julien sorel

The Narcissism of Stendhal and Julien SorelAuthor(s): Steven SandsSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall, 1975), pp. 337-363Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25599983 .Accessed: 22/09/2011 14:15

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The Narcissism of Stendhal and Julien Sorel STEVEN SANDS

LE Rouge et le Noir is presented to us on its title page as a

chronicle of the nineteenth century. It is also, however, a study of personality. Stendhal's "Beylism" is more of a personal philo

sophy than an historical or political one, and his hero, Julien, is at best

only a would-be Beylist. He is too serious and lacks the right kind of wit. His charm is too measured; like his love for Mathilde it is an imi tation of the real thing. Stendhal himself, though he eventually gained a reputation as a wit in the salons, was never as successful as a Beylist should be. Beylism loses out in Le Rouge et le Noir. It was Stendhal's

early ambition to be a comic dramatist like Moliere, yet the story of

Julien is finally a tragedy. It would be inappropriate here to consider whether Le Rouge et le

Noir is tragedy or comedy. We can, however, try to understand the

disparity between Stendhal's literary ambitions and the literature he

produced. When we look behind the masks of this ironic writer we find more of such discrepancies, some of which have psychological explanations.

The two elements of psychoanalytic theory which seem most appro priate to Le Rouge et le Noir are the oedipal pattern, exhibited in

Julien's behavior, which has previously been recognized, and the under

dying narcissism which, as far as I know, has not. It is necessary, first, to retrace the oedipal pattern, as the narcissism is linked to it in its

psychogenesis. Not everything in the novel, of course, can be reduced to a set of

psychological patterns or dynamics. As the title suggests the course of

Julien's ambitions is largely dictated by the society of Restoration France. The importance of that society in understanding Julien's ambitions has been pointed out by, among others, Turnell, Howe, and

Auerbach, and by Stendhal's biographer, Martineau. All his actions are prompted by two feelings: anxiety at having no place in his own world and a consciousness of his genius.1

1. Martin Turnell, "Le Rouge et le Noir/' The Novel in France (New York: New Directions, 1951), rpt. in Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Victor Brombert (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 20.

SiR, 14 (Fall 1975) 337

338 STEVEN SANDS

These two aspects, the social and the personal, show how closely they are linked when, after his first victory over the marquis' daughter,

Mathilde de la Mole, Julien withdraws to his room to read an account of Bonaparte, the greatest social upstart of the time. His other model is Tartuffe, the master of concealed ambition. Of these two models,

Bonaparte represents a value sought in personal as well as social terms,

while Tartuffe represents the strategies to be used in obtaining it. We must look to more than the society of nineteenth-century France

if we are to understand the failure of Julien's ambitions. (Tartuffe is of the seventeenth century.) Society plays its part, with its snobberies and class system. But Julien is able to outwit obstacles of that kind when he wants to. What he never does overcome is his position as an

outsider, and his position as an outsider is marked by the Stendhalian habit?a habit of his personality rather than his class?of examining his

feelings. His alienation, as Turnell points out, is a psychological as well as a social distinction. He is cut off not only from other classes, but from the rest of humanity, and one of his inner walls is the habit of

analyzing himself. It is not simply that what occurs in the novel is seen

through Julien's eyes, but that it virtually happens there, and "l'oeil ne

se voit pas lui-meme."2

Julien's own analysis, however, fails to provide us with an adequate explanation of why he should have become so enraged as to try to

murder his former mistress, Mme. de Renal, why he failed to defend himself properly at his trial, or rather defended himself in a way calcu

lated to provoke the jury against him, and why he should have been

indifferent to his own death and the efforts of friends to enable him

to escape. Finally, it fails to explain how he was able to establish a

remarkably tender relationship with Mme. de Renal while he awaited his execution for having attempted to kill her. The social issues are

important here and Julien's analysis of them is appropriate, but they do not explain all that goes on, and it is questionable whether at this

point they are even decisive. The focus at the end, except for one

moment at the trial, is on psychological matters of a more personal kind.

The course of Julien's youth bears prominent similarities with that of

Stendhal's other hero, Fabrice, and with that of Stendhal himself.

Like Julien, Stendhal hated his father and tried to escape his identity.

2. The phrase is by coincidence virtually repeated by Heinz Kohut in his

study on narcissistic personalities: "The eye, as it were, cannot observe itself."

(The Analysis of the Self, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Monograph No. 4 [New York: International Universities Press, 1971], p. 16.)

NARCISSISM: STENDHAL AND JULIEN SOREL 339

He came to Paris to ri?e in society, flirted with his patron's wife, and

analyzed his emotions as tirelessly as Julien does his. Fabrice, the young hero of Chartreuse de Parme, has almost no relationship with his father. He is looked after exclusively by women?not the maids, but his

mother, the Marquise, and his aunt, the Countess Pietranera, for both of whom he is the center of attention. They do not seem at all concerned with Fabrice's older brother (who serves as the father's chief of police in the household). Fabrice's attractiveness to women is, in fact, irre

sistible, even when he is a priest. His sermons are attended by women of fashion, like the opera. In Le Rouge et le Noir, the animosity between

Julien and his father is the fact with which the novel begins. The old

peasant is brutal with his youngest son who is useless in the mill. There are no women at all in this household. Julien's mother is never men

tioned, and is presumably dead. Both his father and his brothers beat him. His father, like Fabrice's, is unacceptable as a model. Old Sorel himself is actually willing to repudiate his kinship?at the end, when

Julien's plight has captured the pity of everyone else, the old man asks to be repaid for the cost of having brought him up. Julien, as we shall see, is fully as capable of going to the same lengths in revenge. So was Stendhal.

Both Stendhal and Julien were dissatisfied with their names and

eventually changed them. Stendhal is only the best known of Beyle's pseudonyms. There are more than a hundred of them, adopted accord

ing to need. Stendhal?the name of a Prussian town?is the analytic author; Dominique a would-be lover. Stendhal's heroes adopt various

identities or toy with the idea of doing so. Fabrice is at different times Vasi, a merchant of barometers, a peasant, and Joseph Bossi, a young man of means in Bologna. Julien, who does not live under the same threats as Fabrice, nevertheless finds himself in a number of different social roles: a tutor in the house of M. de Renal, a seminarian in

Bescangon, a private secretary to the Marquis de la Mole, his ambas sador abroad, and companion in the evenings, a potential bishop, and an officer in the Hussars at Strasbourg. Finally he is renamed as M. Julien de la Vernaye. There are also fantasies concerning his birth.

These changing names and identities are in Stendhal's case in some

degree a manifestation of his play spirit, the fantasies of a would-be dramatist and an assiduous spectator at the opera. However, that does not really answer the question of why he should play with identities in the first place.

Stendhal used even his own name in the third person. Beyle became

Beylism, not so much a name as a way of life, or, more accurately, a

340 STEVEN SANDS

way of behaving in society where his original identity seemed inade

quate. Like his heroes, he had trouble growing up in the family from which he inherited his name. Pseudonyms involve not only the adoption of a new name, but the repudiation of an old one, and that may have a motive of its own in the repudiation of one's father.

Stendhal's dislike of his father was intense: "my father has behaved like a dishonorable man and an execrable father?in short, like a

wretched scoundrel."3 In fact, according to Martineau, his father was "un passione, un tendre qui, apres la mort de sa femme, le soir,

endormait sa plus jeune fille sur ses genoux."4 Stendhal's animosity was

due not only to oedipal conflicts; to the old griefs was added later a

resentment at the dilapidation of the family fortune which Stendhal would normally have inherited. And while Stendhal hated his father, he appears to have been quite demanding of him, refusing to believe that his father was bankrupt and, as a young man on the make in

Paris, holding him responsible for "the terrible abandon in which I'm left by my bastard of a father."5

In his fantasy Stendhal reversed roles with him. It is customarily the father who has the son, legitimate or illegitimate, yet in his Journal Stendhal calls his father "my bastard." The consequence of deposing his father, however, was that he bastardized himself. Throwing the name back on his father was not enough to compensate. Stendhal and

Julien both were obliged to legitimize themselves elsewhere.

The Oedipal Pattern

In order for Julien to legitimize himself he must find a new set of

parents. Before he gets to Paris, while still in Verrieres, he finds a mother in Mme. de Renal: "Julien would have to scold her for allowing herself the same little intimate gestures with him as with her children. For

there were days when she would delude herself with thinking that she

loved him as if he were her child."6

3. Stendhal, Journal, in Oeuvres Intimes, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: La

Pleiade, Lib. Gallimard, 1955), p. 603. Page references are to this edition.

Translations, where not my own, are from The Private Diaries of Stendhal, ed.

and trans. Robert Sage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954). 4. Henri Martineau, Le Coeur de Stendhal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1952),

p. 35.

5. Journal, p. 586.

6. Le Rouge et le Noir, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: La Pleiade, Lib. Galli

maxd, 1939), p. 119. Subsequent page references are to this edition and will be

ciVH in the text.


One of the things that parents do for a child is to dress him up, and one of the "dearest wishes of Mme. de Renal" is to see Julien throw off the black coat he always wears. When the king comes to Verrieres she secures for Julien a place in the honor guard which would normally go to a son of the bourgeoisie. There he rides in a fine blue uniform with

epaulettes and spurs.

Unfortunately, Mme. de Renal is also his mistress, and Julien is in the

position of being both her child and her lover: "Had she not constantly to answer his artless questions on a thousand things of which no fifteen

year-old child of a good family is ignorant, only to admire him, a

moment later, as her master?" (pp. 119-120). "Stendhal," writes Simone de Beauvoir, "loved women sensually from childhood."7 Julien's sensual attachment, however, is mingled with ambition, and his ambi tion (not to be too harsh with him) with love:

There were moments when forgetting his ambitions, Julien revelled in admiring even Madam de Renal's hats, even her dresses. He could never tire of the plea sure of inhaling their fragrance. He would open her mirror-fronted wardrobe

and remain there for hours at a time admiring the beauty and the orderly ar

rangement of everything in it. His mistress, as she leaned against him, would

gaze at him; but he himself would be gazing at jewels and finery such as fill

the coffers of a bride on the eve of her wedding, (p. 114)

Fathers are harder to come by. Initially Julien finds them in the church. His exceptional performance as a young scholar may have had this as one of its goals; until fortune provides better, the church

is the best means of escape from old Sorel's mill. Because of his in

telligence he is the favorite of the local priest, Father Chelan, who

suggests him as a tutor to M. de Renal, the mayor of Verrieres. Father

Chelan, and later Father Pirard are, for a while, his real fathers (as the Abbe Blanes is "son veritable pere" for Fabrice).

Julien's tie with Father Chelan, even more than his love of Mme. de Renal, is mixed with ambition. He had first been drawn to the Church when construction was begun on a new town church in the wake of Napolean's defeat, when the church replaced Bonaparte as the symbol of the only path to glory available to a peasant boy. As early as the ceremony at Bray-le-Haut, where Father Chelan gets him a place close to the visiting Bishop of Agde, the old priest's authority is eclipsed by the elegance and youth of the bishop whose episcopal cross and

7. Simone de Beauvoir, "Stendhal or the Romantic of Reality," The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 238, rpt. in Stendhal: A Collection of Criti cal Essays, p. 147.

342 STEVEN SANDS

fine lace trimmings catch the attention of the women. Poor Father Chelan has nothing with which to match either Mme. de Renal's sky blue coat or the bishop's robes. Moreover, he is vulnerable to politics and after a lifetime of service he is deprived of his living.

A more powerful clergyman is Father Pirard, the director of the

seminary at Besancpn, where Julien is sent after his affair with Mme.

de Renal is found out. Austere and ugly, his face twisted with distress

caused by political treachery and petty avarice, he is all-powerful in

the seminary and protects Julien from the malice of other seminarists and the faculty.8 When eventually Julien arrives at the Hotel de la Mole in Paris

neither of these kindly men is any longer adequate for his fantasies. Father Pirard, who has come to Paris with him, is now, like Julien, only a protege of M. de la Mole, and?here again clothes are a symbol of

relationships?they both dress accordingly. Father Pirard "had acknowl

edged the claims of his present position in so far as to engage a valet, and he was now very properly dressed" (p. 276). If Julien is to legiti mize himself in the society of Paris and become something better than

the Marquis' "petit abbe," he needs more than a somber black coat, and another father to supply it. Even if Julien still looked to him, Father Pirard was no longer comfortable in his role as a father to

Julien: "The fact is that the abbe had conscientious scruples about his

liking for Julien, and it was with a sort of religious dread that he interfered so directly in another man's fate" (p. 254). The abbe's de

parture is a very real loss for Julien, for Father Pirard has understood him better than most:

With that something or other in your character which, for me at least, is inde

finable, unless you do make your way you're in for persecution?there's no mid

dle way for you. Don't deceive yourself. People can see you're not gratified when

they address a remark to you; in a sociable country like this, you're bound for

disaster if you don't attain to a position where men respect you. (p. 255)

In fairness to Julien, he does not set out from the start to gain the

Marquis de la Mole as a father. The idea begins as a whim of the

marquis'. Father Pirard, while still at the seminary, had refused to be

paid for the legal work he had done for M. de La Mole, who then

8. There were counterparts in Stendhal's boyhood: "un pendant affreux

par la forme . . . grand, pale, maigre," who was nonetheless "pas mauvais au

fond." There was also a Father Chelan, a frequent visitor to the Beyle house and a charitable country priest, later director of a seminary. (Le Coeur de Stendhal,

p. 60)


seized on the idea of rewarding the abbe's favorite pupil, whom he had never seen, with a gift of five hundred francs from a fictitious "Paul Sorel" (p. 218). Father Pirard himself had for some time been taken with the idea that Julien might be the natural son of someone of rank.

Impressed with Julien's indignation in face of the hypocrisy in the

seminary, he wonders if it might "be in his blood" (p. 213). There are

circumstances to encourage Father Pirard's suspicions, such as the ex

travagant anonymous gift from Julien's friend, Fouque, and the abbe is quick to assume that the donor is a local nobleman.

This would seem to place the initial responsibility for the relationship that subsequently develops on M. de la Mole and Father Pirard. It is as if Julien were so skillful in realizing the ambitions of his imagination that the people necessary to his scheme unwittingly oblige him and go

more than half way. He himself is initially made to appear rather naive about it all. Touched by the marquis' polite manner, having previously known only the brutality of his father and the crude contempt of M. de Renal, he relaxes his defenses, only to feel for the first time the more subtle contempt of the marquis:

" 'You're not quite sure of your spell

ing?' asked M. de la Mole. 'That's true,' said Julien, without thinking in the least how he was injuring himself" (p. 260). Gradually M. de la Mole, almost in spite of himself, takes Julien under his tutelage. The

relationship with his secretary seems to grow without either of them

intending it. During an attack of the gout which comes at a time when his wife and daughter are away in the country, M. de la Mole turns for companionship to his young assistant. His own son, Norbert, is

there; "they were on very good terms, but had nothing to say to each other" (p. 288).

The marquis' companionship is at first offered condescendingly: "he

encouraged Julien's absurdities, with intent to get some enjoyment out

of them." However, as his affection grows, he finds it "more interesting to correct, in the gentlest way, the young man's unsound notions of

men and things" (p. 290). It is finally as a son that M. de la Mole receives Julien, and one sign

of it is that, like Mme. de Renal, the marquis gives him a blue coat. He has dressed Julien before and in the best shops, but as a servant of the household. The blue coat is given so that Julien can talk with him in the evenings without wearing the garb of a hired secretary. More im

portant than the coat, the marquis gives him also a fantasy: "When it

pleases you to put it on and come to see me, you will be, in my eyes, the

younger brother of the Cornte de Chaulnes, that is to say, the son of my friend the old Duke" (p. 289).

344 STEVEN SANDS

M. de la Mole from then on continues to play with this fantasy of

Julien's birth. He is, in fact, more fond of Julien, who has more ideas and is a better companion, than of his own son. He makes comparisons between them which flatter Julien: Norbert is courageous, but that is

all, and then who is to say that this young abbe, when faced with dan

ger, would not distinguish himself, Not long after the gift of the coat, M. de la Mole gives Julien a

decoration, a cross which has been coveted by Norbert. At this point the marquis, sensing that perhaps he has gone too far, tries to draw limits to their relationship:

" T have no wish to raise you above your

station. That's always a mistake, for patron as for protege. When you

begin to get tired of my lawsuits, or when you no longer suit me, I will ask for a good living for you, like the one our friend Father Pirard has?and nothing more/ the marquis added, very drily" (p. 294; Stendhal's italics).

But the development which is under way cannot be limited so pe

remptorily. Julien's expectations, once aroused, are not to be satisfied

with so little. Moreover, it is doubtful how successful M. de la Mole is in controlling his own feelings. It is at least as much his fantasy as

it is Julien's. He seems to have forgotten that he was primarily responsi ble for it. And after the gift, and the warning, the marquis still does his share to spread the rumor around: "I must indeed confess some

thing," he says to Father Pirard, "I know all about Julien's birth, and I authorize you not to keep this confidence secret" (p. 292).

Father Pirard is less whimsical and more conscious of his feelings for

Julien and consequently is better able to guard against them: "If Julien is a feeble reed," he says to himself as he goes off to his new living in

Paris, leaving Julien in the Hotel de la Mole, "let him perish; if he's a man of spirit, let him puzzle things out for himself (p. 268). There are moments when M. de la Mole confronts the fact that this fantasy is a product of his own feelings: "People get fond of a fine spaniel, thought the marquis; why am I so ashamed of my fondness for this

young cleric? He's an original sort of fellow. I treat him like a son?

well, what's the harm in that? This whim of mine, supposing it lasts, will cost me a diamond worth five hundred louis in my will" (p. 290).

Unfortunately he is unable to abandon Julien to his own fate. When Mathilde de la Mole finds herself pregnant, the fantasy of

Julien's birth suddenly makes its claim to become fact. Julien is already the father of M. de la Mole's grandchild, yet even in this he appears only indirectly responsible?it is Mathilde who insists on marriage. It

has, of course, been the marquis' fantasy as well, but now that it is about to be realized, he is faced with a conflict between his social am


bitions for his daughter and his fondness for Julien, which is now likely to cost him more than a diamond worth five hundred louis.

Despite his anger, M. de la Mole, himself a man of whim, finally goes along with his still more whimsical daughter, and goes considera

bly farther than reluctant compliance would require. After arranging for Julien to have a noble name and an income, M. de la Mole toys

with the idea of passing down to him his own peerage. (The marquis' father-in-law, the Due de Chaulnes, has in the past offered to hand on

his title to Norbert, the marquis' son, so that he is already taken care

of.) Further evidence that the marquis' wishes are being gratified is the peculiar way in which he bestows an income on Julien, as if he would dispossess Julien's real father of his fatherhood: "M. Julien de la Vernaye will have received this money from his father, whom there is no need to describe more fully. M. de la Vernaye may possibly think it proper to make some present to M. Sorel, a carpenter of Verrieres,

who took care of him in his childhood" (p. 452). The fantasy, then, infects a number of characters, last of all Julien

himself. The anonymous gifts and the fantasies of M. de la Mole and Father Pirard are fortuitous events for which Stendhal exonerates

Julien of initial responsibility. Once it is his fantasy too, however, he is so taken with it, such a flattered parvenu, that he foreswears his childhood hero, the model of every poor young man with ambitions to

greatness: "Can it indeed be possible that I am the natural son of some great noble exiled among our mountains by that terrible Napo leon? Every moment this idea seemed to him less improbable

. . ."

(p. 453). Here his desire to legitimize himself, and some of the feelings behind

it, surface clearly for the first time: "My hatred of my father would be a proof ... I should no longer be a monster!" (p. 453). The hint of

self-disgust in this remark points to a weakness in his make-up which we will come to later. For the time being, his absorption into the la Mole family represents for Julien the success of his ambition to legiti mize himself and to find new parents.

The one ultimately responsible for both the fantasies of Julien's birth and the circumstances which encourage them is, of course, Stendhal. There is nothing like it in the accounts of Antoine Berthet, the peasant whose crime was the model for the plot of Le Rouge et le Noir. More

over, it was a fantasy which Stendhal had had of himself: "What a

difference," he wrote in his Journal, "if I had Mante for a father!"9

9. Journal, p. 562.

346 STEVEN SANDS

As Stendhal bastardized his father, Julien also finds a way of revers

ing roles. Having been the taker until the very end, he then becomes the giver. While in prison he makes a number of bequests. It is usually the father's role to bequeath to the son, but it is Julien who bequeaths the money he has accumulated to his father. (To Mathilde, he actually bequeaths one of his surrogate fathers, the Abbe Pirard.) The pattern of these bequests helps us to understand his behavior in the last chapters and the motive itself of his crime which, to the local Jansenist priest, "remains inexplicable" (p. 508).

The crime is not directed at his father, but at Mme. de Renal, and

any explanation must also explain his renewed relationship with her. Stendhal tells us that Julien makes his final bequests in a new state of

mind. Something more than rage and guilt has happened in him, and we know from certain hints that this new state of mind is not simply remorse: "Ambition was dead in his heart, another passion had risen from its ashes; he called it remorse for having attempted the murder of Mme. de Renal" (p. 476). He is enjoying a strange and serene love affair which is not in the least hampered by the fact that he is in prison. Perhaps there is a clue to the reason for this in the most unusual be

quest of all: he asks Mathilde, who is pregnant, to give their child when it is born to Mme. de Renal to be raised by her. Mathilde is a

little cold and vain, but there is nothing to indicate that she would

perform inadequately as a mammal. Yet Julien tells her, as if he were unaware of what a harsh opinion it is: "In fifteen years time Madame de Renal will adore my son and you will have forgotten him" (p. 478).

The remark is not so bizarre if we consider that the child which

Julien has in mind is himself. In Mme. de Renal he has regained a

mother, and by giving her a child he accomplishes one more childhood dream of being to her both a husband and a son.

Discussions about women who are mothers to Julien point finally to the original mother herself. Stendhal provides us with no evidence about her. While nothing is given about Julien's early childhood or

his parents at that time, Stendhal has left a considerable testimony about his own. According to his own report his mother loved him with a passion. She was a young mother and embraced him incessantly while he covered her with kisses. In language that sounds more appropriate to an adult's memory rather than a child's impression, he describes her

as "une femme charmante" with whom he was "amoureux."

In loving her at six years of age ... I had absolutely the same character as, in 1828, loving to a fury Alberthe de Rubempre. [She was the only one of

Stendhal's mistresses for whom his love was solely physical.] There was but one


exception: I was, in regard to what constitutes physical love, as Caesar would

be if he returned to the world to use cannon. ... I learned this quickly and it

did not basically change my technique. I used to want to cover my mother with kisses without her having clothes on. ... I used to abhor my father when he came to interrupt our kisses.10

Stendhal's mother died when he was seven. When he was fifty-two he could still say "It is forty-five years ago that I lost what I most loved in the world."11 The death of a mother at the age of seven is likely to be felt by the child as a desertion or betrayal, and leave feelings of an

ger and perhaps a desire for revenge, feelings which, as we shall see, involve the father as well.

We do not know whether Julien lost his mother at the same age or in the same way as Stendhal.12 We do, however, know that he lost her, and it is made explicit to us that in Mme. de Renal he has found her

again.

Stendhal, writes Henri Delacroix, adopted a theory of nature which

gave the least part to nature and the larger part to the action of so

ciety.13 "Nature," however, does not disappear because one has theore

tically decided to see things in terms of "society" (assuming that Sten dhal's theories did have such a bias). Society explains what is explicit or conscious in Julien's theory of himself as the intelligent peasant to whom his employers are pleased to condescend. It does not account for

the forces which, at the end of the novel, disrupt society and ruin

Julien's ambitions, forces which belong not to society and the conscious, but to "nature" and the unconscious. At the time of the crime nature

supercedes society: "he was considering everything from a new aspect; he had no more ambition" (p. 462).

10. Stendhal, La Vie de Henry Brulard, in Oeuvres Intimes, p. 60. 11. Ibid., p. 61.

12. It is, however, interesting to speculate. As his relationships show a clear

oedipal pattern, twice involving women who have the most influence on the head of the household, it is likely that his mother did not die before he was five, or at the earliest, not before he was three. On the other hand, there is a touch of sadism in Julien's behavior with women. His accusing Mme. de Renal of not

loving him, when it is obvious that she does, hurts her very much. And when his accusation plunges her into acute distress, he goes to the window pretending to leave. Such behavior suggests that his mother died before he was eight or

nine, when a new awareness of women's beauty begins to soften the early phallic sadism. Seven, then, according to this line of reasoning, would be an appropriate speculation.

13. Henri Delacroix, La Psychologie de Stendhal (Paris: Lib. Felix Alcan, 1928), pp. 5-6,

348 STEVEN SANDS

The unconscious forces which erupt when Julien attempts to kill Mme. de Renal have less to do with his conscious social ambitions and more with his unconscious needs, which provide a kind of inner plot that finally destroys those ambitions. Despite the fact that the jury is hostile to Julien for reasons of class, it is he, not they, who pulled the

trigger. He might have expected harsh treatment even had he been on

good behavior at his trial. It is Julien himself who does the greatest damage to his ambitions.

There is no clear evidence to maintain that in Julien's crime against Mme. de Renal Stendhal intended to "present us with a flawed and in some sense unknowable hero,"14 or that there is a flaw in the novel's realism because Stendhal took the facts he read in the Gazette for granted and did not bother to make them convincing artistically.15

It should not have been surprising to Julien that an abandoned mis tress should write a bad character reference for a former lover who is

asking her support in marrying another woman. Remorse and jealousy would explain it perfectly well. But it is another matter for a mother to betray her son, and "Mme. de Renal," says Julien at his trial, "was like a mother to me. My crime was atrocious" (p. 486). And for the same reason it is more understandable.

A mother, unlike a mistress, is not expected to stop loving and giving support simply because the child has left. The child feels entitled to it; and even after he has shot Mme. de Renal, Julien has no doubt that "she will shed hot tears" for him (p. 486). When he learns that she has survived her wounds, he says to himself:

"So she will live! . . . She will live to pardon me and to love me"

(p. 461). Mathilde de la Mole has never represented to him anything of this

sort. While trying to conquer her, Julien repeatedly compares her with Mme. de Renal, particularly when he struggles with her pride. At such

times the memory of Mme. de Renal is sweet: ". . . even when her

beautiful blue eyes seem to be staring at me with the least restraint, deep down in them I can always read cool self-possession, criticism, and malice. . . . How different was the look in Mme. de Renal's eyes"

(p. 330). Mathilde's devotion to him while he is awaiting execution is an embarrassment. Her love with its mixture of sixteenth-century he

roic fantasies is intrusive. He cannot find the love in himself with which to return hers: "She is ruining herself for me" (p. 474). But he is

14. Michael Wood, Stendhal (London: Elek, 1971), p. 83.

15. Jean Prevost, La Creation chez Stendhal (Paris: Mercure de France,

1951).


"tired of heroism. It was simple, artless, and almost timid affection

that would have found him responsive" (p. 475). Julien wonders if

he is unkind and heartless. "This question would have troubled him little in the times when he was ambitious; for then the only disgrace in his eyes was failure to make his way" (p. 474). Now he is "more

sensitive to moral issues at the approach of death than he had been in

the whole of his life, and he was feeling twinges of conscience not only about M. de la Mole but on Mathilde's account as well" (p. 474)?a remark which incidentally reveals who, in the Hotel de la Mole, was

most important to Julien. He was not seeking a wife there, nor a

mother (whom he had already found in Verrieres) but a father, whom

he had found in M. de la Mole, and was losing in the wake of his

crime against Mme. de Renal.

In contrast to Mathilde, Mme. de Renal does not scheme for love. She is possessed by it and is continually surprised by the strength of her

passion. Also unlike Mathilde, she is someone with whom Julien feels secure enough to expose his insecurities and his ignorance: "There

were times when, for all his accustomed hypocrisy, he found it extre

mely sweet to confess to this great lady who admired him his ignorance of a thousand and one little social usages" (p. 115). This reaches a

point where he "found so exquisite a pleasure in being sincere that he was on the point of confessing to Mme. de Renal the ambition that up till then had been the very essence of his life" (p. 115).

Such confidence was apparently difficult for Stendhal himself. One of his contemporaries who knew him reports that "the fear of being deceived too often put him in the position of being a third person to his most intimate relationships, and deprived them of what is most

pleasant about them, confidence carried to the point of abandon."16

There was more than defense to this withdrawal, but that is more ap

propriate to the discussion of narcissism.

While the betrayal by a woman whom Julien had counted on as a mother releases an uncontrollable rage, the discharge of that rage leaves Julien in a profound state of tranquility. The effect is like a

purgation, releasing a love that previously had been overwhelmed by rage and mistrust. The combined effect of his attempted assassination and Mme. de Renal's recovery is doubly fortunate. He has killed a mother and she has come back to life to love him again; two wishes are gratified beyond expectation, and in such a way as is usually possi ble only in fantasy. "Only then did Julien begin to repent of the crime

16. R. Colomb, "Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de H. Beyle," in Stendhal Raconte par Ceux qui Vont vu, ed. P. Jourda (Paris: Lib. Stock, 1931), p. 4.

350 STEVEN SANDS

he had committed. By a coincidence that saved him from despair, at

that instant only was he delivered from the state of physical irritation and semi-insanity in which he had been plunged since leaving Paris for Verrieres" (p. 461). Julien forgives her the letter of betrayal and she

forgives him his shooting her. If we are correct in seeing their relation

ship as one between mother and son (as Stendhal clearly suggests), both

original offenses, the mother's desertion and the son's resentment, are

here absolved.

The renewed relationship between them is remarkably tender: "At no other time in his life had Julien experienced a moment like this" (p. 494). And only now, when Mme. de Renal has given up the last shred of respectability by calling to see the man who has tried to kill her, does he realize "the whole extent of the sacrifice she had made for him"

(p. 496). Julien has always demanded sacrificial love, perhaps as a

compensation for the humiliation and insecurity he has continually felt as a tutor and secretary and which he may have felt first when aban

doned to the upbringing of his father. When the sacrifice is made, and Mme. de Renal is as humiliated and as helpless as himself, there is finally "no trace of petty vanity in Julien's feelings ... he told her of all his moments of weakness. She was kind and charming to him"

(p. 505). This new-found security may have something to do with the

equanimity with which he confronts his death. Another explanation for Julien's crime and one that is certainly part

of the truth is that his schemes are ruined, and that a violent act will cut off a future that has become unbearable.17 Yet, if he had been

willing to persist, it is not unlikely that even after Mme. de Renal's letter the marquis would have relented. There must have been some

affection Julien could have counted on in a man who had thought of

handing down to him his own title. There may have been gratitude as

well; under Julien's supervision the marquis' investments had increased

considerably. However, Julien shows no desire to persist in such schemes. However redeemable they may be in practical terms they are ruined

inwardly. The game is up because he is psychologically exhausted, and

the effort is no longer worth it. He has regained a mother's love and

his relationships with fathers are approaching a satisfactorily defiant

conclusion.

While the pistol shots settle the score with mother, even after his de

fiance of the jury at his trial there is still "one disagreeable incident

between himself and death, and that was a visit from his father" (p.

17. Wood, p. 89.


467). However, supported by his new-found security with Mme. de

Renal, he actually is able to feel remorse for not loving his brutal father, and this while not having any illusions about him18 (p. 500). There is a curious convergence of father figures at the end. And what is more

curious is that Julien is no longer intent on outwitting them. Father

Chelan is so old and frail that he leaves Julien depressed and for the first time aware of his own mortality.

Nearly all the older men?Julien's father, Father Chelan, Father

Pirard, M. de la Mole, M. Valenod?are at one time or another Julien's judges, in such diverse matters as spelling, dress, manners, women, em

ployment, and finally life itself. How rigid Julien must have been in

wardly faced with such continual judgment. Even love is a duty the

performance of which must be judged: "The stiff self-consciousness had made their meeting of the previous night a victory and not a pleasure" (p. 113). And: "How immensely difficult it is," he thinks to himself, "to play the part of hypocrite every minute" (p. 199). Tartuffe, whose

part he knows by heart, is his "master" (p. 337). He is "at war with the whole of society" (p. 338) and has "not a friend" he can ask for advice: "I shall say to myself like Medea: 'Amidst so many perils I still have MYSELF

" (p. 343).

The comparison is hardly flattering, and there is something about his extreme self-reliance which makes one think he would rather live otherwise. For in spite of his self-reliance he is still vulnerable. Even his

hypocrisy, aided by a pale and attractive face, sanctimonious com

pliance and a way with words, had not been secure against the piercing

judgment of Father Pirard, who recognized the youth within the rigid and ambitious schemer: "Julien could not bear the glance, stretching out his hand as if trying to hold himself up, he fell full length on the floor" (p. 189). It is not even secure against himself; he does not re sent M. de la Mole for having cut him off. When the trial is over, the judges have done their worst, and with

Julien's assistence. The influence used by Mathilde out of court might have worked had Julien not sabotaged it. His self-defense at the trial seems to have been calculated to antagonize the arrivistes on the jury

where they are too insecure to forgive him. Perhaps he is simply tired of being judged, and having regained Mme. de Renal's love, he feels

strong enough for open defiance, or indifferent enough to pull away

18. After promising his money, Julien imagines what his father will say about the gift afterwards: "On Sundays after dinner, he'll show his gold to all his envious neighbors in Verrieres. 'Which of you,' his glance will say to them, 'would not, at this price, be delighted to have a son guillotined?'

" (p. 502).

352 STEVEN SANDS

all disguises and reveal the roles which everyone is playing. Perhaps, also, his passivity after the trial when he is faced with death is not

merely a recognition that the game is up, but his wish that it should be. His trial at Besangon is only the last of several. In one way or an

other, he has been on trial from the beginning, and the book ends where it began, with Julien being condemned?in the first scene by his

father, in the last by the court.

The Narcissism

Such external judgment, until the end when Julien is defiant, is

hardly necessary; it has been internalized. He expresses no resentment whatever at M. de la Mole for his decision to call off the marriage: "I cannot blame M. de la Mole . . . what father would want to give his

dearly loved daughter to such a man" (p. 456). Julien's inner rigidity touches on aspects of his psychology which are

at least as deeply rooted as the oedipal pattern and are connected with

it, though they are not oedipal themselves. His habit of keeping him self concealed even from those who are close to him is a strong trait in his personality. M. de la Mole and Father Pirard, both clever men

who understand Julien's ambition and do not hold it against him, still find something in him which they cannot understand. What they can not understand in him may be what they cannot find there; that is, there is something missing in the feeling of relatedness.

Julien presents an example of the conventional wisdom that ambition

may hide a weakness in self-esteem. Seen from the perspective of socie

ty, Julien's feeling of worthlessness would seem to follow as a result of frustrated ambitions, and humiliations. His insecurity shows itself clear

ly when Mathilde is scornful of him:

For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the action of a

superior mind provoked by the most violent hatred against him. So far from

having at that moment the least thought of defending himself, he reached the

point of self-contempt. Hearing her heap upon him such cruel marks of scorn, so skillfully calculated to destroy any good opinion he might have of himself, it seemed to him that Mathilde was right, and that she was not saying enough (p. 378).

"And indeed,"he explains after examining his own manners and way of

speaking and finding fault with them, "I'm worth very little." At a deeper level, however, the link between his ambition and his

feelings of worthlessness may work in the other direction, so that the


feelings of worthlessness drive his ambitions. Stendhal himself had social ambitions which he never fulfilled. After elaborate fantasies in antici

pation of encounters with prominent persons, when the time came he was sometimes unable to speak. In Stendhal's case the evidence is more

complete, and we see in the origins of the link between his ambitions and a secretly ailing self-esteem a connection between the oedipal pattern of his ambitions (like Julien, he flirted with his patron's wife) and the accompanying narcissism.

While the narcissistic personality has roots that are more archaic than the oedipal phase, certain traumas suffered then can cause the more

archaic structure to re-establish itself: "... a preoedipal or oedipal traumatic disappointment of a son in his father . . . may rest on the

deeper basis of an early inexpressible disappointment in the idealized mother which may be due to the unreliability of her empathy ... or her absence or death."19 Stendhal suffered such a trauma in his mother's death when he was seven years of age. Moreover, it may have appeared to the young Stendhal that his father had something to do with it. For one thing, it was he who had got her pregnant, and she died in labor. On the night of her labor Stendhal's father sent him to stay with a relative. He returned to find his mother dead. His father was dis

traught, but Stendhal felt a repugnance at embracing him.20 So far, this is the oedipal aspect of the trauma.

The narcissistic consequences are due to the fact that the age of seven falls at the end of the oedipal phase and the beginning of latency. It is the last of several ages which are marked by peak vulnerability of the small child's psyche, and of his superego in particular:

These moments of greatest danger in early childhood correspond to 'an as yet insecurely established new balance of psychological forces after a spurt of de

velopment* (Kohut and Seits, 1963, pp. 128-29). If we apply this principle of the vulnerability of new structures to the superego at the beginning of laten

cy and, in particular, to the newly established idealization of its values and standards and of its rewarding and punishing functions it will not be surprising to us to learn . . . that a severe disappointment in the idealized oedipal object . . . may yet undo a precariously established idealization of the superego, may re cathect the imago of the idealized self-object, and may lead to a renewed in sistence on, and search for, an external object of perfection.21

That is to say, the age of seven or thereabouts is one of special vulne

19. Kohut, p. 53.

20. Paul Arbelet, La Jeunesse de Stendhal (Paris: Editions Champion, 1914), p. 82.

21. Kohut, p. 44.

354 STEVEN SANDS

rability, falling as it does when the superego is a newly formed sys tem, as new systems are vulnerable. What may happen to the super

ego when it suffers a blow at that age due to the loss of an idealized

parent is that the ideal fails to be internalized and the superego does not succeed in replacing the external ideal object which one has pre viously needed to possess in such a way as to feel it was part of one

self. The child regresses to a need of narcissistic possession, with the re sult that he may not be able to care for another person as a being separate and independent from himself, but only as a self-representa tion, the ideal which his narcissistic personality still needs to possess if he is not to feel worthless, perilously vulnerable or empty.

It is a form of attachment which characterizes Julien's relationship with Mme. de Renal and others, although in his case, for lack of evi

dence, its childhood origins must remain obscure.

If a disappointment of traumatic proportions concerns the late preoedipal and

the oedipal idealized object [i.e. the mother] or even as late as the beginning of latency . . . then the idealization of the superego will be incomplete with the

result that the person (even though he may possess values and standards) will

forever search for external ideal figures from whom he wants to obtain the

approval and the leadership which his insufficiently idealized superego cannot

provide.22

Whether or not Julien suffered a traumatic childhood loss like Sten

dhal's, he repeatedly behaves in this way in attaching himself to figures of authority or superiority (male and female) and seeking their ap

proval, a burdensome position which is liable to break down under ex

cessive pressure, when the worthlessness which underlies the neediness

is projected onto the objects who were formerly idealized. There is a precarious balance in Julien between autonomy of charac

ter and the need for approval, or, in other terms, between ambition and

shame. In Erikson's scheme of development this might indicate that

there had been some difficulty in the second, or muscular-anal stage of

infancy.23 No such information is available about Julien's infancy, nor, in this matter, Stendhal's, to support such a speculation. Moreover, there

is the question whether such information, if it existed, would amount to

finding something new, or merely to turning over the other side of a

coin. For just as pride may conceal poor self-esteem, the ability to en

dure moments of acute self-doubt may depend on a powerful self

22. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

23. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1963), p. 273.


control and will. Julien shows endurance of this kind, and according to Erikson this is the appropriate strength to grow out of the conflict between autonomy and doubt which is characteristic of the muscular anal stage. Julien's stamina may, in other words, indicate strong reserves

of self-confidence.

When we first see Julien his father is humiliating him and we have reason to believe that the humiliation has gone on since childhood:

"My father,55 he tells the abbe Pirard, "hated me from my cradle"

(p. 256). The result of too much shaming, says Erikson, can be "a secret determination to try to get away with things, unseen?if, indeed, it does not result in defiant shamelessness."24 He mentions a ballad in which a murderer at the gallows does not feel chastened, but instead berates the spectators. Julien behaves like the man in the ballad in both respects: he tries to get away with things unseen in the households where he is employed, and he is defiantly shameless at his trial. As for Stendhal himself, it is reported that as a child he was in continual re volt against obligations and that he committed a thousand thoughtless mistakes to which his parents attached far too much importance. As a result, defiance became insensibly a habit of his spirit.25

Much of the suspense of the novel depends on what Julien is trying to get away with. There is his possession of a miniature portrait of

Napoleon, the conquests of Mme. de Renal and Mathilde, and in Besancon his flirtation with the cafe waitress, Amanda Binet. The

political and social atmosphere itself is full of secret threats, here as in Chartreuse. In each case regarding Julien there is someone who might find out the secret?M. de Renal, M. de la Mole, Father Pirard, seminary spies?and ruin the scheme. Then there is someone who

rescues him from punishment at the last minute. Usually this is a

clergyman, Father Chelan or Father Pirard, though in the case of the portrait of Napoleon it is Mme. de Renal (still a parental figure)

who unwittingly performs this role for him. It needs to be explained why this system breaks down, why his

affair with Mathilde and, if we consider her letter to M. de la Mole, his affair with Mme. de Renal as well, are transgressions which, in the

long run, he does not get away with. There are external reasons for which Julien is not fully responsible, namely Mathilde's determination to carry the affair as far as marriage, which forces its disclosure to the marquis. There is also the letter from Mme. de Renal. Prior to M. de la Mole's receiving that letter, however, Julien has been skillful

24. Ibid., p. 253.

25. Golomb, p. 4.

356 STEVEN SANDS

enough in dealing with the marquis' rage. In a superb gesture he sug gests that M. de la Mole have a servant shoot him, offers his pistol, and volunteers to make a clear target of himself in the garden. It is

genuine regret, but also brilliant manipulation. But just when M. de la Mole has begun to resign himself to having Julien as a son-in-law

("He's not really a scoundrel" [p. 440]) he receives Mme. de Renal's letter. Even then there is an older man who may be willing to let

Julien get away with it, and that is M. de la Mole himself, if Julien had not gone and shot Mme. de Renal and forced the matter into the criminal courts. During the trial and the subsequent appeal he still has a chance. Mathilde is using her money and connections. But for once

Julien is not rescued, and the reason is, as we have seen, that he wishes

to make it impossible. The second possible outcome of being shamed too much is defiant

shamelessness. Like the hero of the ballad who berates the onlookers at his execution, Julien virtually dares the jury to condemn him. One who is ashamed beyond endurance, writes Erikson,

may be in a chronic mood ... to express defiance in similar terms. What I

mean by this sinister reference is that there is a limit to a child's and an adult's

endurance in face of demands to consider himself, his body, and his wishes as

evil and dirty, and to his belief in the infallibility of those who pass judgement. He may be apt to turn things around, and to consider as evil only the fact that

they exist: his chance will come when they are gone, or when he will go from

them.2b

Throughout the book Julien has done just this in his own thoughts: judge his judges and cast shame on those who make him feel ashamed.

When his defenses fail to work, or when others have shamed him exces

sively, he turns things around: Norbert and de Groisenois have wit and courage but lack strength of feeling and originality. "I didn't

despise the brute enough," he says after M. de Renal has insulted him

(p. 86). When it is clear that Mathilde will yield to him, Julien thinks of what a blow it will be to the marquis who had hopes of making her a duchess: "How good of me, a plebian to take pity on a family of this rank" (p. 336). He wonders if "people of this sort have passions" (p. 331). Now, at the end, when "he will go from them," it is time to voice

his judgments openly. Julien's defiance of the jury's respectability has the sound of revenge. He makes it impossible for his judges to con descend to him: "I see in the jury-box," he tells them, "not a single

26. Erikson, p. 253.


peasant grown rich, but simply and solely men of the middle class

enraged against me" (p. 487). Why should Julien have chosen to declare himself when it is most

dangerous to do so? Guilt no doubt has something to do with it: "My crime is atrocious, and it was premeditated. I have, therefore, Gentle men of the Jury, deserved death" (p. 486). But more than guilt, several

developments converge with what must have been considerable effect: the betrayal by a woman whose love he had taken to be as lasting as a mother's, the rage which that unleashes, the purgative effect of his violence against her, and their renewed love, which implies a greater forgiveness than the court could offer. There is also his imprisonment itself, which makes further shame unimportant and leaves him without the means to prevent visits from his father and other potential judges. Finally, there is the prospect of death itself, where perhaps he knows that someone who has gone beforehand may be waiting for him. The

game is up, and, "moved, like a writer of plays, by his own story," he knows it (p. 348).

Julien's last love with Mme. de Renal is enjoyed in prison where, like Fabrice in Chartreuse, he is put in an upper cell with a view. Fabrice's love for Clelia is so strong that he voluntarily returns to

prison after his aunt has gone to great lengths to secure his escape. One way of understanding Stendhal's recurring themes of love in prison and imprisonment in high places is that the highest form of love derives its power from its impossibility. In this view, Julien's love is connected

with ambition or political defiance: "If society avenges itself on the

exceptional individual by imprisoning him, from this very high tower he can avenge himself on society by transforming his solitude into a

contemptuous and hopeless happiness."27 But while love and ambition are obviously mixed in Julien's earlier affairs, they are not in this one,

which is explicitly distinguished from earlier ones on just this point: Julien "has no more ambition" (p. 462). Moreover, ambition and

politics can hardly explain how his final love should be so tender, and does not take account of Mme. de Renal herself and the special place she holds in Julien's feelings.

On a more psychological level, Starobinski sees Julien's love in prison as a form of compensation, an expression of "Stendhal's secret desire to

be loved in spite of his ugliness, in spite of the prison that his body and

27. Jean Starobinski, "Stendhal Pseudonyme," L'Oeil Vivant (Paris: Galli

mard, 1961), rpt. as "Truth in Masquerade," in Stendhal: A Collection of Cri tical Essays, p. 119.

358 STEVEN SANDS

age are for him."28 The prison, in this view, is a metaphorical projection of anatomy, and love, like the pseudonyms, is a means of escape or of

shedding an identity. We can agree that the conclusion of the novel is not, psychologically,

an accident; but we find cause for it elsewhere than in thwarted ambi tion. Julien's peace and happiness at the end are more than resignation or escape. The shooting of Mme. de Renal and his defiance at his trial

have, as we have seen, settled old scores with mother and father. The

renewed love with Mme. de Renal begins on this foundation and it is beautiful in its own right.

Julien's final love bears the markings of an old and unconscious wish that has been finally fulfilled. He has successfully deployed all his conscious skill to rise in Paris only to find that he longed for the quiet days he had left behind in Verrieres. Such turns of plot in the theatre are called dramatic irony, the most famous example being Oedipus who, determined to solve the riddle, finds that the riddle to be solved is himself. Such inadvertent but inevitable endings are reached, in

Michael Wood's words, by "the other road." In the case of Julien, the other road is his unconscious, the unacknowledged needs and forces

which result both in his crime against Mme. de Renal and in the

peace he finds with her afterward. Theories that explain Julien's final behavior as escape, or as defiance

of an upper class, though plausible, and perhaps true, do not take full account of the emotional ambiguities of the situation and of the love

itself, which is more tender than defiance would dictate. It is these

ambiguities which lie at the root of Julien's final peace of mind.

First, as to the ambiguities of the situation, Julien finds a love which is so gratifying that he no longer minds imprisonment. It gives him such

profound security and gratification that his imprisonment is hardly any longer a punishment inflicted on him by other men. Love and im

prisonment is a familiar theme. One finds it in the myth of Amor and

Psyche. Odysseus is entranced by Circe and Calypso. There is Lockit's ironic consolation for the highwayman, MacHeath, as he arrests him: "Your case ... is not particular, the greatest heroes have been ruined

by women."29 Bachelors are popularly said to be caught when they marry. In each of these examples we find the same paradoxical notion

that love is both an irresistible fulfillment and a trap. Where then lies the gratification for Julien? Aside from the pleasure

of a woman's love, the scene of Julien's last love paradoxically protects

28. Ibid., p. 119.

29. John Gay, The Beggars Opera n.v.5.


against threats by fulfilling them. In this sense love in prison is at the same time a defense and a victory, imprisonment and a refuge. Outside is the world of male envy and violence, as in Verrieres it lay outside

Mme. de Renal's bedroom, which Julien left for the last time under a hail of bullets. When the dangers and hostility of the world become too great or frustrating, the peace of an exclusive and costly love may be worth the sacrifice.

Another ambiguity in the situation is that while Julien's imprisonment removes him from society, it attracts everyone's attention. Julien's new

name, which he acquires just before the crime, covers up his past, yet is bound to make an impression on the town of Verrieres. The attempt to kill Mme. de Renal itself attracts the attention of an entire province, yet it is "inexplicable," and while the curious world is swirling around

him, he does not want to see them: "the worst evil of being in prison ... is not to be able to lock the door" (p. 498). Behind such ambiguity in the situation is a conflict in Julien himself, who is "trapped between the need to reveal himself and the fear of being penetrated by another conscience."30

It is one of the contradictory functions of narcissism that it can use the forms of self-display as both a projection of the self and as a defense

against the inquiry of others, which represents a danger to the nar cissistic self-image. The ambiguity of function here is similar to that of Stendhal's use of pseudonyms and his fantasies of metamorphosis, which are forms of concealment meant to arouse interest.

Metamorphosis can be sought for extroverted reasons of sexual

possession, as an imaginative way of "entering" another body, and for

reasons of escape. Mythology presents examples of metamorphosis as

both a form of such aggressive love, in Zeus, and as a means of inac

cessibility in Proteus or Daphne. Both purposes are at work in Julien's attempt to possess Mme. de Renal and Mathilde (which can be seen as an attempted metamorphosis of identity) and in Stendhal's repudia tion of his father's name. We see, then, that pseudonyms and other

fantasies of changing one's identity have, like Julien's imprisonment and crime, the ambiguous functions of escape and exhibitionism.

Another kind of escape which metamorphosis provides, one that is not oedipal in its origins, is the desire to escape from an ego suffering from an

ailing self-esteem, an ego which at the same time feels entitled

to possession of something better. Stendhal's "passion for travelling, his pleasure in flight coincide perfectly with his pseudonymity . . . with

30. Brombert, p. 6.

360 STEVEN SANDS

each trip outside of France, Stendhal has the impression of rejoining his true world."31 It is the notion of rejoining one's true world which

points to something more primitive than an oedipal pattern, namely, the narcissism which is the deep-seated basis of Stendhal's manipula tions of his own identity and those of his characters.

Narcissism, as its mythical name implies, can be seen as an archetypal condition which takes various forms. One of these is the dreamer who, like Julien, loves his own dreams, or the analyst, like Julien and Sten dhal both, in love with his own analysis, which may be a substitute for other love objects. We see something like this in Stendhal's characters when they are at the opera. They are highly susceptible to music, as

Stendhal was himself. The ecstasy induced in them by music?the right aria plunges Julien or Mathilde into tears or a transport of love?is the result of "la revelation de Fame a. elle-meme,"32 which is not the same

thing as being in love, it is rather a transport of love for oneself or for one's fantasies of oneself which have been stimulated by the music: "Never had music so exalted him, he was a god" (p. 339).

"Analysis," remarks Brombert, "is but one of the many masks [Sten

dhal] wore to protect his lyricism and to dissimulate his chronic self consciousness."33 The analyst is also a mask for the amorist. We gener

ally think of masks as hiding a true face, as crusts than can be peeled off to reveal the true surface. However, in some cases the mask is only another aspect of the same thing, for to say that the analyst masks the

amorist overlooks the fact that the amorist is not only hiding behind his masks, but is also in love with them. This can be understood if we see that the amorist and the analyst both are masks of something else,

namely, the narcissist. Stendhal, in his diaries, addresses his pseudo

nyms with more tenderness than he shows for anyone else. He is an

amorist in love with his own strategems and fantasies, of which the women he desires are only a part. Julien's constant analysis of his

situation, like his dreams, is a form of love rather than a mask to con

ceal it. What is more noticeable in Stendhal's diaries than in Julien's self-analysis is the quality of his dialogue of one, its extraordinary in

timacy and tenderness. Stendhal made masks in order to love himself

31. Starobinski, p. 119. Stendhal believed or pretended to believe that his

mother's family had Italian connections in the past. Certainly in his own life

he thought of Italy as a kind of mother country.

32. Delacroix, p. 199.

33. Brombert, "Stendhal, Analyst or Amorist?" in Stendhal: A Collection

of Critical Essays, p. 164.


in more than one way. That leads us to another form of Stendhal's

narcissism, one which we do not find in Julien Sorel. That is his peculiar wish to inhabit other bodies. The motive for this

could vary according to whether the narcissism is functioning as a

form of self-love or as a means of self-defense; that is, it can be a re

action to danger or a desire in its own right which has the aim of losing oneself in a symbiotic kind of union. The primary concern in Stendhal's

fantasy of metamorphosis, or of inhabiting other bodies, appears to have been not to conquer another personality, nor to shed his own, but rather to expand it. In the list of imaginary privileges which Stendhal made

up in 1841, the year before his death, the "Privileged Person" is elusive but not abandoned. Article Seven stipulates that:

Four times a year he will be able to become whatever animal he wants to be, and afterwards turn back into a man. Four times a year he will be able to be come whichever man he wants to be. . . . Thus the privileged person will be

able four times a year and for an unlimited period each time to occupy two

bodies at once.34

The last is a state which, in a sense, does exist in utero and the image of the mother which is implicit in narcissistic identifications or self-ex

pressions is explicit in Julien's relationship with Mme. de Renal. It is a love reminiscent of the infant's earliest relationship with his

mother from which the world is happily excluded, and which is not so much love for another person (as the child is not yet able to distin

guish) as an extension of himself, of his own sense of well-being.35 We

can now understand the prison as a symbol of this earliest "entrap ment" in love, from which other people are excluded and superfluous.

Narcissism, then, is not merely vanity and an attitude of entitlement.

It can be a form of relationship which does not preclude the love of other persons, but determines their selection. They are loved as self

representations or self-extensions, and the relationship is felt as a sense

of identity with oneself: "The term 'narcissistic object choice' repre sents what the person is, was in whole or in part, or would like to be."36

The libido is in fact likely to be directed towards someone else if the

person is active, as otherwise the withdrawal of libido from objects to

34. Stendhal, Privileges, in Oeuvres Intimes, p. 1560. 35. Margaret Mahler and K. La Perriere speak of this as a "dual unity" in

which there is "no polarity between the self and any object." ("Mother and Child Interaction during Separation-Individuation," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, No. 32 [1965], p. 484).

36. Ben Bursten, "Some Narcissistic Personality Types," International /our nal of Psycho-Analysis, No. 54 (1973), p. 288.

362 STEVEN SANDS

the self would result in passivity and the general inhibition of ego func

tions.37 Julien is generally active, and it might be that the passivity which is noticeable in his last days is a result of such a withdrawal of

libido to the self. But this theory by itself ignores the important role at

this point of Mme. de Renal. Rather, there is a withdrawal of libido to

self-representations, of which Mme. de Renal is one, a rendition of the

good and nurturing mother who has finally been repossessed. It is not complete fusion that Julien finds with Mme. de Renal,

which is the state of "primary narcissism," but "secondary narcissism,"

which is "built on reunion."38 With such a reunion he can abandon his interest in "other people" and his ambitions. This special relation

ship, though it does not involve a change of identity, on a more primi tive and deeply satisfying level offers an expansion or completion of it, which is all the more easily accepted since his ambitions have become

hopelessly bogged down.

Julien from the start is wrapped in his own fantasies, and considera ble energy is spent in protecting them. Andre Saures suggests that The

Happy Few to whom Chartreuse is dedicated are those who know that it is divine to be taken in by the beauty of one's dreams.39 This may be

asserting too much. If Julien's fate is an indication of Stendhal's

opinions, there is a danger when one's dreams are out of touch with

reality. In Julien's case there is fortunately at the last minute another

emotional reality which he has regained in the love of Mme. de Renal, in which his inner longings are so profoundly gratified that his dreams are enough. However, it is only at the end that Julien reaches this state.

Previously, Mme. de Renal was justified in thinking that Julian's locket held the portrait of her rival. (It was in fact the portrait of Napoleon.)

Formerly it was only when Julien was entirely by himself that he

enjoyed a sense of ease and freedom which his "habit of hypocrisy" usually did not allow him. It happened once, when he was on a moun

tain top, with the scenes of his life literally at his feet. Below he was a "being for whom hypocrisy and an utter lack of fellow feelings were

ordinary means of salvation" (p. 98). This is not entirely true. There are moments of genuine affection for Father Pirard and Fouque, and of sincere remorse for what he has done to the hopes of M. de la Mole,

37. Edith Jacobson, "Contribution to the Metapsychology of Cyclothymic

Depression," in Affective Disorders, ed. Phyllis Greenacre (New York: Interna

tional Universities Press, 1953), p. 60. This is a normal occurrence in sleep, and

in the "happy passivity" after sexual intercourse.

38. Bursten, p. 291.

39. Brombert, p. 11.


though even then, when he is at a loss for what to say, it is the part of Tartuffe which provides him with a reply.

When Julien faints before the penetrating look of Father Pirard, there is a question whether his fainting is an expression of sensitivity or a form of guilt: "Julien Sorel wants us to know who he is, but only on condition that he is who he wants to be."40

Either way it is at heart a form of secretiveness, a withdrawal to where he is safe. Mme. de Renal is safe because she and her love are

part of his dreams and fantasies. "Leave me to enjoy my ideal life," he pleads with Mathilde and Fouque shortly before his execution while

they are working ceaselessly to secure a retrial or, failing that, his es

cape. "Your petty fusses and worries," says Julien, "your details of ma

terial existence drag me down from heaven. . . . What do I care for other people? My relations with other people are soon to be abruptly severed" (p. 479, Stendhal's italics).

Between his old love renewed and his dreams he does not need "other

people." In case Mme. de Renal should after his death continue to live a life of her own, independent of his fantasies, Stendhal arranges it so that she dies within a few days of Julien, despite the two children of her own who still need her love. Even when he is dead, Julien has dis

placed not only her husband, but her children too, and locked her into his dreams forever. In this his oedipal desires and his narcissism are

gratified together.

The Wright Institute

Berkeley

40. Wood, p. 78.

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