Emotion and Judgment

In their respective works, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Andrew Marvell, and Zora Neale Hurston use instances of love, lust, and sexual desire to demonstrate the impact of human emotion on individual judgment. Here, by presenting various levels of intimacy, the authors seek to prove that physical desire and attraction typically outweigh common sense within the realm of decision making.

For example, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed, attempts to justify the frivolous actions of both the narrator and womankind by highlighting their emotional instability and lust for companionship. In fact, the first few lines of the poem (“I being born a woman and distressed by all the needs and notions of my kind”) immediately serve as a mechanism by which to shift responsibility for the following actions from the narrator to the entire female gender. By removing herself from the central actions of the poem and creating a basis by which readers are left to question the ‘feminine mystique’ the narrator makes her situation extremely obvious. Like most women, she has an innate need to love or feel loved. And it is by allowing this need to control her senses that she falls prey to convenience and physical attraction. She is so consumed by the thought of love and companionship, so caught up in the moment, that she is left entirely “possessed”. Yet, while she later acknowledges the pleasure sustained by this one moment (essentially a one night stand), she also makes a point to clarify the meaning, or lack of meaning, it held. Such an act was one of mere lust, a whirlwind of emotion that, at the time being, seemed like love. But, to those who know better lust can never be compared to true love.

Consequently, while Andrew Marvell’s poem, To His Coy Mistress, may portray a far more intimate couple than the one mentioned in Millay’s poem, the instance of time is still severely important. Whereas the narrator is attempting to convince his mistress or loved one to sleep with him, it is extremely important that he consider the presence of time through various perspectives. The first is inevitably the slowest. Here, he professes the value of time and claims that he is willing to wait several hundred years for her. He feels that final consent should come in the name of love, not lust. Yet, on a second level, while he may love her enough to prolong the union of their two bodies, he cannot help but think that “Time’s winged chariot [is] hurrying near” (line 22). They do not have several hundred years to wait. And if they prolong it too much they may lose the sexual tension that now exists between them. Thus, as the narrator begins to understand that time is of the essence, the speed of the poem picks up. Immediately the argument shifts gears, claiming that they must seize the day (carpe diem) and consummate their relationship while they are still young and in love. Essentially, by claiming that if she waits too much longer they may both be dead and in their graves, he is prompting his lover to relent, to give in to emotion.

Invariably, the same dilemma is present in “The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Hurston. However, instead of focusing on the division between emotion and rational judgment, Hurston’s story seems to unite the two. For unlike the two aforementioned poems, which noted emotional instability as the key factor in false judgment, “The Gilded Six-Bits” places a much stronger emphasis on the impact of money and material goods—citing them as the ‘root of all evil’. Hence, because material wealth is detached somewhat from internal emotion (unless, of course, you include greed or envy), the actions committed by Missy May are far less “clouded” than those of either previous narrator. Instead, she is fully aware of her actions—claiming that she committed adultery in return for the gold pieces so coveted by her husband (ironically, a second sin). It is not until after the act has been committed that emotion becomes significant. Here she regrets sleeping with Slemmons and feels guilty that she has caused her husband such pain.

Nonetheless, in comparing the ways in which the presence of emotion, either before or after the so called ‘decision’, affects the individuals involved, the question no longer remains focused on the ways in which emotion impacts judgment, but whether the impact is beneficial or detrimental to the outcome of the situation. Is it better to act on the basis of emotion or to act without emotion?