As You Like It and Edward Scissorhands

Inherent within humanity is the need to belong, in which an individual must accept one another in order to achieve a greater sense of connectedness and identity. This is firstly evident in Shakespeare's As You Like It whereby the ideas of love are used to reveal how relationships are fundamental to one's sense of belonging. Act 1 Scene 3 explores belonging and not belonging through love and nature as it establishes the plot at the mark of separation from court and country by Rosalind and Celia breaking the sense of belonging to place. Celia and Rosalind convey a strong bond evident in Celia’s plea to her father, Duke Frederick, to keep Rosalind at court rather than banishing her to the Forest of Arden. Conventions of love are evident revealing Celia’s plutonic love for Rosalind portraying their belonging to one another. The high modality used when Celia states that she “can not live” without Rosalind reveals their constant urge and need to be in each other’s company as without one, the other can not be. Blank verse exemplifies the cold and harsh emotions felt by Celia as a result of her separation from Rosalind “pronounce that sentence, then on me, my liege, I can not live out of her company”. This reveals the emotional connections that belonging can bound through this strong relationship. The theme of love becomes a further prevalent aspect of the play as Celia professes that “Rosalind lacks the love which teaches thee that thou and I am one”. The repetition of “together” and the accumulation of united images reveal Celia and Rosalind’s connection which gives them the desire to remain in each other’s company. By embarking to the Forest of Arden disguised as man and woman, Rosalind and Celia display the homoeroticism evident in their relationship; “we still have slept together, rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together”. It is in this sense that love is most strongly shown to lead to a sense of belonging whether it be to a person or place. The Forest of