Masculine Modes and Moods in Mircea Eliade’s Isabel and the Devil’s Waters

Abstract

Alas! the love of women! it is knownTo be a lovely and fearful thing;For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,And if 'tis lost, life hath no more to bringTo them but mockeries of the past alone,And their revenge is as the tiger's spring,Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as realTorture is theirs-what they inflict they feel.[...]Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers,Some mind their household, others dissipation,Some run away, and but exchange their cares,Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;Few changes e'er can better their affairs,Theirs being an unnatural situation,From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:Some play the devil, and write a novel.Lord Byron (from Don Juan 5: 1521)Lord Byron, offended by Lady Caroline Lamb (who personified him as a heartless Don Juan in her novel, Glenarvon, a satire of English aristocracy), didn't spare women writers and depicted them as devils, as can be seen in the above epigraph. A century later, Mircea Eliade showed little more tolerance to his female companions (some of them academics) and reversed Byron's metaphor making his male protagonist the personification of the devil. The women he met during his stay in India and to whom he alluded were not aware that they had been his antimuses until much later, since Eliade was writing his prose in Romanian and his fiction was translated later into more accessible languages, such as French and English.Mircea Eliade's first novel to appear in print (in 19 3 02 ), Isabel and the Devil's Waters, was begun in late spring, 1929, and finished in early August, when the young scholar had been living only a few months in India. It was inspired, like his subsequent works [In a Himalayan Monastery (1932), Maitreyi (1933), The Failing Light (1934)3, Construction Site. Work in Progress, An Indirect Novel (1935)], by his stay in India. The prolific historian of religions was already famous in Romania where he had published studies and articles as well as fiction in newspapers and was considered by his contemporaries as the intellectual luminary of his generation. This seemingly autobiographical novel seemed exotic to Romanian readers because it was set in faraway India, recounting Eliade's experiences as a budding Orientalist living in Mrs. Gwyn Perris's Anglo-Indian pension in Calcutta4.The narrator of Isabel and the Devil's Waters lives as a boarder of the Axon family in Calcutta5 and will marry their daughter, Isabel. Although he went to India to study its culture, Eliade had noted with disappointment in his Indian Journal,6 that he had more contact with British colonists than with locals and was afraid that he would not be able to acquire the knowledge of India he sought but would end up writing only fiction about this fascinating culture: Je suis un de ces Blancs qui viennent en Inde pour en dechiffrer les mysteres et qui finissent par pondre des romans (181). Eliade's deception was even stronger considering the Eurocentrism and the cultural prejudices he noticed in his roommates. In the Indian Journal, he describes one of his acquaintances, more recently arrived from England, as innocent of chauvinism: Catherine, arrivee d'Angleterre depuis quelques annees seulement, n'etait pas encore imbue des prejuges angloindiens; elle n'etait pas venue a detester les Indiens, a les mepriser et a les considerer comme des parias, de Tagore au dernier des mendiants. (51).Nonetheless, Eliade was given the opportunity to live in an Indian household by joining the family of his professor (Surendranath Dasgupta7), and to meet, through his agency, Rabindranath Tagore, Maitreyi Devi's mentor. His close contact with the Dasgupta family (from January to September 1930) left a strong impression on him. His involvement with Maitreyi, Dasgupta's daughter, was the inspiration for his celebrated novel, Maitreyi {Bengal Nights). …