true love

“The Gilded Six-Bits,” “I Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” and “To His Coy Mistress” all portray true love, in which anything would be done to please the other person. The concept of faithful women in each of these three works is very similar to what we have been talking about in class. In Zora Neal Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits,” Missie May is shy, yet playful, and would do anything to make her husband happy. In this case, “anything” is sleeping with another man for his money. We looked at a similar issue in “The Birthmark.” The husband in that story wanted her to change a physical aspect of herself, and she agreed – not because it would make her happy, but because it would make him happy. This is a debatable issue; how far will you go? How much will you change just to make someone love you?

In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” the speaker is desperate to be with the man she speaks about. However, she convinces herself that she cannot be with him. Instead of changing something about herself, she actually decides that she has reason not to. In “To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell, the roles are reversed and it is the man who is begging to be loved. The speaker professes his undying pure love for this woman, desperately begging her to accept him. The difference in this poem is that he does not describe her with anything but beauty. According to the speaker, this woman is flawless. However, he does make it clear that he would do anything for her love, which is a general theme of the works we have been reading.