The Song of Bernadette (novel)
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The Song of Bernadette is a 1942 novel which tells the story of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, who, from February to July 1858 in Lourdes, France, said she had eighteen visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was written by Franz Werfel. The novel was published in 1942 and was extremely popular, spending more than a year on the New York Times Best Seller list and 13 weeks atop the list.
Franz Werfel was born a German-speaking Jew in Prague in 1890, and became well-known as a playwright. In the 1930s in Vienna, he began writing popular satirical plays lampooning the Nazi totalitarian regime until Germany annexed Austria in 1938 as part of the Third Reich. Franz Werfel and his wife Alma (Gustav Mahler’s widow) fled to Paris, making France their refuge until the Germans invaded in 1940.
In his Personal Preface to The Song of Bernadette, Franz Werfel takes up the story: “In the last days of June 1940, in flight after the collapse of France, the two of us, my wife and I, had hoped to elude our mortal enemies in time to cross the Spanish frontier to Portugal, but had to flee back to the interior of France on the very night German troops occupied the frontier town of Hendaye. The Pyrenean départements had turned into a phantasmagoria – a very camp of chaos.
“This strange migration of people wandered about on the roads in their thousands obstructing towns and villages: Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Poles, Czechs, Austrians, exiled Germans; and, mingled with these, soldiers of the defeated armies. There was barely food enough to still the extreme pangs of hunger. There was no shelter to be had. Anyone who had obtained possession of an upholstered chair for his night’s rest was an object of envy. In endless lines, stood the cars of the fugitives, piled high with household gear, with mattresses and beds. There was no petrol to be had.
“A family settled in Pau told us that Lourdes was the one place where, if luck were kind, one might find a roof. Since Lourdes was but thirty kilometres distant, we were advised to make the attempt and knock on its gates. We followed this advice and found refuge at last in the little town of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees.”[citation needed]
Hunted by the Gestapo, the Werfels experienced anxiety for their hosts as well as themselves. A number of families took turns in giving them shelter. These people told the Werfels the story of Bernadette. Werfel vowed that, if he and his wife escaped, he would put off all tasks and write Bernadette's story into a novel.
When the Werfels reached the safety of America Werfel kept his word. He died in 1945 and the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles, having obtained the family’s permission, gave him a Christian burial. After the war, Franz Werfel was re-buried in Vienna.
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[edit] Plot summary
The story of Bernadette Soubirous and Our Lady of Lourdes is retold by Werfel with many embellishments and possible outright fakelore, such as the chapter in which Bernadette is invited to board at the home of a rich woman who thinks Bernadette's lady might be her deceased daughter. In side-stories and backstory, the history of the town of Lourdes, the political situation in France at that time, and the responses of believers and detractors are delineated. Werfel describes Bernadette as essentially having been forced into the convent after her visions are declared real by Church authorities, on the grounds that she cannot be allowed to live an ordinary life. Bernadette's service as a sacristan, artist-embroiderer, and nurse in the convent are depicted, along with her spiritual growth. After her death, her body as well as her life are scrutinized for indications that she is a saint, and at last she is canonized. The book is laid out in five sections of ten chapters each, like the Rosary.
[edit] Major themes
Werfel focuses on Bernadette as a young woman of artless simplicity and sincere piety, characterized as stupid by those who don't know her well. He also depicts her as strong-willed and determined to carry out the wishes of the "lady of Massabielle" she alone can see. Her fight to have the lady and her desires acknowledged and fulfilled by others is played out against the larger canvas of French politics and the social climate of the time. Explanatory digressions illustrate what Werfel perceives as an ongoing conflict between human need to believe in the supernatural or in anomalous phenomena, true religion which should address itself above and beyond such manifestations, and the ideas of the Enlightenment and atheism which many believe necessary for scientific advancement and human progress.
[edit] References to history, geography and current science
Apparently Werfel obtained accounts of Bernadette from Lourdes families whose parents had known her. It is possible that a good deal of folklore had been added to the plain facts by the time Werfel heard the tale.
Lourdes pilgrims often want to know more about Bernadette and do not realize that far from being a simple-minded shepherdess, she was a strong-willed young woman who stood by her story in the face of tough church and government inquiry. Werfel was able to work this aspect of her personality into his narration.
However, Werfel was not above fictionalization to fill in details or romanticize her story. He included a number of characters who did not exist, misportrayed others, and concocted a romance for Bernadette as well as a completely fictitious death scene.
The book should not be regarded as a factual account but as an historical novel. It seems to have been inspired in part by Emile Zola's Lourdes, a blistering denunciation of the industry that sprang up in Lourdes around the allegedly miraculous spring. Apparently Werfel believed the book might serve as a counterpoint to Zola's best-selling vitriol. One of his characters, Hyacinthe de Lafite, a member of the freethinkers' club that hangs around the town cafe, is a thinly disguised portrayal of Zola himself, re-imagined as a failed journalist/author who smugly casts Bernadette's experience in terms of the pagan history of the area. By the end of the book Lafite, the lady's "proudest foe", believing himself to be dying of cancer, is "lying on his knees" before the image of Bernadette's lady in the grotto.
Werfel goes into great detail about the claimed cures at the Lourdes Spring, and has Dr. Dozous, the town physician, show Hyacinthe through the wards of the hospital, particularly a dormitory of women with a particularly virulent form of Lupus vulgaris in which the face rots and falls off. Werfel provides medical details and claims that some such women have been completely cured after washing in water from the spring, and reports that many more healings take place during the Blessing of the Eucharist ceremony which is held daily at the grotto. Most of these details seem to have been paraphrased from Zola's novel or from the research he did to write it.
[edit] External links
- Bernadette of Lourdes Author John Martin's [who abridged Franz Werfel's classic The Song of Bernadette] website
