Author: cam
Chapter four of Sodom and Gomorrah begins with the narrator explaining to his mother that he would not marry Albertine. He didn’t even wish to see her anymore. Instead, he decided to love Andree. But on page 701, when the narrator talks to Albertine for what he intends to be the last time, he is given a shocking piece of information.
“You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I’m expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together? Well, this friend… is the best friend of your Vinteuil’s daughter. And I know Vinteuil’s daughter almost as well as I know her. I always call them my two big sisters.”
The narrator immediately goes into a panic because both Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend are, as he puts it, “practicing and professional Sapphists.” He begins to associate Albertine with lesbianism as well. From page 705,
“What I had long dreaded, had vaguely suspected of Albertine, what my instinct deduced from her whole personality and my reason controlled by my desire had gradually made me repudiate, was true! Behind Albertine I no longer saw the blue mountains of the sea, but the room at Mountjouvain where she was falling into the arms of Mlle Vinteuil with that laugh in which she gave utterance as it were to the strange sound of her pleasure.”
The narrator, at this point, has been given no concrete evidence of Albertine’s sexuality. All he knows for certain is that she has friends who are lesbians. In contrast to Swann, who, when in the same situation, directly asked Odette about her history with women, the narrator does something he often does. He reanalyzes and interprets his memories through the lens of his newly accepted reality.
“With a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vinteuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them? And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarreled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased. And that graceful movement with which Albertine laid her chin upon Rosemonde’s shoulder, gazed at her smilingly, and deposited a kiss upon her neck…”
After contemplating Albertine’s sexuality, the narrator decides that he cannot let Albertine be alone with a girl, that she must always stay with him instead, despite the fact that just a few pages ago he was essentially disgusted with her. He is so desperate to keep her away from her homosexual tendencies, that on page 706 he makes up a story about a broken engagement.
“When I came here, I left a woman whom I was to have married, who was ready to sacrifice everything for me. She was to start on a journey this morning, and every day for the last week I have been wondering whether I should have the courage not to telegraph to her that I was coming back. I did have the courage, but it made me so wretched that I thought I would kill myself. That is why I asked you last night if you would come and sleep at Balbec. If I had to die, I should have liked to bid you farewell.”
The narrator seems to be driven more by a fear of Albertine in a lesbian relationship, rather than a desire to actually win her love. On page 714, he says, “I was too inclined to believe that, once I was in love, I could not be loved in return, and that pecuniary interest alone could attach a woman to me.” So through pity and money, the narrator convinces Albertine to stay with him, and on page 715, he kisses her neck, a parallel to his memory of Albertine kissing Rosemonde’s neck.
Warm weather always makes me nostalgic. Like most people, my summers are what I remember best from my childhood. It always seemed like the only time of the year when I had any control over myself and my time. In reality, of course, my sisters controlled my actions most of the time. I followed them everywhere and did whatever they wanted to do. It wasn’t exactly that I admired them exactly, but I did feel bigger and more important when I was with them.
Sometimes they took advantage of how willing I was. Kate, my sister closest in age, used to make me memorize things (number sequences, song lyrics, dance routines, dialogue sequences from movies, anything) and have me recite or perform them for her on command. I still remember most of them. For the most part, however, my sisters were content to just let me walk a step or two behind them while they embarked on whatever adventure they decided on that day.
Usually we walked along the creek behind our house, hopping from stone to stone and occasionally disappearing into the trees. We would find the biggest sticks we could and play hockey with pine cones. Once, a couple teenagers built a fort to smoke and drink in and accidentally burned it down. After that, my sisters and I always walked through the charred, ashy remains. I think it made all of us feel bigger and more important.
For the majority of my life I’ve had the very vivid but very ridiculous memory of Elmo and Kermit the Frog walking slowly down a foggy street on their way to a murder spree. I can still see the dented trash cans they passed and the dying brown grass they walked over. Obviously, I never believed this was an actual event. I always thought it was from some comedic horror-parody movie. People love seeing their nostalgia perverted.
There was no movie. For so many years I was so confused why no one else could remember it, or why I could never remember the movie’s title, but I never once considered there wasn’t really a morbid muppets movie. The memory of that scene was so vivid in my mind. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I began to realize that I might have been wrong all that time. Now, I assume it must have been part of some nightmare I had as a child falling asleep while watching PBS.
A lot of my earlier memories are just surreal fragmented scenes and impressions. Floating through pale blue hallway and a woman with extremely red lips murmuring under her breath. A swing set in a backyard that is perfectly grey. A man who lives in the woods behind my neighborhood and sings to bees. Someone standing in my room in the early morning who is facing me, but not looking at me.
I don’t know if any of these are real, or if they were dreams, or if I just made them up entirely at some point. I’m not sure if it matters where they came from. However these thoughts got to me, they’re still always going to be a part of me in some way.
On page 245, the narrator sees Mme de Guermantes for the first time, taking particular note of her red face and the pimple on the corner of her nose. At first, he is extremely disappointed in how ordinarily human she seems. Unable to cope with this reality, he makes the (perhaps unconscious) decision to re-imagine her to fit the idealized perception of her he had before. Swann has a similar experience in the next section of the book when he falls in love with Odette, though it seems more like obsession than genuine affection.
One of the major things Swann and the narrator have in common in their romances is their need to see these women as art. The narrator wishes for Mme de Guermantes to be “a tapestry or a stained-glass window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race.” And Swann’s love for Odette doesn’t fully blossom until one day when she reminds him of a Sistine fresco. The more he is able to associate her with art, the more he is able to love her. From page 317, “The words ‘Florentine Painting’ were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a newer and nobler form.” Neither of them wanted a woman, they wanted a beautiful symbolic concept.
Swann and the narrator aren’t abnormal for doing this. When we imagine the kind of person we want in our lives, we never say to ourselves, “and here are the flaws, unflattering features, and annoying habits I would like this person to have.” We grow up wanting so badly to believe that perfect mythical heroes exist, that when we form new relationships (romantic or otherwise) with someone, we tend to put that person on a pedestal. While it is nice to think the best of someone, it’s unfair dehumanizing to think of them as more than they can be. I think, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we sometimes see people just in terms of what they can offer us- status, a sense of worth, power. For Swann and the narrator, they were allowed to feel like a part of some grand mythical world. I read these sections and was disturbed by these obsessions, but unfortunately it could be easy for anyone to distance themselves that much from the reality of a person.
Kansas is my home. And despite the fact that I feel slightly nauseous admitting this, it isn’t completely awful. We have the world’s largest ball of twine, the world’s largest prairie dog statue, and the world’s largest Van Gogh repainting (none of which are particularly interesting, but all of which I have touched). We also have snow every Christmas, sunflowers that make me feel insecure in my height, and skies that look less like actual real atmospheric occurrences, and more like the coloring book of a very imaginative child.
I am, however, sometimes very justified in my complaints about Kansas. My hometown of Topeka, specifically, is where the Westboro Baptist Church is located. And even though they are a very extreme group, many of the people I grew up with shared their fundamental beliefs. My father used to be friends with several of their members. Sometimes, when affiliates of the church visit town, he lets them stay in our house with us.
I figured out I was gay halfway through my freshman year of high school. I had been attending the same small, private, k-12 Christian school since fourth grade. And while it wasn’t exactly the Westboro Baptist Church, it was definitely very far from perfect Christian love. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth times I heard the words “fag” and “dyke,” were from the mouth of one of my middle school teachers during our history class. In my tenth grade literature class, when we got to the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, our teacher asked us what we thought would be a fitting eternal punishment for homosexuals. One of my friends raised his hand and said, “I think they should be ripped apart, like how they ripped apart God’s plan for their life.” It’s amazing what people will say about you when they think you’re not there.
Obviously, coming out would not have been the best option for me at the time. But it would have killed me to completely play along with their hatred, so I fought back in whatever small ways I could. I refused to use traditional male pronouns when I talked about God, I tried to tie feminism into every academic paper and essay I wrote, and whenever we read Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Emily Dickinson, or William Shakespeare, I always reminded the class that these authors were very much not straight. Nothing I did or said directly challenged anyone’s core beliefs, so I felt safe, but by eleventh grade, you could see my teachers physically bracing themselves whenever I raised my hand. I loved it.
The summer before my senior year I began the very slow process of coming out. I told two of my friends from school, but it took the entire break for me to stop dropping hints and actually say it. A week before school started up again, I actually felt vaguely ready for once. While my support system was small, it was nice to have one. I had just gotten home from a sleepover when I received a call from my principal. She wanted to meet with me the next day so we could “address some issues.” I am an incredibly anxious person, so I spent the next twenty four hours wanting to throw up, wondering which of my multiple offenses and sins she wanted to discuss. But when I finally showed up in her office, I somehow wasn’t surprised at all by what she wanted to talk about. She asked me sit down, and then she sat down and folded her hands on the desk in front of her. She unfolded them a second later and started tapping her fingers against the wood like she always does when she’s uncomfortable. She sighed, and said that she heard some rumors about me over the summer.
The next fifteen minutes felt more like fifteen hours, and consisted of my principal slowly but surely forcing me to come out to her, to justify my existence to her. She rubbed the temples of her head, silently mouthed a couple words I couldn’t quite catch, and then she gave her offer. First, I would not come out to anyone else while I was still affiliated with the school. Second, I would tell the people I had already come out to (and anyone else who might ask), that I just had a brief period of confusion, and it is now behind me. And finally, third, that I would stop rocking the boat and making everyone uncomfortable. As long as I met these conditions, I would be allowed spend my senior year at the school. I agreed immediately. I didn’t even think about it. This is something I have been ashamed of ever since. I finally had the chance to stick up for myself, to stick up for something I believe in, to do something that could make actual change happen, but I was too scared. I grew up feeling the disappointment and disgust everyone felt towards people like me, and I allowed myself to internalize it, so somehow, part of me felt like it was a reasonable request. This was the point where I realize that even though it felt good to be a little subversive the last three years, it would take a lot more than that to actually make the school a safe place for me and anyone else who was in the same situation. It’s good to be brave, but you have to make sure you can be brave when it counts. I’ve tried to be braver since then. I don’t know if I can count the number of times I have used the exact words, “No, no, the Sodom and Gomorrah thing was about hospitality.”
While Kansas is not completely awful, it is mostly awful. And I just want to be the kind of person who is strong enough to make it less awful.