point of my paper

In today's society, love has been stretched and bent to mean so many different things. Keeping this in mind, the image of love has become a man and a woman at the alter. I am trying to bring about a new light to the word love and show that there is more than one kind of love and it does not solely belong to the picture-perfect, newlywed, man and woman. I do not intend to water down the power of love or stretch it more than it has been already but instead to show that love can be defined by more than a wedding or any other common image that today's society associates with love.

Portrait

Although there are a lot of images of love in Portrait, it seems like the only lessons learned in the book regarding love are lessons of failure ands what not to do. For instance, Stephen and the prostitute. Instead of having sex for love, Stephen does it in lust. This gives him a false image of love. He has the image that love is easily gained and shown when really it takes a long time to develop. I think that as the book progresses, Stephen starts to realize this and he gets past his juvenile crushes to realize what love requires and what it will take for him to have a true love in his life.

C & P

In crime and punishment it is hard to find examples of what we consider here in America today to be "conventional love." Although there are many examples of love between characters none of them have the familiar images of love. There are no weddings, only funerals. There are no common romance stories where Romeo risks his life for his Juliet. In my opinion, the image of love in today's American society is horribly skewed and it takes works like Crime and Punishment to remind us of the true images of love. Not the fact that a wedding cost thousands of dollars but the fact that there was a wedding and that it was held for the right reasons.