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A Country Love Story presents the destruction of an earthly heaven by the word that created it. The story concentrates upon a couple that moved to the countryside to find their peace, peace recommended by doctor Tellenbach especially for Daniel who was in a sanatorium for a year. It is a kind of withdrawal in a peaceful word in which only good things are expected to happen. But in life nothing happens, as we would expect it.
Everything is turned upside down by destiny, fate that is unknown to us. This happens in our story, too. The main ideas of the story are built on a series of contradictions (man ~ female, past ~ present, reality ~ imagination, nature ~ human nature) that occur in the life of Daniel and May at a moment when their marriage suffers a break caused by a limit situation. The main conflict emerges from these contradictions that center on the word, that created the world and gathered people, but meanwhile, it is capable to separate them. This statement is valid in our case too.
The first strange thing that May noticed is that they were silent too much of the time and their silence was often nettlesome to her. Silence is an equivalent of the lack of communication that destroys the unity of a couple. Each of them has another aim in life. We are told that the raison decirctre for Daniel is to write a book, that is to express his scientific ideas by means of words while May tries to use words to communicate with her husband. But Daniels leaving her without words thrown her into a world of silence, guilt, and anxiety, a world of imagination. At the beginning of their journey, we can identify in Daniel and May the primordial couple.
When they bought the new house, their marriage flourished; they shared everything: ideas, charming sights, love and even the house. It was for them like a second honeymoon. In fact, they had a common aim: to mend the house. Eventually, winter came and the major works of the house were to be postponed. Having no more the mutual aim, Daniel estranged from May. This freeze of their relationship freezes Time for May in a way predicted by Doctor Tellenbach's words: a long illness removes a thoughtful man from his fellow beings.
It is like living with an exacting mistress who is not content with half a mans attention, but must claim it all. The couple undergoes a transformation caused by the lack of communication between Daniel and May. We may say that they fall down from the earthly heaven and this fall reminds us of the destructive power of the Word. Another contradiction is set up between the real world of the characters and their inner perspectives. Being in the countryside, we expect characters to find their tranquility and peace, to understand each other and to be happy, as opposed to the stress and rush of the city life that would probably tear away their marriage. But things do not work like this.
Although being in the countryside, their relation is tensioned and harmonious. They always have verbal quarrels and cannot understand each other. A Country Love Story presents us the stream of consciousness. Being neglected, May finds escape in her imagination and tries to find her lost happiness. The reader must reflect on the strangeness of the title that was supposed to express the idea of a happy couple who lives the most beautiful days of their lives in romantic scenery in the countryside. Mays suffering derives from the fact that she believed in her marriage and its security: the look of her husband frightened her and she remembered the Doctors words.
The story deals with different types of conflict: on one hand, the external conflict between the characters (Tellenbach ~ May, Daniel ~ May) and, on the other hand, the inner conflict in Mays consciousness (Mays feeling of guilt). The latter is developed to a greater extent because it refers to thoughts that are not so easy to express. In fact, the external conflict that starts with loneliness: I have nothing to do! I got sick!
leads to a psychological one, which is deeper and thoroughly presented. Characters are both flat and round. They are presented either by their behaviour or by their thoughts. Hence, we know that May is sensitive, generous and full of life. In Boston she frequented concerts, recitals; she did good deeds for cripple children and she even tried to cure the soul of her husband buying him presents to lighten his tedium. Having given up her city life, now she became to long for it.
Her behaviour has a well-defined reason: an insolent and insensitive person, who is absorbed by his book, that is her narrow-minded and selfish husband forced her to try to escape reality. The story presents Mays evolution that makes her desire another life. Thus she retreats in a sleep, but she wants to push away the obese sleep as if it was a door. Actually, the sleep is a door for the words of reverie and dream. However she doesnt find this world good enough to cure her soul. May shifts her mind towards another world, the world correlated with the sleigh.
The sleigh, the left-motif of the story, helps her make a digression in the past. The more the conflict between Daniel and May develops, the less her interest in everything around her becomes. She realized that love - the very center of their beings overgrew invisible. The house became their common enemy, bringing disaster to them. The scholarship and the illness of Daniel usurped her place in his life. Her only thought focuses on the sleigh and on the smell of the barn that are the main symbolic elements of the story.
She correlates the sleigh with the past and the happiness of this past "here must have been much life within this house once but long ago. At the beginning the sleigh was a picturesque detail, but gradually it became a distracting obsession for both of them. At the beginning they wanted to remove thin obsession, but they did nothing about it. it seemed a part of the yard as the trees. As time passed, the sleigh was regarded differently by Daniel and May. Daniel found it a whimsical, irrelevant thing, while May thought that the sleigh should be the subject of their communication.
In fact, she wanted to reestablish the communication between them, but she found that it was no use doing it. There can be done a certain comparison between Pavlov's theory of instincts and Mays reaction when seeing the sleigh or smelling the scent of the barn. Every time she went out to the barn for firewood, she felt a certain smell that reminded her of the love she nourished towards her husband. She may have wanted to re-light the fire of their love. Another interesting idea is that of the juxtaposition of the woods.
The wood of elm being in juxtaposition with the wood of the sleigh connects present to past and reminds her of their passionate life. Another coincident opositorum is that the pattern of human development does not always work as the pattern of natural cycle of rebirth death. Although in winter the nature is dead or is waiting for a new revival, in Mays inner world things are reversed. It was winter but May felt a certain stirring of life within herself and meanwhile she had no wish for the spring to come. She had no wish for anything beautiful in life, like planting the garden, seeing the sea, seeing children, etc. she wants to stop Time, as Faust did.
May felt herself guilty. First, because her marriage was on the point of destruction, and second, for having found herself an imaginary lover. Actually she imagined an alter ego of her husband, a man with costly clothes, with urbane and anticipatory manners, a man whom she can complain about her problems, a man from the past who is supposed to bring her happiness. She began feeling herself guilty of betraying her husband. She lived with her daily dishonour, ashamed, stubbornly clinging to her secret. This is the way she nursed her wounds.
In what Daniel is concerned, he is right the opposite of his wife. He is reasonable, resolute, rude, and insensitive. He is characterized through hid deeds and through the ideas that May has about him. He accused May of doing something, but he did not look into a mirror. The setting is not chosen at random. Everything happens during one year, but the crisis covers only the winter.
The masses of snow symbolize the cold distance that separates them also, the white, supposed to bring calmness and warmth in their relationship becomes either as white as the sheet of paper on which Daniel would write his thoughts, or as white as the immaculate space in which May would find her loneliness. The house with the pitfalls symbolizes the condition of their marriage, the gap that makes us see the difference between appearance and reality. It is worth noticing that they did not manage to mend their house and neither their marriage. The story is written in the third person narrative, which means that the narrator provides us the story, by standing behind the curtain, thus giving us the possibility of interpreting the story from our point of view. The narrator makes use of irony in order to give us all the subtle contradictions of a human being. Contradicting the rules of nature and those of civilization develops this irony into the meaning of the title and into the names of the characters (May).
While nature is dead May feels happy and wants to stop Time. When spring is to come, she has no desire for it, as she feels she has lost everything, even her Hope. The tone of the narrator is a nonjudgmental one, letting us to judge the story. The story should be associated with the myth of the eternal return, as May is always waiting for somebody's return (her husbands return, her lovers return, her hopes return). Her waiting is motivated: she waits for her husbands love to form the primordial couple and to return in the earthly heaven by means of words i. e.
communication.
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Research essay sample on Lack Of Communication External Conflict
