Théophile Gautier - the deadly lover PDF

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Théophi l eGaut i er ,TheDeat hl yLov er( 1836) : Depicting Desire: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Nineteenth Century p24-39 By Rachael Langford

R carries out duties for the church during the day and expresses his erotic desires during the night. La Morte Amoureuse – French. published in La Chronique de Paris. It tells the story of a priest named Romuald who falls in love with Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire.

Story starts with R thinking back to a time when he was younger. He was in church when he heard a woman promising to love him and make him happier than he could imagine – but he had to leave the church with her. This was all happening while he was in the middle of his ordination vows and before he could react, the ceremony had finished. R regretted taking his vows and the memory of the woman plagued him for years. R was leaving town to reach his new parish, as he looked back the whole town was in shadow except for one golden palace. He questioned his friend and he was told that it was once where C lived, a courtesan, and was a place of debauchery (excessive indulgence in sex, alcohol or drugs). R moved to the country. One night a man on horseback arrived and told R to come quickly to help his mistress. R arrives to a mysterious castle to find C dead; R kisses her and brings her back to life. Three days later R awakes in his own home, confused he asks his maid what has happened and she tells him that he had fallen into a fever and was unconscious when the man on horseback had brought him back. R believes that C was a dream but she later arrives in his room, looking dead (but still beautiful), and tells him to prepare for a trip. The next night she returns looking much more alive. They both moved to Venice and R continued his work as a priest but keeps dreaming about sinning and being C’s lover. C often gets sick but R accidentally cuts himself and after C drinks the droplets she instantly feels better. R gets suspicious by this and refuses to take the sleeping draught she keeps giving him and notices that she drinks drops of his blood every night to survive. R admits he would have given all his blood for her. Serapion begins to suspect what is happening and takes R to C’s tomb to reveal her body. S pours holy water on C and she turns into dust. C reappears that night to tell R they shall never meet again. The story jumps to the present where R is telling his audience that this was the biggest regret of his life and tells everyone to never look at a woman the same way – even though he still misses her. Focus on colours and imagery.

The two main symbols of masculine power, Church and State, were failing to provide the stability and security they had traditionally promised and instead the more transitory but intense pleasures of society and commercialism, sex and money, held sway.

Devil and angel scenario – C being devil and S being angel sitting on R’s shoulders.

The fantastic: Hesitation of the reader when presented with questions about reality. Confusion about if a work is uncanny. Must make the reader feel as if the world of the characters is real and to make the reader consider them as living persons. Not to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events. The hesitation must also be experienced by a character. The actual reader should identify with the character. Requires a certain type of reading. Reader must reject poetic interpretations. Often seen in dreams and wakefulness where the character/reader hesitates to what is reality and what is a dream. Once decided, the fantastic ends. ‘The fantastic is a means of combat against this kind of censorship as well as the other: sexual excesses will be more readily accepted by any censor if they are attributed to the devil.’

Supernatural functions: Pragmatic function – the supernatural disturbs, alarms, or simply keeps the reader in suspense. Semantic function – the supernatural constitutes its own manifestation. Syntactical function – the supernatural enters into the development of the narrative. ‘All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical’. At the start of the narrative, there is always a stable situation; the characters form configuration which can shift but which nonetheless keeps a certain number of fundamental features intact. Let us say for instance that a child lives with his family; he participates in a micro-society which has its own laws. Subsequently, something occurs which introduces a disequilibrium, thus for one reason or another the child leaves his house. At the end of the story, after having overcome many obstacles, the child – who has grown up meantime – returns to the family house. The equilibrium is then re-established, but it is no longer that of the beginning: the child is no longer a child, but has become an adult among the others. The ‘normal’ man is precisely the fantastic being; the fantastic becomes the rule, not the exception....