fhood. In the first-person narrative, Marcel is consumed by a woman, Albertine, for good but mostly for ill, and the novel--though certainly not the entire work--ends with his resolve to marry her. But repeatedly the text hints broadly at or returns to inversion of both men and women, to allusions to the sexual demimonde in Balzac (particularly the melodramatic but before-its-time paean to bisexuality, The Girl With the Golden Eyes), to the freewheeling sexuality of Paris, which decisively includes virtually every permutation of the belle-epoque homosexual way of life.
Proust's conceit of providing Marcel with an all-consuming heterosexuality is highly successful at setting out clues that sexual identity, particularly the homosexual identity, is the author's preoccupation. One suspects early on, as if Marcel's preoccupation with Albertine could conceal the fact, that homosexuality is really Proust's text. The issue is treated continually and with seriousness, and it must be inferred that Proust felt it somehow fundamenta
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