Let's keep it casual, babe

Men behaving badly and women making scenes in Adolphe

The broad strokes of the plot of Benjamin Constant’s 1816 novella Adolphe are still familiar to us: we see them in advice columns, late night phone calls to friends, movies (comic, romantic, and otherwise), self-help books about attachment and codependency, and less reputable books about how to seduce a woman or keep a man.

Adolphe is a young, newly-independent man. His ambitions are vague: he knows he wants to cut a figure in the world, but does not feel a strong pull in any particular direction. He’s conscious of feelings of emptiniess and passivity. Frustrated with his own aimlessness and lack of self-respect, he decides that a love affair (temporary, of course) would be just the thing to lift his spirits.

He settles on a target: Ellénore, an older woman and the longtime mistress of a local Count. She’s beautiful and serious, with a whiff of tragedy in her background that makes her appealing, and her dependence on the Count means (or so he reasons) that she won’t allow an affair to seriously disrupt their lives. Adolphe knows he isn’t in love with her, not exactly, but he pursues her anyway, and when she rebuffs him he becomes infatuated. Determined to possess her, he overwhelms her with letters and speeches declaring his devotion in the most extreme possible terms. He chips away at her reticence and resolve, and before long she stops resisting and falls in love.

But then:

Woe betide the man who in the first moments of a love affair does not believe that liason to be eternal! Woe betide him who preserves a fatal foreknowledge, even in the arms of the mistress he has just acquired, and forsees he will be able to leave her!

What happens next has the character of inevitability. Having given in to him, Ellénore demands his continued devotion; meanwhile, Adolphe is already beginning to lose interest. He grows peevish at her need for reassurance; sensing his resentment, she insists on still more proofs of his love. He longs to extricate himself from the relationship, but can’t face the thought of causing her pain (or, perhaps more pertinently, suffering the blow to his self-image as a moral person). For her part, when she senses she might be about to lose him, Ellénore leaves the Count, forsakes her children, and declares eternal devotion, placing a burden of responsibility on him that she hopes he won’t easily shake off.

Today we’d diagnose them both with attachment disorders and send them off to therapy. But Constant can’t find a way to resolve Adolphe’s predicament without resorting to a transparently convenient plot device: Ellénore obligingly dies.

Understood to be based on Constant’s unhappy relationship with Madame de Stael (read more about it in this past letter), Adolphe, which is narrated in the first person, reads like the father of the modern personal essay: he gives the reader explanations, reminiscences, and regrets; self-condemnations mixed with self-justification; and an attempt to piece together, with the aid of hindsight, exactly what impulses and what reasoning led him into such a degraded situation. Overall, it’s a dispiriting read. Adolphe is detestable when he pleads for sympathy, and so is Ellénore when she acts like a caricature of feminine helplessness. Constant does not imagine any protestations of love that do not function as stratagems.

There’s a flimsy frame story that explicitly presents Adolphe as a lesson to young men. The lesson: if you toy with the feelings of others, you may do it at the cost of your own self-respect.

You imagine that attachments which which you form lightheartedly can be broken easily. But when you see the anguish caused by these broken bonds, the pain and astonishment of a deluded soul, the esteem which is repressed and which finds no outlet, the mistrust which replaces so complete a confidence and which, inevitably directed against the loved one, spreads to the whole world, then it is you realize that there is something sacred in a heart which suffers because it loves. You discover how deep are the roots of the affection you thought you inspired but did not share; and if you overcome what you call weakness, you do so only by destroying in your character all that is generous, faithful, noble, and kind.

There’s an implied lesson for women too, not presented explicitly but which pop culture and conventional advice has continuously felt the need to reiterate. The lesson is: don’t be too needy, or you will drive your man away. There is, of course, truth to this lesson for men and women both: few things kill love faster than berating your partner for not loving you enough. But an overwhelming amount of romantic advice to women is geared at avoiding becoming an Ellénore, either by maintaining one’s frosty aloofness as long as possible (people in my age cohort and older might remember The Rules), or by avoiding getting involved with Adolphes in the first place (see He’s Just Not That Into You). The former category of advice is inadvisable to follow — mostly because it hinges on trying to control someone else’s feelings — and the latter category is usually followed only after painful experience.

The inadequacy of this lesson is dramatized soulfully in Anita Brookner’s Providence. The protagonist, the lonely but even-tempered Kitty, is an academic who teaches Adolphe to grad students and is in love with a handsome professor. She is afraid of becoming an Ellénore, so she places no demands on her man and makes no scenes. She simply waits patiently, with a feeling of futility. Adolphe unsettles and disturbs her, and she asks a friend if it truly represents how men approach love.

Kitty comes to suspect that Adolphe’s lesson for women — don’t be needy, don’t make scenes — is worse than useless. While washing up after yet another dinner she’s cooked for the noncommital Maurice, she rages inwardly at her impotence:

But I want more, she thought. I do not want to be trustworthy, and safe, and discreet. I do not want to be the one who understands and sympathizes and soothes. I do not want to be reliable, I do not want to do wonders with Professor Redmile’s group, I do not even care what happens to Larter. I do not want to be good at pleasing everybody. I do not even want to be such a good cook, she thought, turning the tap with full force on to a bowl rusted with the stains of her fresh tomato soup. I want to be totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful.

When I loaned the book to a friend many years ago, that was the passage she pulled out and quoted back to me.

But of course Kitty continues as she always has. In another scene, characteristic of Brookner’s deep distrust of the women who are chosen by men, she reflects that Ellénore-style scenes are effective only for the very beautiful.

Brookner posits that what makes Adolphe a Romantic novel rather than an Enlightenment novel is the complete failure of Adolphe’s reasoning powers to save him from his situation. As a Romantic novel, it’s unusual in that it doesn’t seem to believe in Romance: surrendering to extremes of emotion is here an act of deception of oneself and others, not a portal to higher realms of sensation and truth. It’s the dark shadow of every love story; if a romance is a polished stone, Adolphe shows the worms living under it.

Perhaps the lesson that women should take from Adolphe is this. There is something much more damaging to one’s dignity than a man who leaves you, and that’s a man who doesn’t.

You may enjoy these past related Amateur letters:

The Loneliest Woman in London

Last book of 2020 and first book of 2021