| Unconvinced of Emile Glenisson's theory that all Mauriac's characters are but one person with an emotionally arrested development, we took Mauriac's novel, La Pharisienne, and studied its ten principal characters, not only to see to what extent they were individualized, but also to understand them in greater depth.As guidelines in our consideration we used the concepts of Transactional Analysis. While this approach is particularly appropriate here, given the novel's subject matter and format, it is also relatively new in literary criticism. We therefore explained briefly its basic ideas, stressing strokes, ego states, existential positions and scripts.While discussing in depth the three young people in the book, we showed how the psychological make-up of each authority figure in their early lives had influenced the development of their personalities differently, leading in two instances to social disfunction. Under similar analysis the adult characters revealed equally differentiated personality structures. |
