Eline Vere by Louis Couperus

Half-successful attempt at a psychological novel

Louis Couperus (1863–1923) was a Dutch novelist who achieved some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Various critics and scholars have classified him as a realist, a naturalist, and a Dutch sensitivist. His first novel Eline Vere was published in 1889 and released in English translation in 1892.

The novel depicts bourgeois society in The Hague. Eline Vere is a wealthy orphaned young woman who lives with her sister’s family. Their social set is comprised of about a half dozen well-acquainted families who all gather frequently for dinners, dances, and outings. Privacy is at a minimum, as no one can seem to do anything without inviting at least a dozen companions. The roster of these families is difficult to keep track of. They all have multiple children who grow up expecting to marry from this tight-knit circle of friends. Among this set, Eline is generally regarded as the most beautiful girl, but there’s something kind of flighty and stuck-up about her personality that’s off-putting to some. For the first half of the novel, you wonder why it’s named after Eline Vere because she barely appears. The second half, however, focuses entirely on her. Over the course of the book, Eline undergoes a few loves and a few minor trials that affect her outlook on life. Her behavior abruptly becomes irrational, and from the reader’s perspective, not entirely believable. She gradually declines into a paralyzing and depressing malaise.

Eline Vere seems to have been obviously influenced by Emile Zola’s l’Assomoir, and probably by way of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. In l’Assomoir, Zola charts the downfall of a woman who succumbs to alcoholism; in Eline Vere, Couperus charts a similar trajectory for mental illness. The heroine of l’Assomoir comes from among the lower classes. Eline, on the other hand, is of the “gentlefolk” who don’t work for a living and occupy themselves with frequent balls and parties, which is probably what made this novel more attractive to an English audience, as it’s more in keeping with Victorian literature than l’Assomoir. Zola and Couperus, to some degree, are both naturalist authors, so they both claim to employ scientific techniques in their fiction, ostensibly drawing from the fields of psychology, medicine, and genetics. L’Assomoir, however, is really the far more scientific (i.e. realistic) of the two. Eline Vere, on the other hand, reads more like a romantic opera.

Eline Vere can be called a psychological novel, but at this point psychology was still a very young field. This novel was published before any of Freud’s books. Couperus certainly makes some baby steps towards psychological authenticity, but it still reads like quite a long way from the more mature psychological novels of Knut Hamsun or Hermann Hesse. Unlike the development of Gervaise’s alcoholism in l’Assomoir, the mental illness from which Eline suffers seems like a collection of assorted symptoms that really don’t follow any logical progression. Her irrational episodes are calculated for operatic drama and not a thoughtful study of mental illness or its social causes. In hindsight, Eline’s malady would fall under the general sexistly amorphous headings of “hysteria” or “women’s nerves” that were commonly cited in fiction of this era.

Eline Vere may be the work for which Couperus is best-known outside of the Netherlands, but in my opinion, he’s got better books in his oeuvre. His follow-up to this debut, Footsteps of Fate (1890) is an improvement. Far superior is his four-novel Small Souls series (including the books Small Souls, The Later Life, The Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan), which also depicts bourgeois life in The Hague but does so with the admirable realism of a mature naturalist style.