Anyone else feel sorry for Francis?
I watched this movie on TV when I was a child and remember being mesmerized by Barbara O'Neal. She radiated viciousness every time she was on the screen; one of those deliciously abominable characters you love to hate, and can't stop watching. But when I watch this movie as an adult I can't help but feel a little sorry for her.
It must be so painful for her to be so in love with a man who openly despises her. She feels alienated from her children and feels no support from her husband. People in the nineteenth century were so quick to attribute post-partum depression (a somewhat likely hypothesis since their marital discord seems to have stemmed at least in part from the birth of their children, particularly the youngest) to madness or shrewishness. Her maternal instinct, whatever the reason, is not as strong as he thinks it should be, and he consequently judges her to be unwomanly and cold. He withholds sex from her, withdraws any demonstration of affection or tender feeling for her. In her desperate cries for attention she only suffocates him, turning disappointment and annoyance to contempt. You read these stories about aristocratic women having been diagnosed as neurasthenic (often shortly after marriage or childbirth), which seems to have been a general term for anything that seemed unnatural in a woman according to the idealized standards of that time. Symptoms often included melancholia, and a sense of alienation from ones children, and the treatment included isolation, confinement, and other methods that tended only to stimulate depression. The Duchesse isn't bedridden or wasting away physically, but her tendency to lounge indifferently, and her emotional dependency on her maid, priest and father for the support she isn't getting from her spouse, and most notably her resentment and jealousy of her children seems characteristic of this in some ways.
Writer Stanley Loomis suggested in his true crime book A Crime of Passion that the tempestuous climate of the Romantic Era excited the passions of the couple in perverse and ultimately deadly ways: he toward murderous rage, and she toward a morbid obsession with him. The aggravated nature of the murder would tend to support this, as well as the fact that a blood drenched copy of a sensational tragicomic novel concerning female domination was found at the murder site. Could this have been a case of people with too much money, not enough sense, and perversely overactive imaginations?
In this film it is suggested that the Duke married for money, but Francis is portrayed as fashionable and attractive in her way (probably a great beauty in her youth), and Historically it would seem that the real couple married (perhaps unwisely) for passionate love when he was a very young man and she was a girl in her teens. He made his choice, and I think that his coldness toward her is unfair and sometimes emotionally abusive. Watching Boyer in this, I couldn't help but think of him in Gaslight playing a charming husband who deliberately makes his wife mad and delusional through emotional abuse and manipulation. I found it difficult to pity his character. Indeed, I cannot find a man who would murder the mother of his children in the most heinous manner, and then try to lie his way out of it, and commit suicide to avoid public trial anything but culpable. Some even say he faked his death and escaped to Nicaragua...most cowardly.
I would love to see this story get the Wide Sargasso Sea treatment, retelling it from Fanny's perspective. The exact same events could have a completely different reading as seen through the eyes of a passionate woman who is swept off her feet by a dashing man, and then subjected to his love gradually deteriorating into disgust.