BRANDON FORTNER
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
5/13/2015
CLOSE READING
Romantic relationships are essentially about possession and distance as Proust would have us believe. Becoming closer to your romantic partner creates boredom as the novelty of the unknown edges away. Proust is creating within his novel the idea of a controlling relationship that centers on the absence of love and focuses on possession as the main theme. This absence of real creation, an absence of actual enjoyment of a romantic relationship creates a disgusting, focused and honest opinion of how powerless women should be and interact with the men they claim to love. Pages 252 through 255 are going to be analyzed in relation to the statements mentioned above
“I regretted only that the style in which I had asked her to do her hair should appear to Albertine an additional bolt on the door of her prison. And it was again this new domestic feeling that never ceased, even when I was far away from Albertine, to bind me to her.” Once the narrator has control over Albertine their relationship changes and instead of creating a space for a healthy relationship to bloom. The relationship between the reader and the narrator becomes foggy; Albertine appears statuesque in most scenes that she’s mentioned a character that comes across as fluid between past and present. The narrator focuses on creating her as a totem of Balbec, an object to be possessed by him and him alone, even if he doesn’t love her. In this passage there is reference to the Albertine the narrator knew in Balbec, “This Forgotten gesture transformed the body which it animated into that of the Albertine who as yet scarcely knew me. It restored to Albertine, ceremonious beneath an air of brusqueness, her initial novelty, her mystery even her setting. I saw the sea behind this girl whom I had never seen shake hands with me in this way since I was at the seaside,” maybe it is moments like these that keep the narrator wanting Albertine to himself, he divulges in memory and revels in the possibility of what their relationship could have been, but is too afraid to let her go and experience what it isn’t.
In comparison to the movie, I have little sympathy for Albertine or the narrator. The film portrayed Albertine in a much more relatable fashion; she became a person with emotions. Her body language conveyed words that she didn’t have to say, and in the novel we’re left to wonder, even more, what her thoughts on the relationship are. This possession comes across as way to stifle Albertine’s independence, in both the film and the novel. Albertine was introduced to us in Balbec as this unattainable woman that the narrator was immensely focused on. The narrator has always been interested in distance, romanticizing something and focusing more on the fantasy rather the reality of situations. The series of events are often blurry, not disjointed, but hard to grasp completely at some times. I’ve often thought that Proust was so dissatisfied with his own life that he had to impose his own insecurities on the characters he creates.
After the brief farewell between the narrator and Albertine, he leaves and is about to hail a cab when he runs into Morel. Morel is sobbing over having left his wife or something, either way it is mentioned later that he had asked his betrothed to procure women for him, “But as soon as he had gone a little too far in his attempts at rape, and especially when he suggested to his betrothed that she might make friends with other girls whom she would then procure for him, he had met with a resistance that had enraged him.” Morel’s relationship is quite different than the relationship portrayed between Albertine and the narrator. Morel is facing hardships in his relationship because of overt sexuality, where as the narrator is in a relationship that involves very little to no sexual contact at all. This might have been used as a framing mechanism for Morel or simply to introduce him and his relation to Jupien and Charlus. Morel’s relationship is portrayed in an opposite fashion than the narrators, yet the narrator can be there to comfort him and also judge him.
What was a woman’s social and political role in twentieth century France? Is this novel supposed to portray the relationship between women and men, how stifled women were at the time? There is a constant general fear that the male characters have, and that is that the women they love are sleeping with other women. It seems that all of Proust’s male characters have a fear that their partners are having sexual relations with other women. Maybe in twentieth century France this was seen as the ultimate form of independence and Proust is trying to convey the relationship and fear of women becoming independent.