65 pages • 2 hours read
Paulo CoelhoEleven Minutes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Life as a Sexual Pilgrimage
The author breaks down the subject of sexuality into a number of themes. A panoramic view of the book may reveal, however, that the one theme Coelho returns to repeatedly is sexuality is not a simple aspect of human life like walking or talking that people naturally learn as they grow and master completely after a few weeks of practice. Instead, Coelho presents ample evidence that sexuality is a lifelong learning experience. In fact, Coelho would likely refer to this sexual journey as a spiritual pilgrimage in that he perceives a close connection between sexuality and spirituality. The lessons each soul is to learn about sexuality, he seems to say, are geared to the specific individual, with the insights gained by one soul differing but enhancing the insights of another.
Coelho provides ample examples of this concept throughout the book. Heidi, the librarian, an aging widow, discovers in her middle years the extraordinary, rewarding quality of a one-time fling. At the end of the narrative, she is still learning about the relative sexual ignorance of most human beings—particularly when it comes to appreciating female anatomy—and she shows a new inclination to become an advocate for anatomical literacy.
Perhaps the best example of a sexual pilgrimage, however, is Ralf, who had endured so many different unrewarding and unenlightening aspects of sexuality that he literally lost interest. Through a series of encounters, each focused on a different aspect of Ralf’s emotions and senses. Maria—though younger and less experienced—reawakens his desire. These lessons could be conceived as having helped Ralf become sexually “current.” Going forward, he and Maria would theoretically have new lessons to teach one another.
The Possibility of a Spiritually Sacred Sexual Relationship
Building upon the notion that each individual has a sexual journey of learning available over the course of a lifetime, Coelho posits that a truly sacred level of sexuality is possible. He describes this state in bits and pieces through the words of various characters, as if each person in the narrative who has reflected on sexuality has some insight about its potential, though none has put all the pieces together.
In describing the spontaneous place physical sex should have between people in love, Coelho has Ralf describe it as an overflowing of the love people share. In describing the necessity for sexual experiences to push the boundaries of sex to new levels, Coelho has Terence say that true vitality in sexuality requires continual experimentation. In describing the deeply emotional element of sacred sexuality, Coelho has Maria scorn the mechanical approach of simply incorporating new techniques. Instead, she feels that everyone should strive to fully express the love for their partners sexually. Just as the sexual pilgrimage is a lifelong journey, attaining the purest sexual experience implies a willingness to know oneself and open oneself spiritually to sex as the language of love.
Humanizing the Objectified Woman Sex Worker
From his jarring opening sentence that uses fairy tale language to refer to a sex worker to his “happily-ever-after-ending” of that person finding her true love, Coelho challenges his readers to overcome the stigma of sex workers. Part in parcel of the condemnation of sex workers is their gender: when the average person thinks of a sex worker, that person usually thinks of a woman. Among the sex workers Coelho interviewed in researching the book only one was male. All the sex workers mentioned in the book are female. Additionally, all the marginalized individuals in the narrative—Maria’s mother, Heidi, Vivian—are women. Those individuals portrayed in the book as masters of their own destiny, able to move about the world and hire sex workers at will, are men.
In this way, Coelho seeks to identify sex workers with other women, indicating that they share the same plight and to an extent are viewed in the same way. The men in the narrative discount and objectify sex workers, and they tend to do the same with the women in their lives. Thus, Maria’s mother—who understands the way things work in a man’s world—counsels her that it is better to be unhappily yoked to a rich man than happily yoked to a poor man since she will be objectified in either case. The irony is, as Maria points out, all the men she encounters are fearful, and they turn to the very people they have dehumanized—the sex worker, the wife, the mother—to comfort and assure them. Perhaps Coelho is asserting that, in the recognition of women as the missing halves of themselves, men will achieve that degree of intimacy that precludes objectifying women. From this perspective sex workers could be perceived as valued professional caregivers.
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