What's in a Name

I was given the name at birth of "Julie Romaine."  I was told, when I grew old enough to remember it, that it was the name of an actress in one of Guy de Maupassant's short stories.  An actress who loved and I felt died from love's injury.  I was born too with my Venus quincunx Pluto.  I looked it up.  It means that I become obsessional about loving.  I love, perhaps, not wisely.  My mother ripped out a few pages from her "Harper's Magazine," the other day, telling me I should read "it."  I looked through the few pages, found the first to be by the editor of Harper's, Roger D. Hodge.  He described the progressives' disappointment with Obama's broken promises.  It hurt to read it.  A part of me doesn't want to believe it can all be true - the apparent selling out to the pressures of business as usual in Washington.  I know it must be very difficult to try to be the one who brings change to those who resist it with all of their being.  I turned the pages and found a review of a translation edition of Guy de Maupassant's writing, Alien Hearts.  Knowing the name and its association with my name, I began to read the review.  Lorin Stein is a true writer herself.  Bravo! 

 

I was struck by her statement (based on an apparent deep study of de Maupassant as a person as well as a writer):  "What most troubled and delighted Maupassant's readers was his erotic identification with women.  He saw them as sexual objects, and he saw himself as a sexual object."  As a published writer of not quite a decade, he began at the end to look deeper into his characters, to express more than the words they said to each other, the thoughts they had about each other (which has been his intellectual and emotional choice) he began to be a writer of the "psychological" novel - thus, Alien Hearts is an example.  Along with my name, my experience of love, I have encountered another thing in common.  The choice to go deep.  Psychologically.