Hooked on Literature - Part 10

But Mme de Clèves so-called imperturbable serenity is shattered the minute she meets the exceptionally handsome, gallant, and irresistibly charming duc de Nemours at a sumptuous court ball. She realizes then and there that what she considered her indifference to passion was simply her husband’s inability to arouse her to it. This intimate drama brings sorrow to all three characters within the triangle, reflecting a sombrely pessimistic view of the nature of love.

Having just analyzed two tragedies, my students were in an excellent position to understand the irrational character of passion and see the similarities between the suffering Racine’s heroines endure and the dilemma in which Mme de Clèves find herself trapped. Passion in the La Princesse de Clèves appears as a disquieting, autonomous force within the person who experiences it. It feeds off the flesh and blood of that person and so seems dependent on him/her. Yet it functions as an independent entity. Passion possesses the heart of the lover and forces him/her to do its bidding, pits its power against the lover’s reason, or infiltrates itself into the lover’s reason in such a way that he/she deludes himself/herself into believing he/she is acting normally whereas he/she is being pulled into an emotional vortex.

As though they were watching a soap opera on television that just happened to have much more depth than normal, my students monitored the fluctuations within Mme de Clève’s disordered heart as she was forced to come to grips with an emotion that she had convinced herself she could never feel. As my students followed her drama avidly, they could admire the subtlety with which the novelist described the successive stages in the heroine’s surrender to passion. Several striking examples come to mind.

The episode of the stolen portrait is one that my class found particularly revealing of how the heroine could glide almost imperceptibly into self-delusion. The duc de Nemours, the nobleman enamoured of her, stealthily removes a portrait of his beloved while she is sitting before a painter for another one. Mme de Clèves catches the duke in action from the corner of her eye. Were she not in the throes of a violent passion for him, even though she is loath to admit it clearly on the conscious level, she would be furious at this invasion of her privacy and would demand that he give it back at once.

Since she is in love, she allows him to get away with this act of larceny. Indeed, she rationalizes her decision very astutely. She convinces herself that she can let him keep the portrait because he is unaware that she had seen him remove it. Consequently, she can bestow a favour on him without his being aware that she has done so, and her honour as a married woman will remain intact.