Response to "Olympia's Look"

From Susan Vreeland’s story, we get several impressions of the character of Suzanne Manet. She is at times the docile wife, suspecting infidelity but never confronting Édouard, and at other times she is fierce and unrelenting, describing the horrors of Édouard’s illness to Victorine. She also has a strong sense of her Dutch identity; she sets herself apart from French women and considers many of her personality traits to be inherently Dutch. She is, in other words, a multi-faceted character.

Before Édouard’s death, Suzanne seems stifled by her sense of propriety. She suspects, but does not ask; she longs for intimacy with Édouard in everyday transactions but never tells him of her feelings. She even runs the faucet so that he cannot hear her sobbing over the news of his terrible illness. Once she comes to the realization that she will soon be on her own, however, Suzanne begins to assert herself in anticipation of the times to come. She demands to have the secret letter, and leaves it out in the open for Édouard to see. After his death, she becomes even more firm. She angrily admonishes Isabelle at the wedding, and when she visits Victorine she is strong and strangely triumphant.

There are a few passages that were particularly interesting to me. The first is on the first page of the story: “She kissed him, a brush of the lips on both cheeks in the French way she’d adopted.” Right from the start, the internal sense Suzanne has of herself is decidedly un-French. She has adopted the French ways, but she doesn’t feel French. She feels Dutch, she IS Dutch and it provides a small level of alienation from Édouard. She wonders if she had been French, if things would have been different; she warns Albert that Dutch women may seem tolerant, but they are not forgiving; she wonders if the Philippine nut that Édouard drew is a French symbol of love. All these small details serve to remind the reader that Suzanne keenly feels foreign.

A second passage that was interesting was really the whole section where Suzanne meets Victorine. It seems as though, throughout the whole encounter, she is really speaking for the benefit of her own peace of mind than to Victorine. She seems to be convincing herself that she was the most important to Édouard, that it was she who he really loved and who really loved him. Victorine does not claim otherwise; she tells Suzanne that they were merely “collaborators”, and yet Suzanne has this desperate desire to prove that she had the real relationship with Édouard. In the end I think that by cowing Victorine she is really defeating the part of herself that fears that he had completely replaced her with all of his elegant French mistresses.

We’re not really given the whole background of Suzanne’s life, but there is a very real sense of who she is and where she will go. She has plans for her life without Édouard, and she fastidiously prepares for the times ahead by asking Albert to make copies of the paintings, learning how to do things for herself, and learning how to be assertive. I think that Suzanne has a very strong will, at first hidden but brought out by circumstances. She is not just going to lie down and fade quietly away once Édouard is gone – she will have a livelihood, and make a place for herself in the world through her husband’s legacy. Though situations beyond her control have shaped her life, she is taking the reins and taking charge.

One funny final note about this story; on page 88, when Suzanne is becoming more and more intense, carried away by the idea that it was Victorine who gave Édouard the syphilis, it says, “She stroked the cat more roughly.” Two pages before it said she stroked the cat with “long, slow strokes.” I just get this image of her first petting the cat like a classic Bond villain, slow and deliberately, then petting harder and faster as she rants more and more. I can imagine the poor cat sitting there and taking it, wishing it were somewhere else. It just struck me as funny and I immediately pictured that scenario.