In the book Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block, the theme of love often ties with ignorance. One of the factors that influences this is the setting. The book takes place in L.A. in the nineties, and it seems very similar to the setting of Romeo+Juliet. The descriptions make L.A. sound like a beautiful hot city full to the brim with overwhelming passion. Everything just almost seems hazy and unreal. Weetzie loves Los Angeles with all her heart because it's this shimmering, magnificent, sparkling city full of angels. But this traps Weetzie in a milky film of ignorance that becomes so thick and opaque that she can't see anything else. Weetzie is so full with love for her two children, Cherokee Love and Witch Baby, her best friends Duck and Dirk, and her boyfriend My Secret Agent Lover Man. With all this love in her way, Weetzie becomes to oblivious to all hardship that is going on around her. Another way that love and ignorance ties in together is that Weetzie starts believing that nothing bad can happen to her. She feels that her love is some sort of forcefield that can protect her from all the evil in the world. She feels like no one can ever leave her. When Duck, one of her best friends, leaves her because he sees the world for what it really is, she just is so very optimistic, trapped in a bubble of almost blissful ignorance. Weetzie is L.A., which is a paradise dripping with hell. But the paradise is so thick and blinding, you can't see the fiery depth that is purely Los Angeles.
A way that the themes of love and ignorance tie in together is with the setting of L.A. The book starts out by saying, "The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school is because no one understood. They didn't even realize where they were living. They didn't care that Marilyns' prints were practically in their backyard at Graumann's; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at the Farmer's Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor's; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors..." The people that Weetzie is talking about are the people who see L.A. for what it truly is. The anti-paradise. Weetzie has so much love for the city that she becomes invisible to all the bad parts about Los Angeles. When she goes to visit her dad Charlie in New York City, she pleads with him to come back to California and live with her. I found his response extremely interesting. "'Weetzie, I love you and Cherokee and... Well, I love you more than anything. But I can't be in that city. Everything's an illusion; that's the whole thing about it-illusion, imitation, a mirage. Pagodas and palaces and skies, blondes and stars. It makes me too sad. It's like having a good dream. You know you are going to wake up."' Weetzie is stuck in this gauzy wonderful dream, and she's unaware that she's going to have to wake up.
Another way that ignorance and love go together in Weetzie Bat is that Weetzie has this logic that love will be able to protect her from anything. As long as Weetzie loves, the bad in the world won't catch up to her. She describes this love that she has when she's sitting down eating dinner with her "family". "Weetzie's heart felt so full with love, so full, as if it could hardly fit in her chest. I don't know about happily ever after...but I know about happily, Weetzie Bat thought.". As long as she continues to love she will be happy, and nothing will go wrong. When her best friend Dirk got severely depressed about his boyfriend leaving him, she simply just rubbed his back, made him tea, and told him everything was going to be okay and that Duck (Dirk's boyfriend) would come back. She wasn't even that upset. As long as she had love, she would be perfectly fine. Another way Weetzie uses her love as a forcefield is when My Secret Agent Lover Man, her boyfriend leaves her, and she becomes shattered, because she realizes his love is gone. Part of her protection just left her. Now she is vulnerable to everything in the world and the "Hell-A." part of L.A. can touch her. As you can see, Weetzie uses love as a huge shining forcefield of ignorance.
In conclusion, the two themes of love and ignorance go together in many different ways. One way that they go together is in the setting, which is Los Angeles. It's shown as this glistening, glimmering, fantastic city where nothing can go wrong. The city is pregnant with love and passion, and this coats it's citizens in a warm blanket of honey-ignorance. It's so sweet, and if the citizens of L.A. weren't smothered in it, they would lose their minds. Esepcially Weetzie. She has so much love for the city, it's almost ridiculous. Another way love and ignorance go together is how Weetzie believes love will block out and defeat all the maliciousness and such in her life. If she does not have love, her entire world will fall to pieces. But as long as she has love, she is invincible. Invincibility is ignorance. But all in all, the theme of love and the theme of ignorance tie together wonderfully in this book.
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