Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EUGENE SUE'S FREDERICK BASTIEN: ENVY 173
envious boy have the utmost difficulty in recognizing the true motive for
the hatred of another that is gradually becoming manifest. It takes them
months.
This double camouflaging of the envy-motive is a consistent feature:
the envious man will confess to almost any other sin or emotional
impulse (in Sue's novel it is intention to murder) before he will confess to
his own envy. And to those around a person impelled by envy, this is the
very last motive they will think of, and that with great reluctance. Not
only does Sue depict this circumstance convincingly and with great
accuracy but he uses it to construct a dramatic plot.
The extent to which Sue concerned himself with envy is evident from
the phenomenology of this emotion which the novel slowly develops
before our eyes.
The sixteen-year-old boy whom mounting envy transforms in the
course of a few months from being happy and studious into a savage
hater, well on the way to becoming a murderer, had a rather lonely
childhood, spent on a small farm with his pretty young mother. This
woman, who had been married against her will and had rejected her
husband, lived apart from him on a minimal income. The misfortunes
start when the family doctor obtains permission for mother and son to
visit a neighbouring chateau and its grounds while its owner, the young
marquis, and his grandmother are away. The son is not only embittered
by the chateau servants' high-handed treatment of his mother and the
doctor during their short visit, but for the first time becomes painfully
aware of the meanness and poverty of his own home.
Sue then describes his condition as follows: 'He felt a strange, growing
sense of moral unease ... a feeling which, although still ill-defined,
made him so ashamed that for the first time in his life he failed to confide
in his mother, afraid of her perceptivity. . . .'
A little later when he sees his pretty mother sitting at home in front of
her wretched dressing-table, he suddenly recalls the rooms in the chateau.
Envy grips him, and he says to himself: 'Wouldn't the elegant,
sumptuous boudoir which I saw at the chateau have been put to better use
by a charming person like my mother instead of that octogenarian
marquise?,21
21 E. Sue, Frederick Bastien: Envy, Boston, no date, Vol. 2, pp. 49 f.