Villanelle’s Heart Symbol Analysis

In The Passion, Villanelle’s heart symbolizes how experiencing passion can undermine a person’s sense of self. Villanelle first mentions her heart after she meets the woman with gray-green eyes, describing her heart as “a reliable organ” that has not required safekeeping during her affairs with women or men. Yet during her affair with the woman with gray-green eyes, Villanelle realizes that she has “wager[ed]” her heart and may lose it. Eventually, Villanelle concludes that she must end the affair because, as the woman with gray-green eyes is married, meaning that external circumstances and chance will always complicate Villanelle’s relationship with her. Yet at this point, Villanelle has already lost her heart—literally lost it, in the magical-realist language of the novel, to the woman with gray-green eyes.

Villanelle, heartless, begins to act in uncharacteristic ways: she marries the large man, a repulsive suitor whom she previously swore she would never marry, just to escape the possibility of running into the woman with gray-green eyes. Years later, Villanelle returns to Venice with French army deserter Henri in tow and convinces him to steal her heart back from the house of the woman with gray-green eyes—a fantastical sequence literalizing the figurative expression to have “lost one’s heart” to the object of one’s passion. After Henri steals Villanelle’s heart from the house and returns it to her, Villanelle regains her heartbeat and begins acting less self-destructive and more confident—symbolizing how the end of her passion for the woman with gray-green eyes has helped her regain her sense of self. Yet while Villanelle chooses not to resume her affair with the woman with gray-green eyes, she ultimately realizes that she will likely gamble her heart on someone else in the future—suggesting that vulnerability to loss of self is an intrinsic part of romantic passion.