I’ve been fascinated by the plot device of a character choosing between nobility and practicality lately. To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to reference several pieces of literature, so if you don’t recognize one, maybe the next one will work.
By the way, if you aren’t familiar with these titles, I highly, highly recommend them (sorry for the plot spoilers). If you are interested in creating dynamic, conflicted characters, you can’t go far wrong by diving into these. In the comments section, you could recommend your favorites to go with the ones I chose.
Maybe the best example is Ilsa’s choice in Casablanca where she, as Meg Ryan as Sally so aptly put it in When Harry Met Sally, “I don’t want to spend the rest of her life married to a man who runs a bar.” Ryan says that Ilsa would rather be “the first lady of Czechoslovakia.”
Ryan argues here that Ilsa would choose the practicality of Victor over the love for Rick (that simplifies it quite a bit, but Ilsa does make a choice). I’ll come back to Casablanca at the end of this.
I see a related choice when Rick chooses between serving his own desires, by flying off with Ilsa, or being noble and letting her go with Victor Laszlo. He struggles between the nobility of releasing her from her promise, and going off to fight Nazi’s (while letting a great, inspirational leader of the resistance continue his work), and keeping her for himself.
Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby faces a similar point when she chooses her abrasive, cheating but “safe” husband over the smitten, dream-filled (also a poser, law-breaking) Gatsby.
Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights chooses between the “low class” Heathcliff, who she loves, and Edgar, who is the right choice socially. Interestingly enough, a generation later Catherine’s daughter, Cathy, chooses the similarly “degraded” Hareton, a noble selection her mother was incapable of. Cathy, by the way, isn’t given an attractive, more socially acceptable alternative. Still, I like her decision.
In A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More chooses between the noble idea of following his conscience by refusing an oath he doesn’t believe in (which will condemn him to the headsman’s axe), and living. His sacrifice defines him, but also sets up the great closing line from the Common Man, who offers this alternative to being noble: “I’m breathing . . . Are you breathing too? . . . It’s nice, isn’t it? It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends, just don’t -make trouble-or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected. Well, I don’t need to tell you that. Good night. If we should bump into one another, recognize me.”
The Common Man chooses practicality over nobility, the opposite of More’s decision.
I think it’s fascinating to see characters choosing between what they believe is right, and what they know is practical (or easier).
Back to Casablanca. I think the movie plays differently now than it did in 1941. My guess is that most of the men in the 1941 audience believed Ilsa when she said to Rick, “I don’t know what’s right any longer. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us.” That makes Ilsa a woman who needs a man to tell her what to think. This is right in line with other stories of the time (and for many years before and after) where a strong man had to think for the woman, or, even worse, show her own mind. The “show her own mind” plays out in any film where at a key point, the man grabs a reluctant and/or struggling woman who is angry with him and kisses her until she melts into his arms. He knew (as did the audience) that she was in love with him, but she didn’t know it.
I’ve always thought the kiss-the-reluctant-woman-until-she-realizes-she-loves-you meme was a model of date rape. Yuck.
A modern viewer of Casablanca, and probably that of many of the women in the 1941 audience, see a much more likely explanation of the “think for all of us” scene is that Ilsa is playing Rick. She’s not choosing between Rick and Victor then. She chose in Paris earlier when instead of going off with Rick to be married, she went to Victor, leaving Rick standing in the rain, holding an enigmatic goodbye note. Her noble sacrifice is to give herself to Rick so that Victor can go on leading the resistance movement. She is doing what another character in the film said to Rick: “If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness is the only thing she wanted in the whole world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”
Rick says that no one ever loved him that much, but Ilsa loves Victor that much.
Rick was right earlier when he said, “You’d say anything to get what you want.”
She did. For a moment he believed her, and probably continued to believe her even when they were at the airport where he told her to go off with Victor. His belief that she loved him defined his nobility, although you can get an interesting second read of the scene if you believed him when he told Victor that he only pretended to believe Ilsa the night before.
So many great stories have, at their centers, characters who are torn, choosing between irreconcilable desires.
The pounding, pulsing organic heart that makes those stories come alive and suck readers in is the conflict within the protagonists.
At any rate, I like plots that set characters up with difficult, character-defining choices.
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s reader’s choice awards. Years and years ago he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
