Gerard De Nerval, Sylvie Gerard De Nerval\'s

Gerard De Nerval, Sylvie

Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie is a short novella composed in fourteen vignettes or chapters. The main theme is erotic: the unnamed narrator recounts different experiences of love and longing for several women. In every case, the love is unrequited or unfulfilled. The logic of the narrative seems, at times, almost dream-like: the title-character, Sylvie, is presented as a childhood love of the narrator, and his interactions with her in the present-tense narrative seem almost like a memory animated and taken for reality. The other unattainable women in the story, Adrienne and Aurelia, are almost blurred together at times -- it seems difficult to tell if, in fact, they are two separate women. Part of the difficulty here is that Aurelia is an actress -- images of theatricality abound in Nerval's story, and point to the larger question of instability or performativity of personal identity. The concluding moment of the story features the narrator taking Sylvie to see Aurelia perform onstage, hoping to have Sylvie confirm that Aurelia is, in fact, Adrienne. Instead Sylvie reveals that Adrienne died in a nunnery some time before. The narrator has, of course, tried to conflate these two possibilities earlier in the story, but rejected the conflation as being somehow a sign of madness or unreality:

To love a nun in the guise of an actress! And what if they were one and the same! That possibility leads to madness, but it is an inevitable impulse -- the unknown beckons like the will-o'-the-wisp fading through the rushes in a still pool. But we must cling to realities. (III)

The conclusion of the novella seems to indicate Sylvie's confirmation that the narrator's romantic obsessions are, in fact, a form of madness. She does not indicate that the actress Aurelia resembles the nun Adrienne at all.

Another curious aspect of the strange dream-logic of Sylvie is the way in which the narrator's views of the women in the story are mediated by prior narratives, both mythological and literary. In some sense, the logic of being-as-roleplaying that is inherent in the description of theatrical acting that begins and ends Sylvie seems to extend to this constant allusiveness, which ranges from descriptions of pagan goddesses (as with the Isis of Apuleius, referenced early in the tale) or the artistic representation of them (as in paintings by Watteau and Greuze invoked within Nerval's text) to the more obviously literary descriptions of femininity referenced in the text (like Walter Scott, or Rousseau's Emile). The constant allusiveness does not have the effect of making Sylvie or Adrienne or Aurelia seem more real to us -- instead, the overall narrative seems more like a dream constructed of prior representations of womanhood, as though the story itself were one in which a young man enraptured by the unreal women depicted in art and myth manages to tumble into that myth, in search of the muse who inspired all these works. The fact that his quest ends up unfulfilled leaves the reader wondering if any of these women were real to begin with, or if their identities are fictions that can be briefly embodied as an actress portrays a role. Fairly late in the narrative, these strands combine in a crucial insight by the narrator:

I wonder whether women know when men are not speaking their true feelings? So often are they deceived, that it seems hardly possible, and many men act the comedy of love so cleverly! Though there are women who submit knowingly to deception, I could never bring myself to practise it, and besides, there is something sacred about a love that goes back to one's childhood. Sylvie and I had grown up together, almost as brother and sister, and to attempt to seduce her was unthinkable. Quite a different thought rose up in my mind! (XI)