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Symbolic Forms of Immortality in Madame Bovary, Niels Lyme, and John Gabriel Borkman

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Symbolic Forms of Immortality in Madame Bovary, Niels Lyme, and John Gabriel Borkman SYMBOLIC FORMS OF IMMORTALITY IN MADAME BOVARY, NIELS LYME, AND JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN FRANCIS ROY CARTLIDGE B.A., University of British Columbia, 1973 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES in the Program of Comparative Literature We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June, 1977 (§) Roy Francis Cartlidge 1978 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Program Comparative Literature B?XH??SPft of The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 January 27 1978 ABSTRACT This thesis is a study of the ways in which the fear of death, and its natural consequence, the desire for immortality, is manifested in the major characters of three post-Romantic works. In each case, the fear of death is unconscious, and has to "be interpreted from the dreams and illusions of the characters, which may not appear to have any immediate connection with death or immortality. In Madame Bovary, the blind man is the symbolic antithesis of Emma's dreams of finding a means of transcendence within the world itself. He is the embodiment of the horrifying vision of biological process that lies at the heart of her flight from reality. The pharmacist, Homais, is also considered to be attempting to establish a symbolic form of immortality for himself through the glorification of his reputation and his sentimental belief in scientific progress. In Niels Lyhne, the young hero attempts to free himself from the romantic influences of his childhood by proclaiming a new philosophy that is based, on atheism. However, his temperamental attachment to the idea of "infinity", and his inability to accept the physical nature of human beings betray his unconscious desire for a state of being in which he will be invulnerable to the forces of aging and death. In John Gabriel Borkman the three major characters attempt to find a means of denying the inevitability of their approaching deaths. Borkman tries to gain control over the forces of life through the exercise of power and through an identification with rocks and metal that seem to hold the promise of conferring their immutability onto him. Borkman's wife wants her son to devote his life to the glorification of the name of Borkman, that her husband has dishonoured. She hopes that her idealized self-image will live on"in the "monument" that Erhart will "erect" to the family name. Ella Rentheim, her sister, also plans to use Erhart for the establishment of a symbolic form of immortality, by trying to persuade him to adopt her family name after she has died. The method of this thesis could be applied to works from any age of literature, but I have chosen the nineteenth century because of the particular social and intellectual influences that existed in Europe after the Enlightenment'. All the artistic movements of the nineteenth century were conditioned by the legacy of metaphysical uncertainty that the religious skepticism of the Age of Reason had bequeathed to the future. In these three works, the characters devote the same religious fervour to the worldly objects of their desires as, formerly, man had devoted to God. The unconscious hope in all their attempts is that they will discover a means of being delivered from death. - iv - TABLE OF CONTENTS page Abstract ii Epigraph v Introduction 1 Madame Bovary 7 Interchapter 1 26 Niels Lyhne 32 Interchapter 2 50 John Gabriel Borkman 54 Conclusion 79 Footnotes 83 Bibliography 85 - V •- Nun gehort aber vor Allem zu den Wunschen des Menschen, wenigstens des Menschen, der seine Wiinsche nicht durch die Naturnothwendigkeit beschrankt, der Wunsch nicht zu sterben, ewig zu leben; ja, dieser Wunsch ist der letzte und hochste Wunsch des Menschen, der Wunsch aller Wiinsche, wie und weil das Leben der Inbegriff aller Guter ist. Ludwig Feuerbach - 1 - In Le Bovarysme ^ (1902), Jules Gaultier attempts to define the nature of the romantic impulses that propel the dreams and desires of Flaubert's tragic heroine. He concludes that she is driven by the desire to become "other than she is"; that the attractiveness of her fantasies derives purely from the fact that they are unreal. He rests his case on the conviction that if Emma were ever to realize her desires, she would reject them because of the reality that they would then assume. La haine du reel est a vrai dire si forte chez Mme Bovary, qu'elle pourrait la contraindre a repudier son propre reve, s'il venait, par impossible, a prendre lui-meme la forme d'une realite. (p. 32) A close reading of Madame Bovary does not support this opinion, however. She is happy with Rodolphe and Leon as long as she can make herself believe that her dreams have been actualized, and it is only when the real facts of existence invade her dreams that her fantasies collapse. If she is not perfectly content with Leon, it is because she has never seen him as her ideal lover, and if she is discontent with their apartment in Rouen, it is because her real dream is to visit a land such as the one that Rodolphe promised to take her to. Gaultier's thesis implies a randomness in the choice of ideals and illusions. If unreality were the essential quality of the objects of metaphysical desire, then surely any object would be as effective as any other. Emma's desires are a combination of her longing for religious - 2 - fulfillment, of her attraction to the aristocratic way of life, and of dreams of romantic and sensual experience. These dreams are far from random: her preoccupations are the preoccupations of millions of others. What is remarkable in her is the way in which these dreams are mixed together. No one fantasy seems to dominate the others. The uniting factor in all these fantasies is that they seem to contain the promise of transcendence away from life as it is: that love, or acceptance into the aristocracy, or religious experience, will liberate her from the normal rules of. human life. Gaultier attempts to analyze man's desire to become "what he is not" without spending any time defining what he is. I propose that romantic, metaphysical desire has its origins in a rejection of those specific facts of human existence that define our mortality: we are born, we grow old, and we die. Traditionally, God was the power through which man could find transcendence (escape from mortality) and his definition (immortal, all- knowing, changeless, all-powerful), is the antithesis of man's fundamental characteristics as a human being. In this sense, God can be seen to be the expression of a wish; he is what man is not, and he seems to have the power of conferring some of his essentially non-mortal attributes upon man. Man is not attracted to the idea of God because he is essentially unreal, but because of the promise that he represents: the possibility of transcending death. - 3 - In this thesis I shall put forward the argument that the fear of death, and its natural consequence, the desire of immortality, not only lies at the roots of religious desire, but can also be shown to explain romantic desire. The traditional qualities of God, explained out of existence by the Enlightenment, often reappear in some object that has no manifestly religious content whatsoever, nor is the person who is caught in the grip of his illusion aware that he has attributed these qualities to the object of his desire. This object may be an idealized lover, a faraway place, or a disembodied idea such as progress, "Truth", or "the Infinite". Whatever form it may take, the object of romantic desire represents the promise of a symbolic victory over life and death: a form of immortality. For the purposes of this thesis, I shall consider any form of behaviour that has as its object a denial or evasion of the inevitability of death to be an attempt to set up a substitute form of immortality. It may be objected that the term "immortality" is allowed too broad' a connotation here, since it departs so far from the idea of the continued existence of the soul after death. Yet the same objection could be levelled at anyone who has proposed an idea such as "social", "historical", or "cosmological" immortality. The notion that men may live on through their works, "and in the memory of future generations, has been current since the time of the Romans, and is an idea that was particularly attractive _ h - to the artists of the Romantic period. Goethe's conviction that "the traces of our earthly days can never be erased by time" certainly differs from the ideal of actual deathlessness that is central to Christian theology. Schiller's view of immortality, whereby the life-force of man unites with the Universal Soul or Mind after death, might justifiably be argued not to be immortality at all, since it would entail the obliteration of the identity of the individual. For most of us, continuity of identity is the minimum requirement for a state that we would be willing to call immortality.
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