One thing that kept hitting me while reading The Legend of Yamato section was just how often, across all cultures, there are tales of women who love unworthy men - completely and utterly love them. In the section, Tacibana becomes Yamato’s wife. It starts as all do - with everyone happy and in love, and then the other shoe drops. Yamato gets bored. So what does he do? Wander off and goes to find another maiden to love.
Old Japan (and indeed many other older cultures) may have allowed polygamy as long as the man could support each family, but in the story itself this move is said to have been to Yamato’s shame. For Tacibana was perfect in every way, she was the ideal wife for the standards of that time. Yet Yamato gets bored and starts to go pursue sirens. Tacibana doesn’t yell, she doesn’t rage, she just weeps for her portion and waits for him to return, praying all the while for his safe journey.
Like, really? Seriously?
This sort of thing likes to happen in literature a lot, and it’s not just in fairy tales and folklore. In The Gilded Age, a Mark Twain novel, we see women who hang on their husband’s every word, agree docily with them all the while, and even when abused and left for dead they return longing for love. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream we have characters like Helena, who follows after Demetrius trying to get his love even when he curses her and threatens to rape her. Victor Hugo wrote Eponine in Les Miserables, who follows after Marius wherever he goes. Marius is entirely blind to her devotion, but Eponine loves him so much she actually introduces him to the girl he’s in love with! And then if that weren’t bad enough, she later follows him to the barricades to remain beside him during their tiny revolution and gets shot by soldiers on her way there.
Come on ladies, wake up and smell the roses! When a man dumps you, sob for three weeks, devour mass amounts of chocolate, and move on. If a man is unworthy, dump his sorry butt. Life isn’t a romance novel. And I understand that yes, women do get that lovesick crazy so there’s serious precedent for this literature trope but after a while you just get sick of it. High literature should be about so much more than this.
"He was never mine to lose. Why regret what could not be?
These are words he'll never say - not to me."
Lyrics from Les Miserables, "A Heart Full of Love". Image of Eponine and Marius from Les Mis. Web Source.
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