Quote:
Originally Posted by Victoria
Just going back to your question about impotence, the plot description was incorrect. But they hadn’t been intimate since Sarah met Maurice, seven years before. Just before she dies, Sarah writes to Maurice in her diary, recounting a discussion she had with the Priest:
”I’m not really married to Henry any more. We don’t sleep together - not since the first year with you. And it wasn’t really a marriage, I said (to the Priest), you couldn’t call a registry office a wedding. I asked him couldn’t I be a Catholic and marry you?.....Every time I asked him a question I had such hope........No,no,no, he said, I couldn’t marry you, I couldn’t go on seeing you, not if I was going to be a Catholic.”
And to my earlier point about sacrifice and suffering, Sarah says in a bit later in the same passage, after storming out of her meeting with the Priest:
”I slammed the door to show what I thought of priests. They are between us and God, I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment. ...I wish I wasn’t as strong as a horse. I don’t want to live without you.......But what’s the good, Maurice? I believe there’s a God.......I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now.......When you came in at the door with blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. ....I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left........I pray to God He won’t keep me alive like this”
That was the end of the diary - she died. She doesn’t leave Maurice because she no longer needs him, or feels internally that it isn’t right; only that it’s forbidden. So her belief didn’t provide her with any comfort at the end; she felt she was in an impossible situation and maybe gave up.
I think Green makes her religious experience sound like a fatal affliction. Who knows, maybe he felt their suffering was a just response to the sin of their affair? Or maybe the organizing principle of Greene’s theology is suffering and sacrifice.
PS. I hope this doesn’t sound argumentative; I’m partly just puzzling it out for myself. But it is interesting that as a group, we can experience the same book so differently. I wonder if it’s just down to differences in our temperaments? |
Argue away! That's a good part of the fun.
As for your first point, it could be semantics; to me "forbidden" doesn't connote that it's outside of a felt emotion or belief on her part. When she argued about the validity of her marriage with the priest, it's because she in fact did think it would be wrong to leave her marriage, but hoped the priest would overrule her.
I've decided that was the point of the baptism, in fact; her baptism did make her marriage invalid, but no one knew (except her mother, of course, and for whatever reason, she kept her counsel).
Thanks for the reference on when Sarah and Henry stopped sleeping together. For me, that argues the importance of her relationship with Maurice. We know Sarah had engaged in a string of infidelities and that Maurice was the last - that she was weirdly physically faithful to him despite being married and that it
was the last, even as she considered a subsequent partner, does tell me it was a deeper relationship than the others.
Coming back around to your postscript, I'd say almost the defining characteristic of this group is that our reading preferences are so very different. So perhaps it's not that surprising that we react differently. Certainly it helps me get out of my own tunnel vision.