ABSTRACT
The second chapter, comparing and contrasting the theme of romantic love in novel and play, takes for its central focus a text from each in which the hero, in a cerebral, trance-like state, takes ritual leave of love of the flesh in the belief that this divestment of the bodily self is integral to achievement of his destiny; Hamlet as single-minded righteous avenger ‘born’ to set wrong right, described, as in a dumb-show, transfixing Ophelia with a scarifying gaze as he harrows her physical self from his gaze; Bao-yu, while unquestioning of his spiritual affinity with Dai-yu, finds himself infused by a wave of ‘lust of the flesh’ for her romantic rival and is left ‘gawping’ in a state of dawning conviction that his matrimonial destiny is a choice of spirit over flesh – ‘lust of the mind’. Where this leaves romantic love – the unity of body and mind – is the issue for both writers: in play and novel, the love between hero and heroine is represented at the outset as ineluctably romantic, a purity of body and soul in its literary expression, and the bodily divestment and self-division of the hero is represented as a form of temporary madness under pressure of the real world debasing love as carnality or ‘love-sickness’ and demanding its sacrifice to uphold the honour of the family dynasty. This is the site of the sacrifice of the romantic heroines; each writer’s answer to the ‘difficult question’ of the role of the hero in their suffering and suicide.
