Heart vs. Head: And so what have we learned, children?

For the last week this blog has looked at the dichotomy between the heart (emotions, passions, intuition) versus the head (logic, reason, thought). But is there anything to be learned from these books about how we should balance our own head and heart?

From The Fall of the House of Usher: Don’t kill off your emotions (or your sister, for that matter*) or they’ll come back with a vengeance…literally. 

From Sense and Sensibility: Don’t give a lock of your hair to just anybody. 

And if you keep writing to the guy who left you suspiciously without sealing the engagement formally, a) that’s stalking and b) maybe he’s just not that into you. 

Besides, what’s wrong with Alan Rickman anyway? Tons of Snape fangirls just don’t get it.

As for you, Elinors of the world: If you keep your secret love a secret, even when his other secret love keeps inexplicably dumping her confidences on you, eventually you will prevail. Except that she’ll also prevail, having heir-hopped to the brother that is much more her type and also has recently been made the sole inheritor to the family fortune. Ugh. 

Heart vs. Head: "Great Expectations" and "Hard Times

To conclude this series on the Heart vs. the Head, I’m going to look at two similar characters from Charles Dickens. Both are young women who are trained to deny their emotions, with dire implications. 

I find it interesting that of all the characters I’ve analyzed in this series, almost all of them are women. Maybe this is because women are (stereotypically) the more emotional and intuitive of the sexes, while men are stereotypically logical. If these novels were always proponents for reason over feeling, I would be led to believe that the moral would be “Stop being so emotional, woman!” But it isn’t. Almost all of these stories let the heart win, or encourage a balance of feeling and thought rather than total suppression of feeling. 

In the following two novels, Dickens explores what happens when people do suppress their emotions.



Heart vs. Head: "Middlemarch"

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch has been called “the first novel written for adults” because of its complexity and attention to realism. The novel follows three main plotlines which intertwine at various junctures throughout the story. We’ll only be looking at one of them, which is the plotline that follows the beautiful young lady, Dorothea in her journey of self-discovery. 

Dorothea and her sister Celia Brooke are very much like Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Where Celia and Marianne are impetuous and emotional, Elinor and Dorothea are deliberate and thoughtful. When Dorothea refuses the proposal of Sir James Chettam, Celia (who has been gaga over him all along) immediately snatches him up. 

Heart vs. Head: "Jane Eyre"





Many Jane fans (of Austen-and-Eyre variety) will be disappointed to find out that Charlotte Brontë was not much of a fan of Jane Austen. Remember that the Brontë sisters were writing at the beginning of the Victorian Era, specifically the Romantic Period of the arts, which was directly reacting against the Enlightenment Period in which Jane Austen wrote.

Yet for all their differences, Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen were a lot alike in their presentation of women characters in literature. (Compare the titular character in Jane Eyre with Fanny Price from Mansfield Park for just one example.) The stories might have been set in societies where men ran the show, but the women are active participants in their stories, and their choices greatly affect the outcome of their lives.

Heart vs. Head: "Sense and Sensibility"

 

The connection between the theme of Head vs. Heart and this Jane Austen classic should be pretty well evident in the title of her novel. Sense and Sensibility describes the two main characters, sisters Elinor and Marianne, in a manner that is far more clear than her similarly titled Pride and Prejudice  (Which one’s “pride”? Which one’s “prejudice”? Elizabeth and Darcy have their moments of each!).

Also, where Pride and Prejudice names two flaws in the characters, Sense and Sensibility names one strength, and one failing. 

(Just a side note, here, for the current generation: in “olden times” the word “sensibility” was used for one’s capacity to feel emotions. I point it out because it would be quite easy to mistake the word for the similar-sounding “sensible,” which is practically an antonym. The title Sense and Sensibility means “Wisdom and Feeling” rather “Wisdom and Wisdom.” The latter just wouldn’t make…er…sense.)

Heart vs. Head: "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Warning: I’m going to spoil the “twist” of this story in the first paragraph.  The rest of the entry isn’t much better, either.
 

Apart from evoking images of Tim Burton’s cinematography, I admit I didn’t initially get much out of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Fall of the House of Usher.  It didn’t make sense that Roderick would bury his sister alive without any apparent reason. 

And so, Sparknotes to the rescue! (Sure, reading Sparknotes is no substitute for reading the real thing, but once you've read the real thing I've found it's a good source for helping you think more about the themes and connections in a piece of literature.) 

A common theme of Poe is the idea of doubles, of two people being two sides to the same coin: the same, yet also opposite. It makes sense in the context of Poe’s writing that he was using a sort of Doppelganger mythos in his stories.

Heart vs. Head: Introduction

 

A common theme in many stories is the dichotomy between emotions and reason. Maybe this arises because novelists need both to tell a story well: reason to craft the narrative in a way that readers can understand, and emotions to create characters that are relatable. Textbooks make us think. Novels make us feel. Great literature incites us to do both.

In my upcoming entries I plan to look at books where the characters represent these two characteristics, or where one character is presented the choice of whether to follow their head or their heart.