 Drama: June 29, 2011 Issue [#4461] |
  Drama
This week: Crimes of Love As Dramatic Subjects Edited by: Joy  
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Love is a crime which requires an accomplice
Baudelaire
"I have always loved thrillers--especially those that are called 'psychological thrillers,' the ones that are more concerned with motives and relationships, rather than the actual crime itself."
Julie Parsons
"Clifford Stern: (on receiving his love letter back) It's probably just as well. I plagiarized most of it from James Joyce. You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin."
From the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors
"True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."
La Rochefoucauld
"Promise me you'll never leave me because if I thought you would, I'd never leave."
Winnie the Pooh
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is on crimes of love, but the subject has nothing to do with Marquis De Sade's Crimes of Love .
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
A crime is an illegal action or activity, but crimes of love have little to do with illegality or the law. Their criminality is in the injustice and the pain they cause. Remember Queen Guinevere's betrayal of King Arthur, Othello's jealousy, and Lester Burnham's affair with a teen-ager in the movie American Beauty? These types of stories all concentrate on falling in or out of love and extreme passions and emotions whether they are logical or illogical, moral or immoral, and unacceptable or barely acceptable.
Both love and crime stories show the human psyche under pressure, whereas crimes of love center around jealousy and other powerful passions with the addition of a sharpened sense of suspense. In this type of a story, the writer can put up overwhelming obstacles for his characters due to the complex range of human emotions.
As in the average love/romance plots, in the crime of love story, a lover and a beloved take the center stage, while one of them, knowingly or unknowingly, commits a crime against the other. The crime may even be planned by a third party; for example, by Iago in Othello.
A few situations where such emotional crimes may happen are:
 siblings competing for the same man or woman
teacher and student love affairs when one character puts pressure on the other
stepparent and stepchild affairs
love affair between an unattached person and a married or attached one
two people in love both attached to others
lover misunderstanding or mistreating the beloved or vice versa
lover becoming jealous of a third party or acting out of guilt feelings over something in his/her background
lover falling for an underage person
lover discovering later that he has fallen in love with is his/her own parent, sibling, or a very close relative
lover's fits of rage, jealousy, or greed hurting the partner
The lover in such situations can be a person who may love deeply, passionately, and sometimes selfishly. He is usually someone who takes risks without giving them a second thought. He thinks he is after the truth, but if he finds the truth, powerful emotions may obscure it, leading him to rationalize his faulty actions.
These relationships can be taboos or they can be those accepted by certain societies. They all result, however, in shock or guilt, and occasionally, in a more severe crime due to the strength of feelings. For example in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother without knowing who they are, and the discovery of this truth leads him to tragedy at the end.
Either unknowingly or on purpose, the beloved also participates in the act. His emotions may equal the lover's emotions in strength, but he is the vulnerable one most of the time since he may not easily walk away from the lover or change the situation at hand.
Other than the couple, a third person, usually a bystander, is also present in involuntary crimes of love; that is, involuntary by the lover or the beloved. This third character may act the sage or the villain. He may either push the couple together or force them apart. Sometimes, the third person wants something from one of the characters and thinks the other one is an obstacle or a helper in his way. Thus, he acts to separate or to unite the couple, disrupting the normal flow of events.
The crimes of love show us the tragic side of love. If love makes the world go round, tragedy has just as strong a hand in it, and when we look inside tragedy, we find it harbors jealousy and fear. Fear is the greatest instigator of irrational and unprincipled behavior especially if the character is under extreme pressure.
Some crimes of love are tiny, but still, they sting. Writers of any genre who include crimes of love in their stories or subplots can capture the power of emotions, such as love, grief, greed, and anger inside page-turning narratives and gripping plots.
Talking about page-turners, let's take a look at this passage from SantaBee  's fascinating book Moldavian Moon, Book One: Wolf's Torment. In this passage, Crown Prince Mihai makes love to his intended, Theresa, for the first time, and while she is still in his arms, he tells her of a love affair he had earlier. He says he gave his heart to a woman but she broke it and her rejection hurt him more than he could say. Theresa reacts:
"What...what are you saying?"
Hurt splayed across her face.
"I regret having this affair."
"Oh." She stilled in his arms. What was she thinking?
"Theresa, I'm sorry-"
"Well, this wasn't quite what I expected."
"I wanted to be honest with you."
"We just made love, Mihai. I wasn't expecting to hear that."
He frowned. She had a point. It was a careless mistake on his part.
This is a tiny crime, but it will cause pain inside Theresa's heart, and she will act coldly toward the prince later. A bigger crime of love occurs in the same book with another couple through no fault of either the lover or the beloved. If you want to find out about that crime, you'll have to read the book. 
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Until next time...
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