Our next love trope is both particularly unrealistic and particularly disturbing. Known as "Abduction is Love" on the Internet, it could also go by the name "Stockholm Syndrome." Kidnap your soul mate, have a lot of objects and insults thrown at you, be incredibly sorry about the fact that you had to kidnap them, eventually win them over with your library or a less impressive form of chivalry and voil? ! It's happily ever after (except for the six months it took to get there).
"Beauty and the Beast" - originally published in 1740 - is the strongest candidate for the trope originator. Admittedly, the degree of abduction varies from telling to telling. In some, Beauty refuses to accept her father's offer to take her place and insists upon going to the beast herself. In others, she's faced with the possibility of her father's death if she refuses to go, or is practically coerced into going by her (requisite) wicked sisters. But she never would have stumbled upon the castle, and the beast within it, if not forced to go, and abduction is inevitably the trigger for their story. Personally, I love "Beauty and the Beast" in all its incarnations. It has a bookish heroine who saves the hero rather than waiting for a prince to find her, an emphasis on her intelligence and courage rather than her looks and the beloved 1991 Disney version even includes singing teapots. Yet the way that this story starts always makes me hesitate, worrying what lesson it leaves.
Of course, we're able to discern fact from fiction. We know that the things we see and read don't always reflect the world that we live in. When the brothers of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," a 1954 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical inspired by the legend of the Rape of the Sabine Women, carry off the women they've fallen for, or when the Phantom kidnaps Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera" (1909) and threatens her childhood love Raoul in an attempt to force her to marry him, we know that something is wrong. But when abduction works - when the seven brides eventually give up their resistance, or when Christine kisses the Phantom (which, admittedly, then prompts him to let her go) - maybe we start to believe in a magic formula for love. The true danger of this trope isn't that it encourages us to abduct our loved ones (despite the slightly alarming trend in young adult fantasy for the hero to suddenly grab the heroine and run from any number of evil creatures), but that it teaches us that love comes with an instruction manual, "Five Easy Steps to Win a Soul Mate" or "How to Become the One in Ten Days." Tropes like "Abduction is Love" promise us that there are steps we can follow and precautions we can take to ensure our happily ever after, and that may be the greatest deception this trope presents.
There are some truths in love, some qualities that every relationship needs to survive, but everyone falls in and out of love in a different way. Despite all the love tropes that I like to analyze, and even despite the kernels of truth at the heart of them, no one trope will ever capture the entirety of a relationship. We have to make our own paths, falling into traps and fighting our way out of them, and anything that promises a magic shortcut is probably lying. Perhaps that's why tropes like this one exist, to tell us what not to do, to warn us of the dangers that come with looking for the easy way out, to keep us from going over the edge in the pursuit of love and to remind us that while a universal magic love spell may not exist, we each have the chance to find our own.
Natalie Girshman is a sophomore majoring in history and drama. She can be reached at Natalie.Girshman@tufts.edu.
