Michael Chapman

In Search of Lost Time

5/10/15

Close Reading Essay

The passage that i picked details the relationship between the narrator and Albertine. It focuses on the neurotic and irrational tendencies that plague the protagonist. After vacationing to Balbec, the narrator returns to Paris with his new mistress Albertine, who is now living with the narrator and his family. The narrator has successfully separated Albertine from the band of girls in Balbec but he finds that new problems arise after they settle into life together in Paris. This passage directly relates to the Combray portion of Swann In Love. In Combray, the narrator as a young boy is obsessed with possessing his mother’s love. He is a sickly child and he relies on a kiss from his mother every night so that he can fall asleep. When his mother is too busy to kiss him goodnight he lays in anguish and he becomes obsessed with getting the comfort that she provides him. This is very similar in a lot of ways to the neurotic tendencies that the narrator displays in his relationship with Albertine.

My passage begins on page 18 with the narrator stating his complex feelings for Albertine,  “Without feeling to the slightest degree in love with Albertine… I had nevertheless remained preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time”. I believe that is a gross understatement of what is really happening. The narrator feels bored with Albertine and says he is falling out of love with her but he cannot help but feel that he must control and monitor all of her actions and movements, even the most trivial. The narrator even goes as far to enlist a female friend named Andree to be Albertine’s consistent companion so that he can know what she is doing even when she is out of his sight.  Albertine is remarkably passive to this intrusion from her new lover and she indulges the narrator. Albertine’s nature calms the narrative and he briefly believes that by having taken Albertine away from the bad influences in Balbec that he has cured himself of his neurosis. But living in Paris provides all kinds of new dangers for the narrator.  He believes that there is a part of Albertine that is inherently lustful and uncontrollable. He imagines her walking down the street and catching the eye of another lustful soul. On page 19 this scene is described by the narrator, “ In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for pleasure is good. A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact”. He imagines causing pain to these unknown and maybe even non- existent perpetrators. The narrator sees Albertine as a sensual creature that is uncontrollable. These mental images which differ from the ones from Balbec are enough to send our narrator into a panic by which he states that  his phobia has returned revived. He vows to “ set to work, as with their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital disease”. Because of his renewed anxiety he decides to take Albertine for a trip to the countryside thinking that a change of scenery my help his nerves. He thinks that a change of scenery may help him because his negative emotions could be connected to a particular place, but just like he left Balbec for Paris he learns that his feelings are not tied to just one specific place. On page 21 the narrator says, “ In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was disseminated all over the world.” Initially I think the narrator believed that he could sequester off Albertine and have her in his own world where he could control every aspect, but he is learning that this is not a possibility.

The Captive provides the reader with an insight into the mind of the narrator that is not found, in as much detail at least, in the other volumes. It shows the desperate lengths that the protagonist will go to in order to keep control over Albertine. This is even though he does not truly love her. In this section, he is reduced to having others spy on Albertine for him and he is not even ashamed of this. Although he knows something is wrong with him, he stills blames Albertine and her perceived flaws for his almost crippling phobia that she will leave him for another lover, possibly a woman.  Because of the previous reading and also from watching the film adaption of The Captive, I know that the narrator believes that Albertine is a lesbian and is actively involved in affairs with other women. I thought that it was interesting that he is so frightened by the fact that she might leave him for a woman, and this reminded me of the lecture on the origins of feminism in France. What I learned from that lecture was that many people were frightened by the rise of feminism and how that related to a change in gender roles. The idea of female homosexuality was a  frightening idea during this time period, because a lesbian was a woman who had no use for a male partner. This was very controversial at the time, because women were thought to need men to survive and also because the biological duty of a woman was to reproduce. I thought it was interesting that Proust tapped into this fear of the unknown that was felt by many men around the time that this book was written.