33: L'amore è Libertà: Love is Freedom

A still from the film Little Women (2019).

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. If it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers[...]What novelty is worth that sweet monotony? Where everything is known, and loved, because it is known.” - George Eliot

Last night I watched the film adaptation of the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott for the first time and cried in recognition. Jo, the misunderstood character that felt so conflicted by being born a woman, recited that bit of poetry from George Eliot, and I replayed the scene again and again. They were on the beach, playing, frolicking, sunbathing, celebrating life for its simplest of joys. 

Jo later admits in a moment of passion, coming undone: “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty. I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.”

A lot of my life I felt like I had to compensate for not being born a boy. 

I always felt like I had to try harder, be able to do the same physical tasks, carry the heavy things, change my own tire, in order for people to see that I was capable, that I was worthy of the respect they so inherently granted my male peers. 

This past summer, I went to meet up with friends for a boat excursion, half men half women, and I went out of my way to introduce myself to the man whose boat it was, offered to help the men loading up coolers, and avoided being objectified as an accessory. I didn’t want to be a pretty girl on a boat like a fixture, a figurehead decoration for men to ogle at in satisfaction. I just wanted to enjoy being on the water with my friends, but the dynamic of being a woman haunts me, always. Did they invite me because they actually like my company? Or am I just a pawn for men to show other men they have some kind of pull? Would they have invited me if I wasn’t conventionally attractive? 

It was also never that I wanted to be “not like other girls”, it was more like I wanted to be like “other guys”, or more accurately other “people”, because often being a girl didn’t feel like being a full person. There are times I have felt counted out by virtue of my parts. 

"Daphnis et Naïs" de Pierre Loison, Marbre (1866).

These kinds of thoughts color so many experiences of the lives of women or fem-presenting people. Like Jo, I want to be taken seriously. I want people to know I am not going to submit to them by some inherent nature mythology. I fight it, everyday. Walking down the street, I will look men hard in the eye. If a man stares at me, I stare back. I aim to seem self-possessed, confident, and willful. And I believe I am, but I also wonder if people see through it, if it’s performative. 

Yet some days, some rare, fine days, I let my guard down and allow myself to be soft. I let myself skip in the sand, dance to the music, and pick flowers because “what novelty is worth that sweet monotony?”. It’s hard to be tough all the time. I understand how the patriarchy hurts men in this way. We all need permission to play, let go, and have complex feelings. My emotional stoicism never saved me from anything anyway.

After moving to Italy and having everything fall apart, it began to completely alter who I was as a person and what I now think is important. Like Jo, I often felt that love was a hindrance to freedom, that you couldn’t have both as a woman (at least not without a lot of money). She was afraid of not being remembered through her work or creating a legacy beyond merely existing, much like I fear, a fictional century later. 

My top priority all my life has always been freedom. But now it isn’t. 

From a journal entry on Wednesday, December 4th:

“It reminded me of the most important thing in this life--love. For a while I felt it was freedom, maybe they were tied for first. But even with all the freedom in the world, without loved ones to share it with, it feels a little less sweet. I can see, now, that love matters more to me than outward accomplishment and accolades, and those will come in time. But love? True, unconditional love is rare. It is finite, like time. I’d rather spend years deeply loving and being loved with an unglamorous job than have the dream job and be alone or sacrifice a good thing. For what? Love is the most important part of the human experience. Love is freedom. It matters, in the end, more than anything else you do.”

A film still from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004).

And now I think of Jo March and I think of how George Eliot said “Where everything is known, and loved, because it is known.” To be known, to be known and loved deeply, is the most profound immortality. It is the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. 

You can have freedom without love, but you cannot have love without freedom. To love in spite of everything is true freedom. To love when the odds are against you is freedom. They are irrevocably intertwined.

Love is freedom.