The Impossible Return to Nature in Maupassant's Bel-Ami or the Intellectual Heroine as Deviant

Madeleine experiences a trauma in the Norman forest that contradicts her liberated principles. The analysis of this key passage reveals the mechanism of her psychology and sheds light on Maupassant's naturalism. The train trip from Paris to Normandy by the newly marrieds is accompanied by a reversal. Duroy gains ascendancy as he and his accomplished wife penetrate deeper into the countryside. Madeleine, depressed by the subservience of peasant women and threatened by the fecundity of a forbidding forest, is overwhelmed by anxieties from her childhood. Madeleine's identity crisis prepares that of Duroy. By falling in love with his wife, he belies his psychological type, conquering male. Self-doubt in his worth as a journalist and as a man turns against Madeleine's deceased husband and takes the form of jealousy. The liberation of Duroy from his obsession occurs in the Bois de Boulogne which counter-poises that of la forêt in Normandy. The rise of Duroy to power does not diminish the significance of Madeleine. (JFH)