Thou Shall Not Defy the Gods

Thou Shall Not Defy the Gods

Questions: 1

    The ending of My Love, My Love was tragic and depressing, thought predictable. In many ways it was even inevitable. Ti Moune’s story is set up as a curve, she started of as a peasant girl, who wishes to escape her ordinary life and see the world. She is full of hope and faith for the Gods. Her wish comes true, she saves Daniel from the car crash and then follows him to the city where she falls in love with him. This is when Ti Moune’s character changes. The more she gets the more she wants. When Ti Moune meets the little girl on her journey to the city, she tells her about the wishing cage granted to every orphan. Ti Moune tells the girl that she must let the butterfly, which she must catch to make a wish, out of the wishing cage once the wish has come true. However when she later lives in the hotel with Daniel, many of Ti Moune’s wishes have come and she doesn’t let the butterfly’s out of the wishing cage: “And the papillons, maddened in their cage, demanded their freedom. But Desiree Dieu-Donne held them captive still.” Thought her wishes have come true Ti Moune doesn’t free the butterfly's showing her as becoming greedy.

Then Ti Moune loses the red comb that was a gift from Erzulie. After the ball people in the hotel see Ti Moune as beautiful: “Now that she had been received-even without her magic red comb. She had taken it form her hair and had thrown it into a drawer of her room. Now she went into the hotel dining room, smiling at guests who admired her for herself alone.” Ti Moune is turning into one of the rich people, she loses her faith in the Gods and instead starts to believe to be able to take her faith into her own hand. She doesn’t need Erzulie’s comb anymore, everyone loves her for who she really is.  It is that hybris that foreshadows a bad ending as in many stories, hybris, leads to a downfall, and My Love, My Love isn’t an exception.

Ti Moune’s luck changes when Andrea returns from France. Daniel is immediately fond of her, and though Ti Moune is still happy because he is happy, things change. She is thrown out of his room and eventually also out of the hotel. As a reader, I thought that she should have seen that coming and it was naive from her to believe that Daniel would make her his wife. Devastated with love sickness she doesn’t eat or sleep, and at Daniel’s wedding to Andrea, he doesn’t recognize her. Now she is again just the dirty peasant girl not visible to the rich people on the island.

From the point where Andrea returns from France, Ti Mounes luck gets worse and worse. The curve is falling rapidly downwards, till ending in Ti Mounes death. What made her death so tragic was that she died a nothing, she had left the only family she every had, she was thrown out on the street by the man she loved, and was left by the Gods. All that nothingness that her character is in the end is symbolized when her corpse is thrown to the garbage. It is not only that Monsieur Gabriel thinks she is a nothing because she is a peasant, but there is literally nothing left of Ti Moune or Desiree Dieu-Donne that could be seen as a dead person. In the two weeks in which Ti Moune is love sick and starves herself she is already dying it just took the wedding and the crowd to make her body die just as her spirit did. With the dead body there is so little left of her it’s like throwing away a candy wrap.

Questions: 2

The book is teaching the lesson that one should not disregard the Gods and believe to be able to take faith into one's own hands. Ti Moune is a dreamy character, not happy with the life she has. After she saves Daniel from the car crash she had gotten a glimpse of the world outside the village and now she can’t get enough of it. She decides to leave the village and find Daniel, this she still does with the help and the compliance of the Gods. However once Ti Moune has found Daniel and they have fallen in love, she starts to get used to the live among the rich, and she starts to enjoy it. Like I mentioned above, Ti Mounes death is a result from her hybris: “No longer did she feel like Ti Moune, the orphan, the peasant. Now she was a lady of elegance.” Ti Moune no longer thinks of herself as a peasant, she has left the peasant life and the Gods, which had saved her as a little girl. Now she is Desiree Dieu-Donne a real lady. At the ball Ti Moune charms everyone, “Now that she had been received-even without her magic red comb. She had taken it form her hair and had thrown it into a drawer of her room. Now she went into the hotel dining room, smiling at guests who admired her for herself alone.” Ti Moune throws away the comb because she believes that everyone admires her just for being herself, thus she takes on the believe of taking her faite into her own hands and leaves the Gods. However that hybris leads to her downfall. When Daniel meets Andrea and falls in love with her he starts to disregard Ti Moune. Thought the Gods try to give her another chance to prove her faith towards them by killing Daniel, Ti Moune refuses to do so and is thrown out of the Hotel. Devastated by her love sickness she doesn’t eat or sleep and is therefore not capable of escaping when a mass panic erupts at Daniel and Andrea’s wedding. She is trampled to death by the crowd and dies a nothing with no support of friends, or a family and her corpse is thrown with the garbage. This way the book teaches the lesson that if one defies the will of the Gods bad things will happen and one will die pitiful and alone.