Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
The Stain
The Stain was sparked by two chance encounters and a dream. Ducornet was living in a rural town in the Loire Valley where little had changed since the nineteenth century. Its rustic charm evaporated as she discovered the dry heat of its prejudices and superstitions. Talking to an aging peasant woman she heard how in the “old days” birthmarks on children were always considered signs of evil, retributions for the sins of their parents. Then, as she bicycled home through the endless vineyards, a former sea that produced fossils at each turn of the spade, an enormous luminescent hare darted out in front of her and froze in its tracks. For a long time they observed each other, both mesmerized by the encounter. That night she had a dream of a birthmark shaped like a leaping hare and the central symbol of the novel was born.
Its first chapter is a riveting account of Charlotte’s arrival in the bloody violence of childbirth in which her mother dies. Charlotte has a furry birthmark on her face shaped like a leaping hare and she will bear this “stain,” a mark of her mother’s sexuality, for the rest of her life. Charlotte’s brutal, drunken father immediately abandons her and she is left in the care of his sister Edma and her husband Emile. Aunt Edma is a rigid religious fanatic who dishes out fear and punishment throughout Charlotte’s childhood. Emile is infinitely kinder and her first savior. He is a gardener and carries much of the novel’s earthly theme through his loving care for his vegetables and his vigilant stalking of their enemies—bugs, slugs and snails. Like frogs and reptiles in alchemical illustrations, they symbolize the primal matter that must be destroyed.
The Exorcist is a dark force in the village, often expounding on the dualistic nature of the world. He imagines himself positioned directly between God and the Devil, but he clearly belongs more to the realm of evil. He uses a camera to capture the world, focusing on the earth and its putrefactions—excreta, clay, sediment, chicken shit and stains. He realizes that Time is his enemy because it keeps the world in flux, foiling his attempts at control.
Charlotte absorbs enough of her Aunt Edma’s fear to be convinced of her own evil and frailty. She wastes away, living on water and rice gruel, imagining that this bodily “purification” will bring her salvation. She even eats broken glass, losing her voice in the process, a desperate act that convinces Edma, the Exorcist and the Mother Superior from a nearby convent that she is destined for sainthood. [32] Stating the alchemical analogy in Christian terms, Mother Superior is convinced that Charlotte is “a rare clay body destined for Purification in the fiery kiln of Beatitude” (68). Emile in his gentle way saves her physical body by feeding her a leek soup, whose fibers bind up the shattered glass. Strangely perhaps, considering her complicity in Charlotte’s oppression, Mother Superior gives Charlotte a sugar Easter egg with a small cellophane window that provokes her recovery. Like the alchemist who must carefully observe the processes within the vessel, Charlotte looks inside this philosophic egg and has her first epiphany (70). Realizing the simultaneity of all things she decides that, “like the infant phoenix” (71) she must live in order to devote herself to the pursuit of salvation.
Charlotte enters the convent followed by the Exorcist as the cross-dressing Sister Rosa Mystica. He and Mother Superior become lovers as they plot for control over Charlotte’s body and soul. The portrayals of these characters are stinging and hilariously anti-clerical. As the plot begins to boil, an alchemical reaction occurs. Soon after Charlotte begins to menstruate, a storm hits the valley kicking up “a wind without rival” (176). The watery inundation causes the destruction of the convent and much of the surrounding countryside. Throughout her trials, Charlotte eventually comes to understand that she is surrounded by evil and must make her escape. It is not surprising that the catalyst for this second epiphany is a beautiful golden hare which she sees out of a train window. “Fear drained from her heart and in a surge of blind excitement she scrambled to her feet…. ‘to catch one last glimpse of molten gold—a lightning flash that charged the air with radiance and urgency” (195). Underlying the many threads of this novel is the search for self-knowledge and with her heroic leap from the train, Charlotte begins that journey.
She is found by a kindly guardian, Père Archange Poupine, whose own spiritual metamorphosis began with an encounter with a “sulphurous” wolf. Under his tutelage, Charlotte learns his love of herbs and woodland creatures. She looks at nature and begins to draw. Color arrives in the form of sixteen cakes of pigment “wrapped in silver paper” (208). Together they write poetry—simple rhymes, but poetry nonetheless. His formula on how to make the color black is clearly alchemical, “First I take some earth, then some air and then some water and: hé, hé! fire, plenty of fire” (210).
The recurring theme of earth within the novel symbolizes the primal matter that must be discovered for the Great Work, and for Charlotte’s process of transformation, to begin. The vessel is her physical body, tortured and nourished in turn by the adults and by the elemental forces around her. The many alchemical references to eggs, shattered glass and molten metals are forged to a Gnostic battle between the twinned forces of good and evil as Charlotte’s quest for self-knowledge takes root. About halfway through the writing of The Stain, Ducornet realized how many earthly and terrestrial symbols it contained. [33] Because she was very interested in Gnostic philosophy at the time, she decided that the next novel must be about fire. Re-reading Gaston Bachelard convinced her that the themes of water and air would follow in a project that kept her occupied for over ten years.
