Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
Why We Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Erica Webb on why she recommended “In Defense of Aunt Léonie” by Jodie Noel Vinson.
The way Jodie Noel Vinson introduces Marcel Proust’s Léonie to us in her essay, “In Defense of Aunt Léonie,” is striking with a series of fragmented thoughts threaded together. This unique style of organization caught my eye immediately; some portions, despite only being single sentences, carry as much weight as – if not more than – any other section because of how Vinson has chosen to portray them. With the introduction of Proust’s experiences, she takes us back and forth in time, between fact and fiction, using these little fragments. Both instances, of Proust and of his creation, seamlessly flow into her meditations on how pain and illness are treated at large, in life, and it is because of this unique structure that I, as a reader, was so drawn into the argument being made. Much like crossing a river, these interwoven ideas, some seemingly displaced – but, in the end, right where they belong – are the stepping stones on which Vinson creates the beautiful throughline of her piece. While reading In Search of Lost Time is not a requirement to understand Vinson’s argument, her writing is so intriguing in its nature that it makes me want to explore the source material – and the eponymous Léonie. Part analysis of the woman’s role in In Search of Lost Time, part discussion of Marcel Proust’s own life, and part reflection on how chronic pain and illness are treated in society, “In Defense of Aunt Léonie” is a compelling piece and I’m overjoyed that it has found its home in MQR.
Part I: The Claim
She had a regal way of complaining.
1.
George Painter, Proust’s foremost biographer, calls her (as well as her author) an “imaginary invalid.”
2.
To the scholar F. C. Green, she is “an eccentric widowed malade imaginaire.” What the French also call une vieille maniaque.
3.
The maid Françoise remembers her weighing “no more than a bag of cherries.”
4.
At first, the reader recognizes and delights in the blithe, winking depiction of the bedridden widow. As Green puts it, Léonie Octave “enjoys all the advantages of ill health with few of the unpleasant symptoms.”
5.
“I must remember that I never slept a wink,” the narrator overhears his aunt tell herself one morning, as if preparing her lines for a play. The daily performance must retain some drama if its lone actor is to continue to convince her audience.
6.
Her symptoms, including insomnia—what Proust calls her “great claim to distinction”—are renowned within the family and throughout the village of Combray. If a shopkeeper must pound a nail into a crate, he sends first to Françoise to learn if Léonie might be—the word couched comfortably in quotes—“resting.”
7.
She is often at rest. In the first book of the seven-volume novel alone, Aunt Léonie is present on close to sixty pages. On all but one of those pages, she is in bed.
8.
In these scenes, Léonie appears ancient—at least through the eyes of the child narrator. She allows him to kiss her “sad brow, pale and lifeless, on which . . . she would not yet have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone.”
9.
Other times, as when Françoise serves her creamed eggs on a plate embossed with an image from Arabian Nights, Léonie can seem almost childlike. She reads the caption below each illustration through her spectacles, murmuring, “Very good indeed.”
10.
Green calls her a “harmless, amusing rather queer old lady.” At the time of her six-year-old nephew’s visits, her counterpart in life (see 18) would have been in her late forties.
11.
In early iterations, Aunt Léonie, as traced by Maureen Ramsden through Proust’s cahiers, is merely infirm, elderly. She becomes, in each progressive version, a bit sicker, as if her failing health were tied to the drafting of the book until she appears, on the first pages of In Search of Lost Time, as a bedridden hypochondriac intent on her medicines and routines.
12.
The family’s habits are shaped by these routines. They send up to the sickroom to relay tales from their walks, which invariably follow one of two “ways” beginning and ending at Léonie’s house. If the family is late because, instead of the titular Swann’s Way, they took the Guermantes Way, they rush to assure the aunt of their safe arrival, particularly if she did not see them depart by the back gate—signaling the longer journey—causing her to assume the worst.
13.
She likes to assume the worst. In the protracted hours between waking and three o’clock vespers, perhaps to avoid thinking of her own demise, Léonie has dark fantasies about the deaths of others.
14.
In truth, it can be hard to like her. The aunt spends her days gossiping with Eulalie—who, along with the Reverend Curé, is one of the few guests admitted to her room. Léonie crafts minor domestic upheavals, sets vicious traps, whispering intrigues behind closed doors, then confiding in Françoise about her faithful visitor’s suspected disloyalty.
15.
Her insistence on illness is an ever-present vigilance. When the Reverend Curé, in his excitement to convey the view from his church’s loftiest point, encompasses the sick woman in his liberal use of the second person (“there’s a strong breeze up there, once you get to the top”), Léonie is offended by the implication she “could ever, possibly be capable of climbing into his belfry.”
16.
Ramsden believes Proust “slowly created the image of the aunt to reflect characteristics of the hero, but often in the form of parody.” Another critic agrees: “Proust sketched this character partly as a sly libel on himself, as a church artist, relishing the chance to play the sinner, renders himself as one of the devils in his portrayal of hell.”
17.
To Jacques de Chastonay, she is mere caricature (symbole caricatural du narrateur lui-même). Or, as Ramsden has it, a “photographic negative” of her author.
18.
And it’s true, Proust’s work drew from life. Academics trace flickers of fin de siècle France through his novel, the characters shadows of those who patronized Parisian soirées and toured the countryside during the author’s lifetime. In this auto-fiction, Aunt Léonie is based on Proust’s Aunt Élisabeth Amiot, whose house he frequented as a child in Illiers—the fictional Combray—which now serves as a museum, mecca for the literary pilgrim.
19.
What do we know about Élisabeth Amiot? Proust’s maid, Céleste Albaret (who, by the time she came into his service, barely saw her employer out of bed), recalled the author saying that, although she had three children, he had never seen his aunt except in bed.
20.
From Painter we learn Aunt Amiot had gentle eyes and good tastes. If her maid’s cooking was exquisite, the biographer intimates, “Aunt Élisabeth’s judgment was even more so.” Her refined palate was so revered that her refusal to finish a dish was a sure sign of its inferiority. Yet Élisabeth was too polite to ever admit there might not have been “quite enough sugar in the pudding.”
21.
In black-and-white photographs from the time—many of them by Nadar—women swan in front of backdrops, fans held demurely or coquettishly in front of them, flamboyant hats perched on elaborate coiffures. Élisabeth Amiot’s portrait, in contrast, is austere, maybe a little sad. Her dark hair, parted down the middle, is covered by a ribboned cap, a veil of black lace cascades over one shoulder. Her ears are dainty, eyebrows thick. Beneath them the deep-set eyes are like her nephew’s, but smaller, lidded by heavy half-moons. The lips are full but pressed in a line. She wears a high white collar and tie above a dark dress, with a few ornamental buttons sewn on.
22.
As he did with many of his societal relationships, Proust used Aunt Amiot as amusing fodder for his imagination. “I often used to stay in her room and listen when people came to see her,” he once relayed to Céleste. “She had a regal way of complaining.”
23.
In the novel, Léonie’s complaints are more like concessions. Less like whines and more like sighs. As if by “regal” Proust meant “resigned.” Though, like any mortal, she preferred not to dwell too specifically on her death.
24.
Few friends are left to Léonie by the time the reader meets her. One by one, visitors have been banished from her chamber by their assumption that if she would just get some exercise or eat red meat, she would recover, or by their implication that she is at death’s door.
25.
Was she at death’s door? The question may not have an answer. There’s no viable way to tell whether a fictional character is sick or not. She exists only on the page, as rendered by the writer. There’s no real referent to which we can turn to verify his depiction. In other words, Léonie Octave is at the mercy of her author.
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Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and AGNI, among other places. She is the recipient of the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and a residency from the Jentel Foundation. www.jodienoelvinson.com
