Claudia Moscovici 
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe
There have been a number of great novels written about seducers, some of which are about psychopathic seducers in particular. Of course, the tantalizing tales of Don Juan and Casanova set the standard. But it’s Laclos’ Dangerous liaisons (1782), an eighteenth-century French epistolary novel that we know now mostly thanks to John Malkovich’s and Glenn Close’s excellent performances in the 1988 movie, that explores the emotional emptiness and the game-like ruses inherent in the process of psychopathic seduction. Dangerous liaisons focuses mostly on the machinations of the seducers themselves. There are also a few classic novels that sketch the psychological profile of the women who are seduced by them. To offer one notable example, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, first published as a serial in La Revue de Paris in 1856, generated a scandal. Flaubert was charged with the corruption of public mores. Many novels depicted with relative immunity middle-class men cheating on their wives with courtesans, mistresses and prostitutes. But the theme of a middle-class woman cheating on her husband shocked the public at the time. Flaubert was nonetheless acquitted in 1857. His novel became an instant best seller and remains to this day a popular nineteenth-century classic. Tolstoy broached the same theme in Anna Karenina, my personal favorite. He published it in installments in The Russian Messenger, between 1873 and 1877. His novel was extremely successful and didn’t cause a scandal. Unlike Flaubert’s morally ambiguous and cynical Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s novel was presented as a morality tale. Anna Karenina masterfully expressed a popular, if somewhat tired, message. For middle-class women, the novel implied, cheating on their spouses and pursuing passion instead of familial duties results in suffering and an untimely death.
Out of all the novels on seduction I’ve read, I believe that Benjamin Constant’s Romantic classic Adolphe captures best the insidious process of psychopathic seduction in particular. Although this novel is somewhat less well known internationally than Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, it was an instant hit in France. It was first published in June 1816 and reprinted quickly thereafter in three more editions—in July 1816, then again 1824 and 1828—due to its popularity. Part of what made this novel so successful was the fact that it was seeped in gossip. Readers interpreted the work as a roman-à-clef. They believed that Constant described in Adolphe his tumultuous long-term affair with one of the most famous women of the times, Germaine de Stäel, as well as aspects of his on/off relationship with the devoted Charlotte von Hardenberg.
In the preface to the second edition, however, the author vehemently denies any connection between his love life and the characters of his novel. In fact, Constant goes so far as to chastise critics and readers alike for having reduced a complex work of fiction to personal intrigue. The author also claims that his sense of tact and devotion to his friends would preclude him from translating his life into fiction. He explains that his novel shows what happens when love is asymmetrical: when one partner loves too much and the other not enough. Although some literary critics still interpret Constant’s novel as largely autobiographical, I’d have to agree with the author that the personal angle is not the most interesting aspect of this work. I believe that Adolphe stands the test of time above all because of its penetrating insight into pathological relationships.
Constant claims that Adolphe, the (anti)hero of the novel, is too weak to escape a relationship that got too deep too fast with Ellénore, a woman whom he no longer loves. The novel’s detailed and nuanced exploration of human pathology, however, leads me to sketch a different psychological profile of Adolphe. I don’t see him as a weak and sensitive man who got in over his head, as the author claims. Rather, I see him as an emotional predator. Adolphe represents the kind of man who is incapable of genuine love. He regards the seduction and destruction of women as an entertaining way to pass time and to alleviate boredom. As realistic as this novel is in depicting a psychopathic seducer, it’s even more accurate in its depiction of the kind of women who fall in love and stay with psychopaths long after the relationship with them has grown cold and their so-called “love” has turned into indifference.
From a certain perspective, the plot bears out the author’s reading of his own text. Adolphe, the protagonist and narrator of this unhappy romance, is the son of a government minister. He leads an aimless and solitary life until a friend’s success in love induces him to seek a comparable diversion. At a party, he meets Ellénore, a beautiful aristocratic Polish immigrant. She’s the mistress of a certain Comte de P, with whom she has two children. Upon seeing her, Adolphe instantly decides to seduce her. He uses his charm and manipulation skills to achieve this goal. Ellénore resists at first—rather half-heartedly—but eventually gives in to his advances. For her, their physical relationship translates into real emotional bonding. For him, it doesn’t. The difference in their attitudes motivates the plot of the novel, moving it towards its fatal conclusion. The more Adolphe withdraws emotionally from Ellénore, the more she struggles to regain his initial affection. In the end, the heroine is reduced to the shell of the person she once was. True to the Romantic tradition, Ellénore dies of sorrow, feeling unloved and rejected by the lover for whom she has sacrificed everything: her partner, her children, her social connections, her reputation and, ultimately, her whole identity. Although now somewhat neglected in the canon of European literature, Constant’s novel helped consolidate Romanticism in France. It also paved the way for psychological fiction, which would later be pursued by Henry James and Marcel Proust.
For decades, literature has been interpreted by literary critics through the optic of psychology. That’s not, of course, because literary characters are real. It’s because they can represent character traits, motivations, interactions and emotions that drive real human beings. Often, however, such interpretations tend to be archetypal or, more generally, theoretical. Psychoanalytic criticism relies upon Freudian, Lacanian, Jungian and other kinds of broad, and generally abstract, frameworks to read general patterns of behavior, desires, emotions and drives. Rarely are the theories applied to literature drawn directly from current pragmatic psychology, meaning from contemporary research on and experience of real, suffering human beings. In my estimation, reading literature in light of actual human experience, disorders, struggles and problems can be illuminating. They shed light upon pathological characteristics that exist in real human beings and that affect our lives deeply. We have a lot to learn about human nature and behavior from good psychological fiction without erasing the boundaries between fiction and life. Constant’s fictional depiction of the process of psychopathic seduction—from its promising beginning to its pathetic ending—is strikingly modern and, as I hope to show by relying on the latest research on psychopathic seduction, remains relevant to this day.
Since they lack the capacity to form emotional bonds with others, from a very young age psychopaths experience a nearly constant state of restlessness and boredom. They also generally lack the patience to complete any of their tasks, seeking meaning in temporary diversions. Young Adolphe, the narrator of the novel, fits this profile. “Distracted, inattentive, bored, I couldn’t notice the impression I created, and I divided my time between studies that I frequently interrupted, projects which I didn’t complete, pleasures which didn’t really interest me, when an apparently very frivolous circumstance produced in my disposition an important revolution” (Adolphe, my translation, 41). Although a misanthrope by his own admission, Adolphe needs others for entertainment. Almost by accident he stumbles upon a solution to the emptiness he feels within. He observes with interest the excitement of an acquaintance that has fallen in love. Before meeting any actual woman, Adolphe falls in love with the idea of falling in love. “The spectacle of such happiness made me regret not having tried it yet; I didn’t have any affair of the heart that could have flattered my self-love; a new future was revealed to me; I felt a new need at the bottom of my heart” (42). From the very beginning, the narrator regards love as a fantasy of conquest. He doesn’t view it as a shared emotional experience that may result in finding a potential partner in life. As Sandra L. Brown’s research illustrates, psychopaths attach to their targets in order to control them.
With this goal in mind, Adolphe quickly spots his target. He zeroes in on Ellénore, the Polish mistress of Comte de P, one of his father’s friends. From the outset, he assesses her weaknesses and needs. He sets out to seduce her by appearing to provide whatever has been missing from her life. He takes note of the fact that Ellénore’s current lover, with whom she lived for ten years and with whom she has two children, didn’t marry her. In Adolphe’s eyes, the refusal to legitimate her status reveals her partner’s ambivalence towards her. He’ll take full advantage of that division between the two lovers, and especially of Ellénore’s unfulfilled need for more attention and a deeper commitment, to seduce her. Adolphe also notices that Ellénore doesn’t quite fit into any culture. Polish by birth yet living in France, she’s a partial outsider to both cultures. With predatory intuition, he focuses on her tenuous social situation and inner contradictions, which he fully intends to exploit: “Ellénore, in a word, was in a constant struggle with her fate. She protested, we may say, through each of her actions and words, against the class in which she found herself, and as none of her efforts changed anything about her situation, she was very unhappy” (44-5).
Ellénore may be discontented and needy, but she’s by no means an easy prey. She’s proud, well educated, still beautiful and enjoys the protection of a powerful count and his circle of acquaintances. Adolphe decides that this woman has just the right mixture of vulnerability and strength to represent a worthy conquest. “Presented to my attention at a moment when I needed love and my vanity sought success, Ellénore seemed a conquest worthy of me” (45). Although he explicitly reviews his target’s weaknesses and strengths, the narrator qualifies that he’s not assessing Ellénore in a cold and calculated manner. He claims to be genuinely drawn to her. The two attitudes don’t necessarily contradict. As Robert Hare and Paul Babiak illustrate in Snakes in Suits, during the assessment phase, when psychopathic seducers measure up their targets, they also idealize them, to see them as objects worthy of their attention. In other words, for emotional predators, the calculated assessment phase and the process of idealization coexist.
In the beginning, Adolphe sees Ellénore both as a potential conquest, which he can dominate through his presence and charm, and as the fulfillment of his romantic dreams. “I thought I was taking, like a cold and impartial observer, a survey of her mind and character, but each word that she uttered seemed to be cloaked in an inexplicable grace” (46). He remains lucid enough, however, not to confuse his powerful obsession with love: “I didn’t believe I loved Ellénore, but I couldn’t accept not being liked by her. She occupied my mind constantly: I formed thousands of plans; I invented thousands of ways to conquer her” (47).
Psychopaths skillfully mimic, rather than actually feeling, human emotions. Adolphe knows how to flatter his target with simulated words of love, borrowed phrases from romantic novels and from other people’s genuine feelings. He’s stimulated above all by the act of simulation itself. He experiences the “duper’s delight” that psychopaths commonly feel when they convincingly present themselves as something they’re not or express sentiments they lack. “My lack of certainty in the success of my endeavor gave my letter an agitation which strongly resembled love. Heated up as I was by my own style, I began to feel, by the end of my writing, a little of the passion which I tried to express with as much force as possible” (48). The fact that Ellénore doesn’t give in to his desires fuels Adolphe’s artificial fire. For weeks, she refuses to see him. He states, “This response overwhelmed me. My imagination, irritated by the obstacle, took over my whole existence. The love which just an hour before I applauded myself for faking I thought all of a sudden I was experiencing with passion” (48).
The inadvertent cat and mouse game that Ellénore instigates through her initial resistance only increases Adolphe’s predatory focus on her. He becomes consumed by the single-minded goal of seducing her: “I was surprised myself about what I was feeling… I was equally incapable of distraction or study. I walked around constantly by Ellénore’s door… Impatience was devouring me. I checked my watch all the time” (49-50). His passion is intense yet hollow. Sandra L. Brown, M.A. explains that emotional predators can form intense attachments without connecting emotionally with their targets. Attachment means simply seeking proximity. Emotional bonding, on the other hand, implies greater depth: a real connection. Psychopaths are incapable of making real, emotional connections. The psychopathic bond is therefore an inherently mismatched relationship. Brown elaborates:
So within the attachment phase of this relationship we have a woman who tests 97% higher in attachment than other people and who tends to trust automatically, and her partner, the psychopath, who has the equivalent of an adult attachment disorder who is trying to camouflage it by masquerading enormous amounts of zealous affection (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 156-7).
While psychopaths can’t bond with others they can, like Adolphe, become obsessed with pursuing a given woman. For a period of time, they may desire to be in her company day and night. But this dogged pursuit of their target doesn’t imply any feelings of caretaking. On the contrary, it exhibits an inherent lack of empathy and the pathological need to control another person by monitoring her activities. However, since psychopaths lack standards of comparison between genuine, deeper feelings of affection (which they can’t experience) and their intense infatuations, they commonly mistake their temporary obsessions for real love. Adolphe recounts, “I passed the night without sleeping. There was no longer any question of calculation or plans; I felt myself, as sincerely as possible, truly in love” (53).
Not satisfied with admiring her from a distance, the narrator starts pressuring Ellénore to see him. Even in our days such ambiguous circumstances may be regarded as inappropriate. In early nineteenth-century France, this violation of social mores would have been flagrant. Adolphe manifests an obvious lack of empathy for how his behavior would compromise Ellénore in the eyes of her partner, her children and her social circle. However, he skillfully couches his selfish request in the flattering language of passionate love. When Ellénore rightfully objects that seeing him in private would tarnish her reputation, Adolphe switches the focus to himself: “I’m terribly unhappy,” he complains. “I don’t have the strength to endure such prolonged unhappiness; I hope for nothing, ask for nothing, except to see you: but I must see you to survive” (53). Ellénore buys into this inflated rhetoric and agrees to see him. Adolphe, in turn, reassures her that this initial boundary violation will not result in further transgressions that could compromise her reputation and ruin her family life. In other words, he deceives her.
To readers, Adolphe’s promise appears like a transparent ruse to get her alone so that he can make his advances on her. But to Ellénore, who’s yearning for attention and affection, such a request seems relatively innocuous. She relents, but imposes upon him the condition that they see each other only in public. When she gives in to his wishes, Adolphe initially rewards her with further declarations of love and flattery. Shortly thereafter, however, he’s no longer satisfied with this level of control. He needs more. Consequently, he pushes the envelope further, demanding new boundary violations from her. Each time Ellénore gives in to his will, the line she drew in the sand becomes erased. Consequently, her values and boundaries lose meaning. The heroine reflects the psychological profile of women who love psychopaths. Brown’s research suggests that such women are eager to please. They also trust the psychopath’s words rather than paying attention to his actions. In general, women involved with dangerous men tend to be too cooperative with their partners’ desires, even when those go against their best interests. Brown documents, “She feels the magnetic pull into an emotional and sexual vortex that she can’t free herself from. She mistakes intensity for love and passion for bonding. It doesn’t take the psychopath long to test the depths of her love (and tolerance) and to figure out he has a lot of wiggle room in the relationship to abuse” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 213-4). Soon, Ellénore and Adolphe see each other more frequently, nearly every day. Rather quickly, she becomes addicted to her lover’s lavish flattery, to his intense focus on her as well as to his professed love.
Once their dominance bond is consolidated, Adolphe feels sufficiently confident to ask that they see each other in private. This carries with it the obvious implications of physical intimacy. Wisely, he doesn’t make his request explicit. Instead, Adolphe couches his need for sexual conquest in the more comforting language of an amitié amoureuse, or the ambiguous but supposedly chaste friendship between men and women that was common in France at the time (granted, probably far more common in theory than in fact). He also turns social mores on their head. He asserts that in being cautious and proper Ellénore is actually being frivolous and superficial. “One would say that in asking you to see me, I obtained the same favor for the whole universe. I swear, in seeing you so prudent, I never thought you’d be so frivolous” (55).
Already used to Adolphe’s daily presence and accustomed to giving in to his requests, Ellénore violates her boundaries yet again. By now, she’s emotionally hooked on Adolphe. She’s not prepared to risk losing him by refusing to fulfill his wishes. The emotional predator senses that he’s got his prey firmly in his grasp. He coolly observes, “The idea of breaking up no longer occurred to her: she consented to see me sometimes alone” (55). Inch by inch, Adolphe erodes Ellénore’s boundaries and approaches his goal. Soon enough, she not only accepts his inappropriate declarations of love, but also reciprocates them. At first, Adolphe rewards Ellénore for each concession, to gain her trust. “I spent several hours at her feet, declaring myself the happiest man on earth, giving her thousands of assurances of tenderness, devotion and eternal respect” (56). Of course, in compromising her reputation, Adolphe isn’t manifesting even temporary and conditional respect, much less the eternal, unconditional love he professes. But like so many victims of psychopathic seduction, by now Ellénore feels too attached to her lover to examine his inappropriate actions: especially the disconcerting succession of violated promises.
As they become more intimate, they exchange confidences. Adolphe pays close attention to everything Ellénore reveals about her background, experiences and needs. He wants to find out as much as possible about his target’s vulnerabilities to discover more ways in which he can control her. He also tells her exactly what she wants to hear and gives her the kind of attention she always craved but never experienced before. Adolphe notices, with satisfaction, Ellénore’s growing emotional dependency on him. By now, she listens for his footsteps, hoping that he’d visit her several times a day. Ellénore helps the seducer’s assessment process along by openly admitting to him that she’s obsessed with him. She confesses to Adolphe that she thinks of practically nothing and nobody else. As is the commonly case with psychopaths, however, the more power the seducer gets over his target, the more he wants from her in order to feel the same degree of pleasure from her conquest. Adolphe now wants to possess Ellénore completely, body and soul. Once again, he camouflages his sense of entitlement—the attitude that he should get whatever he wants when he wants it simply because he wants it, no matter what the cost to others—in flattering, romantic terms. “Ellénore, I wrote her one day, you don’t know at all what I suffer. Close to you, far from you, I’m equally unhappy. During the hours which separate us, I walk aimlessly, hunched over from the burden of an existence that I can no longer tolerate” (57).
In The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout states that the phony pity play constitutes one of the give-away signs of psychopathy. Psychopaths make everything in life be about them. By representing themselves as sensitive victims, they induce others to ignore their own needs and obligations in order to cater to theirs. Adolphe hints that Comte de P, Ellénore’s partner, poses an unacceptable obstacle between them. For as long as the count remains in her life, he implies, their romantic future will be precarious. To overcome that barrier, Adolphe suggests, she must belong only to him. “Close to you, I still fear some obstacle, suddenly placed between you and me” (58). He’s careful not to ask Ellénore more explicitly to leave the count. Instead, he relies upon his skill for manipulation to instill in her the anxiety that she might lose his devotion if she doesn’t leave her partner of her own “free will.” Isolated from the count, her family and her social circle, Ellénore will be fully under her predatory new lover’s control and at his mercy. Which is exactly where Adolphe wants her.
As we’ve seen, psychopaths commonly foster their victims’ dependency in order to control them. They tend to move very fast, in a race against time. Brown exposes the strategic logic behind this seemingly passionate rush:
The rapid pace that psychopaths are known to have in relationship skill building will move her quickly into gorilla-glue bonding at lightning speed (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 156).
Any fast-paced romantic relationship with a psychopath inevitably turns into a train wreck. Ellénore’s affair with Adolphe is no exception. Unfortunately for her and those who care about her, the heroine gives in to her lover’s unrelenting pressure. Like Mme Bovary and Anna Karenina, seen from the external perspective of the implied reader, Ellénore is not a particularly sympathetic character. She readily abandons her values and obligations to others for the sake of ephemeral pleasures with a cheap seducer. She falls victim not only to Adolphe’s machinations, but also to her own vanity and selfish tendencies. Psychopaths intuitively know how to use their victims’ character flaws against them. Like so many women seduced by emotional predators, Ellénore is addicted to the narcissistic supply that only her lover gives her, which, during the seduction phase, makes her feel more special, more desirable and more interesting than other women. Adolphe sees that his persistence and false promises have paid off. “Ellénore never knew until now this passionate sentiment, this feeling of another being lost in her existence, which even my anger and frustration proved to her” (59).
Just as he’s open-eyed about his target’s vulnerabilities, Adolphe remains lucid about the fact that the process of seduction itself excites him, not Ellénore herself. He observes, “Her resistance intensified all my sensations, all my thoughts: I experienced anger which frightened her and moved her to submission, tenderness and idolatrous veneration” (59). Only Ellénore confuses her lover’s intense pursuit and bullying persistence with genuine caring. More generally, she misconstrues his goal of seduction for the goal of building an enduring relationship together. Acting upon this false assumption, “she abandoned herself completely” (59).
While Adolphe experiences casual fondness for his new mistress and takes pleasure in her company, his attachment to her is only temporary and superficial. Emotional predators tend to view sex as their preferred vehicle of exercising dominance. For a psychopathic seducer like Adolphe, once the conquest is over, so is the thrill of the chase. The lesser pleasure of ownership replaces the intense rush of seduction: “I walked with pride among men; I looked them over with a domineering glance” (59).
Psychopaths live passion only in the moment. At this point in the narrative, Constant gives voice to the most lyrical description I’ve read of the psychopathic bond: of this highly contingent and conditional yet often intense form of passion that makes the present seem eternal. The narrator declares, “Love is nothing but a luminous point of light, and yet it seems to extend throughout time. A few days ago it didn’t exist, soon it won’t exist anymore; but, for as long as it lasts, it spreads its clarity upon both past and future” (56). For a psychopathic seducer, however, the present moment casts very little light upon the past and the future. Memories of wonderful times shared together or of overcoming common hardships don’t sediment for such shallow individuals. Therefore, they also don’t create a foundation of real intimacy. Likewise, hopes for the future mean nothing to them without the intense pleasures of the moment. When you remove the significance of a common past as well as future commitment from human experience, all you have left is a tainted, and increasingly tedious, present.
Once no longer distracted by the goal pursuing Ellénore, Adolphe feels inconvenienced by his new mistress’ demands. He remains flattered by her love. But her excessive attention has an obvious downside now, which never bothered him before, when he was euphoric with the rush of pursuing her. As Ellénore’s attachment to him grows with contact, Adolphe’s attraction to her proportionately diminishes. The narrator observes, “Her attachment to me seemed to increase from the sacrifice she made me. She never let me go without trying to retain me. When I left, she asked me when I’d return… It was sometimes inconvenient to have all my steps measured in advance and all my minutes counted” (59). What turns out to be most “inconvenient” for the seducer is the fact that he has to break up with most of his “acquaintances”—code word for his other lovers and flings—since Ellénore is a much more high-maintenance mistress. To his chagrin, she demands most of his time and attention in exchange for her devotion.
At this point, Adolphe is still “in love” with Ellénore. But there’s a palpable difference between the cool satisfaction he feels now and the hot passion of his initial pursuit. He depicts the distinction eloquently and succinctly when he states, “Ellénore was no doubt still a lively pleasure in my life, but she was no longer a goal, she was a bond” (62). That’s not a very good thing to be, at least from the perspective of a psychopathic seducer. A bond is someone or something that restrains his behavior. Psychopaths want to enchain others and gain total control of their lives. But they, themselves, need to remain free. Love bonds can be exclusive because they’re grounded in mutual caring. By way of contrast, the dominance bonds psychopaths establish with their targets aren’t exclusive. Once a psychopathic seducer conquers a woman, she also loses most of his interest.
Unfortunately for their unsuspecting victims, psychopaths rarely admit the selfishness, malice and cynicism that motivate their relentless pursuit of women. While during the seduction phase they commonly argue in favor of violating social mores, once they tire of their targets they appeal to the very norms that they repeatedly transgress and don’t even believe in. Conveniently, Adolphe rationalizes his diminished interest in Ellénore in terms of his concern for her social reputation: “I feared moreover compromising her. My constant presence must have astonished her servants, her children, who could see me. I trembled at the idea of unsettling her life” (62). Funny that he should think of his mistress’ reputation only now, after having used her. It never occurred to him to consider Ellénore’s partner, her children and her place in society before, when she was pointing out to him all these factors as reasons not to get romantically involved. As we recall, at that time Adolphe viewed them as nothing more than obstacles in his path.
It’s not exactly a cosmic coincidence that once a psychopath attains his goal, he suddenly changes rhetoric and becomes conventional. The narrator makes it transparently obvious that once seduced, Ellénore no longer attracts him. He attempts to detach himself from his mistress so that he can be free, once again, to pursue other women. Being emotionally hooked on him and believing in his disingenuous love, however, Ellénore holds on to her lover with all her might. Adolphe’s impatience to move on is only mollified by the idea that the liaison with Ellénore is, after all, temporary: “At any rate the vague ideal that, by the nature of things, this affair couldn’t last… served to calm me when I got tired or impatient with her” (62). Adolphe sees the end of their affair as the light at the end of the tunnel. By way of contrast, Ellénore views him as the light of her life.
Adolphe’s diminished interest in his mistress after having seduced her doesn’t necessarily prove that he’s a psychopath. As many women will tell you, there are millions of emotionally unavailable or shallow men, who view “love” as a sequence of exciting hook-ups. Fortunately for the rest of society, however, most of them aren’t clinically psychopathic. Usually, they’re out to have a good time, not to control and emotionally destroy their targets. What makes a psychopath far more dangerous than your ordinary player is the fact that an emotional predator doesn’t want his targets to escape from his clutches unharmed. Players may, more or less unwittingly, leave behind a trail of broken hearts. They’re generally indifferent to the welfare of their “scores.” Psychopaths, on the other hand, deliberately and maliciously harm their targets. They leave behind a trail of shattered lives.
On some level, psychopaths suffer from incurable addictions, even to the targets they no longer desire. Although he’s grown tired of Ellénore, Adolphe can’t detach from his own dominance bond with her. This establishes between them an unhealthy co-dependency, which becomes increasingly burdensome to him and extremely dangerous for her: “Her happiness was necessary to me and I knew I was necessary to her happiness” (62). Of course, what the narrator goes on to describe is anything but happiness. Because both characters seem unwilling (or unable) to let each other go, literary critics generally take the author at his word. They view Adolphe as a man who lacks the strength to break his mistress’ heart, even after having fallen out of love with her. I don’t see much evidence for this interpretation in the novel, however. Instead, I recognize in Adolphe’s language and behavior the kind of rationalizations psychopaths commonly make for keeping their victims on the hook long after the thrill of seduction, and thus their so-called “passion,” is nothing but a distant memory.
Adolphe’s unwillingness to tell Ellénore the truth—namely, that he tired of her and wants to move on to someone else—functions as a form of psychological torture for her. She can’t understand why she lost his “love.” She therefore doesn’t know what to do to prove herself worthy of Adolphe’s devotion once again. Like many of the real women who love psychopaths, Ellénore clings to the memories of Adolphe’s supposed passion. She refuses to confront his obvious lack of caring for her. Sandra L. Brown, M.A. attributes this bracketing of unpleasant realities in the psychopathic bond to the trance-like focus encouraged by the psychopath during the seduction phase: “Trance produces perceptual biases. That means if the psychopath is telling her wonderful things and she is euphoric with him, she tends to associate wonderful and euphoric things with the memory of him… even after he’s turned into a monster” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 181).
Trusting those misleading memories over real actions, Ellénore hopelessly struggles to reclaim Adolphe’s affection. Yet nothing she does proves good enough for him. She abandons her partner. She leaves her children under the custody of Comte de P. She refuses the fortune the count offers her on the condition that she leaves her unprincipled lover. She gives up what’s left of her social circle to follow her lover wherever he wants to go. She invites him to live with her at her expense in her native country, Poland, once she receives an inheritance from her father. The list of sacrifices she makes to regain the seducer’s “love” goes on and on. By the end, it starts to resemble the absurdity of one of Voltaire’s farces. Ellénore mistakenly believes that the more she gives up for Adolphe, the more he’ll grow to appreciate her sacrifices. In fact, the opposite logic applies. The more she gives in to him, the more he asks of her. As she struggles to meet his new needs, these shift.
Seeking dominance rather than successful relationships, psychopaths enjoy watching their partners jump through hoops for them. They can’t appreciate or reciprocate feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice or love. Consequently, they often prey upon women who play the martyr role, taking everything they give and offering them less and less in return. In fact, the more power a psychopath acquires over a given target, the less she interests him and, therefore, the fewer concessions he makes for her.
After the seduction phase, joint life between Adolphe and Ellénore turns into a game of simulation. He pretends to care about her while she, in turn, pretends to be happy with their increasingly distant relationship. The less effort the seducer makes to keep on his phony mask of charm, the more his true identity and ugly motives show through. As a result, their relationship degenerates into a series of explosive fights and mutual reproaches, punctuated by periodic reconciliations: “We exploded in mutual reproaches. Ellénore accused me of having misled her, of not having had for her anything but a passing infatuation and having alienated the count’s affection, having placed her in the compromising social situation which she had tried all her life to escape” (65).
Susan Forward wittily states in her best-selling book on misogynist men, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, that when the honeymoon phase of a romantic relationship is over, it’s over for both partners. One of them doesn’t get to stay in Hawaii while the other one returns home. Both Adolphe and Ellénore become dissatisfied with their hollow relationship. Perfunctory reconciliations after fights can’t erase the fact that they both realize that his feelings for her are gone. “We kissed: but the first blow was delivered, a first barrier was crossed. Both of us spoke irreparable words; we could remain quiet, but not forget them” (65). During such moments, even Ellénore opens her eyes to catch a glimpse of the unpleasant reality. She acknowledges her loss of status in her lover’s eyes. What she refuses to confront, however, is the more disturbing fact that Adolphe never loved her because he’s incapable of love.
Believing that she must have done something to lose his affection, Ellénore clings to her lover with all her might. Predictably, this leads him to withdraw further. “I complained about my constrained life, of my youth consumed by inactivity, of the despotism she exercised over my actions” (70). From the revered queen placed above all other women on a pedestal, Ellénore becomes a slave to her lover’s wishes. She turns into an abject woman who’s pathetically aiming to appease a psychopath so that he can stay in her life. Needless to say, Ellénore’s desperate struggles don’t reignite Adolphe’s initial enthusiasm for her. They only weaken her further, increase his power over her and perpetuate the farce their life together has become. Once again, her behavior conforms to the real responses of many of the women who love psychopaths, who are weakened by their constant efforts to please their pathological partners. Brown documents, “By the mid-part of the relationship a woman who is normally dominant and resourceful may for the first time in her life feel ‘fragile’ or even ‘mentally ill’” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 214).
Although she keeps jumping through his hoops, Adolphe is not satisfied with the power he has over her. Deprived of any possibility of mutual love, their life together feels rehearsed: “Ellénore and I pretended with one another,” the narrator recounts. “We said nothing about the only thought that obsessed us. We lavished upon one another caresses, we uttered words of love, but we spoke of love out of the fear of speaking of anything else” (70).
Tellingly, only when Adolphe encounters another obstacle—once his father banishes Ellénore and forbids him from seeing her—does he experience a spark of his former passion for his mistress: “I formed thousands of plans to rejoin Ellénore forever: all my heart came back to her; I was proud to protect her. I hungered to hold her in my arms; love repenetrated my soul, I felt a fever which overwhelmed my head, my heart, my senses” (77). This flicker of reawakened emotion, triggered by willfulness rather than love, is quickly extinguished. For once, Ellénore sees through its real motivation and confronts her lover: “She insisted on forcing the truth out of me; her joy disappeared, her face was covered by a dark cloud” (77).
Afterwards, Ellénore and Adolphe fall back upon the only thing they can do, given their pathological interdependency and the absence of mutual love: dissimulation and diversion. Irritated by her reproaches, Adolphe finally confesses to his mistress: “I will always be your friend, I will always feel for you the most profound affection… But love, this transport of the senses, this involuntary inebriation, this forgetfulness of all other interests and duties, Ellénore, I don’t feel them anymore” (77). In admitting to her the truth, Adolphe isn’t motivated by integrity, compassion or honesty. He allows his mask of charm to slip off once he feels that he’s already used up Ellénore’s value. He’s now ready to initiate the discard phase. As Sandra L. Brown, M.A. elaborates, “Psychopaths enjoy power most when it is equated to, and produces, victimization” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 39).
At this point in the narrative, if Ellénore were strong enough to accept this fact, she would have finally understood that Adolphe’s passion for her was predatory, shallow and ephemeral and moved on with her life. But that wouldn’t make for such a poignant story. It also wouldn’t be as psychologically realistic. Current research on the psychopathic bond shows that many women stay with their dangerous partners and persevere in toxic relationships even after they see the psychopaths for what they are and even after their pleasure and joy together are gone. Instead of letting go of her malicious lover, Ellénore continues trying to resuscitate their comatose relationship. Predictably, none of her strategies work. Adolphe aptly summarizes the emotional vacuum he senses between them: “We lived, if one could call it so, in a kind of memory of the heart, sufficiently strong so that the idea of separation was painful to us, but too weak to give us any pleasure in being together” (85).
To alleviate their mounting tension, Adolphe and Ellénore throw themselves into social life. They also resort to playing mind games with one another. She tries to make him jealous by flirting with other men. “This cold and reserved woman […] seemed to suddenly change personality. She encouraged the feelings and even the hopes of a crowd of young men” (99). But her plan predictably misfires, since having already had her, Adolphe no longer wants to possess her. In addition, he sees through her transparent ploys. Although not genuinely jealous, Adolphe exerts control over his unhappy mistress for its own sake. He asks Ellénore to stop flirting with other men. She instantly obeys, hoping, as before, that her concessions will buy her his love. They don’t, of course. On the contrary, Ellénore’s constant submission to his will bores Adolphe. A defeated, passive conquest presents no further challenge to a psychopathic seducer. The narrator recounts, “Everything around us resumed a normal existence but we were even unhappier. Ellénore thought she had new rights over me; I felt weighed by new chains” (102). The downside of establishing such dominance bonds, at least from the psychopath’s perspective, is that they also constrain the seducer himself.
To make matters worse, Adolphe is blinded by his own delusional narcissism. He imagines that without being tied to his current mistress, he’d be great, rich, successful, sociable, beloved, wealthy and desired by far more distinguished aristocratic women: even though he wasn’t doing anything productive with his life before having met Ellénore. “As stingy men see in the treasure they amass all the goods they could buy with them, so I saw in Ellénore the privation of all the successes I could have without her. It’s not just one career that I regretted. As I hadn’t tried any of them, I regretted them all. Having never used my talents, I imagined them to be limitless; I wished that nature would have made me weak and mediocre to spare me the regret of having sunk so low voluntarily” (89-90).
Having already devalued his victim, Adolphe sets the groundwork to discard her with immunity by criticizing her to others. He damages Ellénore’s tainted reputation further by making misogynist comments to mutual acquaintances. His interlocutors correctly interpret such jabs as aimed at his mistress, not at women in general. “People reproached her for not having inspired in her lover more consideration for her gender and more respect for romantic bonds” (71). He then proceeds to complain about Ellénore more directly to a man who is a friend of his father’s—and thus already biased against her—as well as to his mistress’ best friend. The psychopath’s smear campaign works. Both acquaintances fall for Adolphe’s fake pity play. They spread more nasty rumors about Ellénore.
After having demeaned his mistress and isolated her from everyone who cared about her, the seducer abandons her. When Ellénore discovers a letter Adolphe wrote to his father’s friend, in which he maligns her and promises to leave her, she falls seriously ill. She finally realizes that she has sacrificed everything and everyone in her life for a man who doesn’t even love her. Only then does Adolphe also see that he’ll soon lose the only being over whom he exercised total control. He’s not particularly concerned about Ellénore’s failing health. He worries instead about finding himself alone, deprived of such a willing and malleable target: “I broke the only being who loved me; I broke this heart, this companion, who persisted in devoting herself to me with indefatigable tenderness; already a sense of isolation overcame me. Ellénore was still breathing, but I could no longer confide in her my thoughts, I was already alone in the world, I no longer lived in this atmosphere of love that spread itself around me… The whole of nature seemed to tell me that I ceased to be loved forever” (113-4).
Readers need not worry about Adolphe, however. We can be confident that psychopathic seducers like him will always find plenty of willing victims to attract, use, manipulate and destroy. The death of Ellénore is not a tragedy, just as the story of this failed love affair is not a romance. As much as it’s difficult to believe in Adolphe’s sorrow at the end, it’s difficult to mourn the death of Ellénore. Even though she’s a more sympathetic character than Adolphe, her self-absorption, the neglect of her obligations towards her previous partner and children and her obsessive need for an empty man’s manipulative attention caused her undoing. Yet in some respects, like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina—two comparably imperfect heroines—Ellénore is an emotionally compelling character that deserves some sympathy. She reflects with stark realism the psychological devastation of victims of emotional predators. She illustrates how psychopaths turn strong and healthy individuals into effigies of their former selves. It’s difficult to comprehend this horrible experience if you haven’t felt it on your own skin. How can anybody have sympathy for someone whose moral framework and dignity have been so seriously undermined that she willingly accepts such a humiliating asymmetrical arrangement and even pines for it when the psychopath inevitably grows tired of her and discards her?
The only way I can answer this question is by suggesting that we should not look at “voluntary” relationships only in terms of a reductive voluntarism. I’ll offer an analogy to explain my point. When the women in Afghanistan “choose” to cover their whole bodies except for their eyes in burkas, when they “choose” a religious ideology which regards them as the property of men in their culture, when they “choose” to forgo education and even basic medical care, it’s because their options of gaining respect in that society are severely restricted. Basically, their “voluntary choice” is to be respected as a proper Muslim woman or not at all. Our choices aren’t open-ended among infinite possibilities. We make life decisions largely based on our temperaments, circumstances, values and, above all, the information we have at our disposal.
When dealing with psychopaths, however, you’re dealing with a steady flow of misinformation, compounded by phony yet often compelling behavior, which distorts your perception of reality and hampers your ability to make rational decisions. Lack of knowledge about personality disorders, false or partial information, brainwashing and the creation of unrealistic expectations all play a significant role in determining women’s poor choices once they’re trapped in psychopathic bonds. Furthermore, with each step they take to get closer to their psychopathic partner and strive to gain his approval, such women become increasingly entangled in a web that narrows the range of their freedom and diminishes the quality of their lives, as Adolphe did for Ellénore. Like her, they can end up prisoners of an unrequited love.
Why is this phenomenon relevant to a general audience and not just to those who have been burned by psychopathic seducers? Because just about anyone can be ensnared by emotional predators. As we’ll see in my discussion of the current research on the women who love psychopaths, psychopathic seduction can happen to anyone, not just to women predisposed to masochism or to those who lack self-esteem. Constant’s novel illustrates that psychopathic seduction happens gradually and in ways that are disguised as true love and mutual caring. Current research shows that it happens to moral and religious women as well as to those with more liberal values. It happens to women of every age, social background and range of education. Information about psychopathy and relationships with emotional predators is the best way to protect yourself against them. Without this information, you may not realize that you’re involved with a dangerous man until it’s too late: until, like the misfortunate Ellénore, you’ve invested far too much for far too long into that toxic relationship. How much are some women willing to sacrifice in the name of “love”? Both fact and fiction tell us that the answer is astonishingly much. Sometimes even everything.
Dangerous Liaisons/Legături Periculoase, Editura Vremea, http://www.edituravremea.ro/leg–turi-periculoase–cum-s–recuno–ti-un-psihopat–i-s–scapi-din-mrejele-lui
