Lit 225 Essay

Brianne Beets
Lit 225
Tommy Kim
Spring 2006

Love is Sorrow in Every Country

Life is complicated. The complications in life are innumerable, but life can become particularly perplexing when love is thrown into the mix. Love can be an incredible thing, but in James Baldwin's Another Country, love is portrayed as nothing close to a positive ideal.

After reading Another Country, I believe Baldwin's concept of love is something of heartbreak and sorrow. Every single character defined in Another Country has ended up experiencing love through some kind of tragic personal experience. In the beginning pages of Another Country,the character Leona admits her true feelings for Rufus, and pleads with him not to hurt her for giving her heart out. When Rufus asks why she'd think he would want to hurt her, Leona remarks, "People do, hurt each other." (Baldwin, p.23) This particular quote can be seen as a foreshadowing of the painful relationships that emanate from Another Country. In truth, the characters do hurt each other, sometimes not deliberately, but they do in fact bring pain to one another.

At some point in Another Country, every single one of the characters experience a form of what Baldwin describes as "love". Except how can the characters truly love each other if they all wind up hurting each other at some point? Every relationship in Another Country is sabotaged either by a particular person cheating on another, or in the case of Rufus and Leona, by driving each other to such an absolute state of misery that Leona is forced to exist in agony in a mental hospital, while Rufus ultimately ends up committing suicide. Although it wasn't specifically Leona that caused Rufus to jump off a bridge, it was the fact that she was white and a woman. Rufus was so obssessed with the idea of needing to possess the white female body that it drove him to madness.

Other couples that are hurt in their relationships while they are supposedly in love include, Vivaldo and Ida, Cass and Richard, Eric and Cass, as well as Eric and Vivaldo.

At first Vivaldo and Ida portray such a blissfull couple, while they are not exactly monetarily stable, everyone around them is decieved into thinking that they are a wonderful match, including Ida and Vivaldo themselves. But Ida is preoccupied with she and Vivaldo's racial differences; she constantly brings up the subject of race with Vivaldo, as if she is attempting to start an argument. One of the final scenes that occur between Vivaldo and Ida include the two disscussing race and how it has become such an obstacle in their relationship.

"His small anger died down as quickly as it has flared up. "Well," he said, quietly, "sometimes I'm nostalgic, too, Ida." He watched her dark, lonely, face. For the first time, he had an intimation of how she would look when she grew old. "What I've never understood," he said, finally, "is that you always accuse me of making a thing about your color, of penalizing you. But you do the same thing. You always make me feel white. Don't you think that hurts me? You lock me out. And all I want is for you to be a part of me, for me to be a part of you. I wouldn't give a damn if you were striped like a zebra."(Baldwin, p. 414)

This particular conversation between Ida and Vivaldo reflects American culture in the 1960's as well as how Baldwin may have felt about interracial relationships. Because neither of the mixed relationships that Baldwin wrote about in Another Country ended up sustaining happy endings (Rufus and Leona; Vivaldo and Ida). When Vivaldo began his relationship with Ida, he may not have even truly loved Ida. In Vivaldo's perspective, Ida was the closest person to Rufus that Vivaldo could get. Because he was afraid to reveal his true feelings for Rufus, Vivaldo had to express his passionionate feelings for Rufus through his sister Ida. But Vivaldo was also never able to fully understand Rufus, because of their racial separateness. In this sense, Ida brings to light what Vivaldo never really wanted to deal with.

Richard and Cass are supposed to represent the golden couple in Another Country. They are everything that a grounded, successfull, happily married family is supposed to be. Yet as the novel progresses, so do Cass' and Richard's relationship begin to unravel. The significant turning point in the relationship occurs when Cass confesses to Richard that she has been having an affair with Eric. As the two of them argue about Richard suspecting her of cheating on him with Vivaldo, Cass finally blurts all that she has done in the past few weeks. "I've, been having an affair with Eric." (Baldwin, p.373) The words are so brittle and concise that Richard is immediately baffled, and finds the situation almost humorous for being so outrageous. After Cass admits her affair, their relationship is already ripped apart at the seams. A definite tragic ending for who was supposed to represent the model couple in Another Country.

Lastly, the love square that occurs between Eric, Cass, Vivaldo, and Yves is one of the defining moments in tearing apart relationships in another country. While Yves is still in France, Eric has a torrid affair with Cass, knowingly behind Richards back. Case is lulled into a false state of love because she thinks that Eric can give her what Richard has not been able to as of late; the feeling of being wanted and loved. In the beginning pages of their affair, Cass and Eric discuss how this relationship will turn out. Eric even discusses his lover back in France Yves. "But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he's supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks... No matter what happens, I loved him very much,Cass, and I still do. I don't think I've ever loved anyone quite like that before, and, I'm not sure I'll ever love anyone quite like that again." (Baldwin, p.289) Even though Eric admits his love for Yves to Cass, they still continue on with their affair. Therefore Baldwin's definition of love has no happy ending because of the enduring lack of unfaithfulness that goes on between almost every couple in Another Country.

While innumerable people believe that love is an amazing experience to encounter in life, Baldwin's definition of love is an entirely opposite idea. Filled with pain and anguish, Baldwin believes that love is pain, and life in general is pain. No matter how much someone wishes to sustain a happy ending in their relationships with one another, a heartbreaking tragedy occurs, making love an unnattainable force for the characters of Another Country.