Mr.
Moeller's introduction to When Does Romantic Love Grow into Mature Love?
Cyrano de Bergerac remains
without doubt Edmond Rostand's best-known romantic drama. Unlike
A Doll's
Housethat focuses on the
growth of childlike affection into mature realization of the nature of
true love, Rostand's concern is young love, romantic love (eros)
that becomes Cyrano's and Roxane's consuming passion. In this beauty-and-the-beast
story, Cyrano must love Roxane from afar because he cannot but believe
that his deformity (his grotesque nose) repulses her. Nevertheless,
Cyrano makes her happiness his happiness. Through letters that Cyrano
writes for the inept Christian, Roxane falls in love with him. However,
Cyrano eventually realizes it was his masterful letters that had brought
Roxane and Christian together. Nevertheless, after Christian is killed
in war, for fifteen years Cyrano defends Christianís love for Roxane
while denying his own. To the end, Roxaneís happiness was his sole
concern. Basic question: Even as he dies, why does Cyrano refuse
to reveal to Roxane that he had loved her all his life?
Although the 1987 film version
of Rostand's play, Roxanne, starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, follows
the original story line, there are major differences in characterization
and plot. Basic question for comparison-contrast discussion: Given
the major differences in characterization and plot, why would Rostand reject
this contemporary interpretation of his play?
In the climatic confrontation
between between husband and wife, when Torvald asks Nora how she can neglect
"her most sacred dutiesî to him and her children, Nora replies: ìI have
another duty, equally sacred--my duty to myself." Nora then leaves
her family slamming the door behind herself. When Nora leaves the
doll's house, it is the birth of her self-assertion. However, when
Ibsen's, A Doll's House was first performed in 1879, some producers
found its resolution was so shocking that they insisted on having
Nora and Torvald reconcile. But Ibsen would have none of it.
In an open letter to a Norwegian newspaper, he wrote: "I cannot possibly
directly authorize any change whatever in the ending of the drama. . .
it was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was written."
Basic questions: What and how
does each relationship between Nora and Doctor Rank, Nora and Krogstad,
and Christine and Nora contribute to Nora's emancipation? Why does
Ibsen say that the entire play was written for the sake of the last scene? |
