Comparing love to an illness

The expression of comparing love to an illness gives Martha’s feelings for Stig the force of an affliction: something that has entered her body, commandeers her thoughts and actions, and leaves her both longing for and resisting surrender. Its progression from disease to drug makes love feel at once involuntary, intoxicating, and dangerous.

Love as an Invasion

Martha reflects that she has had crushes before, but never anything like this. Earlier attractions felt like an exciting game, accompanied by butterflies, heightened senses, and flushed cheeks. Her present attachment is different in kind and scale. She calls it a disease, an unwanted force that has invaded her body and taken control of her thinking and behavior. The phrase “love-struck” sharpens the contradiction: love appears not as a choice or a pleasure she can simply enjoy, but as a blow that has struck her down.

The language also marks Martha’s loss of confidence in her own judgment. She considers whether the woman who hanged herself in the attic had likewise fallen for a man she knew was wrong, and whether love had blinded her into making a new morality to excuse him. Martha wonders if she, too, has discovered the danger only after becoming deeply involved. The comparison makes the attic woman an unsettling parallel, while Martha’s own words cast love as both an emotion and a possible impairment of discernment.

Desire Against Judgment

The illness metaphor becomes morally consequential when Martha considers reporting Stig. She refuses, telling herself that there must be something she does not know and that he is not a cold-blooded killer. Yet she recognizes that love is part of the reason she believes him: she knows he is not a killer, she says, because she is in love. The circularity exposes the tension at the heart of the expression. The feeling supplies certainty, but may also compromise the judgment on which that certainty depends.

Her distress is not simply fear of Stig or a settled wish to leave him. Martha admits that she does not even want him, while also acknowledging that he wanted to kiss her, that she wanted to kiss him, and that she still does. The contradiction gives the metaphor its emotional pressure: she experiences desire as excessive and unwanted, yet cannot detach herself from it.

The Drug Image

Martha imagines surrendering to love as taking a drug: pressing the plunger, feeling the high, and being grateful even as she is damned by it. The image carries the illness comparison forward from invasion into intoxication. Love is at once something acting on her without permission and a sensation to which she consciously longs to yield. The language of gratitude and damnation holds pleasure and harm together rather than resolving one into the other.

That image makes surrender sound like a decision, but not a free or calm one. Martha imagines losing herself in a warm ocean of emotion, while the drug metaphor figures that loss as a high whose consequences she already fears. The expression therefore names more than the intensity of attraction: it shows how Martha understands herself as caught between judgment and the temptation to let feeling take control.