tartuFFe; Paine, Thomas: aGe oF reason, the;
Pirandello, Luigi: six characters in search
oF an author; Shakespeare, William: haMLet;
otheLLo; Silko, Leslie Marmon: aLManac oF
the dead; Sophocles: antiGone; Twain, Mark:
adventures oF toM sawyer, the.
FURTHER READING
Buchanan, Allen, and Deborah Matthieu. “Philosophy
and Justice.” In Justice: Views from the Social Sciences,
edited by Ronald L. Cohen, 12–36. New York: Ple-
num Press, 1986.
Kiskis, Michael J. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Again!): Teaching for Social Justice or Samuel
Clemens’ Children’s Crusade.” Mark Twain Annual
1 (2003): 63–77.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. 1971. Reprint, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple
love
There is perhaps no other theme in world literature
as prevalent, provocative, diverse—and perenni-
ally compelling—as that of love or its absence. An
integral part of the human experience in its various
forms, love is also a key if highly complex compo-
nent of what writers and critics have tried to express
for their readers. Exploring different kinds and con-
sequences of love in literary works can thus serve to
define what it means as a theme within particular
cultural contexts and genres as well as in our lives.
But a distinction must first be made between the
word love’s common usage (as in, “I loved lunch”)
and its deeper, more intense and abstract meanings
with which we are primarily concerned here.
Among the most common kinds of love depicted
in literature is that between family members. Mar-
riage, a familiar ending of many comedic plays,
tends either to be the culmination of romantic
love (discussed below) or a matter of convenience,
such as money and social status, often by parental,
political, or economic arrangements. Jane Austen’s
novels, such as sense and sensibiLity and pride
and preJudice, are prime expositions of the theme
of tensions that can arise between the two marriage
motives, one love-based and the other not. Sustained
lack of love in a marriage can lead to estrangement,
separation, divorce, or extramarital affairs (adultery,
considered a sin in many religions), in which one
spouse seeks out the love, affections, or opportu-
nities denied by the other elsewhere, frequently
tragically. The misadventures of Emma, the name-
sake character of Gustave Flaubert’s MadaMe
bovary, are a case in point.
A second kind of familial love, that between
parents and their children, usually differs greatly
depending on the genders, personalities, and cultural
circumstances of the individuals in the relation-
ship. Motherly love is generally described as being
boundless, tender, and attentive, while paternal love,
in contrast, is commonly depicted as unemotional
and contingent, and it often has to be earned. In the
psychologist Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Sopho-
cles’ play oedipus the kinG, such stereotypes of
parental love lead boys to seek out women like their
mothers and rebel against their fathers (or father
figures) later in life, and girls to see their mothers as
competing for their father’s love; by extension, this
makes all women jealous of their lovers’ attentions.
Many literary works follow these basic patterns,
purposefully or not.
Sibling love between brothers and sisters is not
only used literally by writers and critics; it can also
be a metaphor for specific kinds of relations between
characters unrelated by blood. The relationships
between the two twin hobbits Merry and Pippin and
between Frodo and Sam in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Lord oF the rinGs draw attention to the similarity
between biological and nonbiological sibling love.
Big Brother totalitarianism in George Orwell’s
nineteen eiGhty-Four is a satirical extension of
brotherly love, often overly protective. Fraternal
love, on the other hand, develops through bonding
experiences among men of all ages, as with certain of
the teenagers in William Golding’s Lord oF the
FLies. Sisterhood is likewise not limited to the love
between biological sisters but is a thematic term also
applied to close and affectionate relations between
women friends—as, for example, between the sisters
in Louisa May Alcott’s LittLe woMen or the
sisterly bond among the women of the older genera-
tion in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck cLub.
Another kind of love quite unlike familial love
is that which characters and people can have forlove 67