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How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot; Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned ...
Receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) has a penchant for pithy quotes that she gets from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.1 One of her favourites relates to her job at Lacuna Inc., a place where, according to her boss, Howard (Tom Wilkinson), people go when they're 'not happy and ... [want] to move on. We provide that possibility.' The procedure they offer is, even they admit, minor 'brain damage', and involves mysteriously 'mapping' the unhappy memories the clients wish to have removed, and deleting them from their brains. Thus Mary quotes from Alexander Pope's 1717 poem Eloisa to Abelard2 as it seems 'really appropriate', and the verse also gives Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) its title. However, it is significant that Mary gets the poet's name back to front, for she is also mistaken in her understanding of the quotation - it means quite the reverse of what she thinks it does.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind therefore aligns itself overtly with the literary, from Joel (Jim Carrey) writing and narrating in his journal to Clem (Kate Winslet) calling herself an open book and working in Barnes & Noble. The notion of reading people, of piecing together narrative and self-knowledge from story fragments, of interpreting the world to understand one's self - these are acts of literary criticism, and like Mary's quotes and the company's name, they are borrowed from the language and concepts of studying literature. Moreover, when Mary discovers her company is not doing 'noble work' after all, her epiphany and the film's poetic title suggest the effort to explore the text's historical and literary influences will also lead us to a meaningful place upon which to stand, and through which to understand the film. Pope's poem was inspired by a famous twelfth-century love story of the ill-fated romance between two young scholars. The illicit affair and secret marriage of Heloise and Abelard ended in Heloise entering a nunnery upon Abelard's castration by her irate family. Pope's 'letter' from Heloise to her lost love harks back to Ancient Rome, where Vestal virgin high...