Marceline Desbordes-Valmore Research Articles

The Aesthetic Pass: Beauty and the End of Analysis

This essay reads Jacques Lacan’s 1967 “Proposition on the Analyst of the School” from the perspectives of the metapsychology that upholds the Pass at the École freudienne du Québec and of aesthetic acts in Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral works. Specifically, it examines the aesthetic act as a possible path for the unbound drive upon traversing castration. It argues that the Pass is, specifically, a transindividual act of solidarity with desire that extends its ethics and efficacy beyond both the institutional frameworks of psychoanalysis and the control of cultures and civilizations. The essay relates Freud’s thoughts on transience and beauty to the end of analysis and concludes with a reading of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “Les Roses de Saadi” to contend that the transmission of the Pass occurs on the level of sensation to attain, beyond cultural particularities, desire as the common cause of humanity.

UNCOVERING THE DOUAI FRAGMENT: COMPOSING POLYPHONY AND ENCODING A COMPOSER IN THE LATE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Douai, Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, MS 1105/3 fragment 74.4/1 is a musical fragment from the second half of the fourteenth century, composed of two bifolios copied in black mensural notation. It not only contains a concordance for Multipliciter amando, a motet that, until now, has only survived in the famous Chantilly manuscript, but also four unica (another complete motet, two incomplete ones and a three-voice Gloria). After presenting a codicological overview of the fragment, I analyse distinctive features of each of the three complete pieces, based on the first modern transcription of the source. Special attention is given to the motet Ferre solet, which, by way of literary encoding mechanisms, reveals its composer’s name (Frater Johannes Vavassoris) and its precise date of composition (1373), making these four folios a crucial witness for understanding fourteenth-century musical culture.

“Clochetin or the Kingdom of Sa-Sa”

The nineteenth-century French writer, actress, and poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is still celebrated today for her innovative use of the eleven-syllable line in her poetry and is recognized as an important precursor of poets in the French Romantic tradition. Her vast collection of prose writings contains only one conte merveilleux or wonder tale, first published in her 1849 collection Les Anges de famille (Angels of the Family). The tale, "Clochetin or the Kingdom of Sa-Sa," blurs the lines between imagination and reason, the dreamworld and reality, and also contains a negative didactic metacommentary on the genre of the fairy tale.

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saʿdi to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Saʿdi’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Saʿdi’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Saʿdi’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.

Lyric and Memory: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “Tristesse”

Accounts of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry tend to be preoccupied above all with the question of gender, variously castigating her for conforming to feminine stereotypes or celebrating her resistance to the male model of poetic authority. Starting from the premise that this question can only be tackled by situating her verse in the context of Romanticism and reading it with careful attention to poetic form, this article undertakes a close reading of the poem “Tristesse” from Les Pleurs (1833), taken as an example of her distinctive and intricate lyric treatment of the theme of memory. The speaker of this poem describes the changed landscape around her childhood home to meditate on disillusionment and loss and, in contrast to a widespread tendency in this kind of poem, refuses to identify with the stability of nature. “Tristesse” problematizes spatial references and underlines that memories are internalized by the pysche. It refuses to idealize the past, but instead shows how articulating memories in the present is both a painful acknowledgement of what is lost and a creative way of overcoming that loss. This link between creativity and mourning is particularly evident in the unusual emphasis on the very process of recovering memories and in the speaker’s preoccupation with her own voice being heard. Close attention to the structure and texture of “Tristesse” demonstrates that it is both an original articulation of the general concern with temporality in this period and one inflected by the female perspective.

Between Poetic Cultures: Ancient Sources of the Asian “Orient” in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Louise Ackermann

Through close analysis of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s and Louise Ackermann’s readings of the literature of ancient Persia and India, Sa’di’s Gulistan and the Mahabharata, respectively, this article examines the specific meaning their texts give to the ‘Orient’ as a source of global poetic exchange.

Fathers, daughters, and slaves: women writers and French colonial slavery

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves brings to life the unique contribution by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. The book enriches our understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Stael, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In addition to these now canonical French authors, it calls attention to the lives and works of two lesser-known but important figures—Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the empathy that daughters show toward blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. The works by these French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone texts. These women’s contributions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women’s writing in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism. It undercuts neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies and between nineteenth and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (review)

Reviewed by: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer Melissa Percival (bio) Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011, 338 pp. $59.95 (cloth). Alexandra Wettlaufer’s book explores the figure of the female artist in France and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, juxtaposing the careers of actual women with representations of female artists in portraiture and the novel. This task requires an awareness of the different working conditions of artists on both sides of the Channel, and also a sensitivity to the varied inflections of artistic representation in different cultural milieux and artistic genres. To her credit, the author mainly keeps this vast, complex territory well under control. In her Introduction, exceedingly well grounded in previous scholarship, she describes how female artists and writers contended with two distinct issues: firstly the patriarchy of the artistic profession, and secondly the masculinist discourse of Romanticism—so anxious about the male artist’s survival that it ruthlessly quelled any notion of female creativity. Against these obstacles, Wettlaufer tells a largely positive story of the struggle by women artists to forge a creative identity in the public sphere. Their achievements, she argues, are not least down to their collective endeavors in affirming a sisterhood of artists. Moreover, she suggests, through the realism and pragmatism with which they approached their task, nineteenth-century women artists provided a compelling counter-model to the self-aggrandizing, dislocated Romantic male artist. Three thematic sections follow on, each neatly comprising three chapters. Part I examines the artist’s studio (actual and represented) as a charged physical space where women forged their careers and negotiated their entry to the sphere of cultural production. Wettlaufer contrasts an eighteenth-century discourse of exceptionality (foregrounded in Mary Sheriff’s work on Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun) where female artists’ endeavors were constructed in terms of isolation and rivalry, with a collective ideal that emerged in the early nineteenth century where female artists’ groups were formed as alternatives to the homosocial cliques of, for example, Jacques-Louis David or the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. More organized French studio practice is contrasted with the informal support networks of the female art scene in Britain. Also stressed is the sisterhood of the arts themselves—the paragone is here gendered as masculine—where female writers and artists mutually supported one another. With reference to paintings [End Page 164] of the studio by artists such as Amélie Cogniet and Mary Ellen Best, Wettlaufer shows how gendered notions of space, objectification and viewing practice were challenged. Two novels are discussed in subsequent chapters. Firstly Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s studio novel, L’atelier d’un peintre, which questions and subverts many gendered tropes of the artist, is read as a “corrective” to the “misognynistic fantasies” of Balzac. Then Anna Mary Howitt’s utopian vision of female solidarity, Sisters in Art, is analyzed with reference to campaigns in Britain for women’s education and professional rights. In Part II, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” links between the female artist and the Other are explored. Chapter 4 includes a comparative reading of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, both novels where hierarchies of cultural difference are mapped onto gender hierarchies. The placing so close together of Stael and Owenson throws up some unexpected complexities—which may be more obvious to this English reviewer than to readers from other shores. Namely, it would have been worth exploring Oswald’s “Scottishness.” As a land-owner of English descent, Oswald represents the colonizer of his native Scotland, a land with an unfettered indigenous culture as compelling as that of Ireland or Italy. Class issues subtend this discussion, and one wants to know more about class in relation to other parts of the book. To what extent did the “sisterhood” of artists enable women of all backgrounds, not just those from artistic or privileged milieux, to participate in the sphere of cultural production? “Cosmopolitan Visions” is...

French Poets and British Reviewers, 1814–30

In mainstream studies of French literary history, the Bourbon Restoration of 1814 is often viewed as a pivotal event which encouraged the burgeoning of French Romanticism. The familiar narrative is that, while (with a few notable exceptions) poetry largely stagnated during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it flourished again after 1814 with the emergence of writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Pierre-Jean de Beranger, Pierre-Antoine Lebrun, Victor Hugo, and others. By the 1840s, it was commonly asserted (in Britain and elsewhere) that ‘[w]ith the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the French romantic school of literature was ushered into existence’, and this interpretative stance has remained surprisingly constant ever since. There are differences of detail, of course. For some, the appearance of Desbordes-Valmore’s Elegies et Romances in 1819 inaugurated a discernable shift in poetics, while for others, this did not occur until the publication of Lamartine’s Meditations poetiques in 1820. Nonetheless, Rosemary Lloyd has recently (re)affirmed that Lamartine introduced ‘a new poetic sensibility’, and literary critics and cultural historians alike have routinely argued that, by comparison with similar developments in Britain and Germany, French Romanticism was ‘a belated literary phenomenon’. Despite the broad consensus about these matters, there have been few detailed assessments of the way in which British writers and critics evaluated French poetry (both ancient or modern) during the period 1814 to 1830. Predictably, the main critical focus has repeatedly fallen upon the pervasive scepticism concerning French neoclassical poetry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and particularly its (apparently) deleterious influence on English literature. Keats’s caustic lambasting of the Augustans in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1817) is too well-known to require extensive quotation, but the following lines are especially pertinent here:

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (selección de poemas)

El artículo propuesto ofrece una breve aproximación a la biografía de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, además de una también breve síntesis de sus ideas poéticas. Sigue una bibliografía de las principales obras publicadas en vida por la autora. Acabamos realizando una traducción al español de una selección poética, que desea brindar un conocimiento fidedigno de las principales preocupaciones estéticas de la escritora.

Sarah: The Original French Text , and: Sarah: An English Translation (review)

Reviewed by: Sarah: The Original French Text, and: Sarah: An English Translation Michelle S. Cheyne Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline . Sarah: The Original French Text. Eds. Deborah Jenson and Doris Y. Kadish. MLA Texts & Translations. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Pp. xxxviii + 94. ISBN 978-1-60329-026-5 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline . Sarah: An English Translation. Trans. Deborah Jenson and Doris Y. Kadish. MLA Texts & Translations. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Pp. xxxvi + 96. ISBN 978-1-60329-027-2 Renewed interest in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's prose has led to recent modern editions of her short stories, notably by Marc Betrand (Huit femmes, Droz, 1999) and Aimée Boutin (Les Veillées des Antilles, L'Harmattan, 2006). Desbordes-Valmore's writings on the Antilles, and in particular, Sarah, have drawn attention to her contributions to French Romantic writings on slavery and the colonial experience. Previously language stood as the primary barrier to potentially widespread adoption of Sarah in a variety of Anglophone university courses exploring areas ranging from race to gender to Atlantic studies, to colonialism, to emancipation, to history, to literature. This has now changed. Deborah Jenson and Doris Y. Kadish's edition of Sarah in French and English translation in the MLATexts & Translations series opens access to what stands arguably as Desbordes-Valmore's most provocative work. From a material perspective, the two volumes offer excellence at an affordable price rendering Sarah an attractive selection for undergraduate and graduate courses across the disciplines in French or in English. Relatively understudied, this text offers a fascinating example of a French female author's portrayal of a love triangle in the tropics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The critical apparatus (introduction, editors' and translators' notes, bibliographies) highlights and informs readers of complexities easily overlooked at first in this deceptively simple novella. Jenson and Kadish elucidate the ways in which Sarah rises above its form as a standard melodrama [End Page 299] in a colonial setting. They argue persuasively that Desbordes-Valmore transformed a seemingly simple-minded tale of the innocent love between an orphaned girl and the son of her short-sighted benefactor that was threatened by a nefarious and jealous suitor. Under her pen, these stock characters and plot twists gained depth, serving as the basis for a fascinating meditation on narrative authority, personal autonomy, liberty, and color prejudice. Jenson and Kadish heighten the reader's appreciation for the unique status of Des-bordes-Valmore and her novella by signaling elements linking the text to the author's personal experiences as a female artist on the socio-economic margins in France and as a teen on an ill-fated voyage to the Caribbean marked by slave revolts, the yellow fever epidemic that claimed the life of Desbordes-Valmore's mother, and a painful journey home. In addition, they situate Sarah within the literary genres sentimental novels and melodrama; contemporary cultural debates over the abolition of slavery; and the history of post-Revolutionary, post-Napoleonic, Restoration France. In their discussion of the rhetorical implications of Desbordes-Valmore's deliberate layering of narrative frames, which invests women (the narrator and Eugénie) and an African (Arsène) with unusual authority, they underscore the continued relevance of the issues raised in Sarah. The quality of the introduction, edition, and translation leave little to regret, although we note that the emphasis in the introduction on the specificities of Desbordes-Valmore's novella and its status as a piece of women's writing tends to obscure the fact that Sarah occupies a central place in a different corpus of fictional texts by women and men from the 1820s that attests to a contemporary preoccupation with race and the bounds of desire. Characterizing Sarah as a precursor to Romantic texts like Ourika, Bug-Jargal, Indiana, and Toussaint Louverture (xxiv) tends to gloss over the text's centrality in a more tightly-knit though less prestigious body of Restoration fiction that includes Balzac's Le Nègre, de Duras' Ourika, the myriad of Ourika poems and plays, Hugo's Bug-Jargal, de Rémusat's L'Habitation de Saint-Domingue, Lacour's Pyracmond, ou Les Créoles, and de Paban's Le...

'Sarah': An English Translation by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Deborah Jenson, Doris Y. Kadish

'Sarah': An English Translation by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Deborah Jenson, Doris Y. Kadish

Nouvelles Françaises Du Dix-Neuvième Siècle: Anthologie by Allan H. Pasco

MLR, I03.2, 2008 543 Chapter i draws on Reik and Deleuze to argue that the (virtual) spectator's position in relation toSade's plays involves a kind ofmasochism avant la lettre,as the spectator is rendered 'impotent yet attentivewithin the safe illusion' (p. 3 I). This claim, along with the idea thatSade's theatre isproperly viewed in themind's eye rather than on stage, provides a connecting thread for thework as awhole. Chapter 2 examines what theSadean aesthetic of tout montrer, normally associated with thenovels,might mean in relation to theplays. Chapter 3 suggests that inhis emphasis on spectacle Sade tends to subvert traditional generic distinctions 'so as toassert the independent artistover a figureof authority' (p. 82), but once again from amasochistic position. In Chapter 4 the essential point is that 'the [Sadean] tableau thathalts action to suspend carnage isalien to sadism, whereas it is an essential aspect ofmasochism' (p. I03). Chapters 5 and 6 offer innovative analyses ofLes Yumelles, Le Boudoir, and Les Antiquaires. The first two are presented as explorations of the gaze, which is revealed to be 'partial, compromised and redundant as a means of accessing truth' (p. I44). As for Les Antiquaires, in that play 'the pleasures of dramatic performance are lost to literary playfulness' as the reader is drawn into an intertextual 'network of exchange and comparison' (p. I58). The seventh and final chapter considers the relation of Sade's theatre to the post-classical or (pre-)Romantic sublime. This involves the following claim: 'Immaterial yet spectacular, Sadean drama uses thedispositif thMtral toplot a stage-like space of fantasy in the reader's imagination' (p. I73). We are thus invited to appreciate Sade's plays as theymight be seen by our mind's eye, rather than wondering if they can actually be produced. Overall this is an engaging analysis, fullof interestingand thought-provoking insights.The author's grasp of the literary and aesthetic debates of Sade's time is impressive. Although not every reader will be convinced of the value thatWynn claims for Sade's plays, his study effectively challenges us to re-examine themboth in themselves and in their relation to thenovels. UNIVERSITY OF KENT JAMES FOWLER Nouvellesfranpaises du dix-neuviemesiecle: anthologie. Ed. by ALLANH. PASCO. Char lottesville: Rookwood. 2oo6. 487 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-I-886365-59-9. This substantial anthology comprises an introduction entitled 'Qu-est-ce que lanou velle?', followed by twenty-six texts from seventeen authors. Many of the stories chosen are acknowledged classics, and most of thewriters major figures.They in clude fourwomen: Mme de Stael, George Sand, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, and Rachilde. Chateaubriand is represented by 'Rene, Balzac by 'Le Colonel Chabert' and two other texts, Stendhal by 'Vanina Vanini', Merimee by 'Carmen', 'Mateo Falcone', and 'La Venus d'Ille', Flaubert by 'Un cceur simple', Maupassant by 'Le Horla' and three shorter tales,Huysmans by 'Avau-l'eau'. Hugo and Zola make the selection, as do Vivant Denon, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, andMar cel Schwob, whereas Gautier is surprisingly omitted. Pasco's introductory essay was originally published inNew Literary History in i99 i, and is effectivelya study of the poetics and problematics of the genre. He arrives at theunremarkable definition that 'une nouvelle est une courte fiction litteraireecrite en prose' (p. 6) (except when it is in verse), but then concedes that 'de telles discussions sont steriles et ne ciblent pas les enjeux reels' (p. 9). Yet although the anthology is aimed primarily at students, he makes no real attempt to introduce either the literaryhistory of short fictionor the social history of nineteenth-century France, still less to explore the cultural and lin guistic barrierswhich confront the twenty-first-centuryreader ofmany of these texts. No rationale isoffered forthechoice of texts,and while theyappear largely inchrono logical order of authors, this isnot always the case: thusHugo appears afterFlaubert, 544 Reviews Maupassant before Zola, Huysmans before Barbey. Each author's career ispresented in a couple of pages and followed by a brief bibliography. These sketches provide fac tual information, but few clues as tohow to interpret the texts.They are sometimes oddly redundant ormisleading: thuswe are told thatBalzac was 'unpetit homme trop rond, aux...

Myth, History, and Witnessing in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Caribbean Poetics

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was a witness of the upheavals of the Revolutionary Caribbean in 1802. The colonial novella Sarah indirectly represents the Napoleonic reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe through a plot centered on confusion over who is or is not a slave, a confusion with profound historical and philosophical valences.

Returns of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Repressed Colonial Memory: "Sarah" and Critical Belatedness

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's semi-fictionalized encounter with colonial culture in "Sarah" has not received the critical attention it merits until recently. Belatedness, in fact, marks the composition, publication, and reception of the novella. Displaced, and even replaced, by the biographical fallacy governing Desbordes-Valmore's reception, "Sarah" authorizes a reflection on slavery that challenges metropole-centric imperial history.

Scènes d’aumône: Misère et poésie au XIXe siècle (review)

Reviewed by: Scènes d’aumône: Misère et poésie au XIXe siècle Dan Edelstein Anne-Emmanuelle Berger . Scènes d’aumône: Misère et poésie au XIXe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2004. "The workers need poetry more than bread": Simone Weil's aphorism might well have served as the epigraph for Anne-Emmanuelle Berger's ambitious study of poetry and/as poverty in an "age of misery." Interspersing close readings of Verlaine, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, and other poets with sophisticated discussions of philosophical, anthropological, and sociological discourses on poetry and gift-giving, Berger argues for a redefinition of the modern lyric subject as a respondent to the (literal) face of misery in nineteenth-century France. She also suggests that only poetry can function as a "pure gift," that is, one bereft of selfish interests. The first part of this rich work, "Misère de l'âge," examines how poverty and misery were constituent themes in nineteenth-century reflections on the modernity. After classifying the different figures of the poor, she shows how poets not only identified with the poor, but made poverty the model for "dwelling poetically" in the world. Berger develops this point with a case study of Verlaine's poetics (and ethics) of impoverishment (his "art du peu," 69). But this poverty, Berger suggests, is more than an esthetic choice; following Heidegger ("What Are Poets For?"), she argues that it is constitutive both of poetry and of the modern condition. Only by wallowing in this "age of misery" can we escape the "misery of the age"; only the homeless (in both literal and figurative senses) can find shelter in Being, which in turn is only disclosed through poetry. In reaction to this Heideggerian theory and to the nineteenth-century poetics (and practice) of poverty, however, Berger brings up in finis Rimbaud and his farewell to poetry, which she interprets as a farewell to poetry-as-misery. In the following part, "Fins de don," Berger turns to the question of gift-giving, taking Mauss's landmark "Essai sur le don" as a point of departure, before engaging its multitude of commentators, from Bataille to Derrida. After redefining every gift-exchange as a potential [End Page 263] potlatch, Berger focuses on the question of the pure gift: under what conditions can giving escape the laws of exchange? While Berger later suggests that the pure gift may be found in poetry, she uses Benveniste's etymological study of the gift-giving lexicon to argue that laws of exchange are precisely what the poor cannot respect—to be poor is to be unable to give. In this respect, giving to the poor challenges the Maussian theory of reciprocal gifts. Alms ("l'aumône") either fall into a Christian charity/maternal Nature model, or force us to rethink our relation to the poor. Berger argues that Lévinas's theory of the face-to-face encounter, in which the other commands me to respond, should dictate this relation. However, this argument hinges on a questionable analogy between every face's spiritual poverty and the pauper's specific material poverty, an argument which contradicts Lévinas's own statement that the face contains no social or material information (168). The theme of an encounter with the poor is nonetheless central to the Baudelaire prose poems that Berger analyzes in the third part ("Les dons de Baudelaire"). The encounter with the poor family in "Les Yeux du pauvre," and with various beggars or widows elsewhere, indeed forms the basis of Baudelaire's relation to the poor. And yet his attitude toward poverty is ambiguous, somewhere between Mme de Staël and Proudhon, Berger suggests. Her reading of "Assommons les pauvres!" stresses how sarcasm and sincerity are so intricately interwoven that it becomes impossible to determine Baudelaire's exact position on pauperism. Her finest analyses, however, concern the foundational link for Baudelaire between alms and toys (joujous). Evident in numerous poems, this "missing link" conclusively connects the pure gift with poetry, or art: the toy is the child's first intoxicating experience, which the poem later attempts to reproduce. Literally gratuitous, the toy-poem does not burden the recipient...

Le Moi, L'Histoire, 1789-1848 (review)

Reviewed by: Le Moi, L'Histoire, 1789-1848 W. Jay Reedy Zanone, Damien, ed. Le Moi, L’Histoire, 1789-1848. Grenoble: Ellug, Université Stendhal, 2005. Pp. 193. ISBN 2-84310-063-1 The emergence and diffusion of individualism in modern times has had its share of students in the humanities and social sciences. Much of this attention (a good example would be Steven Lukes' Individualism [1973]) focuses on the social dimensions and political institutions of this phenomenon. But the topic also has been approached from the side of literary and cultural studies. In this perspective it is the "construction" of individuality and subjectivity (i.e., the existential facets of the self-concept and self-consciousness of the individual) that claims primary interest. A number of studies by Jean Starobinski and pages from the pen of Michel Foucault dwell in this camp. But fewer scholars have tried to bridge the divide between the institutional and the existential. One exponent that comes to mind, however, is Charles Taylor, whose Sources of the Self (1989) quickly became the locus classicus of this interdisciplinary genre, at least in the Anglophone academy. The essays in the volume under review may be said to follow this more eclectic model, but they do add their own ingredient to the mix. As the title indicates, Zanone's collection is dedicated to exploring the complex web of connections and disjunctions between the actual and perceived historical developments of the tumultuous half century following the fall of the Bastille and what Gerard Rannone's initial essay calls the veritable "explosion" of French Romantic texts dedicated to probing or displaying the self. The relationship between the accelerated, destabilizing social change of those decades and the ambiguous ego explicitly or implicitly apparent in the writings of such engaged intellectuals as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gérard de Nerval, Tocqueville and Michelet is the thread that ties these contributions together. All the contributors support their interpretations with "close readings" of selected passages from the narratives, memoirs or poems of the aforementioned writers and thinkers. What emerges from these ten brief studies is that those intellectuals wrestled with the dual dilemma of understanding both the macrocosm of a revolutionized social order and the microcosm of an alienated or uncommitted self. Time and again, this volume shows that this very different group of artists and cultural observers found [End Page 402] themselves disoriented by the context of the new world they experienced. This disorientation led, paradoxically enough, in two opposed directions – sometimes toward the riches of introspection yet just as frequently toward an amorphous subjectivity that made a malaise of inwardness. Rarely was the latter disposition relished as unalloyed emancipation from past customs and constraints. The psychological burdens of individuality often compounded the sociopolitical uncertainties of individualism, just as reactionaries such as Maistre and Bonald – the ideological foes of most of those studied by Zanone's colleagues – had warned. Bonald's works contained an unexpected anticipation of Emile Durkheim's formulation of "anomie." However, even the Doctrinnaires of the Restoration and Orleanist years, though committed liberals (e.g., Royer-Collard), wrestled with this same conundrum. Germaine de Staël and Alexis de Tocqueville, as others have pointed out, were deeply affected by the loss of an aristocracy-dominated society which they roundly criticized but whose republican successor they worried over as much as welcomed. A transience of beliefs and feelings accompanied the transience of things and norms as democracy's multiple forms and consequences became manifest. On the other hand, when the ephemeral nature of human affairs and of the Old Regime's supposedly eternal institutions were revealed by history's flux poets no less than utopians gained an unprecedented appreciation of the imagination-driven plasticity of reality. The lived ambiguities that attended newly-triumphant modernity are everywhere in evidence in these reactions to early-l9th century civilization. Nowhere is this Janus-faced comprehension of accelerated history more evident than among those whose literary projects brought them closest to the role of the historian, in particular, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Tocqueville. But even Stendhal – a novelist who often drew direct inspiration from the intersection between history and his own...

Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism

Aimée Boutin is associate professor of French at Florida State University. She is author of Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine (2001) and“Inventing the 'Poétesse': New Approaches to French Women Romantic Poets,” Romanticism on the Net, nos. 29-30 (2003).

Lucretia Davidson in Europe: Female Elegy, Literary Transmission and the Figure of the Romantic Poetess

This essay heeds Yopie Prins’s recent call to abandon critical attempts to recover the subjectivity of (real) poetesses and instead to look at the culturally constructed figure of the “poetess.” It describes the early reception history of American poetess Lucretia Davidson who died at 16, (possibly of anorexia nervosa). Focused as it was on her death, this transatlantic body of criticism (Southey, Poe) and tribute (Desbordes-Valmore, Karolina Pavlova) offers to the poetess tradition a women’s ethic of self-sacrifice enabling a female form of literary transmission that celebrates women’s interchangeability rather than their uniqueness. An elegy by French poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore manipulates Davidson’s image as a means of insisting on the abstemiousness (to the point of death) of the poetess figure despite her hyperproductivity, and then ultimately insists upon the interchangeability and solidarity of women poets. In contrast, Karolina Pavlova’s elegy to Davidson carves out of this transmissible figure her own particular identity, leading to the masculinization of Pavlova’s poetry by Russian critics – and, unfortunately, to Pavlova’s subsequent obscurity. This essay leaves open the question as to which of these two elegists made the “better” choice, delineating instead options for transcontinental women poets in shaping their own subsequent transmission.

Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France by Alison Finch (review)

Book Reviews1 1 7 stopped reading when Chopin died), the book is a broad mural of Parisian manners, preferences, interests, preoccupations, and dreams in this period. This portrait of an era contains many curious little known facts. How many Americans realize that, before inventing the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse was an art student in Paris or that he, along with James Fenimore Cooper, helped Lafayette to raise money for displaced Poles after the fall of Warsaw to the Russians in 183 1? How many French people know that both Hector Berlioz and Alfred de Musset were destined for medical careers and abandoned them when faced with the horror of the dissecting room? This work shows evidence of being carefully researched from many sources, and one suspects that quite a few of the chapters could stand alone as an introduction to opera, theatre, or art, etc. in the nineteenth century. The only unifying theme for the disparate essays is the presence ofChopin in their midst. Nevertheless, the book is quite enjoyable and permits one to image s/ he is actually living in the Paris ofthe nineteenth century. Lucy M. SchwartzBuffalo State College (SUNY) Alison Finch. Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-521-63186-6. Pp. 316. $57.47. Alison Finch's Women s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France is breathtaking in scope and impressive for the depth of analysis and synthesis the author brings to this vast subject. Finch's survey encompasses more than ninety women writers and a wide range of literary genres including not only novels, drama, and poetry but also politics,journalism, history, travel, children's literature and life-writing. By providing such an extensive overview, Finch hopes to "give a sense of what women writers were doing in the century as a whole" that will serve as a background and complement to more specialized studies focusing on individual authors, themes, genres, or periods (1). While demonstrating how these women established "a distinct female tradition," Finch is also concerned with "repositioning" them in other traditions, such as socialist theory and life-writing (23 1). In her first two chapters, Finch discusses the conditions that these women writers faced, the prejudices that have led to their omission from the literary canon, and the continuing need for a reassessment of their contribution to French literature. Following these introductory chapters, the book is divided chronologically into three sections, each preceded by an overview of the period: "The Early Nineteenth Century: The Age ofNapoleon and the Aftermath ofRevolution (1 800-1 829)"; "Mid-Century: George Sand and Her Contemporaries (1830-1 869)"; and "Naturalism and Symbolism: The Beginnings of a New Era (1870-1899)." Within each section, chapters are most often organized around figures who are representative of certain genres or themes, for example, "Rank and race: Claire de Duras" and "Adventure and travel: Flora Tristan and Léonie d'Aunet." 1 1 8 Women in French Studies In her selection of authors to highlight, Finch has chosen "those who seemed most likely to give a sense of both general currents and the variety of individual temperaments" (2). In some cases, these are well-known authors such as Germaine de Staël, George Sand, Marceline DesbordesValmore , Louise Michel and Rachilde. In other cases lesser-known writers are highlighted, such as Henriette de La Tour du Pin (1770-1853) whose memoirs were not published until 1906 but who provides an example of women's approaches to history as well as how women all too often "having produced obviously talented work . . . leave it unpublished or complete" (40). Likewise, in a chapter dealing with "Confidence and the woman writer," Finch focuses on two mid-century authors who depict societal pressures on women to abandon literary achievement: Amable Tastu in her poem "L'Ange gardien" and Sophie Ulliac-Trémadeure in her novels Valérie ou le jeune artiste (\ 836) and Emilie ou la jeune fille auteur (1837). A chapter on naturalism and symbolism highlights the contributions of Marie Krysinska, one of the innovators of free verse and "the woman writer most successfully air-brushed from the literary history of nineteenth-century France," (189). Finch also includes...