La Princesse De Research Articles

PEACEMAKING, INTERDYNASTIC MARRIAGE, AND THE RISE OF THE FRENCH NOVEL

This article examines the declining prestige and utility of one of the mainstays of pre-Enlightenment peacemaking: treaties uniting once belligerent dynasties through marriage. By the late Middle Ages, interdynastic marriages had become such a common feature of the diplomatic landscape that the practice seemed almost transhistorical, something that was done always and everywhere. By the reign of Louis XIII, however, statesmen began stressing the limits of interdynastic marriage as a diplomatic strategy. This transformation of French affairs of state coincided with the appearance of prose romances that scholars identify retrospectively as the first French novels. This essay focuses on two of the most popular and influential of these novels, César Vichard de Saint-Réal's Dom Carlos (1672) and the Countess of La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), as responses to the devaluation of the marriage diplomacy that had established dynastic networks between France and the Mediterranean world for centuries. Both works center on the 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis between France and Spain, which married Henri II's daughter Elisabeth de Valois to King Philip II. While Saint-Réal does not condemn such arrangements wholesale, he suggests that their success is highly subject to fortune. La Princesse de Clèves owes much to Saint-Réal's portrayal of the personal costs of marriages of state, as well as to Madame de La Fayette's own observations of the French and Savoyard courts. Although her focus on the interior life of her heroine limits explicit political commentary, her allusions to miserably unhappy queens-consort cast marriage diplomacy in an overwhelmingly negative light.

John D. Lyons The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French LiteratureThe Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature. John D. Lyons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. vi+211.

<i>John D. Lyons</i> The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature<i>The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature</i>. John D. Lyons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. vi+211.

Les images de soi chez Rousseau: l’autobiographie comme politique by Morihiko Koshi

in chronological order with Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). Jensen elucidates previously unanswered questions in this chapter. One of the main questions is how the Princesse breaks away from maternal possession and how she successfully creates her own identity after her mother’s death. In chapter 2, the author examines Madame de Sévigné’s desire to be an individual and to be recognized as a writer (140). Jensen shows how much Madame de Sévigné needed her daughter to validate and recognize her mother’s talent in her letters. However, on her side, Sévigné does not recognize her daughter’s desires, but imagines a “fantasy daughter” (176) that does not exist in real life. In chapter 3, Jensen analyzes Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, in which the author uses her daughter to represent herself as“ideally feminine” (201), a loving and tender mother.Vigée-Lebrun also invents a“fantasy daughter,”representing her as her“alterego ”, her “self-reflective object” (214). Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between George Sand’s two ‘mothers’ who raised her: her biological mother and her grandmother on her paternal side. Jensen starts her analysis by questioning why there is a discrepancy between the way Sand was viewed and what she wrote in Histoire de ma vie. Jensen concludes that Sand’s problematic relationship with her mothers is due to a lack of recognition as an independent subject (265). The last chapter analyses Break of Day, Colette’s fictional autobiography where Sido (the writer’s mother) is depicted very positively. However Jensen asks why Colette wrote about her mother after her death.She finds the answer in the preface when Colette states that her mother“imposed” herself on her (329)—most likely,as Jensen argues,because there were some unresolved issues or feelings between them.With a clear, well-supported, and thought-provoking study, Jensen has made a valuable contribution to the field of feminist literary criticism and has proved that there are no ‘easy possessions.’ California State University, San Marcos Véronique Anover Koshi, Morihiko. Les images de soi chez Rousseau: l’autobiographie comme politique. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0329-3. Pp. 331. 39 a. It is notably characteristic of almost all Rousseau’s work—as opposed, say, to standard philosophical discourse—that the narrator frequently refers to himself in the text. Koshi’s objective is not to get at the ‘real’ Jean-Jacques but to analyze the character or image of that first-person voice as exemplified in a certain number of works, in particular those he deems particularly polemical (but then virtually all of Rousseau’s writings are in one way or other contestatory or combative) and/or that take the form of discourses,letters,or autobiography.Koshi refers to this persona throughout as the author’s ethos, a term I find distracting even if it can be etymologically justified (22). Since he is concerned with how the “I” functions pragmatically (one might say ‘interactively’), he takes into account the ways in which the reader’s role as well is manipulated, and evidence of the manner in which the public sphere (both 222 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 223 virtual and factual) reacts. The analysis is made more complex by the fact that it focuses not on the self-image as abstracted from the argumentation, but rather on how it functions as part of the argumentation, in other words in the context of overall rhetorical strategy.The discours savant which Rousseau favors early on has,for example, very different rules from other genres that can be pressed into polemical service. A number of the formal letters are examined, particularly that addressed to Christophe de Beaumont and those to his fellow Genevans in response to Tronchin’s Lettres de la campagne. The texts that best lend themselves to this exercise are of course those that contain plenty of first- and second-person pronouns and verbs, yet the third person must not be overlooked (particularly in the form of on, but also le lecteur or even le public). Koshi spends relatively little time on dialogues, though Rousseau juge de JeanJacques is adduced for its theory of how...

Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 by Katharine Ann Jensen

Reviews 221 analysis of whatever critical concern is willed to be operative in the work. The essays thus uniquely and surprisingly explore the varieties of Beckettian pain, inspired by this mutually interdependent relationship between the writer’s emotional and physical experiences of pain, loss, and suffering, and pain’s incidence in his characters. Beckett, the editors write in their introduction,“was compelled to write on pain, himself being in pain and sympathizing with the other people’s pain” (21). This theme is explored most fully in the first essay, Mark Nixon’s lucid and detailed account of how Beckett’s early aesthetics emerged from the biographical experiences of pain that led him to study the traditions of quietism, pessimism, and melancholia. In arguing that Beckett consistently “sought to find a cultural, artistic solution for a personal problem” (33), Nixon offers a fresh analysis of Beckett’s early development as a writer and establishes a thematic that will be taken up by many of the other writers in the volume, including excellent contributions by Graley Herren, Garin Dowd, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Jonathan Boulter. In addition to the freshness of these approaches, the editors have wisely included a variety of critical points of view, and pain is actively engaged rather than taken as a matter of course. Given the subject matter, Elaine Scarry’s influential The Body in Pain naturally forms an intertextual thread running through each of the ten collected essays. But Beckett’s work is shown to confirm Scarry’s accounts of pain just as often as it disrupts them. Particularly in the latter essays, the privacy of Scarry’s account gives way to new and unexpected models inspired by the thought of Blanchot, Levinas, and Agamben. This plurality of pain’s presence throughout Beckett’s oeuvre is what makes the present volume a key source for scholars interested in thinking through pain’s role in shaping Beckett’s worldview, and in exploring the Beckettian subject more generally. Towson University (MD) Jacob Hovind Jensen, Katharine Ann. Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61149038 -9-1. Pp. 450. $90. Jensen presents an ambitious, comprehensive, and unique study centered around the work of five French women writers from four centuries: Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, George Sand, and Colette. The purpose of this study is to analyze the psychological power relationships between mothers and their daughters and their effects on identity and the self. In these texts, daughters are often treated as objects possessed by their mothers, who deny them their psychic autonomy in order to satisfy their maternal desires. Jensen relies on Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective psychoanalysis theory, which argues that paradoxically, mutual recognition between mother and daughter is necessary for a daughter to differentiate herself from her mother and build her own identity. The analysis starts in chronological order with Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). Jensen elucidates previously unanswered questions in this chapter. One of the main questions is how the Princesse breaks away from maternal possession and how she successfully creates her own identity after her mother’s death. In chapter 2, the author examines Madame de Sévigné’s desire to be an individual and to be recognized as a writer (140). Jensen shows how much Madame de Sévigné needed her daughter to validate and recognize her mother’s talent in her letters. However, on her side, Sévigné does not recognize her daughter’s desires, but imagines a “fantasy daughter” (176) that does not exist in real life. In chapter 3, Jensen analyzes Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, in which the author uses her daughter to represent herself as“ideally feminine” (201), a loving and tender mother.Vigée-Lebrun also invents a“fantasy daughter,”representing her as her“alterego ”, her “self-reflective object” (214). Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between George Sand’s two ‘mothers’ who raised her: her biological mother and her grandmother on her paternal side. Jensen starts her analysis by questioning why there is a discrepancy between the way Sand was viewed and what she wrote in...

Camus and Film

Compared with other writers of his generation, Camus had relatively little to say about movies. Even though he close to actress Maria Casares, even though he began working on a screen adaptation of La Princesse de Cleves for Robert Bresson, (1) even though Jean Renoir proposed to make a film version of The Stranger (this, years before Visconti's 1967 version), Camus never wrote for film journals and never theorized his relation to film. He was, at best, ambivalent about medium and, at times, openly hostile to it. According to Dudley Andrew, in 1949 Camus may even have convinced Gallimard to stop funding prestigious Revue du cinema, one of very few journals in postwar France that treated cinema as a serious art form. Camus, Andrew concludes, was simply not interested in films. (2) And yet, movies constantly appear in Camus's writings, from early essays of L'Envers et l'Endroit, through The Stranger, to long comical description of a day spent at movie theater in Camus's posthumously published The First Man. As critic Vincent Gregoire has written, movies appear discretely, in small doses and quite often in margins of Camus's work, but they are everywhere. (3) In this essay, I look at Camus's often contradictory relation to cinema in an attempt to add to our understanding of relation between aesthetics and politics in his work. Looking at what Camus had to say about movies may help us to better understand Camus's relation to aesthetic forms in general, and, more specifically, it may shed light on how aesthetic hierarchies still very much at work in twentieth-century France may have participated in way Camus approached questions of mass culture, poverty, and colonial space. I want to start with an early example from L'Ironie, a short text published in L'Envers et l'Endroit, collection of essays that Camus wrote in 1935-36 when he only twenty-two. These essays have as their backdrop a number of cities in North Africa and Europe--Algiers, Naples, Prague--and take shape of a series of short meditations on poverty, existential isolation, and what Camus calls absurd simplicity of world. (4) The text titled L'Ironie tells story of a group of young people who visit an old woman who is isolated and dying, her life entirely turned to God. At one point, young people decide to go to movies: Pour prolonger cette reunion, on decida d'aller au cinema. On passait justement un film gai. Le jeune homme avait etourdiment accepte, sans penser a l'etre qui continuait d'exister dans son dos. (40) This, as far as I can tell, is first mention of cinema in Camus's work, and it generates a crisis. The movies very quickly become opposite of everything narrator values: thought, meditation, constant contemplation of death. The young man in story realizes that cinema is a form of distraction and of absentmindedness, a facile happiness. And Camus uses a rare hyperbole to describe dilemma: Lui se sentait place devant le plus affreux Malheur qu'il eut encore connu: celui d'une vieille femme infirme qu'on abandonne pour aller au cinema. (41) This somewhat excessive conclusion--going to movies becomes the most horrible Misfortune young man has ever experienced--can be attributed to an author who is still green. But there is something else at work in this short text. L'Ironie, a story in which Camus establishes tone and some of themes that will recur throughout his career, is also an attempt to situate his writing in opposition to cinema as a form of popular entertainment. From Camus's very first writings, cinema is an agent of social cohesion and of mass distraction. It is technology that turns individual's gaze away from contemplation of poverty and death, these two realities that remain at center of Camus's writing. …

Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought by Christina Howells

galanterie revealed the often mundane, physical, and emotional underpinnings of political causality. The theme is familiar to readers of La Princesse de Clèves; Grande revisits this novel provocatively and speculatively in an epilogue, suggesting that multiple ironies and even a great deal of humor may have gone largely unnoticed in Lafayette’s masterpiece. Grande states in conclusion that this kind of reading against the grain of Classicism aims to open up the study of the century by raising awareness of the presence of comedy, irony, and licentious humor alongside the appearance of order that has often defined the field. University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Howells, Christina. Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7456-5275-7. Pp. 263. $26.95. This fast-moving overview claims that“phenomenologists, existentialists, religious philosophers, psychoanalysts, and deconstructive thinkers [have] all resisted the idea of closure” in human existence (217). They do so through paradox and aporia, as in the idea of salvation achieved through failure. Our mortality simultaneously creates and abolishes our subjectivity. The soul, understood literally or metaphorically, offers a privileged site where the mind-body dualism may be overcome. Howells’s four main chapters feature phenomenologists (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir); religious philosophers (Marcel, Ricœur, Jankélévitch, Levinas); psychoanalysts (Lacan,Anzieu, Kristeva); and deconstructionists (Derrida, Nancy). Howells asks what happens to the subject in death, whereas“what is generally explored in the theorization of subjectivity is its genesis, not its dissolution” (20). She examines her chosen theorists respectfully, often revealing latent affinities. Sartre does not pursue the link between desire and death. Unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty finds it impossible to explore the structure of consciousness without analyzing the role of the body. He fails richly to imagine others and their interactions. Beauvoir has been “more successful in her discussion of mortality and passion than either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty”(54). Marcel also has a more realistic, humane conception of illness and death than does Sartre (75). But he is unsystematic, and avoids the hard questions. The Catholic Ricœur, who called himself a Socratic, rejects dualism, seeing the subject as‘irremediably incarnate.’He focuses on mourning, considering it the opposite of gaiety.Levinas stresses solitude as a wellspring of identity, not as a tragic condition. His non-standard terminology and his ideas are hard to pin down. Lacan thinks desire can never be satisfied, because it aims at an unknown alterity. It arises from a‘weaning complex.’Pleasure satisfies desire without ever slaking it, but language can partially assuage desire. Concerning female jouissance, Lacan remains vague and self-contradictory. His“account of love at the end of Encore is deeply bewildering [...]; negations replacing one another in [...] an unstoppable whirligig” 266 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 267 (146).Anzieu objects to Lacan’s concept of the self,but seems close to it.Kristeva’s treatment of passion and subjectivity surpasses others. Since the 1970s, she has analyzed three main versions of love: romantic, maternal, and transferential (in psychoanalysis). Like Lacan, she assigns a primary role to language in all her analyses, which tend to elide the real, physical body—ageing, sick, or dying. Howells’s interests in Derrida focus on his studies of mourning, particularly, how to remain faithful to the memory of a friend while respecting his alterity. He speaks as a survivor, whereas Nancy can speak as a person dying. Like Kristeva, Nancy separates love and desire, while mingling desire and pleasure. He rejects the idea of a body infused by the spirit, seeing bodies as a medley of ever-changing relationships to externality. After a heart transplant, he better than any other contemporary philosopher understands the subject as a concrete, inescapable reality (214). Howells’s helpful conclusion should be read first.A judicious, well-informed tour de force, her book typifies Polity’s high-level popularizations in the social sciences. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Hubert, Marie-Claude, éd. Dictionnaire Beckett. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-27453 -2144-2. Pp. 1200. 180 a. This dictionary is the result of a collaborative effort by sixty international specialists of diverse generations and levels of research experience that...

A Mathematical Key toLa Princesse de Clèves

This article interprets Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves as a response to Blaise Pascal’s arithmetic triangle. Pascal used the numbers of the triangle to determine how to divide fairly the stakes of an interrupted game of chance. He called his method “the geometry of chance,” and he touted it as an expansion of “the empire of reason” into formerly ungovernable territory. However, Pascal never applied the arithmetic triangle to games with more than two players, and the love triangle among the central characters in Lafayette’s novel implicitly ridicules this constraint. The frame around the present argument extends its significance beyond La Princesse de Clèves to the modern literary mechanisms whose origins critics have identified with it.

Identité humaine et vieillissement dans une lecture du Temps retrouvé de Marcel Proust

Dans Le Temps retrouvé , Marcel Proust au cours d’une matinée chez la princesse de Guermantes retrouve des personnes qu’il n’avait pas vues depuis longtemps. Le vieillissement a imprimé aux visages et aux silhouettes des modifications telles que Proust évoque un bal costumé et raconte des difficultés d’identification. Mais il constate que laborieusement ou sous l’effet du surgissement du trait du visage qui déclenche le souvenir, les personnes sont en général reconnues. Bien plus, cette reconnaissance malgré les changements ouvre à l’évocation d’un passé qui n’était pas perdu. Tel est le Temps retrouvé qui, du passé profondément enfoui au présent, raconte l’histoire d’une vie dans laquelle on peut plonger jusqu’aux souvenirs les plus lointains. Et le parcours de la vie n’est plus vu comme une déchéance emportée par le naufrage du Temps. Il est vu comme un parcours ascendant même si cette ascension fragilise et rapproche sans cesse de la mort. Le vieillissement décrit par Proust peut ainsi se lire comme une permanence identitaire, au sens de l’ipséité, au-delà des changements qui n’affectent que la mêmeté et préservent le lien continu de chacun avec son passé. L’être humain, si frêle dans l’espace, tire toute son ampleur de la place qu’il occupe dans le Temps. Telle est ainsi la fascination que Proust finit par ressentir à l’égard de la vieillesse qui montre un même Moi en perpétuel changement mais aussi et du même coup en marche vers la mort qui le déliera du Temps. In Time Regained (volume 8 of Remembrance of things past ), during an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes, Marcel Proust met people he had not seen for a long time. The transformations of faces and features linked to old age seem to be a costumed ball and Proust experiences “difficulties in putting the required names to the faces around him” and in recognizing them. “Certainly, some women were recognisable because their faces had remained almost the same and they wore their grey hair to harmonise with the season like autumn leaves. But in others and in some men, their identity was so impossible to establish – for instance between the dark voluptary one remembered and the old monk of now – that their transformation made one think, rather than of the actor's art, of that of the amazing mimic of whom Fregoli remains the prototype”. But a fugitive impression or an effort of memory, abstracting “the natural feature from the travesty”, commonly allows recognition of persons. “One starts with the idea that people have remained the same and one discovers that they have got old. But if one starts by thinking them old, one does not find them so bad”. Despite changes, recognizing people allows one to refer to a past time which is not forgotten. Such is the “regained time”, which, from the past deeply hidden to the present, does tell a life in which we can reach the oldest memories. The course of life is not seen anymore as a decline caused by the wreck of Time. It is seen as an ascending path even if this ascent is also seen as an increase in one's fragility and weakness. Old age, described by Proust, can be interpreted as a permanent identity meaning “selfhood”, beyond changes which only affect “sameness” and preserve the unceasing link of each person with one's past. The human being, so weak in space, withdraws all his contribution to his place in time. This is why Proust is so fascinated by the feeling he has, regarding old age, which proves a permanent self maintaining its identity despite transformations over time, but also on the way to death which will set one free from Time.

Model Behaviour: Cocteau, Radiguet and La Princesse de Clèves

This article explores certain implications of the intertextual connections between two canonical French novels, Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves (1678) and Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du comte d’Orgel (1924), with particular emphasis on the question of literary individuation as it applies to the later work and its author. The functional importance of exemplary model works in respect of the modern French literary field is examined in the context of challenges to notions of literary tradition and transmission in the inter-war years. Radiguet’s literary individuation is seen as both practically enabled and theoretically problematised by the connection to the earlier text. The individuation process, complicated additionally in this instance by Radiguet’s literary and personal association with Jean Cocteau, is argued to unfold with respect to a classical imaginary that is facilitated by but independent of the actual classical intertext.

The Jilted Friend: Omniscient Narration in Lafayette’sLa Princesse de ClèvesandL’Histoire d’Henriette d’Angleterre

This article offers a new reading of La Princesse de Cleves by refracting it through Lafayette’s earlier Histoire d’Henriette d’Angleterre and that work’s subtext of jilted friendship and offset social perspective. Lafayette’s experience of having a prestigious younger friend, Princess Henriette, commission a memoir of her life, only to drop the project partway through, pushed Lafayette to recognize how much she had already discerned about the princess even without the latter’s insider information. Drawing on trenchant observations culled from the sidelines of the court, Lafayette developed narrative techniques that valorized what she had observed from afar and from below. Importantly, Lafayette expanded these techniques in La Princesse de Cleves, creating a memorialist narrator and perspicacious characters whose powers of observation and whose ideas about manners resemble her own in the memoir. Though the novel’s narrator has often been described as omniscient, the earlier memoir reveals that Lafayette u...

Competing Codes and Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in La Princesse de Clèves

Research Article| January 01 2012 Competing Codes and Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in La Princesse de Clèves Nora Martin Peterson Nora Martin Peterson University of Nebraska, Lincoln Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2012) 103 (1-2): 233–253. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-103.1-2.233 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nora Martin Peterson; Competing Codes and Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in La Princesse de Clèves. Romanic Review 1 January 2012; 103 (1-2): 233–253. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-103.1-2.233 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 The Trustees of Columbia University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Blushing and Legibility in La Princesse de Clèves

In La Princesse de Clèves, the eponymous heroine is the only character who blushes. The meaning of the princess’s blush is often ambiguous and is left to the interpretation of other characters within the plot as well as to readers of the novel. This essay explores the princess’s blush as a figure for the tension between legibility and dissimulation that runs throughout Lafayette’s text. The ways in which the princess reads other characters — and is in turn read by them — underpin the difficulty with which she nego- tiates the politics of passion in Henri II’s court. The blush ultimately signals the princess’s paradoxical lack of transparency, and constructs a link between the complexity of reading the princess and the complexity of reading Lafayette’s 1678 novel.

Inner Workings of the Novel: Studying a Genre (review)

Reviewed by: Inner Workings of the Novel: Studying a Genre Laurence M. Porter Pasco, Allan H. Inner Workings of the Novel: Studying a Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xii+209. ISBN: 978-0-230-10698-7 I confess that I asked to review Allan Pasco's new book sight unseen, with the intention of praising a distinguished scholar for his continuing contributions to narratology. I would have liked him to have written a different book than he did. This attitude is neither fair nor appropriate in a reviewer, who should simply go try to write that ideal book himself. I hope, then, that our disagreements can be understood not as evaluations of Allan Pasco's book per se but as testimonials to the provocative power of his analyses. Allan Pasco defines the novel as "long prose fiction that is unified, coherent, and literary" (ix; emphasis in original). He does not seek its unity and coherence in emplotment, characterization, depictions of society, or message. He finds unity in constellations of symbols, and in "sequences" (a term never defined) that may crystallize into a reader's awareness by the end of a narrative. Pasco uses "theme" to designate the coherence produced within a narrative by recurring situations, motifs, topics, images, or symbols. His proof texts are Camus's L'Exil et le royaume; Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques; Flaubert's Tentation de saint Antoine; Huysmans' À rebours; and Proust. The major differences between our outlooks concern the use to Camus's and Barbey's short story cycles to illuminate the novel; what I see as the lack of adequate contextualization for all the works; a need for a richer sense of character and of interpersonal relations in the three novels; and a fuller treatment of "theme" in its ethical rather than esthetic sense. By "ethical" here I mean a work's "message," the reason why we should care about the story we are reading. Such messages hold up standards for judging human behavior. They may be axiological (concerning relative values), deontological (moral values), epistemological (how much is knowable), or anagogical (spiritual progress—see Dante's letter to Cangrande della Scala). The Kunstlerroman such as Proust's reflects a secularized version of the anagogical. Where Allan Pasco tries consistently to minimize the importance of character and plot, I try consistently to enhance it. To do so, I consistently emphasize implicatures. Admitting that one person's implicature is another person's psychic projection, or void—never proof positive—we can quickly see the difference between our views in what Pasco says (in passing) about La Princesse de Clèves. "Of Mlle de Chartres . . . we are told only that she is a great beauty and that she has very white skin and blond hair. From that point on, her actions and the stories told to her are hung from little but her name, to which readers of good will attach significant traits [through psychic projection] as they follow her adventures" (4). True, Madame de Lafayette's physical description is perfunctory. But it sets up the major conflict of the work. In the late seventeenth century French court, where the discrepancy between the public and the private self was all-important (see La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère), the typical problem of physically beautiful people is aggravated: they tend to be seen only as desirable objects. The fascination they exercise is also their curse. Prior to this description, moreover, we readers have already been told that the future Princesse is an only child, [End Page 160] dominated by her ambitious, widowed mother, who pushes her into an arranged marriage (compare George Sand's Indiana). The tragedy of her life flows from that family dynamic. Moreover, thought report, which occurs throughout the narrative, provides rich, unequivocal information about her character. So does her unconventional decision to confess to her husband her attraction to another man, as a way of resisting it. (Unconscious vengeful cruelty? We have no way of knowing.) She undergoes deep, agonizing spiritual struggles. The open-ended conclusion avoids pat moralizing, leaving us to do much interpretative work ourselves. What are we to make of the memories of "inimitable" examples of virtue that...

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen (review)

Reviewed by: Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen Hope Christiansen Whidden, Seth , ed. Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 187. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6643-1 In his useful introduction to this collection of twelve essays, Seth Whidden proposes "a new model for considering literary collaboration" (3), one that examines the nature of the collaborative texts themselves rather than attempting to get into the minds of writers. At issue in these studies are two general categories of collaboration: in præsentia (where co-authors are physically present when the work is created) and in absentia (where one of the co-authors is not). Taken together, the essays elucidate "what, precisely, was at stake in collaboration, that it was so prevalent, with such a variety of approaches, throughout the nineteenth century" (11). Joan DeJean's and Jack Iverson's opening contributions may seem out of place in a book devoted to the nineteenth century (the other 'bookend' for this volume, Daphné de Marneffe's study of 1920s Belgian literary journals, stretches this point further). However, the aim of DeJean's short piece is to show that while the early nineteenth was in many ways "a brave new literary world," it actually continued, rather than broke with, pre-Revolutionary practice in which collaboration was the rule, not [End Page 164] the exception (19). La Rochefoucauld was more editor than single author of Les Maximes, for example, as was Madame de Lafayette in the case of Zayde and La Princesse de Clèves. As for the eighteenth century, Iverson underlines the importance of collaborative endeavors such as the Encyclopédie, whose articles were meant to "interact with one another to yield a powerful cumulative impact" (27). Contacts and exchanges resulting from gatherings of philosophes were invaluable in stimulating intellectual activity; "conviviality and creativity," Iverson argues, "went hand in hand" (32). Of the remaining nine essays—each a worthwhile investment of reading time—those by Pascal Durand, Whidden, Jennifer K. Wolter, Frédéric Canovas, and Pamela A. Genova stand out. Durand affirms that Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier not only epitomizes collaboration in the nineteenth century, with its eighty poems by almost eighty poets and its wide range of poetic forms, but stands as a fitting tribute to a poet who, as "painter, engraver, serial writer and artist writer, licentious poet and poet cherishing the 'contour pur,'" was "a whole artistic field, all by himself" (71). Whidden casts a wide net, looking first at L'Album zutique, a collection of poems, jokes, rants, and illustrations; then at Charles Cros's poem "Le Fleuve," for which Manet provided etchings; and finally, at Manet's work with Mallarmé on the latter's translation of Poe's "The Raven"—a partnership in which additional layers of collaboration were entangled: Poe's with Mallarmé and Manet, and Baudelaire's hypotexte (his own translation of "The Raven" published twenty years earlier) with Mallarmé's hypertexte. Canovas also explores the connections between visual and literary arts in his study of painter Maurice Denis's illustrations for Verlaine's Sagesse and Gide's Le Voyage d'Urien. He suspects that there is a correlation between the closeness of the Denis-Gide collaboration (in contrast to the extremely limited Denis-Verlaine one) and the superiority of the illustrations for Le Voyage. . . . Denis, who preferred the term "decoration" to "illustration"—which he felt subjugated the image to its textual equivalent (127)—"simply illustrated" Verlaine's text, whereas he "decorated" Gide's (128), taking such liberties as including a great number of female figures, "in full contradiction" to Gide's male-dominated text (134). For Canovas, the Denis-Gide collaboration represents "a milestone in the history of illustrated books: the moment when a visual artist finally decided to question the subordination of his art to literature in order to follow his own aesthetic and artistic goals" (135). Under scrutiny in Genova's contribution is La Revue Wagnérienne, the brainchild of Edouard Dujardin and "a singularly interesting example of literary journalism" thanks to its blend of methodologies and formats and its balance between theoretical and...

Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity

Verisimilitude (probability, plausibility) began to be cited in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries as the feature that distinguished the novel from the other narrative genres of romance and history. Observing that verisimilitude was borrowed from neoclassical dramatic theory, and defined in terms of (gendered) character typologies, I argue that the decorum of dramatic verisimilitude was specially implicated in the decorum of female honor. I explore the much-discussed shift in the European discourse around gender and sex during the same period, and the connection others have established between that and the emergence of the modern novel, as a shift from "honesty" to "fidelity." Specifically, I examine this shift in the context of verisimilitude and the fictional representation of gendered and interiorized character in the European novel. With reference to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, David Hume's History of England, and Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, I suggest that the aesthetic paradox of the quixotic figure in the early novel, and "female quixotism" in particular, performed, rather than directly representing or reflecting, this shift in the decorum of femininity from honesty to fidelity. In the process quixotism helped produce the effect of psychological interiority so often associated with the novel, by performing a gesture of internalizing moral norms that had traditionally been imposed from without..

Madame de Lafayette

When, in 2007, the French President scorned the idea that budding public servants should be required to read La Princesse de Cleves, the ensuing protests, whatever their purely political dimension, were a reminder of this work's iconic status. Naturally enough, perhaps, this spotlight left in the shade the other works attributed to Mme de Lafayette. There was also scant reference to the messy question of attribution. With no manuscript in existence the present attribution of La Princesse de Cleves was made ‘definitively’ only a century after its publication in 1678: for example, the 1764 reprint of the 1704 Paris edition cites La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, and Segrais as co-authors. Does this matter? True, we would still watch Hamlet if it were performed by the Royal Bacon Company. However, in the case of Mme de Lafayette, biographical details are still often used to shore up critical hypotheses. At the outset, therefore, one issue deserves attention: what does ‘Mme de Lafayette’ now imply?

From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century Literature

This article proposes the view that during the course of the seventeenth century the concept of fortune in the Boethian mode, dominant in French literature during the Middle Ages, yielded to a new manner of conceiving the fortuitous. This new conception, still sometimes called 'fortune' but increasingly known as 'hasard', took the form of what we would call randomness. However, both the older and the newer ways of representing the fortuitous require awareness of individual human desire. In this study, Moliere's L'Ecole des femmes and two narratives by Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Zayde and La Princesse de Cleves , are considered with regard to the way the texts display chance either directly or indirectly. In conclusion, the article proposes the hypothesis that the shift from fortune to randomness in French literature is related to an increasing emphasis on what we call the reader's 'identification' with fictive characters.

Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (review)

Reviewed by: Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age Adrian Daub Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 303 pp. We have spent over two hundred years living in and through books, and the ways in which we have done so were essentially the invention of a short span of time straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. Such is the central thesis of Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books. And Piper adds another, perhaps more surprising guiding thesis: at what seems to many observers—though not to Piper, to be sure—the twilight of the book era, many of the concepts used to describe what is supposedly new about communication in the internet age map quite snugly onto the forms of communication that were established by, and in turn helped establish, the dominance of the book in the late eighteenth century. Piper, surprisingly sanguine about the future of the book, argues that not only have we not left the book behind; instead the very terms we turn to mourn or celebrate the book’s demise actually hearken from the world of the book itself. As a result, Piper tells the story of the book “not as a narrative of rise and fall, but . . . as a series of social, historical, and technological negotiations” (236). This is a set of exciting and ambitious claims, and Piper’s rather detailed case studies don’t entirely manage to vindicate these claims with quite as much force as staked out by his introduction. But Piper is breaking new ground here, and he seems quite content to forge ahead and beckon others to follow—and, given this erudite, lucid, and altogether thrilling book, I am quite confident that they will. [End Page 325] Each individual chapter deals with a different way of putting together texts, or texts and images, between two covers. The first of these chapters deals with the fractious and fragmented editorial history of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Piper starts out from the simple suggestion that, given the incredibly convoluted genesis of the book we purchase under that title today, it might make more sense to speak of a “network” of interrelated and interacting texts rather than relying on a teleological model by which the earlier texts are simply fragments striving for the final fulfillment of their destiny between the covers of a physical book. Piper’s second chapter deals with the tantalizing and terrifying role the copy plays in fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century. Piper connects E. T. A. Hoffmann’s practice of republication and collection with his deployment of uncanny returns and doppelgängers. The third and fourth chapters deal with two other kinds of books that contained multitudes—namely editions and almanacs. The importance of translation in constituting the pan-European romantic movement has received much scholarly attention recently, as has the crucial role women played in romantic translation practice. In picking up on these discussions, Piper once again grounds the phenomenon in the material world of physical books, drawing our attention to “the commercialism of women’s writing.” It was through translating that women writers became professionalized, Piper argues, and it was translating and publishing translations that allowed them to negotiate problems of originality, subjectivity, and publicity. Piper begins his fifth chapter with a writer who did not just practice translation, but rather lived in translation—Elisabeth Kulmann grew up in St. Petersburg and wrote most of her poetic work in three languages at once, without any of them ever being the primary or original one. He then backtracks to survey a number of women translators and their practice, from Sophie Mereau-Brentano’s translation of La Princesse de Clèves, via Hedwig Hülle’s translations of Homer, to Dorothea Tieck. Chapter six turns to the illustrated books of the romantic age. Here Piper is most interested in the intertextual and interpictorial references that abound in the early nineteenth-century explosion of illustrated books, books of illustrations, or books about illustrations. Piper deftly navigates the proliferation of engravings, Schattenrisse, or Umrisse, drawings (such as those of...

On Letting Sleeping Blonds Lie: Gender, Leisure Literature, and the Imagination in Fontenelle

Research Article| January 01 2011 On Letting Sleeping Blonds Lie: Gender, Leisure Literature, and the Imagination in Fontenelle Juliette Cherbuliez Juliette Cherbuliez University of Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2011) 102 (1-2): 145–168. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.145 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Juliette Cherbuliez; On Letting Sleeping Blonds Lie: Gender, Leisure Literature, and the Imagination in Fontenelle. Romanic Review 1 January 2011; 102 (1-2): 145–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.145 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 The Trustees of Columbia University2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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.