She stared out into the sea quietly. Her eyes were as calm as the farthest reaches of the horizon, but her mind and heart were as torrential as the sea. Sitting for hours on end each day was now a pastime for her, but she hated such a routine. It consumed her.
Days went by and she looked at the port. Messengers came everyday, and delivered notices of death to the other wives, and always they missed her house. This brought comfort to her, knowing that he was still alive, but also pity for the wives who now had to mourn. So as she waited for the message declaring the men were coming home, and she tried to think positive thoughts to retain herself. She imagined him coming home, and taking her into his arms, and then the bed, that they could finally settle down and raise a family.
Then the day that everyone had been waiting for. A fisherman coming from the battlefields shouted "The war is over! We have won!" The news was received with jubilant shouts of joy. This brought a smile to her face as her hope was rekindled. Could it be that he was there in the whole campaign, that he survived battle after battle and won high honors. He would be famous then, a hero who fought, and risked dying for her people. It brought pride to her just thinking about it, the father of her child to be, a hero in the war. In a matter of days, she would be reunited with him, and she could put this all behind her.
The ships came in a fleet, and she stood there along the port. When they docked, all the young men got off, and kissed their parents, or their lovers, or their wives and children. She waited patiently, when suddenly she saw his best friend. She smiled and waved to him, and he quickly walked over and embraced her, sobbing.
"It's alright, your home now," she whispered.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he bawled.
"Why? What happened?"
He looked at her intensely. He said nothing. He didn't need to.
Dressed in black with a veil, bags in her eyes, she sat and looked out at the sea once more. Her husband's friend came by, and rested his hand on her shoulder.
"Do you still miss him?" he asked.
She simply nodded as she took one last glance at the sea. She turned around, but didn't look at him.
"Yes," she smiled sadly, her hands folded over one another, "but it's time to move on."
xXxXx
The story, based off of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and the expression that the woman in the painting gives those who look at her. It is a sublime story that evokes many of the concepts of Edmund Burke's work, "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful." The story takes a look at death from the perspective of a woman, who waits for the man she loves to return to her. In this story there is pleasure and pain, and joy and grief. The combination of the four emotional levels, and its use in the story make this a sublime story.
In one instance, during the story, the lover waits patiently for the man that she loves, and she sees messengers informing other women that their loved ones have died. Though it is painful for her to think about it, she cannot help but feel pleasure in the fact that she has not received a letter. This ties in to Burke's thoughts, "that pain and pleasure in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence," (Burke 454-455). In Burke's perspective, pain and pleasure do not necessarily come into being from the ending of the other, but rather, they are born directly from states of indifference. Indifference is another way of saying "neutral," and in the story, the state of neutrality is born from the unpredictability of the war that is occurring elsewhere. Because of the wars unpredictability, she is careful not to get her hopes up, and yet, she is optimistic of the outcome that the love of her life will return to her. This idea that the emotions are born from neutrality is integrated in the other emotions.
Joy and grief are other emotions that are considered sublime. In the part where the woman is waiting for her husband to leave the ship, she feels overwhelming joy. Not just for the end of the war, but also for her belief that her husband has finally returned. The emotion at hand is pleasure, or joy, but Burke states that, "…if the object be so totally lost that there is no chance of the enjoying it again, a passion arises in the mind, which is called grief," (Burke 457). The husband is not coming home, and this ends all pleasure in the woman's mind. Now according to Burke's ideas, she must endure the pain of grief in order to be free of pain altogether. Only when she has endured all of that does she experience a slight tinge of pleasure at the end. The moment of sublimity is when she smiles at her husband's friend when she affirms her position that she has gotten over her grief.
What makes this story sublime is the use of the different emotions that the woman experiences compressed into a very short story. The emotion of the story, like the Mona Lisa's expression in the painting, is joyful yet melancholy. This wide range of emotions all packed in gives it more power when the ending line is said.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 2nd Edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010. pgs. 454-460. Print.
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