Abundance is a first person account of Marie Antoinette's life and is so perfectly cast from inside her head that I almost believed her. The letters her mother wrote, the stories she was "fighting" against, and the horror of the revolution cast doubt on her veracity, but as a reader you still want to believer her. And even though I knew the ending of the story, I think I was as shocked as she was that she was executed.
The novel starts with Marie Antoinette leaving home and recreating herself as the Dauphine of France. Her youthful exuberance and her desire to be loved is enchanting, as she herself seems to be, but she fails to arouse her husband which almost dooms her new life from the beginning.
As Marie Antoinette tries to negotiate the foreign world she finds herself in, she grows more cynical and tries to find enjoyment from other areas of life—through gambling, lovers, friends, the arts, and finally her children. She is cast by the public in a horrible light and has to explain again and again to her mother that the stories about her are just rumors.
As Louis’s indecisiveness and her lack of awareness of the horrors going on around her continue to mount, Marie Antoinette’s life as royalty comes to an abrupt end with the storming of the Bastille. The way Naslund portrays Marie Antoinette’s life as an imprisoned monarch very convincingly demonstrates her attempts to maintain the fairy tale life she had created for herself. During these three years, or so, she never loses hope that she will get back home to Austria until the very end when she is sentenced to be executed.
No comments:
Post a Comment