Reading Order
MoïraMoïra Reading Order
Moïra (1950) by Julien Green is the most powerful of Green's southern American novels — a study of sexual obsession and religious horror set in a southern American college in the 1920s, in which the protagonist Joseph Day, a religious young man of extreme Puritanism, murders the red-haired girl Moïra because the sight of her destroys his sexual self-control. Green was born in Paris to American parents and wrote all his major novels in French; he was simultaneously one of the major American writers (by parentage and by the Southern material) and one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century, a combination without parallel in literary history. Green's world is a world of sexual obsession, moral horror, and religious terror — the body and the spirit at perpetual war, with the body always winning in the most destructive possible way. His other major novels include Adrienne Mesurat (1927), Léviathan (1929), and Minuit (1936).
Where to start
Read Moïra as your introduction to Green — the southern American material and the extreme psychological drama make it the most immediately gripping of his novels. Then read Adrienne Mesurat (1927) for the French provincial equivalent — a girl trapped by her father in a provincial town — and Mont-Cinère (1926), his first novel, for the New England equivalent of the same claustrophobic obsession.
Complete Moïra Book List
- 1Buy
Moïra
Julien Green·1950·Start here — the southern American college; the Puritan boy and the red-haired girl; the most immediately gripping Green; the essential entry point - 2Buy
Adrienne Mesurat
Julien Green·1927·The French provincial equivalent — a girl's obsessive love for a doctor she cannot reach; the Harper Prize 1928; read after Moïra - 3Buy
Mont-Cinère
Julien Green·1926·Emily Dickinson country — the first novel; New England avarice and obsession; the Anglo-American material in its first form; read after the two masterpieces - 4Buy
Léviathan
Julien Green·1929·Leviathan — the most supernatural Green novel; a provincial town; a man's obsession with a prostitute; the Catholic horror of the body at its most extreme - 5Buy
Minuit
Julien Green·1936·Midnight — the most formally experimental Green novel; a young woman who cannot die; the supernatural in a modern French setting; read after establishing the realistic Green
Moïra — Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Julien Green and why is he unique in literary history?
Julien Green (1900–1998) was born in Paris to American parents — his father was an Atlanta businessman who had moved to France — and grew up bilingual; he converted to Catholicism in 1916 (and briefly renounced it, then reconverted) and spent almost his entire life in France. He wrote all his major novels in French, but his subject matter is often American: the Southern Gothic, New England Puritanism, the American bourgeois family in its most destructive forms. He is simultaneously one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century (elected to the Académie française in 1971) and one of the most important American novelists writing in French — a combination that has no parallel. He also kept a journal for over sixty years (the Journal, 1928–1998) that is one of the great documents of twentieth-century literary and spiritual life.
What is the role of sexual obsession in Green's novels?
Green's world is organized around the conflict between sexual obsession and religious horror — a conflict that he experienced personally (his journals record his struggles with homosexuality and his Catholic faith) and that generates the extreme psychological drama of his fiction. His protagonists are almost always people whose sexuality is in violent conflict with their religious or moral self-conception; the resolution is almost always catastrophic. In Moïra, Joseph's Puritanism makes the sight of Moïra intolerable — he can neither accept his desire nor live with it — and the murder is the resolution of an impossible tension. The same structure recurs in Adrienne Mesurat, Léviathan, and Minuit: desire that cannot be named destroys the person who feels it.
What is the Southern Gothic influence in Green's work?
Green's American novels — Mont-Cinère, Moïra, and the journal accounts of his Virginia childhood — are closely related to the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers. The common elements are: the obsessive violence that erupts from apparently respectable family or religious life; the landscape (Southern or New England) as the correlative of interior darkness; the extreme Protestant religiosity that produces guilt, repression, and explosive release; and the sense that the past is more real than the present. Green's Puritanism — whether New England (Mont-Cinère) or Southern Baptist (Moïra) — serves the same function as Mauriac's Jansenism: a religious framework that makes sexuality simultaneously necessary and terrifying.
How does Green's journal relate to his fiction?
Green's Journal (1928–1998), published in 19 volumes, is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the twentieth century — a day-by-day record of his reading, his dreams, his religious struggles, his homosexuality, and his literary projects. The journal illuminates the fiction directly: the sexual obsessions in the novels are autobiographical; the religious crises of his protagonists mirror his own; the landscapes are drawn from memory. But the journal is also a work of art in its own right, comparable in its quality and scope to the journals of Gide, Kafka, and Chekhov. Reading Green's journal alongside the novels is one of the most complete experiences of entering a writer's interior life available in any literature.
What is Green's relationship to the French Catholic literary world?
Green was associated with the French Catholic literary revival — the world of Bernanos, Mauriac, and Claudel — but his position was always somewhat outside it. His Catholicism was intensely personal (the journal records repeated crises of faith) rather than doctrinally polemical like Bernanos's; his world was more American than French in its material; and his homosexuality was an open secret in literary Paris that made his position in the Catholic intellectual world uncomfortable. Mauriac was his closest French literary friend; they shared the Catholic psychological novel and the provincial bourgeois subject matter, but Green's extreme psychological violence has more in common with Bernanos than with Mauriac's more controlled social analysis.
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