Greene portrays the transmutation of Sarah’s earthly love into something greater with a grace that is all the more impressive for being realistic. She is not an instant saint. Her feelings swing from misery to peace and back to misery, with much bitterness and hatred of God. She berates herself for making a vow under the influence of hysteria, and she tries again and again to convince herself that her vow is not binding. She realizes that Christianity affirms the importance of the body she loves--Maurice’s body--because Christianity is what she calls to herself a “materialist” religion. She could wish her own annihilation but cannot wish that Maurice should simply die and rot. And in her desperate search for God in what she calls “the desert,” Sarah comes to find a meaning for the love she had for Maurice.
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Sarah’s exclusive, passionate, sexual love for Maurice has become a self-sacrificial love that includes in its beneficence the woes of other men. It is now love for God and thereby love for Maurice. Greene shows that Sarah is not becoming a saint as he declares that when Sarah is weak, she decided that she cannot go on keeping her vow any longer and that she wants “ordinary corrupt human love”. Maurice also is a repentant, and even in the midst of his anger and duplicity he can still issue a challenge to the Christian view of the
Sarah’s exclusive, passionate, sexual love for Maurice has become a self-sacrificial love that includes in its beneficence the woes of other men. It is now love for God and thereby love for Maurice. Greene shows that Sarah is not becoming a saint as he declares that when Sarah is weak, she decided that she cannot go on keeping her vow any longer and that she wants “ordinary corrupt human love”. Maurice also is a repentant, and even in the midst of his anger and duplicity he can still issue a challenge to the Christian view of the