Eva! I am so delighted to have found you here on Substack! A brilliant question — and one that would have felt right at home in a smoky salon off the Boulevard Montparnasse, debated over cognac by the women of the Left Bank!
Where would I take the question "What’s more bourgeois then--the search that moves us, or the fulfillment that paralyzes?" were I to answer it through the voices (and literary characters) of the day?
Colette, for instance, gives us Renée Néré in The Vagabond — a woman who has stepped out of the confines of bourgeois marriage, out of the comfort of being "kept," into the restless, precarious independence of a performer. Renée’s desire is not about pleasure in the conventional sense. Her longing is for movement, for freedom, for solitude even. She walks away from a man who offers her stability and sensual fulfillment, precisely because it threatens to end the search. “What I love,” Renée suggests, “is not the man, but the breathless feeling of maybe.” So if pleasure is a still point, Renée flees it. It is the desire — as absence, as motion — that keeps her alive. Bourgeois fulfillment would mean enclosure. Desire, for her, is emancipation.
Djuna Barnes, through Robin Vote in Nightwood, pushes this even further into the territory of the unknowable. Robin is desire personified — elusive, shifting, never graspable. She is the object of obsession for Nora, who is left wrecked not by pleasure but by the endless pursuit of Robin’s meaning, her essence. Robin does not give pleasure; she devours it. In the world of Nightwood, desire is gothic, fevered, and endless — and any notion of bourgeois fulfillment becomes grotesque by comparison. To "attain" Robin would be to destroy her. The pursuit is the only form of intimacy allowed.
Gertrude Stein might answer you less with a character than with a form. Her writing, like in Tender Buttons, resists the consumer logic of narrative pleasure — there is no payoff, no climax, no resolution. Just rhythm, iteration, and resistance. The search is everything; fulfillment is a trap. A bourgeois reader demands closure. Stein denies it. She offers desire as structure — endless, circular, alive.
So: What is more bourgeois? The search, or the fulfillment?
To these women and their creations, the answer is implied through refusal. Bourgeois culture might promise fulfillment: home, security, climax, resolution. But their characters know better. They live in the restlessness, in the ache, in the promise of something just out of reach. Desire, then, is not just a rejection of pleasure — it is a rejection of the bourgeois dream altogether.
In that way, perhaps desire is not only not bourgeois.
Dear Paula, I was delighted to see you are now on Substack. It's been ages since we talked last time. I left FB long ago and lost track of you. In fact, I have, in vain, looked for The Left Bank Review in the net but couldn't find it any longer. I'm so glad you are writing here now.
Your take on desire and women of the Left Bank is the kind of thing I'm eager to read. Always a pleasure to bring Nora and Robin up in the conversation.
Eva! I am so delighted to have found you here on Substack! A brilliant question — and one that would have felt right at home in a smoky salon off the Boulevard Montparnasse, debated over cognac by the women of the Left Bank!
Where would I take the question "What’s more bourgeois then--the search that moves us, or the fulfillment that paralyzes?" were I to answer it through the voices (and literary characters) of the day?
Colette, for instance, gives us Renée Néré in The Vagabond — a woman who has stepped out of the confines of bourgeois marriage, out of the comfort of being "kept," into the restless, precarious independence of a performer. Renée’s desire is not about pleasure in the conventional sense. Her longing is for movement, for freedom, for solitude even. She walks away from a man who offers her stability and sensual fulfillment, precisely because it threatens to end the search. “What I love,” Renée suggests, “is not the man, but the breathless feeling of maybe.” So if pleasure is a still point, Renée flees it. It is the desire — as absence, as motion — that keeps her alive. Bourgeois fulfillment would mean enclosure. Desire, for her, is emancipation.
Djuna Barnes, through Robin Vote in Nightwood, pushes this even further into the territory of the unknowable. Robin is desire personified — elusive, shifting, never graspable. She is the object of obsession for Nora, who is left wrecked not by pleasure but by the endless pursuit of Robin’s meaning, her essence. Robin does not give pleasure; she devours it. In the world of Nightwood, desire is gothic, fevered, and endless — and any notion of bourgeois fulfillment becomes grotesque by comparison. To "attain" Robin would be to destroy her. The pursuit is the only form of intimacy allowed.
Gertrude Stein might answer you less with a character than with a form. Her writing, like in Tender Buttons, resists the consumer logic of narrative pleasure — there is no payoff, no climax, no resolution. Just rhythm, iteration, and resistance. The search is everything; fulfillment is a trap. A bourgeois reader demands closure. Stein denies it. She offers desire as structure — endless, circular, alive.
So: What is more bourgeois? The search, or the fulfillment?
To these women and their creations, the answer is implied through refusal. Bourgeois culture might promise fulfillment: home, security, climax, resolution. But their characters know better. They live in the restlessness, in the ache, in the promise of something just out of reach. Desire, then, is not just a rejection of pleasure — it is a rejection of the bourgeois dream altogether.
In that way, perhaps desire is not only not bourgeois.
It is rebellion.
Dear Paula, I was delighted to see you are now on Substack. It's been ages since we talked last time. I left FB long ago and lost track of you. In fact, I have, in vain, looked for The Left Bank Review in the net but couldn't find it any longer. I'm so glad you are writing here now.
Your take on desire and women of the Left Bank is the kind of thing I'm eager to read. Always a pleasure to bring Nora and Robin up in the conversation.
I cannot agree more with your views.
Let's desire, let's rebel.