SOURCE: “History and Story,” in The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 71-93.

[In the following excerpt, Hogsett examines de Staël's attempts to insert feminine ways of narration into a masculine-oriented history and literature in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales and Delphine.]

Staël published nothing between Passions in 1796 and On Literature in 1800. Simone Balayé speculates that between 1796 and late 1798, when she began the writing of On Literature, she was perhaps working on the second part of the Passions.¹ That does indeed seem likely, especially in the light of her failure to complete “On Current Circumstances …” whose subject matter was closely related to the Passions project. Realizing the impossibility of doing that piece of work, she began to cast about for a potentially more successful project. Her search seems to have taken two forms. In the first place, she apparently decided that part of her problem was the subject matter she had proposed for herself in the Passions, namely, the science of government. Our examination of reasons why government did not energize her writing, a fact all the more odd given her intense interest in it, suggested that Staël felt, in spite of herself, that it was not a topic a woman writer could adequately or appropriately treat. If that is so, it is logical to conclude that she would be looking for a viable topic. She found it in literature, a subject with which women had been traditionally associated. At the same time, Staël thought of a way of treating literature that would enable her to incorporate some of the research she had already done on forms of government through the ages and which would at least partly satisfy her desire to talk about politics. The full title of her work reveals this approach: De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (On Literature Considered in Its Relationship with Social Institutions).² One of the “social institutions” that she will treat insofar as it impinged on literary production is, of course, political organization. In little over a year she had written and published her work, so that it seems that she had indeed rethought her topic in a way that allowed her writing to move ahead rather than to remain stymied.

The second reason why the work on the Passions presented obstacles to the flow of writing was her plan to include both masculine and feminine ways of thinking and writing in the same book and to present them as “analogous.” In her work of the turn of the century, Staël has found a new way of approaching that problem. During this time she writes not only On Literature but also Delphine, an epistolary novel, her next literary project after the work on literature.³ These two works are a pair, the first belonging to the “male” series laid out in the Essay on Fiction and the second to the “female” series. The first is a work of history that recounts public events and arranges them according to a theory of history. The second is a fictional work that reveals the happenings and feelings of private life, inspired by events actually observed or lived by the author. Rather than trying to write the masculine and the feminine together, as she had attempted in the Passions, Staël is now separating them into two distinct works, not claiming any particular relationship between them, making no attempt to show their “analogies.” She must have felt that this was a successful approach. Between 1803 and 1810 she wrote another pair of works, one expository, the other one fictional. Toward the end of her career she can be shown to have been projecting still another such pair.

In composing books by pairs, Germaine de Staël has found a most interesting solution to the problem of sexual writing identity. Members of a pair are both associated and dissociated. The latter effect—dissociation—is, I claim, the one actually sought by Staël herself. The androgyny of a male/female work, like the Passions, of which she dreamed but which she did not complete, made her uncomfortable. Perceiving maleness and femaleness to be a dichotomy, she could more easily deal with creating works that she could think of as adhering to its parts rather than questioning them by the act of establishing analogies. Writing works in pairs thus satisfied this need to keep the dichotomy intact. Meanwhile, however, it is the associative quality of pairs that is the more interesting and critically useful phenomenon here. If it can be shown that the male and female members of a pair are in fact “analogous” after all, we may conclude that, like it or not, Staël had a single identity that insistently manifested itself whenever she wrote, no matter how different the types of works she created may seem. These assessments differ from that of Simone Balayé who, in comparing the fictional and nonfictional works of Staël has written, “The critical and political work of Madame de Staël proposes, constructs, comforts, while the novelistic work destroys, expressing the anguish of the author.”⁴ While evidence to support this claim can certainly be gathered in the overt themes of the works in question, their deep structure constantly asserts unity rather than duality.

That Delphine and On Literature are a pair can be demonstrated by reference to both their tonal and their structural affinities. A major tone struck by both works is that of nostalgia. As On Literature ends Staël thinks back to the period ten years earlier, depicting herself as “entrant dans le monde” (entering the world). This is the same phrase by which the Staël of the 1814 preface to the Rousseau letters was to use to characterize her status in the late 1780s and early 1790s. She contrasts the hopeful and confident young woman she was then with the guarded person she has become. The action of the novel Delphine takes place in the same time period. Her central character describes herself at that time with this same phrase: “I am entering the world …” This nostalgic note is emphasized by the presence of parental figures in both books, Delphine being the book of the mother, On Literature, the book of the father.⁵

The epigraph of Delphine is “A man must be able to defy opinion, a woman, to submit to it.”⁶ This aphorism was written by Staël's mother. The novel comments on it by featuring a man who submits to public opinion and a woman who defies it. Thus, the qualities that should be associated, according to Suzanne Necker, with a man are exhibited by a woman who permits herself masculine behavior. The appropriate quality has been transferred to the inappropriate sex, so that a crossing, or a chiasmus, has resulted. Staël has crossed or gone against the values of her mother, but in the same ambivalent way that we have already observed, for example, in her attitude toward moral philosophy in the Essay. She has indeed created a plot in which the female character fails to act in the way prescribed by the maternal aphorism. However, Delphine is severely punished for each failure. At the same time she is without any doubt the heroine of the novel. Her character is exalted, her actions are blameless, her way of being is valorized. Suzanne Necker had been dead since 1794, and yet even now when her daughter crosses her, she must do so in a shifting way, her aggressive moves tempered by attempted appeasements. Delphine is in part a response to Suzanne Necker. The memory of her moral lessons, of her interpretation to her daughter of woman's proper place, is present even before the actual beginning of the novel, and, as Madelyn Gutwirth demonstrates, the “complicity in woman's fate” of both good and evil mothers is depicted and analyzed in the book.⁷

The attitude toward the father, however, is quite different. On Literature traces the history of literature and thought in their relation to various other social phenomena from the time of the Greeks through the French Revolution in a first part. Its second part is an attempt to project the nature of the literature of the future, a literature she hopes will develop somewhere in the world, perhaps in France, perhaps in America, when an enlightened and free nation comes into being. In her penultimate chapter, entitled “Du Style des Ecrivains et de celui des Magistrats,” (On the Style of Writers and of Magistrates), she discusses her father in terms that recall the Rousseau letters. Her father is the best example of a magistrate/writer and stands as one to be emulated in this essential endeavor. If the first part of the book leads up to the French Revolution, the second part leads up to Necker. He has then a significant place in the overall plan of his daughter's book. The father is not crossed; he is apotheosized.

That Delphine is conceived as a response to the mother and On Literature to the father, suggests the dissociation between the male and the female Staël seems to have wished to bring about in these two works. Yet structurally, the two works are similar in that they share a central preoccupation and organizing principle: both are stories and thus both are arranged diachronically. Narrations are grounded in some fundamental informing conception of temporality and causality. The writer must arrange chosen or invented events in temporal succession and show how they derive from prior events and lead to those that follow. The events will be related in a way that forms a pattern of development in time and of causation. On Literature, the book of the father, is man's history, the story of development in the public realm. Delphine, the book of the mother, is a novel which depicts the world of a woman in her relation to the man she loves and of that part of the man's life that is carried out in the private arena. The distinctions Staël set up in the Essay lead us to expect that we will be dealing with different stories in the two cases. The public story will be abstract, exclusive of certain elements. In telling it, one will be working under some theory of history according to which one will order events and interpretations. The private story will have to conform to the contours of experience. Some of Staël's critics have adopted this dichotomized picture of her performance. Simone Balayé says, “There are for her novels tragic endings, for her philosophical and political works endings which are never closures” and discerns “a fundamental difference of orientation between these two manners of expressing her genius.”⁸ James Hamilton, however, senses a “structural polarity” in On Literature, two levels of reasoning, the one dialectical and the other “unconscious and skeptical.”⁹ There is indeed a tension in that work, rather than openings into hope. In fact, the stories of the two books bear striking similarities that provide evidence for a certain Staëlian conception of temporal sequence and of causality, which imposed itself on her rendering of both man's and woman's story. That conception comes from her unmistakable female identity.

In the book on literature, Staël's theory of history is a particularly insistent version of perfectibility, an idealized interpretation that she found in a number of sources. Rousseau, one of the first to use the word perfectibility (in his Second Discourse, 1755), actually meant by it “capacity for change,” a change that can move toward amelioration or degeneration. Condorcet, probably the most immediate influence on her theory, claimed progress in the development of the human mind but saw little advancement for human kind itself in his “Essay on the history of the progress of the human mind,” 1793-1794. Staël wishes to adopt a stronger attitude still, to claim progress for humankind as well as progress in thought. She words her initial presentation of the theory in such a way as to underplay the distinction between progress of the mind and improvement in the human lot. “In looking at the revolutions of the world and at the succession of centuries, there is one prime idea which I keep constantly in mind: the perfectibility of human kind. I do not think that this great work of moral nature has ever been abandoned, in periods of enlightenment as in centuries of darkness, the gradual march of the human mind has not been interrupted” (emphasis added).¹⁰ The shift in terminology (from “human kind” to “human mind”) is not brought out and explained but rather slipped in so as to blur the distinction. The implication is that Staël wishes to claim progress for human kind, but because she cannot do so with an entirely clear intellectual conscience, she expresses herself ambiguously on the point. The strong claim she wishes to make is one that finally she cannot entirely bring herself to make even at this initial, introductory stage. Lucia Omacini discovers this same pattern in Staël's very syntax: “The syntactical structure transmits and reflects at once optimism, faith in perfectibility, hope in a better future, but, if one can read between the lines, it hides traps which lie in wait for the irreparable calamities of humanity.”¹¹

In this same passage Staël posits an agent (moral nature) which has set out on and continually pursues its activity, that of creating a work. The work is a readable, understandable, sensible story. Human kind and the human mind or both gradually march forward under its influence. There is a force at work that somehow moves events along in such a way as to form a pattern of progress. The causal principle behind the movement posited here is a hidden but active intelligence. “Time reveals to us a design, in the sequence of events that seemed to be only the pure result of chance; and one sees a thought emerge, always the same thought, from the abyss of facts and centuries.”¹²

The importance to Staël of this theory of history is emphasized when, in her second preface to the book, she reiterates her claims, now citing a number of other writers who have professed the same theory in answer to her critics. It is a system, she says, that “promises to men on this earth some of the benefits of immortality, a limitless future, continuity without interruption!”¹³ This passage specifies that the movement of history which Staël wishes to recount will be characterized not only by an upward linear progression but also by a particular articulation of events—they must be continuous, uninterrupted, their lines unbroken, smoothly linking from one to the next. But the passage also betrays the scarcely spoken skepticism Staël felt about her cherished theory. She says it “promises” various benefits.

In the Preliminary Discourse of her book (p. 208) Staël calls her theory a “une croyance philosophique” (a philosophical belief). At the same time she claims that it is not a “vain theory” but rather that it is based on the “observation of facts.” She does not, however, state what those observations are, so that the word belief seems to fit well. What she says about this belief does not amount to a proof of its truth but rather to an appeal to its advantages. It serves to combat discouragement, the feeling that one's efforts are pointless. Thus Staël's attitude toward her theory of history is characterized both by an adamant insistence on the importance of its moral and emotional role and by an inherent implicit skepticism about its foundation in demonstrable fact. The story of perfectibility must be told and believed, but it is not necessarily a true story. Staël made a valiant effort to tell that story, but she does not manage to make it work smoothly and convincingly. The structure of the story being told works at cross purposes with that of the story Staël wanted to tell. Decadence taints perfectibility. Senselessness threatens sense. Circularity bends linearity.

Every story must have a beginning. Staël does not show as much interest in beginnings, though, as such eighteenth-century thinkers as Rousseau and Condillac, who discussed at length the origins of language, knowledge, and society. Rather she sets history in motion abruptly. Facts about our origins are missing; lacking anything upon which to base our ideas, we speculate in vain. Yet it is necessary to posit some sort of a beginning and some force that explains why there was a beginning at all. Staël brings in a quite general principle. She claims simply that “moral nature” acquires quickly what is needed. “For example, … language is the instrument that is necessary for the acquisition of all other developments; and, by a sort of miracle, this instrument exists.”¹⁴ The initial step of human kind is inexplicable; one can only appeal to some unknown force, a divine hand, a quasi-magic thrust into existence from nothingness. Once the elements of humanity and society are in motion, further developments come slowly, in steps, which lend themselves to study and to understanding. But the beginning leaps into being surprisingly, irrationally.

Staël's attitude toward the originators of Western civilization, for her, the Greeks, is decidedly ambivalent. This is a second factor that gets her story off to an uncertain start. She does not admire them as much as she does the Romans, saying that they, in disappearing from history, leave “few regrets” (part I, chapter 4). Yet emotions and thought, as well as the literature which expressed them, existed in a pristine state, uncomplicated by precedents, which can never be recaptured. Staël does show some nostalgia for this state. Regret for a lost past is not compatible with the theory of perfectibility that theoretically should involve looking ahead with anticipation and behind with the assurance that the past existed mainly to serve the present and the future. From the outset nostalgia coexists uneasily with perfectibility.

The main characters of the next episode are the Romans. If the theory of perfectibility is valid, then they must be both different from the Greeks (that is, the Romans must be superior to them), and different from modern France (that is, inferior to it). On the first point, Staël has little difficulty. Rome borrowed from Greece and integrated its borrowings into its own distinctive culture. On the second point, however, there are some obstacles. Modern France may be superior to ancient Rome, but not in all ways. Roman historical writing, for instance, is better than French. Or again, in many ways, France is neither better nor worse than Rome, but similar. To point out a few resemblances between ancient and modern times does not at first glance seem to threaten necessarily the theory of perfectibility. But if the examples of similarity become too numerous, then history will start seeming to repeat itself and thus be more like a circle than a straight line. That is why Staël, whenever she makes a comparison, is potentially endangering her entire hypothetical structure.

In fact, Staël does much more than point out resemblances. She sees a structural similarity between the history of the Romans and that of the French. Everyone knows and Staël repeats the story of the Romans, whose civilization flourished and then declined and fell. One cannot talk about Rome without talking about decadence, that major enemy of perfectibility. Naturally, then, when Staël treats the fall of the Roman Empire she is working in an area mined with danger to her system. It presents a strong case for the countertheory to that of Staël: inevitable periodic decadence. “Some have claimed that the decadence of the arts and letters of empires must necessarily occur after a certain degree of splendor.”¹⁵ Staël combats this hypothesis by recourse to a distinction she was careful to make at the beginning of the account and which she reiterates throughout: that the arts are not indefinitely perfectible (the classical ideal of a “point of perfection”), whereas thought can progress indeterminably. This distinction can certainly guard perfectibility from the threat of decadence in the realm of the arts, but it provides no defense if decadence can be demonstrated in the realm of thought. Faced with this threat Staël makes a very dangerous move. “Moral nature tends to be perfected. Previous improvement is a cause for future improvement; this chain can be interrupted by accidental events that impede future progress but that are not the consequences of previous progress.”¹⁶ She introduces the element of chance, of accident, disconnecting the chain of events that, she had claimed, leads continually from one to the next. She has given up a great deal here, abandoned, in fact, the cornerstone of her entire claim, the uninterrupted continuity of progress. Yet she proceeds as if this capitulation had not taken place. She goes on to claim that whereas the Romans did indeed decline, decadence is not an inevitable thrust within history and that there is every reason to believe that it will not happen again. The argument is that decadence is not destined to occur; it comes as the result of certain causes, so that when the causes are eliminated or diminished the effect will cease or be attenuated. But the case is not very strongly argued. Reference is made to Montesquieu for factual proof of the thesis. Yet, as in her discussion of perfectibility, the appeal is not to demonstrable evidence but to emotional necessity; it would be too depressing to contemplate an inevitable succession of falls. Furthermore, in the case of at least one cause, that of the atrocities committed as the Roman Empire declined, it can only be demonstrated that that cause does not exist any more by eliminating the fact of the Terror. If one took this Terror into consideration, rather than refusing to consider it, as Staël suggests, one's conclusion would be quite different. The price of the proof is abstraction. And even so, Staël cannot bring herself to claim triumphantly that decadence no longer threatens, only that the threat has diminished in intensity.

Next, Staël has to deal with the “Dark Ages,” with what appear to have been ten centuries of decadence, a period that would indeed seem to question the idea of perfectibility. But even in those times events were not left to chance development; a mysterious force was at work. The narrative language of the chapter on the Middle Ages (part I, chapter 8), depends on the functioning of some hidden but active intelligence. The force is strongly reminiscent of the one Staël used to set history in motion. The process of creation is described in terms similar to those used in the discussion of this process of re-creation after the neo-chaos which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Staël must deny chance as an explanatory factor in the unfolding of history (and this in spite of her own occasional slips). But at the essential moments of articulation, as at the moment of creation, she cannot manage to assert and demonstrate a chain of cause and effect. She relies instead on a behind-the-scenes, mysterious power that energizes what might otherwise have remained in nothingness or reverted to it. Neither the thrust nor the processes of history seem to be marching along.

Halting and questionable as the progress has been up to this point, however, Staël moves on to the Renaissance. Here modern history begins. It is to be, she asserts, different from the past. Resolutely taking the side of the Moderns rather than the Ancients, Staël points to a new era that has already begun and which will now progress without further interruption. She calls upon the reader to look ahead. Looking back is associated with depression or discouragement, looking forward with renewed life, fecundity, hope, the excitement of voyage. Theoretically, whatever threats decadence may have posed before the Renaissance are now past, overcome. One may proceed into a continuously progressive future.

But that is not by any means how the story really goes on, for Staël soon arrives at the Revolution. “Thus time was marching toward the conquest of freedom … Ah! … Every time the course of ideas leads us to reflect upon the destiny of man, the revolution appears!”¹⁷ The only answer to this despair is a renewed rhetorical exhortation: “Nevertheless, let us not succumb to this discouragement. Let us return to general observations.”¹⁸ Moreover, when Staël turns from the past to the future, in the second part of her work, projecting what further progress is foreshadowed in the events and developments of her own time, her projections do not seem to promise continuity and progress any more than her retrospections. It begins in this way: “I have followed the history of the human mind from Homer until 1789. In my national pride, I viewed the time of the French Revolution as a new era for the intellectual world.”¹⁹ The Renaissance was supposed to be a new era that was to proceed without interruption. But now there has been another interruption, the Revolution, and there is to be a second new era. Is history not repeating itself?

It certainly seems to be doing so. The similarities between the state of things at the fall of the Roman Empire and now, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, are overwhelming. The structure of the two situations is the same, and Staël brings it out very clearly herself. In the first case, the friendly force of history had to bring about a reconciliation between two opposing sides, the barbarian invaders from the north and the decadent invaded from the south. The linking factor was the Christian religion. In the second, contemporary, case, the opposing sides are the decadent aristocracy invaded by the lower classes. How, Staël asks, can they be reconciled? The problem is the same: opposing forces to be united. The very natures of the two sides in the two cases are parallel. And the solutions, Christianity in the first case and now, as Staël shows in the latter chapters of her book, enthusiasm, are strikingly similar.

As Staël says, in her projections of the future she has depended upon her observations about the past. Indeed, people say that one studies history in order to learn from it; no doubt that is in general a good thing to do. But within the system of Staël, when the past is so inescapably like the present, the backlash from learning the lessons of history is that history begins to look circular. There is a double bind here: one cannot profit from the contemplation of the past unless history does repeat itself; but in that event we must face the fact that past events may recur and with the same results as before, and recur again and again. That, for Staël, is a very depressing thought. “It is impossible to condemn thought to retrace its steps, without hope and with regret; the human mind, deprived of a future, would fall into the most miserable degradation. Let us then look for this future, in literary productions and in philosophical ideas.”²⁰ Again, in the face of threatened decadence, the rhetorical exhortation. History does not have tense, not the past, nor the present, nor the future. It has only mode, and that mode is the imperative. It is the “let us affirm, let us look, let us not give up.” In this book Staël wanted to make the past make sense by the power of the word, but she could not finally tell the story she wanted to tell. The chain of perfectibility is constantly buffetted by the fear of decadence. The projected future is a wish; the only hope for its realization is to write rhetorically in such a way that the reader will want to share the “philosophical belief.”

Thus Staël's theory of history and her development of events and their causes are troubled, proceed by fits and starts, demonstrate the opposite of what she claims, and veer finally away from history into rhetoric. In her epistolary novel Delphine²¹ projections just as optimistic meet with equally disappointing results. In the preface to her novel, Staël does not immediately announce a definite shape that it supposedly will have, but she does make her explanatory factor quite clear. Destiny is formed by morality. The moral life of the characters will determine the elaboration of their stories. “Fictions should explain to us, by our virtues and our feelings, the mysteries of our fate.”²² Whatever happens to us, mysterious as it may temporarily seem, is finally explainable, can ultimately be shown to spin out of what we are and do. In the novel, the reader can expect to find a linking of events which makes sense of their succession and direction. The implication is that if the characters are virtuous, their stories should be, like history, a continuous improvement. That, in any event, is the prediction the main character Delphine naïvely makes about herself as the novel opens. “I am entering the world with a good and true character, wit, youth and fortune; why would these gifts of Providence not make me happy?”²³

But here is briefly what happens: When the hero, Léonce, and Delphine meet, the former is engaged to be married to a cousin of Delphine, Mathilde de Vernon, who is also the daughter of the woman whom Delphine considers to be her closest friend, Sophie de Vernon. Since the announcement of the engagement has not yet been made nor all of the arrangements completed, Léonce would be able, at the beginning, to change his mind and marry Delphine instead of Mathilde. Certainly the two of them recognize very soon their irresistible attraction to each other. But a villain intervenes. Sophie de Vernon, it turns out, is a treacherous woman who has taken advantage of Delphine's friendship and generosity. Now she intends that her daughter will marry the wealthy and charming Léonce and uses Delphine's innocence, credulity, and spontaneity against her, once she has perceived that Léonce's preferences do not go toward her daughter. She tricks Léonce into believing that Delphine is involved with another man. Disappointed, Léonce quickly marries Mathilde (part I).

Delphine does not understand why Léonce has acted as he has, so that following the marriage there is a period of misunderstanding. At length, however, Léonce and Delphine both discover the truth about Madame de Vernon's perfidy, but too late: Léonce is already bound to Mathilde (part II). Delphine realizes that under the circumstances she should leave Paris, refuse to see Léonce, and thereby eliminate the risk of allowing their relationship to continue and deepen. But Léonce prevails upon her not to leave, and continually finding new excuses to blind herself to her duty, Delphine stays. The position of the would-be lovers becomes more and more untenable, so that finally Delphine manages to leave Paris without telling Léonce where she is going or indeed without even announcing her departure to him (parts III and IV).

Now, two more villains: one Monsieur de Valorbe, who wishes the reluctant Delphine to marry him, and Madame de Ternan, sister and eventually agent of Léonce's mother, whose aim it is to separate her son from the threat that Delphine presents to his marriage. Hounded by the first and perfidiously encouraged by the other, Delphine takes religious vows, (part V), ironically at the same time that Léonce is being freed from his marriage by the death of his wife. At this point it is Delphine who is bound and Léonce who is at liberty to marry. If only Delphine could be persuaded to abjure her vows … But she knows that Léonce would never be able to accept that solution: What would people say of his marrying a defrocked nun? The only real solution is the one that is worked out in each of two endings: the death of the lovers (part VI).

In Delphine, the claim is made that character leads to destiny. To some extent, that is true. To be sure, Delphine's character produces the spontaneous actions that turn out to be so compromising in the eyes of Léonce. This exchange of properties which results in chiasmus causes the lovers to be not so much star-crossed as character-crossed. The actions of the villains as well as those of characters who innocently, or at times with good intention but blunderingly, end by placing obstacles to the progress of the lovers are explainable and explained by the characters. But something else is at work in the formation of destiny that makes it depend not only on the tightly-conceived interaction of people but also, to an important degree, on chance and fate.

One can best see the design of Delphine by outlining the major actions of the plot.

a.	Part I: Léonce marries Mathilde instead of Delphine.
b.	Part II: Léonce and Delphine find out the truth about what has separated them.
c.	Parts III and IV: Delphine leaves Paris.
d.	Part V: Delphine takes religious vows, thus making marriage impossible.
e.	Part VI: The lovers die.

The working out of these actions does not proceed always in the same way. In fact, there are two series of actions, viewed from this standpoint. Actions (a), (b), and (d) differ from actions (c) and (e). Novelistically, the first series is superior to the second. In the former case, Staël skillfully and gradually presents a number of characters whose complex interaction moves the story along. Essential here are the machinations of villains, Sophie de Vernon, first, and then Monsieur de Valorbe and Madame de Ternan. They take advantage of Delphine's well intentioned help for her friends, of her naïve trustfulness, and of her tendency to act spontaneously, without sufficiently foreseeing the repercussions for herself. In the case of the second series, however, there is little real story. At the beginning of part III and at the beginning of part VI, the climactic action is so predictable that the letters consist of a sequence of avoidance maneuvers that merely postpone the inevitable. The first series is more dynamic than the second.

The factors at work in the second series are malevolent chance and, on the part of the characters, an indecision that would put the most hardened procrastinator to shame. In part III, Delphine announces her departure three times, but in each case Léonce uses emotional blackmail, the threat that he will die if she leaves, and in each case she submits to his threats. In part IV, still knowing she should leave, she insists that her much-admired sister-in-law, Mademoiselle d’Albémar, decide for her. The latter, herself much influenced by Léonce's threats, decides that she should stay. But her staying becomes more and more problematic. Chance events make the situation as unendurable as possible, but still her decision is not forthcoming. Finally, Delphine reveals the truth about the feelings between herself and Léonce to Mathilde, whose ability not to see them make her a model wife for a faithless husband. But this action on Delphine's part is not an action at all. She describes her state of mind during the confession as irrational; she did not know what she was doing. Her “decision” was not based on a reasoning process but on an irresistible inner movement. Then in the aftermath of the encounter, Delphine depicts herself as a helpless victim, waiting for someone else, in this case, Mathilde, to make the final determination. Mathilde, not surprisingly, requires that she leave, but even now fifteen more letters intervene before the departure.

In these two parts (III and IV) the plot is not one of suspense, but of suspension. Whatever happens, happens despite the characters, not only the interventions of chance but even their own so-called actions. The inevitable outcome is postponed at great length, so that the characters exist always in a state of waiting, of living-until, of uncertainty and loudly proclaimed helplessness, the victims not of themselves but of circumstance.

In fact, suspension is present also in the parts in which more really motivated action takes place. The moment of truth that concludes part II is postponed, for example, when by chance Delphine does not find the person to whom she needed to deliver an essential letter, and she trustingly, foolishly, gives it to Madame de Vernon to send. The latter takes advantage of the contretemps in order to keep the lovers separated and in darkness longer than would have otherwise been possible. In part V, Delphine takes the vows that will separate her from Léonce at the very time when he is becoming free; had she waited just a little while, the situation that seemed to be forcing her into that drastic solution could have been dispelled.

Not even the actions of villains have the expected force. Their actions represent negative and destructive forces, but they are at least dynamic, emanating from character, evil though it be. It is useful to compare Madame de Vernon to a character Staël probably had in mind when she created her, Pierre de Laclos' Marquise de Merteuil. The marquise, in working her evil designs on her innocent victims, intended and maintained her actions and her character to the very end. Madame de Vernon intended what she did, but she ends by repenting, explaining her motivations in such a way as to expiate her crimes, at least in the eyes of Delphine. The same is true of Monsieur de Valorbe. Even Madame de Ternan, who does not repent, gives a lengthy explanation of her actions, designed to attenuate the evil of her character. Staël, unlike Laclos, will not allow evil to persist in her book; she must purge it, explain it away, make it acceptable. But in this refusal of evil she is undercutting an essential active force, softening her plot, turning away from what she had used as a principle of story-advancing action.

Decision is postponed and finally thrust upon the characters; the plot depends on chance; the villains are defused. Where the characters and their actions should be present, if we are to believe that out of our essence spins our story, there are voids. The analysis of the plot gives negative view of human action that people are not involved in a series of events that either make sense or are related in a pattern of consequence.

The atmosphere of the novel confirms it. In fact, the book is a romance that bathes in the atmosphere of medieval chivalry. Conventional motifs from that system abound. On two major occasions, when she falls in love and when she travels into Switzerland upon leaving Paris, Delphine has the impression of a passage from the ordinary world into a new one, dangerous but perhaps promising transformation and salvation. In several scenes, she is depicted in a carriage, being led away from the old world by dizzyingly swift horses. There are what the characters take to be supernatural premonitions of the future: when Delphine has taken her vows, she accidentally breaks the portrait of Léonce, signaling, she believes, the coming of some ominous event. A wise older woman, latter-day crone, tries to help the heroine. A blind man represents a happiness into which the lovers are denied access and a warning of that denial. There are festivals, a masked ball, scenes in dark churches. The love of Léonce and Delphine is that of Tristan and Isolde, a love-passion which leads to death through a series of separations and reunions. Realistic scenes, that is, scenes in which the characters are shown in their social settings, do not lack. Yet actually society is not so much the background against which the story is played out as a stock character of medieval romance, the villain, “this modern fate,”²⁴ “an uncontrollable, irrational, destructive, counter-natural force.”²⁵ Such conventional motifs set up certain expectations about destiny. A dark fate hangs over the characters, and it will not be carried out in linear, logical fashion. The arbitrary is in the service of the inevitable.

Are we, then, responsible for our actions? Apparently not, if the actions based on our characters are as fated as those visited upon us by others or by circumstance. But what does, finally, explain destiny? The book comments on the question but by no means addresses itself to it effectively. The plot explains nothing, gives no coherent vision of destiny, because the way events are articulated within it does not make sense of them. Naturally, the only appeal possible is to an obscure external force sometimes called chance and sometimes, fate. In Delphine the force is more openly acknowledged than in On Literature, where it is imbedded, implicit in the language but not overtly discussed. But it is, nonetheless, recognizable as the kind of agent ex machina that Staël brought in at crucial junctures of that story as well. Both books deal uneasily with consequence.

Whereas sequence of events caused Staël a great deal of difficulty in On Literature, the shape of destiny is clear in Delphine. That shape bears an interesting and revealing relationship to history as Staël tells it. The story in Delphine follows the archetypal pattern of Tristan and Isolde. The protagonists meet and fall in love despite the fact that one of them is already engaged to marry someone else. They share a moment of happiness and intimacy (in Staël the intimacy is spiritual only) but are separated by the marriage of one. However, they do come together later, (in the case of Delphine and Léonce, twice) but are again separated after each reunion. Their final encounter brings death. Thus the pattern is one of alternating presence and absence. In the description of the shared moments (six in all), several qualities are gradually developed and linked: bliss, timelessness,²⁶ music, and death.

The recurrence of the same motifs in each of the encounters creates a circularly shaped plot, consisting of a sequence of returns to and banishments from ideal moments. In shape, therefore, the story of Delphine strongly resembles the history of On Literature, not, to be sure, the latter's asserted movement of perfectibility, but its tendency to fall away from linear progression into a cycle of rise and fall.

Thus the story Staël wanted to tell—a story of temporal progress and comprehensible causality—becomes constantly distorted into another quite different one, characterized instead by circularity and senselessness. Despite the assertions she made about her conception of history on the one hand and the novel, as a genre, on the other, they both actually tell the same story. Some unwilled but inexorable pattern seems to impose itself, weakening the links of the desired narrations and molding them into a common shape. It is, then, in the very “weakness” of the plot that Staël expresses herself most strongly. Nancy K. Miller's work on novels by eighteenth-century women, often accused of implausibility and lack of verisimilitude, directs attention to this kind of strength: “The peculiar shape of a heroine's destiny in novels by women, the implausible twists of plot so common in these novels, is a form of insistence about the relationship of women to writing … The attack on female plots and plausibilities assumes that women writers cannot or will not obey the rules of fiction … but … the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs.”²⁷ The case of Germaine de Staël illustrates and is illuminated by these perceptions.

The associations Staël spells out in her Essay are crucial: speculative philosophy, history, abstract, invented, and public are linked with the male; the opposites, imaginative fiction, concrete, imitative, private, are related to the female. In these two books she separates the two domains into two supposedly different works, thereby theoretically dividing herself into two people, the one functioning in man's terms with the mind of a man and the other in woman's terms with the sensitivity of a woman. Staël could not, of course, successfully execute such a polarized plan. One cannot function alternately in two preconceived modes. Rather, one functions always in the same mode, one's own, informed by the place in the world one occupies as male or female and by one's interpretation of that place. Thus, Staël could not finally set history aside as an idealized and abstract form that she could use to tell a story of progress and continuity. It is difficult to believe in a story one has not participated in and even more so to lend credence to a story that does not ring true when judged according to one's own experience.

It is to Staël's credit that she devoted considerable thought to the nature and relationship of the stories of man and of woman. In the Passions she states that love for woman is a story but for man it is an episode.²⁸ Man's story is public and recounted by history. In his story, woman, who belongs to private life, figures only incidentally, in those “vast empty spaces” that are not included in the narration of public events of the past. In man's story woman is present only in the absent parts—in other words, she figures not at all. If she tries to tell that story herself she will inevitably find herself not included in it. Can one tell a story from which one has been erased in advance? In On Germany, some ten years after the publication of the two books under consideration here, Staël put the matter somewhat differently: “Women try to arrange themselves like a novel; men, like a history”²⁹ This reflection implies that a woman will design her story along the lines of the private life she leads rather than in the manner of the story in which she has no part. This is in fact what Staël did in composing her two histories. She aspired to the telling of man's story in what she perceives as man's way, but she could not carry it off. She ends instead by telling twice the story whose structure she had personally experienced.

There is, however, one element in the book on history that indicates that Staël was making an effort to go beyond the impasse she had reached in trying to tell two separate stories. This effort takes two forms in On Literature: the first is to find a place for women in male history; the second is to write a new story with parts for both men and women.

The search for a place within male history was most fundamentally for Staël a search for a place for herself, that is, a place for a special woman, different from others, more talented, more energetic, more ambitious, unwilling to be relegated to the domestic life that other women accept. At the beginning of her chapter on women, the reader may be led to expect a general treatment of the place of women in society and a call, like that of Mary Wollstonecraft, for improvement in the status of woman through education. But after this general introduction, Staël passes immediately to the subject of her real interest, revealed in the very title of the essay, “On Women Who Cultivate Letters” (part II, chapter 4). She particularly examines the place of woman writers in a monarchy and in a republic. As the essay draws to a close she depicts the vicissitudes of the female literary figure in a way all too obviously calculated to attract pity to herself. Politically, this chapter amounts simply to an appeal that some few, elite, superior women be allowed a role in man's history. The chapter does not foresee any impact on that history that would exceed its limits.

The second effort is more imaginative and may reach further. Staël promises in the introduction to show what impact the status (“mode d’existence”) of women before and after the establishment of Christianity had on the development of literature. Such an initiative would potentially involve a new history that would integrate both man's story and woman's story into one story. Thus two inadequacies of history, as Staël saw it, would be overcome. No longer would there be vast empty spaces that remain when one tells public history only, thereby leaving out the private. No longer would woman's story be an often-omitted episode in a story in which she did not participate. Both man's and woman's story would thereby be completed, complemented, supplemented by each other.

That Staël even envisaged such a history is quite impressive. To this day it has not been written, although feminist historians are at work to increase the knowledge about women in the past to a point that would make it possible to attempt such an integration. That Staël did not succeed is not surprising. Even in her introduction one realizes that her insight has not gone far enough, for she writes of woman's influence in a list of many other factors that includes forms of government, religion, and climate that have had an impact on the history of literature. Obviously woman is not the focal point of her concern. Moreover, in this introduction, the influence of woman is subsumed under another apparently more influential category, the establishment of Christianity.

In the remainder of the book, Staël does not actually limit herself to woman's place before and after Christianity. Possibly she introduced her topic in such a timid and limited way in order to avoid criticism that she, as a woman, was giving inordinate attention to the place of women. Identifying herself with women, making common cause with “them,” was not part of her approach. Her desire to write a book which would be admired by men and accepted as a piece of writing as fine as any man had done would have turned her away from any bolder move. Each mention of women in the work, in fact, has the same double movement which we are noting here: a claim rich in suggestions followed by an undercutting of those suggestions or of the claim. I will give a few examples of this phenomenon.

Staël states that in Homer there is little “true sensitivity.” It seems, she says, that the ability to love has increased with other progress the human mind has made, especially in modern times when women are called upon to share man's destiny (part I, chapter 1, FD I, p. 212). The fact that the Greeks had only limited relationships with women, who were kept rigidly in certain roles, in turn limited the sensitivity and thereby the profundity of their works. Here she seems to be pointing toward a new society. A society that includes both men and women functions best. Any other society will be constrained and restricted, its works of art concomitantly vitiated. Yet only a few sentences later Staël specifies the role that she envisages for woman: she will be mentally equal, submissive because of love, “a companion who will be happy to dedicate her faculties, her time, her feelings, to complete another existence.”³⁰ Here the particular kind of “sharing man's destiny” is specified. Woman is depicted in her traditional secondary and private role. Destiny still belongs to man, this second passage states clearly. Woman may share it but only by remaining in a derivative place.

Before Christianity, women were virtual slaves, Staël states. Christianity made them morally and spiritually equal (FD I, p. 239). This equality, limited as Staël indicates by her qualifiers, admitted women to the role they now have: they have not composed, she says, truly superior works but they have served the cause of literary progress because of what men have learned from them in their relationships. Or again, as Staël begins her discussion of contemporary literature, she stresses woman's influence. “All the feelings which they are permitted to have, the fear of death, regret for life, endless devotion, measureless indignation, enrich literature with new expressions.”³¹ The beginning of the chapter attaches great importance to women in the transformation of ancient into modern literature. Here again an attempt at integration of the private and the public is at least sketched. But the influence of women is limited (I, 151) to works of imagination and, within that category, to certain aspects—delicate sensibility, variety of situations, knowledge of the human heart. Furthermore, Staël's references to women are always in the third person, indicating a distancing and dissociation from the group to which she in fact belonged. In short, many times suggestions are made but their implications are immediately restricted to relatively small and delimited areas that are not outside the traditional realm of women.

Timid and consistently undercut claims bear witness to troubled and unresolved feelings, which are really at the heart of the narrative difficulties of Delphine and On Literature. In her chapter on women of letters Staël says “The existence of woman in society is still uncertain in many ways … Everything is arbitrary in their success as well as in their failures … In present society, they are, for the most part, neither in the order of nature nor in that of society.”³² Observing that her actions have unpredictable results, a woman may well find it difficult to believe in continuity and causality, to depict an order to which she does not belong, to speak with certainty from a position of uncertainty. Staël's desire to function within the world of men conflicted with society's dictates concerning woman's proper place. Her desire to believe that there was a forward-looking, progressive, continuous male story in which she might herself take some part, albeit indirect, conflicted with her observation of the story she seemed to be living out herself. In these two books she works in a troubled half-light with these conflicts. Her tremendous energy and ambition are still at work, but they become enmeshed in circularity and senselessness because she has found no resolution, no certain ground on which to stand and from which she can function. She refuses solidarity with other women, cannot find a satisfactory place for herself in man's world, and finds no way to reconcile the two.³³

Staël was both bold and timid. Her audacity made her writing possible; her timidity undermined its effectiveness. The uncertain position of their author generates the peculiar status of these strong and yet insecure works. She had not enough courage to object to that status openly, not enough fear to accept it, and not enough blindness to ignore it. Here she has seen through to the true nature of woman's, of her own, story. She has told it once and again, always with the same structure, no matter what the difference in terms. Therein lies her deeply female vision and her implicit “j’accuse.”

Notes

1. Balayé, Simone. Madame de Staël: Lumiéres et Liberté, 1979, p. 248.

2. The critical edition of this work is Madame de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, edited by Paul van Tieghem (Geneva: Droz, 1959).

3. Des femmes has recently published an “édition féministe” of Delphine, edited by Claudine Herrmann (Paris: Des femmes, 1981).

4. “A propos du ‘préromantisme’: continuité ou rupture chez Madame de Staël,” p. 168. (L’Oeuvre critique et politique de Madame de Staël propose, construit, réconforte, pendant que l’oeuvre romanesque détruit en exprimant l’angoisse de l’écrivain.)

5. Gutwirth, Madelyn. Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman, 1979, pp. 77-80 and 157.

6. Un homme doit savoir braver l’opinion, une femme s’y soumettre. (FD I, p. 334)

7. Gutwirth, pp. 108-10 and 113-21.

8. Balayé, pp. 136, and 243. (Il y a pour ses romans des fins tragiques, pour ses oeuvres philosophiques et politiques des fins qui ne sont jamais des fermetures … une différence fondamentale d’orientation entre ces deux manières d’exprimer son propre génie.)

9. James Hamilton, “Structural Polarity in Madame de Staël's De la litterature, French Review 50, no. 5 (April 1977):706-12.

10. En parcourant les révolutions du monde et la succession des siècles, il est une idée première dont je ne détourne jamais mon attention: c’est la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine. Je ne pense pas que ce grand oeuvre de la nature morale ait jamais été abandonné; dans les périodes lumineuses, comme dans les siècles de ténébres, la marche graduelle de l’esprit humain n’a point été interrompue. (Discours Préliminaire, FD I, p. 207)

11. Lucia Omacini, “Pour une typologie du discours staëlien,” p. 379.

12. Le temps nous découvre un dessein dans la suite des événements qui semblaient n’être que le pur effet du hasard; et l’on voit surgir une pensée, toujours la même, de l’abîme des faits et des siècles. (Part I, chapter 8; FD I, p. 236)

13. Promet aux hommes sur cette terre quelques-uns des bienfaits d’une vie immortelle, un avenir sans bornes, une continuité sans interruption! (P. 198)

14. Par exemple, … le langage est l’instrument nécessaire pour acquérir tous les autres développements; et, par une sorte de prodige, cet instrument existe. (Part I, chapter 1. FD I, p. 210)

15. On a prétendu que la décadence des arts, des lettres et des empires, devait arriver nécessairement après un certain degré de splendeur. (Part I, chapter 7. FD I, p. 234)

16. La nature morale tend à se perfectionner. L’amélioration précédente est une cause de l’amélioration future; cette chaîne peut être interrompue par des événements accidentels qui contrarient les progrès à venir, mais qui ne sont point la conséquence des progres antérieurs. (Part I, chapter 7. FD I, p. 234)

17. Ainsi marchait le siècle vers la conquête de la liberté … Ah! … Toutes les fois que le cours des idées ramène à réfléchir sur la destinée de l’homme, la révolution nous apparaît. (Part I, chapter 9. FD I, p. 245)

18. Ne succombons pas néanmoins à cet abattement. Revenons aux observations générales.

19. J’ai suivi l’histoire de l’esprit humain depuis Homère jusqu’en 1789. Dans mon orgueil national je regardais l’époque de la révolution de France comme une ère nouvelle pour le monde intellectuel. (Part I, chapter 1. FD I, p. 288)

20. Il est impossible de condamner la pensée à revenir sur ses pas, avec l’espérance de moins et les regrets de plus; l’esprit humain, privé d’avenir, tomberait dans la dégradation la plus misérable. Cherchons-le donc cet avenir dans les productions littéraires et les idées philosophiques. (Part II, chapter 1. FD I, p. 289)

21. For a discussion of the novel's epistolarity as well as of its revelation of Staël's depiction of the Revolution, see Madelyn Gutwirth, “La Delphine de Madame de Staël: Femme, Révolution, et Mode Epistolaire,” in Cahiers Staëliens, nos. 26-27 (1979):151-65.

22. Les fictions doivent nous expliquer, par nos vertus et nos sentiments, les mystères de notre sort. (FD I, p. 335)

23. J’entre dans le monde avec un caractère bon et vrai, de l’esprit, de la jeunesse et de la fortune; pourquoi ces dons de la Providence ne me rendraient-ils pas heureuse? (Part I, letter 3. FD I, p. 341)

24. Balayé, p. 136.

25. Gutwirth, p. 106.

26. I take the desire to stop time altogether to be a more fundamental mode of temporal sensibility than the “hâte de vivre,” the desire to make time move more quickly, isolated and analyzed by Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain, 1946. Reprint (Paris: Plon, 1956), 194.

27. Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 96 no. 1 (January 1981):44, 46. This article has been reprinted in Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, 339-60 edited by Elaine Showalter, (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 339-60.

28. Section I, chapter 4. FD I, p. 137.

29. Les femmes cherchent à s’arranger commen un roman, et les hommes comme une histoire. (Part III, chapter 18. FD II, p. 217.)

30. Une compagne de la vie, heureuse de consacrer ses facultés, ses jours, ses sentiments, à compléter une autre existence. (Part I, chapter 8. FD I, p. 212)

31. Tous les sentiments auxquels il leur est permis de se livrer, la crainte de la mort, le regret de la vie, le dévouement sans bornes, l’indignation sans mesure, enrichissent la littérature d’expressions nouvelles. (Part I, chapter 9. FD I, p. 243)

32. L’existence des femmes en société est encore incertaine sous beaucoup de rapports. … Tout est arbitraire dans leurs succès comme dans leurs revers. … Dans l’état actual, elles ne sont pour la plupart ni dans l’ordre de la nature, ni dans l’ordre de la société. (Part II, chapter 4. FD I, p. 301)

33. Two articles which treat Staël's attitude toward women in society are Madelyn Gutwirth, “Madame de Staël, Rousseau, and the Woman Question,” and Joanne Kitchen, “La littérature et les femmes selon Madame de Staël.” The latter, in the main, juxtaposes passages in which Staël treated the subject, whereas the former is marked by reflection and analysis.