole Self for the better is incredibly powerful. I want to be the kind of person who inspires that way. I want it and I don’t. It could be a huge responsibility. Although most people won’t have Spike’s stalker/creepy/demon issues, so I guess that would make it easier.
I guess the idea of being so beautiful and so good that a hero is ennobled simply by loving me has always had an appeal. Maybe I should have lived in the days of courtly love when everyone felt like that was the ideal.
On the other hand, the closest brush I’ve ever had with someone veiwing me that way was in early teenager-hood and was much closer to a creepy-stalker experience than anything beautiful. Perhaps the only kind of person who is so willing to shift for another is an obsessive person. Hmm. . . not a happy though that. I think I’ll stick with Howard who laughs and talks with me and shares my life. And instead of inspiring a single person to change his whole Self, I think I’ll just try to be the kind of person who might possibly inspire lots of people in very small ways. That’s more balanced because there are people who inspire me all the time.
Courtly Love
Back when I was getting my Master’s degree in Literature, I did a fair amount of research on the topic of “courtly love”. As ideals go, it was quite horrible. It boils down to a celebration of adultery. 😛 It was literally considered inappropriate to love someone you were actually married to. And if you were happy, you were also doing something wrong. It was all about finding some beautiful married woman (she had to be married), declaring your undying love for her, sneaking around behind her husband’s back in trying to sleep with her, and angsting about the travails of the relationship. No, really. The modern spin on it actually improved the concept somewhat.
Re: Courtly Love
Hmm. Sounds like Courtly Love is NOT what I was attempting to describe. I’m so glad society got over that weird ethic. I like being in love with my husband.
Re: Courtly Love
In fairness to your original post, part of courtly love was that the unfulfilled (not necessarily unconsummated) love for said beautiful married woman was supposed to inspire the man to great deeds. Um, usually more “success in beating up lots of enemies and rivals” than becoming better and more virtuous people. (Unless you count beating up your enemies and rivals as virtuous which, let’s face it, people in the middle ages and Renaissance did.)
Anyway, I see the relationship between the concepts, even though I don’t think there was ever a point in history where it was put into practice in that way.
I also have to confess that I adore redemption stories, especially redemption through love. I’ve had a lot of fantasies of being that sort of catalyst, myself. But ultimately, there is something creepy, even unhealthy about the notion. After all, whoever you’re redeeming has to have been bad at some point — and who’s to say he won’t fall back into his old ways? :/ I’m afraid a lot of abusive relationships prey on the desire of women to redeem men who, sadly, are never really going to change. 🙁
Re: Courtly Love
I knew a guy like that in high school. He was emotionally abusive, not physically which is probably why he was able to ensare so many really smart girls. He was attractive and extremely intelligent. He had at least 4 different girls afraid to abandon him because they each were the ONLY one who could redeem him from his “pit of dispear”. I saw it all happen and I still felt the pull of it on the day he turned his attention to me. He only turned his attention to me on the one day so I’ll never know if I would have fallen into the same trap as those other girls. I wonder if he was doing it consciously or if he was simply reacting to subconscious needs. I’m guessing the latter although he was smart enough to be doing it on purpose.
The more I think about it, the less I want to be the pivot point in someone else’s redemption.