Nerval's Sylvie: The Flight from Materiality

Sylvie is a drama of blocked maturation. Fearing adult commitment, the hero loses the women who attract him because he secretly wishes to. The chapter divisions and the forward narrative movement correspond to his ostensible, conscious intentions: to recapture past happiness and to win a woman. But the hero's ambivalence is betrayed by two series of inner discontinuities: (1) changes of subject and time level when the threat of sexuality or marriage becomes too immediate; (2) interruptions by raucous reality-figures shattering the hope of reconciling past and present. Both quest and failure are epitomized by the frequent motif of ecphrasis – the descriptions of works of art embedded within the narrative. Here these works try to reduplicate the past, but produce only pale imitations of it. Likewise, the hero's final relationship with Sylvie is but a tepid copy of the eighteenth-century novels of passion. (LMP)