Now, I can’t quite buy into Markale’s thesis. For one thing, while it’s true that Pelléas meets his earthly end, in the work’s belief system this means that he has ascended to the light, where, we soon discover, Mélisande will join him. She “knows” this, and Pelléas comes to “know” it, only at the level that birds and animals know their migration or hibernation patterns. When Golaud, recovering from his near-mortal accident, pursues Mélisande in the only way he knows concerning her mysterious unhappiness (what can she be hiding? who has harmed her? is it Pelléas?  this dark old castle? there must be a reason!—he tries really hard), she can only answer that no, it isn’t that, no one’s done her the slightest harm, she’s just unhappy here. And of course nearly everything she says is by way of This Life-The-Life-Beyond double entendre. But it’s crucial, I think, that she be aware only of the literal, surface meaning. Otherwise, it’s all unpalatable—why would Maeterlinck write his remarkable play, and Debussy compose his remarkable music, to show us that? (I do confess, though, to a perverse wish to see Mélisande played and sung as “an excellent student of Satan,” just to see how it all shakes out.)

To avoid this morally problematic outcome, the best that is usually done for Mélisande is to construct a scenario of either a rather hard-to-credit childlike innocence or a traumatized amnesia victim ruled by the unconscious as we understand it in modern psychology. Either can be played, but the former is apt to turn coy and fey or merely passive, and the latter winds up reductive. Something isn’t being gotten at, unless we see Mélisande as one of those sentient female souls, and see also that though she is indeed ruled by her unconscious, this unconscious is the guidance of a powerful occult force. It is something that she can’t explain and isn’t aware of in the usual meaning. But she feels it, and acts accordingly. Each little event in the story is a thing that has to happen, that Mélisande must bring about. The guidance brings first Golaud, then Pelléas, into her life, and makes her the cause of everything that happens among them. Her evasions with Golaud are not “resistance” or “trauma,” but a recognition that the knowledge he seeks is irrelevant and possibly threatening to her mission—she must move on before becoming enmeshed. At the end, she dies, reaching out toward the light, because everything that had to happen has now happened. (Arkel: “It’s the turn of the poor little one”,  of another soul thrust into matter.)

Pelléas is young, but not quite as young as Mélisande. Furthermore, he has not fled into the forest to escape a maleficent someone or something. He has grown up in a family, and his contacts with people have been essentially benign, however limited. He possesses some of the same sentience as Mélisande, and thus is immediately drawn to her. But he is also “maturing,” acquiring a sense of boundaries and responsibility. (From the first, part of him resists the attraction: at our first sight of them together, he hesitates on the path up to the terrace overlooking the sea, and Geneviève tells Mélisande she thinks he has seen them, but doesn’t know what to do.) He tries to keep her from flinging her ring toward the sun at the Fountain; he advises her to tell Golaud the truth about it; he periodically intends to go away, to distance himself from their relationship, and in his Act IV soliloquy has at last determined to do so. For Mélisande, these things mean that he is moving into adulthood, farther away from the light and from her, from the destiny that she “knows” is meant to be theirs. She must not let that happen, and when they finally give in to each other, he sings that “all is lost [this life], all is saved [the other life] on this night.”