My Husband

“I don’t know of any fictional heroine who can show me how to behave. There are plenty of despairing lovers who sing about loss or rejection. But I don’t know of any novel, any film, any poem that can serve as my example, show me how to love better, less intensely.”

As these lines show, Ariane’s narrative is frank and emotionally raw, revealing her intimate highs and lows. The fact that Ariane does not have any role models for her peculiar kind of love—a long-married woman yearning for the husband she lives with—is an early clue about the toxicity of her marriage. Ariane does not see it, but her yearning for her husband is mixed up with her insecurity about her own inferior position in their power dynamics, introducing The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession.

“I wonder whether I’m the only one to notice the universal women’s waiting room.”

Ariane’s views on marriage and womanhood are often conventional and stereotypical, reflecting The Oppressive Nature of Gendered Expectations. Though Ariane is a contemporary woman with a meaningful career, she casts herself in the role of a passive figure, always awaiting her husband. She sees the world as divided between active men who go to work and the breathless women who yearn for their return. The irony is that Ariane makes this observation on a day when she has herself been to work at her high school, and labored over the book she is translating.

“It was not a reminiscence, but a premonition: ‘I’ve never done anything but wait outside the closed door.’”

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is an important literary allusion in the novel, with Ariane often referring to the book. Ariane recalls a line which affected her deeply the first time she read The Lover, identifying with the protagonist’s contradictory feeling of being left out, yet anticipating something. Ariane thinks the line was a premonition about her life, for which she is still waiting to happen. These complex feelings indicate that Ariane does not feel at peace with her persona, possibly because she represses her emotions and looks to others for self-validation.

“On the pillow is a fine trail of dandruff, like the first snowfall. Often, I am moved to find these flakes in our bed or on the collar of a shirt. Is it bizarre to feel tenderness toward my husband’s dandruff?”

Ariane’s observation is an example of Maud Ventura’s use of satire to parody The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession. Ariane is so obsessed with her husband that she is moved even by the detritus of his skin; her tenderness is so excessive that it appears absurd. Ventura also shows how a person in love may seem silly to an outsider, but is themselves steeped in romance and genuineness.

“English is simplistic: no declensions to memorize, no adjective agreement. However, it’s a hilly language, irregular and changing: a rudimentary grammar, but expressions that sound good to the ear and an accent impossible to imitate […] English will always have a leg up on you. Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t choose a logical, predictable language like German. With English I have to give up all control, which often irritates or frustrates me, but maybe it also explains why I haven’t grown tired of it.”

As an English teacher and translator, attention to language is an essential part of Ariane’s mental make-up, with her translation work forming an important motif. Here, her opinions of English could well apply to her choice of husband. Ariane likes English despite its seeming simplicity; she knows the simplicity is deceptive because English is a finicky, idiosyncratic language. Similarly, her so-called normal husband keeps her on her toes because of his unpredictability. Just as English is out of her control, so is her husband.

“People have asked me if my work as a translator has made me want to write my own things. My response has always been the same: I don’t think of myself as an author. When I translate, I am merely an interpreter, and that suits me perfectly.”

Ariane’s lines show her tendency to undervalue herself: She presents her work as a literary translator as mere interpretation, ignoring the fact that interpretation too requires ingenuity, and literary translation in particular is a challenging, creative task. Ariane’s tendency to undervalue her work is linked with her quest to find self-worth in external markers of success, such as status and marriage, invoking the theme Appearances Versus Reality.

“When it comes to clothes, I prefer not to take any risks, and I pay whatever the price is without batting an eye.”

Appearances Versus Reality is an important theme in the book, with characters placing great premium on how they come across to others. Beauty and style are seen as markers of status, which is why Ariane doesn’t take a chance with fashion. She prefers to dress in the most expensive clothes possible, as long as the clothes project an air of class and polish.

“So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.”

Ariane’s indignation at the clementine comment is an example of the text’s use of humor and satire. Apart from satirizing Ariane’s tendency to overthink, these lines also add lightness to the proceedings, breaking up the tense atmosphere created by Ariane’s anxious thoughts. Ariane despises the comparison to a clementine—a citrus, segmented fruit—because it implies she is common and easy to unpeel. She would rather be thought of as a pineapple, like Louise, which she sees as exotic and thorny, difficult to access.

“During this time, my husband continues to revel in his egotistical sleep. In this moment, I detest him. There is no other solution: I scream as though I’m having a nightmare. He wakes up with a jump. I stammer in a falsely sleepy voice that I’m sorry, just a bad dream, and turn back to my side of the bed. I hope my husband can’t fall back asleep and that his insomnia will leave him the time necessary to reflect on his betrayal.”

These lines establish the dichotomous nature of Ariane’s feelings for her husband, complicating The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession. While she often expresses intense love for him, she is also frequently irritated by him. Ariane does not express her anger in a healthy and direct way: Even after the husband wakes up, Ariane pretends the scream is from a bad nightmare instead of telling him what’s bothering her. These passive-aggressive tactics reflect the toxic dynamics in their marriage.

“Each new person who enters into our life is an additional dilution of his attention, a dilution of him, and I’m horrified by this. The energy he expends toward others hurts me: it tells me that I am not enough for him.”

Ariane is an unreliable narrator, a narrator whose testimony lacks credibility, either because they are hiding something or because their perspective comes across as warped. As these lines show, the author positions Ariane as an unreliable narrator by emphasizing Ariane’s skewed take on life. Ariane is so insecure about her husband that she is “horrified” by him making new friends. A simple act like expanding his social circle seems to Ariane a personal attack on her.

“Marriage is all about compromise. But why did I have to be the one to adapt? There was no more reason for it to have been me to give in rather than him. And yet the closed shutters became a foregone conclusion between us. It was hardly a question.”

By positioning Ariane as an unreliable narrator, the author often uses misdirection and red herrings to build up the suspense in the plot. One such misdirection is that everything Ariane says is hyperbole, whereas the truth is that Ariane’s exaggerations often contain a grain of truth. Here, she is actually questioning the troubled dynamics of her marriage, as well as the still-persistent notion that women should be the ones to compromise in a marriage. The advice in italics is from Ariane’s mother, implying how women are culturally wired to make a marriage work at any cost and speaking to The Oppressive Nature of Gendered Expectations.

“In reality, marriage didn’t calm me down. I realized at the very moment we said “I do” that my husband could still divorce me. Then I hoped that he would want to buy a house with me, and then have a child with me, certain that these acts would be more solid than a contract signed at city hall or a promise made before God. I was constantly awaiting the next step. I discovered a world of proofs of love, with commitment everywhere and love nowhere. And fifteen years after our first date, I still sleep just as poorly.”

Although Ariane claims to love marriage and her husband, she also admits that being married has not fixed her problems in any way. She had assumed that she would feel more solid and settled once she was married, yet each thing she has gained through marriage—husband, children, house—only implies she has more things to lose. The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession keeps her feeling perpetually insecure.

“Tonight, I decide that if I could have one magical power, I would want to control dreams. I would inflict horrible nightmares on anyone who posed a threat to me, and meddle in my husband’s sleep to make him dream of me each night…I would show him my body in its most magnificent form so that he would never stop desiring me, and our house looking its best so that he would always want to stay.”

This passage establishes two truths about Ariane: She wishes to exercise control on the chaotic world around her, and the boundaries between Appearances Versus Reality are often blurred for her. Ariane wants to magically inhabit her husband’s mind to make him desire her all the more. These thoughts show Ariane’s perspective on reality is skewed, and that she believes her husband can only value her for outward, external factors—her beauty, their lovely home.

“So I flirt over text, I agree to meet, I wear a pretty dress, I get waxed, I let myself be penetrated a few times. But I would be better off facing facts: despite my best affairs, I’ve never managed to develop feelings for a stranger. I am truly incapable of having a real affair.”

One of the distinctive features of Ariane’s narration is her propensity for elision. After a passionate, pleasurable afternoon with Maxime, Ariane absolves herself of responsibility for the affair, now describing such encounters as a rote, unwilling task. She describes sex as letting herself “be penetrated a few times.” The elision makes it easy for her to declare that the affairs are devoid of emotion, meaningless. The narrative itself reveals the unintended irony in Ariane’s declaration, since it is clear that she is capable of an affair and did enjoy sex with Maxime.

“But even when he’s deep inside me, my husband is out of my reach. Even now, I still miss him so much. When he leaves my body, he leaves a gaping wound, a horrible void, a gash waiting to be infected.”

he “wound” or “void” to which Ariane refers when she and her husband make love symbolizes the troubling secrets in their marriage. Ariane romanticizes the void, seeing it as a symptom of her nature, which is made to yearn. However, the emptiness she senses stems from her own guilt about her infidelity, as well as her suspicion that her husband is controlling her. The use of words like gash, void, and wound suggest the bleeding, infected nature of their relationship, speaking to Appearances Versus Reality.

“The music my husband listens to gives me a real insight to his state of mind, so I meticulously record all of that data. For example, when he hums a French tune, that means he’s in a good mood; listening to a French song is also correlated to his arousal. Brazilian music means he’s clam, at peace. On the other hand, when he listens to pop, it’s rarely a good sign.”

Ariane meticulously records and analyzes her husband’s preferences so she can interpret his moods. While this signifies her tendency to catalogue reality in order to control it, it also shows that Ariane feels watchful about her husband’s moods, a classic sign of someone being emotionally abused.

“Adrien, Antoine, Arnaud: my desire to love has always been so great that for each person I’m with, I love with the same intensity. To console myself over one, I leap into the arms of the next, incapable of being alone. Only my dependency on love, rather than on one or the other of these men was a constant.”

Ariane’s willingness to ignore the truth coexists with her acute self-awareness. In these lines, she shows that she is well-aware of her fear of being alone. She knows it is this fear—rather than true, healthy love—that drives her from one relationship to another. The names of all her former lovers, as her own, begin with an “A”: This particular narrative choice is never explained, but implies that she perhaps views them as interchangeable. Her obsessive habits with each man speak to The Thin Line Between Love and Obsession in her behavior even before her marriage.

“I wanted my life to take shape. I wanted it to transform into something durable, firm. Like clay that dries and becomes less and less malleable, I too, wanted to dry and harden…I hadn’t found the love of my life—and there was no candidate on the horizon who was likely to be serious husband material. To practice patience while I waited for my life to take shape, I bought myself this ring.”

These lines reveal Ariane’s attitudes toward marriage: She sees it as a crucial step for her “life to take shape.” She waits for a husband to shape her, as if witnessing her own life from a distance. She does not want to remain flexible so she can grow in life, but wants to “dry and harden” into a static shape. Her purchase of the ring introduces one of the novel’s key symbols, speaking to The Oppressive Nature of Gendered Expectations surrounding women and marriage.

“Saturday is red. And my husband’s Saturday—bright red. For him, Saturday is always a joyous event…a day of leisure, to be spent outside, amongst friends…I prefer the routine of weekdays. Saturday intimidates me…If only our favorite days coincided—our life would surely be easier to plan.”

These lines show the text’s use of visual imagery, as well as Ariane’s unique perception of time. They also explain Ariane’s need to control time and reality. The redness of Saturday is an ominous sign, foreshadowing the events at Ariane’s daughter’s birthday party. The bright redness of the husband’s Saturday immediately evokes the blue image of Ariane’s favorite day, Monday. The husband’s festive red and Ariane’s cool blue are not a natural match. The colors symbolize the gap between them. Ariane’s mistrust of Saturdays reflects her need for order. Weekdays bring the promise of routine; Saturday represents a whole swathe of unpredictable, chaotic time.

“Fortunately, it’s only once per year and once per child. I may be a bad mother, but I don’t think any parent in their right mind, even a very loving one, could find their child’s birthday party tolerable.”

Ariane often considers herself a “bad mother,” reflecting The Oppressive Nature of Gendered Expectations. While it is clear Ariane does not like parenthood, it is debatable if she is as terrible a mother as she thinks. She might detest children’s parties, but, as she notes here, many other parents possibly feel the same. Ariane’s attitudes are more reflective of someone who has opted for parenthood to tick a social box, rather than a truly cruel parent.

“My relief mitigates my pain. It’s the relief that comes when what we’ve been dreading finally happens…When the main character of a horror movie is caught by the monster who’s been hunting them. It’s a good thing…I have nothing left to fear, because the worst has happened.”

If the week represents a crescendo of slights and hurt—as Ariane’s husband has intended—Sunday’s declaration brings a measure of relief. Ariane assumes her husband wants to divorce her, and experiences the moment as relief. Rather than fear the worst every day, she can now deal with its aftermath. Ariane’s relief reflects her recognition that she may finally be free of her troubled marriage.

“I nestle against him, drunk with happiness over the ultimate proof of love he’s given me, and certain of the positive changes I’ll put into effect starting tomorrow morning…I close my eyes, cradled by my husband’s oceanic breathing and my thighs begin to itch. I ignore the signal…refuse to scratch. But the itching spreads slowly to my head, my arms, my stomach.”

This passage swiftly uncovers Ariane’s subconscious realization that what she thinks of as happiness is actually despair, reflecting Appearances Versus Reality. The joyous, conjugal vocabulary of the first few sentences—Ariane nestling against her husband, his breathing an ocean cradling her—gives way to the breathless, indefatigable itch spreading rash-like all over her. Since the itch is a symbol of Ariane’s repressed intuition, this suggests Ariane’s body telling her that her happiness is short-lived.

“The secret to keeping the scales of power tipped to my advantage is to switch up the intensity: if every week were like this one, she would be exhausted and numb to everything. So, after a particularly grueling week…I have to ease up on her. That way she lets her guard down, puts things in perspective, remembering that she and I do have good moments.”

Ariane’s husband’s first-person perspective adds a last-minute twist to the plot, a commonly used device in suspense fiction. It also presents Ariane’s own narrative in a new light. Rather than just the controlling, secretive person she has seemed, Ariane is also being emotionally manipulated. The husband’s strategy for manipulating Ariane follows the classic recipe of abuse: He intersperses bad days with the good, so Ariane can always aspire for another happy time.