Perfume (novel) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ed Moffatt

Critical Essay by Ed Moffatt

SOURCE: Moffatt, Ed. “Grenouille: A Modern Schizophrenic in the Enlightening World of Das Parfum.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 37, no. 3 (July 2001): 298-313.

In the following essay, Moffatt diagnoses Grenouille, the protagonist in Das Parfum, with acute schizophrenia, exploring the critical implications of the relationship between Grenouille and his cultural milieu and showing how the text subverts received notions of socio-cultural development and human progress.

To maintain that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a modern, schizophrenic anti-hero, more advanced and psychologically complex than his Enlightenment context, is to fly in the face both of critical orthodoxy and of the obvious immediate reading of Patrick Süskind's novel Das Parfum.¹ Rather, it is perhaps easier to equate his blatant, bestial inhumanity (as evidenced by his murder of twenty-five female virgins in order to rob them of their scent) with social and biological primitivity. In such a reading, Grenouille's apparent madness (most spectacularly...
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