Oh look! While traveling in distant lands, the hero met a girl–probably the chief’s daughter–and fell (or rather, stumbled) in love. The catch? Neither of them speak the same language.
That’s okay, though: through the power of love, the two of them will somehow find a way to understand each other. Whether through touch, music, math, or a montage filled with magical sparkles, they come to discover that love itself is a language, one which they know fluently.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the page for this trope. It’s pretty dang sparse, though it does make a couple of good points. The main one is that this type of story almost always has the male character speak the language of the audience, with the female character being the foreign or exotic one. That might be because the seductress is such a powerful character archetype…but then again, it might just be because everything sounds sexier in French.
My favorite example of this trope is in the film Jeremiah Johnson, where the hero unwittingly stumbles into a marriage with–you guessed it–the chief’s daughter. What starts out as an awkward pairing, to say the least, turns into a wonderfully endearing love story, as Jeremiah builds a cabin for the two of them (and the mute boy he picked up earlier…long story) and together they become a family.
Because this is a major driving element in Star Wanderers, the novel I’m currently writing, I’m especially conscious of this trope right now. However, I can’t think of many good examples where this trope came into play. Do you have any ideas that you can share? Favorite stories where love overcame a major language barrier? If so, I would love to hear about it. Because in spite of my tongue-in-cheek comment about the sparkles, I think this trope has some really awesome potential.
Image by Kevin Jackson. Taken from here.
Interesting topic! I thought of two examples.
The first is the TV series Flash Forward, in which everyone in the world has a simultaneous blackout and sees a vision of themselves in a moment several months in the future. One of the characters sees himself meeting a beautiful Japanese girl for dinner and so in the intervening months before this event is supposed to happen he gets all into Japanese culture and tries to teach himself a few phrases so he can communicate with her (not doing very well, of course). It’s an interesting twist on it, but that storyline definitely strikes me as calling on this trope.
The second example I thought of is also a bit of a stretch, but had an interesting quote associated with it. In Gene Wolfe’s short story Under Hill, a knight embarks on a quest to rescue an exotic foreign princess. They sidestep the language barrier with: “She’s been enchanted, she says — a spell to replace her own tongue with ours.”
However, there is still a huge cultural divide between the two of them, but they fall in love in spite of it (and in spite of not knowing anything about each other whatsoever). There’s a fantastically tropish bit of prose later on in the story that addresses the cross-cultural love at first sight: “Together they went into the castle, she tottering and half supported by his hand and arm; and if their words were the stately ones of their time and their disparate homelands, their hands spoke a language much older: I am a woman and you — you are a man! whispered the tiny hand; and I am a man and you are a woman indeed! replied the great one.”
I thought that was a particularly curious twist on the trope.
However, I also wanted to add the opinion that I totally hate this trope. It seems disturbingly sexist to me, since the way it’s almost always used is “I’m a man from a dominant culture and you’re a darling little exotic foreign woman so I’m going to fall in ‘love’ with your sexy little self and you’re going to act all besotted with me in return because I’m richer/stronger/speak the dominant language/come from the dominant culture.” The whole thing smacks of mail order bride mentality.
It’s one of my long-standing grudges against Gene Wolfe, actually. I think the man’s a brilliant writer, quite possibly one of the best scifi authors of all time, but the way he writes women is absolutely infuriating. It gives the impression that the only women he has any experience with are fictional ones. His female characters can be violent and athletic and passionate and conniving but none of them are actually intelligent or emotionally real and they act like sexy pinups running around in a men-only reality.
I don’t know if reversing the trope would have any sort of mitigating effect on how it makes me feel – it’s still relying on the myth that love at first sight is legitimate or that communication in a relationship is secondary to physical attraction. I’ve yet to see it done in a way that doesn’t make my feminist cockles bristle.
However, I did think of one example of a similar story that treats the language barrier well. In this case it isn’t love but friendship that is built, and it only comes after a long period of hard work and misunderstanding. It wasn’t very well acclaimed as a movie, but Enemy Mine is actually pretty touching and effective with the way it handles true understanding despite difference.
I think that Jackie Chan inadvertently gets married to the chief’s daughter in Shanghai Noon. They don’t speak the same language, but she does end up saving his life….by shooting someone in the butt, if I remember correctly. But maybe I’m just smoking a peace pipe.
I think there could be potential to the trope, but I think Anneke does raise some good points. Plus, it always comes off to me as a bit contrived–I never feel like that would happen in real life, and I can’t really relate to the relationship there when there’s a language barrier. The culture barrier though–I think anybody can relate to that…even if you fall in love with someone from your hometown and church, there’s still a culture barrier.
Is that the culture of love that overcomes cultural barriers though?
I agree, there’s a lot of potential for sexism and cultural imperialism when the trope is done wrong. However, I think that’s more typical of tropes like Asian Gal With White Guy, or Race Fetish, or Mighty Whitey. I don’t think it was a problem so much with Jeremiah Johnson, though, because the whole story was about him leaving his culture and becoming a mountain man. At the very beginning, he was an utter failure, and needed help from the Indians just to survive. Yes, there were elements of Noble Savage as well, but I didn’t find it too horribly offensive. I guess it’s like most tropes: they’re neither good nor bad, just used in good ways and used in bad ways.
For a more potent version of this trope, try “Sweet Land.” It’s a movie that sticks with you. The girl is a mail order bride from Germany right after WW2 sent to a poor farmer in mid-west america, So as you can guess, it’s not so popular with the locals that’s she’s there…it’s a movie that’s stuck with me for a long time.
Interesting. I’ll have to check that out sometime.