Maeterlinck’s Golaud:Between Shakespearean ‘Sadism’ and Emersonian Disquiet

François de Médicis Debussy: Text and Idea Gresham College

Three ArgumentsGolaud’s increasing violence may be explained by his jealousy and frustration at his inability to understand the spiritual communion between Pelléas and Mélisande.

Maeterlinck play suggests a marked parallel between Golaud and Othello.

Maeterlinck provides a critique of Shakespeare after the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Henri Ronse: Pelléas is an 1890s Shakespearean dream. A dream of Maeterlinck’s entangled with the shadows of Shakespeare. Pelléas is Hamlet to some degree; Melisande, Ophelia. Golaud is Othello; Arkel, Lear at the end of his journey or, even better, Prospero. Maeterlinck dreams of Shakespeare and our inability to inhabit Shakespeare’s major roles.. (Ronse’s preface to: Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande. Brussels: Labor, 1992.)

Jean-Marie Carré:

The giant Golaud recalls Othello to some extent. Through his fate (he causes his wife and her presumed lover’s deaths), with his jealousy and rage (he drags her around by the hair), and through his repentance (at Mélisande’s deathbed in Act V).

(Jean-Marie Carré, « Maeterlinck et les littératures étrangères. » Revue de littérature comparée 3 , p. 466.)

The Progress of Golaud’s Jealousy

1) Golaud’s suspicions are raised when he discovers that Mélisande has lost her ring . He sends the terrified young womanout into the night to search her ring in the cave.

2) Golaud catches Pelléas and Mélisande around midnight: she is held captive by her hair (which Pelléas has tied to a willow’s branches). Bending over her window-sill, she tries to give him her hand.

3) Golaud leads Pelléas into an underground passage, refers to the events of the previous night, and says that Mélisande is pregnant. The scene, filled with innuendo, may be an intimidation tactic on Golaud’s part.

4) Beneath Mélisande’s bedroom window, Golaud asks his son to spy on the 2 young lovers.

The Progress of Golaud’s Jealousy (cont.)

5) Golaud interrupts Mélisande and Arkël’s peaceful conversation. Losing control, he engages in acts of domestic violence, progressing from verbal to physical abuse. He grabs his wife by her hair, pulling her around in a brutal imitation of the sign of the cross.

6) Pelléas and Mélisande meet in the park, and after the castle has closed its doors, they confess their love to each other and embrace passionately. Golaud surprises them, kills Pelléas, and then wounds Mélisande before turning his weapon against himself.

7) Golaud, who despite his violent outburst has not recovered his peace of mind, continues questioning Mélisande on her relationship to Pelléas, even on her deathbed.

Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act IV Scene 2

GOLAUD: Come, what makes you look at me like a beggar? I have not come here for your charity. You are hoping to see something written in my eyes, while I should see nothing yours might have to tell me? Do you believe I’ve discovered something? (To Arkël) Do you see those great eyes? And how proud of the wealth of their beauty?

ARKËL: I see only great innocence.

GOLAUD: A great innocence only!... No innocence as great as they are… They are more pure than the eyes of a lamb… Why, God might take a lesson in innocence from them! A great innocence only! Just see here! I am so close I can feel the breath their lids make in closing; but nevertheless, I am less far from the secrets of the other world, than I am from knowing anything about these eyes!...

Violence and Swearing

Golaud declares that God could take a lesson in Innocence from Mélisande’s eyes.

He comes to take his sword from a prayer chair (prie-dieu) 

He drags Mélisande around by the hair creating a Pattern resembling the sign of the cross.

These sacrilegious acts betray his frustration with the mystery of her sacred, invisible mystery.

Maurice Maeterlinck, ``The Tragical in Daily Life`` (excerpt Treasure of the Humble)

« What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, and who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, or a mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death ? […] I admire Othello, but he does not appear to me to live the august daily life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moments when this passion, or others of equal violence, possesses us, that we live our truest lives ? » 

Maurice Maeterlinck, Le trésor des humbles

« I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him ; […], interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, […], — I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or ‘the husband who avenges his honour.’ »  Maurice Maeterlinck. The Treasure of the Humble, p. 105-106.

Arkel et Golaud?

Maurice Maeterlinck, « Introduction à Novalis »

« Thus, to return to this ordinary consciousness which reigns supreme at so great a distance from our soul, I know more than the one person whom the marvellous picture of Othello’s jealousy, for example, no longer astounds. It is determinate in the first circles of man. It remains, provided one takes care to open neither the doors nor the windows; otherwise the image falls into dust in the breath of all the unknown that awaits it outside.» 

Maurice Maeterlinck, « Introduction » à sa traduction de Novalis On Emeson and Other Essays, p. 63. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914). Translated by Montrose J. Moses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

« Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. […] And never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts this power. […] As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify?

Le rapport des personnages à l’absolu

Mélisande (et Pelléas): privileged vehicle to the absolute; opens the way for Pelléas to supra-sensitive realities (Maeterlinckian conception of feminity).

Golaud: vaguely senses the existence of superior truths.

Arkël: displays wisdom comparable to that of Emerson; enjoying simple pleasures while resigned to the course of destiny.

Yniold: illustrates the Maeterlinckian conception of childhood, holder of an intuitive wisdom, mysteriously acquired through human evolution and naturally close to the absolute

Geneviève: withdrawn, as befits a mature Mélisande, resigned to a dull and monotonous existence and to the impoverished light.