SOURCE: Hamilton, James F. “The Gendering of Space in Chateaubriand's Combourg: Archetypal Architecture and the Patriarchal Object.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 50, no. 2 (summer 1996): 101-13.

[In the following essay, Hamilton analyzes the use of spatial arrangements in Memoirs. In depicting Combourg, his childhood home, Chateaubriand offered an archetypal architecture which psychologically represented his hierarchical family structure and the dominance of his father.]

                                        Cet étroit espace me parut propre à
                                        renfermer mes longues espérances;
spatio brevi spem longam reseces.

—(Horace, Odes)¹

Time seems to have precedence over space in our understanding of French Romanticism. Time distinguishes human nature in its awareness of freedom and mortality, which engenders the feelings of melancholy and anguish so dramatically brought into modern consciousness by Rousseau and the Romantics. This ontological truth, popularized by Rollo May's tribute to the nineteenth-century origins of existentialism, also prevails in critical studies on Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1849-50). For example, time defines being (Porter 118) and gives the work a temporal unity (Lehtonen 315). Even Combourg, an inherently spatial entity, is assimilated temporally into “le thème monumental” to become one object among other literary structures (Riffaterre 64).

Space also structures existence to give it meaning (by configuring daily life and personal relationships) and needs to be elevated to the same high level of understanding as time. Spatial arrangement in architecture and art gives visualization to the artist's needs, desires, feelings, and intentions—personal and collective, conscious and unconscious—to produce distinctive categories in cultural history, period style, and artistic movement. The dynamics of spatial representation and meaning can be illustrated by an architectural form and literary theme, the Gothic cathedral. On a conscious level, Victor Hugo sought in articles to preserve medieval monuments through the process of “resignification,” recasting Gothic's symbolic connection from a despotic past repudiated by the French Revolution to a symbol “of continuity with the best of the past,” in his successful struggle to realign the French national consciousness (Nichols 138). In contrast, to view the cathedral as constructed in the form of the crucified Christ with the main entrance at the feet rather than the head (signifying entry into the sacred through submission and humility rather than through intellectualization) and to see the rose window as a mandala or symbol of psychic wholeness is to inquire into the internal significance of architecture as an expression of faith and as a “psychic state” (Knapp x).

Space goes to the heart of Romanticism defined as a personal voyage from the periphery of life toward the center of one's being, “cette intuition de la source,” which promises expansion of the Self and unity of being (Poulet 176). Internal and external space intersect in a privileged place, the home/house, which Bachelard refers to as “un être privilégié” and creator of images (24), as “un être concentré” calling us into consciousness (35), and as “un état d'âme” truer than a landscape (77). This capacity to integrate place and consciousness, as in the house/home, elevates an object to the timeless dimension of an archetype, an inherited design or “primordial image” latent in the collective unconscious mind, which emerges as a metaphor or symbol (Jung 1990, 57).²

Archetypal architecture finds poetic expression in Chateaubriand's portrayal of his family home, Combourg. Connecting inner space and time, identity and the world, psyche and the text, Combourg becomes a focal point in the Mémoires from 1826. Its mythic potential has been pointed to by critics in the images—“du côté de Combourg” (Le Youanc 70) and “haunted memories” (Rollo 38). Moreover, a view of Combourg as a place of subjective reality, concrete but evolving in significance (Barbéris 292-93), prepares the description of Combourg as “a mythic place” existing “outside of time” (Salesse 29, 11). The subjective reality of Combourg as perceived by an adolescent surpasses its historical, geographical context to reveal an ominous configuration of space and its corresponding pattern of psychic development. Underneath its lyrical description lies the stark reality of another archetype, the negative Father, a patriarch whose pervasive presence is made concrete through the spatial organization of family life.

The description of Combourg is prepared by Chateaubriand's portrait of the most influential person of his life, “Monsieur mon père” (11). His father's negative influence is attributed to “un des caractères les plus sombres,” which, frightening and depressing (“effrayant” and “contristant”), marks the narrator's childhood and youth (7). The son's psychic wounds derive implicitly from those of his father who, at age fifteen, takes leave of his mother and, feeling guilty (“un fardeau”) for being unable to support her, seeks his fortune in the military. Separation from “la ferme maternelle” seems to cut him off from his feelings, for he is referred to as “l'aventurier orphelin” (14). Wounded in a naval battle, shipwrecked, and robbed, he succeeds in the colonial slave trade—then a legal business—and establishes “les fondements de la nouvelle fortune de sa famille” (15).³

Hence, the elder Chateaubriand represents the warrior archetype in its negative aspect, total identification with the persona: “Une seule passion dominait mon père, celle de son nom” (15).⁴ Obsessed by a war of reconquest, “l'espoir de rendre à sa famille son premier éclat,” he apparently becomes stuck in this stage of development, and the successive stages of lover and father suffer. No passion is indicated textually in the narration of his marriage to a neighboring noble lady, and he relates subsequently to his wife and family as a military commander and administrator.

The warrior's features are emphasized by Chateaubriand in the depiction of his father's nose, eyes, and mouth “comme ceux des lions et anciens barbares” (15). Possessed by the primordial imperative to defend his territory, the patriarch builds, around his ego, a psychological fortress designed to make him unapproachable. Its enclosure—“dur,” “sec,” “hautain,” and “menaçant”—assures a distance from others, while the constant threat of “la colère” and “des emportements” discourages any challenge to his authority (15). Power is projected through a piercing stare, “un pareil regard,” not intended to penetrate character in order to instruct or to serve but rather to dominate. Between him and others—both “ses vaisseaux” and “les gentilhommes” but predominantly men—exists a rivalry bordering on hostility.⁵ The father's defensive posture in obeisance to the persona-ego axis entails the unfortunate fate of walling himself into a personal prison. Driven by insecurity and its need to dominate and insulated from loved ones by the ego defenses of a wounded male, he falls deeper with age into a “tristesse profonde” shut off in a lonely and empty grandeur, “un silence,” which is especially intimidating to his son (15).⁶

In the tradition of the psychologically immature warrior, the future patriarch weds his opposite in the unconscious attempt to achieve balance through external means and thus to avoid a deflating confrontation with the shadow aspect of personality.⁷ In their marriage of opposites, Mme de Chateaubriand's salient attributes of “imagination,” “elegance,” lively humor, sociability, and literary culture contrast with M. de Chateaubriand's “rigidity,” austerity, coldness, and introversion (16). Instead of honoring his inner feminine by allowing his wife to openly and freely carry his anima projection in order to enrich his inner life and that of the family and thereby achieve the semblance of balance in a traditional way, he silences her: “Obligée de se taire quand elle eût voulu parler …” (16).

Disdaining sentiment as a weakness, the patriarch suppresses any manifestation of the feminine around him. However, his psychological aggression does not go unchallenged. The counterpart of his piercing “regard” takes the form of Madame's “soupirs,” which reflect an agitated but repressed animus. Repeated “sighs” function as a muted protest in a passive resistance against patriarchal oppression: “Obligée de se taire quand elle eût voulu parler, elle s'en dédommageait par une espèce de tristesse bruyante entrecoupée de soupirs qui interrompaient seuls la tristesse muette de mon père” (16 emphasis added). Hence, a negative patriarchy—dominant and ego-centered—generates, in turn, a negative matriarchy of passive resistance and muted opposition.⁸ The Combourg chateau concretizes this psychic imbalance through spatial configuration. Such is the “discriminating” power of the architectural object.⁹

Combourg constitutes the primary architectural structure in the Mémoires and is associated with the father as seen in the images of “le domaine paternel” and “foyer paternel” (76, 78). Indeed, the Celtic root of the family name, Brien, combines with the prefix of château in the eleventh century, according to Chateaubriand's account of his geneaology along patrilineal lines (7). In fact, Combourg represents but one traditional stronghold of the three family branches and was reclaimed through purchase by M. de Chateaubriand four years before the birth of François-René. Seen as a metaphor, Combourg overshadows by far its bipolar opposite, the maternal family chateau of the Bedée clan, Monchoix, located near the village of Plancouët, where François-René passes his first three years in the care of a wet nurse.

An eccentric but warm and loving matriarch, grandmother Bedée, presides in Monchoix with a supporting positive patriarch in the person of François-René's beloved, good natured, and generous uncle Bedée, a nurturing father. The ambience and values of Monchoix contrast with those of Combourg—light versus darkness, laughter versus mournful silence, activity versus stasis, spontaneity versus regimentation. In his passage from one chateau to the other, François-René is struck by the incongruity of his paternal and maternal backgrounds: “Quand j'arrivais de la maison paternelle, si sombre et silencieuse, à cette maison de fête et de bruit, je me trouvais dans un véritable paradis. Ce contraste devint plus frappant, lorsque ma famille fut fixée à la compagne: passer de Combourg à Monchoix, c'était passer du désert dans le monde, du donjon d'un baron du moyen âge à la villa d'un prince romain” (25).

The moral difference between the two family castles parallels the distance between the parents of François-René. She “destested” Combourg, while he preferred to remain there removed from the family in Saint-Malo: “Quand je fus rapporté à Saint-Malo, mon père était à Combourg, mon frère au collège de Saint-Brieuc; mes quatre soeurs vivaient auprès de ma mère” (19). This distance is internalized by the narrator as witnessed by the titles introducing their portraits—“M. de Chateaubriand” versus “Ma mère” (15-16). The division between parents results in emotional conflict. On the one hand, François-René loves being surrounded by the closely knit Bedée family. On the other, he describes his arrival at Combourg as “la première journée heureuse de ma vie” (45).

Combourg shows itself to be literally the paternal home, for the father's presence reigns over the structure from the east tower to the west tower; he assigns living and sleeping space, sets the tone, and controls the household schedule. Feudal architecture and patriarchal personality compound one another: “Le calme morne du château de Combourg était augmenté par l'humeur taciturne et insociable de mon père” (80). Distance through dispersion of family members throughout the chateau reflects not only his detachment and need to control but also an underlying tension between father and son. “All desire” is a function of space, and Combourg, as “a discriminating” architectural object, “easily organizes the strategies of desire and the strategies of intentionality” (Hamon 27).

The patriarch stakes claim to the personal space of his bedroom in the small east tower and to his study in the west tower, as if securing the “periphery” of his territory (Pedersen 59). Between the two towers are located the large bedroom of his wife and the small adjoining room of his daughter, Lucile. Located on the trajectory between his exclusive domains, he is assured regular access to the rooms occupied by the females in the family. In contrast, the son is assigned “une espèce de cellule isolée” located far from the family, at the top of the turret stairs and above the sleeping quarters of the valet (81). The boy refers to it as “mon donjon”; its window opening onto the inner courtyard allows no view and little light (84).

Very conscious of being separated from the family, “relégué dans l'endroit le plus désert,” the son also feels rejected by his father, whom he regards as being not only distant but cruel, “Cette manière violente de me traiter …” (84). Isolation is intended to make the boy into a man, but his father's sarcastic teasing—“Monsieur le chevalier aurait-il peur?”—betrays a tension (85). Parallel references to his parents but with contrasting tones, negative and positive—“Lorsque mon père me disait avec un sourire ironique: ‘Monsieur le chevalier. …’ Lorsque mon excellente mère me disait: ‘Mon enfant, …’”—concretize the latent rivalry within the eternal triangle of father, mother, and son. Buttressed by his mother's professed faith in heaven's protection, the son meets the challenge. Moreover, he assumes the father's role in escorting mother and sister to their rooms each night. At their insistence, he checks underneath their beds, in their chimneys, and so forth, for ghosts. Hence, a latent Oedipal rivalry exists between father and son but issues from the former. For example, paternal dominance is enforced not only through space but also temporally. The time to retire at 10 p.m. is announced by the father, and his voice is heard at 4 a.m. Shouting to the valet asserts dominance over the son, who contrasts his rude awakening to “la douce harmonie” used by Montaigne's father (84). Moreover, the patriarch of Combourg does not include the son in his schedule of daily activities so as to prepare him for adult responsibilities.¹⁰

Space transcends physical dimension, taking on symbolic import. Combourg functions architecturally as “a hierarchical object,” a system of ranking parts in relation to the whole and delineating container and contained (Hamon 28). Not all spaces are equal, and their disproportion can have psychological, social, and gender significance. The description of Combourg's interior begins with the patriarch's study. An aura of masculinity and egoism is made evident by three chairs in black leather, a table covered by titles of ownership and documents, a genealogical tree in the form of a tapestry over the fireplace, and all kinds of firearms in a window-recess. Its feminine counterpart, a chapel, belongs to Mme de Chateaubriand in the sense that she habitually retires there to spend hours alone. In contrast to the cold starkness of the study, beautiful paintings, supposedly unusual in a Breton chateau, decorate the chapel. One is still owned by the narrator, “une Sainte Famille de l'Albane, peinte sur cuivre, tirée de cette chapelle: c'est tout ce qui me reste de Combourg” (82).

Study and chapel can be seen to represent bipolar opposites, contrary ways of being-in-the-world as expressed by the principles of Logos and Eros. The former excels in the ordering of material reality, and the latter has superior access to the inner world of relationship and spirituality.¹¹ Ideally, the opposite functions are eventually integrated in each person, but traditionally, they are balanced by complementary roles. Such balance does not take place in Combourg as demonstrated by the pattern of family life during autumn and winter in “la grand-salle” located directly under the mother's boudoir, which is “parqueté et orné de glaces de Venise à facettes”—the embodiment of the feminine (81). Situated beneath the boudoir, which is located between the father's bedroom and study, “la grand-salle” offers a middle ground whose integrative potential in a décor mythique is not realized. There, a family scenario is repeated nightly that dramatizes the imbalance between parents and their corresponding principles. Patriarchy entails psychological consequences for all; its impact is not limited to “only the male segment of the population” (Waller 141).

The great hall, “la grand-salle,” proves to be a living room in designation only. Its decor—wood paneling with antiquated portraits of powerful political and military leaders of the Old Regime—“depuis le règne de François I^er jusqu'à celui de Louis XIV”—emphasizes the patriarch's archetypal identity, warrior (81). The image of Combourg as a fortress is likewise reinforced by the painting above the enormous fireplace, “un tableau représentant Hector tué par Achille sous les murs de Troie” (81). Moreover, the great hall lacks a middle ground; only its extremities are used: “On dînait et l'on soupait à l'autre extrémité du côté de l'est; après le repas, on se venait placer à l'autre extrémité du côté de l'ouest, devant une énorme cheminée.” Alone, the patriarch enjoys freedom of movement, and he controls the dynamics of the evening scene as in a psychodrama with himself as the center of attention, the protagonist and the director.

Time seems to stop with the shift to the imperfect tense, and space stands out all the more in the description of the after-dinner scene. Spatialization takes precedence in the distancing of the father from the rest of the family. He alone dominates the verb in movement, which by definition joins space and time. In contrast, a passive posture is assumed by the mother (and her extension in the children). Energy is drained from her in a resignation masking a muted anger—“ma mère se jetait, en soupirant, sur un vieux lit de jour de siamoise flambée …” (82). Beneath the apparently quiet surface of the domestic scene—with the mother reclining and the children by the fireside on one side and the father pacing to and fro from the other side of the hall—a moral struggle goes on as evidenced by the débat of “sighs” with “footsteps” on the background of angry wind, the elemental image of spirit: “Le reste de la soirée, l'oreille n'était plus frappée que du bruit mésuré de ses pas, des soupirs de ma mère et du murmure du vent” (82).¹²

Just as the patriarch bridges time and space in the prerogative of movement, he spans light and darkness to assume an unearthly aura—“on l'entendait seulement encore marcher dans les ténèbres; puis il revenait lentement vers la lumière et émergeait peu à peu de l'obscurité comme un spectre …” (82). Like the solitary Gardener of Genesis, to the father belongs the “word,” and the children (who act also as projections of the mother) tremble with fear at being caught defying the unspoken covenant of silence: “… nous nous taisions quand il se rapprochait de nous. Il nous disait en passant: ‘De quoi parliez-vous?’ Saisis de terreur, nous ne répondions rien; il continuait sa marche” (82). Such imbalance, made concrete by spatial configuration, distorts internal psychological structures, collective and individual, to harm and to help the creativity of Chateaubriand as a literary artist. In order to understand this paradox, analysis requires a theoretical model.

When the family is viewed as a circle with structuring points located in the center and at the periphery, a clearer understanding of Combourg as a negative patriarchy emerges. The father occupies not only the center of his family (as demonstrated in the evening scenario around the hearth) but also the periphery. At the threshold, he greets provincial nobles and travelers en route to the Parliament: “Mon père, toujours très cérémonieux, les recevait tête nue sur le perron, au milieu de la pluie et du vent” (79). His dominion over the verb continues in fishing, walks, visits to fields, and long hours spent on business in his study. Hence, the would-be mistress of the house is powerless, suspended between center and periphery, without an effective identity, territory, or prerogatives. Madame's psychological castration, blocked in the expression of her feminine ego and in the development of her animus, negatively impacts her children. As wife, her low level of energy, passive resignation, and implicitly repressed anger (muted in a refrain of “sighs”) undercut her ability as mother to nurture the children and to protect them from a fearfulness generated by a cold, authoritarian father.

As the son of a negative patriarch and a powerless mother (“negative” through circumstance rather than inclination), the narrator's psychology reflects the imbalance found in Combourg. Suspended between father and mother but not grounded in either the masculine or the feminine—Logos or Eros—which prepare a boy to give and to receive love, the narrator repeats in his own way the “original sin” of his father, “l'aventurier orphelin” (14). The theme of orphan and abandonment, inherited from Rousseau and destined to become emblematic of modernity, forms the affective context in which Chateaubriand's fictional themes of “voyageur” and “exilé” can be most deeply understood.¹³ For example, the hero in René (1802) gravitates to the company of older men and father figures—Chactas and Père Souël. He is the adopted son of Chactas, who was adopted by Lopez in Atala (1801). Moreover, René feels abandoned by his sister Amélie, and, as a reluctant husband while living with the Natchez, he has difficulty in attaining manhood. His daughter, Amélie, is orphaned in Les Natchez (1826), as is her daughter.

In the Mémoires, the narrator too is psychologically an orphan. His adolescent personality becomes characterized by a passive fluidity without form, direction, or identity: “Accablé et comme submergé de ces doubles délices, je ne savais plus quelle était ma véritable existence; j'étais un homme et je n'étais pas un homme …” (98). Gone are the courage and defiance of childhood at Saint-Malo (where a loving servant, la Villeneuve, cherishes him and where his mother benefits from the moral support of mother, sister, and women friends). As a boy playing the risky games of dodging the waves crashing against the ramparts and defending a bridge across the marshes against bigger boys, his wounds of courage (such as a partially severed ear) give proof of a nascent warriorship. However, the psychological imbalance of Combourg overcomes the promise of Saint-Malo to distort his personality: “La vie que nous menions à Combourg, ma soeur et moi, augmentait l'exaltation de notre âge et de notre caractère” (88). Suspended between its poles of being, the narrator as adolescent lacks sufficient internal points of reference to understand himself—“je sentais davantage ce qui manquait à ma jeunesse: je m'étais un mystère” (91-92).¹⁴

Combourg's absorption of space by a patriarch and its repression of emotions lead the youthful narrator to turn inward to “la solitude” (92). His ego lacks a strong, independent identity fostered by supportive parents. Orphaned psychologically, holes open up in his conscious mind, allowing a free flow of archetypal contents from the collective unconscious. On the one hand, this permeability releases his poetic creativity in a constant inspiration, an enduring encounter with the “sacred” triggered by his sister's suggestion to write: “Ce mot me révéla la muse; un souffle divin passa sur moi. Je me mis à bégayer des vers, comme si c'eût été ma langue naturelle: jour et nuit je chantais mes plaisirs” (88).¹⁵ Because his wounded ego lacks sufficient strength to order the influx of unconscious material, the anima overwhelms his consciousness to assume a semi-independent personality: “Cette charmeresse me suivait partout invisible; je m'entretenais avec elle comme un être réel; elle variait au gré de ma folie; Aphrodite sans voile, Diane vêtue d'azur et de rosée, Thalie au masque riant …” (93).¹⁶

“Fused with his unconscious,” i.e., remaining identified with the mother archetype (Corneau 33) and confusing sister, muse, mythical women, and beautiful strangers but feeling inherently inferior and unworthy of love (“qu'aucune femme n'aimerait jamais”) and even more so in his mystification of the feminine, the narrator falls into despair, unable to free himself from his impossible obsession, “de plus en plus garrotté à mon fantôme” (99). Semiconscious of his wounded psyche (his male ego having been undermined by the weight of his father's shadow), he pictures himself “comme ces hommes mutilés.” Unable to reconcile fantasy and reality, he attempts suicide repeatedly, the barrel of a hunting rifle in his mouth with the butt struck against the ground—a symbolic rejection of both the phallic father and the earth mother.¹⁷ His crisis is subsequently symptomized by an illness, a lung infection, which brings to mind his mother's “pulmonary protestations.”¹⁸ Its cure requires him to separate from a family on a downward spiral—a mother ever more passive, a father more bitter with age, and a sister more and more unhappy.

Resolution of internal opposites happens instinctively, in part, for he rejects closure and passivity—entry into a seminary—favored by his pious mother. His inclination at age eighteen to a military career and entry into the world is reinforced firmly by his ailing father in a touching scene of reconciliation: “Le Comte de Chateaubriand, homme si redoutable à mes yeux, ne me parut dans ce moment que le père le plus digne de ma tendresse. Je me jetai sur sa main décharnée et pleurai” (104). Armed with his father's “old sword,” ritualized symbol of paternal confirmation,¹⁹ and without having time to either reflect or to consult his mother or sister, he is ushered to a coach waiting in the courtyard. Hence, his departure from Combourg under patriarchal direction has mythic overtones: “Alors, comme Adam après son péché, je m'avançai sur la terre inconnue” (105). Combourg is constellated, then, both as dungeon and Eden.

This concluding scene to “Livre Troisième” sheds additional light on the narrator's psychic imbalance. He suffers less from a mother complex, i.e., insufficient separation, than from a “negative father complex”; the son looks at the father through the mother's eyes and sees only paternal failings (Corneau 177). This mechanism appears implicitly in the nightly scenario in Combourg's great hall, where mother and children, mesmerized, gather at one end near the fireplace and watch the patriarch walk to and fro (“ma mère, ma soeur et moi, transformés par la présence de mon père”) and in their uncontrolled verbal awakening upon his departure for bed (83). An earlier, more explicit scene occurs in Saint-Malo. While being scolded by his mother for his tattered appearance and defended by his father for continuing the rowdy tradition of the Chateaubriand chevaliers, François-René identifies with the negative reaction of his mother to this macho defense: “Tout enfant que j'étais, le propos de mon père me révoltait …” (21).

At the same time, the son is forced to carry the burden of his father's shadow, which, by definition, is projected on those of the same gender. An example is found in the hunting motif. François-René is introduced to hunting by his father and takes it up with a vigor “jusqu'à la fureur” uncharacteristic of his sensitivity (86). Rather than gaining approval, the son feels increasingly the heat of his father's unrelenting gaze (“il m'épiait sans cesse pour me gourmander”), especially at the dinner table; and his ego seems to dissolve: “Sous les regards de mon père, je demeurais immobile et la sueur couvrait mon front: la dernière lueur de la raison m'échappa” (100). Rather than face his father after hunting and undergo the “torture” of dinner, François-René opts for suicide on one occasion. The pathology of Oedipal conflict is made concrete by the father's manipulation of space in Combourg, which alienates a son from the family. Under the gaze of paternal disapproval, the son is also alienated from himself. Therefore, in order to achieve identity, François-René must leave Combourg—its imbalance, its unconsciousness, and its false innocence.

To conclude, Combourg constitutes the psychic center of the Mémoires and acts as the affective referent for all subsequent structures, internal and external, having to do with “home” and relationship in the ontological sense of haven or “Heimat” (May 1958, 201); these include maison, patrie, pays, foyer and reflect upon motifs of place such as ruines, cloître, tour, jardin. In the concluding sentence to “Livre Troisième,” Chateaubriand solidifies his identification with the Combourg chateau as an inner reality: “Isolé comme lui, j'ai vu comme lui tomber autour de moi la famille qui embellissait mes jours et me prêtait son abri …” (106).

My interpretation of Combourg supports Hamon's definition of Romanticism as “an effort to rediscover the historical, symbolic, and psychological weight of real places” but agrees just partly with his view of memory as “only a function of architectural space, places that haunt the collective unconscious” (3-4). The Mémoires retains the temporal identity of its genre, for memory operates under the focused, specific task of the autobiographer to “search for a center” in time and outside of time (Gusdorf 1975, 971) in order to give “the meaning of his own mythic tale” (Gusdorf 1980, 48). Psychological complexity in the Mémoires pays tribute to both the structuring capacity of architecture and to the healing power of art. Chateaubriand demonstrates acute consciousness of living in a “patriarchal” century and concretizes through an architectural metaphor his insight into the formation and development of his personality (403). Its internal imbalance between the feeling and thinking functions reflects the one-sidedness in his family. Hence, center and periphery, space and time intersect in Combourg as a historical reality and mythic setting. Chateaubriand's depiction of his paternal chateau excels as a human and esthetic success which, colored by sentimental longing and tinged with guilt, requires a lifetime of reworking the relationship between space and time in the understanding of Self.

Notes

1. “Au bref espace de la vie, retranche le long espoir” (1120). In the opening to the Mémoires, Chateaubriand refers to the purchase of “une maison de jardinier” (5) that reminds him of “les champs paternels” (6). This image recalls the reflection: “C'est dans les bois de Combourg que je suis devenu ce que je suis” (105).

2. “The Gothic cathedral, for which Notre Dame in Paris or to a lesser extent Chartres stand as archetypes, looms at the core of a continuing dialogue” (emphasis added; Nicholas 143).

3. “It is in war that men are again thoroughly split from the feminine and nature …” (Pedersen 168).

4. Archetypes, constructs of psychic energy in the collective unconscious, have by definition a dual valency—positive or negative. Comparable to instincts, they bear cultural inflections but are universal (Stevens 39-47). Predominance of the persona blocks the male from consciousness of his anima (Pedersen 19, 90-91). This contrasexual archetype (animus in woman), meaning literally the “spirit,” has the opposite gender of the ego and acts as the mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. A personification of the latter, the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros and projects itself in love (Jung 1958, 16, 14).

5. Inner woundedness manifests itself negatively by acute competitiveness with other men until psychological maturity. See Pedersen 156 and Bly 23, 25.

6. “All men live more or less in a hereditary silence that has been passed down from generation to generation, a silence that denies every teenage boy's need for recognition—or confirmation—from his father” (Corneau 10). The cogency of this observation is confirmed by Salesse: “De son père, le fils ne reçoit que silence, condamnation ou défi” (22).

7. For a contrast between the positive and negative poles of the warrior archetype, see Moore and Douglas 75-95. Because of insufficient self-knowledge, a man's anima (or a woman's animus) can be contaminated by the shadow. This major archetype, a complex of repressed negative attributes and primal energy (similar to the id of Freud), forms the gateway between “the personal unconscious” and the ego (Jung 1958, 10). It must be confronted in order to gain self-knowledge and consciousness.

8. The psyches of the father and the mother flex against one another but within the negative context determined by the dominant partner, a patriarch: “The patriarchy is a complicated structure. Mythologically, it is matriarchal on the inside, and a matriarchy is equally complicated, being patriarchal on the inside. The political structure has to resemble our interior structure. And we know each man has a woman inside him and each woman has a man inside her” (Bly 98).

9. “Secondly, the literary text can apprehend any architectural object as if it were a differential, discriminating object that analyzes space through interfaces and proximities or through partitions and contiguities. This kind of architectural object either opens or obstructs and distinguishes between what is joined and what is disjunct; it welcomes, rejects, or filters while partioning, distributing, straightening, classifying, and separating objects and subjects” (Hamon 27).

10. Pedersen reinterprets Freud to stress psychic suffering: “The psychological manifestation of this abandonment by the father is a man's Oedipal wound” (126). This rivalry is explained mythically by Girard: “The idol's wrath must be justified, and it can only be justified by some failure on the part of the disciple, some hidden weakness that obliges the god to forbid access to the holy of holies, to slam shut the gates of paradise” (175). See Moore and Douglas for patriarchy as “an attack on masculinity” (xviii).

11. For a definition, see Jung 1991, 14-15 and, for a discussion, Ulanov 215-40, 335-41.

12. Cases of animus problems associated with lung infections led Emma Jung to speculate about the connection of animus, pneuma, Hauch or breath, and Geist, spirit (10).

13. In his “Préface testamentaire” (1834), Chateaubriand refers to the Mémoires as “la fortune du pauvre orphelin” (1047).

14. “An individual with a negative father complex does not feel himself structured from within. His ideas are confused; he has trouble setting himself goals, making choices …” (Corneau 37). In this regard, Salesse refers to “une structure sado-masochiste” that imposes an inferiority upon François-René (22).

15. Johnson defines the sacred as “partly the revelation of the inner world to my ego,” “partly my ego's reverence toward the archetypes” (176).

16. Men visualize the anima very often as priestess or goddess. See von Franz 193-98. See also the hero's crisis symbolized by “The Meeting with the Goddess,” a reunion with the good mother archetype (Campbell 111, 113).

17. Painter insists upon “three bullets, three knocks, three trials, magic numbers!” (72). “Separation of the archetypal parents” is often played out in “a creation myth” that enacts the “dawning of consciousness” (Stevens 92). When the Oedipal complex is seen as a form of mimetic rivalry, a shared object of desire necessarily links “desire and violence” (Girard 175).

18. See footnote 12.

19. Bonding between father and son had been reinforced through the ritual of confirmation at age thirteen, just before François-René's departure for college in Rennes, with “an additional Christian name” of Auguste, that of his father (Painter 48). Salesse sees the narrateur as orphan of the father partly in the sense that François-René is “Fils de l'Histoire,” an image which assumes a mythical, messianic aura.

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