BRANDON FORTNER<\/p>\n
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME<\/p>\n
5\/13\/2015<\/p>\n
CLOSE READING<\/p>\n
Romantic relationships are essentially about possession and distance as Proust would have us believe.\u00a0 Becoming closer to your romantic partner creates boredom as the novelty of the unknown edges away.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Pages 252 through 255 are going to be analyzed in relation to the statements mentioned above<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u00a0 And it was again this new domestic feeling that never ceased, even when I was far away from Albertine, to bind me to her.\u201d\u00a0 Once the narrator has control over Albertine their relationship changes and instead of creating a space for a healthy relationship to bloom.\u00a0 The relationship between the reader and the narrator becomes foggy; Albertine appears statuesque in most scenes that she\u2019s mentioned a character that comes across as fluid between past and present.\u00a0 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\u2019t love her.\u00a0 In this passage there is reference to the Albertine the narrator knew in Balbec, \u201cThis Forgotten gesture transformed the body which it animated into that of the Albertine who as yet scarcely knew me.\u00a0 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,\u201d 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n
In comparison to the movie, I have little sympathy for Albertine or the narrator.\u00a0 The film portrayed Albertine in a much more relatable fashion; she became a person with emotions.\u00a0 Her body language conveyed words that she didn\u2019t have to say, and in the novel we\u2019re left to wonder, even more, what her thoughts on the relationship are.\u00a0 This possession comes across as way to stifle Albertine\u2019s independence, in both the film and the novel.\u00a0 Albertine was introduced to us in Balbec as this unattainable woman that the narrator was immensely focused on.\u00a0 The narrator has always been interested in distance, romanticizing something and focusing more on the fantasy rather the reality of situations.\u00a0 The series of events are often blurry, not disjointed, but hard to grasp completely at some times.\u00a0 I\u2019ve often thought that Proust was so dissatisfied with his own life that he had to impose his own insecurities on the characters he creates.<\/p>\n
After the brief farewell between the narrator and Albertine, he leaves and is about to hail a cab when he runs into Morel.\u00a0 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, \u201cBut 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.\u201d\u00a0 Morel\u2019s relationship is quite different than the relationship portrayed between Albertine and the narrator.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This might have been used as a framing mechanism for Morel or simply to introduce him and his relation to Jupien and Charlus.\u00a0 Morel\u2019s relationship is portrayed in an opposite fashion than the narrators, yet the narrator can be there to comfort him and also judge him.<\/p>\n
What was a woman\u2019s social and political role in twentieth century France?\u00a0 Is this novel supposed to portray the relationship between women and men, how stifled women were at the time?\u00a0 There is a constant general fear that the male characters have, and that is that the women they love are sleeping with other women.\u00a0 It seems that all of Proust\u2019s male characters have a fear that their partners are having sexual relations with other women.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. … Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":339,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/339"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}