Love is sacrifice of one’s self for the people you care about most in your life. Love is a choice to do what is best for another person. There are times when choosing to love someone comes at a great cost. You have to sacrifice something; time, money, energy, and sometimes the supreme cost will be giving up your own life so that someone else can live. When it really costs you something to carry on in a relationship or to help someone, that is the real test to find out if you truly love that person. If you bail out, you have just proved that you love yourself more than the person who needs your help.
If you do what is best for the other person even though it is difficult for you, then you have discovered real love, a love that you choose to exercise regardless of how you feel. I feel like Louise loved him in the beginning of their relationship, however, over time she was only comfortable being with him. Staying together was easier than being alone. So when she found out about his death, and that it was not her fault, she could be free without taking any blame. According to Joseph Rosenblum, “nothing can compensate Louise for the freedom that she has lost by marrying.
Her face “bespoke repression”; no matter how kind Brentley has been, he has still imposed his will upon his wife. Hence, Brentley’s death is not tragic to her, since it gives her own life back to her” (Rosenblum par 7) The story states that she had loved him some of the time, which I believe if not all the time, then love did not exist throughout most of their marriage. When Louise whispered free over and over, she exhibited the fact that her life would be lived without the constant controlling of her husband.
I think that since being diagnosed with heart trouble, maybe Brently must have been a little forceful with Louise to make sure she would not get worse. He could have imposed rules that she must abide by in order to prevent her from getting worse, such as, staying in bed, confining her to the house, and keeping her from doing things she enjoyed doing. Her freedom could be doing all the things he would not allow. Rosenblum supports this freedom with this passage: In contrast to the world of nature is the cloistered, confining house, symbol of domesticity. In her own room she looks through an open window, another symbol of her freedom.
The window does not intervene between her and nature and allows her the scope of infinite vision. She herself locks and unlocks the door to her room, admitting or excluding whomever she wants. She has what Virginia Woolf stressed as so important, a room of her own. Yet it is only a temporary, and finally an inadequate, refuge. She leaves it, as she must, to rejoin her sister and Richards; in unlocking her door she paradoxically consigns herself to the prison of her house. Nowhere else in the house is there even a glimpse of nature, and, in contrast to the open window, the front door is locked; only Brentley has the key.
He can come and go as he pleases, but she remains trapped within. Related to this contrast of nature and house is the imagery of up and down. Louise’s room is upstairs, and from there she looks at the tops of trees and hears the songs of birds on the roof. Her freedom is thus literally elevating. Her leaving this refuge and going down the stairs foreshadows her loss of freedom. She descends from the heaven of solitude to the hell of marriage again, where she encounters her husband. Now death is her only salvation. Instead of soaring freely like the birds, she can escape only by sinking still lower, into the grave.
Rosenblum par 12, 13) In conclusion, I believe this Louise defies my definition of love because she does not show the sacrifice it takes to be in love because she seemed relieved that the relationship would not carry on any longer. If love were truly present in the relationship she would not have whispered, “free” over and over. Her only escape after finding her husband to be alive was in her own death. Maybe she had it coming, maybe that is what she wanted to escape her undesirable marriage. Her freedom came in the most ironic way.
