Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...] But off the top, I will say that while I thought Maurice was explicitly trying to reduce the value and integrity of religious experience, I didn't feel as if it were joyless for Sarah. My sense was that it made her life richer and deeper, that she gave up on her love with Maurice in exchange for a greater love, a greater experience. Certainly it was worth it to her. There was no sense that she was just in it for her eternal salvation, or at least I didn't get that sense. It made her life more intensely realized in the present.
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I never got the sense Sarah got anything greater beyond that first "miracle" of Bendrix's survival. She wanted that, but I never felt as if she found that. It seemed to me that that was why she struggled. She got her miracle, and knew (if she truly believed in God) she should be awed and fully convinced by that. But the miracle does
not cut her ties to Bendrix (I won't call it "love", because I'm not convinced), so she keeps bouncing back and forth between temptation and keeping her vow. And she's already broken her vows to God once (marriage vows), and that makes it even much harder to resist breaking this new vow. I think that's why committing to stay with Henry (affirming the first vow) was also an implicit strengthening of her second vow. But then Henry starts to bring Bendrix back into the picture and makes everything that much harder again.
One of the more effective elements of the book, I thought, was seeing her as persecuted. Four men were watching her, coveting her. Bendrix covets the idea of her but never seems to see her; Henry truly cares for her but can't seem to touch her; Richard worships her; Parkis ... just watches? (Maybe "covet" is too strong a word for Parkis.) But none of them actually help her. Presumably Greene set this up to better pave the way for her proposed sainthood.