La nouvelle Héloïse marks the birth of a mythical place, the salon of Apollo, a familiar space but invested with the sacrality of ritual and initiation, the ceremony of intimacy. In reality a simple dining room, in the novel this room becomes the concentrated nexus of the house, the ideal room that sums up the household by absorbing all of its qualities. This is where Julie engages in communitarian experiments conceived as rituals: “it is the inviolable sanctuary of trust, friendship, freedom. The companionship of hearts there binds the table companions; it is a sort of initiation to intimacy, and never are assembled there any but people who would wish never again to be separated.” Rousseau writes that the house is inseparable from life; in a sense it gives form to life through a complex magic that explains the teleology of the place, not by enforcing arbitrary rules but rather by conforming to the “example” of life: “If I had to say concisely what they do in this house to be happy, I think I would have answered rightly in saying that they know the art of living,” explains Saint-Preux (part 5, letter 2).
Above all, it must be said, Rousseau leads his characters “outside,” into nature (part 4, letter 11). This is the significance of the Elysée, Julie’s orchard where the mistress and mother of house and family can intermittently withdraw. Saint-Preux is impressed with this miniature Eden nestled between garden and forest: “I was struck by a pleasantly cool sensation which dark shade, bright and lively greenery, flowers scattered on every side, the bubbling of flowing water, and the songs of a thousand birds impressed on my imagination at least as much as my senses; but at the same time I thought I was looking at the wildest, most solitary place in nature, and it seemed to me I was the first mortal who ever had set foot in this wilderness.” A surprising taxonomy opens his eyes to the discovery of the local plants and a variety of fruits.
This letter, however, inscribes Saint-Preux’s curiosity as the inverse of that manifested at his penetration of her dressing room. Natural objects, handled by Julie, are the only ones that arouse the ecstasy of her former lover. During a solitary visit to the garden, fetishizing eroticism sets out again in search of imaginary substitutes: “I shall see nothing that her hand has not touched; I shall kiss flowers on which her feet have trodden; I shall breathe with the dew an air she has breathed; the taste displayed in her diversions will make all her charms present to me, and I shall find her everywhere as she is deep in my heart.” But the stroll leads to a radical conversion of the former lover’s gaze: “I imagined I was seeing the image of virtue where I was seeking that of pleasure. This image merged in my mind with the features of Madame de Wolmar, and for the first time since my return I saw Julie in her absence, not such as she was for me and as I still like to picture her, but such as she appears every day before my eyes.” Thus this outdoor asylum where artificial nature has worked so many miracles again reverts to a metaphor for the interior. L’Elysée becomes one with Julie herself: “Even that very name Elysium called to order the aberrations of my imagination, and brought to my soul a calm preferable to the agitation of the most seductive passions. It depicted for me in some sense the inner thoughts of her who had found it.”
Rousseau also abolishes the libertine bed; he dethrones it. This erstwhile site of secrets, intrigues, ravishings, deceits, and traps (as in Les liaisons dangereuses) is no more than a tomb. The site of pleasure has been converted to the consecration of matrimonial virtues. Familial ideology arranges Julie’s family around her bed in her final moments. It is Julie’s husband who draws us into the intimacy of her deathbed. The family scene that he describes, uniting the expiring Julie with those she most cherishes, echoes that of the salon of Apollo.
In his novel Histoire de Juliette (Juliette, 1799), the Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade does send his heroine out wayfaring, in a late resurgence of the picaresque novel. But what is most memorable about this text is the confinement that encloses horror. Sade continues the emphasis on interior space: secret alcoves, hidden closets. However, their purpose is transformed. Such spaces, similarly employed, had been the exclusive setting of his La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795), a novel consisting entirely of dialogue. Private space is instrumentalized as a site of instruction, of advanced sexual experimentation. Sade distributes masters and student throughout so as to maximize the offerings of the location.
Indeed, Eugénie de Mistival tells Madame de Saint-Ange: “I came hither to be instructed, and will not go till I am informed.” Her escape from these two days of captivity will come only after she is once and for all “a doomed girl.” Showing off the “delightful boudoir,” the hostess reassures the pupil about the imperviousness of the space, which she guarantees secure from the outside world: “[W]e will be more at our ease. I have already spoken to the servants. You may be certain no one shall take it into his head to interrupt us.”
Madame de Saint-Ange’s boudoir foregrounds the commanding bed, the “niche” of all pleasures; the whole room will be used to further the lesson, reinforcing the actors in their various roles. The furniture and accessories complete and supplement the characters’ actions. Madame de Saint-Ange explains the functions of the mirrors thus: “By repeating our attitudes and postures in a thousand different ways, they infinitely multiply those same pleasures for the persons seated here upon this ottoman. Thus everything is visible, no part of the body can remain hidden: everything must be seen; these images are so many groups disposed around those enchained by love.” The room is transformed into an optical machine, or rather into a pleasure factory that transforms the projected images of bodies into a surplus of energy. Thus Sade stages tableaux that promote the fluidity of desires, the efficiency of pleasures, through fleeting arrangements orchestrated for an ephemeral profit. Dolmancé is constantly arranging these scenes, reordering the bodies in a perverse choreography: “[L] et’s get on with the scene I proposed and, the three of us, let’s be plunged into the most voluptuous drunkenness.” Elsewhere, he directs: “One moment, while I arrange this pleasure bout in a sufficiently lustful manner. … Augustin, lie down on the bed; Eugénie, do you recline in his arms.”
With Sade, above all, philosophy insinuates itself into the boudoir not merely in the form of risqué lessons in anatomy administered to the pupil; the master-philosopher Dolmancé also develops a set of materialist theories concerning God, the imagination, nature, and education. Disquisitions on a variety of subjects fill up the lesson time. In the Fifth Dialogue, the boudoir raises the curtain on a historical scene: the revolutionary pamphlet Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, if You Would Become Republicans will be read there in order to cap off the political discussion already begun by the participants. Dolmancé, who bought the tract in the public square (outside the Palace of Equality), even concludes at the end of the reading: “Indeed my thinking does correspond with some part of these reflections, and my discourses—they’ve proven it to you—even lend to what has just been read to us the appearance of a repetition.”
In a biting parody of La nouvelle Héloïse, Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir ends with a communal bed that is radically different in spirit from the one in Rousseau’s novel. Sade’s bed is a far cry from Julie’s sacred ceremonial bed, which the dying woman offers to share with her cousin Claire d’Orbe: “[M]y illness is not catching, you do not find me repulsive, sleep in my bed,” she pleads (part 6, letter 11). Dolmancé invites his fellow libertines to share the same bed, but for the purpose of lecherous pursuits: “[G]ood friends, let’s to dinner, and afterward the four of us will retire for the night … in the same bed. … I never dine so heartily, I never sleep so soundly as when I have, during the day, sufficiently befouled myself with what our fools call crimes.”
But the dissolution of familial ideology culminates in the ordeal of Eugénie’s mother, Madame de Mistival, whose own husband hands her over to the libertines’ violence. She suffers endless torments and humiliations (including pincers and the wheel), up to the death sentence that Dolmancé imposes on her: inoculation w
ith smallpox, which will forever destroy her “exceptionally healthy” state, which he finds unacceptable. She is expelled from Madame de Saint-Ange’s boudoir on the verge of death. With the mother’s sacrifice, the text completes the young girl’s lesson in the conquest of liberty: the libertine educational project is accomplished. “And now all’s been said,” Dolmancé concludes with satisfaction. Mme de Mistival is stricken by the same punishment Mme de Merteuil receives at the end of Les liaisons dangereuses. Indeed, Merteuil’s beauty is destroyed by smallpox, a disease that serves to “unmask” her, when the novelist offers the reader the public face of her schemes (part 4, letter 169).
The rococo boudoir flourishes in the libertine novel, as seen in a number of minor works. This place is devoted to two enigmas: that of love and that of the woman. A small architectural box that sets the stage for scenes of intimacy, it seeks to make the reader complicit in secrecy as well as in the mechanical unveiling of the ineffable. For these reasons, it would experience a resurgence in the novel of the nineteenth century, in homage to the aesthetics and erotics, and to the reigning taste, of the previous century. Thus Baudelaire, Balzac, and Zola will each in turn restore some of the boudoir’s lost luster and mystery. It remains an evocative site of imaginary memory, a space of all possible fantasies, a palimpsest of limitless rewritings. But as well as anticipating a future set of literary developments, it is also something distinctively eighteenth century. It demonstrated the quest for interiority by an aristocratic culture, the libertine arts of dissimulation in the desperate search for secrets, and the hypocritical covering up of sexuality on the part of a society that excelled in compartmentalizing the public and the private. La philosophie dans le boudoir illustrates this conundrum eloquently. The republican pamphlet that figures in the latter is crucial here in marking a new social geography of private and public. In delineating new sexual codes and mores alongside the laws of nature, a more open society is brought into the boudoir from the public sphere of opinion, ironically envisioning “houses of debauchery” for women and men regulated by the state. There is nothing secret in these houses; on the contrary, the exploits of lust are now to be recounted publicly, in the banality of everyday discourse.
There is one further development, a twist to the eighteenth-century tale of boudoir and bedroom. Breaking from the shadow of their male counterparts and from the struggle of (bad) education, the women writers of the eighteenth century would respond with their own brand of the novel, in a genre already especially decried when practiced by them. They would answer in a sentimental mode that would leave its marks, define a genre that accounts for their difference, and allow for an alternative opening to the canon. Rousseau and the epistolary novel, La nouvelle Héloïse itself, would act as the countermodel from which they would draw their inspiration. Imagining another plot, they would denounce the bedroom of seduction that served often as place of entrapment for the woman and her desire. Two examples: Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805) in Lettres de Mistriss Henley (Letters of Mistress Henley, 1784) would turn this place of intimacy and interiority into a locus of estrangement and uncanniness, as she suffers despair and discontent in her marriage (second letter). In fact, the bedroom in this novel appears interchangeable, and it passes without ceremony from the first wife to the new one. Françoise de Graffigny (1695–1758) would go further in Lettres d’une péruvienne (Letters from a Peruvian Woman, 1747) and take her heroine out of the bedroom altogether. Seeking to provide Zilia a place of her own, of autonomy, Graffigny reserves her the library as the most enchanting room (indeed, when she visits her new house, she skips most of the other apartments). There she cultivates herself, away from the torment of hurtful passions, living what she herself calls her “independent life.” Here is literature making a new bid for autonomy that will have a long, if problem-beset, literary afterlife.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
I have concentrated on the following novels, which span the century: Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Up from the Country, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980); Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, The Wayward Head and Heart, trans. Barbara Bray (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978); Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, trans. P.W.K. Stone (London: Penguin, 1961); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, in vol. 6 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); and Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, in “Justine,” “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austin Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965).
Two studies I found particularly useful appear in the monumental A History of Private Life, vol. 3 (on the Renaissance through the Enlightenment), ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): these are the essays by Orest Ranum, “The Refuges of Intimacy,” 207–63, and by Jean-Marie Goulemot, whose title leaves no doubt as to its relevance: “Literary Practices: Publicizing the Private,” 363–95. An impressively rich contribution to this history of the private, with a particular emphasis on rooms, is Michèle Perrot, Histoire de chambres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2009). On the way in which the eighteenth-century novel reflects the architecture of intimacy and space in general, the reader is referred to the groundbreaking works by Henri Lafon, Espaces romanesques du XVIIIe siècle, 1670–1820 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997) and Les décors et les choses dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle de Prévost à Sade (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992). Christophe Martin pursues these lines of inquiry in his extensive study Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004). The boudoir, the unifying thread of my chapter, is the focus of Michel Delon, L’invention du boudoir (Cadeilhan: Zulma, 1999) and of his Le savoir-vivre libertin (Paris: Hachette, 2000), chapter 6, “Lieux et décors.” Other essays from which I have drawn inspiration include the pioneering article by Rémy Saisselin, “The Space of Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel and Architecture,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 319 (1994): 417–31. Extending into the field of architecture, it might be said that everything begins with Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture; or the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (1780), trans. David Britt (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992). The architecture of the boudoir also has its historians. The reader is referred above all to Ed Lilley, “The Name of the Boudoir,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 2 (1994): 193–98. An indispensable source on rococo aesthetics and the eighteenth-century boudoir is Jean Starobinski, “Rococo and Neoclassicism,” in Revolution in Fashion: European Clothing, 1715–1815 (Kyoto: Kyoto Costume Institute, 1989), 10–16. Finally, for an overall history of the eighteenth-century novel, the reader may consult the exhaustive study by René Démoris, Le roman à la première personne (Paris: Colin, 1975); and on novels written by women, I recommend Martine Reid, Des femmes en littérature (Paris: Belin, 2010).
—Translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage
Women’s Voices in Enlightenment France
CATRIONA SETH
One of the highlights of the collection of paintings housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons is a large oil (256 × 277 cm) by François Gérard titled Corinne au Cap Misène (Corinne at Cape Misenum). In the foreground to the right, her eyes raised to the heavens, the poetess, dressed much like an antique muse, clutches a lyre in her left hand. Her audience is gathered around her, from the dashing young Scotsman, Oswald Nelvil, to mariners and, in the middle, two young women whose rapt attention is obvious to the beholder. One has to believe that the main character’s poetic improvisation has just ended and that all are feeling awe and wonder at what they have heard. Commissioned by Prince Augustus of Prussia for the celebrated salon hostess Juliette Récamier as a memorial to
the late Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), the picture in some ways represents the culmination of an ever-increasing, but often challenged, recognition of the power and authority of the female voice in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France.
The eponymous heroine of Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne, ou l’Italie at once fascinated and repelled her contemporaries. She struck a chord for many as she provided a link between spontaneous creation and literary culture—the character’s frequent references to mythology and to antiquity, as well as to more modern writers in her improvisations illustrate this aspect of her approach—but also between modernity and tradition, between north and south (she is half-British and half-Italian), between history’s great moments and a possible future for Europe after the revolutionary upheaval. She appeared to offer a long sought-after role model, that of a brilliant and eloquent speaker, a talented and sensitive individual, a cultured and tender woman, as passionate as she is clever, as generous as she is unique. She has secrets to reveal and promises to keep; she is bound at once by her moral rectitude and by a past in which the previous generation has plotted her future with a careful eye to social norms, making her gender and the expression of desire irreconcilable.
As her story shows—she loses both her talent and the opportunity to marry the British nobleman who is in many ways her soulmate—the world might not have been ready for her or her type. Her death is that of a virtuous woman who looks to the heavens for her only possible reward, like Isabelle de Charrière’s Caliste. (The latter, as Joan Hinde Stewart remarks in A New History of French Literature, gives up the ghost to the strains of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater “not … because she has engaged in illicit sex; instead, she withers away for lack of it.”) Delving a little deeper, we can add that Miss Edgermond was eliminated by the elder Lord Nelvil as a possible wife for his son when, as a young woman, in the privacy of her home, she struck him as something of an extrovert in her behavior. Male prejudice meant he felt threatened by the idea that his heirs could be borne by someone who might metaphorically or literally put on a show. We never learn the heroine’s full name: when living as a celebrated poet and improviser, she bears only the pseudonym “Corinne.” The elder Miss Edgermond, her first name never mentioned in a symbolic rejection of her individuality, was written out of history by a fictitious death announcement circulated by her stepmother. In much the same way as posthumous publications were sometimes envisaged by those who could not conceive of their texts being published during their lifetimes, symbolic deaths, like changes of names, could release bridled creativity.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 40