Escapism In The Secret Life Of Niel

Additionally, over the course of the novel, Niel slowly watches Marian grow old and change, but he consistently suppresses the realization. “He had the feeling, which he never used to have, that her lightness cost her something” (Cather 83). This “lightness” foreshadows the pivotal point, the grimy, true behaviors of Marian. Yet, Niel cannot help but keep his escapism intact: “Was he afraid of his womenfolk? Or was it another kind of cowardice, the fear of losing a pleasant memory, of finding her changed and marred, a dread of something that would throw a disenchanting light upon the past?” (130). Niel never moves on from this image he has put onto Marian. Once Marian, herself, moves on, Niel does, too. Nevertheless, as we see in the end of
the novel, his idealization of Marian continues in his psyche. Roland Barthes give a great explanation for this so-called, secular notion of love (yes, I do, personally, believe Niel loves Marian.) Barthes states, my rejection of reality is pronounced through a fantasy: everything around me changes value in relation to a function, which is the Image-repertoire; the lover then cuts himself off from the world, he unrealizes it because he hallucinates from another aspect the peripeteias or the utopias of his love; he surrenders himself to the Image, in relation to which all “reality” disturbs him.
(90)
So, it just got more complicated. Niel’s image of Marian, in his mind, is similar to an art-object, which is idealized in order for it to become real. This brings up a stylistic question: does aesthetic appeal become idealized as well? Rosowski remarks that “Cather vividly develops tension in Mrs. Forrester. In interpreting this tension, the reader must distinguish Niel’s criteria for her from those that emerge from Cather’s characterization of her. Niel interprets Mrs. Forrester by his abstract aesthetic ideal versus common reality” (55). Aesthetic appeal connects with the idealization of Marian because Niel does not want her to change. Cather writes,
Long, long afterward, when Niel did not know whether Mrs. Forrester were living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.
(59)
Niel’s aesthetic image, his “creation of his own mystified contemplation” (Trevitte 193) of Marian works subconsciously as the ideal.
He does not realize it for he is merely aware of what he fantasizes. It is no longer the past nor experience which is idealized, but the aesthetical appeal itself. Trevitte continues:
Niel’s image of Marian also remains dehumanizing in its own right, insofar as it projects her beauty in symbolic terms that fail to acknowledge her agency. Notwithstanding his sense of her distinctive charms, his perception of her is fundamentally static, disembodied, carefully confined within the realm of his passive contemplation. Thus Niel’s aesthetic sensibility hollows out the beauty that it seeks to protect: for the more rigorously he conceives of her beauty as a self-contained essence, the more he transforms it into an abstract form that lacks any substantial content in Marian’s person. (196)
Niel renders the reality of Marian to fit his aesthetic and nostalgic ideal. Meaning, a person idealized as an art-object comes down to the issue of subjectivity—the final feature of this
analysis. In the end, Niel turns his subjective experience of Marian into his idealized memories. One cannot get away from subjectivity, meaning, one cannot get away from idealizing. “Cather was trying to make her works true to life—or at least how she saw life” (Johanningsmeier 51). Readers recognize this in their own subjectivity, just as Cather did. Marian, to Niel, will remain stuck as his idealized conception: “Niel was destined to hear once again of his long-lost lady” (Cather 147). “His.” It is his truth, his ideals, his feelings, his mind. And as Eliot perfectly articulates,
Everything, from one point of view, is subjective; and everything, from another point of view, is objective; and there is no absolute point of view from which a decision may be pronounced. Hence any history of the process must be only relatively true: it must be a history of the object side, postulating the subject, or a history of the subject side, postulating the object side (22).
Niel’s ideal of Marian is real because it relates back to the real, regardless. On a final note, Niel’s idealization of Marian Forrester is subconscious due to his nostalgia and this is significant because it ends up being a form of escapism for Niel, which then, turns into an aesthetic, biased demand. Trevitte believes “The tension in A Lost Lady between illusion and disillusionment, romance and realism, also speaks to the role of art in modernity” (182). Cather was a modernist writer, and what stands out with her works is the fact that she does stays true to her subjectivity—she never hides it. Lastly, this analysis made me realize that one cannot have the ideal without the real (they go hand-in-hand.) But, of course, one is only true, which is that of emotion. Ultimately, like Cather, “[Niel] attempts to turn his very disillusionment into an aesthetic experience. In other words, he becomes a modernist” (Trevitte 202).