McEwan, 'Enduring Love' - What does the novel have to say about love?

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Vicky Charles                                        

What does the novel have to say about love?

The website Dictionary.com offers two main definitions for the word “love.” The first describes it as, “A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.” The second, “A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.” The title, “Enduring Love,” also has a double meaning. On the one hand is the more traditional, conventional understanding: that Joe and Clarissa’s love endures the trials that befall it during the course of the book. The second meaning is the darker, more sinister meaning, the full severity of which unfolds throughout the book: that of Jed Parry’s “enduring love” for Joe.

McEwan makes a pun of the word “love” – on the one hand is the first definition, the “ineffable feeling of affection” between Joe and Clarissa. On the other is a “feeling of intense desire and attraction” which Jed feels for Joe. McEwan seems to be suggesting that love is not merely something to be celebrated in poetry and flowers, but also something to be feared. One cannot, after all, choose who they fall in love with, or who falls in love with them.

Joe and Clarissa have been together for seven years, in a “childless marriage of love.” We meet them having a welcome home picnic upon Clarissa’s return from Boston, where she has been researching Keats for 6 weeks – the longest they have been apart. They seem to be a happy couple; pleased to be reunited and even after the horrific incident with the balloon they help each other through their trauma, talking through their recollections of the event. Indeed, even when Parry’s presence first starts to become an issue, they still seem to be happily in love. However, as the book goes on, Joe and Clarissa’s relationship begins to show cracks and they start to drift apart. Clarissa feels that Joe is overreacting to Parry, suggesting several times that he “ask him in for a cup of tea and he’ll probably never bother you again.” She even hints that this may all be in Joe’s imagination; she mentions twice that Parry’s handwriting is very similar to Joe’s, suggesting that maybe she thinks he has gone mad and is writing the letters himself. Clarissa feels that Joe is handling the situation badly and has perhaps even become a little obsessed with Parry.

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Meanwhile, Joe feels hard done by, and that Clarissa is not supporting him in his time of need.  He remarks that, “to her I was manic, perversely obsessed… As far as I was concerned she was disloyal, unsupportive in this time of crisis, and irrationally suspicious.” Their relationship begins to fracture under the pressure of Parry’s stalking, and Joe’s handling of the situation. Joe describes their living situation in chapter seventeen, stating that, “we slept in the same bed, but we didn’t embrace. We used the same bathroom, but we never saw each other naked.” They have both “lost ...

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