‘given’ which is sometimes not questioned until much later life, and this
seems to have been the case with Benjamin Constant. For many years,
therefore, Marianne occupied the role of protector, perhaps of elder sister,
and of substitute mother, before becoming, very late in the day, his
stepmother. If, in this whole episode which is so reminiscent of Molière’s
L’Ecole des femmes (School for Wives), Juste played the role of an
implausibly successful Arnolphe to Marianne’s Agnès, the older man
turning his young ward into his wife, Benjamin also had his part to play,
and it was an unenviable one. Taken away from whatever security he had
known to a strange house with a 20-year-old village girl he did not know,
Benjamin became a pawn in a game he could not possibly understand. For
Juste, who nonetheless idolized Benjamin, the boy was a means of defying
his mother, ‘la Générale’, and taking revenge on her, among other things,
for her earlier disapproval of his forcible abduction and adoption of
Marianne. For Marianne, Benjamin was something like a bond imposed on
her by Juste lest she be tempted to free herself from her by now highly
compromising relationship with him. What Benjamin himself felt about
the arrangement emerges from his later comments. On the one hand he
could write to his half-sister Louise in 1819 or 1820 when Marianne was
on the point of death:
Please tell your mother how much I sympathize with her in her
illness and how much I hope that she will recover soon. I shall
never forget her tender care of me in my childhood. Nothing has
ever weakened my affection for her and nothing ever will.^50On the other hand in 1792, and nearer the events, when Juste proposed
giving Marianne a third of his wealth, Constant objected bitterly to being
thus partially disinherited ‘in favour of a harpy I don’t even know’.
51
In
other words Constant’s feelings towards Marianne were always
ambivalent and tended towards hostility whenever he saw himself
replaced by her in the affections of his one surviving parent.
In trying to gauge the effect of the relationship that grew up between Benjamin and
Marianne during the two years (1772–4) she looked after him, I would suggest that it is
essential once again to consider it primarily in the light of Benjamin’s relationship with
his father. From a Freudian point of view the situation was relatively simple: Benjamin’s
oedipal feelings, left unsatisfied by the death of his real mother, would have been
redirected towards this young substitute mother. Marianne introduced the missing third
term which was added to the father/son dyad, and as a result Constant experienced what
Jacques Lacan would consider a corrective, normative oedipalization. This would later
have produced precisely the kinds of aggression and tenderness that we see in Constant’s
Benjamin constant 30