Isabelle – The Last Princess of Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck, the author of some of the plays associated with the symbolist aesthetic, in which the character is often an unseen presence associated to destiny or death, writes in the first part of his career a collection of dramas in which the heroines seem to appear each time under different guises. At the end of his career, Maeterlinck returns to the mysterious universe proposed in his first text – The Princess Maleine , finishing the circle of love dramas, the dramas of the profound self discovery. The princess Isabelle comes and claims the unfulfillment of her sisters from the previous texts, which she afterwards saves. The obsession of the water, a lethal substance for most of Maeterlinck’s heroines, becomes for Isabelle the unconscious need for purification. Being the last text published during this author’s life, it contains within its structure fragments from almost all his previous work, and thus there is a certain continuity and unity between the obscurity of this author’s beginnings and the light of revelation which precedes the great travel to the unknown

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