Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore , Alphonse de Lamartine (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 201 Claire d'Albe. By Sophie Cottin. The original French text, ed. by Margaret Cohen. (MLA Texts and Translations) New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 2002. xxviii+158pp. $9.95. ISBN 0-87352-925-1. Claire d'Albe. By Sophie Cottin. An English translation by Margaret Cohen after the 1807 translation by Eliza Anderson Godefroy. (MLA Texts and Translations) New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 2002. xxxiii + 155 pp. $9.95. ISBN 0-87352-926-x. These two volumes are the latest in the invaluable MLA Texts and Translations series offeringkey,often neglected, texts that would otherwise be difficultto get hold of or too expensive to put on student reading lists. The dual nature of the project means that texts can be taught to a group of both French and non-French readers simultaneously, thus greatly increasing the scope of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury authors available to teach. Claire d'Albe (1799), Sophie Cottin's firstnovel, is an epistolary tale of adultery concluding in what Margaret Cohen deems to be the first depiction of female orgasm in polite fiction. Ethically complex, the novel plays out the traditional themes of love vs. duty and personal fulfilmentvs. collective welfare at a time when sentimentality is merging with Romanticism. Both the English version and the French original are preceded by an introduction in English sketching out Cottin's life and literary career, contemporary reactions to Claire dAlbe, key themes and moral issues, and the nature of sentimental fiction of the time. There is a bibliography of works cited followed by suggestions for further reading and a selected bibliography of Cottin's works. The English edition contains a detailed note on the translation, expanding on a paragraph from the introduction to the French original discussing the meanings sentimental terms held forthe contemporary reader. Basing the translation on a roughly contemporary one has allowed Margaret Cohen to draw on authentic sentimental vocabulary in English while updating expressions she felt to be needlessly archaic for a contemporary American audience. One aspect impossible to translate has been carefully footnoted, the shift from 'vous' to 'tu' at a crucial stage in the relationship between Claire and Frederic in Letter 18; but the subsequent shifting back from 'tu' to 'vous' to 'tu' again which reveals the state of mind of each character is referred to only in passing, so that someone reading the English version would lose some of the sense of inner struggle that a reader of French gains from the original text. This issue of nuance is one impossible to resolve. On the whole the translation reads well and makes the text available to those without French, but anyone who can read French should?it goes without saying?be encouraged to use the French original because so much of the essence of the sentimental epistolary novel lies precisely in nuance of language. Overall, though, these two volumes are a welcome addition to the number of texts by women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries readily accessible for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. University of Warwick Katherine Astbury Maternal Echoes: The Poetry ofMar celine Desbordes- Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine . By Aimee Boutin. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2001. 246 pp. $42.50. ISBN 0-87413-727-6. In her comparative account of two French romantic poets Aimee Boutin examines Lamartine's effeminacy and Desbordes-Valmore's matriarchy in order to raise signi? ficant questions about Romanticism's relationship with the maternal and the period's underlying ideology. This is a carefully researched book that begins with an explo? ration of reception, grounding the argument for the maternal in the way in which 202 Reviews later nineteenth-century poets position themselves with respect to the mother text (Chapter i). This is developed in Chapter 2 in Hugo's figure of the echo. Boutin, in a finely tuned argument, here brings together a range of theoretical approaches to suggest that there is, in Hugo's notion of the echo, an implied interlocutor whom Lamartine seeks, only then to retreat into the self, whereas Desbordes-Valmore uses her poetic voice as a friendly echo of another, as...