A model for chi-square analysis of regression vocabulary in Hélisenne de Crenne'sLes Angoysses douloureuses

Abstract

Historians of the French novel concur that Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours by Helisenne de Crenne (pseudonym for Marguerite Briet), offers the earliest example in French literature of the autobiographical or memorialist form.2 First published in 15 38, the three-part narrative contains what can loosely be described as an amorous triangle. In Part I, the narrator-heroine, Helisenne herself, evokes her persistent passion for the young Guenelic, a passion more wayward in thought than in deed. Eventually an exasperated husband incarcerates Helisenne in a country tower. Later episodes shift attention to the would-be lover, his military prowess and finally an attempt to rescue the beloved. Les Angoysses, then, presents another mutation of the Tristan legend in which separated lovers are eventually reunited in death. Although the shifts in narrative voice and content within the three parts of the story have long been deplored,3 the first person narration in Part I has more recently been faulted by Helisenne's editor, Paule Demats,4 who regrets an absence of "composition" and of "action" (p. xiii). Likewise, Alexandre Lorian5 in his comparison of Renaissance and twentieth-century rhetorical preferences among French writers finds a singular indifference to stylistic discrimination in the first part of the tale: . . . la rhetorique fait peu de distinction entre rdcit, description, monologue ou dialogue, oud l'emphase et les figures de style sont redparties d'une maniere assez uniforme (p. 78). Both Demats using personal observation and Lorian who relies on 10,000 word machine-processed samples argue persuasively that Helisenne's Part I eschews stylistic subtleties, that her rhetorical tropes issue forth unvaryingly regardless of manifest content.