I found Bonjour Tristesse to be a very engaging yet melancholic novel. The decadent mood that Françoise Sagan creates by portraying the French upper class in the first half of the 20th century is almost dreamy. One of the things that I found most interesting about the story is Cécile’s character development and how it is shaped by the adult women in her life. Overall, the role of female characters in the story and their impact on the main character is impressive for a book published at that time, so that’s what I will focus on in my post.
Cécile is a very entertaining main character. She seems to be very mature for her age mentally but her father’s tendency to spoil her leads her to engage in immature behavior. The coming-of-age nature of the story allows the reader to see Cécile changing substantially due to the circumstances she goes through. At the beginning of the novel, the main character lives her frivolous life carelessly, indulging in her privileged life thanks to the superficiality of her father and, probably, to the absence of a mother figure. She says “I am not ashamed of indulging in these pleasures. In fact I just take them for granted” (19) In part 1, Cécile acts like a spoiled seventeen-year-old but she doesn’t seem to have any bad intentions.
After Anne and Raymond get married, though, we start seeing her manipulative and morally questionable side. Her mean childish behaviors reach a peak when she splits up the couple and hurts Anne’s feelings so badly she has to run away. Right after Anne’s escape, however, we see her realizing what the consequences of her actions have led to. Cécile starts feeling guilty about what she has done and beings to feel that her conduct can influence others. After fighting with Anne, she says: “for the first time I realized that I had hurt a living, sensitive creature, not just a personality.” (135)
It is interesting to observe how Anne – an older, more intelligent, and successful woman – has an impact on Cécile’s character that goes way beyond Elsa’s. While Elsa is described as one of the many young mistresses that Raymond gets together with, Anne is presented as a more sophisticated woman who appears to be more serious about her relationship with Cécile’s father. I think the author might have created this juxtaposition to show the importance of a mother figure in the lives of adolescent girls. Anne is the only character in the novel who is able to change Cécile’s stubborn attitudes, and, in my opinion, that is because of Anne’s connection to the main character’s mother and her overall motherly attitudes.
My question for the class is: can Anne’s influence on Cécile’s character development be attributed to her presence as a mother figure in the story?
– Bianca