A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  It is interesting that both Staël (in Zulma, for instance) and Charrière (with her unfinished Constance) include cases of black women or slaves whose condition serves as a way of addressing all manner of economic and social prejudice, exploitation, and inequalities. A later novella with a similar premise is the highly sensitive Ourika (1823), by Claire de Duras (1777–1828), in which a dying black woman tells her tale to a doctor, much as one might to a psychoanalyst: she was brought over from Africa and treated like a trophy, cherished in her childhood, but, once she reached womanhood, excluded from the very society that had lavished attention on her—she could never be the equal of those who had welcomed her as an object of wonder and delight; she could never hope to marry the white nobleman she loved.

  While female characters in eighteenth-century women’s fiction often get a raw deal, they usually make their case to be heard eloquently and with feeling. Their remarks or behavior can be unsettling: they sometimes challenge or subvert a social order in which they were, like Victorian children, expected to be seen, rather than heard. They thus serve implicitly to show their authors’ aspirations. Although many people considered the rise of the novel to be a marker of the decline of highbrow culture—and its frequent association with women only served to underline this—the readership showed its support, and fiction came to occupy an increasingly important place in periodical reviews and private libraries. Even the most exceptional writers, like Charrière and Staël, whose birth and upbringing set them far above most of their contemporaries, remained in some ways on the margins, emblematic of the fact that to many, at the time—and in spite of Poullain de La Barre’s assertion in his aptly titled 1673 work L’égalité des deux sexes (The Equality of Both Sexes), that the mind was not gendered (“l’esprit n’a pas de sexe”) or Jaucourt’s claim in the Encyclopédie’s entry for the word femme that natural law could offer no basis for inequality between the sexes—women were by definition outsiders in the intellectual world or, at very least, in the public sphere.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Women have traditionally been quasi-absent from the canon in French eighteenth-century literature, as publications like the Lagarde et Michard series, used until recently for teaching purposes, illustrate. The impulse for change was in part due to the influence of Anglo-American gender studies. As far as texts go, in France, Chantal Desjonquères’s series of eighteenth-century texts put writers like Charrière, Lespinasse, Riccoboni, and Tencin back on the map. Raymond Trousson, ed., Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, Bouquins ed. (Paris: Laffont, 2000) includes works by Tencin, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Charrière, Gouges, Souza, Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, and Duras.

  The MLA Texts and Translations series offers English versions of works by several eighteenth-century women writers: Charrière’s Three Women (trans. Emma Roksby, 2007); Duras’s Ourika (trans. John Fowles, 1995); Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (trans. David Kornacker, 1993); and Riccoboni’s Letters of Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend (trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, 1993) and The Story of Ernestine (trans. Joan Hinde Stewart and Philip Stewart, 1998).

  Charrière has been well served by Caroline Warman’s translation of several of her works, The Nobleman and Other Romances (London: Penguin Books, 2012), and the enthusiastic and knowledgeable introduction to the edition is a joy to read. For context, Cecil Courtney, Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen), a Biography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 1993) is the obvious starting point. Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore has been edited by Gillian Dow (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). On educationalists, Nadine Bérenguier, Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011) is useful. See also The Memoirs of Madame Roland, trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh (New York: Moyer Bell, 1990).

  Staël’s novels are available in modern translations: Delphine, trans. Avriel Goldberger (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Corinne, or Italy, trans. Avriel Goldberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). A revised version of the 1818 translation of her Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was edited by Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008). There are selections of her work in Vivian Folkenflik, ed., An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Dorish Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, eds., Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994). Staël has been the object of much attention, but biographies of her are of an uneven quality. Maria Fair-weather, Madame de Staël (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005) is worth reading.

  Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) contains short, pithy essays with bibliographical data on authors including Charrière, du Deffand, Duras, Genlis, Graffigny, Lespinasse, Riccoboni, Roland, Staël, and Tencin. I would also recommend Jean Bloch and Martin Hall’s chapters in Sonya Stephens, ed., A History of Women’s Writing in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Another staging point might be Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, eds., French Women Writers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). See also the following titles:

  Bongie, Laurence. Diderot’s femme savante. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977 (on Ferrand).

  Goodman, Dena. Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

  DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

  Dijk, Suzan van, Lia van Gemert, and Sheila Ottway, eds. Writing the History of Women’s Writing: Toward an International Approach. Amsterdam: K.N.A.W, 2001.

  Gutwirth, Madelyn. The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

  Hesse, Carla. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  Lokke, Kari E. Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence. Oxford: Routledge, 2004.

  Stewart, Joan Hinde. The Enlightenment of Age: Women, Letters and Growing Old in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010.

  ———. Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

  Comedy in the Age of Reason

  SUSAN MASLAN

  The French eighteenth century is known as the age of reason (L’âge des lumières). Writers urged readers to rely on their own use of reason, rather than heeding superstition or unthinkingly following tradition or authority. Writing and “philosophy” became indistinguishable: best sellers investigated the foundation of the social order and the legitimacy of the political order. New discoveries in the natural sciences captivated imaginations. Isaac Newton’s announcement that a knowable, definable set of laws governed the physical world led many thinkers to believe that society was likewise subject to a set of universally valid laws: if they could only determine what those laws were, scientists could reform political, economic, legal, religious, and social institutions and, finally, make people happy. What on earth is funny about all of that? How could the age of reason produce comedy?

  Comedy was already a tricky business. Molière, the great founder of the French dramatic comedy, commented ruefully, “It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.” By “respectable people,” he meant those who could afford to go to the theater and those who were the arbiters of taste; comedy on the fringes of society—at the fairs and on the boulevards—might be easier to pull off because it could make use of traditional farce, physical comedy, and low humor. But those who wrote plays for the major theaters of Paris, where the prestige and the money were, faced myriad constraints. To make people laugh meant making them laugh at something. Bu
t many subjects that might make respectable people laugh were taboo. The Crown’s censors and the Church’s were always on the lookout, always ready to forbid a performance or even jail an author if a play seemed to make an allusion to contemporary political affairs, to important persons, or to ecclesiastical authority.

  So, on the one hand, eighteenth-century writers, readers, and spectators were more invested than ever before in the twin projects of critique and reform, in the effort to lay bare the irrationalities, contradictions, and injustices of their society in order to improve it; and on the other, the institutions that governed the theater sought to retain a tight grip over what could be represented on the stage. Moreover, the idea of art for art’s sake, that is, the argument that the aesthetic pleasure and value of art was the only important, true justification for its existence, was not yet accepted. Theater, like literature more generally, had to defend itself against claims that it promoted immorality or subversion of rightful authority. Literature’s standard line of defense was that it “amused while instructing” and comedy’s traditional self-justification was that it held up a mirror to vices so that they might be corrected. Comedy, in other words, was supposed to make faults and even immorality visible and, more important, the subject of ridicule. No one wants to be ridiculous, not even the wicked.

  So, with all these limitations and constraints, how could anyone write a funny play? Despite the moral and didactic functions assigned to comedy by theorists and critics, despite the taboos that limited what dramatists could stage and how they could stage it, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763) and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99) wrote intensely funny, aesthetically important, and socially conscious plays: they did it by exploiting the best of the traditions they inherited from Molière and from the Italian commedia dell’arte even as they broke new, indeed revolutionary, ground in subject matter and language.

  The comedies of Marivaux and Beaumarchais are structured around the relationship between servants and masters. Their plots may develop stories of love and marriage, stories that explore the tensions between obligations to family and authority and the desire for personal autonomy and self-determination, but the place those tensions are discussed and debated is less in the dialogues between lovers than in the conversations between devoted servants and their masters or among the servants who act as witnesses to these struggles. Indeed, just in terms of the number of lines, dialogue between servants and masters and among servants dominates the plays. In Molière’s come dies, the prominence of servant characters varied. Some plays, such as Dom Juan, feature servants in prominent roles; in others, servants provide bits of farcical or physical humor. But even when servants are important figures in Molière, even when they speak a good deal and advise the master characters with great intelligence and wit—as does the wonderful Dorine in Tartuffe—they always serve the master’s story, not their own. Molière’s servants help or hinder their masters’ quests for love or money. The play’s plot is the unfolding of the master’s quest. Prior to Marivaux and Beaumarchais, servants simply did not have a story of their own.

  Why is the role of servants and their relations to their masters important? The theater, and more specifically comedy, was the most important, most influential, and most popular artistic form available for portraying and reflecting on identity, social status, social relations, and even on hierarchy itself. Novels, so important today, still lacked the prestige enjoyed by the theater. In the French theater, servants essentially stood for all members of the lower classes, or, put another way, they stood for everyone who had to work for a living. And in the eighteenth century, the lower classes made up the overwhelming majority of the population. France was still an agrarian society. Of course there was the great city of Paris and the glittering court at Versailles, but most French people, indeed at least 90 percent of them, were peasants who lived in the countryside and made their very meager living by cultivating the land. Historians estimate that 90 percent of the peasantry lived just at or under the level of subsistence. Servants came overwhelmingly from the ranks of the peasantry. They were younger sons for whom there was no soil to till; they were daughters for whom there were no resources available for the dowry that was still an absolute necessity in order to marry. Indeed, some of the poorer provinces became so well known for the steady and abundant stream of servants they sent to towns and cities that employers disregarded their servants’ given names and simply called them by their supposed province of origin. We can see a satirical reflection on this practice in Marivaux’s play La fausse suivante (The False Lady’s Maid, 1724). When the eponymous protagonist (a rich young lady in double disguise as a man and as her own maidservant) asks Trivelin, who after years of living as a vagabond has finally accepted his fate to live as a domestic servant, a seemingly straightforward question: “What is your name?,” Trivelin responds, “As you wish, sir,” suggesting a varied list of provinces from which to choose, “Burgundian, Champagne, Poitevin, Picard. It’s all the same to me; the name under which I will have the honor to serve you will be the handsomest in the world” (act 1, scene 5).

  Although Trivelin’s seeming lack of interest in a name, and hence a kind of dispossession of an identity or even what we might today call a personhood of his own, along with his overly fulsome flattery, might seem to indicate that the playwright intended to represent servants as the mere ciphers of the masters, nothing could be farther from the truth. For in that very scene between the would-be mistress disguised as a chevalier and the-soon-to-be servant, there is so much verbal sparring, so many attempts to understand and grasp the meaning of the other (the puzzled employer wonders, “Is he making fun of me?” and asks, “are you laughing?”), so much specific and idiosyncratic speech on the part of Trivelin—his rejection of the term “valet” (“his valet! What a harsh term. Will we never purge such names from our language?”)—that we realize Trivelin retains a full, distinct sense of self and that he forces his new employer to recognize him as an individual whose will is not dominated by his master. When the false “chevalier” tries to reject Trivelin’s services, Trivelin simply refuses to be rejected, saying, “Let’s not bandy about; time is passing and we haven’t decided anything yet.”

  This scene underscores the degree to which Marivaux’s servants and masters act as each other’s comrades, confidants (for Trivelin knows that his employer is a woman dressed as a man and certainly intends to keep her secret), and allies. Indeed, while Marivaux’s servants are utterly capable of pursuing their own distinct desires, whether for money or love of their own, their trajectories never conflict with those of their masters. Sometimes, their emotional lives resemble those of their masters so uncannily they seem more like twins than foils to the upper-class characters. In the first Surprise of Love (1722; Marivaux wrote two plays with this title), Lélio, a nobleman, and his servant Harlequin, have sworn to themselves and to each other to live a retired life in the countryside because they are both consumed by melancholy after having been betrayed by the women they loved. They act as each other’s companions and as each other’s support through emotional trials. As Lélio explains in the play’s second scene, “Yes, my friend; I love you; you have good sense, although a bit crude. Your lover’s unfaithfulness made love repellent to you; my lover’s betrayal did the same for me. You followed me into this solitary life with courage and you have become dear to me because of the correspondence of our spirits and the resemblance of our adventures” (act 1, scene 2). So when Harlequin falls in love with Columbine, maid to the countess who lives nearby, he works with Columbine to make his master Lélio’s life adventure continue to resemble his own: the two servants successfully manipulate their employers so that they too fall in love and decide to marry, despite their professed horror of the opposite sex.

  The world of Marivaux’s characters is based to an extraordinary degree on the tight bond between servants and masters. In typical comedy, and certainly in Molière for the most part, the protagonist
s have important family relationships that inform and shape the plot: this usually means that the young lovers live under the authority of fathers, uncles, or guardians, and sometimes even mothers, who intend to dictate the course of the young person’s life. Often the authoritarian figure insists that the son, daughter, or ward, marry a person of the parent’s or guardian’s choosing despite his or her love for another. Much of the force of the comedy in such plays comes from the cleverness and stratagems, and even dumb luck by which those who are weak—because they are legally minors and have no right to decide for themselves, because they have no access to economic resources which are monopolized by the father, because they lack moral justification in a society that granted near omnipotence to fathers and endlessly repeated children’s duty to obey—triumph over the obstacles put in their way by those who, ostensibly, are strong. Since most comedies were built around the joyful release of laughter that accompanied the upsetting of what was considered the divinely ordained social order, church and state authorities regularly condemned comedies, authors, and actors. Because in Molière wives regularly overcame their husbands and sons and daughters defeated their would-be tyrant fathers, and because spectators in the audiences could not help but side with the young lovers against the old, unappealing figures of repression, comedy was often viewed as vindicating disorder and turning the world upside down. Love in comedies meant love, but it also stood for the right to make decisions for oneself, for autonomy, for freedom.

  Evaluating Marivaux against such a backdrop illuminates just how unusual he is. Most of his characters lack any defining social qualifications other than the bare minimum indicated by their names: they often are called simply the countess, the marquis, the chevalier. We know therefore that they are members of the nobility, but that is all we learn. When the noble characters do have names, they are stock comedic first names (Lélio, for instance, is one of Marivaux’s faorites) rather than names that convey a distinct individuality. The servants, for their part, are identified as servants by names such as Harlequin and Columbine, which come straight from the Italian commedia dell’arte repertory. These names indicate types rather than persons. And yet, Marivaux manages to enrich these stock figures; he makes them into developed personalities though their extensive and highly particularized use of language.