Benjamin Constant has written one of the most profound works in literature with “Adolphe.” He connects the heart to the brain directly, attempting to logically explain the emotional conflicts of a 22-year-old first-person narrator, Adolphé, who seeks to escape society’s grip on his life via a romantic affair.

Aside from Adolphé, there are three key characters:

• Adolphe’s father and a minister
• Baron T—, his father’s fixer and the minister of Poland
• Ellenore, Adolphé’s love

Adolphé describes his father as “cold and caustic” and writes that “his attitude was noble and generous rather than tender,” which tells us that his father was not openly loving and nurturing, that his father’s main concern was preparing his son to succeed him as minister.

Once his father finds out about Ellenore, he enlists his friend, Baron T—, who’s his father’s fixer, pressure Adolphé into focusing on his future.

In the story’s first pages, Adolphé weighs society’s influence on youth:

“It weighs so heavily upon us, its blind influence is so powerful, that it soon shapes us in the universal mould (26).”

Throughout the novella, he feels pressure from his father and Baron T— to follow through on their suggestions of splitting from Ellenore. Baron T— says:

“I will even say that I understand them: the man does not exist who has not, some time in his life, been torn between the desire to break off an impossible liaison and the fear of afflicting a woman he has loved. The inexperience of youth causes you greatly to exaggerate the difficulties of such a position; you believe in the truth of all those demonstrations of grief which in the weak and passionate sex are the arms that replace all those of strength and reason (86).”

At the same time, Adolphé feels pressure from Ellenore to commit to her after seducing her early on. Following a twelve-hour hunt by Ellenore to find him, he writes:

“I was angered at finding myself subjected by Ellenore to this insufferable supervision. I repeatedly but vainly told myself that her love alone was the cause. Was not that very love the cause of all my misfortune? However, I managed to subdue this feeling which I considered reprehensible (96).”

Later, alongside Baron T—, he receives a bitter letter from Ellenore and feels suffocated:

“‘What!’, I exclaimed to myself, ‘can I not be free for one day? I cannot breathe one hour in peace. She pursues me everywhere, like a slave who must be brought back to her feet.’”

The back and forth pressure from his love and the fixer causes Adolphé indecision as well as to straddle the public and private spheres. He’s unable to separate the spheres because of the prominent position he would be taking over. Throughout we see him battle emotions and expectations. This creates an inherent story structure of back and forth that builds a natural tension, one that is dominated by conflicting emotional states and psychological states, the latter which are a byproduct of the attempted reasoning of the former.

We see Adolphé change after he bonds with Ellenore. Immediately he’s taken back by her obsession with him, as she wants to spend every minute together, causing him to abandon friendships, which he otherwise wouldn’t have cared for but does in this case because it was not with his “own free-will (53).”  This continues till the end where he’s afraid to hurt her, yet he’s also afraid to commit to her fully.