What wasn’t written about love? Since the appearance of writing and the birth of the story, an endless stream of words was poured over this mysterious feeling; over the sensation of spiritual and corporal elevation that fills a woman and a man who are connected by love. The story “Madame Rose Hanie” is, too, a love story, but it focuses on the tragic dimension of love. Because this exalted and fortifying feeling can lead – in and because of certain cultural and social circumstances – to a feeling of helplessness, humiliation or an existential bind. The author brings us the story of a man and a woman as he heard it from each of them separately. Using a simple but remarkably poetic language, he weaves these two stories into a complex human drama, in which the two protagonists are tormented by social and cultural coercion. Rose Hanie, a girl of only eighteen, was married to Rashid Bey Namaan – a good-hearted and generous forty-year-old man, from a wealthy and well respected family, who fell in love with her, married her, and gave her his best. The heart of Rashid, the goodhearted conservative, was filled with good intentions, and Rose tries with all of her might to return his love, but her attempts are in vain. As she says, “because Love descends upon our souls by the will of God and not by the demand or the plea of the individual”. Whereas, Rashid, her husband, despairingly asks: “If your lot in life is a beautiful bird that you love dearly, you gladly feed to him the seeds of your inner self, and make your heart his cage and your soul his nest. But while you are affectionately admiring him and looking upon him with the eyes of love, he escapes from your hands and flies very high; then he descends and enters into another cage and never comes back to you. What can you do?” The heart of Rose, who is locked in a golden cage made for her by her loving husband, is attracted to another man, whereas he, the husband, is made to live-out his misery without receiving an answer to his question. In this original story, Gibran Khalil Gibran succeeds in conveying to us both the experience of suffocation that is forced upon a woman by the society and culture in which she lives, and the horrible frustration of the man who sincerely loved and believed, in being himself constrained by social mores, that he will win her heart. And so, due to these mores, two human creatures live a life of misery: the man feels betrayed by an ungrateful woman, and the woman, whose love to another man makes her into a pariah. This is Christian Lebanon – a captive of its social mores and bound by religion and conservatism – during the early 20th century. But are we, here and now, in a different land and a hundred years later, free from these mores?
I love all the books of him
This is a very powerful story of love and marriage. Many people (men and women) have married for riches, and not love. Or, marrying too young, and not experiencing many loves, one may choose the wrong mate. I understood Madame Hanie’s heart, and I rejoiced in her decision to leave riches for love. The neighborhood examples of those who sold their happiness and their souls, for wealth and riches, drove home the importance of following one’s heart, in the matters of love. It is best to follow the dictates of God’s love, than to be a slave to the laws of man. A wonderfully powerful story of love and marriage.