Love and Passion Theme Analysis

At first glance, The Mysterious Affair at Styles might not seem like a book about romance, but the vast majority of the characters are ultimately driven by love or desire. Like many works of detective fiction, the novel throws suspicion on almost all of its characters, casting doubt on everyone from the victim’s stepsons to a young woman the victim herself took into her home. Although all of Emily Inglethorp’s potential murderers attract suspicion in different ways, most of them have something in common: their dubious behavior usually arises from clandestine matters of the heart. For instance, both John and Lawrence Cavendish—the victim’s stepsons—have secret romantic feelings for other characters, and these feelings often make it difficult to discern their true motives. As a result, they seem guilty at various points throughout the novel, since they’re often trying to hide something about their private lives. For instance, when Lawrence insists that Emily Inglethorp wasn’t poisoned, he attracts suspicion, but he’s really just trying to direct attention away from the woman he loves, Cynthia, since he thinks she’s the one who killed his stepmother. In this way, it becomes clear that strong romantic feelings can cloud a person’s better judgment, since Lawrence runs the risk of getting himself convicted simply because he’s so focused on protecting the woman he loves. To that end, the novel suggests that romantic feelings are often so powerful that they drive people to do crazy things—like, for instance, commit murder, which is exactly what happens when Alfred Inglethorp and Evelyn Howard fall in love and decide to kill Emily Inglethorp. Although the novel doesn’t condemn romance in general, then, it does outline the ways in which getting carried away with clandestine love can lead people to behave irrationally or even immorally.