Reflections on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
By Roger Cantrell
The Origin of Mélisande
One of the most enigmatic characters in the operatic mythic world is Mélisande. Who is this mysterious young woman? Other than a few oblique references she gives in Maeterlinck's play to an unknown he, and that she was born far from here, neither the opera or the original play provide any kind of history for her. Yet, clues about who she is may possibly be found in sources outside of Maeterlinck's play.
Maeterlinck provides a clue about her in his play Arianne and Bluebeard. In Maeterlinck’s play, one of Bluebeard's seven wives is named Mélisande. Is this the same Mélisande we find in Debussy's opera? Did she escape from Bluebeard in this post-Pelléas play? Is the he Mélisande refers to when questioned the mythic Bluebeard? Does this play about the gruesome Bluebeard and his unfortunate wives relate to the characters in Pelléas et Mélisande?
The Myth of Bluebeard
Shortly told, the story of Bluebeard is about a very ugly, yet very wealthy man who
entices women to marry him by means of his wealth. In some versions, he must leave his wife for a period of time and gives her the keys to the house that includes a small key to a room she is forbidden to enter. Of course as soon as he leaves, she goes straight to the forbidden room. Discovering to her horror, the corpses of her husband's previous wives attached to the walls of the room, she accidentally drops the key and gets blood on it. Despite her attempts to hide her disobedience by removing the blood from the key, the stain keeps magically reappearing as soon as she wipes it off.
Bluebeard returns home unexpectedly and demands his keys back. She returns them with the exception of the bloodstained key. By her guilty demeanor, he guesses what she has done and tells her that she must now die and join his other wives. In the many versions of the story, the endings have varied through the ages. Some accounts have her rescued at the last minute as her brothers kill Bluebeard. Other versions have her escape from him and he returns to his home and wealth to await his next victim.
This myth speaks to us on several levels. On one level it seems to imply that a love which requires the giving up of the most private secrets of a person's identity or the loss of personal boundaries doom love to failure. Yet, the paradox to that is the feminine need to unlock the dark room of the unconscious and shine the light of consciousness on the relationship between man and woman enabling it to grow and mature.
A different aspect of the psychology of the Bluebeard tale is that it symbolizes the destructive power of the inner masculine, known in Jungian psychology as the animus. This illustrates the inability of a Bluebeard archetype to integrate the inner feminine called the anima, into his masculine-dominated personality.
Author Verena Kast writes:
Bluebeard is, on the one hand, the representative of a patriarchal society that is in a state of war with women or with the feminine principle altogether...By means of wealth, prestige and power, and despite their uneasy feelings, Bluebeard succeeds again and again in binding women to him and then he tries to kill them, like all their other predecessors, when they discover his secret. The interpretation presented here detects a sadomasochistic pattern of relationship: a dominating destructive man stands in relationship to a woman who identifies herself with his apparent power until she realizes that her femininity must inevitably be destroyed by this relationship...
The confrontation with Bluebeard consists of the woman no longer being involved with Bluebeard but rather consciously allying herself with everything he doesn't stand for.
Although Bluebeard kills his wives when they discover his secret, he does not get rid of the bodies. He keeps the women in a secret room. What he actually kills is his relationship to the women. The conflict is between the feminine wanting to be conscious in a relationship and the desire of Peter Pan (puer aeternus) to want to live in the fantasy world of the unconscious paradise.
The late Joseph Campbell has written that the Bluebeard myth belongs to the folktale-type known to folklorists as the one forbidden thing (you may open all the doors in my castle but one!). Professor Campbell also places this tale in the same category as the story in the second chapter of Genesis. In that case, the castle symbol is the Garden of Eden. In this case, the one forbidden thing is not to eat the fruit of the tree containing the knowledge of good and evil. It seems that Lot's Biblical wife who was unable to not look back at the destruction of Sodom, Pandora and her box, and the mythic Greek character of Psyche's curiosity to discover the identity of her husband all share the one forbidden thing syndrome.
One aspect of the Bluebeard tale concerns the element of blood. Which is also a recurring theme in Mélisande's relationship to her husband Golaud.
The key, which becomes covered with blood and cannot be removed, is, according to Bruno Bettelheim, an ancient motif.
Bettelheim writes:
The key that opens the door to a secret room suggests associations to the male sexual organ, particularly in first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it. ...it makes sense that the blood cannot be washed away: defloration is an irreversible event.
Bettelheim also contends that the behavior of Bluebeard's wife suggests (like the Mélisande of Debussy) that she has betrayed her husband and she hopes that he won't find out.
Bettelheim continues:
...there is no doubt that “Bluebeard" is a story which gives body to two not necessarily related emotions which are by no means alien to the child: First, jealous love, when one wishes so badly to keep one's beloveds forever that one is ready to destroy them so they cannot change loyalties. And second, sexual feelings can be terribly fascinating and tempting, but also very dangerous.
....the child knows only too well from his own experience: to find out about sexual secrets is so tempting that even adults are willing to run the greatest risks imaginable.
Mélisande and Bluebeard's wife share the same entrapments of sex and crime where an incriminating event sends their respective husbands into a murderous rage. As children we are consumed with curiousity about those mysterious sexual secrets adults have in those rooms behind closed doors.
The Mélisande of Legend and History
The search for the genesis of Mélisande may also be found in her very name. Legend and history record two famous Mélisandes. The first one was the legendary daughter of the great emperor of France: Charlemagne. This Mélisande's claim to fame is the adventure in which Moors abducted her during the Pyrenean wars of Charlemagne. Her husband, Gayferos is the same Gayferos whose own heroic exploits during a marionette exhibition so excited the Don Quixote of Cervantes fame, that he attacked the "wooden villains" to aid the famous son-in-law of Charlemagne. After being held captive for seven years, (note that in Bluebeard's case he had seven brides) Mélisande's husband, Gayferos, finally rescues her from the castle tower after being shamed into the adventure by Charlemagne.
The second Mélisande was the famous Queen of Jerusalem during the 12th Century Crusades. It was her fabled plea to the sovereign heads of Europe to save her and the holy city of Jerusalem from the infidels of Islam that helped spur the Second Crusade into being.
In the case of both "Mélisandes" there are images of the feminine in need of rescue. They are archetypal Rapunzals of the fairytale. And like Maeterlinck’s Mélisande, lets down her hair from the window of the castle tower to her waiting lover.
Mélisande and Magical Celtic Shape-shifting
Finally, we return to Maeterlinck's play to search for Mélisande. This play resounds with the imagery of Celtic legend. There is an old Celtic tale sometimes called Oisin's Mother, and in author-psychologist Claire Douglas's insightful retelling, the myth begins with a beautiful fairy maiden named Saeve. Her relative, the evil Black Driud, lusted for her and watched her with his evil eye. Unable to escape his incestuous invasions, Saeve's terror grew until she was forced to flee before his approach. As her frightened eyes grew larger like a deer's, Saeve magically escaped in the form of a fawn.
Mélisande is a shape-shifting sister to Saeve. Fleeing from a masculine invasion, she is the victim of a wound inflicted by the pursuing Golaud and his hounds as she sought to escape in the form of the sacred boar. The sacred boar is a very old symbol of the Celtic boar-goddess known as Arduinna.
Miranda Green in her Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend writes:
She (Arduinna) is probably a huntress, akin to the Roman Dianna, representative of the spirit of the forest and protectoress of all its inhabitants, hunters and hunted.
Wounding the boar causes the sacred boar to shape-shift back to the young girl he discovers weeping by a well.
In the mythological world, incest relates not only to a personal violation between two people, but to the impersonal violation society imposes as a set of inauthentic rules by which a human being is expected to accept in the service of the social system. This leaves the individual path to be either ignored or forbidden to take.
John Layard, in his depth-psychology study A Celtic Quest, writes:
Incest is here taken psychologically as indicating a closed system impervious to change, the 'incest taboo' as that which breaks this closed circle and allows of expansion into something larger and more worthwhile...
When Golaud first sees Mélisande why does he perceive her as a young girl? There are two aspects to his perception. Like Saeve, the deep wound of the personal incest experience is one that happens in childhood.
As Claire Douglas writes:
Dark powers get stirred up before the ego is secure. One result can be panic and flight: life as a fawn replaces growing up. The wounded person inwardly remands stuck in the childhood though the outward person maybe a fully mature adult. So, there is a life-long tragic significance to the violent element of incest in Saeve's story.
Sight as the seeing aspect of the five senses, plays a pivotal role for Golaud. The forest Golaud has entered is a magical place of testing and illusion.
The form in which Golaud thinks he 'sees' Mélisande as a little girl, confirms Marcus Antoninus' observation that: The nature of the universe (the Great Mother, which symbolizes the forest) delights not in anything so much as to alter all things, and present them under a new form. This is her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird a beast- now a flower, then a frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performance, as men are their own fancies.
In Dan Milman's book, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior, there is a conversation between a female Shaman character called Mama Chia and her young initiate, Dan, about the subject of shape-shifting and its personal meaning.
“So, you thought I'd become a bird,” she said. “Well I think you've been reading too much Carlos Castaneda. I've seen stranger things,” I said defensively. Quoting William Shakespeare, she said ‘There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophies’ Yes, Dan, and many everyday miracles go unnoticed by everyday people.
But people don't physically change into little birds. Shape shifting involves the transference of consciousness, a form of deep empathy. Nothing more and nothing less.
“Damsels, Fountains and Knights”
Pythagoras wrote: The world is built upon the power of numbers. For instance, the image of things in three, whether they are goddesses, heroes or demons, recurs over and over throughout the stories of all cultures and mythologies. One of these stories is an ancient legend of King Arthur's court about one of his greatest knights and two of his companions as retold by Malory in Book IV of Le Morte d'Arthur.
They arrive at the forest of Arroy, (Like the first scene in Debussy’s opera, the forest is symbolic of the unconscious) where says Marhaus' came never knight since it was christened' but he found strange adventures; and so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones, (the place between pairs of opposites...good and evil, light and dark) and thereby they saw a fair fountain (yet again the image of a fountain) and three damsels sitting thereby. And they rode to them, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her and she was three score winter of age or more, and her hair was white under the garland. The second damsel was thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel was but fifteen year of age, and a garland of flowers about her head. When these knights had so beheld them, they asked them the cause. The women replied: if we may see any errant knights, to teach them unto strange adventures; and ye be three knights that seek adventures, and we be three damsels, and therefore each one of you must choose one of us.... (Book IV, Ch.xix0)
The meaning of the previous Mallory episode is interpreted by John Matthews, in his book about Gawain, as the meeting between the Goddess, in her triple aspect as Virgin-Mother-Crone, with Gawain in the triple aspect of Hero.
John Matthews writes that Gawain is in actuality in the service of the Goddess and is being tested by her for his worthiness. Gawain's encounter with the Goddess at her fountain offers intriguing comparisons with the Golaud/Mélisande meeting. These images symbolize the desire of the divine (aka Mélisande) to join with the forms of time which Golaud, the human element, represents. Golaud seeks to find fulfillment in his frail short life by returning to the wellspring of his existence by being tested by the Goddess. This testing process, by which our illusions are stripped from us, is then the actual process by which the transcendent is ultimately revealed.
Finally, one could come to the conclusion that all of these “reflections” carry a fragment of truth about Mélisande and that the search for her is something beyond the physical personality she represents. Golaud enters the forest where it is darkest and there is no path. This search leads him to a mythical threshold called the labyrinth, where in the words ofthe religious scholar, Mircea Eliade, we enter a maze designed to defend the ‘Centre’. To reach this ‘Centre’, like Dante in his Divine Comedy, Golaud awakens to find himself in a dark wood at the mid-point of his life beginning a journey to the subtle inner world of his own being. While following the maze in this Mélisande-labyrinth a profound ritual unfolds. It is this searching ritual which could eventually lead you to the center of the mystery of who Mélisande is and even possibly who you are.
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