Love, Quinn — An Open Letter from Sophocles and Petrarch
How to redeem a psychopath.
When Love Quinn first wanders into frame, her deep eyes framing a face so fragile and unspeakably sensitive, she seems to be a romantic paragon. Victoria Pedretti’s masterful restraint over microexpressions translates directly into Love’s exposed vulnerabilities, providing an additional layer of dynamism over what would otherwise be another cinnamon-roll turned femme fatale. ‘Brutality’ — is not a word audiences of “You” would initially associate with her. Yet brutal is the way which she senselessly murders. Brutal is the truth when she reveals that, similar to Joe Goldberg (the titular serial killer), she too has a hand in predatory manslaughter. Brutal is the way Love — well — loves.
A brilliant irony — the judicially abhorrent, clinically unstable Love Quinn became an internet martyr. Not a delusional and obsessive stalker — rather, she became an icon for the socially marginalised and the lovestruck groundling.
“Right person, wrong time.” “Joe’s scapegoat.” “She deserves so much more”
If there is any possibility of moral salvation, Love Quinn would be first in line among the cast. Even those who scorn her nature more or less acknowledge the depths of her suffering — largely as a pawn of Fortune (read: Joe Goldberg). For Love to be so fervently defended, there must be internal logic within her composition that makes her disarmingly attractive. But analysing Ms (Mrs?) Quinn is difficult without an established framework…
::Enter Ajax::
It happens that the Athenian playwright Sophocles offers us a perfect didactic analogy.
Ajax. Manliest of men. Broad-chested and startlingly tall, he was the most physically excellent of all the homeric heroes, a brilliant spearman and second only to Achilles in sheer mortal will. Athenians in the mid-5th century referred to him as the Lord of the Shield — speaking to his virtue and his protective instinct. Once, Ajax held the Trojan onslaught alone, while Greek ships burnt along the shore and the army scattered behind him.
Yet Sophocles writes him differently. When Ajax first appears before the audience, all his human qualities are erased in place of animalistic fury. Curled up in a fetal position, neck deep in the steaming guts of livestock he tore apart in his rampage, Ajax is utterly defeated. The pride of Salamis, denied his rightful inheritance of Achilles’ weapons and armour, is struck mad with agony and turns on the very army he swore to love and protect. Had Athena not deferred his fury, Ajax would be the only character left breathing on stage. But this analysis is about Love Quinn and not Ajax — so what is the point?
Sophocles forces Ajax to veer between the shame he feels for his ruthless killing, and the burning bitterness he has toward those that denied him glory. Even among the homeric heroes, Ajax was the furthest removed from his society. Unlike Achilles, Ajax did not have the unanimous support of the gods. Unlike Odysseus, Ajax could not negotiate with rhetoric and diplomacy. The world which relied on his protection also abandoned him. We meet him alone in his hut, and all speaking parts mention Ajax’s self-consuming individualism. Because Ajax, like Love, realised early in their narratives that nobody *actually cherishes them*. Rugged individualists and fiercely mimetic — they are startlingly capable observers, but embroider their sensitivities with malice and impulsivity.
To further this analogy — Sophocles’ Athenian audience, though repulsed by the carnage, refused to antagonise Ajax. Rather, he was worshipped in state cults and sacrifices at the Dionysia were made in his name. Similar to popular arguments in defence of Love, there is something unspeakably tragic about Ajax that seems to uplift his heinous crimes and soften his character. Classicists like Christina E. Sorum and Bernard W. M. Knox have throughly examined how Ajax’s redemption came about. This essay will use ‘Ajax’ as a critical angle and frame-of-reference for examining Love Quinn.
1. Can Love’s attractiveness be substantiated?
2. Is Love redeemable?
I propose Affirmative to both questions.
Pedretti’s Allure
Love Quinn is attractive — or rather, Love’s allure is a half-half split between Victoria Pedretti’s physical beauty, and the micro-expressions that humanise her in every scene.
It might seem reductive to talk about physical beauty in an evaluation of character, but since Love appears in a visual medium her presentation must be accounted for. If we study the angle of the inferior facial third, labiomental angle, angle of facial convexity, cervicomental angle, and lower lip projection — there might be a specific answer. For a more holistic approach however it might be easier to just assume that Love’s being — from frame to costume — reflects her physiognomy.
Notice the automatic eye-levelling which Pedretti-Quinn integrates in every conversation— her eyes are always horizontally level with the speaker — which leads to uncanny amounts of head tilting that can then be interpreted as heightened perception or awareness. Her lower body reacts to spontaneous outbursts (Joe punching the wall beside her, the argument in the rain) in a very restrained manner — there is no reflective shielding instinct where the shoulders draw the arms rapidly toward the neck — putting her vulnerable façade into question. Does she have more control in situ than we give her credit for? Alternatively, this reaction validates her traumatic past by demonstrating her familiarity with impromptu violence and abuse — and how might we we feel about her then?
If physical motion drives the character on stage, costuming consolidates their position within that space.
Pushing for any obvious patterns here could make me guilty of recognition-bias, but analysis assumes that nothing is ‘by randomness’. If you agree that there is a quintessential “Love” aesthetic which separates her from the other cast members, then there must be a subconscious patterning (however minute or convoluted that might be). Her formal attire is minimally layered — her garments are more Neoclassical Revival(of the late 18th — 19th centuries) than Midcentury Modern (‘45–’70). Why? It’s difficult to be specific at this scale, but neoclassical dress notably holds a higher waistline that alters the silhouette, bringing attention the face of the wearer — which coincidenally draws the observer to Pedretti’s face. There doesn’t seem to be a particular trend with (textile) patterning or textile selection, but it’s notable that she wears muslin and satin with more frequency leading up to the S3 finale. The conclusion for all this is not as clear; but to generalise, her dress possesses a curious anachronism¹ that makes her distinctive — whether by design or intuition.
There are no surviving records of what ‘Ajax’ the play would have looked like onstage. Since the great Athenian tragedians didn’t feel the need to offer casting tips, or even stage directions², it is empirically difficult to make a detailed connection with Love. That is not to say Ajax (the hero) is devoid of physical characteristics. “Ajax so fearful in greatness, so raw in his strength, lies bowed…”³. Sophocles keeps the epithet that Homer used for Ajax — ‘Lord of the Shield’. Sorum argues that Ajax’s physical excellence reflects his heroic archetype, which is inherently defensive. This defensiveness becomes obvious in his speech and behavour, but diffuses into his physical appearance. Ajax is the ‘classical’ hero even for Sophocles’ audience— his appearance belonged to the epic landscape of Bronze-Age, and looks out of place when performed in a democratic 5th-century Athens.
The currency of a homeric hero is his body — which he uses to exchange for material honour and social recognition. In this sense, Ajax looks ‘out of touch’ with the world of the play. His wife Tecmessa, his half-brother Teucer, his sailing crew — they appear especially vulnerable in his protective shadow. His ‘enemies’ Agamemnon and Menelaus are sardonic, but not ‘great’ in the heroic sense. Even Odysseus no longer acts like a hero, but like a diplomat or a civic official. Physically, Ajax towers above everybody. It is as if Ajax stumbled out of Homer’s Bronze-Age and into a modern, confusing, different world. This was Sophocles’ intention: to frame Ajax into a world that he cannot belong, and watch as he is driven to desolation.
The Sophoclean audience was invited to sympathise with him, brutish and dangerous as he is, due to that conflict-of-setting. He lumbers across the stage, all muscle and all blood, while other characters bear themselves with grace. He struggles to express himself with sophisticated rhetoric, preferring instead to brood or to burst out in anger. Love, like Ajax, desperately attempts to belong to a society full of people that she struggles to resonate with. Like Ajax, she often appears alone.
It’s a rudimentary reading — shallow, even — but so are appearances in general. To answer why Love Quinn is redeemable (or why she is attractive at all), we must move away from presentation and into persona.
¹compare to Guinevere Beck, whose formal attire is heavily layered.
²stage directions were integrated into the dialogue. Staging devices like the Ekklykeima(cart) and the Skene(backdrop) did exist.
³-Tecmessa, Scene 2 Line 205–6, Penguin Classics: Fagles
Defining the Argument
Popular online readings are divisive about Love Quinn’s “character”. I use this term loosely because “character” in this context could mean her motivation, her morality (or lackthereof), the cultural milieu that she represents. There is a pattern for discussing Love: Analysts talk about Love’s attractiveness, reject her morality, and then substantiate their attraction from a personal angle (all while ensuring their readers understand that no, her relatability does not redeem her actions, nor should her worldview be condoned).
I notice that no online analysis was able to:
- Account for her attractiveness† (or lack of) in totality— as a whole character who is capable of performing laudable actions, and despicable actions simultaneously — without contradicting their argument.
- [For authors who do attempt to redeem† her]: Address rebuttal that point to her transgressive actions.
† (or: Un-)Attractiveness: qualities that are valuable for the text and the society that produced it
† Redeemable: when a society that produced the text can accept transgressive actions that the individual performed. Whether the action is transgressive is determined by law[alt. social order], natural order or religious order.
This reading is literary by design. Though it is impossible to abstain from reality, making a distinction would be appreciated. This analysis stands strongest when we consider Love Quinn as an entirely fictional construction.
Because of the discordant popular opinion around Love, let us set the skeleton of the argument by looking at Sophocles’ ‘Ajax’ first.
Ajax is denied the arms of Achilles in a vote. Enraged, he plots to kill the winner of the prize Odysseus, as well as those who facilitated the votes Agamemnon and Menelaus. Athena intuits his scheme, drives Ajax mad, and forces the ‘best man of the army’ to slaughter the very livestock he helped secure. Athena then invites Odysseus to watch Ajax — What are you afraid of? The scene shakes Odysseus to his core.
It is morning, and Ajax’ sailors run frantically from the Greek camp to look for their master. They have heard horrible rumours, which they hope to confirm. Along with Tecmessa, his wife, they witness a lucid Ajax slouched outside his hut. Drenched in gore and grief, he begins to process what he has done. Ajax must salvage himself — but he is disoriented and shamed. Tecmessa and his sailors implore him not to be impulsive, but Ajax ignores them. He demands his son Eurysaces, asks them to greet his brother Teucer, and storms back inside. Ajax re-emerges with a sword, but his voice has changed. He is full of rue. He is no longer bellowing. Ajax contemplatively expresses a desire to — go down to the meadows…to wash myself and purge away my stains¹. As Ajax leaves for the beach, Tecmessa and the sailors are comforted: Ajax will be okay.
A messenger arrives with a message from old man Calchas — Ajax is in dire straits and they must find him, should they want to see him again. Ajax’s family and men scatter. In a startling twist, Ajax enters for one last scene. Here Ajax sheds all his composure, cursing to the Furies beneath the earth to haunt Odysseus and his enemies. He draws out the sword, and falls onto it as Tecmessa runs to him from the distance.
Shouts of grief are joined by hollers from the army. Agamemnon and Menelaus arrive to check the commotion. They see Ajax’s wife, clutching his orphaned son, weeping beside the stiffening body. Ajax’s sailors stand guard beside it, and his brother Teucer warns the Atridae to let them be. Menelaus sneers at Teucer — I’ll say just this: Ajax must not be buried.² Agamemnon joins the debate — You’re a nobody, taking another useless nobody’s side.³
Odysseus joins the fray. Teucer braces for a verbal onslaught he cannot win. Agamemnon laughs — Shouldn’t you kick his body now that he’s dead?4 But Odysseus is solemn — He was my foe, but he once was noble. The Atridae crumble under Odysseus’ rhetoric; they leave Ajax’s body to his kin. After the commanders leave, Odysseus promises — that from today I’ll prove as strong a friend as I was once an enemy...and join in all the tributes due to the greatest men.⁶
¹ -Ajax, Scene 3 Lines 654–5, Penguin Classics: Fagles
²-Menelaus, Scene 6 Line 1140, Penguin Classics: Fagles
³-Agamemnon, Closing Scene Line 1231–2, Penguin Classics: Fagles
⁴-Agamemnon, Closing Scene Line 1348, Penguin Classics: Fagles
⁵-Odysseus, Closing Scene Line 1355, Penguin Classics: Fagles
⁶-Odysseus, Closing Scene Line 1376–80, Penguin Classics: Fagles
Homeric Ajax — Petrarchan Love
Ajax is a homeric hero guided by a specific ethos. Ajax needs kleos, glory in his society, material honours like Achilles’ arms. He obtains kleos by harming his enemies, and defending his allies. Ajax’s society creates warriors in order to receive the protection it needs; at the same time, it finds a useful outlet for the violence of some of its members. In return for risking death, the hero receives special status and rewards from his social group.
Ajax’ society is Bronze-Age Greece. But through characters like Odysseus and Teucer, the audience quickly realises that they are in different society. The world of the play seems closer to mid-5th Century Athens, than it does to Homer’s time. There is no individualism under a democratic city-state. No individual should be especially commended for collective defense of the community. Thus lies the conflict which Sophocles points to: Ajax is an anachronism — out of his time, behaving under a set a values no longer useful.
Sorum argues that ‘The emphasis on the (hero’s) function and relationship to his society in the play elucidates the inappropriateness of heroic individualism to the fifth century’¹. In other words — Ajax is an archetype that is no longer in fashion.
This angle can help us understand (and redeem) Love Quinn — as an archetype “out of fashion” in her fictional landscape. Ajax is a Homeric hero in an Athenian democracy —
I propose that Love Quinn is a Petrarchan lover in 21st century Los Angles.
From the early Italian Renaissance, Francesco Petrarca pioneered a form of sonnet that captured his simultaneous obsession, pining and lust for “Laura”. So obsessive and passionate, it would underline F. Petrarch’s work for the rest of his life. Little is known about “Laura” — beside that Petrach loved at first meeting, never interacted with her, and that she was already married. The famous Rima 134 illustrates his passion:
Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra;
e temo, et spero; et ardo, et son un ghiaccioI find no peace, and yet I make no war:
and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice
The Petrarchan lover, like the Homeric hero, follows a particular ethic. Their primary desire is ‘pure’ love, which is supplemented by their primary fear of them being incomprehensible to their prospective partners. What do Romeo Montague, Lucy Snowe(Villette, C. Brontë), Anna Karenina and Jay Gatsby have in common?
Obsession — while not unique to Petrarch’s archetype, it is an obvious symptom. Notice the specific self-pity that all these characters express — about their families, their prior relationships, their views on life. When their romantic intentions are foiled, Petrarch’s lover turns to impulsive (often extreme) action and put on a show of their visible sufferings. Petrarchan lovers are especially dynamic and energetic — which separates them from their Byronic counterparts that prefer to brood.
Being purged a fire sparking in lovers’ eyes
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers tears
What is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall and a preserving sweet.
- Romeo
Love Quinn uses similar dichotomies to demonstrate her devotion:
I used salt instead of sugar. Sucks being lied to, huh?
Love is a Petrarchan archetype, then it also resolves a frequent discussion about her psychopathy. Notably, psychopathic behaviour is rationalised by their agent’s lack of remorse and perception. But Petrarch’s lovers are fundamentally humanist — rather than rejecting remorse or grief, they redirect their emotional energies towards loving, and being reciprocated with love. Love has demonstrated that she is capable of both understanding grief, and exposing vulnerabilities in the hope that she is reciprocated. This is not to say Love Quinn is devoid of psychological illness. But Love Quinn, under this line of argument, is not a psychopath.
To substantiate, Petrarch’s lover is attractive for the audience in two ways. For those who are not yet ‘learned of love’ (as the Friar from R.&J. would put it), they are a symbol of action. Try to climb the wall of your crush’s house in the dead of night, and you will be spurned and restrained. Romeo not only gets away with the action, but is commended by Juliet in the process. Watching these lovers achieve their ends through elaborate, often convoluted means is fulfilling for an audience that is restricted by their circumstance.
For audiences that have experienced love with burs and all, or from a more pragmatic view — this archetype represents a nostalgic delusion. This is expressed in people who might question Romeo’s method, but agree that ‘he has a good heart’.
In their singular obsessions, the Petrarchan lover can appear attractive and intellectual to those who ‘buy into’ that element of their character, and appear endearingly idealistic (thus vulnerable to reality) to those who don’t buy it.
Because while I was seeing you, really seeing you, you were busy gazing at a goddamn fantasy.
The Renaissance court that produced this archtype featured an elaborate love-seeking process. Men bore the burden to express themselves, while guarding against rival courtiers. Women were expected to don an image of elusiveness and desirability. While love-seeking has since been modernised, the culture around finding the ‘the one’ remains elaborate still. Petrarch’s lover ignores many of these social conventions, with the hope of ‘striking the heart’ immediately. ‘Love at first sight’ is characteristic, because loving at first sight bypasses the steps before it — introduction, familiarisation, cross-evaluation.
This is the part about ‘understanding’ — the humanist core of this archetype. Reciprocal understanding is the final step in love, but Petrarch suggests a character who can reach that stage in a whim. Intriguingly, a Petrarchan lover does not need to be alive to complete their narrative. Rather, the audience is satisfied when the lover is “understood”. When the lover isn’t understood, such as in the case of Dido or Heathcliff, the audience is left with a sense of incompletion.
We have substantiated for Love Quinn’s attractiveness, now for her redemption.
¹ Christina E. Sorum, Sophocles’ “Ajax” in Context, 362–3
Love’s Labours Lost?
That Love Quinn belongs to the same archetype as Romeo Montague is unintuitive. We’re not conflicted over whether Romeo Montague is ‘redeemable’, so why is Love Quinn contested?
Romeo has done, objectively speaking, abhorrent things. Killing your lover’s brother is one of them. Sure — Tybalt was belligerent. But seeing that Tybalt threatened his relationship with Juliet, and presented an opportunity, Romeo does not hesitate to kill the young Capulet.
I do protest I never injured thee
But love thee better than thou canst devise
Oh really? But you aggressed Tybalt. Like Love Quinn, Romeo has subconsciously identified a threat to his lover. Freudian impulse was the only drive behind Romeo, whether R. is willing to accept that or not:
O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
… And ⌜fire-eyed⌝ fury be my conduct now.
The point of this anecdote is to demonstrate how, due to their obsessiveness, all Petrarchan archetypes more or less perform actions that are morally transgressive. But in most instances (such as R.&J.), their playwrights and authors shape the world of the text around the lover — in order to soften the outcomes of their obsession and ease the reader’s moral guilt. It’s okay for Romeo to kill Tybalt within the larger conflict which Shakespeare builds between the Capulets and Montagues. It’s okay for Gatsby to obstruct justice (by taking the blame) and spy on Tom and Daisy’s private life, if the audience is aware of the Great American Dream[Delusion] that Fitzgerald constructs. So is it okay for Love Quinn to kill Candace in the abrupt way she did? The show-writers do not provide any metaphorical airbags to fall back on. The answer is no.
Very rarely does the author choose to exaggerate the obsessive and intrusive elements Petrarchan lover. Even in cases like Dido from the ‘Aeneid’, Virgil makes sure that the audience distinguishes between how much Dido controls herself, and how much of her mind is manipulated by Juno instead. When the Dido burns on the pyre in a spectacular show of immorality, impulse and fury — Virgil suggests it is Juno who is driving her to despair. Love Quinn has no such privilege. Not from Klepnes’ text-of-origin, and not from the Netflix adaptation.
Not all characters are redeemable. If Love Quinn’s character is something like “Petrarchan lovers bad”, this analysis ends here. But Petrarchan lovers have existed throughout the ages, both in fiction and in people who try to replicate fiction. Love is not merely an exploration of the inherent flaws of the Petrarchan lover — she is a demonstration of how this archetype, normalised or idealised in the past, transgresses what our current society deems acceptable.
The Los Angeles in “You” is as alien to Love Quinn’s petrarchan ethic as the army camp is alien to Ajax’s homeric ethic.
For the Athenian audience, the city had absorbed the function of war, the citizen soldier had evolved, and the army became a popular assembly under arms. Thus the myth of Ajax is based upon a conflict that was distant from them, not only because centuries had intervened, but also because its assumptions — that a hero is best and is individual — undermined the democratic world they belong to.
Love Quinn expresses her disappointment at consumerism — the most prevalent ‘norm’ of 21st century anywhere — especially rampant in LA. She sniffs at Joe Goldberg eating instant noodles — instead opting to take him on a culinary tour of the city, ending with a speciality that she made herself. What many dismiss as worldbuilding details, I argue to be constructive appositions to Love Quinn’s character. They offer an alternative method to approach Love’s psychology, removed from the central axis of the plot. She makes him a roast chicken as the last item on their culinary journey — with emphasis that the recipe is unique to her. Note this innocuous, Petrarchan expression of individuality is what facilitates the conversation over both characters’ “deep loss”. Love Quinn exclaims:
I see it every time I look in your eyes. You’ve felt it. Real love. Real loss.
Compare to Lucy Snowe:
While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed! — I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.
Or Dido:
this one alone has stirred my feelings…O sacred shame, I violate your law. He who first joined me took away all my love.
Another example of anachronism can be seen in her use of aconite as a paralytic. Monkshood is a sensitive plant to grow, and a horribly inefficient sedative compared to pharmaceutical alternatives. It’s hard to imagine that in 21st Century LA, Love Quinn would resort to a fickle flower to be her death-messenger. Coincidentally (or not) — many Petrarchan lovers resort to poisons, both within fiction and in reality, due to their symbolist connotation. Think Aqua Tofana — a mercury and belladonna concoction applied in 17th Century Rome by to-be widows; or the hellebore that Hero gives Leander. Therefore Love’s choice of poison cannot be pragmatic — yet she certainly suggests a particular irony in using wolfsbane — and an irony that carries more metanarrative significance to us, and consolidates her archaic leanings.
Ajax in the Iliad was a good hero — because the characters within the Iliad facilitate Ajax’ ethic. Love Quinn, by all means, is a good lover. To make an analogous case — imagine Love Quinn in a Petrarchan context that suits her more. Say, she replaces Romeo in R. & J. — would she appear out of place there?
As we witness what Love Quinn is capable of doing to satisfy her yearning for Joe Goldberg, it might be intuitive to suggest that her Petrarchan qualities shift. I argue otherwise: Love Quinn, from the first meeting to her dying breath, exhibits the same qualities of her archetype. I will even suggest that they’ve since become more exaggerated as Joe drifts further from her and imperils their love.
Love Quinn is devoted, yearns for understanding, and is singularly obsessed — she remains so.
In the same way as how Ajax isn’t less of a homeric hero as he advances toward his death, Love isn’t less of a Petrarchan lover as she moves toward her poisoning act by S3.
Rather, it is the audience that has grown increasingly aware, for both Ajax and Love, that they live in a world that has since modernised and discarded their archaic worldviews. It is in this disjunct that Ajax is redeemed by the Athenian audience, and in this same disjunct that Love Quinn can be redeemed.
By the end of the play, it appears that those characters who require a traditional hero, the sailors and Ajax’s father, wife and son, do not have one. If the homeric hero does not perform his social function, there can be no heroic ethic. Furthermore, Ajax has been rejected by the Greek army and its leaders, those who can reward the hero. If society does not affirm his worth, there is no heroic reputation. By all means, Ajax has failed even within his own conceptual world. The city with its growing authority is now able to undertake its own defence and consequently, need no longer tolerate the threat of rogue and individualist heroes.
But Ajax is redeemed not because his actions are suddenly less transgressive or his heroic failure less discrete. The Sophoclean audience celebrates Ajax because they can see how their own worldview not only allows them to understand Ajax’s homeric ethic, but also the reject it for a more relevant democatic one. Ajax’s heroism is finally at ease. Homer’s heroes were the textbook of Athens, the source of cultural assumptions, but the lessons could no longer be applied. Sophocles guides his audience to agree with Odysseus; and as he sees it — Ajax was once noble.
This exact framework can be adopted for Love Quinn. By the end of S3 as she lies paralysed beneath Joe, Love dies and thus fails to achieve the ends of the Petrarchan archetype. Yet as a 21st century audience, we can find room to celebrate her as a sensitive and beautiful exploration of Petrarch’s lover, and we can lament her as a tragic heroine without incurring moral backlash. Love is a good lover — but one unsuitable for our modern conceptual universe.
Many attribute the scene where Love hands the gun to the Conrads in the glass cage as an exhibition of unfeeling psychopathy:
If your marriage is so perfect, stay together. Die together.
If we interpret this line within the parameters of my argument, a different reading emerges. This is not unfeeling, psychopathic pleasure; this is a Petrarchan lover’s extreme attempt at validating her ethos, after being repeatedly disseminated and proven otherwise, in a world she does not belong. As mentioned before, the lover does not need to be alive to fulfill the expectations of their archetypes (think of Jack and Rose, or the double suicide in R.& J.).
From a metanarrative standpoint, Love Quinn makes a fatal assumption: that those around her can facilitate her Petrarchan behaviour.
Like Ajax, there lies her tragic demise.
Questions, Refutations, Criticisms:
Reading Love Quinn as the above is refreshing, but there are a few questions and criticisms which should be pondered.
a) Not all characters can be redeemed, and this essay tries too hard to redeem the unredeemable.
I defined ‘redeemable’ as: when a society that produced the text can accept transgressive actions that the individual performed.
Fair enough. I’ve tried to find an academically accepted parameter here, but I couldn’t. Where the line is drawn, as critics seem to suggest, entirely depends on how flexible your morals are. The metaphorical ruler that extends from Jesus Christ to Pennywise is long, and exactly how Love Quinn places is going to vary by more than a few degrees. I personally stand by the Athenian principle of sophrosyne — moderation by substantiation. If you can offer a reading and argue it without claiming absolutes, I’m more than happy to accept it.
b) Joe Goldberg is the issue.
Oh boy: this is hard. I haven’t made up my mind on what Joe Goldberg even *is* from a convention perspective. How he interacts with Love Quinn under this reading (or even in general) is going to depend on how you interpret him. Is he a problematic Byronic hero like Mr Rochester or Edmund Dantès? Is he a perversion of the lonely hearts murderer?
He certainly isn’t a Petrarchan lover (he lacks humanism)— so his relationship with Love is not symmetrical. And while I see where this is getting at, Love Quinn’s previous husband would like to disagree. Joe deserves punishment, but his flaws don’t subtract from the anachronism that Love exhibits.
c) Petrarchan lovers can exist in modernity. Look at [this character]
Undeniably true. Just like how you can argue Pericles exhibits traits of the homeric hero as he led Athens in the 5th Century. I’m not suggesting that all Petrarchan lovers are incompatible with modernity. Heck — everybody knows a romantic or two. I’m suggesting that Love Quinn’s native universe (aka. her world) is at temporal opposition to her ethic. I wouldn’t extrapolate this reading outside of this circumstance.
d) What about Love’s relationship with Forty? What about Love as a mother?
Ah — Forty Quinn. I was going to make a seperate section that delves into how analogous Ajax and Teucer’s relationship is to Love and Forty’s. I eventually decided to cut it out, since it didn’t really contribute to the body of the reading. In brief: both believe they took the correct course of action, but both fail to protect their sibling. I would recommend looking at Teucer’s speech as he laments Ajax, and do a cross comparison with Love’s rhetoric for Forty — you will be surprised.
Same goes with looking at Love as a mother. Like Love, Ajax had a kid. Eurysaces is mute for the entire play, but Ajax makes an entire speech to him — talking about lineage and expectations and regret. Notably, Ajax and Love both expect their children to grow *outside* of their shadow. Sophocles intentionally compared Eurysaces’ bleak fate as a slave-of-war to the way which the Athenian city-state communally took care of orphans. With Love and Joe both absent, I wonder if “You” is making a similar point about little Henry as an “orphan-of-love” so to speak.
e) Is Love the perfect partner for Joe? Did Joe deserve Love Quinn?
As counter-intuitive as this might sound, I argue that Love Quinn was never in love with Joe in the first place. Joe is Love’s object-of-limerence.
In Dorothy Tennov and Helen Fisher’s “Love and Limerence” — they distinguish between the two ideas. Limerence is egotistic — where one partner obsesses over the other (the Limerent Object), because the LO object exhibits qualities that the partner believes can “fix them”. In other words, it’s a form of projection-compensation which Tennov associates with borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive behaviours.
Petrarchan lovers more or less all take on a limerant object in their narratives — it’s just that few authors deny their lover that object. This is because denying the petrarchan archetype their lover is unsatisfying to read, while providing them with their lover is very, very satisfying(bordering on ecstacy). Love Quinn unfortunately falls into the former, which explains why many viewers still yearn for her return — it’s the unfulfilled archetype crying out.
Does Joe deserve Love? No. Because Joe doesn’t deserve to be socialised. Society is created from mutual humanism — the understanding that there are things about you and me which cannot be accessed on the outside. Joe’s lack of humanism is characterised by his agency — in his view, the women beneath him are his creations, moulded from his psychology. In my view, Joe deserves detainment; in the same way a child torturing a cat or smashing bird’s eggs deserves reprimands — I wouldn’t trust anything living under his care.
f) What if Love is actually just a psychopath, and I (like many others) have fallen into her trap?
I’m unwilling to cede my argument about why Love Quinn isn’t a psycho. But I’m aware that evidence is only as strong as the lawyer on the stand. So really, it depends on how much licence you give her. At what level is a character fully honest anyways? Is that a level which we can substantiate, or do we enter the weird and wonderful world of assumptions?
g) Your definition of a Petrarchan Lover is wrong!
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Concluding Remarks
Writing this analysis helped me understand myself more than anything else. But it leaves me with more questions than answers. Do people like Love actually exist? Am I, too, an anachronism?
From Petrarch to Sophocles, from Athens to LA — this argument was spontaneously conceived in all but three days’ work.
All the while, I was listening to Richard and Mimi Fariña’s “The Falcon”. This entire essay is a strange coincidence, yet it strikes me how relevant Richard and Mimi’s verses are to this reading —
She’ll tease you
She’ll please you
She’ll satisfy your needs
But someday she might turn around
And maul the hand that feeds
— it’s especially haunting if you imagine Love singing this, in place of the Mimi Fariña.
With love,
from Vincent, with thanks to:
Francis Petrarch
Sophocles
