Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Age before beauty

What did you think of the use of Madame de Rosemonde as a multipurpose confidante? Was her being at the hub significant in terms of a moral center? What role did her physical decrepitude play?
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5 comments:

Ben said...

I didn't see Rosemonde as a particularly important character. For some reason I found her rather easy to overlook. I think she could have been the moral center of the story if she had been a more major character.

10:41 PM, July 18, 2007
Erin said...

We didn't get to see much of her character until the end. I really liked her. She loved her nephew but wasn't blind to his serious flaws and had a pretty healthy attitude about life, despite her religious devotion.

1:28 PM, July 19, 2007
kc said...

The other characters trusted her, period. Then they trusted her to be decent. That makes her very important in the world of the novel. (Plus there's that passage in the marquise's letter where she says old women must be befriended because they can make or break one's reputation).

Plus, the older woman's insights on love and sex and men and women were insightful.

She refers to the deceitful ideals of perfect happiness that love instills us — the shattering of illusions the chief cause of unhappiness.

She mentions that those who are most worthy of love (Madame de Tourvel) will not be made happy by it in this screwed-up world.

She says: "Man enjoys the happiness he feels, woman the happiness she gives," which seems to be not only a statement of the misogynist ideals of the time, but which becomes a guiding (and deadly) principle in Madame de Tourvel's relationship with Valmont.

2:13 PM, July 19, 2007
Erin said...

Exactly. The stuff she has to say toward the end of the book is really important. You get the sense she has been through all this kind of stuff before.

3:14 PM, July 19, 2007
Ben said...

Yes, I wondered what her own experiences with love and sex were.

3:23 PM, July 19, 2007

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