Manon Lescaut: Kicked Out of Eden, Stuck This Side of Paradise
“We found we had no other course but to run away” – Manon Lescaut
Antoine Prévost’s Manon Lescaut gives a complex vision of love, for it is twofold. The first is an explicit negative portrayal of love, prefaced to be an ethical treatise by poor example. The second, an implied positive. Due to the story centering around the former, this essay focuses on how Prévost sees the love between main characters the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut, with words at the end for its implications for what Prévost envisions for the positive. Through a series of obstacles in pursuit and keeping of Manon that des Grieux invariably manages to choose the least virtuous response to, Prévost depicts his vision of negative love as a love that gets us through the day as an all-consuming end unto itself. The implication of this is that his positive view of love puts pleasure as part of a greater picture in the grand journey toward spiritual happiness.
Early in the novel, Prévost establishes that to be making ethical choices in love is to be condemned to suffer in the present. When first des Grieux presents himself to Manon, he recounts her laments of her grievances toward her parents. She says, “It was against her will that she was being sent to the convent, in order, no doubt, to check that predisposition to pleasure which had already declared itself” (14). So early, humanity as it is presented in Manon, is naturally inclined toward evil romantic pleasures and religious institutions are to correct this sin. Through the barrier (imminent nunnery) instantly thrown between des Grieux and the woman he loves sets up love and religion as incompatible. Furthermore, God is directly responsible for unhappiness: “…she [Manon] could see only too well that she was meant to be unhappy, but that this was apparently Heaven’s will, since it left her no means of avoiding it” (14). They found their ways of avoiding it. But immediately, godliness and fate are set up incompatible with happiness and love; it is upon this assumption that des Grieux makes a series of unfortunate turns to alleviate the issue he and Manon created for themselves.
Indeed, the greatest challenge to their love affair is des Grieux’s struggle with himself, as he refuses to attempt reconciling pleasure and virtue, but to clings to first one, then the other. Des Grieux seems to follow Manon into this mindset, perhaps an allusion to Adam and Eve. When Tiberge again attempts redeeming des Grieux, he exclaims, “But the poison of pleasure has led you astray” (27). Indeed, a moment from just out of Eden. Over and over again, des Grieux is tormented, he vascilates between the awareness of his poor decisions and the feeling of helplessness in a battle against pleasure. At a pivotal point in the novel, des Grieux finally puts into words the contradiction, as he sees it. He says to Timberge, “Your much-vaunted happiness… is nothing but a tissue of sufferings through which one reaches towards felicity,” and that similarly, “…I will feel myself only too well rewarded by a single moment spent with her [Manon] for all the griefs I have suffered in order to win it” (63). Here he argues that 1) virtue is an inevitably suffering-ridden means toward an abstract end of happiness, and 2) a lack of virtue is also laced with suffering but toward a more proximate, tangible ends of assured pleasure. A compelling argument in terms of endearing human suffering by creating his own god of sorts, but the result of the extremes he takes it to is a constant state of running after something that is always a step ahead.
Prévost’s (negative) position on love is illuminated: that it is equated with pleasure, and is somehow the net sum total of every moment of euphoric connection squeezed in before death. This rather existential way of looking at things causes Manon and des Grieux to be constantly running from that space that exists between the pleasurable moments, from virtue, from France, and from reality. Their delusion is evident in des Grieux’s defense of Manon’s spending habits: “No girl was ever less attached to money than she was, but neither could she endure for a moment the fear of having to do without it. What she needed was pleasure and diversion” (43). Des Grieux attempts to separate money and character in a way so idealistic it denied economic realities. As Manon relied on money for pleasure, and des Grieux on Manon, by necessity des Grieux relied on money for pleasure in an unsustainable manner. No matter their philosophies, des Grieux relied on the material world to maintain his reality. Des Griuex never seems to identify this particular contradiction. In this state of chasing pleasure, running from pain, the question must be raised: can escapism create real happiness? At the end of the book they are still running, and despite all their efforts, both are forcibly brought to reality: Manon by her physical death, and des Grieux by a sort of spiritual death. His replacement for god had died, so who else was he to turn to but Tiberge’s while stuck on this earthly side of paradise?
Prévost attempts to demonstrate that devoting themselves to a love premised entirely on existential impermanent moments in the end got the lovers nowhere – reality caught up to them and they ended up dead and repentant. Prévost could espouse a very Timbergean version through which eternal love carries meaning that temporal love, however sweet, cannot. I think it more likely that he implies something more simple, that excess in anything makes happiness and virtue impossible. Had the couple not acted in reaction to the idea that love and happiness are incompatible with religion, they may have found happier, more meaningful endings, albeit less dramatic ones. Because of his oscillation between brief stints of cold-turkey virtue and extended, unchecked bursts of bacchic revelry, des Grieux never gave moderation and compromise a chance.
Works Cited
Prévost, Antoine-François. Manon Lescaut. Translated by Angela Scholar. 1731. New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.
