SOURCE: "Woman: The Other as Sister," in Gérard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary, French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987, pp. 65-103.

[In the excerpt below, Lokke discusses Nerval's depiction of women in his short fiction.]

One glance at the titles of Nerval's major works shows women to be the heart, the center, of his fictional and poetic universe: Les Filles du feu (Angélique, Sylvie, Jemmy, Octavie, Isis, Conila, Emilie), Pandora, Aurélia, Les Chimères ("Myrtho," "Delfica," "Artémis")

This poet, who never knew his mother, who never married, who seemed most at ease with women when separated from them by the costumes, theatrical makeup and footlights of the stage, compensated for their absence in his life by granting them overwhelming power and presence in his art. The contemporary critic, inevitably looking at Nerval through the lens of current psychological and feminist theory, cannot help responding to such an obviously compensatory effort with a certain skepticism. Such an artist, one assumes, must be telling us much more about himself, his own fears, needs and projections, than about the reality of 19th-century womanhood.

Nevertheless, the almost preternatural sensitivity to the plight of victims of economics, political and religious persecution reflected in so many of Nerval's works suggests that he might be equally sensitive to the oppression of women as a social injustice in need of commentary and correction. And in fact, as an artist, Nerval, like Blake, seems to have been endowed with a visionary imagination so subjective that, following the laws of Hegel's dialectic, it becomes objective and impersonal as well as concrete and historical. A careful look at Nerval's fictional portrayal of the social roles imposed upon women by patriarchal society reveals a remarkably modern critique of marriage and the bourgeois family as vehicles for entrapping, timing and breaking the female spirit. Once again, just as Nerval understood and elucidated the role played by ideological and political repression in the creation of mental illness, so his works consistently portray women, both in their strengths and in their vulnerabilities, as pitted against the constraints of patriarchal society.

Yet Nerval is certainly not first and foremost a conscious social theorist or critic, and perhaps the most striking feature of his poetic presentation of woman is his mythification of the feminine. Woman is daughter, wife, mother, mistress and worker for Nerval, but she is also saint, victim, goddess, siren, courtesan, amazon and witch. How does one reconcile these seemingly opposing impulses—a clear and explicit sympathy with women as victims of societal oppression and an even more powerful urge to view women through the strictures of age-old archetypes, perhaps even misogynistic stereotypes?

This tension between a progressive historical view of woman's evolving social roles and an apparently conservative mythological presentation of her seemingly ahistorical essence characterizes Nerval's portrayal of woman from beginning to end of his œuvre. In fact the relationship between social and mythological woman in Nerval's work is one of interpenetration and creative complementarity. It is in the socially determined and accepted roles of mother, wife and daughter that Nerval shows women to be oppressed and unnecessarily limited. And, paradoxically, it is his seemingly restrictive stereotypes of witch, siren, queen and saint that in fact release and celebrate the power of women.

This conception of the role of myth in cultural imagination follows the lead of Nina Auerbach's eloquent study of 19th-century British images of womanhood, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Auerbach asserts that the process of understanding and demystifying male myths of womanhood should include the task of searching those same archetypes for the subversive and emancipatory power they enclose. She suggests that feminist criticism should move beyond its earlier simplistic condemnation of myths of womanhood to a rediscovery of myth as a source of contemporary strength: "Woman's freedom is no longer simple initiation into historical integrity, but the rebirth of mythic potential. The mythologies of the past as well have become stronger endowments than oppressions." Interpretative revaluation of myth can act as a corrective to what Auerbach terms the "sleek complacency" of modernist formalism, as well as to the lack of imaginative spirit and promise in behaviorist and empiricist research:

The allegiance of feminism in the early 1970's was to the social sciences, whose demographic charts and statistics affirmed the reality of our half-life in society—and nothing else. But lives are inspired by beliefs before they are immortalized in statistics. It may be time for feminists to circle back to those "images" of angels and demons, nuns and whores, whom it seemed so easy and so liberating to kill, in order to retrieve a less tangible, but also less restricting, facet of woman's history than the social sciences can encompass.

Nerval's obsessive fascination with the enigma of the feminine creates in his poetry a kind of ideal repository of 19th-century myths of woman. The archetypes of mother, saint, amazon, courtesan, siren—protean, selftransformatory images that recur incessantly, blend into and flow out of one another—form the heart of all of Nerval's major works. It is almost as if the absence of close relationships with women in his personal life allowed Nerval the distance needed to present a kind of panoramic view of 19th-century woman's social and mythic essence. The complementary relationship between Nerval's mythic and social representations of women can perhaps best be demonstrated by showing that for Nerval mythic woman often has precisely those powers denied or repressed by her social roles of daughter, wife and worker. Finally, what is of ultimate interest, as Mary Harper suggests in ["Recovering the Other: Women and the Orient in the Writings of Early Nineteenth-Century France," in Critical Matrix 1, No. 3, 1985] is not "any simple opposition between myth and 'reality,'" but rather "the blurring of the boundaries between them—not as a seamless narrative but rather as a tangled web of attitudes which need to be explored." My discussion will seek to render evident the connections between Nerval's criticism of patriarchy and his mythification of women. . . .

Nerval's most important collection of fiction is entitled Les Filles du feu, daughters of fire. Before Nerval's women are mothers or lovers, they are daughters, not of earthly men and women, but of the creative, active and rebellious Promethean element of fire. Yet they are daughters of earthly parents as well, parents who represent the demands of social order and hierarchy against the demands of the free spirit. Thus it is the figure of Iphigenia under the knives of her father Agamemnon and the priest Calchas, Iphigenia sacrificed to "la vieille autorité du prêtre et du souverain," to the demands of war and nationalism, who stands as central symbol of woman in Nerval's introduction to this series of novellas. In his dedication to Alexandre Dumas, Nerval creates a narrative persona, one of his many fictional doubles, who is an actor imagining himself in the role of Achilles. Achilles, as lover of Iphigenia, is trying to save her from martyrdom. Yet the modern ironic self-consciousness of Nerval's actor prevents him from taking his own role seriously, though he presents Iphigenia's plight with empathy and intensity of feeling:

l'entrais comme la foudre au milieu de cette action forcée et cruelle; je rendais l'espérance aux mères et le courage aux pauvres filles, sacrifiées toujours à un devoir, à un Dieu, à la vengeance d'un peuple, à l'honneur ou au profit d'une famille! . . . car on comprenait bien partout que c'était là l'histoire éternelle des mariages humains. Toujours le père livrera sa fille par ambition, et toujours la mère la vendra avec avidité; mais l'amant ne sera pas toujours cet honnête Achille, si beau, si bien armé, si galant et si terrible, quoiqu'un peu rhéteur pour un homme d'épée!

Yet despite—or in fact precisely because of—the beauty and superiority of these lovers, both the Greek witnesses and the French audiences, Nerval suggests, are desirous of the sacrifice of Iphigenia as scapegoat: "Chacun s'est dit déjà qu'il fallait qu'elle mourût pour tous, plutôt que de vivre pour un seul; chacun a trouvé Achille trop beau, trop grand, trop superbe!" Daughters, then, like the archetypal son in Nerval's "Christ aux Oliviers" and like the victims of religious and political persecution described in Chapter I, are scapegoats of a cruel and authoritarian social order.

The first of Les Filles du feu is Angélique, written in 1850 and originally published together with the story of l'abbé de Bucquoy in Le National. In his research for "les Bucquoy sous toutes les formes" Nerval discovers the diary of Angélique de Longueval, his elusive abbé's great aunt who, in disobedience to her father, eloped with a servant to embark on a life of exile, hardship and brutalization at the hands of her husband. Because Nerval's aims are primarily esthetic and spiritual rather than political, his depiction of women as an oppressed social group often seems more a product of unconscious sympathy and sensitivity than one of a conscious commitment to the emancipation of women. With Angélique it is almost as if Nerval had unconsciously asked himself a question analogous to Virginia Woolf s "What if Shakespeare had been a woman?" For in the life of Angélique de Longueval Nerval shows how the courage, determination and will to freedom characteristic of "Les Bucquoys" manifested themselves in a woman unable to move about in society on her own, bound to the "protection" of a husband or a father. Angélique, Nerval writes, represents "l'opposition même en cotte hardie." As Ross Chambers suggests, she shares with her descendant l'abbé de Bucquoy "l'hérédité valoise, grande source de rebelles et de ligueurs de tous camps."

Angélique tells her story in her own voice as Nerval quotes long passages from her diary. Nerval mirrors her naïve, straightforward and unflinching style in his own restrained, almost matter-of-fact narration of her profoundly tragic life story. Thus he resurrects the historical voice of a woman whose name had been effaced from the genealogical records of her family. As he states ironically, "Angélique n'était pas en odeur de sainteté dans sa famille, et cela paraît en ce fait qu'elle n'a pas même été nommée dans la généalogie de sa famille." Although all her brothers are listed, "on ne parle pas de la fille."

Angélique, Nerval suggests, is an exceptional human being, "d'un caractère triste et rêveur," an early victim of Romantic melancholy. Before she had reached twenty years of age, two men had been murdered as punishment for their passion for her, uniting in truly Nervalian fashion love, death and sorrow in a seemingly indissoluble whole. It is almost easier to see Angélique as a fictional creation, an angel-anima, rather than as a historical personage. She is in fact clearly Nerval's sister soul—note the relationship of equality—a personage, like so many of Nerval's fictional characters, with whom Nerval cannot help identifying. The line between fact and fiction, between historical and imaginative reality, is never clear for Nerval. In one of his letters to Jenny Colon Nerval admits that he conceives of his life "comme un roman," and he makes the following confession in the dedication of Les Filles du feu to Alexandre Dumas:

Il est, vous le savez, certains conteurs qui ne peuvent inventer sans s'identifier aux personnages de leur imagination [....] l'on arrive pour ainsi dire à s'incarner dans le héros de son imagination, si bien que sa vie devienne la vôtre et qu'on brûle des flammes factices de ses ambitions et de ses amours!

As much as Nerval emphasizes that Angélique's passionate and dreamy character creates her fate, he also makes it clear that the restrictions placed on her as a woman and daughter force a person of such passionate determination to rebel. Once again, with Nerval sympathetic identification produces acute insight into the realities of political and social oppression. For Nerval Angélique is like the heroine of the folk song he records in the seventh letter of the text, a brave heroine who refuses to reject her poor lover and is, therefore, sentenced by her father to confinement in a tower that will become a tomb:

—Ma fille, il faut changer d'amour . . .
Ou vous resterez dans la tour.
—J'aime mieux rester dans la tour,
Mon père, que de changer d'amour!

After the death of her first lover at the hands of her father, Angélique had begged him to introduce her into the world in the hopes that she would find someone to free her from the memory of "ce mort éternel," as Nerval calls him. It appears that the count ignored her wishes, as her later attempts to forget her love for La Corbinière, her father's servant, are frustrated by the lack of any occupation or company worthy of her. She cannot be satisfied with the concerns traditionally assumed to be the province of women. Thus when La Corbinière is forced to spend a year in Paris, she succumbs to depression and melancholy, distracted only by their exchange of letters. She writes, "Je n'avais pas d'autre divertissement, [. . .] car les belles pierres, ni les belles tapisseries et beaux habits, sans la conversation des honnêtes gens, ne me pouvaient plaire. . . . "

Angélique finally resolves to leave the prison of her father's castle with his servant, her lover. Love seeks to invalidate class distinctions here, just as it does in the Histoire du Calife Hakem and just as it seeks to transcend international warfare and hatred in Emilie. Love, no matter how strong, is not all-powerful, for Angélique, a victim of a societal and familial repetition compulsion, chooses a husband who is every bit as insensitive and tyrannical as her father. Her search for freedom only subjugates her more deeply to an oppressive and tragic fate.

Her account of their life together reveals her husband's nightmarish brutality and stupidity. After escaping with the family silver, she quickly changes into men's clothing so as to avoid detection and capture. One evening when they are resting at an inn, La Corbinière is questioned about the "demoiselle vêtue en homme" who is accompanying him. Nerval isolates his proprietary response and records it with condemnatory silence: "Ouida, Monsieur . .. Pourquoi avez-vous quelque chose à dire là-dessus? Ne suisje pas maître de faire habiller ma femme comme il me plaît?." Similarly, there seems to be a kind of silent horror behind Nerval's matter-of-fact quoting of the passage in Angélique's diary where she records her lover's "cavalier" response to having accidentally shot her: "Il dit seulement à ceux qui le blâmaient de son imprudence: 'C'est un malheur qui m'est arrivé .. . je puis dire à moimême, puisque c'est ma femme'."

The fleeing couple, exhausted, sick and nearly starving, finally reach Italy, where they are married. As a woman exiled from family and home, Angélique is subjected to the advances and propositions of a number of men, but she remains true to her husband, even following him when he is forced by their poverty to join the Austrian army. La Corbinière falls critically ill with a fever, and Angélique nearly dies of the combined effects of a miscarriage and exposure. Doubtless Nerval associates Angélique with his own mother, who followed her husband, an army surgeon, into battle six months after Nerval was born, and died two years later in Silesia, never having seen her infant again. It is, however, Angélique, rather than her husband, who appears to have the greater physical endurance, for she nurses him back to health, obtains a pardon for him when he is detained for desertion and eventually leads him back to Verona. In Verona they set up a home, but are soon forced by his debauchery and profligacy to open up a tavern.

All of Angélique's love and devotion are rewarded by murderous brutality on her husband's part. After witnessing her exchange greetings with a passing army officer, La Corbinière tries to strangle her, nearly kicks her to death and feels justified in threatening to eviscerate her if she ever speaks to the man again. Beginning with this event, her story is no longer recounted in her own voice. Angélique has been silenced, perhaps by shame and misery. Her diary stops here, and the sparse facts of her last years are known through the manuscript of her cousin, a Celestine monk to whom she appealed for help in her last years. When Angélique finally receives a pardon from her mother and wishes to return to France, her husband refuses, fearing that he will be executed there. Finally, after the death of both her parents they return to France, where La Corbinière dies and Angélique lives out the rest of her life in ignominy and the most abject poverty.

Angélique is Nerval's portrait of a lady, his tribute to a woman who, once she had committed herself to a husband, never complained and never wavered: "en constatant quelques malheureuses dispositions de celui qu'elle ne nomme jamais, elle n'en dit pas de mal un instant. Elle se borne à constater les faits,—et l'aime toujours, en épouse platonicienne et soumise à son sort par le raisonnement." As mythic vision, the appropriately named Angélique is a strange melding of scandalous fallen woman and self-sacrificing saint, revealing to the careful reader the proximity of these two dialectically opposed images. These stereotypes in fact both contain and reveal her strength of will and endurance of spirit. She refuses to succumb to the tyranny and brutality of either her father or her husband, remaining true to her conception of love and outliving both men, refusing the traditional escape of death, suicide or seclusion in a convent usually reserved for the fictional fallen woman/saint.

Yet there is something Brechtian as well, perhaps unconsciously so, in Nerval's portrait of this "good woman." Like Brecht's Shen Te, she does not want to "count the cost" of going with the man she loves. During all her hardships her constant refrain is a simple "Voyez [. . .] ce que c'est de l'amour." This heart-rending exclamation cannot but frustrate and even anger a modern reader who wishes in vain for Angélique that she wake up to a consciousness of her right to personal freedom and dignity and that she leave her brutish husband. This discrepancy between character and reader consciousness, as in Brecht's plays, is a highly effective tool of social criticism. Angélique stands as an implicit critique of a social and familial structure that made it almost impossible for her to give serious consideration to leaving her husband even after his debauchery and cruelty had reduced her to utter misery.

The exquisite novella Sylvie is in fact structured around the opposition between real and mythic woman, between Sylvie, "la douce réalité," and Adrienne-Aurélia, "l'idéal sublime," becoming in the end a highly self-conscious critique of the tendency to view other human beings as a mirror of one's own psychic, esthetic or mythic projections.

Sylvie is immediately self-conscious, beginning as it does in the realm of theater, with Gérard acknowledging that he is playing a role: "je paraissais aux avant-scènes en grande tenue de soupirant." He worships not a real woman, but "une apparition," who, he imagines, egotistically enough, lives only for him: "Je me sentais vivre en elle, et elle vivait pour moi seul. [. . .] Elle avait pour moi toutes les perfections, elle répondait à tous mes enthousiasmes [. . .] ." There is little self-delusion in Gérard's attitude, however. In a highly ironic expression of self-mockery he speaks of the "paradoxes platoniques" of his generation: "Amour, hélas! des formes vagues, des teintes roses et bleues, des fantômes métaphysiques! Vue de près, la femme révoltait notre ingénuité; il fallait qu'elle apparût reine ou déesse, et surtout n'en pas approcher." He feels no jealousy for his beloved's suitors ("C'est une image que je poursuis, rien de plus,") because he does not wish to know the real woman, fearful that she is not equal to her magical image, that she is not a reflection of his own soul: "Je craignais de troubler le miroir magique qui me renvoyait son image."

Dreams of this ideal woman, who he suspects may in reality be a heartless materialist, kept by the gold of his era, mysteriously call forth an image of feminine purity from an earlier time, Adrienne, the beautiful, blond, aristocratic child whom Gérard kissed and crowned with a laurel wreath in a magical childhood memory of a nostalgic folk dance on the lawn of a beautiful château. This young, ethereal beauty, as a source of "pensées douleureuses que la philosophie de collège était impuissante à calmer," inspired in Gérard "un amour impossible et vague." Adrienne was soon "consecrated" (one is tempted to read "sacrificed") by her family to a religious life, so that she was never more than a glimmering "mirage de gloire et de la beauté" for him.

In the world of myth, opposition exists only to be negated; the actress-demi-mondaine and the saintly nun become one in Gérard's reverie:

Cet amour vague et sans espoir, conçu pour une femme de théâtre, qui tous les soirs me prenait à l'heure du spectacle, pour ne me quitter qu'à l'heure du sommeil, avait son germe dans le souvenir d'Adrienne, fleur de la nuit éclose à la pâle clarté de la lune, fantôme rose et blond glissant sur l'herbe verte à demi baignée de blanches vapeurs.

Yet it is precisely the fluid, nebulous metamorphic quality of these dream images that provokes a response of terror and desperation in the conscious, rational mind: "Aimer une religieuse sous la forme d'une actrice! .. . et si c'était la même!—Il y a de quoi devenir fou! C'est un entraînement fatal où l'inconnu vous attire comme le feu follet fuyant sur les joncs d'une eau morte . . . ".

For help, for a touchstone to reality, it is to another woman that Gérard turns, to the peasant girl Sylvie, his childhood friend whose heart was once broken by his attentions to the aristocratic Adrienne:

Et Sylvie que j'aimais tant, pourquoi l' ai-je oubliée depuis trois ans? . . . C'était une bien jolie fille, et la plus belle de Loisy! . .. Elle existe, elle, bonne et pure de coeur sans doute. [ . . . ] Elle m'attend encore . . . Qui l'aurait épousée? elle est si pauvre!

If Aurélie and Adrienne are not valued in and for themselves, but as fulfillment of a mystic fantasy, then Sylvie is also not perceived as a human being with her own needs and wants, but as a poor peasant who has suspended her life for three years waiting for the preoccupied Parisian to return to her.

And Gérard resolves to return to her and to marry her, hoping to build a life together on what remains of the inheritance he has almost totally squandered. The reverie of his return to her on the "triste route [ . . . ] de Flandre" is flooded with memories of the joys he has shared with Sylvie in the past: an annual festival imagined by Gérard as a recreation of Watteau's Voyage à Cythère with Sylvie in the role of smiling Aphrodite, the "Vénus populaire" of the Voyage en Orient', the picturesque room of Sylvie, the fine lacemaker; their walks together along the flower-filled fields. Most significant is their enactment, in the wedding costumes of Sylvie's aunt, of a playful yet deeply nostalgic wedding celebration that has overtones of a mystical marriage. Together they sing "le naïf épithalame qui accompagnait les mariés rentrant après la danse." "Nous répétions ces strophes si simplement rythmées, [. . .] amour-euses et fleuries comme le cantique de l'Ecclésiaste; nous étions 1'époux et 1'épouse pour tout un beau matin d'été."

This marriage never leaves the realm of fantasy, however, and when the voyager finally reaches the real Sylvie of the present, it is too late. In the reverie of his journey Gérard has once again become haunted, obsessed, with the spirit of Adrienne, this time as actress-nun participant in an apocalyptic mystery play. Sylvie, then, above all else becomes a means of escaping this obsessive memory risen from the Nervalian netherworld between the empirical and the imaginary:

Tout à coup je pensai à l'image vaine qui m'avait égaré si longtemps.

"Sylvie, dis-je, arrêtons-nous ici, le voulez-vous?

Je me jetai à ses pieds; je confessai en pleurant à chaudes larmes mes irrésolutions, mes caprices; j'évoquai le spectre funeste qui traversait ma vie.

—Sauvez-moi! ajoutai-je, je reviens à vous pour toujours."

Sylvie, however, is a real woman with a life of her own. When Gérard finally returns to her, she is an incarnation of the changes that urbanization and industrialization have brought to his idealized world of the Valois. Her simple dress has been replaced by city fashion, her folk songs by phrased operatic arias, and her quaint bedroom is decorated in a more practical modern style. Most poignantly, her beautiful and delicate lace is gone, sacrificed to the law of supply and demand. She is now a glovemaker, and her room is invaded by an iron instrument, a machine that holds the gloves while they are being sewn.

Furthermore, her poet-lover sacrificed his chance with her when he chose to leave for Italy instead of carrying their fictional and theatrical marriage into reality. As Sylvie says, "les choses ne vont pas comme nous voulons dans la vie. [. . .] Ah, que n'êtes-vous revenu alors! Mais vous étiez, disait-on, en Italie." At one time, she admits, she had imagined herself and her costumed lover as Rousseau's Julie and Saint-Preux, but now she has pledged herself to another, to "le grand frisé," Gérard's "frère de lait," or foster brother, another Nervalian double figure. True to the archetypal pattern of the double, "le grand frisé" will marry Sylvie, leaving the poet-narrator a "Werther, moins les pistolets," as he ironically imagines himself, to long for his Lotte and to muse wistfully when he visits her and her children: "là était le bonheur peut-être; cependant. . . . "

As Rousseau's Julie and Goethe's Lotte, Sylvie takes on a life in the realm of fiction as the novella closes. She also seems to move from reality into the realm of myth. Already in her aunt's quaint bridal costume, she becomes in Gérard's imagination "la fée des légendes éternellement jeune" of the Théâtre des Funambules. By the end of the novel she is elevated to the level of goddess; with her "sourire athénien" she is the warm, smiling "Vénus populaire": "Sylvie m'échappait par ma faute; mais la revoir un jour avait suffi pour relever mon âme: je la plaçais désormais comme une statue souriante dans le temple de la Sagesse. Son regard m'avait arrêté au bord de l'abîme."

Just as Sylvie is transfigured and idealized, so Aurélie moves from the realm of theater, illusion and myth into reality. And just as Sylvie now has the power to inspire him, so Aurélie teaches him a lesson in the reality—not the illusion—of love. When Gérard finally meets Aurélie, confesses his fascination and admits to the authorship of extravagant anonymous love letters, her response is sympathetic, yet matter-of-fact: "Vous êtes bien fou; mais revenez me voir .. . Je n'ai jamais pu trouver quelqu'un qui sût m'aimer. [. . .] Si c'est bien pour moi que vous m'aimez [. . .]."

Gérard, however, learns the painful lesson that it is not for herself that he loves Aurélie. When he brings her to the world of Adrienne, having persuaded her theater company to perform there, he imagines he will finally unite Aurélie and Adrienne, the actress and the nun, and his dream will be complete. "J'avais projeté de conduire Aurélie au château, près d'Orry, sur la même place verte où pour la première fois j'avais vu Adrienne." Aurélie comes to him on horseback "en amazone, avec ses cheveux blonds flottants," "comme une reine d'autrefois." In this moment of mythical climax Gérard sees Aurélie not only as actress-nun, not only as courtesan-saint, but also as powerful amazon-queen, thus prefiguring the apocalyptic conclusion of Aurélia, where, as Berthe Reymond notes in ["Le Myth Feminin dans l'oeuvre de Nerval," in Etude de Letters, 6, No. 4, 1963], "les trois images de l'actrice, la sainte et l'amazone [. . .] se fondent [. . .] dans celle de la Médiatrice chevauchant vers la Jérusalem céleste."

Once again, however, the real woman steps out from under the burden of Gérard's projection:

Nulle émotion ne parut en elle. Alors je lui racontai tout; je lui dis la source de cet amour entrevu dans les nuits, rêvé plus tard, réalisé en elle. Elle m'écou-tait sérieusement et me dit: "Vous ne m'aimez pas! Vous attendez que je vous dise: 'La comédienne est la même que la religieuse'; vous cherchez un drame, voilà tout, et le dénoûment vous échappe. Allez, je ne vous crois plus."

Aurélie's sophistication and clear-mindedness communicate what Sylvie had only gently suggested, that Gérard does not love her, but only wishes to use her as material for the unfinished drama that constitutes her life: "Cette parole fut un éclair. Ces enthousiasmes bizarres que j'avais ressentis si longtemps, ces rêves, ces pleurs, ces désepoirs et ces tendresses . . . ce n'était donc pas l'amour? Mais où donc est-il?"

From the very first line of the text, the self-conscious poet-narrator is keenly aware of his own tendency to view women as actresses in a comedy, goddesses in a myth he has created. But by the end of the novella, Sylvie and Aurélie have shown him how potentially harmful, exploitative and lacking in love this tendency to estheticize and mythologize the real, flesh-and-blood woman can be. Gérard begins to take responsibility for his esthetic vision and mythological projection and not to confuse it with true love of, and concern for, another human being. Thus the lucidity of his self-consciousness has been heightened and clarified by a moral dimension. Paradoxically, then, the wistful, delicate beauty of Sylvie, Nerval's stylistic and tonal masterpiece, is created by Nerval's combination of this mythic and esthetic vision of the Valois and its women with the melancholy realization that such a sublimated mode of interaction leads away from the present and the love of a real human being to an ideal past or a Utopian future.

In Nerval's earlier and simpler work Corilla (1839) the same dilemma stands out in much bolder relief. Corilla, a kind of drama in miniature, gives expression, as does Sylvie, to the opposition between reality and illusion through the metaphors of doubling, the mask and the theater. The plot is age-old: the prima donna Corilla, pursued by two men, disguises herself in an effort to discover which one truly loves her. She arranges simultaneous meetings with Fabio, the idealist, at the Villa Reale and with Marcelli, the realist, at the baths of Neptune—an occult, astrological symbol of illusion, dream and the ideal—as if to suggest that she knows and can communicate to each man what he lacks.

In the end, however, she concludes that neither Fabio the poet and platonic lover nor Marcelli the Don Juan and sensualist loves her. Once again it is woman who holds the wisdom and power of human relationships:

Pardonnez-moi d'avoir été comédienne en amour comme au théâtre, et de vous avoir mis à l'épreuve tous deux. Maintenant, je vous l'avouerai, je ne sais trop si aucun de vous m'aime [. . .]. Le seigneur Fabio n'adore en moi que l'actrice peut-être, et son amour a besoin de la distance et de la rampe allumée; et vous, seigneur Marcelli, vous me paraissez vous aimer avant tout le monde, et vous émouvoir difficilement dans l'occasion. Vous êtes trop mondain, et lui trop poète.

Corilla holds herself aloof from both men, who are really only loving themselves through her.

The moral and psychological dilemma presented by Corilla and Sylvie is transformed, transfigured in Aurélia by the death of Jenny-Aurélia. Gerard is no longer torn between the real woman and the mythological projection. The drama of Aurélia takes place, as he writes, "toute entière dans les mystères de mon esprit." Thus the poetnarrator accepts responsibility for his purely mythological vision and no longer forces it upon a real woman. True to the dialectic of Nerval's work as a whole, however, the subjectivity of Aurélia transforms itself into its opposite and creates a historical vision of the oppression of woman and the potentiality of her Utopian future.

Expiation of a crime against woman is the motivating force behind the entire narrative of Aurélia, as the first chapter indicates: "Une dame que j'avais aimée longtemps et que j'appellerai du nom d'Aurélia, était perdue pour moi" (I, 359). Gérard considers himself "Condamné par celle que j'aimais, coupable d'une faute dont je n'espérais plus le pardon." The novella concludes with the miraculous pardon won through the experience of a series of trials and effected by the combined figures of the Christ-like Saturnin and the goddess Aurélia, united in the image of the sacred Rose-Pearl. As François Constans emphasizes, [in his "Sur la pelouse de Mortefontaine," in Gérard de Nerval de vant le destin], the poet's spiritual journey concludes with the defication of Aurélia and the journey towards "la Jérusalem céleste":

Avant de décrire la vision qui l'assure de son salut, il est allé jusqu'à mettre la médiatrice sur le même rang que le Juge de l'Univers! "Oh! que ma grande amie est belle! Elle est si grande qu'elle pardonne au monde, et si bonne qu'elle m'a pardonné!" L'espérance chrétienne est ici transcendée par un délirant syncrétisme d'espoirs. Plus précisément, le Christ et 1sis, conciliés en Aurélia, concourent à la "réintégration" de Gérard selon la formule théosophique.

Central to this process of redemption is Gérard's recognition not only of his individual guilt in relation to Aurélia, but also his acknowledgment of the collective guilt of man in his crimes against woman. The "plot" of Aurélia is the story of the narrator's growing awareness of the magnitude and significance of these crimes. From the first chapters woman is identified with and celebrated as nature in Nerval's own delicate expression of the Romantic rebellion against Western man's worship of the rational and the technological. Woman is goddess of nature for Nerval, a nature threatened with destruction:

La dame que je suivais, développant sa taille élancée dans un mouvement qui faisait miroiter les plis de sa robe en taffetas changeant, entoura gracieusement de son bras nu une longue tige de rose trémière, puis elle se mit à grandir sous un clair rayon de lumière, de telle sorte que peu à peu le jardin prenait sa forme, et les parterres et les arbres devenaient les rosaces et les festons de ses vêtements; tandis que sa figure et ses bras imprimaient leurs contours aux nuages pourprés du ciel. Je la perdais de vue à mesure qu'elle se transfigurait, car elle semblait s'évanouir dans sa propre grandeur. "Oh! ne fuis pas! m'écriai-je . . . car la nature meurt avec toi!"

Woman is the garden of Eden, the ouroboros, feminine symbol of divinity, the snake without sin, curled in a circle of infinity, completion and openness. This "déesse rayonnante" guides the evolution of humanity until a group of sorcerers impose upon others "les leçons funestes de leurs sciences" along with tradition, hierarchy and priestly ritual:

Cette grandeur imposante et monotone, réglée par l'étiquette et les cérémonies hiératiques, pesait à tous sans que personne osât s'y soustraire. Les vieillards languissaient sous le poids de leurs couronnes et de leurs ornements impériaux, entre des médecins et des prêtres, dont le savoir leur garantissait l'immortalité. Quant au peuple, à tout jamais engrené dans les divisions des castes, il ne pouvait compter ni sur la vie, ni sur la liberté.

Death and destruction of woman, l'Etoile, and nature are the result. Gérard sees a woman crying out and fighting for her life: "Fut-elle sauvée? Je l'ignore. Les dieux, ses frères, l'avaient condamnée; mais au-dessus de sa tête brillait l'Etoile du soir, qui versait sur son front des rayons enflammés."

Sophia, the ouroboros, image of wisdom, wholeness and unity, is severed by the sword of dualism, rationality and conflict, which has produced religions that are agents of carnage like that between Christians and Moors:

Partout mourait, pleurait ou languissait l'image souffrante de laMère éternelle.... on voyait se renouveler toujours une scène sanglante d'orgie et de carnage. . . . La dernière se passait à Grenade, où le talisman sacré s'écroulait sous les coups ennemis des chrétiens et des Maures. [. . .] Ce sont les tronçons divisés du serpent qui entoure la terre . . . Séparés par le fer, ils se rejoignent dans un hideux baiser cimenté par le sang des hommes.

In this mythological history Nerval prefigures more explicit 20th-century discussions of the intimate relationship between the glorification of rationality, the technological subjugation of nature and the oppression of women found in works as varied as André Breton's Arcane 17, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature.

In the final chapters of Aurélia visions of the violation of women stand in opposition to revelatory experiences of correspondence, harmony and unity: "Comment [. . .] aije pu exister si longtemps hors de la nature sans m'identifier à elle? Tout vit, tout agit, tout se correspond; les rayons magnétiques émanés de moi-même ou des autres traversent sans obstacle la chaîne infine des choses créées; c'est un réseau transparent qui couvre le monde." An understanding of the intricate balance of nature and of the interpenetration of all life and matter provokes the horrific and prophetic insight that technological mastery of nature's secrets without equivalent moral awareness could lead to apocalyptic annihilation of the earth:

Si l'électricité [. . .] qui est le magnétisme des corps physiques, peut subir une direction qui lui impose des lois, à plus forte raison des esprits hostiles et tyranniques peuvent asservir les intelligences et se servir de leurs forces divisées dans un but de domination. C'est ainsi que les dieux antiques ont été vaincus et asservis par des dieux nouveaux; c'est ainsi [. . .] que les nécromants dominaient des peuples entiers, dont les générations se succédaient captives sous leur sceptre éternel. [...] rien n'est indifférent, rien n'est impuissant dans l'univers; un atome peut tout dissoudre, un atome peut tout sauver!

In the face of this horror it is to the principles of love and relatedness embodied for Gérard in the goddess Isis-Mary-Aphrodite that he appeals for the spiritual values necessary to combat such terror and destruction. Realistically, however, he fears that the oppression of woman has rendered her nearly powerless: "'Que peut-elle, vaincue, opprimée peut-être, pour ses pauvres enfants?' Pâle et déchiré, le croissant de la lune s'amincissait tous les soirs et allait bientôt disparaître; peut-être ne devions-nous plus le revoir au ciel!" The image of a woman's dismembered, bleeding body graphically depicts the carnage and fragmentation that for Nerval is human history:

Je crus alors me trouver au milieu d'un vaste charnier où l'histoire universelle était écrite en traits de sang. Le corps d'une femme gigantesque était peint en face de moi, seulement ses diverses parties étaient tranchées comme par le sabre; d'autres femmes de races diverses et dont les corps dominaient de plus en plus présentaient sur les autres murs un fouillis sanglant de membres et de têtes, depuis les impératrices et les reines jusqu'aux plus humbles paysannes. C'était l'histoire de tous les crimes [....] "Voilà, me disais-je, ce qu'a produit la puissance déférée aux hommes."

The efforts to heal the French soldier that immediately follow this vision clearly take on symbolic significance as an attempt to heal the wounds of humanity's age-old plague of war and bloodshed. From this moment on, the tone of the text changes as the combined mediatory and redemptive powers of Saturnin and Aurélia redeem the world in Gérard's imagination and usher in the reign of peace and harmony created by women rulers and by the female divinities of Isis-Mary-Sophia.

In the mythical world of Aurélia the reconciliation between man and woman, the mystical, alchemical marriage that is lacking in Nerval's other works, takes place. . . . [In] Sylvie and Conila women function as spiritual and emotional healers and as teachers who are out of the reach of the male protagonists. As Aurélie so wisely observes in Sylvie, there seems to be conclusion to the comedy of love Nerval writers for his heroes and leading ladies. Women seem to challenge traditional plot lines and narrative devices, as Mary Harper asserts: "The strange equivocation of these encounters with women [...] , the narrative inconclusiveness with which they seem to be associated, call attention to the disruptive presence of women in the plot as figures who persistently defy the narrator's attempts to 'fix' his direction, and organize his narrative." The Nervalian narrators and protagonists gather their honey and abscond, giving obscure and unconvincing reasons for their failure to make peace with woman—ill health, bad timing, restlessness, misunderstanding, the presence of rivals, themselves also ineffectual.

This pattern of behavior also forms the narrative structure and the thematic content of two of Nerval's most troubling texts: Octavie and Pandora. In Octavie Gérard hovers, hummingbird-like, over three flowers—the ideal Parisian love, avatar of Jenny Colon, named Aurélie-Aurélia in his other texts; her dark mirror, the mysterious woman of the night met on the streets of Naples; and the bright, playful undine Octaive, his swimming partner in the Mediterranean. These three images of Venus—the ideal Vénus-Uranie, the demonic underworld temptress and the smiling Aphrodite—metamorphose into one another in Gérard's consciousness and make it impossible for him to separate the real women, the individual human beings, one from another.

It is precisely the metamorphic, even volcanic (following the metaphors of the Vesuvian landscape) quality of these mythic images that gives them their power to overwhelm Nerval's voyager-narrator. The heart of the text—Gérard's escape from his unrequited Parisian love to the Neapolitan landscape, both bright and joyous as well as dark and mysterious—reveals that the attempt to run away from woman only brings her presence more fully and powerfully to mind. For Nerval fear of woman is fear of life; this fear calls forth her image in the form of seductive, easeful death.

Gérard recognizes in a mysterious, gypsy-like foreigner Aurélia's dark mirror image: "Il me prit fantaisie de m'étourdir pour tout un soir, et de m'imaginer que cette femme, dont je comprenais à peine le langage, était vousmême, descendue à moi par enchantement." Paradoxically, this image of death in the form of a gypsy-sorceress has infinitely more vigor and life than the cold, abstract and distant creation and recipient of Gérard's desperate love letters. The dark Middle Easterner speaks a beautiful and mysterious language and lives in a room described with the fascination of occult significance: a picture of Saint Rosalie, Nerval's saintly patroness crowned with roses, a treatise on divination, a table of the four elements and corresponding mythical beings, spectacular jewelry and a black madonna ornamented with gold: "cette femme, aux manières étranges, royalement parée, fière et capricieuse, m'apparaissait comme une de ces magiciennes de Thessalie à qui l'on donnait son âme pour un rêve." She is surrounded by a warm and kindly mother and a beloved son. A dark madonna, both embodying and breaking out of her stereotype, she stands among her religious relics, proudly comforting and consoling her crying infant.

Gérard, "L'Inconsolé," will, however, not be comforted. His sadness is as simple as it is profound:

O dieux! je ne sais quelle profonde tristesse habitait mon âme, mais ce n'était autre chose que la pensée cruelle que je n'étais pas aimé. J'avais vu comme le fantôme du bonheur, j'avais usé de tous les dons de Dieu, j'étais sous le plus beau ciel du monde, en présence de la nature la plus parfaite, du spectacle le plus immense qu'il soit donné aux hommes de voir, mais à quatre cents lieues de la seule femme qui existât pour moi, et qui ignorait jusqu'à mon existence. N'être pas aimé et n'avoir pas l'espoir de l'être jamais!

And now he adds to his sorrow the guilt of having desecrated the image of his ideal love in the night spent with this "fantôme," his "facile conquête."

The eternally restless Nervalian narrator makes it clear that he cannot make peace either with woman or with nature and that the two processes are somehow intertwined. Each of the three women is in fact mythically mirrored in the magical Italian landscape conjured up by Octavie. Octavie herself, child-nymph-undine, first seen swimming in the Mediterranean and presenting Gérard with the gift of a fish caught in her own hands, is the bright blue Italian sea and sky. Vesuvius, erupting the night Gérard spends with his gypsy-sorceress, unites heaven and hell in a cataclysmic movement, powerful as the divine and demonic madonnas of his dreams. Contemplation of this magnificent landscape brings nothing but the desire for death.

Only the thought of the young, innocent and bright Octavie saves him from suicide. Like Sylvie, who saves him, "au bord de l'abîme," from the haunting apparition of Adrienne-Aurélia, so Octavie rescues him from the severity of his ideal Venus as well as the temptations of her dark double. And once again, as with Sylvie, a marriage takes place with Octavie only on a figurative, ritualistic level as they reenact the rites of Isis and Osiris at the temple of Pompeii. Finally, again as in Sylvie, the world of myth becomes an oppressive burden preventing closer contact with the real woman Octavie:

En revenant, frappé de la grandeur des idées que nous venions de soulever, je n'osai lui parler d'amour . . . Elle me vit si froid qu'elle m'en fit reproche. Alors je lui avouai que je ne me sentais plus digne d'elle. Je lui contai le mystère de cette apparition qui avait réveillé un ancien amour dans mon coeur, et toute la tristesse qui avait succédé à cette nuit fatale où le fantôme du bonheur n'avait été que le reproche d'un parjure.

Here the text breaks, informing the reader in the next line that Gérard has vanished, that this mythic Pompeian reality lies in the far distant past: "Hélas, que tout cela est loin de nous!" The conclusion is doubly melancholic, doubly nostalgic, as Gérard relates the story of a second trip to Naples when he returned from his voyage to the Middle East, to find Octavie married to a famous painter. With this marriage, she added to the care of her crippled father the burden of a husband, for the young man was struck with a complete paralysis as soon as he married Octavie. Imprisoned by his "atroce jalousie," Octavie cannot even walk freely through the beauties of the Neapolitan landscape. This spectacle of sorrow is intolerable to Gérard, and he leaves, wondering, as in Sylvie, if he has not abandoned with Octavie all hope of happiness: "Le bateau qui me remenait à Marseille emporta comme un rêve le souvenir de cette apparition chérie, et je me dis que peut-être j'avais laissé là le bonheur. Octavie en a gardé près d'elle le secret."

Yet in place of the domestic idyll of Sylvie, Octavie gives us the picture of feminine youth, beauty and delicacy of feeling imprisoned by a monstrous husband, image of "ce géant noir qui veille éternellement dans la caverne des génies, et que sa femme est forcée de battre pour l'empêcher de se livrer au sommeil!" Octavie thus ends with a radical opposition of man and woman. Octavie, symbol of joy and life, is opposed to her father and husband, the embodiments of sickness, paralysis and stricture, who are extreme images of the narrator's own fears of impotence and ineffectuality. Like Fouqué's Undine and true to her archetype, the mermaid Octavie is under the surveillance of a powerful male spirit who regulates the entrance of such a refreshing being into "humanity."

Why, then, this radical disharmony between man and woman to which Octavie testifies from beginning to end? Nerval gives his reader a clue in the question posed at the end of the text: "Faut-il voir dans un tel tableau les marques cruelles de la vengeance des dieux!" The happiness of a union with a woman such as Octavie provokes a vengeful response on the part of the gods, who cannot bear to witness such happiness on earth. As is so often the case in Nerval's oeuvre, the gods are presented here as petty and vindictive, certainly of no greater moral stature than their human antagonists and perhaps even incapable themselves, like Jehovah's earthly representative Solomon, of the happiness they deny others.

Pandora, one of Nerval's most enigmatic and disturbing texts, also presents the battle of the sexes in terms of divine vengeance, elaborating the problem in more detail and perhaps even suggesting some answers to the question posed at the end of Octavie. There is no more misogynistic myth than the tale of Pandora, the tale of a curse in the form of a woman placed upon humankind and upon Prometheus in retaliation for his theft of fire from the gods. And of course it is Pandora's curiosity that opens the forbidden box and gives pain, suffering and evil to the world.

Certainly Pandora seems Nerval's most misogynistic tale. His "artificieuse Pandora" is a temptress and a tease, a true incarnation of "la belle dame sans merci." Always evasive, her taunts are nevertheless blatantly sexual as she mocks Gérard's timidity and impotence by naming him her little "prêtre" and by calling out a sexual challenge in her last words to him: "Où as-tu caché le feu du ciel que tu dérobas à Jupiter?" (Pandora). Pandora is without doubt a tale of sexual fear, frustration and humiliation, as the Freudian analysis of L.-H. Sebillote [Le Secret de Gérard de Nerval, 1948] emphasizes. The atmosphere of the tale is so sexually charged that it is almost impossible to take at face value such exclamations as "Je n'ai pu moi-même planter le clou symbolique dans le tronc chargé de fer (Stock-im-Eisen)" or " . . . ma bourse était vide! Quelle honte!"

After a salon performance where Gérard forgets his part, and Pandora, "froide Etoile," seems to take joy in this humiliation, Gérard writes to his "déesse" in a "style abracadabrant":

Je lui rappelais les souffrances de Prométhée, quand il mit au jour une créature aussi dépravée qu'elle. Je critiquai sa boîte à malice et son ajustement de bayadère. J'osai même m'attaquer à ses pieds serpentins, que je voyais passer insidieusement sous sa robe.

He compensates for his feeling of humiliation by raping her in a dream where she appears as the archetypal seductress and as an embodiment of female power:

Je la voyais dansant toujours avec deux cornes d'argent ciselé, agitant sa tête empanachée, et faisant onduler son col de dentelles gauffrés sur les plis de sa robe de brocart.

Qu'elle était belle en ses ajustemens de soie et de pourpre levantine, faisant luire insolemment ses blanches épaules, huilées de la sueur du monde. Je la domptai en m'attachant désespérément à ses cornes, et je crus reconnaître en elle l'altière Catherine, impératrice de toutes les Russies.

François Constans, in his "Nerval et l'amour platonique: 'la Pandora,'" argues convincingly that Pandora appears here as an avatar of the Syrian goddess Astarté-Dercéto, figure of "l'érotisme déchaîné," a horned goddess who is also serpentine and amphibious, "mi-femme, mi-poisson." She, then, is the dark side of the undine-mermaid Octavie. The rape of Pandora-Dercéto becomes a recreation of the original sin, as Gérard, like his many mythical predecessors, blames woman for the consequences of his own desire:

Malheureuse! lui dis-je, nous sommes perdus par ta faute, et le monde va finir! Ne sens-tu pas qu'on ne peut plus respirer ici? L'air est infecté de tes poisons, et la dernière bougie qui nous éclaire encore tremble et pâlit déjà au souffle impur de nos haleines .. . De l'air! de l'air! Nous périssons.

Yet Pandora is much more than a tired rerendering of the myth of male anxiety before female sexuality and power.

Placed in the context of Nerval's work as a whole, it can even be seen as a radical rereading of the tale of Pandora. If one remembers Nerval's glorification of such Promethean figures as Adoniram, Hakem and Antéros, Pandora's last words—"Où as-tu caché le feu du ciel que tu dérobas à Jupiter?"—become less a sexual provocation than a provocation to the poet-narrator to acknowledge his theft of creative and sexual fire from the gods, to take responsibility for it and to use it. And Gérard's response can be read as his desire to deny his own Promethean nature and to capitulate to the tyrant god Jupiter: "Je ne voulus pas réspondre: le nom de Prométhée me déplaît toujours singulièrement, car je sens encore à mon flanc le bec éternel du vautour dont Alcide m'a délivré. O Jupiter! quand finira mon supplice?" Seen from this perspective, Pandora is not so much an evil temptress as she is a "fille du feu" calling to the frightened poet-narrator to accept his inheritance and his destiny as "enfant-génie du feu."

Such an interpretation is corroborated by the mysterious opening paragraph of the text:

Vous l'avez tous connue, ô mes amis! la belle Pandora du théâtre de Vienne. Elle vous a laissé sans doute, ainsi qu'à moi-même, de cruels et doux souve-nirs! C'était bien à elle peut-être,—à elle, en vérité,—que pouvait s'appliquer l'indéchiffrable énigme gravée sur la pierre de Bologne: AELIA LAELIA.—Nec vir, nec mulier, nec androgyna, etc. "Ni homme, ni femme, ni androgyne, ni fille, ni jeune, ni vieille, ni chaste, ni folle, ni pudique, mais tout cela ensemble ... " Enfin la Pandora, c'est tout dire,—car je ne veux pas dire tout.

Thanks to Jean Richer, we know that AELIA LAELIA is the name given the philosopher's stone by the 17th-century alchemist Nicolas Bernaud. Here [in "Nerval et l'amour platonique,"] is Constans's succinct summary of Richer's findings:

Grâce à la sagacité de Jean Richer on sait que ce double nom désignait la pierre philosophale que les alchimistes tenaient de composer au feu de leurs athanors, le premier élément qui signifierait "Fille du Soleil" (Hélios) représentant l'or alchimique, le second désignant "la force et l'essence de la lune" (ou argent vulgaire). Et, toujours selon Richer, Nerval pourrait avoir appris d'un autre écrivain occultiste au pseudonyme prométhéen, Epimetheus Franciscus, que l' androgyne alchimique luni-solaire portait le nom de Pandora. Rappelant un mythe du feu et, par un raffinement d'interprétation étymologique, faisant songer à l'étalon traditionnel de la richesse, l'or, figure de tout don (pan dôron), le nom de la mythique créature était bien fait pour aimenter l'attention des artisans du Grand Œuvre, systématiquement curieux de symboles à la fois séculaires, hermétiques et savants.

Suddenly the text is turned on its head. As an embodiment of the philosopher's stone, Pandora represents all that is most valuable; she is the ever-evasive goal of the spiritual seeker's quest, the union or marriage of opposites. Somehow for Nerval this goal is incarnated in woman, not only in her saintly side or in her role as medium, but also in her most frightening and seductive self, in "la complexité déroutante de l'âme féminine," composed, as Constane suggests, of coexistent contraries. Considering the myth of her origin, it is hardly surprising that Pandora should be so valued; all the gods vied in giving her their most extravagant gifts at her creation. Yet Prometheus rejected her, sensing the deceit implicit in Zeus's gift of the beautiful box. Nerval, on the other hand, may be implying that it would have been well worth it to take the risk and to marry Pandora, just as he repeatedly revealed the wisdom of his sympathy for the devil and his understanding that human progress is based upon a pact with forces that law and order label demonic.

Jean Guillaume suggests that the phrase "ni androgyne" quoted by Nerval in Pandora vitiates an alchemical interpretation based upon the search for androgyny and the union of opposites. Nevertheless, as he also recognizes, this negation, "ni androgyne," is reversed by the concluding phrase, "mais tout cela ensemble." The esoteric and alchemical context and connotations of the AELIA LAELIA formula cannot, in my opinion, be discounted, as Guillaume seeks to do. Rather, they should be combined with his assertion that Nerval, in Pandora, envisages "le problème psychologique ou moral posé par l'étonnante complexité d'un personnage immédiat (bien que non réductible pour autant à un seul être"). Once again we seem to have arrived at the notion of a self that is a dynamic and active union of opposites, of coexistent contraries.

Nerval's Pandora is in fact a quintessential embodiment of the enigmatic, indifferent, self-sufficient woman, the type and essence of the "eternal feminine," who is at the center of Sarah Kofman's incisive essay "The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard" [in Diacritics, 1980]. Kofman suggests that narcissistic women may in truth represent a threat to the male ego by virtue of their healthy self-love, their affirmative self-sufficiency. The intellectualizations of Freud and Girard, as they are exposed by Kofman, seem strikingly dishonest in the light of the fearful fascination of Nerval's narrative persona and his intuition that Pandora's completeness is something he envies, something he himself seeks. Perhaps Nerval's monism and his conception of a collective self free him from Freud's need to condemn narcissism ethically, for if humans are all part of a collective self, then all love is, in a positive and healthy sense, love of self.

The alchemical enigma AELIA LAELIA connects Pandora with two little-known Nervalian fragments, L'Ane d'or and Le Comte de Saint-Germain. Both narratives begin with a segment entitled "Une Ame sans corps" that is the story of the strange fate of the cynic philosopher Pérégrinus-Proteus, "l'inventeur du suicide le plus extraordinaire qu'on ait vu sur ce globe." He demonstrated the key to eternal life to his disciples by incinerating himself in a public square and distilling himself into an eternally wandering soul without a body, an impalpable and floating spirit.

Posing as "l'Incréé, le Radical et l'Absolu," as the father of eclecticism, pleading "la cause du néant," he insulted the gods of all religions and was, therefore, excluded from all their heavens. Thus he is forced to move from foreign body to foreign body, entering them as their spirits leave them:

Je me suis vu enfant, homme, femme tour à tour, mourant comme les autres, par hasard ou par destinée; mon âme a parcouru toute l'échelle humaine, j'ai été roi, empereur, cacique, artiste, bourgeois, soldat, Grec, Indien, Américain, Français même.

Since he has been everything, he identifies with nothing, no body, no sex, no class; in fact, he literally is Nothing in his own rendering of the AELIA LAELIA formula: "Je suis donc celui qui n'est ni mort, ni vivant; ni ombre, ni corps; ni élu, ni damné; ni historique ni fabuleux."

This same Pérégrinus-Proteus is incarnated in the fantastic historical figure of the comte de Saint-Germain in the Nervalian story of the same title. Here the alchemical formula appears as an almost identical, though extended, version of the introduction to Pandora:

Aux Dieux Mânes: Aelia Laelia Crispís qui n'est ni homme ni femme ni hermaphrodite: ni fille, ni jeune, ni vieille, ni chaste, ni prostituée, ni pudique, mais tout cela ensemble, qui n'est ni morte de faim, et qui n'a été tuée, ni par le fer, ni par le poison mais par ces trois choses: n'est ni au ciel, ni dans l'eau, ni dans la terre; mais est partout.

Pérégrinus in this tale is more tragic, less light-hearted, as he confesses that he burned himself on Mount Olympus in revolt against Jupiter and that he therefore now suffers the vengeance of Jehovah: "il . . . s'écria en baissant la tête et pleurant: 'Jéhovah! Jéhovah! mon père .. . ne t'estu pas assez vengé."

This Pérégrinus-Proteus, this "âme sans corps," is Nerval's metaphor for the human self, reminding one of the notion of Brahman as "neti, neti, neither this nor that." Coming back from the dead, he is told, "Revenez à vousmême . . . ," and his response is an untroubled "D'abord, qu'est-ce que c'est que moi-même?" What, then, is the relationship between this iconoclastic philosopher and Pandora, seductress and femme fatale? Perhaps it is that in women this mythical, protean, self-transformatory quality of the self is much easier to see, that woman is by definition less easy to categorize than man, who molds himself to the status quo and the social order. For Nerval historical woman is on the outside of the power structure, always slipping out and away from man's attempt to pin her down and categorize her. She embodies what Nina Auerbach calls the disruptive power of the myth of self-transformation and self-transfiguration, a myth that is profoundly threatening to hierarchy and authority, to the realm of God the Father.

Woman holds the key to realization of the self, a key she will present to man only when she is permitted free expression of her own nature, both mythic and real. Without Pandora Nerval's Prometheus is chained in perpetual suffering and servitude to Jupiter-Jehovah. It is hardly surprising that Nerval describes, however mockingly, a visit by Pérégrinus to a political rally celebrating the "evadism" of his time:

—L'évadaïsme, c'est la nouvelle synthèse du grand Evadam.—Cette formule renferme les noms de l'hommefemme, Eve et Adam . . . L'androgyne, le père et la mère. Les deux êtres séparés n'en font plus qu'un; l'homme est réuni à la femme, et la femme à l'homme; l'antagonisme des deux sexes n'existe plus, l'homme est libre, la femme est libre, tout le monde est libre.

Evadism was the religion of Ganneau, the Mapah, whose name is composed of the first syllables of mater and pater, a religion founded in principles of androgyny. As Busst emphasizes in his essay on the androgyne, evadism celebrated the hermaphrodite as a symbol of the emancipation of women and the ideals of the French Revolution. Busst quotes Ganneau's disciple, L.-Ch. Caillaux, as he praises his leader: "C'est un homme qui proteste intégralement contre la forme religieuse, politique, sociale, comme n'étant que l'expression monstrueuse de l'absorption de la femme par l'homme, du pauvre par le riche, du faible par le fort." In fact, social mystics as varied as Ballanche, Leroux and Enfantin all propounded variations on the theme, central to Nerval's work, that true human progress depended upon the breakdown of barriers between men and women, rich and poor, West and East, not through appropriation of one by the other, but through equalization of power inequities.

Nerval, too iconoclastic to adhere to any party line and too sophisticated to believe in any simplistic formula for human liberation, nevertheless shares the belief that future human progress would be based upon the emancipation of women. This belief unites him in spirit with the Utopian socialists of his time and distinguishes him from the liberal feminists of his day, who were convinced that emancipation of men would inevitably free women as well. My analysis of Nerval's poetic and political vision of women joins that of Stéphane Michaud's Muse et Madone in its emphasis upon the bonds that unite 19th-century Utopian feminism with the work of poets like Jean-Paul, Novalis, Nerval and Baudelaire. As Michaud writes in the introduction to this informative and provocative study, "Je me suis en effet efforcé de montrer que la flamme mystique qui brille dans les ténèbres baudelairiennes et la mélancolie nervalienne n'était pas radicalement distincte à son origine de celle qui luit dans le combat des femmes prolétaires de 1848." Perhaps a new picture of Nerval is coming into view, one in which his works are seen to constitute a self-conscious meditation on the complexity of woman's social and mythic essence and evolution, a celebration of the gifts a free Pandora could bring to humanity.