A Life Read Online Free PDF

raise. But, as we have seen, this seeming onward march of events is characterized by repetition and circularity. Such alterations as occur in Jeanne's circumstances constitute an unrelenting series of dispossessions, both of her property and of the persons she loves or cares for: her husband, her parents, her only woman friend, her son. Jeanne begins the novel as a stereotype and ends it as a nonentity. By the same token, while the novel abounds symbolically in journeys and excursions, these changes  of location prove most usually to be mere forays into sameness. The first journey of all apparently represents a liberation (from convent education) and a new beginning; but this new beginning takes place in an old chateau that has been restored (some critics have seen it as symbolizing the Restoration of the French Monarchy in 1815, shortly before the period in which the opening of the novel is set), and the liberation proves to be merely the substitution of one form of incarceration for another (a loveless marriage and 'a quotidian reality', in which there is 'nothing left to do, today, tomorrow, ever again': p. 75). Certainly the honeymoon in Corsica provides a different landscape, and serves to recall the Napoleonic excitement and 'liberation' which preceded the Restoration, but the statutory account of the maquis and the depredations of Corsican jealousy (in the story related by Paoli Palabretti) will prove to be no more 'exotic' than the Comte de Fourville's violent murder of his wife and Julien de Lamare upon the cliffs of Normandy. The various calls paid on fellow aristocrats are but pointless journeys into the mothballed irrelevance of the ancien régime , while Jeanne's final expedition to Paris brings her not a reunion with her son but the most desolate sense of isolation: 'And she felt more entirely alone in this bustling crowd, more wretched and lost, than if she had been standing in the middle of an empty field' (p. 227). For these reasons, Mama's daily exercise up and down her avenue epitomizes the novels' presentation of time and place: ever on the move, departing and returning, desperately trying to breathe yet dead to any enthusiasm other than her genealogical and amatory past, this Baroness who had 'waltzed in the arms of every man in uniform under the Empire' (p. 22) is always going nowhere. Like the long, straight wake behind the steamer taking the newlyweds to Corsica, or the long, straight railway line stretching to the horizon in the final chapter, the trail of grassless dust left by Mama's dragging foot symbolizes the unswerving rut of purposeless time.
    Towards a Conclusion
    For Jeanne herself life is not an active journey into the future but a passive disintegration beneath the weight of a cruel destiny. Already we have seen how at the end of the novel 'she believed herself to be so directly the target of unrelenting misfortune that she became as fatalistic as an Oriental' (p. 231); and part of this passivity derives from her role as a subordinated woman. Having been told by her father on her wedding-night to 'remember this, and only this, that you belong totally to your husband' (p. 52), she becomes the victim of her husband's despotism. Physically his slave and economically his dependant, she is powerless to protest at his infidelity as the Abbé Picot forces a conjugal reconciliation on her in the name of Christian forgiveness, and her husband and father leave her bedroom to patch up their quarrel over a manly cigar. And whereas on this occasion she wants to leave Julien but is prevented by the Church, later the fanatical Abbé Tolbiac calls on her to reject her adulterous husband when she is financially and legally unable to do so (p. 172). But from Julien's sexual oppression she learns what Maupassant believes to be a universal lesson: 'that two people are never completely one in their heart of hearts, in their deepest thoughts, that they walk side by side, entwined sometimes but never completely