Re: Making Sense of Sarah

I am going to drop this response to Russ's excellent post here so that it doesn't get lost in the comments.

I think that Russ is right that Sarah is a kind of generic "woman" upon whom Greene is basing his apologia for his own adulterous behavior. Russ caught something I had missed, namely that Sarah is never given her own "form", but, rather is deliberately left a blank form upon which the reader can fill in whatever he finds most attractive in a woman.

I may have missed that point, but I certainly had the sense of Sarah being very vaguely sketched as an individual.

One of the feminist literary types can speak to this better than I, but I understand that feminists complain about the cultural trope that describes women as either "madonna" or "whore", i.e., sinner or saint. In Sarah we see the Madonna/Whore complex in spades. She is a slut of the first order, but then she works miracles, and when she works miracles, she is totally chaste. So, Greene seems to be saying that it's one or the other - either women are chaste "teases" or wanton sluts.

*Jeez*!

*Shudder*

Who says that kind of thing?

In my experience, immature, self-centered, narcissistic men say that kind of thing because that is how they see - or how they want to see - the world.

Knowing the history of Greene as we do, does "immature, self-centered, and narcissistic" seem like an apt description of a flagrant adulterer like Greene? Yup, could be.

There is also the treatment of Sarah as being, in my view, farely immature. To me, she seemed more like a breathy teenager than a mature woman.

Sarah in The End of the Affair reminded me of another purportedly self-creating female character - Catherine Barkley in Farewell to Arms. I found Catherine to be unreal, at times talking baby-talk to Captain Henry but always being sexually accessible to him and - dream of dreams - conveniently removing herself without complaint by dying in childbirth so that he could go on to his experience. This Wiki article describes Catherine:

Feminist thinkers will see in Catherine, Hemingway's perfect woman: wise and cynical in many ways, her wisdom cannot contain her desire. As Henry gives his health and youth to the war effort, Catherine's chief heroism is to ignore the dangers of unprotected sex and to accept the pain and death of childbirth stoically.

I mean, come-on now, if you were a self-centered, macho narcissist, how cool would it be to have a woman like that!

John Kasian told me that in light of the semi-autobiographical nature of "Farewell" it is fair to say that Catherine represented the kind of woman that Hemingway dreamed about when he was a teenager in Italy. From that perspective - the perspective of a teenager - Catherine seems more realistic than from the perspective of a middle-age burnout.

Similarly, given the autobiographical nature of The End of the Affair, I think it may be fair to say that Sarah represents an ideal for Greene, and that that says more about Greene than about "Sarah." I think it may be fair to say that Greene is looking to apologize for his adultery, and he may be saying that if only he had a lover who became a saint, then he might have been a better person.