Lafayette's Impossible Princess: On (Not) Making Literary History

Abstract

The branch of literary history occupied with generic evolution customarily views masterworks as the drivers of formal change: their success causes later writers to follow their innovations. This article considers the case of the comtesse de Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves, which broke from received Aristotelian ideas on the use of history by focusing on an invented heroine; because the princess was invented, she blocked traditional reading strategies and allowed instead for readerly identification. It is tempting to conclude from this that the novel's innovations made it a harbinger of the future, an ancestor of the nineteenth-century novel. Yet writers of Lafayette's time did not follow her cue, and no trail leads from the princesse de Clèves to later fictive protagonists. Theories of literary evolution must take into account that in many cases there may be no reassuring causal relation between masterworks and broader literary practice.