Guiding Question: ‘The two novels I will discuss both
take in consideration the theme of love and sex, obviously each independently
from the other. How is the theme exposed to the reader through the stories of the
two female protagonists? How do the two authors contrast each other in
portraying and concerning the topic, and also how do the two different ways of
illustrating the argument remind of each other?
The aspect of the two books I would like to discuss is the theme of love
and sex and the particular shadings regarding the two which surprised me during
the reading of ‘Eleven Minutes’ by Paulo Coelho and subsequently ‘ One Hundred
Strokes of the Brush Before Bed’ by Melissa P.
The two novels are similar since the minds of the two female characters
have no secrets to the reader. This last experiences the growth of the two
girls into women. I felt this effect both within Coelho’s elaborate
descriptions of Maria’s feelings and
similarly through the confessions of Melissa’s diary which has been published
into an autobiography and it is the second novel I will now be concerning. Both
books mainly resume a couple of years of the two women-to-become protagonists
who see and reflect upon their change due to new experiences.
These experiences include the living through of love and sex. These two
elements and the relation to each other contribute to building the issue that
guides both narratives. Moreover, in both ‘adventures’, the final installment
of the girls’ personalities happens only after the long period of ‘mutation’
that shows both girls quarrelling with the same fear inside them: of not
finding love. In both the growing adolescents’ lives this agitation turns into
anxiety of inevitably ‘destroying’
themselves by actually falling in love. However in both cases, the two women
find the strength to say ‘yes’ to the change, sick of being ‘addicted’ to sex,
embarrassed of dressing the role of prostitutes.
Even the role, within which the two female protagonist identify
themselves is the same one, demonstrating once again that the similarities
concerning the two novels are multiple. Above all these similarities, however
the two narratives deal with the girls’ panic, frenetic and desperate searches
for love (to escape their filthy habit and their ‘addiction’ to it) in great
depth. Also, different narrative methods and literary techniques are applied to
the narrative’s construction; these greatly personalize the different styles.
This is what creates the differences in the two writer’s representation of the
theme.
When studying the theme and the way the authors present it, what I noticed straight away and I thought would
be interesting to discuss and reflect upon, was the presentation of the same
identical theme. Not simply that, but how this happens through two narratives
which both re-call each other being very similar for what concerns the plot,
but so different for what concerns the narrative techniques and writing style.
In order to go more in depth with this argument, the two novels have to firstly
be individually summarized and briefly analyzed. Before comparing them, it is
essential to have an overview of both.
Paulo Coelho’s narrative is clear, but at the same time extremely based
upon reflection, always extremely delicate in treating the main subject of the
story. As Paulo Coelho himself states: “I knew that my novel, Eleven Minutes,
dealt with a subject that was harsh, difficult and shocking.”.
Coelho’s comment is in my opinion a perfect summary of what the majority
of people feel. For what regards me, I was greatly surprised by the novel when
I came to discover the main theme of it. Love and sex are not so much taboo in
our society nowadays but the topic must still be discussed with extreme care as
Coelho does amazingly. Eleven minutes invites the reader to join Maria’s voyage
to Switzerland as well as the one to becoming a woman and finding love.
The way these contemporaneous voyages start is through the reader being introduced
to this Brazilian girl. The first image of her is a youngster who right away
looses self-esteem in herself as well as trust in love in a failure that causes
her a heart-break during her child-hood. From that moment, through her
adolescence and onwards she has a great ‘desire’ to experience sex, lead by her
curiosity and the fear of being left as an ‘outsider’ between her friends. She
lives through love and sex many times and is always left heart-broken loosing
her dignity and left disappointed and irreversibly upset by love. As a
consequence she asks herself why ‘When we meet someone and fall in love, we
have a sense that the whole universe is on our side […]How is it possible for
the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly.” Maria is
then casually and to her surprise invited to get involved in a modeling career
in Switzerland. The young girl afraid of making another mistake: ‘I made my
first mistake when I was eleven years old, when that boy asked me if I could
lend him a pencil...” and finds the courage to say “Yes to life.” However, life
puts Maria on trial and she finds herself trapped in a fraud of which she had
not been advised and had never minded about really in advance. She is left with
no choice but to remain in Switzerland with no job because of a mischief-maker
that cheated on her, taking advantage of her naïve and inexperienced
personality. She will therefore have to find her own way through difficulties
and try to confront the challenge of life. She desperately tries all she can
figure out to earn a decent amount of money for a living with no success. One
night, fortune knocks at her door and she casually finds herself in the Copacabana , a nightclub and is promised a great
fortune in the eventuality she engages as a prostitute for the most famous bar
of ‘Rue de Berne’, well-known centre of illegality in Geneva. Brought to a
decision by a complete situation of desperation and loneliness within her, she
accepts and is dragged in the world of prostitution. However, she doesn’t mind
selling her body as it earns her a living and she believes that as long as she
keeps up writing in her diary (which is the only thing she manages to love) to
keep ‘the purity of her soul alive’ she will never end up becoming someone else
and loosing her virtues. She goes through tough confusion and does not even
recognize herself anymore. She confesses, against her will, that she becomes
incapable of feeling love although she is dying to find “the man for her”.
Totally unexpected it happens, and he saves her, creating a relationship where
these two extremely similar souls teach each other how to build up trust for
love again, falling together in the “pool of passion”. Maria however, is
convinced she will be able to say “no” to love and go back to Brazil as she
promised herself before her departure for Europe. She is in fact strong enough
to catch the airplane back to her hometown maintaining the target she set
herself, but when Ralf Hart, shows up once again at the airport in Paris (scalo
aereo) she decided that this time it will not be a mistake, she would risk,
fate has just decided for her and there is no way to fight against love, true
love this time. “ Nevertheless, as always happened when fate took decisions for
her, she thought, once again, that she would take the risk [...] she kissed him
utterly indifferent to what happens after the words ‘the end’ appear on the
cinema screen.”
What expresses the theme of love and sex at its best in this novel is
the contradiction between the two elements of the theme, that for Maria seems
to be obvious, one is pleasurable and causes no harm whilst the other only
leads to weakness and sufferance. She cannot accept the idea of love causing
herself to be possession of someone else, neither does she want to possess any
other person. This is why sex, as she says “makes you free, it is only a question of eleven minutes and neither of
the two have obligations to respect.” However, the theme will soon be reviewed
by Maria when she decides that she does want to love Ralf Hart, the painter as
with him she wants to stay a lifetime knowing she will not be free, she is
happy this way and wants to stay with him for more than eleven purposeless
minutes. “Someone was looking at her not as an object, not even as a woman, but
as something she could not even comprehend[…] he’s seeing my soul, my fears, my
fragility, my inability to deal with a world which I pretend to master, but
about which I know nothing.”[1]
The continous contradiction of the two
elements of the theme (love and sex) is accentuated and underlined by Maria’s
emotions which she delivers and explains in her diary which with the
development of the book shows the growth of Maria, who full of experience and
freed of the confusion finally understands that Ralf Hart has taught her to
love again and she can combine love and ‘sacred’ sex which belongs to the soul,
making them appear with no contradiction between the two anymore as they both
leave her freedom and she is no more slave to sex instead. Maria reflects on
how she feels about love and sex and this is the conclusion she reaches and the
conclusion of the book achieves for the discussion of the theme “Everyone knows
how to love, because we are all born with that gift […]but the majority of us
have to re-learn, to remember how to love […] and then our bodies learn to
speak the language of the soul, known as sex, and this is what I can give to
the man who gave me back my soul.”[2]
Melissa P. writes about her own growth and
experiences which brought her from (as in Maria’s case in Coelho’s novel) the
heartbreak and mistrust, disappointment in love to the relieve of this lack of
emotions through sex that instead caused no suffering, back to the re-discovery
of love which did instead make her really happy and made her feel desired as
she’s always longed to feel.
Melissa writes a diary from the age of
fourteen to that of sixteen. Contained in it are narrations of the Sicilian
schoolgirl’s experiences and the contradiction once again between her need to
love, her desperate search for it and her fear and incapability to do so. “I
want to love, Diary” is what she continuously writes before her fifteenths
birthday. “ I want to feel my heart melt, want to see my icy stalactites
shatter and plunge into a river of passion and beauty.”[3]
Melissa experiences a great variety of
men, but none of them suit her except Daniele who has managed to make her
suffer. She is therefore convinced that love is suffering whilst she adores
feeling desired by the numerous men, many times much older than her who make
her feel important and it is the only way she can achieve attention and
therefore happiness.
The two novels remind much of each other
through the narrative of the confessions of two young girls (women-to-become
protagonists) who through negative and harsh experiences of life finally grasp
love after numerous misadventures and key events through which they manage to
become young women gaining peace with themselves and acquiring maturity which
helps them deal with love. Moreover, although they had always denied it, that
was what they had always desperately searched for. Love and sex are two
extremely frightening experiences perhaps although common of the everyday life,
however in both the two books the fear of the first brings both girls to
insecurity after being left heartbroken and in both Melissa and Maria grows the
need for self-esteem and the need to re-gain the lost security which they find
in sex.
In the ruined world in which we do
unfortunately live in and which is underlined and maybe represented
exaggeratedly , the two protagonists of the novels achieve success against a
great challenge, to grow up in such a harsh and virtue-lacking setting. However
their greatest challenge comes when it is time to overcome fear and risk what
gave them the security they acquired in order to change once again and find
purity in love exiting the unworthy world they had got lost in.
The authors’
messages are pretty much similar. The contradiction between love and sex in the
lives of the two girls is in my opinion especially designated to show that sex
is not a game, it is quite dangerous. In fact when it comes without love, as
not always, as happens to Melissa with Roberto or Maria with Terence who want
to drag them further leaving no chance for the girls to recover love and faith
in love and the man loving them.
In both cases the most important element
is the diary the two girls keep which helps them to reflect and therefore
understand they have reached a limit and have to make an inversion for what
concerns their habits. “The right way is the other way , light of love help me
take a change.”
Both authors choose to write inserts of
the girls diaries (One hundred strokes of the brush before bed is an autobiography,
completely written in diary-form to exaggerate this first person effect to
convey emotions, and the message through these , most effectively.) creating
the opportunity to reach the reader’s mind and feelings more directly and
create a reader-protagonist relation in order to make the reader perceive the
numerous reflections and same contradictions on the brutality of the two
women’s lives from which they are trying to escape unconsciously and finally
manage to do so, thanks to love. “A real eye-opener of a book to those who
think that kids couldn’t possibly think or know about sex until they are firmly
up the aisle. But maybe more striking is the way in which Melissa P. shows us
how the need to be loved and accepted can manifest when there is nobody to
trust but yourself.”[4]
“Finally, I must thank Maria, who during
various meetings with myself, told me her story, on which this book is based.”[5]
It is striking to know that these are both true stories and through the
protagonists’ reflections and confessions which occur and illustrate both
novels the authors manage to shock the reader both through the effective use of
the diary-narrative form, that in first person allows the theme to be seen as
even more brutal and perceived directly. The two novels, could also be
considered in my opinion two great elements that represent reality. The books
are two allegories that indirectly describe and comment the world and society
we live in as well as discussing issues that are sometimes taken for granted nowadays
but that are causing our society’s values to drop dramatically. Moreover the
contradictions built around the two elements of the theme and the
re-conjunction of these two give much the idea of how delicate the lives of two
young women can become in a world of such danger and brutality. Both authors re
able to achieve this effect magnificently.
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