Franz Werfel was a German-speaking Jew born in Prague in 1890. He became well known as a playwright. In the 1930s in Vienna, he began writing popular satirical plays lampooning the Nazi regime until the Anschluss, when the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Werfel and his wife Alma fled to Paris until the Germans invaded France in 1940. In his Personal Preface to The Song of Bernadette, Franz Werfel takes up the story: 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.
Plot
The story is about the Platonic love relationship between Bernadette and “the lady” of her vision. Bernadette’s love for the lady attains “ecstasy” when in her presence at a grotto near Lourdes. The love she feels sustains her throughout the trials and tribulations which she is made to endure by doubters and by public officials who see her as a threat to the established order, which is based on a secular milieu. The lady guides Bernadette to the discovery of a stream which springs from beneath the ground of the grotto. The curative powers of the water are discovered by various town folk, and the word is spread by them. Bernadette does no proselytizing. The lady informs Bernadette of her wishes to have a chapel build on the site of the grotto, and to have processions to the site. Bernadette informs church and secular officials about this, but takes no action to have it done. Eventually, it gets done. Bernadette does not actively cultivate a following, but people are attracted to her by the love she radiates and by witnessing the ecstatic trance she experiences when she has visions of the lady at the grotto. Bernadette does no preaching or evangelizing, but her behavior of itself converts doubters, and the very church officials who once doubted her become her protectors and advocates. Although she is dying of tuberculosis, she refuses to seek a cure from the lady, or to drink the curative water. She is canonized several years after her death. The story of Bernadette Soubirous and Our Lady of Lourdes is told by Werfel with many embellishments, such as the chapter in which Bernadette is invited to board at the home of a rich woman who thinks Bernadette's visionary "lady" might be her deceased daughter. In side-stories and back story, the history of the town of Lourdes, the contemporary political situation in France, and the responses of believers and detractors are delineated. Werfel describes Bernadette as a religious peasant girl who would have preferred to continue on with an ordinary life, but takes the veil as a nun after she is told that because "Heaven chose her", she must choose Heaven. 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 novel is laid out in five sections of ten chapters each, in a deliberate nod to the Catholic Rosary. Unusual for a novel, the entire first part, which describes the events on the day that Bernadette first saw the Virgin Mary, is told in the present tense, as if it were happening at the moment. The rest of the novel is in the past tense.
Major themes
Werfel presents Bernadette as a simple and pious girl from a poor family, who is regarded as stupid by her teachers, classmates, and authorities. He also depicts her as having inner strength and personal integrity, which is unshaken by those who challenge her stories of the "Lady of Massabielle" whom she alone can see. Bernadette is not a crusader, but the local people take up the cause of turning the grotto into a spiritual site, although the local authorities resist at first. This drama is played out against the larger canvas of French politics and the contemporary social climate. Explanatory digressions illustrate what Werfel perceives as an ongoing conflict between a human need to believe in the supernatural or in anomalous phenomena; a true religion, which should not address such "popular" manifestations; and the ideas of the Enlightenment and of atheism.
Copyright
The Song of Bernadette has been in the public domain in the European Union since 1 January 2016.
