This biographical and literary link with contemporary feminism raises the question whether Couperus’ book is to be read as a fictional counterblast to Hilda van Suylenburg and its message that women “can have it all”. A commentator like Marianne Braun, for example, in her study of the first wave of feminism in the Netherlands, sees Couperus’s novel as an “antipode” to the earlier book. This, though, would seem a rather crude reading of a generally empathetic and balanced work. Certainly it would be simplistic to view Cornélie’s final submission to Brox as a pre-Lawrentian recipe for “sexual bliss ever after”; there is a heavy price to pay for Couperus’ character: her independence, her political engagement, and the cultural and intellectual affinity as well as the love she had shared in Rome with Duco. The Dutch critic Herman Verhaar has pointed to Couperus’s debt to Madeleine Férat (1868), an early novel by his revered model Zola, while stressing the Dutch writer’s commitment to individual psychology over the deterministic theories of “first impregnation” that loom large in Zola’s vision. Ton Anbeek stresses the fact that Couperus’ fatalism is never crudely physical or psychological, but has from the outset a mystical dimension, for most of his career classical in flavour, though in his last period coloured increasingly by oriental beliefs. Anbeek quotes a passage early in the novel (Chapter II), which seems to present Cornélie one-dimensionally as a product of her social class:
This woman was a child of her time but particularly of her environment, which was why she was so immature: conflict against conflict, a balance of contradiction, which might be either her downfall or her salvation, but was certainly her fate.
Certainly, the socio-economic consequences of an upbringing that has left her unfit for “menial” shop work in Rome are clearly spelt out (for example in Chapter XLII). It is no accident that Mrs Holt, the English feminist who urges Cornélie, as the author of an influential pamphlet, to rejoin the struggle, should be wealthy (Chapter XLVI). But realistic elements can be contrasted with a less tangible expression of her quandary when she is forced to leave Duco (Chapter XLIII):
There was absolutely no reason to leave him. He did not want her to either, he would never want it. And they held each other tight, as if they could feel something that might separate them, an inexorable necessity, as if hands were floating around them, pushing, guiding, restraining and defending, a battle of hands, like a cloud around the two of them; hands trying to sunder violently their glistening lifeline, their merged lifeline, though too narrow for both their feet, and the hands would wrest them apart, making the single great line spiral split apart into two.
Couperus is too great an artist to content himself with a purely programmatic treatment of his heroine’s predicament, though such charged passages, of which there are many in the novel, may seem to border on mystification. Today’s reader may wish to supply his or her own question mark to the English title (which, it must be stressed, was not the author’s choice).
PAUL VINCENT