Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-11-02 07:28 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-11-02 07:28 am
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This is, more or less, what's been keeping me too busy for fandom.
Maybe if I blather on LiveJournal about my French essay it will help me write it. Of course, then I'll have to do the double work of translating it from LJ-ese into academic-ese, and thence into French academic-ese. But at least I'll have written stuff?
Previously on Essay Tiemz: we are firmly in the domain of 1820s Romanticism, where narratives of gender/sexual difference are super-repressed (and are, in fact, about the anguish caused by repression and secret-keeping). There is an obsession with secrets, and with people bowing to codes of honor that forbid their love, at great personal cost. These novels are all very personal/intimately focused and, if not entirely apolitical, at least they don't get political about sexuality--everything is repressed, people are following the rules even if it destroys them, so there's no need to take it out into the public sphere. I'm focusing on the Olivier-Armance-Aloys trio, three novels inspired by the same events: the Marquis de Custine is set up for a perfect match with the Duchesse de Duras's daughter, then breaks it off at the last minute. People (i.e. Stendhal and Mme de Duras) write novels about his motivations. Later everyone finds out he was gay all along, and later still, after everyone else involved is either dead or married off to someone else, Custine himself writes his own version.
Last week I covered Olivier, which is kind of the canonical example of the 1820s themes: the whole plot is about the secret that prevents Olivier from marrying the heroine, but the secret itself is never revealed and deliberately empty--it could be anything. Olivier could be gay, could be Louise's half-brother, could have a previous marriage, could be secretly female, etc. Some matter of sexual shame that allows him to love her but forbids him from marrying her, and causes him to royally freak out when she offers to bang him anyway. The standard explanation is impotence, both because that's what Mme de Duras had in mind and because that's what the secret fundamentally reduces to--whatever it is, it renders him powerless to act. It's not about what the secret is, it's a study of the effects of impossible love, and more broadly an existential exploration of this character who lacks "manliness," power, and resolution--he's forbidden from consummating his love, can't bring himself to break it off with Louise for good, and the possibility of defying whatever the secret is and marrying her anyway is never seriously considered. It ends with him dead and her insane, but the cool thing about this novel--and about 1820s treatment of sexual difference in general--is that Olivier is sort of a tragic hero, you're meant to relate to him and root for him, he's not some inexplicable Other but rather a guy with a problem. And the problem--the thing that leads to the ultimate tragedy--is not his queerness, specifically, but the impossible situation he's in. And this ties in to the broader themes of impotence/powerlessness, and the mal du siècle of a whole disaffected Romantic generation that felt it had no place, no power, nowhere worthwhile to use that power even if they had it.
This week I have a slightly shorter essay on Aloys, which is Custine's take on the failed engagement. Note that at this point Mme de Duras and Custine's mother, who had both tried to set up the match, were dead; that Olivier and Armance had already been written, with impotence as the Word of God explanation for a secret that stayed unexplained in the actual texts; and that in the meantime (after Olivier was written, but before Aloys) it had become notorious public knowledge that Custine had a thing for strapping young officers.
Summary: Aloys is the very model of a modern Tormented Romantic Youth before meeting Mme de M---- (name not given), who tries to set him up with her daughter. The problem is that Aloys is secretly in love with Mme de M---- herself, and waits, tormented and in denial about the whole business, until the marriage contract has practically been drawn up, before confessing his love and running away to become a monk.
The big glaring difference here is that while there's a secret, it actually contains something (Aloys is in love with a married woman while being engaged to her daughter!), rather than being this big looming idea of A Secret (Of Unspecified Nature). This is transitional towards 1830s Romanticism, which, when it dealt with queerness, was all about ripping aside the veil and mucking about flamboyantly with what was underneath. There's also recurring suggestions that the secret is not just the obvious plot secret, but the secret of Aloys's personality. What is the secret of his personality? That he's fickle, apparently; irresolute, terrified of seeing all the possibilities for the future collapse into one real (and dreaded) sequence of events; easily led into white lies, which then become webs of deception, out of an eagerness to please, to avoid conflict, to keep his options open. The moment the secret (both plot and character wise) is spoken aloud, all the possibilities collapse and Aloys has no choice but to break the engagement; he slinks out of the social world in disgrace, never sees Mme de M---- again, and eventually retires to a monastery.
Relatedly, unlike in Olivier and Armance, the love interest guesses the secret here. Aloys and Mme de M---- spend a good part of the novel doing the dance of "I don't know if you know that I know" and generally playing off the idea that both of them have guessed the secret, but as long as neither of them lets on or says a word about it, they can carry on as though nothing is happening. There's a similar dance going on between the author and the reader, because Custine's homosexuality was well-known at that point; everyone knew that's why he broke off the engagement in real life; the "in love with the mother and engaged to the daughter" idea would've been flimsy and pointless as a cover-up. Which is why he doesn't use it as a cover-up, but instead explores it on its own terms and uses it to do different things. Such as incredibly fucked-up webs of Oedipal triangulation between Aloys, the mother, her husband, and her daughter. Is he exploring his own mommy issues? Probably. Are the mommy issues, as many critics have suggested, the actual issues lurking just below the surface of his homosexuality? No. Fuck you guys. Freud is dead, and the fact that most of this critical literature was written in the 1990s and not the 1930s is fucking shameful. (Why yes, I did want to take stabby pitchforks to most of the critical literature I had to read about this book, why do you ask?)
In any case, uh. The tension of "secrets" that are tacitly understood but left unsaid, the idea of the elephant in the room, and the pain of having to deceive on an everyday basis are all huge themes in this book, working on several levels between characters, author, readers, etc. This is one of the few books I'm studying that were actually written by a queer author, and while Olivier is a good analysis of the general shittiness of impossible love and impossible situations, Aloys gives you those painful moments of recognition where you realize Custine is writing about the closet before the concept of the closet existed. I leave you with quotes:
"As long as we only speak in order to respond to the disapproving silence of others, as long as all our words are nothing but defenses of ourselves, we cannot judge the world with any justice. If our existence is an enigma to the eyes of others, theirs becomes an enigma for us, and our efforts to communicate with them are in vain: to our eyes they are always spectators, and to them we are nothing but actors. No personality, no mind can resist such false relationships; they influence not only our manners, but even our most intimate feelings."
"I learned the infernal art of deceiving without lying; or at least of making the truth serve a lie: my best disguising was when I spoke of what I felt. I would reveal a part of my impressions, but I would hide their source; I found the language of passion in the agitation of my heart, but I was careful not to let anyone guess the object of this love, profaned by my trickery; in short, although I had been born with a soul free of fraud and calculation, through the false position where my weakness chained me I became the most impenetrable and two-faced of men. Hearts that were created for truth, when they give themselves over to lies, have a great advantage over hearts that are fundamentally perverse. They keep a veneer of innocence that no artifice could fake, and what primitive virtue they have works wonderfully to conceal their degradation."
Previously on Essay Tiemz: we are firmly in the domain of 1820s Romanticism, where narratives of gender/sexual difference are super-repressed (and are, in fact, about the anguish caused by repression and secret-keeping). There is an obsession with secrets, and with people bowing to codes of honor that forbid their love, at great personal cost. These novels are all very personal/intimately focused and, if not entirely apolitical, at least they don't get political about sexuality--everything is repressed, people are following the rules even if it destroys them, so there's no need to take it out into the public sphere. I'm focusing on the Olivier-Armance-Aloys trio, three novels inspired by the same events: the Marquis de Custine is set up for a perfect match with the Duchesse de Duras's daughter, then breaks it off at the last minute. People (i.e. Stendhal and Mme de Duras) write novels about his motivations. Later everyone finds out he was gay all along, and later still, after everyone else involved is either dead or married off to someone else, Custine himself writes his own version.
Last week I covered Olivier, which is kind of the canonical example of the 1820s themes: the whole plot is about the secret that prevents Olivier from marrying the heroine, but the secret itself is never revealed and deliberately empty--it could be anything. Olivier could be gay, could be Louise's half-brother, could have a previous marriage, could be secretly female, etc. Some matter of sexual shame that allows him to love her but forbids him from marrying her, and causes him to royally freak out when she offers to bang him anyway. The standard explanation is impotence, both because that's what Mme de Duras had in mind and because that's what the secret fundamentally reduces to--whatever it is, it renders him powerless to act. It's not about what the secret is, it's a study of the effects of impossible love, and more broadly an existential exploration of this character who lacks "manliness," power, and resolution--he's forbidden from consummating his love, can't bring himself to break it off with Louise for good, and the possibility of defying whatever the secret is and marrying her anyway is never seriously considered. It ends with him dead and her insane, but the cool thing about this novel--and about 1820s treatment of sexual difference in general--is that Olivier is sort of a tragic hero, you're meant to relate to him and root for him, he's not some inexplicable Other but rather a guy with a problem. And the problem--the thing that leads to the ultimate tragedy--is not his queerness, specifically, but the impossible situation he's in. And this ties in to the broader themes of impotence/powerlessness, and the mal du siècle of a whole disaffected Romantic generation that felt it had no place, no power, nowhere worthwhile to use that power even if they had it.
This week I have a slightly shorter essay on Aloys, which is Custine's take on the failed engagement. Note that at this point Mme de Duras and Custine's mother, who had both tried to set up the match, were dead; that Olivier and Armance had already been written, with impotence as the Word of God explanation for a secret that stayed unexplained in the actual texts; and that in the meantime (after Olivier was written, but before Aloys) it had become notorious public knowledge that Custine had a thing for strapping young officers.
Summary: Aloys is the very model of a modern Tormented Romantic Youth before meeting Mme de M---- (name not given), who tries to set him up with her daughter. The problem is that Aloys is secretly in love with Mme de M---- herself, and waits, tormented and in denial about the whole business, until the marriage contract has practically been drawn up, before confessing his love and running away to become a monk.
The big glaring difference here is that while there's a secret, it actually contains something (Aloys is in love with a married woman while being engaged to her daughter!), rather than being this big looming idea of A Secret (Of Unspecified Nature). This is transitional towards 1830s Romanticism, which, when it dealt with queerness, was all about ripping aside the veil and mucking about flamboyantly with what was underneath. There's also recurring suggestions that the secret is not just the obvious plot secret, but the secret of Aloys's personality. What is the secret of his personality? That he's fickle, apparently; irresolute, terrified of seeing all the possibilities for the future collapse into one real (and dreaded) sequence of events; easily led into white lies, which then become webs of deception, out of an eagerness to please, to avoid conflict, to keep his options open. The moment the secret (both plot and character wise) is spoken aloud, all the possibilities collapse and Aloys has no choice but to break the engagement; he slinks out of the social world in disgrace, never sees Mme de M---- again, and eventually retires to a monastery.
Relatedly, unlike in Olivier and Armance, the love interest guesses the secret here. Aloys and Mme de M---- spend a good part of the novel doing the dance of "I don't know if you know that I know" and generally playing off the idea that both of them have guessed the secret, but as long as neither of them lets on or says a word about it, they can carry on as though nothing is happening. There's a similar dance going on between the author and the reader, because Custine's homosexuality was well-known at that point; everyone knew that's why he broke off the engagement in real life; the "in love with the mother and engaged to the daughter" idea would've been flimsy and pointless as a cover-up. Which is why he doesn't use it as a cover-up, but instead explores it on its own terms and uses it to do different things. Such as incredibly fucked-up webs of Oedipal triangulation between Aloys, the mother, her husband, and her daughter. Is he exploring his own mommy issues? Probably. Are the mommy issues, as many critics have suggested, the actual issues lurking just below the surface of his homosexuality? No. Fuck you guys. Freud is dead, and the fact that most of this critical literature was written in the 1990s and not the 1930s is fucking shameful. (Why yes, I did want to take stabby pitchforks to most of the critical literature I had to read about this book, why do you ask?)
In any case, uh. The tension of "secrets" that are tacitly understood but left unsaid, the idea of the elephant in the room, and the pain of having to deceive on an everyday basis are all huge themes in this book, working on several levels between characters, author, readers, etc. This is one of the few books I'm studying that were actually written by a queer author, and while Olivier is a good analysis of the general shittiness of impossible love and impossible situations, Aloys gives you those painful moments of recognition where you realize Custine is writing about the closet before the concept of the closet existed. I leave you with quotes:
"As long as we only speak in order to respond to the disapproving silence of others, as long as all our words are nothing but defenses of ourselves, we cannot judge the world with any justice. If our existence is an enigma to the eyes of others, theirs becomes an enigma for us, and our efforts to communicate with them are in vain: to our eyes they are always spectators, and to them we are nothing but actors. No personality, no mind can resist such false relationships; they influence not only our manners, but even our most intimate feelings."
"I learned the infernal art of deceiving without lying; or at least of making the truth serve a lie: my best disguising was when I spoke of what I felt. I would reveal a part of my impressions, but I would hide their source; I found the language of passion in the agitation of my heart, but I was careful not to let anyone guess the object of this love, profaned by my trickery; in short, although I had been born with a soul free of fraud and calculation, through the false position where my weakness chained me I became the most impenetrable and two-faced of men. Hearts that were created for truth, when they give themselves over to lies, have a great advantage over hearts that are fundamentally perverse. They keep a veneer of innocence that no artifice could fake, and what primitive virtue they have works wonderfully to conceal their degradation."