How Does Swann Feel For Odette

Jealous Love
The words of love songs and poems declare that a person cannot endure being without another every minute of every day and that they would die without them. This may sound quite poetic and loving in prose, but when rationally thought about in an everyday context this is a form of co-dependency and jealous love, being disguised as affection. This essay will discuss this type of jealous love which Swann felt for Odette in the novel “Swann’s Way,” which was so competently portrayed by the author Marcel Proust.
Swann’s feelings for Odette begin with indifference, move on to obsessive jealousy, turn to distaste, and then return to indifference again. Swann is a womaniser and he only keeps female friends that he finds beautiful on the
As he is at a time in his life when he has no real meaning or substance to what he is doing, he juxtaposes his love of these arts onto Odette. The first sign that he loves her is when he turns up at the salon one evening and she is not there to meet him. He visits many places looking for her until he finally comes upon her and on this night, they finally kiss. Proust describes this night as, “in this moment of deprivation—the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage—the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively” (Proust, 1992, p. 322). This is the night that Swann acknowledges he is becoming a different man as he does not want Odette going out with other
His days are filled with endless thoughts of her and he declines to visit other friends from his need to be with her, which is unhealthy co-dependent love. Obviously, the word co-dependent was not in the vocabulary of Proust’s time, but this is exactly what he is describing when writing about Swann’s love for Odette. Now Swann begins to distrust Odette and after she sends him home one night he believes that she is cheating on him and returns to spy on her. On another occasion, he opens a letter that she asked him to deliver as he believes she is having an affair with Forcheville. One night when she is going out without him, he resorts to blackmail, saying if she does not stay at home, she will be less attractive to him, and that she is beneath everything in the world (Proust, 1992, p. 401). Jealousy is consuming so much of Swann’s life he realises that he must overcome it somehow. He starts to question her, and she admits she has had affairs with both men and women while with him. Furthermore, one evening after hearing the piece of music that he loves so much in its entirety, he begins to understand that Odette does not reciprocate what he feels for her. Ultimately, he ends up marrying her and maybe this was his way of making his jealousy