The Mythology of Heartbreak
Thursday, September 30th, 2010Cross-posted from Bitten by Books
The ancients thought the heart was the source of all human emotion and passion. This is probably because of the way our heart thumps when we fall in love, and the way our heart seems to seize inside our chests when we’re frightened or grieving. The heart is a wonderfully resilient muscle, soft and fleshy, yet we describe the fracturing pain of loss as heartbreak?
The strange thing about heartbreak is that almost everyone experiences it at some point in their lives, but almost nobody can explain what it is. Still, since love, heartbreak, and redemptive happy endings are a romance writer’s stock-in-trade, it behooves authors like me to try!
Heartbreak is an emotional distress, but physically painful, even though no physician would ever be able to find the wound. And it can seldom be cured by anything but true love.
If you’ve ever experienced heartbreak–true heartbreak–you know that it changes you. After a bad breakup, people aren’t just depressed. They tend to internalize their feelings as a loss of self. Divorcees often describe a sense of alienation from themselves, as if they don’t know who they are anymore in the world without the love of their spouse. Heartbroken people talk about having a hole in their heart that they fear will never be filled. They have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, as if they had woken up without a limb and weren’t sure how to walk again. They might think they’ve forgotten how to laugh. Their taste in music may be changed forever. Their sense of identity, warped beyond recognition.
Today we have many fancy clinical ways of explaining these changes in personality, but when the ancients couldn’t explain something, they turned to mythology. They knew what heartbreak does to a person–how one shattering moment can take away everything you’ve ever believed about the world and your place in it. They took that knowledge and shaped it into their stories about nymphs.
Nymphs are ubiquitous in Greek mythology. They’re wild feminine demi-goddesses. Representations of woman at her purest, outside the realm of societal structure. But none of them seem to be immune from heartbreak, and in the oldest stories, when a nymph falls in love, it almost never turns out well. Nymphs not only seem doomed to suffer heartbreak, but they are changed by it. Literally.
As Ares reflects in my debut paranormal romance novel, Poisoned Kisses
She was a nymph; love would change her like it did all her kind. Love changed pretty Galatea, who turned into a fountain of tears when her mortal lover died. Pitys’ heartbreak transformed her into a tree that weeps whenever the wind blows. And who could forget Salmacis? She was so desperate with love for Hermaphroditos that she melded her body with his and became a new creature, half woman, half man!
The nymphs of ancient mythology were transformed by love. Their essential place in the world was so shaken, that they lost their essential womanhood and became something else entirely. An observation about human nature, or simply a cautionary tale? It’s hard to say. But either way, these stories illustrate the depths of our emotions as human beings in a way that all our modern, clinical diagnoses fails to capture.
The sad stories of nymphs spoke to me, and that’s why I chose one to be the heroine of my romance novel. I wanted her to have a happy ending…one that shows how love can mend a broken heart. How love can give us all second chances, because love also changes who we are; it makes us stronger. And I can think of nothing more romantic!
So, let’s hear it. How has love gotten you through your first, or worst, heartbreak?
In modern day western culture, our death holiday (Halloween) and our harvest celebration (Thanksgiving) are celebrated separately. Not so for the ancient Greeks.
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