Is it Really Love, or Just Convenience?
The Beggar Maid
 |
| King Cophetua and The Beggar Maid, Edward Burne-Jones |
"Patrick Blatchford was in love with Rose. This had become a fixed, even furious, idea with him. For her, a continual surprise."
As said in the story's opening line, "The Beggar Maid" tells the story of Rose and Patrick. However, whether they are in love is arguable. The story reflects a relationship between two people of different social statuses, founded on an unexpected incident and imagined ideal, and held together by a necessity to feel liked and secure.
From the very beginning, stark contrast is presented between Patrick and Rose. Firstly in their social class, and secondly in their desires. Patrick is not only from a more well-off family than Rose, but he is also very certain and direct with what he wants. Rose, on the other hand, doesn't seem to know what she wants. This is clear from the opening lines, where Patrick decides he is in love with Rose and then continually suspends their relationship upon this accepted truth.
"You don't know how I love you."
Patrick not only uses the idea that he is in love with Rose as a foundation for their relationship, but also envisions their relationship in a specific way. Coming from a rich family, he has spent his entire life surrounded by tradition, art, humanities, and romanticism. This is clear in the way he imagines his relationship with Rose. The reality of it is that he is a well-off boy chasing a poor, fat scholarship girl, almost entirely because he enjoys both the comfort of her assumed love for him and because she is the opposite of what his parents want for him. The entire thing is crafted in a way that the only real goal of the relationship is to inflate his ego, giving him a false sense of security and independence.
While this is the reality of the romance, Patrick manages to effectively ignore it. Instead of seeing the truth, he imagines a version of the story in which he is the savior of the whole narrative. This begins when he first meets Rose after she has had her leg grabbed by an assumed stranger. Here he imagines himself as the hero, rescuing a damsel in distress. Meanwhile, Rose is, in fact, quite alright and forgets the incident sooner than he would like. Patrick sees the leg-grabbing as his opportunity to step into a heroic light that his skinniness and intelligence have so long denied him. He believes "rescuing" Rose is a way for him to be more than he is, to be manly and bold and brave. However, for him to embody the role of the hero, something he is not, he needs someone to save.
"I'm glad you're poor. You're so lovely. You're like the Beggar Maid."
Patrick not only crafts an imagined persona for himself, but by extension, he crafts one for Rose. He compares her to the Beggar Maid of Edward Burne-Jones's King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. Patrick envisions himself as the rich king, worshiping a beautiful, young Beggar Maid in love. However, when Rose views the painting later, she sees the truth of the matter. The Beggar Maid is "meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet," full of "milky surrender," "helplessness," and "gratitude." Rose knows that is not her. Yet she also knows that King Cophetua, "sharp and swarthy," "clever and barbaric," is not Patrick. The King holds "none of that flinching, that lack of faith, that seemed to be revealed in all transactions with Patrick."
This painting is central to the story, as it demonstrates Patrick's imagined ideal, yet also proves the falsity of that ideal. It also forces both Rose and the reader to acknowledge the impossibility of Rose and Patrick's relationship working out. However, Rose doesn't leave Patrick. Why? Why do they stay together when they know their relationship is rooted in some impossible imagined fantasy?
"When people said how happy she must be she did think herself happy. It was as simple as that."
The answer is security. Comfort. It's the reason Rose doesn't take her ring off after breaking her engagement to Patrick. She loves the unfamiliar feeling of being envied, yes, but she is envied because she is in what appears to be a perfect relationship. From an outsider's perspective, Rose and Patrick appear to be in love because they've been together for such a long time, and because they seem to act so very affectionate with each other. However, Rose's hatred for all of Patrick's sentiments makes it very clear that even if he does love her, she certainly does not reciprocate; and even an outsider can see the more physical problems in their relationship, as many people suspect Rose only stays with Patrick for his wealth.
"It was a miracle; it was a mistake. It was what she had dreamed of; it was not what she wanted."
This wealth is the only thing in their relationship that echoes the painting. Patrick is not a King. He is not bold, brave, or strong. He is intelligent, desperate, and pathetic, and he knows it. To prove his false beliefs and idealism true, he asks Rose over and over "Do you love me? Do you really love me?" While this strengthens his beliefs by forcing her to counter his statements of "I suppose I don't seem very manly," his repeated pleas for encouragement and attention altogether weaken their relationship from Rose's perspective, as it further exposes the reality that she does not love him, and he is not very manly. Likewise, as he keeps telling Rose how delicate and lovely she is, he is reinforcing his own beliefs in their idealized relationship. However, the juxtaposition of the Beggar Maid's traits and Rose's reality only makes it clearer to her how little she likes Patrick and how far she is from his ideal partner.
"Patrick loved her. What did he love?"
The visits to Patrick and Rose's families only make this contrast between fantasy and reality clearer. When she visits Patrick's family, Rose sees how very childish and unfamiliar with the average lifestyle they all are. She feels despised by them and also feels as though in order to be liked she has to force herself to be something she isn't. On the other hand, when Patrick visits Rose's family, he is disgusted by their poverty, though it's clear they have far more familial connection and love in their homes than he has in his. Patrick and Rose's respective families function as an extension of Patrick and Rose themselves. Patrick's family expands his patronizing, snobbish nature, while Rose's family embodies her roots of poverty and community, which she has been hiding. Patrick's disgust with Rose's family reflects the way he feels toward the true Rose, rather than the way he feels toward his imagined version of her. Likewise, Rose's discomfort while visiting Patrick's family reflects her discomfort in the relationship as a whole.
Patrick is not the only one who desires a partner he does not have. Just as he wishes Rose had the meekness and innocence of the Beggar Maid, Rose wishes he had the boldness and ferocity of King Cophetua. She continually provokes him in hopes of making him react in anger or fierceness, simply because she is desperate to see some semblance of what she knows he is not. That is the difference between Rose and Patrick's desired partners. While Patrick never sees or loves the real Rose, Rose knows he is not what she wants. She knows he is pale and weak, and deep down she knows he'll never change. She wants the security of being loved and the envy that it brings from others, even though she knows she doesn't feel the same love and her efforts to change that are unsuccessful.
"I never loved you. I never wanted to. It was a mistake."
This is why it's so freeing for Rose when she finally confesses that she does not love Patrick, when she breaks off their engagement. For the first time since she met him, she can live in reality. She is free from lying to herself and to him. To live in truth, in reality, is far more comfortable than any illusion of comfort provided by being "loved." This is why Rose and Patrick never would've worked out, no matter how many times they tried. They kept returning to each other hoping to feel love, yet knowing that they wouldn't because they prioritized security and comfort. However, each time their loneliness was conquered, they remembered how much they despised having to lie to one another. And so continued their years-long struggle between their inherent desires for truth and for community. This is why they keep coming back to each other and then running for the hills again.
"How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures? Oh, Patrick could. Patrick could."
Rose hates Patrick because she hates the necessity of lying to him and never being truly seen. She was able to hate him because she never saw him as anything other than what he was. She never loved him at all. Yet throughout the whole length of the story, Patrick claims to love Rose. Why is it that when he finally sees her again after their divorce, he looks at her with such hatred? Patrick wanted to marry Rose. This is something Munro makes clear to the reader in the first paragraph of the story, and it is a desire that stems from the traditional lifestyle he was raised in. Though he and Rose fought and split up many times, that promise of a wedding was always waiting at the end, and even after they were married the fighting didn't matter because he had comfort in the fact that she was still his wife. Their divorce shattered Patrick's desires, and it shattered his perception of Rose. With no hold on her, he had no reason to imagine her as anything other than what she was. He no longer saw her as the Beggar Maid. He saw her as a poor girl, just like her family, and he despised her.
Rose was right. Just as she never loved Patrick, he never loved her. This is why he can look at her with such hatred upon their meeting in the airport. Patrick hated Rose. He only ever loved the Beggar Maid, the version of Rose he made up in his head in order to inflate his own ego and provide himself comfort and security in the belief that he had found some meaningful place in the world. Though it's a sad reality to face, its sadness would have been less had Patrick and Rose both acknowledged the truth early on, rather than spending years attempting to sustain a nonexistent reality.
"All the time, moving and speaking, she was destroying herself for him, yet he looked right through her, through all the distractions she was creating, and loved some obedient image that she herself could not see."
Comments
Post a Comment