Thoughts on Adolphe

Adolphe struggles with the same problem that Werther struggled with. Both men, whether knowingly or ignorantly, conjure up insatiable visions and creations of a woman in their minds. Their imaginations completely take over their realities, and they begin to live only in their imaginations. The first support of this I see in Adolphe is when Ellenore takes her first long vacation to see friends, and Adolphe is unsure of when she will return. When he finally receives word that she is returning, his imaginations gets to work: “I visualized her smiling as I came up to her at the way in which a short absence had calmed a young hothead’s effervescence… the vision of her was floating before my eyes, holding sway over my heart. (52)”
The creation of Ellenore as a forbidden love began in Adolphe’s imagination. He even says that he was looking for some sort of game; some sort of woman who was worthy of his efforts. Because Ellenore was already married and had children, his quest would be that much more worthy. This unhealthy and obsessive love that Adolphe feels is more towards an image of Ellenore in Adolphe’s mind than it is towards Ellenore in reality. Thus, Adolphe creates Ellenore as he pleases.
Later, when he has become dissatisfied with the love affair with Ellenore, Adolphe says that, “We are such unstable creatures that feelings we pretend to have we really do have in the end. (83)” His imagination is so strong and vivid that he creates a world in his mind that would please his father. “The wife suddenly conjured up by my imagination fitted into all these visions and made all such wishes permissible;… and all these things seemed so real, so intensely alive that they made me tremble almost unbearably. (96)”
Because Adolphe is with Ellenore, he cannot satisfy his father. His father wants Adolphe to use his talents and have a wife and family. Adolphe must also have a vivid imagination where he can place himself in a world with a wife where he can please his father, like shown in the quote above.
The most important observation from this book is the distinction between reality and the imagination. As I have tried to show before, Adolphe created this divine-like vision of Ellenore in his mind. The fact that their love was forbidden only strengthened his desire for her in his fantasy. But when his fantasy is finally fulfilled, after a short while he comes to realize that Ellenore does not exist in reality as she did in his imagination. Ellenore at one point tries to rekindle Adolphe’s imagination by flirting with many other men in their town. She knows the power of Adolphe’s imagination, but at that point in their relationship, Adolphe has already learned to differentiate (maybe subconsciously) between the two.