by Steven Moore
So, we have a novel written by a man that pretends to be an abandoned bundle of letters written by a woman who admits she portrays herself as “the heroine of a romance” which is denied by her creator who insists she/he’s writing neither fiction nor history but something new. The point of all this metafictionality is to force readers to abandon their previous genre expectations and open themselves to a new mode of fiction. As Ioan Williams notes, “Behind this conception of fiction is a radically new conception of character which breaks clear away from anything previously attempted in fiction and informs the whole structure of [Marivaux’s] work” (164).
In the same preface, Marivaux warns readers that in the next installment he would be dealing with lower-class characters in a realistic manner that might displease some. “But those that are more of a philosophic turn, and less deceived by the distinction which pride has established here below; those people, I say, will be glad to see what man is, in the character of a coachman, and what woman, in that of a little shopkeeper” (1:54). Sure enough, the slangy, comical shouting match between a coachman and Mme Dutour the linen-draper outraged readers accustomed to ladylike novels populated solely by genteel characters. Of course Marivaux wasn’t the first to inject realism or lower-class characters into the French novel, but his commitment to realism permitted a character like ginger Marianne, who can be both an artful ingenue and a principled young lady. Most characters in early fiction are either/or; Marivaux knew that most people are both/and, combining good and bad qualities in varying degrees. Distancing herself from traditional novelists, Marianne writes near the beginning of her story, “They who would give us a picture of human nature very often describe what we should be rather than what we are, like the writers of modern romances who, fond of everything that is marvelous, neglect nature and describe their hero as wanting even the foibles which we are unavoidably liable to. For a perfect character is a very unnatural one, and whatever these visionaries may think, those who speak from their own experiences are more likely to teach us the knowledge of ourselves than the dreams of these novelists” (22). One of the great evolutionary leaps in the history of the novel is this transition from “perfect” characters to more human ones, from flat characters to round ones, and Marivaux’s principal characters are as round as Marianne’s naked arm. Marianne/Marivaux further distance themselves from earlier novelists and assert their commitment to realistic characterization at the beginning of the eighth letter, where Marianne chides her correspondent (and Marivaux the reading public) for being surprised and angry at Valville’s infidelity:
I fancy that, instead of the life of your friend, you have insensibly brought yourself to believe you were reading a romance. And, this granted, there must be some reason for the violence of your indignation. What! An unfaithful romantic hero? Surely never was heard such a prodigy! It is an established rule that they all of them ought to be true, and it is on this account only that we interest ourselves in their concerns. . . .
But infidelity is uncommon nowhere but in this visionary romantic world. I am here representing things as they really are, as the instability of all human things render them, and not the adventures of the brain which may be framed as we please; not a fictitious heart, but the heart of a man. (279)
Her earlier suggestion that one should read fiction for “knowledge of ourselves” rather than for a few hours’ entertainment represents another leap, a repurposing of the novel. Regardless, that shouting match so outraged the critics that Marivaux temporarily abandoned the work and began writing The Upstart Peasant instead. But we’re not yet ready to say So long, Marianne.
What Brooks calls Marianne’s “lucid social consciousness” allows her to make some damning indictments against French society. Before Mme de Miran succumbs to Marianne’s charms, she explains why she cannot countenance a wedding, a remarkable passage in which she both condemns and kowtows to social convention:
I myself should be charmed [to allow Marianne to marry her son] if the maxims of the world did not restrain me from acquiescing with it. For, alas, what is it you want [lack]? Neither beauty with all its most pleasing graces, the most sparkling wit, not the unaffected goodness of a great and upright soul. . . . But you have not twenty thousand livres a year. He would make no alliances in marrying you, nor do we know your relations, who, perhaps, would be an honor to us. The greatest part of mankind, my dear, have a superficial way of thinking, and consequently very false ideas;120 they are dazzled with the splendor of riches and their ears tickled with the sound of titles, and yet to these I must give an account of my actions, to these who would never pardon the misfortunes you have suffered, which they would falsely term defects. Reason would certainly choose you for his wife, but an extravagant custom rejects you. (141)
It doesn’t occur to her to reject “extravagant custom,” and Marianne agrees; even after Mme de Miran changes her mind (she plans to deceive society into thinking Marianne is an acceptable country relation), Marianne nobly offers to withdraw after the extended Valville family voices their opposition to the marriage: “The world disdains, it rejects me; and, as we shall never be able to correct its prejudices, we must humor them” (253). She may feel that way, but not Marivaux: far from humoring the world’s prejudices, he scores several hits against a ridiculous, rigid social structure that values family connections and social standing over individual merit, where an inbred coxcomb of noble blood is held in higher esteem than an intelligent, sensitive commoner. Bring on la Révolution! Marivaux, who moved in that upper-class world, notes that its superficial, false, prejudicial standards were maintained mostly by women.
Nonetheless, Marianne is a remarkable study in female sensibility; women dominate the novel, and there is special attention to alternative mother– daughter relationships, both in Marianne’s story and in the nun’s tale at the end. “How great, how interesting an adventure it is to find again an unknown mother,” the nun gushes. “That very name carries in it something inexpressibly delightful” (428). Mme de Miran means more to Marianne than her son ever does, and the nun’s tale is essentially her failed search for a surrogate mother after her biological one abandoned her. (Since she warns Marianne against taking the veil, we can assume Mother Church isn’t a satisfactory surrogate.) At times the novel reads like Mother’s Day porn as Marianne weeps her eyes out again and again in gratitude to her “mamma” (as she calls Miran), though a cynic might suspect her daughterly tears are put to the same use around older women that her wardrobe malfunctions are around men. (An ocean of tears are shed in this sentimental novel; not only is Marianne as psychologically acute as a Japanese novel, it’s just as wet.)
Though left unfinished, The Life of Marianne was immensely popular and influential, especially in England. Much scholarly ink has been spilled on the similarities between Marivaux’s and Richardson’s besieged 15-year-old charmers and the question of influence; the fact Richardson worked in the printing house that published the early installments of Lockman’s translation in 1736, and may have even set the type, certainly suggests Marianne contributed to Pamela (1740). Fielding and Sterne were admirers—the slow, digressive pace at which Tristram Shandy tells his life story comically exaggerates Marianne’s manner—and in Frances Burney’s preface to her Evelina (1778) she includes Marivaux among those who saved the novel “from contempt, and rescued [it] from depravity.” But like Challe’s equally revolutionary Illustrious French Lovers, it fell out of favor at the end of the 18th century; Marianne was eventually rehabilitated in France, but in the English-reading world, this tear-stained milestone in the history of the novel remains criminally neglected.
Same with Marivaux’s next best novel, The Upstart Peasant (Le Paysan parvenu, ou les mémoires de M***, 1734–35); there’s a good translation by Benjamin Boyce dating from 1974, but it was privately printed and hence is very scarce. This engaging memoir-novel, written and published in installments while Marianne was still in progress, is a masculine, bourgeois version of that feminine, aristo
cratic novel, and is likewise narrated decades later when the protagonist is socially and financially secure. A wine-grower’s son named Jacob arrives in Paris around age 19, gets hired as a servant to a swinging married couple of the business class—the wife flirts with him, the husband tries to bribe him to marry a servant-girl so that he can more conveniently see her on the side—then leaves their household after the financier dies suddenly. The bulk of the 210-page novel occurs over the next week as Jacob is hired by a repressed church lady in her late forties, marries her within a few days, and has flirtations with a few other older women. Jacob has just met the man who will make his fortune when the novel ends; again like Marianne, Marivaux didn’t bother to finish it.
Jacob is an outgoing, open-hearted lad and isn’t threatened by Paris as Marianne is, largely because he quickly adapts to its ways and is happy to respond to any woman who takes an interest in him. He’s a bit of a gigolo just as Marianne is a bit of a coquette, but spares himself the moral dilemmas she entangles herself in, largely because male chastity isn’t an issue, nor does he have any inborn aristocratic promptings to obey. The peasant succeeds because he takes life as it is, not as it should be. (Marivaux gives no indication of whether we should approve or disapprove of this attitude; the “parvenu” of the title had not yet become a slur and merely indicated a self-made man.) One doesn’t suspect the older Jacob is doctoring this account of his younger self, as one does with Marianne; either he’s as sincere as he repeatedly claims to be—sincerity in fact is his defining feature—or he’s too cunning for us.
Marivaux provides more examples of rounded characters who are both/and, especially older female characters who are both pious and sensual. (Scorn for religious hypocrisy is another similarity between Marianne and this novel.) As Jacob says to one of these cougars, “One is what one is, and that’s not the world’s affair; after all, what does one do in this life? a little good, a little bad, now one, now the other; one does as one can . . .” (137–38). Marivaux attains new heights of realism in characterization and dialogue, and allows Jacob to deflate the very sentimentality he was simultaneously inflating in Marianne when it comes to love: “one doesn’t need tenderness to love people,” Jacob tells us, unknowing evoking Scudéry’s key term: “There are amours in which the heart has no share; there are, indeed, more of that kind than of any other, and it is basically by these that nature rolls along, not by our delicacies of sentiment that do not serve her at all. It is we usually who render ourselves tender in order to give grace to our passions, but it is nature that makes us amorous; we accept from her the experience which we embellish with gentility; I speak thus of sentiment; however, one seldom embellishes it anymore; that fashion has rather disappeared at the time I am writing” (182). Would that it were true: sentimental fiction became even more popular as the 18th century progressed, but Jacob’s unsentimental acknowledgment of the sex drive is refreshing and frees Marivaux’s amorous characters from charges of immorality. Although there are a few hot scenes of extreme flirting, the novel isn’t lascivious, and in fact at one point Marivaux inserts a two-page critique of that quality in a novel by Crébillon (whom we’ll get to shortly), who had parodied Marianne in a racy novel called The Skimmer (1734). Sex is natural, Jacob insists, and shouldn’t be sentimentally sweetened or coarsely dirtied.
The Upstart Peasant is an early example of the “young man from the provinces” genre that would become more popular as novelists abandoned aristocratic characters for more ordinary folk. Jacob isn’t corrupted by the big city, nor does his homespun wisdom triumph over metropolitan sophistication as in some examples of the genre. As Greene notes, “He is neither hero nor anti-hero. He is that extraordinary paradox, an ordinary man” (193), which was still a novelty in fiction at this time. Marianne is an extraordinary girl, and Marianne a superior novel, but The Upstart Peasant is remarkable for its very ordinariness: its ordinary characters speaking ordinary dialogue and behaving in ordinary ways make it extraordinary.
It’s a shame the author didn’t finish it; the novel ends with a promise for a sixth installment of Jacob’s memoirs, but Marivaux returned to Marianne and never fulfilled his promise. In 1743 he was admitted to the French Academy (largely due to the influence of the real-life counterpart to Marianne’s benefactress) and he gave up fiction completely, leaving behind one of the most diverse bodies of novels from any writer.
The memoir-novel was also the favored form of the other almost-famous French novelist of this period, Antoine François Prévost (1697–1763). He’s usually referred to as Abbé Prévost because technically he was a priest, though he certainly didn’t act like one. Torn between the incompatible attractions of the sacred and secular worlds, he spent his youth bouncing back and forth between the novitiate and the army, unable to decide between the tranquility of the cloister and the excitement of the outside world. A failed love affair in his early twenties drove him back to the monastery—which he likened to a “tomb”—where he worked on theological projects; but unable to resist the call of the wild, he simultaneously began writing a romantic novel, the first four installments of which appeared in 1728. That year, he left his monastery without permission, which resulted in a warrant for his arrest, so he fled to England, converted to Anglicanism, got work as a tutor, began writing a second novel, became secretly engaged to his student, got fired, fled to Holland, added a theatrical “d’Exiles” to his surname, wrote and published the final three installments of his first novel—which caused a scandal—then became obsessed with a disreputable adventuress named Lenki Eckhardt who bankrupted him, which led him to commit forgery and get arrested. He then snuck back to France, managed to get papal absolution for his apostasy, rejoined a monastery but kept up an active social life and continued writing novels, even though his superiors forbade him from publishing. Further financial problems (he had hooked up again with leeching Lenki) and threats of imprisonment caused him to flee France again, and it wasn’t until he was in his forties that the renegade priest finally settled down back in France, concentrated on writing nonfiction and translations (including Richardson’s later novels), and attained a modicum of respectability.
Prévost decided to make his wild oscillations between the sacred and secular realms, between religious calm and profane passion, the subject of his first significant novel, Memoirs of a Man of Quality Who Has Withdrawn from the World (Mémoirs et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde, 1728–31).121 It purports to be the memoirs of a high-principled man named Renoncour who has retired to a monastery after a tumultuous life (books 1–2), then is talked out of retirement to accompany a young nobleman on a European tour, another tumultuous experience that sends Renoncour back to the monastery for good (books 3–6). Book 7, the famous Manon Lescaut, recounts a tragic story Renoncour heard during the events of book 5. Over the course of the Man of Quality’s 700 pages, Prévost scores many palpable hits: he undermines the moral code maintained by the French aristocracy (the “quality” of the title) and questions its rigid social structure; he slyly slanders their god by way of praising him; introduces new character types (the melancholic solitaire, the femme fatale) and new modes (Gothicism, Romanticism, decadence) to the French novel; complicates the reliability of narrators and reader expectations; deromanticizes the idea of love at first sight; discredits the moral value of literature; defends England against French prejudice; and last as well as least, sets part of his novel in New Orleans, its first appearance in fiction.
Prévost stages a number of dichotomies—reason versus passion, tranquility versus activity, social duty versus personal inclination, books versus life—and shows how hard it is to reconcile the socially approved first halves of those pairings with the instinctive appeal of the second. They are irreconcilable differences, and The Man of Quality is the tragedy of a man who fails to reconcile himself to those differences. Before Prévost exposes the Marquis de Renoncour for the inhuman, blinkered, hypocritical character he is, the author wins the re
ader’s sympathy for this man of constant sorrows. The son of a couple that defied their parents by eloping and were disinherited as a result, the 17-year-old Renoncour no sooner reconciles his grandfather to his wayward father than his mother and sister die, sending his father to a monastery. (As in other novels of the period, the cloister offers an escape from the world; it’s more an asylum for those who can’t cope than a religious retreat, and a holding pen to keep girls out of trouble until they’re old enough to marry.) The gloomy teen goes to Paris to further his education, and after a lonely period meets a fellow solitaire, who recounts the first of the novel’s many embedded histoires, most of which concern the “violent passions” of young love and which invariably involve subterfuge, crime, murder, unhappiness, and/or suicide. Disinherited by his evil stepmother, Renoncour drifts through Europe for several years before getting captured and becoming a slave to a Turk. Now in his mid-thirties, he falls for a Turkish girl half his age whom he is tutoring and elopes with her to Italy. They are happy for a while and have a child (though they don’t marry until later), but after his wife dies of a fever he buries himself in solitude in a room hung with black curtains, weeping daily before a shrine he erects to her. Eventually he returns to France, only to learn his father has died; after his 15-year-old daughter elopes just as he and his father did, Renoncour renounces the world and retires to a monastery at age 50 to write the memoirs we’ve just read.