An immediate national and international best-seller that was also well received by critics, The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned Thornton Wilder his first Pulitzer Prize. (He is still the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama.) That Wilder’s second novel has remained in print for more than 75 years attests to its timelessness, as does its selection by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century (Lewis, 4), ranking 37th, which was ahead of such highly regarded novels as The Sun Also Rises, Women in Love, Light in August, The Age of Innocence, Heart of Darkness, Main Street, and Finnegans Wake. Once a standard on high school English class reading lists, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was filmed in 1929 and again in 1944; a new film adaptation starring Robert De Niro, Kathy Bates, and Harvey Keitel was released in 2005. Scholars attribute the popularity of Wilder’s most famous novel to its accessibility as it deals with philosophical questions about the meaning of life that are asked in every culture in the past, the present, and the future.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey both is and is not a novel of its time. It contrasts with such realistic novels set in the contemporary world as The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Main Street; however, its form (including nonlinear, nonchronological structure, multiple interrelated protagonists) resembles other modernist fiction such as Winesburg, Ohio, The Sound and the Fury, and Nightwood (Christensen, 203). A reflexivity bordering on metafiction characterizes the narrative of Bridge—which is more an allegory of reading (natural phenomena, lives, history, letters, and literature) than an Aristotelian causal plot, and makes this short novel of the 1920s of interest to fans and scholars of postmodern fiction.
Three sections, each of which focuses on one principal and other secondary characters, framed by a prologue and epilogue, respectively entitled “Perhaps an Accident” and “Perhaps an Intention,” compose The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the philosophical and highly allusive frame device, an anonymous first-person narrator relates the rather quixotic life of Brother Juniper, a Franciscan priest traveling and ministering in Peru during the 18th century. The priest regards the deaths of five people who were on an old rope bridge when it broke as an opportunity to prove his belief in Providence: that “either we live by accident and die by accident or we live by plan and die by plan.” Although Wilder has the narrator affect a skepticism toward Brother Juniper’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to man,” the story of the five victims’ lives dramatizes that this “act of God” was simultaneously punishment for the wicked, reward for the good, and mercy for the suffering (Kuner, 76).
The next three sections of the novel are parables of profound love, which some scholars attribute to the influence of Marcel Proust on Wilder (Castronovo, 48–49). In “Part Two, The Marquesa de Montemayor,” Wilder explores the emotional complexity of a familiar character type: the mother whose love for her child so consumes her that she smothers her offspring, who must flee to another place to be free. Furthermore, in modeling the marquesa after French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné, Wilder shows how unrequited love, even of a mother toward her daughter, can inspire great literary expressions of the human heart, as we are offered excerpts of what the narrator tells us are now considered great writing in the Spanish language studied by schoolboys. Through the narration and letters, we see that ultimately the marquesa transcends her selfish, oppressive love of her daughter, but because it occurs the night before she takes the famous bridge on the day it breaks, she is unable to live out her new determination to live and love rightly. This section also relates the story of a young girl named Pepita, the marquesa’s servant sent to her from the convent in Lima. Pepita too has a consuming love (Burbank, 49), but it is for the abbess who took her in and began grooming her to succeed the abbess when she is too old to run the orphanage and other charitable operations based at the convent. Pepita suffers from her separation from the abbess and the hardship of serving the marquesa; she also reaches a determination on how to live from then forward, and thus is about to “begin a new life,” as are all five victims of the fall of the bridge (Christensen, 198), but she does not survive.
“Part Three, Esteban” tells the story of the eponymous young man and his twin brother, Manuel. Growing up in the convent orphanage, Esteban and Manuel are so close emotionally that nothing can come between them except death and perhaps romantic love. When Manuel falls in love for the first time, Esteban is prepared to make the sacrifice of leaving his brother so he can be happy with Camila Perichole, the actress. However, Manuel trumps this act of fraternal love when, we are told, “in one unhesitating stroke of the will, he removed the Perichole from his heart.” The issue becomes moot when Manuel accidentally tears open his leg and the wound becomes infected, and he dies. Esteban is so devastated by the loss of his twin that he unsuccessfully attempts suicide only to perish, mercifully (Stresau, 23), when the bridge falls.
In “Part Four, Uncle Pio,” Wilder tells the tale of a Svengali and his protégé, Camila Perichole. Uncle Pio is an unsavory character except that he has a great passion for the Golden Age of Spanish theater; when he finds a young peasant girl singing in a café in Peru, he decides to mold her into the greatest actress of his age and succeeds. However, Camila develops other aspirations and passions, and eventually is alienated from him. Uncle Pio’s love for Camila is not romantic or sexual, but he nonetheless suffers from this separation until he finds perhaps what will be an acceptable substitute: he persuades Camila to allow him to take her epileptic son Don Jaime to teach him the classics of Spanish literature and how to become a man. They both die when the bridge falls, but this engenders a spiritual transformation in Camila. For her to have gone from café singer, to honored actress, to member of the social cabal in Lima, to comforter of the poor and sick (the abbess’s successor) attests to the progress of grace in her life.
The final section of the novel not only finishes the story of Brother Juniper, who is burnt at the stake for heresy, and closes out the philosophical and theological themes associated with the accident of the bridge; it also brings to resolution the story of a character who appears in the preceding sections: Madre Maria del Pilar, or the abbess. Like the other characters, she has an epiphany about love and life after great suffering (Izzo, 125), but unlike them she is allowed to continue living with this new knowledge, and it is her realization that closes the novel: “But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” From the microcosm of the five victims of the bridge and other characters, to the macrocosm of the final sentence, we see the technique and sentiment Thornton Wilder will employ throughout his career in such plays as “Our Town” (1938) and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1942), and in such novels as The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (1973). More fable than novel, perhaps, The Bridge of San Luis Rey transcends the mundane as it reaches for the universal story and the classic ideal of truth.
SOURCES
Blank, Martin. Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.
Burbank, Rex. Thornton Wilder. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: F. Ungar, 1986.
Christensen, Peter G. “Human Relatedness and Narrative Techniques in the Early Novels of Thornton Wilder and Glenway Wescott.” In Thornton Wilder: New Essays, edited by Martin Blank, Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer, and David Garrett Izzo, 185–205. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999.
Izzo, David Garrett. “Thornton Wilder and the Perennial Philosophy: A Legacy of Goodness as Represented by His Five Affirmations First Enunciated in the Early Plays of The Angel That Troubled the Waters.” In Thornton Wilder: New Essays, edited by Martin Blank, Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer, and David Garrett Izzo, 105–125. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999.
Kuner, Mildred. Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark. New York: Crowell, 1972.
Lewis, Paul. “Ulysses at Top As Panel Picks 100 Best Novels.” New York Times, 20 July 1998, pp. E-1, E-4.
Stresau, Hermann. Thornton Wilder. Translated by Frieda Schutze. New York: F. Ungar, 1971.
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York: Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, 2003.
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