196 Baldwin, James
cated, and she believes that the marks of true love
are so obvious that they cannot be hidden or bidden.
If a person can manage to disguise her feelings, as
Lucy Steele does, then those feelings cannot be love.
Likewise, real passion can never be counterfeited.
That Marianne and Willoughby can fall in love
so quickly, then, is only natural to her, and it cor-
responds that her feelings after her abandonment
are so dramatic. She “would have thought herself
very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the
first night after parting from Willoughby. She would
have been ashamed to look her family in the face
the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in
more need of repose than when she lay down in it.”
The loss of such passion, after all, can be survived
with no fewer fireworks than the passion first pro-
duced. Every emotion is pushed to its extreme, be it
affection or anguish, hope or despair, and love is the
chief emotion of all.
On the other hand, Elinor Dashwood’s moder-
ate and reasonable feelings for Edward grow slowly
over time; they ripen and mature into love rather
than proclaiming to have begun immediately. This
slowness, to Marianne, marks a less worthy emotion,
a feeling that is not really love at all because of its
pace and because of what it appears to lack. To her,
Edward’s eyes have no spirit, no fire; his reading lacks
feeling, so he must not, therefore, be acquainted with
such emotion; and his taste does not, in every point,
coincide with Elinor’s. These deficits, Marianne
believes, prevent the depth of feeling that is part and
parcel of real passion. If Edward lacks the capacity
for such emotional compatibility, then he surely is
not capable of the burning ardor Marianne believes
necessary. Finally, when Elinor speaks of Edward
with moderate warmth rather than effusions of
affection and fervent vows, Marianne calls her sister
“cold-hearted” and threatens to leave the room! Eli-
nor, however, understands that there is more to mar-
riage than love, especially once Lucy Steele reveals
her secret engagement to Edward. Commitment
and honor, loyalty and honesty, are just as important
in marriage. Edward must once have felt something
like Marianne’s quick passion, or else he would not
have engaged himself surreptitiously as a youth, but
in the end, it is the rational love between Elinor and
Edward that survives all of Lucy’s selfishness, Mari-
anne’s judgment, and the coldness of his own family.
In observing the success and enduring passion of
this love between Edward and her sister, and from
the failure of her own methods and sentiments,
Marianne realizes her folly. Erotic passion can be
controlled, though it claims it cannot, and this is
evident when Willoughby throws Marianne over for
Miss Grey and her 50,000 pounds. The endurance
of rational love is harder to break. Marianne learns
the qualities that are just as important as passion,
qualities that may appear to temper it but must exist
alongside it in order for that passion to endure; these
are the qualities of which Elinor has been aware
from the beginning. Colonel Brandon’s possession of
these qualities, in addition to his constant affection
for her, finally wins Marianne over, to the great joy
of everyone save Willoughby.
Laura L. GuggenheimBALDWIN, JAMES Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1952)
James Baldwin’s first novel is notable because it
marks a break with the tradition of “protest’ lit-
erature that had long dominated African-American
writing. Instead of focusing on dramatic instances of
racial oppression and African-American suffering,
Baldwin (1924–87) focuses on the life of a family
whose relationships are, of course, embedded in the
racist history of the nation, but whose fates are also
shaped by personality.
Elegantly structured and lyrically written, the
novel is set in Harlem on its protagonist John
Grimes’s 14th birthday. The novel follows his day, but
it also explores the lives of the family members—his
father, Gabriel; his mother, Elizabeth; and his aunt,
Florence—whose histories impact John’s life. John’s
father is an evangelical preacher whose personal his-
tory of youthful dissolution, betrayal, and duplicity is
masked by the piety he uses as a weapon against his
wife and children. John’s loving mother has borne a
child—John—whose father died, a suicide, before
they could marry. Having saved her from disgrace
by marrying her, Gabriel holds her sexual sin over
her head throughout their marriage. Florence, who
has learned the deep emotional price of attempting