I’ve seen the movie but had never before now read the novel, Rebecca. I’m up to chapter six, and I’m not sure I like the mode of the narrative. The retrospective approach, interspersed with moments of the present, leaves so much mysterious because the narrator knows but does not include the reader in her knowledge. Mystery is the point. I know. And then the character of the narrator—she reminds me of how much more interesting is Jane Eyre, who in similar circumstances proves to have a real spine. Oh—and Max de Winter is worse than Rochester.
At any rate, the narrator, middle aged now but barely twenty-one in the past, is what one would call a wimp. She sets my teeth on edge. She also passes judgments that leave me wondering. At the start of the fifth chapter, for instance, the narrator says that she is “glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.” I think she is right about the fever and the burden, although not about the cause of those sentiments. Flaccid and malleable as she is, she says they derive from “little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.”
Yes indeed in the fierce tumult of first love one does bruise and wound very easily. But for me it was not the “barbed word” that raised the bruise, inflicted the wound. It was something more complex than a word meant to wound—indeed by the time such a word came to be exchanged the love would have been gone, or at least deeply compromised.
The groundwork for the troubles of first love is more like what Shakespeare suggests in Much Ado, not a sharp or piercing word but rather the fear that in the exchange of self and self that makes love love the identity of the lover, the very personhood will be lost. That is a fearsome reality for anyone, but especially for youngsters finding themselves in real love for the first time. First love, real first love, for people just coming into a full sense of who and what they are, is more than difficult to navigate.
Claudio seems to be a young man in the first blush of finding himself. His sense of relationship comes from that delicate stage of self identity. Because that is the case, I do not believe that Claudio is in love, at least not in the sort of love that produces a true merging of selves. To be sure, Benedick is astonished at the apparent transformation of his hail-fellow friend. Claudio, who now he seems in love has, seems to Benedick to have become an entirely changed man: “I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see a good armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet.” But those changes are superficial at best, a “fashion,” mere posturing as is conventionally expected from a young man “in love.” Still, they provoke Benedick to consider his own condition. He wonders whether “love may transform me to an oyster,” and concludes that “till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool.”
Unwilling at that moment to contemplate the truth of the matter, that he is already in love with Beatrice, Benedick throws love under the bus, so to speak, making his conversion into lover as improbable as his being turned into an oyster. But under the oyster joke lies the reality of his fear, that love has the power to convert a person from one to another identity. By the end of the scene in question, and falsely assured by Don Pedro’s plot to catch him that Beatrice already loves him so he cannot lose face, he affirms that he “will be horribly in love with her.” The language here works in the same humorous way that he had used earlier to throw love under the bus. But in fact he has already lost himself, his identity, his personhood. He may not be an oyster, but he certainly is not the Benedick who enters in the first scene of the play.
Benedick’s transformation comes, it seems, at at a time when he is old enough to know who and what he is, and so is able and willing, though hesitant, to forego his own identity and allow love to transform him into something new, if perhaps not something rich and strange. The love is strong, powerful—so much so that he is willing to abandon Don Pedro, his prince, the prince’s patronage, and the expectation of a bright future that such patronage enables.
Claudio’s “love,” properly in quotation marks, is of a different order. It leads to the posturing that Benedick has already noted. Claudio is really purely conventional. He behaves exactly as his social world supposes natural for a lover. He has “turned orthography”; “his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.” Claudio adopts the “fantastical” and “strange” language of convention—Rosaline Love's Labours Lost might urge him, “sans sans.”
Shakespeare details the difference between the two men. Claudio’s exchanging the martial “fife and drum” for “the tabour and the pipe” of the lover depends on externalities. When Benedick comes to seek Leonato’s approval for his seeking Beatrice’s hand, on the other hand, although there are surface differences that prove he has been careful about his appearance, the change also addresses the man himself, who now speaks to Leonato seriously: “I have studied eightor nine wise words to speak to you, which these hobby-horses must not hear.” This is not the jokesters whose first words in the play are a bad, even indecent joke, one of the many references to cuckoldry that made G. B Shaw dislike the play so much.
The focus of Claudio’s love is obvious in his first question to Don Pedro about Hero as a possible bride: “Hath Leonato,” Hero’s dad, “any son, my lord?” Don Pedro understands perfectly well the point of the question, and responds, “No child but Hero; she's his only heir.” I don’t want to put too heavy a burden on the word that Don Pedro uses to ascertain Claudio’s purpose, but it is suggestive: “Dost thou affect her, Claudio?”
An affectation is not the same thing as love. It does suggest that the “love” for Hero is really about something else, as Don Pedro’s comment about Leonato’r heir already implies. The same self-interested venality remains in place when in the denouement of the comedy Claudio agrees to marry Hero’s supposed cousin because Hero, he is made to think, has died. Leonato has promised Claudio that the cousin “alone is heir to both of us,” of his brother and himself. Hurray for a double inheritance, although, alas and alack, at the cost of one dead Hero. Claudio doesn’t mind the cost. Certainly the elegiac verse that he inscribes on a scroll to be hung on Hero’s supposed tomb is, at best, conventional. It never acknowledges Claudio’s culpability in what has happened, and ends with what amounts to a cutting off of grief and a washing away of responsibility: “Hang thou [the scroll] there upon the tomb, / Praising her when I am dumb.”
As the marriages of Claudio and the “cousin” and of Beatrice and Benedick are about to take place, several women enter masked. Among them is Beatrice and the “cousin” to be given in marriage to Claudio. Claudio’s reaction as he sees the “cousin” for the first time is “Here come other reckonings.” Not exactly words of love, but certainly in line with what seems to underlie Claudio’s “love,” a matter of contract between families. The contractual basis for Claudio’s “love” explains why Claudio had all but asked Don Pedro to woo Hero on his behalf. Amused by his courtier's transparent purpose, Don Pedro agrees to be the mouthpiece for Claudio’s wooing:
If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it,
And I will break with her and with her father,
And thou shalt have her. Was't not to this end
That thou began'st to twist so fine a story?
Nothing quite like a prince to act as go-between, in effect a godfather to the proposed marriage, and so to assure Claudio a brilliant future. Conventional as Claudio’s contract-seeking marriage is, Don Pedro approves:
By contrast, while Claudio is willing to marry “other reckonings” sight unseen, Benedick is much more circumspect. When the friar urges the gathered company to move quickly to the chapel so that the wedding ceremonies can take place, Benedick stops him. “Soft and fair, friar. Which is Beatrice?” Benedick is not contracting marriage with a woman. He is wedding Beatrice in particular, a companion whom he loves so deeply that he is willing, happy even, to be made an oyster. The companionship is fraught, as is demonstrated in the constant bickering that the two aim at each other. But that bickering really expresses the fear they have in encountering another person who compels a transformation of the self into something new.
In Benedick’s case, that fear of being transformation into something that leaves aside his own personhood, is what he must overcome, must fight so as to live the true love he has for Beatrice. The transformation is the real bruise and wound that makes first love so very difficult to navigate. Beatrice too has to overcome her fear of being dominated by Benedick and so converting herself into someone new. Falling again into the bickering mode, Benedick is compelled to ask “Then you do not love me?” Beatrice replies, “No, truly, but in friendly recompense.” One more nudge from Leonato and Claudio overwhelms the bickering. Both are sufficiently assured of their self to make a leap into the mutual bond.
First love comes at a particularly fraught moment in the development of a person’s identity and personhood. I was eighteen, perhaps a tad older than Claudio seems to be and so
The first steps towards that self-definition took place in the context of very powerful peer pressure. It was not malevolent in any way, any more really than the pressures on Claudio to be the successful courtier and rising aristocrat. But there’s no doubt that in moving away from the morass of family expectations I was absorbed into a different, even more powerful world of peer expectation. And at the beginning of my college life I adapted myself very well to those expectations much as Claudio adapts to the role of soldier and courtier. I was, if not a shining star in the cinema firmament, then at least an ember in the hippiedom of 1970.
In the vacuous words of some kid with whom I had a random conversation one evening, I knew where it was at. To be honest, I knew very little of what “it” was, let alone of what “I” was outside the conventions of hippiedom. I had no clue at all about what sort of person I really was or what a relationship with another person would demand of me and my identity. I was cool for the first time in my life, and I thought that coolness defined the person I actually was. My encounter with the universe of college was not as clear cut a contract as Claudio’s relation to Hero’s family and Don Pedro’s power and authority, but it surely was a socially embedded, deeply embedded, phenomenon.
And then I met my first love.
I was not pure Claudio. I saw the challenge that love presented to my new-found identity. My dilemma was like Benedick’s, then, because I recognized that, were that love to subsume me, I would have lost my coolness in the companionship of the beloved—me-you/you-me would erase the “I” that I’d developed. In the language of “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” “I” would be subsumed completely, and she and I would defy all convention, reason itself. We'd become “Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.” I would not be transformed into an oyster, but definitely altered from the “cool” that I then enjoyed into something entirely new, entirely unknown.
My first love was a lovely young woman, and not only or even primarily because she was beautiful, although beautiful she certainly was. As kids in high school say, she was way out of my league. More importantly, she was also a serious human being, someone whom I could admire, esteem, adore. In retrospect it’s clear to me that I would have been fortunate to lose the facile, conventional personhood that I’d just cobbled together in accepting her and the power of that first love to convert me.
She would have been less fortunate, let’s say.
Lucky for her, I was not ready to be Benedick. I feared the loss of my identity. I placed my engagement with buddies, that silly coolness, above engagement with love. I wish I could have been Benedick. But I was Claudio, too absorbed in the construction of a separate personhood, the last phase of adolescence, to understand what my first love could have built.
And then there was my second love. By that point I had long passed the self-construction part of life and was ready, more than ready, to engage in making the pearl that oysters produce. That second love was—rather, is as beautiful, if not more so as my first love. She has a character so strong, so admirable, that after forty-five years of marriage it still astonishes me. She is principled. She is sharp. She is straightforward. She is wonderful.
Our first year together was maybe a little like what Shakespeare gives us in the initial relationship of Beatrice and Benedick. We did not indulge in a “merry war of wits,” to be sure, but we did rub up against each other in sometimes uncomfortable ways. The discomfort seems to me inevitable. Two fully-formed characters facing each other front to front will necessarily frown from time to time. The result? Bruises and wounds. They were not fatal nor long-lasting. In the long term, on the contrary, we wore away the rough edges that caused the bruises and the wounds. In the end? A merging together of selves so that she and I together have become “a single cherry, double-parted.”
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