Wearing a white nightdress, tears slipping down her face, Claire leans forward and looks at Jamie. He has admitted that he is broken, that Randall has succeeded in his depraved mission. In an agonizing line taken straight from the novel, Jamie declares “I lie here feeling that I will die without your touch, but when you touch me, I feel as though I will vomit with shame.” Jamie cannot think of Claire without remembering Randall. The two are ever intertwined, and that haunts him.
Throughout the season, Jamie and Claire have been the unbreakable couple. We watched them make love with utter tenderness and joy. The newness of the experience, the way in which they discovered one another, touched us deeply. Much was made of the fact that the female gaze appeared on TV, that we looked at Jamie through Claire’s eyes, and saw in him kindness, fealty and physical beauty.
We watched their love tested as Claire is assaulted, first by Redcoats and then by Black Jack himself. Three times Claire finds herself in danger from Randall, and three times she is saved – the first, when she arrives on the scene after passing through the stones, the second, when Randall captures her and brings her to Fort William, and the third, when she is discovered attempting to free Jamie. Diana Gabaldon herself wrote that “love for these two is always reciprocal. It’s not about one partner making a sacrifice for the other’s sake. Throughout the story, they keep rescuing each other.”
So why does Jamie end up having to be raped and tortured? Gabaldon answers that as well, explaining that “Love has a real cost. Jamie and Claire have built a relationship that’s worth what it’s cost them. This is the final challenge, and Jamie’s willing to pay what will apparently be the ultimate cost.”
In the books, when rising to the challenge of saving Jamie, Claire finds herself in an equally uncomfortable, sickening place. She actually takes on the persona of Randall, anointing herself in lavender oil, speaking in his clipped accent, forcing a feverish Jamie to live through an encounter with the man, to fight him (through her) physically and get a little of his own back. She is active, strong, the woman we have come to know throughout the series. She makes choices – dark ones, dangerous ones – but choices that show her to be the equal and the match of Jamie Fraser, who is willing to give all for love.
Claire, too, is willing to risk all and give all – to play Randall to ease Jamie’s pride, to help him work through the nightmare in his mind. He physically assaults her, believing she is Randall, and she struggles to get free, struggling not only for her life but for his. Eventually, at the end of this terrifying and heartbreaking scene, he believes she is his mother and lays down, exhausted. The fever breaks. He has fought through (at least part of) the trauma. There is symmetry, if not parity, between their two experiences – Jamie with the torture he endures, and Claire in the role of inflicting torture and enduring the aftermath.
In the season finale, Claire is not permitted to be the active, strong woman that she is. She is robbed of the symmetry of her sacrifice, of the strength that enables her to do something horrific out of love. While she does begin by forcing Jamie to wake up through using lavender oil – on him, but not on her – any similarity to the part she plays in the books ends there. We are instead treated to a weeping, overwrought Claire, who claims that she believes that she and Jamie are meant to be together, that this is the reason she slipped into the past. This tearful character – for surely she is not the Claire we know and love! – says, “But if you take away the one last thing that makes sense to me then I will die, with you, right here, now.”
This is a distortion of, fundamentally, who Claire is. Claire is not the woman to lay down and die (especially not when she knows she is bearing Jamie’s child!) She is not the woman to win over her husband via a guilt trip – how he needs to live because otherwise she will die. That is a TV trope we have seen on many second rate shows but it is not one of which Claire will ever be guilty. She is active, a combat nurse, a healer, someone willing to stand up to Dougal, brash and bold and unbroken.
By having Claire utter this sentiment, the TV series has taken the healthy relationship that Claire and Jamie have – one in which they work through their difficulties and help each other out of their low points – and made it unhealthy. They have transformed the Claire who is able to live on but who would not want to be a Claire who is incapable of living in a world without Jamie. They have defined the pinnacle of female love as being the desire to die if the person they love is dying. In this equation, love equals sacrifice equals death – when true, healthy love would be forging the strength to live on, bear Jamie’s child and raise him or her to be a credit to the man Claire adores.
In The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Sam talks about her boyfriend and says “He is my whole world.” Her parents are horrified by the sentiment and say, “Don’t ever say that again. Not about anyone. Not even about me.” The implication is that you should never live for anyone else, and someone else’s death, while emotionally devastating, should not be reason to give up your own. That sentiment ought to apply here.
A healthy relationship between two people would model Claire’s strength – her strength to live and fight, damaged, but unbroken. It would honor Claire’s courage in doing something difficult and horrific for the sake of allowing Jamie to fight against the man who hurt him. By retreating to Gothic sentiments that echo those of a Heathcliff-Catherine relationship, the TV series has harmed the searing, unrepentant love between these two- and betrayed the true Claire, who is marked by her uncompromising, fierce strength in the face of darkness.
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