SOURCE: “Tragedy, Sisterhood, and Revenge in Corinne,” in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 212-32.

1

The publication of Avriel H. Goldberger's new translation of Germaine de Staël's Corinne ou l’Italie makes accessible to an American readership the novel that Ellen Moers, in her early pioneering study of women's literature, called “the book of the woman of genius” and whose “enormous influence on literary women” she traced throughout the nineteenth century (173, 174). Coinciding with a burgeoning interest in women's studies, Goldberger's translation comes at an opportune time. Thirty years ago, Staël's American biographer was content to write off her novels as period pieces; comparing Staël unfavorably to her contemporary, Jane Austen, J. Christopher Herold observed that while the problems of Austen's characters “are of the commonplace or eternally human variety … the problems of Germaine's characters are those of her age and place.” However questionable this distinction, it led him to an undeniable truth, which he presented as right and just: “Jane is still read, and Germaine is not” (232). The contemporary American Staël scholar, Madelyn Gutwirth, takes a different view of Corinne in her back cover quote for Goldberger's new translation: “It will set this building block of women's literature firmly back into the foundation of the edifice, where it belongs.”

Which is it, then, to be—a book for scholars only, or a book that speaks to our contemporary concerns? In any case, the time is ripe for our considering Corinne ou l’Italie anew, for in her fundamental concern with the status of women, Madame de Staël addresses issues that touch us deeply today. She challenges female stereotypes that still afflict us and poses problems that remain relevant to our experience. Yet it will hardly surprise if Corinne cannot be read by us in quite the same defiant and self-affirmative spirit in which it was written, or if in challenging many attitudes and social conventions that were detrimental to female development, the novel nonetheless upholds others equally damaging. Our most valiant efforts to achieve critical distance from the intellectual and social climate in which we have developed must, necessarily, remain in some way part of that context. The tension between what is challenged and what is accepted constitutes the hidden drama of Corinne.

That Staël was “not only unmilitant but often quite reactionary in her own statements about women” has been aptly demonstrated by Madelyn Gutwirth with regard to the gradual and cautious evolution of Staël's theoretical position (“Madame de Staël” 101). This essay is concerned with the complementary issue of the unarticulated logic behind Staël's dramatic treatment of women in Corinne. The novel makes extraordinary claims for an exceptional heroine, and appears to defy an ideology that opposes the flowering of her talent; but it also endorses a system of values destructive to the heroine and ultimately calls into question the genius it claims for her.¹

Explicitly, Corinne is presented as a tragedy of a woman of genius defeated by the restrictive forces of narrow social conventions and expectations. By now, the story of how female potential is thwarted by the limitations of social possibility is easily recognizable as a familiar “woman's plot,”² a variant of a more general pattern in the nineteenth-century novel—the thwarting of individual potential by social constraint; but for the “woman's plot” the social constraints are much greater, the obstacles much more pronounced. Viewed in this context, Staël's 1807 novel prefigures subsequent versions of the same general conflict that embody in a manner particular to women a perpetual human dilemma. Corinne, however, is immediately distinguishable from later, more typical nineteenth-century treatments of this theme by its unremitting insistence on the fulfilled genius of its heroine: when we first see Corinne she is being crowned for her artistic achievement at the Capitol in Rome.

Staël makes plain, however, that such appreciative social recognition of female genius is possible only in Italy. Late in the novel Corinne reveals herself as the daughter of an English lord and a Florentine mother, who from the ages of fifteen to twenty-one had lived in a small town in England, where she was made to feel the crushing weight of social disapproval for any activity or interest that departed from the narrowest interpretation of female domestic duty. The best advice from her father was to exercise her talents in secret, so as not to excite envy. With less conviction he extended the feeble hope that with luck she might be fortunate enough to find a husband who would take pleasure in her talents. But when Corinne spent time alone to cultivate her talents, her stepmother became angry and resentful. “What is the good of all that,” she would ask with chilling Utilitarian logic, broaching what emerges as an important underlying question throughout the novel: “Will you be any happier for it?” (365). Corinne's naive belief that happiness consists in the development of our faculties was met with her stepmother's correction that a woman's role was to care for her husband and children, and that all other ambitions could only cause trouble. In Staël's account, English provincial life appears more wholly suffocating and stultifying than it does in the novels of Jane Austen or George Eliot, lacking even a shred of hollow approval for such female “accomplishments” as piano playing or sketching, which their works satirize. Hence, when Corinne comes into an independent income after her father's death, recognizing that her energies and enthusiasm need encouragement if she is to develop her talents, she flees the death-in-life of English provincial society and returns to her native Italy. Corinne's past history, then, circumscribed within a single retrospective, autobiographical “book” of the novel, presents the reader only with a tragedy-that-might-have-been, one averted by the wise choice of a nurturing environment.

Still, Simone Balayé surely reads Staël's intention correctly when she describes the “essential theme” of the novel as “the conflict of the woman of genius with society” (137), although our reading will suggest ways in which the text that emerges is less simple than the apparent intention behind it. In its broadest outlines the opposition between social requirements and female genius is clear enough, for though Corinne appears to have escaped the asphyxiating influence of English social attitudes, her triumph is short-lived. To summarize a complex plot: at the moment of greatest glory in her career—her coronation at the Capitol—she meets and falls in love with Oswald Lord Nelvil, peer of Scotland, in whom are deeply rooted the very prejudices of British society that Corinne has fled. While in Italy and under the direct influence of Corinne, with whom he falls in love, Oswald subjects these attitudes to scrutiny, concluding that the exceptional qualities of her genius and personality are more desirable than the self-effacing domestic virtues that his society has taught him to value most in women. Nevertheless, he feels bound by filial devotion to do nothing that might contradict the wishes of his dead father. Only late in the novel does Corinne reveal that Oswald's father had met her in England and thought her unsuitable to be his son's wife, preferring Corinne's younger half sister Lucile instead. Corinne's revelation does not initially alter Oswald's intention to remain faithful; but when his regiment summons him back to England, he learns more about his father's disapproval of Corinne as a marriage choice, hears her disparaged by her stepmother, and meets the angelic, socially conventional Lucile. Influenced as well by a series of improbable coincidences and the mistaken belief that Corinne has lost interest in him, Oswald betrays Corinne by marrying her sister, as his father had wished, and Corinne retires from the world to die. As social forces hostile to Corinne's genius converge to assist her defeat, the novel follows the broad pattern of classical tragedy, dramatizing the fall of a protagonist from her initial position of grandeur, and sidesteps the tragedy manquée (which will become more typical of the nineteenth-century novel) of a protagonist whose exceptional sensibilities are inhibited by circumstance from developing fully.

Other embryonic tragedies in Corinne are also adumbrated but not pursued. The most important of these is the conflict between the demands of love and genius in a woman. Corinne openly pursues and delights in glory, an attitude commonly regarded as praiseworthy in men but unseemly in women. Yet, while it is abundantly clear that her happiness depends on the full and free exercise of her talents, once she falls in love with Oswald his love becomes equally necessary to her. Italy—as much a construct of Staël's myth-making imagination as a product of her powers of observation—is presented as the required sustaining soil for the full flowering of her genius.³ This fact, implicit in her life history, is made explicit late in the book in a letter by Oswald's father to Corinne's father, antedating the action proper of the novel and underscoring the importance of contextuality in determining identity and possibility: “such rare talents must necessarily excite the desire to develop them … [Corinne] would necessarily lead my son outside of England; for such a woman can not be happy here; and only Italy is suited to her.” But, the letter continues, whereas English provincial domestic life is entirely unsuitable to Corinne, “a man born in our happy fatherland must be English above all.” In short, the politically responsible male citizen and the woman artist must necessarily prove incompatible, because “in countries where political institutions provide men with honorable opportunities to act and to prove themselves, women must remain in the shadows” (466-67; bk. 16, ch. 8). The late Lord Nelvil's letter only confirms the potential conflict that has cast its menacing shadow over the love story all along. A good Englishman, Oswald needs England; an artist and a woman, Corinne needs Italy. What Lord Nelvil could not predict, however, is that, as a passionate, loving nature, Corinne would need Oswald as well.

The potential conflicts between Oswald's love for Corinne and his role as a Scottish peer, military man, and devoted son, and between Corinne's needs as an artist and a woman in love, are carefully constructed. But they are not sustained, and the focus of the tragedy shifts elsewhere. Back in England, Oswald does wonder how to reconcile loyalty to his father with his oft-sworn fidelity to Corinne. A compromise they had earlier discussed—his returning to her in Italy as a devoted, loving friend—hovers unsatisfactorily in his mind as a hazy, ill-defined alternative. But Oswald does not clearly confront the problem of how frustrating such an existence might prove to him in the long run. This is partly because the novel offers no convincing proof that he has any real work from which an idle residence in Italy, passed in single-minded devotion to Corinne, would keep him. (His exploits of military bravery after his marriage are presented more as desperate attempts at self-destruction than anything else.) More fundamentally, he never faces directly the potential conflict between love and vocation because his newly awakened love for Lucile, the insufficiency of his prior love for Corinne, his moral scruples regarding his father's wishes, and his faulty interpretation of Corinne's silence all combine with his deep-rooted prejudices to lead him, confusedly and almost passively, into his precipitous marriage with her half sister.

In the presentation of Corinne, the potential conflict between love and career—in her case, between love and genius—is more abundantly prepared for and more completely abandoned. Throughout the novel Staël scatters indications of an inherent conflict between Corinne's increasing dependency on Oswald, which characterizes her love, and the necessary independence of spirit required for her artistic creativity. Yet as long as Oswald remains with her, this embryonic conflict results in no appreciable ill effects. Indeed, as long as she is sure of Oswald's love and he remains with her, she is perfectly happy. The very idea of marriage appears distasteful to her, especially when she contemplates that it would force her to leave Italy to live in England. Ultimately, however, she does come to hope that Oswald will want to marry her as she recognizes that “he conceived of happiness only in domestic life and that he could never renounce the plan of marrying her except by loving her less” (397; bk. 15, ch. 2). In fact, she assures him, “if you wished to spend your days in the remotest part of Scotland, I would be happy to live and die there by your side; but far from giving up my imagination, it would serve me the better to enjoy Nature” (366; bk. 14, ch. 1). But how can the reader believe this sudden turn after all we have read? There has been abundant preparation that might have led to the tragic ramifications of an unreconcilable conflict between Corinne's need for Oswald's love and for an environment and state of mind conducive to her uninhibited development as an artist, as well as between the demands of marriage and those of a woman's creative self-fulfillment; but such preparation is not followed up. Instead of pursuing the internal dynamics of Corinne's contrasting needs and desires, the focus of the tragedy shifts to Oswald's betrayal and his failure to appreciate adequately Corinne's extraordinary worth and love for him.

The tragedy growing out of a woman's contradictory needs and desires would have conferred a more contemporary, even a more feminist, flavor to the novel. The tragedy of a woman's misplaced affections and her betrayal by an unworthy man is, sadly, a more conventional as well as a conceptually less interesting plot. A particularly dated aspect of the structure Staël develops is that, in the contrast between the intensity of Corinne's love and the insufficiency of Oswald's, Oswald is portrayed not only as psychologically weak and indecisive, but also as morally culpable. Although Corinne repeatedly affirms she wants Oswald's love freely given and never seeks marriage as a means of holding him against his will, his failure to reciprocate the intensity of her love is presented, in the context of the novel's moral structure, as objectively blameworthy. This judgment, implicit throughout, is made explicit in several authorial statements on greater female vulnerability—both emotional and social—in love, and is reiterated near the end by Prince Castel-Forte, who pronounces definitively on Oswald's guilt by pointing above all to women's greater vulnerability “in the world's opinion” (563; bk. 20, ch. 2). Interestingly, Staël might have bolstered her view of Oswald's culpability by developing the implications of a situation which, again, she introduces and then declines to pursue dramatically. She repeatedly shows Corinne's concealing from Oswald the extent to which she is “compromising” herself when she sets off from Rome to travel alone with him to other parts of Italy; but when Corinne returns from these travels unmarried, though her friends are surprised, her social position has in no way suffered. Even after she is abandoned, her friends esteem her as highly and remain as eager for her company as before. The issue of Corinne's social vulnerability is raised only to be dropped. On the other hand, Corinne's angry reproach near the end, “what have you done with so much love?” (572; bk. 20, ch. 3), echoes the novel's sustained viewpoint, implicit throughout, that a love as exceptional as Corinne's somehow “deserves” to be returned. It is her emotional, rather than her social, vulnerability that proves her undoing. It may be, of course, that the author does not really believe in the idyllic social context she has constructed for her heroine. But as the novel is written, Corinne becomes a victim of her love for Oswald because of forces within herself, not within society.

2

A modern reading of the novel might want to overlook the emphasis attributed to Oswald's “fault,” and to locate the deeper tragedy in the way in which all of Corinne's extraordinary talents, her intellectual and artistic energies, ultimately fail to help her when she is wounded in love. Such a reading would lead us to re-view, in a sadly ironic light, Corinne's earlier conversations with her stepmother, in which Lady Edgermond questioned the worth of female genius and Corinne expressed unhesitating confidence in the intrinsic value of cultivating her faculties. With a logic that recalls Rousseau as it anticipates Stendhal, Staël reiterates that the very power of Corinne's faculties—the richness of her sensibilities, intellect, and imagination—only serves to increase her unhappiness.

However, if we attempt to “update” the novel by ignoring the clearly expressed view of Oswald's responsibility for Corinne's death and by viewing the profounder tragedy as the heroine's own emotional vulnerability, we encounter an unavoidable difficulty: it is not at all plain that we are being invited to regard Corinne's monomaniacal fixation on Oswald's betrayal and her determined drift toward death as tragic. Rather, her withdrawal from the world and her death from a broken heart are presented, finally, as more triumphant than tragic. How this happens may best be seen by considering the roles of the two other women in the novel whose relation to Oswald can be compared to Corinne's. One is her half sister with whom at the end she develops a strange bond, which has been sensitively commented on by feminist critics and which we shall examine shortly. The other is Mme. d’Arbigny, Oswald's first love, the other “other woman” in Corinne, who typically receives only the briefest possible mention from critics, if they do not ignore her entirely. Mme. d’Arbigny deserves considerably more attention if we are to understand the values implicit in Corinne—its ideology—and the problems the novel poses for contemporary readers.

Mme. d’Arbigny belongs to the prehistory of the narrative proper, existing only in Oswald's account of his earlier life. A foil to Corinne, whose honesty and naturalness are everywhere insisted upon, d’Arbigny appears from the beginning as calculating and deceitful. The aristocratic widow of a rich, older husband whom she had married without love to escape financial hardship, she inveigles herself into Oswald's affections by flattering and always agreeing with him. After her brother's execution, following Oswald's return to Scotland, she lures Oswald back to revolutionary France by appealing to his sense of chivalry, untruthfully expressing anxiety about her financial plight and pretending to be more friendless than she is. However, her interest in him is not venal, any more than Corinne's. She loves as much as one can when “one conducts the affairs of the heart like a political intrigue” (318; bk. 12, ch. 2). In Oswald's account, she is also somehow at fault for failing to resist his overtures of physical passion: “as it was part of her plan to captivate me at any cost, I thought I perceived that she was not invariably set on rejecting my desires; and now that I think back over what happened between us, it seems to me that she hesitated from motives that were foreign to love”—this implies that true love would have fortified her resistance—“and that her apparent struggles were secret deliberations.” Afterwards, “She showed more unhappiness and remorse than perhaps she actually felt, and bound me tightly to her destiny by her very repentance” (319; bk. 12, ch. 2). She refuses Oswald's entreaties to return with him to England to obtain his father's consent to their marriage, urging him instead to marry her first and threatening to give herself up to assassins if he leaves. Finally, in response to his sick father's repeated urgent summonses, he is on the point of departing alone when she pretends to be pregnant and claims his departure will cause the death of her unborn child as well as herself.

Ultimately, Oswald is released from his agonizing moral dilemma by the disclosures of M. de Maltigues, a close relative and confidant of Mme. d’Arbigny, whom, Oswald learns belatedly, she has been planning to marry should Oswald leave her, “for under no circumstances did she want to appear as an abandoned woman” ‘car elle ne voulait à aucun prix passer pour une femme abandonnée’ (321; bk. 12, ch. 2). An engaging cynic, M. de Maltigues reveals Mme. d’Arbigny as “a person of great wisdom … who, even when she is in love herself, always takes wise precautions for the eventuality that she will no longer be loved.” Exposing Mme. d’Arbigny's pregnancy as a hoax, M. de Maltigues advises Oswald against marrying her (“she is too crafty [rusée] for you”), while relieving him of possible moral scruples: “She will weep, because she loves you; but she will recover, because she is a woman too reasonable to want to be unhappy, and above all, to appear to be so. Within three months she will be Madame de Maltigues” (329-31; bk. 12, ch. 3). M. de Maltigues's prophesy seems to provide a satisfying closure to this episode in Oswald's history. Oswald returns to Scotland, but too late to see his father alive; blaming himself for his father's death, he is left with an unassuageable sense of guilt.

Mme. d’Arbigny's absence from the rest of the novel, however, is deceptive, for her unacknowledged, invisible presence hovers over much of what follows. While her most obvious dramatic function is to intensify Oswald's deference toward his father's wishes regarding his choice of a wife, structurally and thematically she also serves other functions. Her many differences from Corinne throw into relief aspects of the heroine's character—Corinne's simplicity and naturalness, and her refusal to try to hold Oswald against his will or scruples by marriage or, indeed, by any stratagem or ruse. Moreover, the love affair between Oswald and Mme. d’Arbigny also emphasizes the different nature of his romance with Corinne; although Oswald is forever clasping Corinne to his heart in outbursts of passionate intensity, the novel makes clear that their love is chaste:

Several times he pressed Corinne to his heart, several times he moved away, then returned, then moved away again, in order to respect the woman who was to be the companion of his life. Corinne gave no thought to the dangers which might have alarmed her, for such was her esteem for Oswald, that, if he had asked for the full gift of her being, she would not have doubted that this prayer was his solemn oath to marry her; but she was quite glad that he would triumph over himself and honour her by this sacrifice. … (288; bk. 11, ch.1)

She assures him, “I am confident you will respect the woman who loves you; you know a simple prayer from you would be all-powerful; therefore it is you who are answerable for me; it is you who would refuse me forever as your wife if you rendered me unworthy of so being” (289; bk. 11, ch. 1). In short, they both subscribe to the familiar double standard, whereby female chastity is an unquestioned virtue, and men are thought to have stronger sexual feelings than women and are permitted greater sexual liberties—but not with women they truly respect. Tellingly, the story of Oswald's romance with Mme. d’Arbigny arouses no feelings of jealousy in Corinne—indeed, having listened to his lengthy tale, Corinne wastes not a word or even a thought on her predecessor in Oswald's affections. By contrast, Corinne's account of her chaste relationships with two prior suitors arouses considerable jealousy in Oswald.⁴ The novel thus implicitly admonishes the reader not to confuse the unabashed public display of female talent, intelligence, and eloquence with emotional lightness or sexual unchastity. Whatever other literary and social conventions Corinne may violate, female chastity is not one of them. Sadly, it is in part by insisting on a code of sexual propriety more stringent than any Staël herself followed, that the novel seeks to validate Corinne's right to lead the free life of an artist.

That the sexually freer “other woman” is in reality less passionate than the virtuous virgin heroine is not in itself implausible. We may want to recognize, however, that this polarity has appeared particularly congenial to women novelists in a world unreceptive to the unconventional, “unfeminine” public display of talent, eloquence, and emotional intensity which writing necessarily entails. It can be understood as a kind of back-handed defense of passion, a way of demonstrating its compatibility with virtue. The same pattern appears later in the century in Jane Eyre, whose sexually chaste heroine is more truly passionate than any of the four “looser” “other women” in Rochester's past (his Creole wife or his three continental mistresses). Charlotte Brontë, herself a passionate writer, lived under severely circumscribed social conditions; moreover, the value she placed on Jane's “virtue” corresponded to her own ethical beliefs. Staël's beliefs, as well as her personal conduct, were different. But despite this—and the vastly greater social rank and economic independence enjoyed by her and her fictional heroine—the pattern of polarities that separates Corinne and Mme. d’Arbigny are essentially the same as in Brontë's novel.

Mme. d’Arbigny's shallowness is revealed not only in her sexual “looseness,” but also, and perhaps chiefly, in her ability to recover from her disappointment in love and to transfer her affections to another man, “car elle ne voulait à aucun prix passer pour une femme abandonnée”. The predefined role of “la femme abandonnée” was to be contemptible, ridiculous, or pathetic. By outliving a lover's rejection and redirecting her affections a woman might escape the stigma of being “une femme abandonnée,” but only at the cost of confirming her fundamental “lightness,” compromising the dignity and integrity of her prior feelings of love, and, in turn, her own dignity and integrity as a human being.

In the broadest outlines, Mme. d’Arbigny is a kind of prototype of Corinne, despite all the differences already noted. In relation to Oswald, both are enticing foreign women, both in some ways too clever for him, but also too clever for their own good. Oswald's father disapproves of each as a wife for his son. The most significant similarity, however, is that both are abandoned by him. Oswald's story of Mme. d’Arbigny, with its stern assessment of her, might well serve Corinne as a cautionary tale, though no evidence is given that it does. However, it conveys to the reader the author's view of the appropriate attitude toward Corinne's death. Reminding us of the unflattering associations attached to la femme abandonnée, while demonstrating the indignity that, alternately, attaches to a woman who accepts rejection and carries on with her life, the episode helps us to recognize the predicament that Corinne goes on to demonstrate—only through death can the abandoned woman escape the stigma of being thought light, ridiculous, pitiable, or contemptible. A woman who loves unwisely can reaffirm her dignity and worth only by proving the absolute and uncompromising purity of her love, and this affirmation can be achieved only through her complete and demonstrated inability to sustain its loss.⁵ Corinne may come to recognize at the end that Oswald “is not the man I thought he was” (565; bk. 20, ch. 2), but this discovery only makes it more imperative for her to prove that her love is “unique au monde.” Corinne's death distinguishes her from the other “other woman” of the novel, and thus becomes a means of heroic self-vindication, rather than tragic defeat.

The Mme. d’Arbigny episode leads to other reflections. If Corinne feels no bonds of “sisterhood” between herself and Mme. d’Arbigny, it would be strange if the same were true of the author who created them both. On the simplest level, among the cosmopolitan cast which populates Corinne, Mme. d’Arbigny is the only Frenchwoman. And who could be more French than her Paris-born author, who yearned throughout years of exile to return to her native city? Both character and author were the widows of much older husbands, whom they married without love; yet both pursued love and were sexually accessible. And while Mme. d’Arbigny's approach to her love affair with Oswald, as well as her reaction to his loss, may have been totally alien to Corinne, her conduct cannot have been entirely so to Staël. Although Staël was not particularly looking for another husband, Oswald's accounts of Mme. d’Arbigny's scenes—her tears, hysterics, operatic demonstrations of suffering, her threats of suicide, her swooning at his feet in attempts to renew a cooling lover's ardour—all have a familiar ring to readers acquainted with Staël's biography. Equally familiar is Oswald's account of Mme. d’Arbigny's calculated strategies, her attempts to hold a current lover by stressing her dependence, while yet encouraging a future one—above all, her desire not to pass for an abandoned woman. Moreover, as has been widely noted only in relation to the author's difference from Corinne, Staël herself survived and recovered from rejection by lovers—indeed, more repeatedly than Mme. d’Arbigny.

If aspects of Staël's experience found their way into the creation of this resilient, unchaste Frenchwoman, however, such an identification—even if a “negative identification”⁶—is unlikely to have been conscious. Her portrayal is so generally negative as to have not only prevented critics from appreciating her complex function in the novel, but also to have rendered her all but invisible to them.⁷ Perhaps we require a Jean Rhys to rediscover this overlooked woman.⁸ In a novel deliberately designed to challenge so many conventional ideas about women, the harsh, dismissive judgment passed on Mme. d’Arbigny reminds us how difficult it is for even a writer as boldly unconventional as Staël to break free from entrenched ways of thinking about her own sex.

3

While critics have failed to recognize any kinship between Mme. d’Arbigny and her creator, and Corinne herself experiences not the slightest bond of sympathy with Oswald's first love, the same neglect has not attached itself to the figure of the more obvious “other woman” in the novel whom Oswald finally does marry.⁹ Half sisters in fact, Corinne and Lucile, near the end of the novel, establish a bond of spiritual “sisterhood” as well, which benefits them both. Through her bond with Lucile, Corinne assures the triumphant nature of her death. Five years after his marriage, Oswald returns to Italy with his wife and daughter. Corinne, in the final stages of her gradual and deliberate drift toward death, asks to see her niece, Juliette. In what become daily visits to her aunt, “the child made inconceivable progress in all fields” as Corinne “took the greatest pains to instruct her and communicate all her talents, as a legacy she took pleasure in bequeathing her while she was still alive” (575; bk. 20, ch. 4). Thus, the child of her half sister and her perfidious lover will become the vehicle of Corinne's immortality. Moreover, Lucile also takes to visiting her sister, at first out of pique, but then to benefit from the talents that Corinne is so generously ready to share. In passing on the legacy of her talents to niece and sister, Corinne insures her continued spiritual presence in Oswald's daily life. Corinne teaches Juliette to imitate her on the harp by playing a Scots tune with which, formerly, she had deeply touched Oswald's emotions, and she teaches Lucile to complement her own virtues with those of her dying sister: “You must be you and me at the same time” (578; bk. 20, ch. 4). While Corinne's pedagogical undertakings ostensibly reflect her generosity of spirit and desire to sweeten Oswald's life with the pleasures she was once able to give him, they also, transparently, constitute a means of triumphant self-affirmation, a victorious superimposition of her presence on the future lives of niece, sister, and lost lover. Despite the patina of Christian resignation which colours Corinne's last weeks, her generosity, as critics have noted, far from being selfless, can be seen as a form of triumphant revenge (Goldberger xli-xlii; Gutwirth, Madame de Staël 251-57; Moers 175).

However, Corinne's relationships with Lucile and Juliette create a serious difficulty for the reader in reconciling what the novel claims with what it actually shows. It is clear enough how Corinne is able to perpetuate her memory, but just how she might be able to perpetuate her talents and genius (terms used interchangeably) poses an embarrassing question. Corinne has been presented as a universal genius—poet, writer, above all improvisatrice in the first definition; as the novel proceeds, her talents multiply. She acts, dances, paints, sculpts, sings, plays the harp, translates, and writes plays. The common thread is that she is “an inspired priestess who devoted herself … to the cult of genius” (68; bk. 2, ch. 4) and “a priestess of Apollo,” while at the same time a perfectly natural and unaffected woman (52; bk. 2, ch. 1). The superlative nature of the multifaceted talents claimed for Corinne may lead us to wonder how the “legacy” of such genius can be transmitted in a few weeks, or months, to a five-year-old girl, or a young British-educated wife and mother. Of all her many talents, what can—and does—Corinne actually teach?

The text provides some startling answers. Regarding Juliette, we may quote the whole of a passage cited earlier in part: “in a few days the child made inconceivable progress in all fields. Her Italian teacher was enraptured with her pronunciation. Her music teachers already admired her first efforts.” Enrapturing Italian pronunciation and admirable “premiers essais” in music, in addition to learning how to imitate Corinne on the harp, are the only concrete evidence of Corinne's legacy to her niece which the novel provides—along with the more general statement that “the lessons … added to her attractions [agréments] in a most remarkable manner” (575; bk. 20, ch. 4). The key summarizing word appears to be “agréments”—those attractions, or adornments, that render us pleasing ‘agréable’ to others.

Corinne's legacy to Lucile is similar. After his wife's first visit to Corinne, Oswald is struck by the increased interest she shows in conversation, and after several days he observes that his wife “appeared [se montrait] constantly more likeable [aimable] and more lively than usual” (576-77; bk. 20, ch. 4). It is no accident that Lucile's gains are seen through Oswald's eyes, since what we actually see Corinne teaching her sister is the art of pleasing her man:

Knowing his character perfectly, she made Lucile understand why he needed to find in the woman he loved a manner that was in some respects different from his own … Corinne depicted herself in her days of splendour … and warmly showed Lucile how agreeable [agréable] a person would be who, with the most proper conduct and the most rigid morality, nevertheless would have all the charm, all the abandon, all the desire to please [le désir de plaire] which is sometimes inspired by the need to redress errors. (578; bk. 20, ch.4; emphasis added)

The lesson continues in this vein, with Corinne helping Lucile to understand how she should seek “to appear more likeable” ‘à se montrer plus aimable’ and should recognize “that your virtues never justify you in neglecting in the least bit your attractions” ‘vos agréments’ (578; bk. 20, ch. 4). Lucile's studies to “resemble the person whom Oswald loved the most” are rewarded, as her husband daily observes in her “new grace(s)” (579; bk. 20, ch. 4). The former crowned priestess of Apollo and the cult of genius, repeatedly likened to the Sibyl of Domenichino, here, through her essential legacy, all but transforms herself into a geisha girl.

Staël thus trivializes her heroine's genius and undermines the claims she has made for her. Even considering that the art of conversation and the social skills of pleasing a cultivated audience were more highly valued in the eighteenth-century Paris salon society in which Staël grew up than they are in our own culture, the conclusion of the novel may still come as a shock. While Corinne's own need for a receptive audience is integral to her conception, and has received abundant critical attention (Moers; Starobinski; Gutwirth; Poulet), at least Corinne seeks an audience for her genius. But her decision to privilege her skill in pleasing an audience of one as the essence of the legacy she bequeaths may find the reader so unprepared as scarcely to absorb the sudden turn in the narrative. If readers have overlooked the strange dénouement and ignored its implications, it is a tribute to the imaginative power of Staël's original conception, which succeeded in inspiring generations of female readers (cf. Blanchard). But the full daring of that conception may be better appreciated if we face the extent to which Corinne's “legacy”—and hence her chosen immortality—represent a radical retreat from the novel's previous bold claims. This finale also adds to the difficulty of any attempt to regard the tragedy as the failure of all Corinne's talents to sustain her in the loss of Oswald. For if this were the crux of her tragedy, then how could her ability to pass on to his wife and daughter the art of knowing how to please and the secret of acquiring “agréments” be seen as adequate, no less triumphant, “revenge”?

Still, there is a disturbing coherence between the dénouement and what the narrative has revealed. Corinne can scarcely transmit her artistic and intellectual attainments as their own reward, since they have manifestly not proven so to her. At the same time, the fact that her profoundest legacy should be the art of pleasing enables Corinne to effect a specific revenge. In her autobiographical letter, Corinne described the visit of Oswald's father seven years earlier, when he came to look her over as a potential wife for his son, and she speculated on the causes for his disapproval: “When Lord Nelvil arrived, I wanted to please him, perhaps I wanted it too much, and I gave myself infinitely more pains to succeed than were necessary; I showed him all my talents, I danced, I sang, I improvised for him, and my spirit, contained for too long, was perhaps too lively in breaking its chains.” Her account of her performance as a kind of trained pet is sad to read, as it must be for her to reflect on—especially as it was, she fears, her very eagerness to please which made her seem to his father unsuitable as a wife for Oswald. She goes on to suggest, however, that with her greater age and experience she would actually better please Lord Nelvil today, were he alive to see her: “After seven years, experience has calmed me; I am not so eager to show myself off. … I have, I know it, improved after seven years” (373-74; bk. 14, ch. 2).

A pitiable plea, and with cause. For Corinne is caught in a classic female double bind. Women are supposed to seek to please, but to please only a very restricted few, or a select “one,” and they are not supposed to reveal their intentions too obviously. Corinne's failure lies in the transparency of her youthful efforts to please, and what this suggests about her need for a wide audience, not in the efforts themselves. Her speculations about Lord Nelvil's reaction, in fact, prove correct, as he writes to her father, “No doubt your daughter has received from you, has found in her heart, only the purest principles and feelings; but she has the need to please, to captivate, to make an impression” ‘mais elle a besoin de plaire, de captiver, de faire effet’ (466; bk. 16, ch. 8; emphasis added). Once deemed unsuitable for Oswald because of her excessive zeal in wanting to please, Corinne, through the legacy she bequeaths during her last days, has the satisfaction of passing on to his wife and daughter precisely that talent for which she was too hastily condemned and whose lack in Lucile Oswald has felt painfully for the last five years. The demure, retiring Lucile is encouraged to become a synthesis of herself and Corinne, not by assimilating her sister's genius, but by learning how “de plaire, de captiver,” without falling into Corinne's youthful error of visibly striving to “faire effet.”¹⁰

Our discomfort with what is presented as Corinne's final triumph is only one more instance of the difficulty a modern reader experiences in responding to Corinne in the spirit in which it was written, or even first read. The discrepancies between our contemporary response and the author's intentions, however, may prove instructive, as they clarify important aspects of her world and our own, and dramatize the insidious power of the constraints Staël had to overcome in her bid for a woman's right to lead a full, unfettered existence. Certainly, we can still respond to her concern with the obstacles that society places in the way of woman's quest for self-fulfillment. But since Oswald appears so clearly undeserving of Corinne, and since her world apart from him—her Italy—has proved so attractive to female readers precisely because it seems to offer women all but unlimited possibility for self-development, it is easier for us to appreciate Corinne for what it suggests about a woman's own inner conflicts and what it demonstrates about the dynamics of her incomplete liberation from the social codes she has internalized, than for what it shows about her struggles with external obstacles. Although we recognize ways in which women are disadvantaged by society, we feel more comfortable in our literature with tragedy that grows out of internal conflicts and contrasting needs and desires, or that reveals the insufficiency of even great strengths in the face of great needs. On the other hand, the opposition between Corinne's need for independence and her counterbalancing need for love, as the opposition between healthy female identity and marriage, though only adumbrated, finds as ready a response in modern readers as the portrayal of Corinne's all-too-human pain and suffering in the face of loss, despite her acclaimed genius and achievement.

We are less comfortable with the notion of blame in a failed romance, and prefer, at least in theory, to see people take responsibility for their own choices, even for their own mistakes. Implicit in the novel's focus on Oswald's fault and betrayal is a dangerous diminution of Corinne's stature, her uncongenial transformation into a passive victim of someone else's inadequacy. Similarly, her uncompromising rejection of life as a means of remaining “uncompromised” by her unfortunate bestowal of love on an unworthy object is apt to diminish rather than elevate her in our eyes; our instinctive sympathy is with survivors, not with those who seek in what Dickens was to call the “vanity of suffering” a source of triumphant revenge. Nor do we believe—any more than did Staël in her own life—that a woman must deny her sexuality to preserve her dignity and deserve our sympathy. And we regret, even as we try to understand, Staël's need to uphold in fiction those standards—so demeaning and divisive to women—by which she did not want to live. In Corinne's heroic death and in her failure to acknowledge any spiritual kinship with her resilient, sexually freer predecessor in Oswald's affections, we recognize the tenacious hold, on both author and heroine, of values that are deeply destructive to women. Corinne's closing bond of sisterhood with her actual sister, on the other hand, would strike us as satisfyingly “modern,” were it not for the questionable object of their alliance. The final element of Corinne's apparent revenge, in which she and her author choose to trivialize her talent and genius in favor of her “agréments” and ability to please an undeserving lover, can best be appreciated as an eloquent demonstration of the unconscious imperatives and double binds at work in both author and heroine. Read in this way, as the valiant and sadly flawed attempt of two extraordinary women (one real, one fictional) to free themselves from a pattern of internalized sexist demands and inhibitions which ultimately prove too strong for them, the novel may still engage us, move us, and even make us weep.

Notes

1. Corinne's defeat itself, of course, has never been in question, but explanations for it vary—from the view of Corinne's death as expressing simple pessimism regarding the fate of the exceptional woman in a world unreceptive to her claims, to Madelyn Gutwirth's recent suggestion that it reflects Mme. de Staël's guilt over her own transgression of the limits placed on female achievement by a patriarchal society and by her own father in particular. This view informs Gutwirth's 1978 full-length study (154-310, 157, 207-08, 224-27). While I am in broad sympathy with Gutwirth's argument, I believe, and shall argue here, that in Staël's presentation of Corinne's death—its logic as well as Corinne's own active role—and in her attempt to transmute tragedy into a victory so powerful as virtually to annihilate its tragic aspects, the novelist has internalized more values destructive to women, and with less self-awareness, than has generally been acknowledged. On Corinne's willed death, see also Starobinski.

2. While the pattern is too familiar to require examples, the “Prelude” to George Eliot's Middlemarch succinctly states the conflict as “a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.”

3. The status of Staël's “Italy,” which had an enormous impact on subsequent nineteenth-century representations of that country, has been the subject of extensive commentary. Moers and Gutwirth in particular have discussed Staël's construction of Italy as a land uniquely favorable to female possibility. For further reading on parallels between that Italy and women, see Hogsett 117-22.

4. Because Gutwirth refers to Corinne's “[living] freely, taking and leaving lovers” (162), I have dwelt on the extreme care Staël takes to clarify the unconsummated nature of the love between Oswald and Corinne and the latter's unimpugned “virtue.” The corollary of this is that the term “lovers” can be applied to the men in Corinne's life only if we understand it in its nineteenth-century sense—roughly equivalent to “suitors.”

5. One may be reminded here of Racine's Phèdre or Richardson's Clarissa, who also bring about their own deaths as a means of regaining or achieving heroic stature after the consequences of their feelings and judgment threaten to leave them irrevocably compromised. The pattern is a familiar one, though the circumstances and complex of meanings surrounding each heroine's death vary from text to text.

6. I am using this term in its popular psychoanalytic sense, introduced by Erik Erikson, in which a “negative identity” embodies all those qualities one fears most to recognize in oneself, but by which, for that very reason, one feels particularly threatened.

7. For example, Balayé, in the Introduction to her recent edition of the novel, while reminding us, “Mme. de Staël n’est jamais tout entière chez l’un ou l’autre des protagonistes,” goes only so far as to add, “on la trouve un peu partout même chez d’Erfeuil. Lui, Corinne et Oswald, dans leurs dissemblances, represent des moments de Mme. de Staël” (18-22)—ignoring Mme. d’Arbigny entirely. Goldberger's Introduction to the American edition does mention Mme, d’Arbigny, but only in passing, as “one of the three characters who represent France in the novel [she ignores M. de Maltigues] … a product of the Parisian society that has corrupted her ability to be honest” (xxxii). Similarly, Gutwirth's extensive discussion of Corinne in Madame de Staël makes only the briefest passing reference to Mme. d’Arbigny, wholly accepting Oswald's view of his first beloved and all but dismissing her as a kind of villainess preying on innocence (162, 224, 235, 196). In her discussion of Corinne in Lumières et Liberté, Balayé also makes only the briefest passing reference to Mme. d’Arbigny (“une femme … intriguante et fausse”), relating this episode in Oswald's past to the situation of Constant's Adolphe in Germany (149). Hogsett's book discusses various autobiographical elements in Corinne, but never mentions Mme. d’Arbigny. This dismissive assessment of Mme. d’Arbigny possibly owes something to Sainte-Beuve's early identification of her as a “portrait” based on a real-life model (Mme. de Flahaut) (155), a reminder that is picked up by Gennari when she dismisses Mme. d’Arbigny as a “peinture assez conventionelle de l’hypocrisie mondaine” (123).

8. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea offers, of course, the classic revisionist view of Jane Eyre's mad Mrs. Rochester. The literary critical equivalent of this is in Gilbert and Gubar, which has called our attention to suppressed bonds of kinship among unlikely literary and fictional women.

9. See Gutwirth, Madame de Staël 237-45; Goldberger xl-xlii. Sensitively arguing that “the sisters represent … the divided part of what ought to be a unity” (241), Gutwirth nonetheless simply ignores Mme. d’Arbigny completely when she asserts, “Mme. de Staël always ends by embracing another woman's plight imaginatively” (245). Goldberger, who also praises the vision of sisterhood conveyed in the bond between “the dark woman and the fair lady,” refers to Lucile without qualification as “the ‘other woman’ in the novel” (xl).

10. In keeping with the quite separate roles envisioned for men and women, Oswald is loved by three women in the novel without his taking the least pains to please any of them; nor would any reader accuse him of being excessively “agréable.” Indeed, Corinne loves him precisely for his tortured, melancholy reserve, in which he distinguishes himself from her more agreeable continental admirers, whose deficiency, articulated by the British M. Edgermond, is tacitly confirmed by Corinne's love for Oswald: “Men in Italy have nothing to do but to please women” (204; bk. 8, ch. 1). This correspondence can also be seen as part of a more general correlation suggested by the novel between the position of women and Italy (or Italians) with regard to their shared lack of political power.

Works Cited

Balayé, Simone. Madame de Staël: Lumières et Liberté. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979.

Blanchard, Paula. “Corinne and the ‘Yankee Corinna’: Madame de Staël and Margaret Fuller.” In Goldberger 39-47.

Gennari, Geneviève. Le Premier Voyage de Madame de Staël en Italie et la Genèse de Corinne. Paris: Boivin, 1947.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Goldberger, Avriel H., ed. Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on Nineteenth-Century European Women Writers. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987.

Gutwirth, Madelyn. Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978.

———. “Madame de Staël, Rousseau, and the Woman Question.” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 86 (1971): 100-09.

Herold, J. Christopher. Mistress to an Age: A Life of Mme de Staël. London: Hamilton, 1959.

Hogsett, Charlotte. The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Poulet, Georges. “‘Corinne’ et ‘Adolphe’: deux romans conjugués.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1978): 580-97.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. Portraits de Femmes. Paris: Garnier, 1847.

Staël, Germaine de. Corinne, or Italy. Trans and ed. Avriel H. Goldberger. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.

———. Corinne ou l’Italie. Ed. Simone Balayé. France: Gallimard, 1985. [This is the edition cited in the text; translations are mine.]

Starobinski, Jean. “Suicide et mélancolie chez Mme de Staël.” Madame de Staël et l’Europe: Colloque de Coppet. Paris: Klincksieck, 1970. 242-53.