This second volume 📗 of the “Search” is introduced and edited by Julie André, who explains the title as follows…
Translated from French.
This second volume 📗 of the Search for Lost Time is introduced and edited by Julie André, who explains the book’s title as follows in her preface:
🖋️ “By ultimately choosing the title “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” 🌺, Proust appears, at first glance, to be employing a traditional artistic metaphor. Already revisited in Baudelaire’s ‘virgins in bloom’ and Wagner’s ‘flower-maiden’, it was revitalised by Art Nouveau, where women and flowers were regularly associated, and was very prominent in early 20th-century literature: Montesquiou 🪻 published a poem in 1907 entitled ‘Filles-fleurs’, whilst Maeterlinck 🌷, in “Le Double Jardin”, compares wildflowers to women. A motif of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, flowers, with their “varieties” and “species”, introduce the realm of botany into the novel and spark debates around biological heredity – Gilberte appears as a “new variety of Mme Swann” 🌹 – but also social: if Mlle de Stermaria draws the hero to the Grand Hôtel, it is through her aristocratic background, her “hereditary lineage” 🥀 which anchors her in her native Brittany.
Proust thus imbues the motif with political dimensions. In doing so, he also sets the stage for the sequel, “Sodom and Gomorrah”, a volume in which the botanical metaphor is used to address the issue of homosexuality 🌻 through the famous scene featuring the bumblebee and the orchid. 🐝
Finally, in Proust’s work, this image of the flower has, since as early as 1908–1909, accompanied his conception of writing and literary history. Viewed as ‘immortal flowers’, the great writers 🤵🏻♂️📚 are unique and “all different” yet “of the same family”: they resonate with one another across the ages and form, as it were, “a braided garland”, transcending time, trends and artistic movements.” 🕰️
#MarcelProust #JFF #proustagram #JulieAndré #LivredePoche #1919 #PrixGoncourt #Proust #Albertine #Gilberte #Montesquiou #Balbec
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