Soulmates and Free Will: A Debate About The Time-Traveler’s Wife
Written by: The CinCitizens
Beth Woodward responds:
Tony, you bring up some interesting points. Henry’s final letter to Clare—in which he tells her that he will come back sometime in the future—is one of the things I had difficulty with when I was reading the book, for the same reason you did. Henry tells Clare he wants her to move on but then gives her information that could (and apparently does) make it more difficult to do so. I never read the galoshes that Henry tripped over as indication that Clare had remarried and had additional children. In fact, I thought the galoshes were an indication that Clare and Henry’s daughter, Alba, had married and had children of her own, and that the galoshes actually belonged to Clare’s grandchildren. To me, it was a subtle indication that Alba’s life had turned out more normally than Henry’s had—although admittedly, I could be reading too much into this.
For the sake of argument, let’s take Henry’s intentions at his word: that he wants Clare to move on with her life, but that he thinks the reassurance that he will come back to her sometime in the future will give her some much-needed solace during her mourning period. Granted, that may not have been the best approach, but your interpretation negates Clare’s agency in the situation. Henry told her that he would return someday, but Clare chooses to wait for him. She could have remarried or gotten involved with someone else, but we’re led to believe she didn’t. Instead, near the end of her life, she waits for Henry—just as she did when she was young. And since Henry’s letter never indicated that she hadn’t remarried—only that she would see him again—you cannot blame him for Clare’s choices. And given what we know about Clare’s character, I find it difficult to believe that she would have behaved any differently even without this information.
That said, I think your misgivings have less to do with the characters’ actions than your belief that the book is an endorsement of them. Clare spends her entire life waiting for her dead husband to time travel to her from the past, and this is supposed to be romantic? It’s actually horribly sad, and this is why I described the book as “bittersweet.” That Clare presumably spends the remainder her life alone, waiting for Henry’s final return, is tragic. But the fact that Clare and Henry were able to experience a love like that in the first place makes them luckier than many people.
You have to admit: Henry and Clare were dealt a pretty crappy hand. Henry’s time travel forces him to re-experience the past and gives him foreknowledge of the future—without any power to change any of it. (Several key scenes in the book show us that when he tries, he only ends up creating the very circumstances he was trying to avoid.) His travels are frequently dangerous and always beyond his control. And there’s a sense of ominousness throughout their life together: both Clare and Henry know, from the beginning, that they’ve never met a Henry older than 43. Later, Henry finds out about his own death—five years before it happens—and hides this knowledge from an increasingly suspicious Clare. And when Clare and Henry receive visits from a future Henry, there’s often the sense that they’ll have to “pay the piper” later on; the night Henry gets stuck, naked and freezing, in a parking garage is a perfect example. Clare is often left alone, not knowing where Henry is, when he’ll be back, or whether he’ll be okay. Then when Clare decides she wants to have a baby—a decision that, I believe, was a way that she could exert some control over her otherwise chaotic life—her life is endangered by her numerous miscarriages. All of this places a lot of strain on their marriage. It’s not unreasonable to assume that this—stress being one of the triggers of Henry’s episodes—caused Henry to time travel more, thereby contributing to his ultimate demise.
Now that I think about it, this adds a whole new level of tragedy to the story. Henry frequently cites his relationship with Clare as one of the things that kept him going for so long—but it could also have been one of the things that killed him.
But let’s think about what their lives would have been like without one another. Had Henry and Clare not met, there’s a good chance that Henry would have ended up with Ingrid and Clare with Gomez. But Ingrid is a suicidal, drug-addicted mess, and during the time that Henry is with her he frequently drinks himself into numbness. Gomez is an arrogant, chain-smoking lawyer who pursues Clare even though he’s in a relationship with (and later married to) her best friend. As you mentioned, Gomez made a play for Clare after Henry’s death; what you didn’t say was that Gomez was married with three kids at the time. Neither Ingrid nor Gomez sounds like a good option to me.
Furthermore, that Clare and Henry’s marriage survived all the obstacles speaks to how strong their love was. A lesser relationship would have crumbled under the strain of Henry’s frequent absences and Clare’s unrelenting desire to have a child in spite of the dangers. But Clare and Henry stay together, and I think they would both be able to look back on their relationship with no regrets. (Henry’s final letter to Clare said as much.)
And so that brings us back to the final moments of the book: an aged Clare waits for Henry, and she apparently has not moved on (i.e. found someone else) after all those years. But why should she when whatever relationship she would have would probably be, at best, a pale imitation of the one she lost? Yes, it’s sad to think of Clare spending so much of her life alone, but it’s also wonderful because Clare had the kind of love that so many people spend their whole lives searching for.
A big theme of the book is free will vs. determinism. As I mentioned, Henry’s condition negates the idea of free will because both the past and the future are fixed. When Clare meets Henry as a child, they are already married in her future. And when the adult Henry meets Clare in his present, she has already learned about their future during his past visits. Neither one of them ever really chooses their life together. When she waits for Henry, she says that she “has no choice,” but this isn’t entirely true: yes, she knows he’ll come, and yes, she knows he’ll be there. But she also knows, within the “rules” of Henry’s time traveling, there’s nothing she can do to alter that—so no matter what she does, she’ll arrive in the right place at the right time. The fifty or so years in between Henry’s death and his final visit are entirely up to Clare. And Clare does choose: she chooses to wait for Henry.