Love as Failed Imagination in 'The Passion' and in Sexton's Poetry Anonymous College

The notion of love is something that evades language, yet has been a staple theme in literary works all over the world. Writers have struggled to express this abstract feeling in language and accord it with a definition so that it can finally be understood. However, in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and Anne Sexton’s poems, “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts” and “That Day”, it is suggested that trying to capture love may very well be a futile act. The Passion follows the journey of Henri, a soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. Although he is initially passionately in love with Bonaparte, Henri is later disillusioned by the latter’s cruel acts and deserts the army. He meets and finds passion in Villanelle, a Venetian woman, but his love is ultimately left unfulfilled, as Villanelle does not return his feelings. Sexton’s poems, similarly, play with the idea of unfulfilled desire. In “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts and “That Day”, the character of the beloved is conspicuously absent, leaving the lover in an attempt to sculpt the beloved into existence using language. Both Winterson’s novel and Sexton’s work portray the lover as attempting to recreate or remember their beloved from past memory. Love is...