From the merry preparations of the young people in the very first chapter she is conspicuously absent. ‘Such a shame Eline is not here!’ her aunt-through-marriage exclaims. ‘She is not feeling very well,’ Madame Verstraeten is told; it is a question of ‘nerves’ apparently, ‘the affliction of the younger generation’.
So we do not meet Eline until the second chapter, and when we do, we encounter her at nighttime, at half-past two in the morning. (To the British and American readers of today these members of Hague society keep astoundingly late hours, just as they all have a surprising amount to drink.) And we first see her ‘looking rather pale in a white flannel peignoir, with her hair loose and flowing,’ the last a favourite symbol in nineteenth-century paintings, from the Pre-Raphaelites through to Edvard Munch, of a girl’s rejection of the restraints of conventional respectability. ‘Languorous and graceful’, Eline has absented herself from the jollifications of her peers through a ‘whim of indolence and ennui’, and has been regretting it ever since, unable to relieve her melancholy even by reading. When her brother-in-law, Henk, chides her for yielding to yet another black mood — Henk, the first man she was ever seriously attracted to, and who, probably more than any other, still holds her heart — she breaks down in tears:
The urge to pour her heart out was too strong to resist. What was she living for? What use could she be to anyone? She wandered about the room, wringing her hands and lamenting without pause. She didn’t care if she died within the hour, she didn’t care about anything at all, it was just that existence was so futile, so useless, without anything she could wholeheartedly devote herself to, and it was all becoming too much to bear.
What is Eline’s malady, and what is its meaning when viewed in the context of her social world? Which is also to ask, what is its meaning for the novel as a whole? In Anna Karenina’s case the cause of her undoing is her trust in the truth of passion over other truths, other considerations. On account of this trust she undervalues the importance of society itself, which exacts retribution on her of both an outward and an inward kind. This is not to say that Tolstoy accepts society on its own (so often hypocritical or cynical) evaluation; far from it. But he does believe that it is only through principled unselfishness that a satisfactory life can be led, and that this entails taking society into account. We see in Anna Karenina how the erratic Levin, who, like War and Peace’s Pierre before him, has a normal man’s dissolute past, realizes that a reciprocally giving married life with Kitty will benefit not just himself but the larger world as well.
Such thinking is present also in Eline Vere. Paul van Raat is as silly and selfish as young men often are, indeed maybe more so than many because of the wealth and lofty social position into which he was born, the very thought of which makes him proud and a touch reckless. But he is also warm-hearted and observant of others, and through the love he feels for Frédérique and the marriage with her that he will sustain, he can not only repay his debts to society but make it a better place (this being fittingly emblemised in his becoming Mayor of a comparatively small provincial community). But Eline will make no contribution of this kind whatsoever. In common with Tolstoy’s Anna, what she will bequeath to the society that has produced and nurtured her is a death that at once distresses and disconcerts it. Why? What went wrong?
Eline’s flaw is not, like the Russian tragic heroine’s, related to intensity of sexual reaction. If anything Eline strikes us as deficient in normal erotic feelings. The baritone Fabrice, Otto for the greater part (she has to be cajoled into accepting him as fiancé), Vincent, the mysterious figure of Lawrence St Clare — there is no evidence that she is sexually aroused by any of them. Nor is there much evidence that men generally, while admiring her beauty and her social grace, respond to her physically, as — to take examples from literature — men, including her own husband, do to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, or those in Christiania’s élite do to Hedda Gabler in Ibsen’s virtually contemporaneous play (1890). What attractions Eline feels for the men in her life, what emotions they have brought out in her very quickly dissolve into day-dream. Fabrice — whose picture she will buy for her albums, like any starstruck shop-girl — scarcely has any reality for her off the boards of the stage on which he sings Gounod. Vincent’s secretive disposition, compounded by his insecurities of money and health, she soon distorts into a novelette invalid’s yearning for love, which she could somehow in a fantasy-world encounter. Even Otto, for whom she does know something not unlike love, becomes for her chiefly an embodiment of masculine good sense on which she will be able eternally to depend.
Unlike Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler, however, Eline is not unintelligent or even notably unintellectual, nor — as Ibsen, in his preparatory notes on his play, says of Hedda — conventional. Couperus is insistent that Eline’s English is positively good, and her French is clearly proficient also: she reads as well as speaks both languages. She is interested in the arts, even if she does have an inordinate admiration for Ouida (!), is cognisant of cultures outside the Netherlands, and, if anything, is rather too much at ease among the bohemian, heterodox folk whom her uncle Daniel and his younger wife, Eliza, take up with. Her discussions with Vincent might not impress a professional philosopher any more than they please her irascible sister, Betsy, but they show her to have, for all her languor, a certain liveliness of mind, a wish to explore further than the bounds of the immediately perceptible. It is hard to imagine the other young members of her circle engaging in them. Furthermore she has the ability — often, admittedly, coming to the fore too late or with insufficient force — to stand back from her fantasies and even her behaviour. (Think of her sad, bemused awareness of how badly she can behave to kind old Madame van Raat.) Likewise, she has the ability to discern the sham even when it is she herself who, through her heightened theatrical tendencies, is doing the shamming. When, in her despair, she turns to church-going, she can see through her own religiosity — so akin to the swooning over opera which led her to idolise the sorry, shabby Fabrice — and also through the hypocrisies of her fellow worshippers.
No, Eline’s tragedy — for it is nothing less — is not the consequence of her having too much erotic passion in her or too little sharpened an intellect. It is that she has too abundant and fertile an imagination in a society which gravely undervalues this quality, indeed scarcely even pays lip-service to it. Imagination is not an attribute one could ascribe to any other character in the book — with the possible exception of Eline’s shadow-self, Vincent, and perhaps Frédérique, in her own frustrated way. Her milieu is one of fundamentally practical, pragmatic persons, sensible once they have put youthful idleness behind them, incurious, rarely looking beyond their own set, dabbling in the arts (as Paul van Raat does) while unaware that these have profounder purposes than amusement, worried about money in a household-expenditure kind of way, but never seriously discomposed by current affairs — and accordingly disinclined ever to challenge the status quo.