Rereading Harrow (already? it’s more likely than you think) and I am having Thoughts.
Thinking about what the Locked Tomb series is telling us about love and relationships, but particularly regarding Gideon and Harrow.
Specifically, I am thinking about Ianthe and Gideon’s discussion about Harrow’s choice to take away her memories of Gideon. After Gideon tells Ianthe she “never got anywhere [with Harrow]” and Ianthe challenges her (“Did you?”)
I’m talking about forgetting… Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me… I’d kill you myself. Love… true love is acquisitive. You keep anything… Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise.
Ianthe obviously trying to claim that Gideon must not have meant much to Harrow if she was willing to just discard her and rewrite her own memories, wipe her from her life.
Ianthe’s idea of love here is very interesting, most especially because I sort of see her and Harrow as foils, particularly in HtN. And growing up, I do feel that Harrow also saw this type of expression as love.
I think about their fight when they were kids, as Gideon tells it
you told me if anyone came looking for me you would get your parents to lock me in a closet and say that I had died of “brain malfunction”
and also that Gideon tried to escape the 9th House 80 something times but Harrow always prevented it. And yet that Harrow confesses in the pool that Gideon is her only friend and she would be “undone” without her.
So, yeah in a way I think Harrow has formed similar ideas of love being this possessive thing, this preventing someone from leaving you. That there is little room for agency and choice in it.
But. I think that is lowkey why her erasing Gideon is exact proof that she unselfishly loves Gideon and that her definition of what it means to care about someone has grown. Her love for Gideon is no longer about possessing her or keeping her under her control - it’s about saving her, even if that results in Harrow losing her for good. Because if Gideon lives, Harrow dies. Or if Gideon’s soul is to be saved, she must give up everything she knows about Gideon, a big part of herself in the process.
A lot of people talk about Harrow as taking the easy way out with her grief by erasing Gideon, but the reality is she is sacrificing a lot in order to express a much more selfless kind of love.
I know the series isn’t over yet but I can’t help but think about these interwoven themes of love being about consensual and mutually beneficial service and to some extent sacrifice - but that it’s not about sacrificing the self or consuming another. It’s about a balance and a wholeness. “The love of service on both sides” as the paperback of GtN puts it.