My Year With Proust - Day 172

   "'I should very much like, if you have such a thing, a photograph of the little portrait of Miss Sacripant.  By the way, that's not a real name, surely?'

   'It's the name of a character the sitter played in a stupid little musical comedy.'

   'But, I assure you, Monsieur, that I've never set eyes on her; you look as though you thought that I knew her.'

   Elstir was silent.  'It couldn't be Mme Swann before she was married?' I hazarded, in one of those sudden fortuitous stumblings upon the truth, which are rare enough in all conscience, and yet suffice, after the event, to give a certain cumulative support to the theory of presentiments, provided that one takes care to forget all the wrong gestures that would invalidate it.

   Elstir did not reply.  The portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crecy.  She had preferred not to keep it for many reasons, some of them only too obvious.  But there were others less apparent.  The portrait dated from before the point at which Odette, disciplining her features, had made of her face and figure that creation the broad outlines of which her hair-dressers, her dressmakers, she herself - in her way of holding herself, of speaking, of smiling, of moving her hands and eyes, of thinking - were to respect throughout the years to come.  It required the vitiated taste of a surfeited lover to make Swann prefer to all the countless photographs of the 'definitive' Odette who was his charming wife the little photograph, which he kept in his room and in which, beneath a straw hat trimmed with pansies, one saw a thin young woman, fairly plain, with bunched out hair and drawn features."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 919-920

Initially I included this passage mainly because it once again draws in Odette, a character who increasingly fascinates me.  I'm frustrated that Proust, at least up to this point, did not share more of her internal world with the reader; she's more of an object or an ideal than a person.  Of course, it may well be that I wasn't paying enough attention to the more subtle points Proust was making and I'll understand her more clearly on a second reading.

Upon more mature reflection, however, I'm also intrigued by Odette's decision to leave the painting with Elstir.  Certainly, some of it relates to the fact that it would be a constant reminder for her, and for Swann, of her more "notorious" past.  However, I think that's only part of it, and Proust makes that clear.  Odette doesn't like that painting because it was of an Odette before she "became" ODETTE, before she created herself, the public self, the self that would eventually become Mme Swann.  As any student who survived Concepts of the Self at Champlain will tell you, the self is a negotiated construct, and this is one of the reasons why we, like Odette, cringe at earlier pictures of ourselves.  It's not simply that we might look ridiculous or that we're wearing whatever horrible clothes were the fashion then or are sporting an absurd haircut, but because we're viewing painfully incomplete and clumsy, although oddly predictive, proto-versions of the self we eventually constructed.