“Maitreyi”, Mircea Eliade (en)9.8104

Maitreyi was and still is a successful novel by Mircea Eliade because it presents the bodily love symphony, revolutionizing the epic in the Romanian literature.

This novel is based on an existential history, with a surprising result that the author (Mircea Eliade) and the central female character (Maitreyi) face and continue their biography besides the story.

The novel does not justify the book’s symbols or its aesthetic value. It is a historical parallel, which means that if the author’s biography does not explain creation itself, biography cannot indicate the circumstances in which he wrote the novel and, of course, the starting points.

Maitreyi begins with a sentence about the writer’s distrust about the journalist: “I hesitated so much before this book, because I still did not manage to find the exact day when I met Maitreyi; in my notes from that year (1929) I found nothing.” Writer’s Inaccuracies in the novel represent a part of the eliadescian scenario.

Maitreyi is the story about a young European who enters into a Bengali family and after a time he is tempted by one of Narendra Sen’s daughters, an engineer with European education, but inflexible Hindu mentality.

But inside the erotic novel is another novel, about the atmosphere and habits. Allan (Mircea Eliade) opts for Indian culture, elder than Europe and, from his point of view, deeper and with more subtle effects within private life. Allan wants to mess up with a girl even impure by her origin as Maitreyi, but Narendra Sen does not agree with the accompanying of his daughter with the main character and with the intention to move to Hinduism of this one, considering it an aberration. The engineer, who brought the European foreigner to his house, wants to adopt him and later to move together in England, a country more peaceful and safer than India.

In this mixed and explosive world a love story is developing, really beautiful, unusual for the Romanian reader, between Allan and Maitreyi, exotic embodiments of an eternal myth: that the couple of lovers. Maitreyi is a 16 years old teenager in which lies a refined sensuality along with an innocence confusing the rationalist European, Allan, used with another female behavior.

The sealed soul of the girl opens with small gestures, impenetrable for the European lover, such as reaching leg, caressing innocent pulp, undressing arm, providing flowers. Maitreyi has grown in a civilization of signs and maximum modesty, but she draws Allan on an erotic, complicated and predictable game. These two plight in front of the water, forest and sky, each bearing a jasmine coronet. The engagement is a mystical one, a cosmic oath, a beautiful fairy poem.

With the same complicated and refined innocence that Allan does not recognize in any white woman, Maitreyi and offers her body to him in a lewd and fragrant night. The girl’s proof is simple: “Our union was commanded by heaven”.

Eliade places in the script the old theme of incompatibility and debt by repudiating the ferocity of the love between Allan and Maitreyi. Sen family banishes the European and the young Hindu is impounded, being considered guilty in besides her tradition. The main character, after futile attempts to get in touch with his fiancée, seeks refuge in the Himalayas, in a monastery, opting for solitude and meditation. Allan forgets for a while about his love and returns to his old habits, until one day he finds Maitreyi. He realizes that he lost his interest for the mystery of the Asian female and he does not respond to the calls of the girl shackled to Hindu tradition. Allan understands the true love of the young Bengali girl when he learn that she did anything to be repudiated by her family, managing to get only one shipment to Midnapur to give birth in secret to her baby.

The end of the novel presents the erotic drama that extends in the writing that just begins: “I feel she did it for me … and if she is just one of my love’s jokes? Why should I believe? How would I know? I want to look in Maitreyi’s eyes.

Maitreyi is a living novel, substantial, with a new opening to problems of the modern man and not least, is a novel viable after more than half a century since it was written, with which Eliade attempts to build a mythology of seduction.