Suspicious Minds

In Balzac's Cousin Bette, jealousy often becomes the source of rupture between two lovers. After a bit of teasing between Hortense and her husband Wenceslas, the former visits the latter in his art studio where he is sculpting a group of people out of clay. When she arrives, he immediately throws a sheet over the sculpture to hide it from his wife.

"'We were not really angry, were we, my pretty puss?' Hortense had caught sight of the group, had seen the linen thrown over it, and had said nothing; but as she was leaving, she took off the rag, looked at the model, and asked--

'What is that?'

'A group for which I just had an idea.'

'Why did you hide it?'

'I did not mean you to see it til it was finished.'

'The woman is very pretty,' said Hortense.

And a thousand suspicions cropped up in her mind, as, in India, tall, rank plants spring up in a night-time."

Hortense's imagination contrives a story out of her husband's actions and the pretty woman she sees that his hands have moulded. It is quite reasonable, actually. Anyone who has drawn another person's portrait or sculpted his/her shape knows just how intimate such a gesture is. You have to love the angles and crevices of the subject you are replicating; you have to explore with a lover's interest the form of the subject's physique, and, most importantly, you have to relish in every aspect that makes him/her truly unique. You have to seek out what makes him/her beautiful, even if he/she is not conventionally so. So, I can understand Hortense's anxiety.

In The Captive, Marcel ponders,

"...by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality. This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals. My jealousy was born of mental images, to produce a specific suffering, not based on probability."

Though I have not been so jealous as he is in this book (he ironically claims he does not even want to marry Albertine because he needs his freedom, and yet all he does is think about her affections running astray), I can relate to him. I don't think the jealousy itself is as important as the degree to which he feels this emotion. The reason why I can relate to Marcel is because I have been to such an extreme level of anxiety before, only not because of jealousy, but because of hypochondria. And I think the emotions are very similar. His comment that his feelings were, "born of mental images, to produce a specific suffering, not based on probability," remind me of my own strange suspicions of various symptoms that lead me to believe I have some deadly disease. But it seems to me that even though I can understand the progression of Marcel's jealousy, and I can admire him for being aware of it, jealousy is ranked higher than hypochondria on the scale of unacceptable nervousness. I think more people would call him "crazy," "creepy," or "out of control" when really jealousy is only the symptom of the real problem, just like hypochondria is the symptom of mine. In both cases it is an anxiety that is at the root of our illogical assumptions.

I suppose today I have been ranting a bit, but I just wanted to share some of my own relationship to the text. In both Balzac and Proust, I often relate to the characters - I guess that's how I try to understand the narrative for myself - though often for unlikely reasons. If we don't relate to or attempt to understand the actions and thoughts of characters, how else can we read?

-natalie