[In the following excerpt, Besser surveys the story, theme, and critical reception of Delphine.]

Staël's two principal novels were to earn her spectacular success. Her first full-length work of fiction, and her only experiment with the epistolary form,¹ was the hugely popular Delphine. Recapitulating themes touched on in her short stories, Delphine has a well-developed if convoluted plot, presents a number of sharply defined characters, exemplifies social criticism at its most daring, and marks Staël's emergence as a best-selling writer. The book's conception dates from April 1800. Staël began writing that summer, as she apprised Adélaïde de Pastoret on 9 June 1800: “I am writing a novel … and preparing for a literary career. Contrary to the usual sequence, I started with generalities and have now embarked on a work of the imagination. We shall see what happens.” (Solovieff, 176). By September, she informed Pastoret that she was focusing on women's condition: “I am continuing my novel, which has become the story of women's destiny presented under various guises” (181).

Delphine appeared in December 1802. By the following May, it was in its fourth edition; two translations had come out in London and three in Germany. Although Staël specified that political polemics would have no part in her novel, she situated the action during the last years of the Revolution. This time gap facilitated treating such tinderbox questions as divorce and monastic vows, which are germane to the plot.² The book's dedication—a quotation from Mme Necker's posthumous Mélanges—sums up the fictional dilemma: “A man must be able to challenge public opinion, a woman to submit.” The tragedy of Delphine arises from the reversal of these sex-related roles; the hero is incapable of defying society, while the heroine is incapable of yielding.

The preface to the first edition, summarizing the history of fiction in a single paragraph, is like a précis of the Essai sur les fictions. Although writing fiction may appear easy (witness the slew of mediocre novels), in effect it requires uncommon imagination and sensitivity. Like Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Werther (titles already mentioned in Fictions), the novel must probe hidden feelings and inculcate moral lessons. While explaining the tenor of knightly romance and granting nodding recognition to Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, Staël places fictional mastery firmly in eighteenth-century England. Overlooking Chateaubriand's devastating critique of Littérature, she lauds his “original, extraordinary, overwhelming imagination” ([Oeuvres complètes, henceforth OC], 5:xlv) in the Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802) while at the same time specifying that creative inspiration is antithetical to religious dictates.

The first part of Delphine, which begins in April 1790, initiates a confrontation between two rivals for the same man and highlights their personality clashes. With the generosity that will be her downfall, Delphine d’Albémar offers a gift of land to facilitate marriage between her cousin-in-law Matilde de Vernon and Léonce de Mondoville. (This is the first of many ironical twists of plot, for it is Matilde's eventual marriage to Léonce, accomplished by duplicity when he and Delphine are already in love, that will doom the heroine to suffering and death.) The contrast between the two women is a product of character and upbringing. Raised in the Catholic church, Matilde is a cold, self-righteous religious bigot, whose conformity to convention provides a counterpoint to Delphine's candor and spontaneity. The latter's moral character has been formed, not by church dogma, but by her late husband. (Like Adélaïde and Pauline, she was married young to a much older man³ but was genuinely fond of her husband, who was more like a father than a spouse.)⁴ Delphine echoes her husband's (and Staël's) humanistic creed: “He believed in God and trusted in the soul's immortality; virtue based on goodness constituted his cult toward the supreme Being” (OC, 5:17). Staël's valuation of natural goodness over ritual (and of Protestantism over Catholicism)⁵ is concretized by Delphine's later serving as lay confessor to Matilde's dying mother and as moral mentor to Léonce. Functioning as Delphine's confidante and surrogate mother, her sister-in-law Louise d’Albémar warns against the unscrupulous ambition of Sophie de Vernon, Matilde's mother and Delphine's close friend. Ugly and deformed,⁶ Louise has buried herself in the country because her physical defects have eradicated any hope of love or marriage.

Léonce de Mondoville's composite background—half Spanish, half French⁷—supposedly accounts for his hypersensitivity and prickly code of honor. He explains (prophetically) to his preceptor Barton why he has not yet fallen in love: “I was afraid to love a woman who might not agree with me about the importance I attach to people's opinion, and whose charm would ensnare me while her way of thinking made me suffer” (OC, 5:104). The stage is set for an impasse between the impulsive, unconventional heroine and the tradition-bound hero. While recognizing the disparity between Léonce's character and her own, Delphine is smitten by pity when she sees him pale and in pain. Among Staël's heroines, sympathy for a suffering hero is an invariable prelude to love.

Staël inserts vignettes of the duc de Mendoce, a “flatterer,” Mme du Marset, a busybody, and M. d’Ervins, a man consumed by self-interest. These social “types,” like those traced in Passions, create the background of conventional attitudes against which Delphine's story will be played out. Societal pressures are exemplified in the famous incident when Delphine, accompanying Sophie de Vernon and Léonce to the Tuileries to see the queen, defies the assembled society by befriending Mme de R., who has been collectively snubbed.⁸

Delphine's guileless generosity precipitates her disgrace and Léonce's desertion. In a weak moment, she agrees to lend her home for a tryst between her friend Thérèse d’Ervins and M. de Serbellane, Thérèse's lover. When the irate husband discovers the couple, he challenges Serbellane to a duel and is killed. Delphine confesses her part in this event to her presumed friend Sophie who, while promising to exonerate her to Léonce, in actuality persuades him that Serbellane is Delphine's lover and hastens his marriage to Matilde. Delphine attends the church ceremony, hidden behind a pillar, where Léonce imagines he sees her reaching out to him.

In the second part, Matilde's absorption in religious duties prompts Léonce to describe the void of his marriage, in terms that reflect Staël's own marital deception: “Side by side we will proceed along the path that leads to the grave—a road we ought to travel together; the journey will be as silent and somber as its destination” (OC, 5:256). Matilde's bigotry extends to a cousin who has divorced and remarried, whom the more open-minded Delphine visits and whose story she learns. After a miserable first marriage, Elise fell in love with Henri de Lebensei. Although his strength of character and complete indifference to other people's opinion have provided a bulwark against the world's disfavor, she has been obliged to withdraw from the society she defied for the sake of love.

At a performance of Tancrède (a play Staël repeatedly favored), Delphine spies Léonce hidden in a cloak, shaking with sobs as the hero expresses his love for Aménaïde and despair at her infidelity. Realizing that she has been maligned, Delphine determines to regain Léonce's esteem. Thérèse decides meanwhile to become a nun and entrust her daughter Isore to Delphine's care. When Léonce learns from the child that Serbellane was courting her mother and not Delphine, he implores the latter to tell him the truth, but she refuses to exculpate herself for fear of angering him against his mother-in-law.

Summoned suddenly to Sophie's deathbed, Delphine is handed a confessional letter tracing the steps that led the older woman from a tormented childhood to a perverted, amoral, self-centered adulthood.⁹ Orphaned at age three, she was brought up by an unprincipled tutor and then forced to marry a man she detested lest she be confined to a convent forever; her only recourse was hypocrisy and deception. Although she led a life of pleasure, she gave her daughter a strict Catholic education. Afraid of losing an inheritance when d’Albémar married Delphine, she studied the young woman's character carefully: “I soon realized that you were governed by your good qualities—kindness, generosity, confidence—as others are controlled by passion, and that it was almost as difficult for you to resist your virtues, however unpremeditated, as for others to withstand their vices” (OC, 5:459). Because she resented Delphine for endangering Matilde's marriage, she did not intercede with Léonce after d’Ervins's death, as she had promised. Ironically, a child (Isore) uncovered her duplicity. Now that she is dying, she can speak the truth. Delphine is the only person she ever loved, who sometimes made her doubt her heartless calculations. Countermanding Matilde's order to send for a priest, Sophie asks Delphine to hear her prayers. In replacing the traditional clergyman, the heroine plays the role of confessor whose saintly ministrations rehabilitate the sinner and whose religious morality, untainted by dogma or prejudice, supersedes the arid rigidity of Matilde's creed. After the emotional turmoil of Léonce's unexpected arrival, his furious denunciation of his mother-in-law's treachery and deceit, and Sophie's death, Delphine falls dangerously ill.

In the third part, Léonce—disregarding his customary subservience to social pressure, and with no qualms about the risk to Delphine's reputation—begs her to live with him as man and wife. When she refuses to see him again, Léonce first threatens to inform Matilde of their love, then contrives to change Delphine's mind with the prospect of reforming him spiritually as she had Sophie. In confirmation of Staël's assertion in Passions that true love means merging one's self with the beloved, Delphine tells Léonce: “At present I am merely a creature who lives for the man she loves and exists only for the interest and glory of the object she has chosen” (OC, 6:50-51). Léonce announces his presentiment that he will die young, happy to perish in the full ardor of love, before age makes the heart grow cold (another Staëlian notion).

Like Théodore before him, Léonce grows jealous of Delphine's social success as the center of attention in every salon, where men and women stand three deep to hear her. Wanting her all to himself, he asks to spend the winter together at her country house of Bellerive—again inducing Delphine to flaunt convention. While there, he admires her unsuspected housewifely skills,¹⁰ and they visit the Belmont ménage, which exemplifies marital happiness. Mme de Belmont gave up a fortune to marry a blind man, whom she loves and nurtures. With their two children, they form a picture of self-contained domestic bliss, as Belmont describes it: “Life offers no greater joy than the union of marriage and the affection of children, which is only perfect when one cherishes their mother. … No relationship outside marriage is permanent. External events or natural disinclinations shatter once-solid bonds. Opinion pursues you … and poisons your happiness” (OC, 6:116). For Staël, love in marriage is still the ultimate utopia.

Uneasy about the imminent arrival in Paris of a man named Valorbe (who will play the villain's role assigned to Meltin in Pauline), Delphine asks Louise to dissuade him from visiting her. A royalist, Léonce is pained by Delphine's prorevolutionary sentiments. Like her creator, she claims to detest factionalism and to cherish liberty. Before entering the cloister, Thérèse begs Léonce not to damn her by making Delphine “guilty.” In the furious belief that Delphine is conspiring to leave him, he insists she prove her love by swearing, at the very altar where he took his marriage vow, that she will be his; if not, he will kill himself on the spot. Praying heaven to protect her, Delphine falls in a faint.¹¹

In the fourth part, Delphine's rash generosity once again incurs society's stigma. Having unwisely granted Valorbe political asylum for the night, thereby provoking an altercation between him and Léonce, she is maligned for giving an assignation to two men in one night. Léonce cannot avenge the affront to Delphine's honor because, as Lebensei explains, “we can only protect the bonds that society sanctions—a wife, a sister, a daughter—but never the one who is linked to us by love alone” (OC, 6:312-13). Lebensei also furnishes philosophical and moral arguments in favor of divorce (which the Constituent Assembly is about to ratify): society encourages marriages of convenience without permitting a means of escape (including adultery); a bad, irreversible marriage makes for a hopeless old age; youthful inexperience can entail a lifetime of misery; children are adversely affected by “the eternal circle of suffering formed by an ill-assorted and indissoluble union” (327). This liberal position—a courageous stand for women's rights and a refutation of Mme Necker's posthumous work opposing divorce—was to cost the author dearly in social and critical disapproval. Although at one point she considered divorcing her husband and marrying Narbonne,¹² Staël eventually gave up the idea, as she has Delphine reject it. The latter returns to society in a futile attempt to silence wagging tongues. Ostracized at a social gathering, she flees in humiliation (a reversal of the incident when she alone befriended Mme de R.). Having learned that Matilde is carrying Léonce's child, she departs incognito for Switzerland with Isore.

The fifth part begins on 7 December 1791, as Delphine crosses the border. The bleak weather and bare trees remind her of death. In a rare allusion to the harmony between nature and mood, a storm on the lake mirrors her agitation.¹³ She flees to Zurich on learning that Valorbe, who has vowed to stop at nothing either to win or to punish her, is in Lausanne. When she takes up residence in a convent run by Mme de Ternan, Léonce's aunt, Delphine is warned by a new friend, Henriette de Cerlebe, against the abbess's authoritarian and self-centered character. Afraid that the new divorce law will encourage Léonce to abandon Matilde for Delphine, Mme de Mondoville asks her sister, the abbess, to do everything in her power to separate the two. Mme de Ternan resolves to make Delphine a nun. At the latter's behest, Lebensei tries to dissuade Léonce from joining the émigré forces to fight against France. His arguments against civil war and party prejudices repeat ideas contained in Passions. Like Staël, Lebensei voices the patriotic duty not to tolerate foreign armies in the land and declaims that “liberty … is the prime happiness and sole glory of the social order; history is adorned by the virtues of free peoples” (OC, 7:84). This type of liberal dissertation, upholding freedom and revolutionary ideals, particularly irked Bonaparte.

Henriette de Cerlebe tries to persuade Delphine to accept Valorbe; not believing in romantic love, she lauds filial and maternal affections instead. She recounts her life story: at her father's urging, she retired to the country to raise her children herself; she has learned to enjoy domestic duties and the calm contemplation of nature in company with a sensitive, intelligent, and indulgent father (with whom she enjoys the creator's fantasized relationship with the widowed Necker). Delphine spurns Henriette's suggestion; death is preferable to a mismatched marriage. Indignant at her rejection, Valorbe vows to pursue and possess her.

Yielding unwisely to pity when he is arrested for debt, Delphine travels to nearby Zell to bail him out. The ingrate locks her up in his house; if she will not marry him, he will dishonor her by publicizing the fact that they spent the night together. Upon Delphine's return to the convent next morning, Mme de Ternan threatens to expel her unless she takes the veil. After learning that Valorbe has threatened to carry her off by force and Matilde has borne a child, Delphine tearfully accedes. When he finds out what she has done, Valorbe clears her name, then kills himself. Henriette points up the ironic twist: “A week after pronouncing her vows, she learned that the terrible sacrifice she had made was for nought” (OC, 7:179).

When the sixth part opens, Matilde and her newborn son have died; her last wish was that Léonce marry Delphine. Lebensei is dispatched to find the hero, who has left for Switzerland. Having heard of a nameless woman resembling Delphine in Paradise Abbey, Léonce is ecstatic at the prospect of seeing her. But when she appears, veiled in black, he shakes the grill in anguish. “Matilde is dead,” he cries. “Delphine, can you be mine?” “No,” she replies, “but I can die!” (OC, 7:223). To save the two, Lebensei proposes that Delphine return to France, where monastic vows can be broken by law, and there live with Léonce in defiance of “absurd prejudices” (229). Always the voice of rational judgment, Lebensei urges Léonce to disregard social convention, citing reasons why Delphine's impetuous act should not bind her eternally. Although Léonce ostensibly agrees, Delphine worries about his underlying conviction. For health reasons, she receives permission to spend two months at Baden with him.

In the original ending, Delphine realizes that Léonce is still troubled by other people's opinion when a crowd murmurs against her in public and he complains that life without honor is unbearable. Aware that they cannot be happy together, she swears that she will never be his wife; Léonce swears in turn that he will not survive without her. He writes to announce his intention of joining the émigré army: the only way he can reconcile the conflict between his character and his love is to sacrifice his life.

With Serbellane's help, Delphine finds Léonce in a Verdun prison, where he is about to be judged and shot. He tells Delphine that the proximity of death has made him understand life's priorities; if she obtains his pardon, they can be happy together. At her insistence, Léonce prays to God for the first time in his life. By dint of eloquent supplication, Delphine prevails on the judge to release him,¹⁴ but a commissioner from Paris rescinds the order. Serbellane arrives with a reprieve, provided Léonce declares he did not intend to bear arms against France, but he refuses lest people think he signed falsely; at the point of death, he still bows to public opinion. (This last-minute pardon, with an untenable alternative to execution, echoes Jane Gray).

After swallowing poison in “a moment of convulsion and despair” (OC, 7:346), Delphine accompanies Léonce to his execution so that she may serve him (as she did Sophie) in lieu of a priest. In the tumbrel, she prays for and with him; their love will endure forever: “Those who succumb slowly beneath the weight of time can believe in destruction, for they have experienced it in advance; but we who approach the grave full of life attest to immortality!” (350-51). Just as Léonce tells the firing squad to dispense with a blindfold and aim at his heart, Delphine collapses and dies. The deeply affected soldiers are ready to spare the prisoner, but he hurls insults until one of them fires and kills him. After burying the lovers in the same grave, Serbellane muses: “Léonce should have defied opinion … when happiness and love made it his duty to do so; Delphine, to the contrary, over-confident of her heart's purity, was never able to respect the power of opinion to which women must submit; but do nature and conscience teach the same moral lesson as society, which imposes contrary rules on men and women? and did my unfortunate friends have to suffer so much for such pardonable errors?” (357).

This ending, consonant with the tenor of the story and the character of the protagonists, makes Delphine a suicide-for-love and Léonce a misguided hero to the last. It reenacts with greater pathos the execution scenes sketched in Jane Gray and “L’Epître au malheur.” The conclusion echoes Staël's youthful credo that it is better to die at the height of love than to witness its decline. Serbellane's final reflection emphasizes the antithetical roles of hero and heroine: if Léonce had disregarded convention (as a man may) and Delphine had observed it (as a woman must), their tragedy would have been averted.

Because Staël herself was caught between Scylla and Charybdis—between braving and submitting to public opinion—her personal dilemma reflects that of her heroine. Long after Delphine appeared, its author took certain criticism to heart and, unlike her heroine, ceded to public outcry. Not only did she write a preface defending her moral intentions, but she even penned an alternative, nonsuicidal ending in order to appease her detractors. It was her son Auguste, rummaging among his mother's papers after her death, who discovered this alternative denouement as well as the apologetic “Quelques réflexions sur le but moral de Delphine” (Thoughts on the moral goal of Delphine), which he published with her collected works.

In the new ending, Léonce solemnly confirms his promise to marry Delphine by placing a ring on her finger in the presence of the rising sun. Back in Mondoville, near the royalist enclave of the Vendée region, it is soon rumored that the young lord is about to dishonor himself by wedding a nun. An old soldier of his father's accuses Léonce of disgracing the family name; when Delphine overhears him explain that he cannot abandon a woman who has sacrificed everything for him, these words take a mortal toll. Dying, she writes Léonce to explain the basic discord between her sensitivity and society. Weary of suffering, she is content to die before love palls. Sophie de Vernon was right: the differences in their characters would have prevented their being happy, even if there had been no obstacle to their union. She asks to have music played during her last night (like Mme Necker) and dies at dawn. At her request, Léonce entrusts Isore to Louise d’Albémar, then departs for the Vendée, where he is killed in his first encounter.

In this second ending, Léonce's liaison with Delphine is legitimized in a ring ceremony under the aegis of nature, if not of the church; Delphine manages to die for love without committing suicide; there is no religious conversion by Léonce and no priestly ministrations by Delphine. If the situation is artificial and lackluster, the underlying message is twisted to hold Delphine, not society, responsible for her tragedy. We may dismiss this alternative as an inauthentic compromise with the very conventions that Staël's novel seeks to undermine.

Despite the mediocrity of this new denouement, “Le but moral de Delphine” is a significant critical and feminist text. Insisting that her novel stands on its own merits, without apology, Staël states that a literary work is vindicated by “the imposing impartiality of time” (OC, 5:v). Because society as a collective personality tries to maintain the status quo and ensure that outward conventions are observed, it feels threatened by extraordinary individuals—especially women—and judges them harshly. Delphine's difficulties arise out of her character; Staël never intended to present her as a model to emulate—the epigraph blames both Léonce and Delphine. She considers her novel useful because it stresses goodness in a postrevolutionary period when sympathy toward misfortune is imperative. It teaches women not to trust their good qualities but to respect opinion, else it will crush them. The author also feels that Delphine admonishes society to deal kindly with those of exceptional mind and spirit; otherwise it commits a disproportionate injustice that may ruin a promising career.

In balancing a graceless Matilde against a superior Delphine, Staël claims to have demonstrated the overriding force of morality, for, in spite of her cold religiosity, Matilde's honesty outweighs all Delphine's qualities and charm. Although men may sometimes escape punishment, “the social order makes it impossible for women to avoid the unhappiness that results from wrongdoing” (OC, 5:xix). Once a man has obtained a woman's affection—unless their bond is sanctified by marriage—his ardor cools first: “[Men's] lot is too independent, their lives too dynamic, their future too certain, for them to experience the secret terror of loneliness that ceaselessly pursues even those women whose destiny is most brilliant” (xxiv). Delphine can help those who are victimized by their feelings (as another way of instilling the lesson of Passions). “We do not sufficiently realize the dire combination, for our happiness, of being endowed with a mind that judges and with a heart that suffers from the truths the mind reveals” (xxvii). Mirza was also meant to illustrate the dichotomy of reason and emotion.

Staël professes that she changed the ending for various reasons, but not because some readers objected to Delphine's suicide.¹⁵ A writer does not express a personal opinion when characters act in a certain way. Nor can an argument be found for or against suicide in the example of a woman who lacks the strength to endure life after the man she loves has gone to the scaffold. Moral severity must be tempered with sympathy and understanding (attributes Staël claimed for herself in Passions): “One must have suffered in order to be heard by those who suffer and … to have tried a dagger on one's own heart before asserting it does not hurt” (OC, 5:xxxvi).

According to her stated intention, Staël populated Delphine with an assortment of women whose lives represent the various possibilities open to their sex, none of which is satisfactory. In spite of a loving heart and sensitive nature, Louise d’Albémar is condemned to spinsterhood for no reason other than her physical unattractiveness. Thérèse d’Ervins, like Elise de Lebensei and countless others, is married against her will to a despicable husband. Her attempt to find happiness in adulterous love is doomed; not only is she ostracized by society, but she is forced to bury herself in a convent, that is, to embrace a living death. Elise de Lebensei depicts the woman shamed by divorce who, in embracing love, must retreat from society. Furthermore, her decision requires collaboration by a man strong enough and willing to support her in her isolation. Mme de Belmont epitomizes the fulfillment of perfect love in marriage; however, it must be noted that her husband, being blind, depends on her like a child.¹⁶ Henriette de Cerlebe celebrates the joys of maternity and domestic tranquillity in a rural setting, where she rears her children herself—but with the help and emotional support of a loving father. Mme de Ternan's story exemplifies women's destiny: while young and beautiful, she turned men's heads; when her beauty faded, life lost its meaning. In her latter years, she had no option but the cloister. Sophie de Vernon illustrates the depravity to which an inadequate or uncaring upbringing can lead. However selfish and deceitful she has been, however deeply she has wronged Delphine, her “confession” explains her character defects according to woman's obligatory status. As a youngster, Sophie's feelings and intellect were repressed. She was forced to marry a man she loathed because the alternative was life imprisonment in a convent (a centuries-old way of coercing women into wedlock). While deploring her stunted character, Staël is careful to show that circumstance forced her to become what she was. She also has Sophie properly repent before she dies.

Although fictional characters are often composites of people the author may have known, critics over the centuries have enjoyed the game of designating Staël's probable models. In this respect, Delphine has been a fertile field for treasure seekers. The title character shares a number of her creator's traits. Clever, kind, and impetuous, she is an impassioned lover, faithful friend, and champion of freedom. Ambivalent about social conventions, she flaunts them while acknowledging their abusive power. Delphine is also pictured as beautiful—an attribute her creator sadly believed she lacked.¹⁷ Some contemporaries and present-day critics take Sophie de Vernon to be the portrait of Talleyrand in skirts.¹⁸ Because she is married to an older man and is one of the most seductive beauties of her time, Thérèse d’Ervins has been likened to Juliette Récamier (Levaillant, 37). Louise d’Albémar resembles Suzanne Necker to some extent, although she is more sympathetic than Staël ever believed her mother to be. Gutwirth calls Matilde “Mme Necker's grossly caricatured surrogate” (112) because, while pious and prudish, she is also critical of and a rival to Delphine. Léonce is supposedly a combination of Narbonne and Ribbing, with greater emphasis on the first.

Contrary to Staël's naive assumption, Delphine did not win the approbation of the first consul. Quite the opposite. A number of elements in the book were almost guaranteed to arouse Bonaparte's ire. To begin with, Staël's bold dedication “to silent and enlightened France” was a backhanded slap in the face. Her defense of divorce and denigration of Catholic ritual in favor of a humanistic Protestantism appeared soon after Napoleon signed a concordat with the pope. Her running indictment of society and arranged marriages was regarded as a criticism of the status quo, as were the liberal views she expressed via Lebensei. Her profeminist attitudes were also anathema to a man who felt that women were good for only one thing—child-rearing.

Bonaparte was all the more incensed when Delphine's appearance in December 1802 became an epochal event. To counteract its popularity, he instigated a virulent press campaign. The Journal des Débats of December 1802 attacked Staël's immortality in denying divine revelation and advocating divorce. Bonaparte criticized both book and author: “I do not like women who try to be men any more than I like men who are effeminate. … I cannot abide that woman.” In May 1803 one Emmanuel Dupaty staged a parody entitled Delphine, ou l’Opinion (Delphine, or, Opinion), satirizing both Staël and one of her detractors, Félicité de Genlis, but a coalition of Staël's friends ensured the play's swift demise. Charles de Villers was ecstatic about Staël's novel; he wrote her on 4 May 1803: “Your work sparkles with beauties of detail, observations, perspicacious and profound views, and passages of eloquence, purity, grace, and breath of feeling. … You have feminized Rousseau's pen.”

Delphine may retain the prolix and sentimentalized excesses of its period, the epistolary form (also symptomatic of its age) may be artificial and confining, and the proliferation of plot and subplot may tax the patience of today's reader; nevertheless, the novel has much to recommend it. The characters, especially the gallery of female portraits, are lifelike and appealing. When not enraging, the love story is engaging. The heroine is not a two-dimensional stereotype but a woman of multiple facets and accomplishments. Her early, isolated education, like Emile's, fostered the very spontaneity and impulsive generosity that bring her into conflict with the severe social arbiters among whom she is thrust. Her suicide at the end is as much a gesture of defiance as despair.

From a feminist point of view, as Noreen Swallow aptly points out in her excellent analysis of Delphine (65-76), Staël's heroine is the victim of a patriarchal society whose dictates are reinforced by the very women it represses. Church and society collaborate in maintaining women within a circumscribed role wherein their primary function is to marry and bear children. The laws, customs, and attitudes sanctioned by society contribute to the subjugation of women while perpetuating the pleasure and security of men: “Anticipating modern feminist literature by over one hundred and fifty years, Mme de Staël sets to work to expose these deeply ingrained, chauvinistic values, showing how they operate, often below the level of consciousness, to obstruct the development and fulfillment of women, to undermine relations between the sexes, and to poison the moral outlook of society” (66).

In the course of the novel, Delphine's inveterate kindness and affection are consistently disparaged by a Greek chorus of minor characters, many of them women. It is Delphine's mischance to fall in love with a man who lives by the patriarchal code she challenges. Léonce does not merely represent a contrasting attitude toward societal traditions. He embodies masculine freedom from the values that govern women's lives. He can marry as he chooses, leave his pregnant wife to woo another woman, and scuttle back and forth between the two without a hint of disapprobation. He is selfish enough to try to force Delphine into the kind of behavior he excoriates—and although her “virtue” remains intact, her reputation is tattered: “Through the arrogant imposition of Léonce's will both Matilde and Delphine are devalued as individuals.” (Swallow, 72). The book reinforces Staël's contention that society accepts in a man behavior it finds contemptible in a woman.

Staël's criticism of patriarchal society repeatedly calls into question the double standard governing men's and women's lives. The same frustration in the face of convention, the same struggle between love and independence, the same destruction of woman's potential by man's selfish privilege, pervades Staël's fictional masterpiece Corinne, which carries woman's fight for love and self-fulfillment onto a higher and more complex plane.

Notes

1. Although Simone Balayé credits La Nouvelle Héloïse and Werther as providing Staël with forceful examples of epistolary fiction, she fails to mention Richardson's Pamela (1740-41) and Clarissa (1747-48) or Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses (1782) as other probable models (Delphine, 2 vols., ed. Simone Balayé and Lucia Omacini [Geneva: Droz, 1987-90], 1:12).

2. Staël gave Charles de Villers yet another reason (3 June 1803): “For the struggle between prejudice and reason, there is no more favorable period than the French Revolution” (Jasinski, 4:628).

3. Adélaïde, Pauline, Delphine, and Corinne are all orphans; Corinne alone has been shaped by a mother's influence. All but Corinne have been married and widowed young; all are independently wealthy. Their married status (for Corinne, her exceptional prestige as a poet) and personal fortune endow these heroines with the freedom of action that would be unthinkable for an unmarried woman or an impecunious widow at the turn of the nineteenth century.

4. Not only does the concept of a paternal husband reflect Staël's subconscious wish; it mirrors the real-life example of her intimate friend Juliette Récamier.

5. Staël acknowledged to Suard on 4 November 1802 that her novel was slightly “anti-Catholic” because the plot places “the heart's religion above Catholicism” (Jasinski, 4:570).

6. Louise is supposedly modeled on Benjamin Constant's hunchbacked cousin Rosalie.

7. The antinomy of a binational upbringing will resurface in the conflicts of Corinne's character.

8. This scene is a precise rendition of Staël's rescue at a reception by Delphine de Sabran (see ch. 1).

9. Despite lack of evidence that Staël ever read Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses, both Hogsett and Gutwirth detect resemblances between this novel and Staël's work. Hogsett sees a similarity between Théodore's seduction of Pauline and the seductions in Liaisons (20 n. 12), while Gutwirth discerns a basic correspondence between Sophie de Vernon's and Mme de Merteuil's autobiographical backgrounds (119 n. 13).

10. Staël finds it important to endow even Corinne, the freest spirit she has engendered, with domestic capabilities.

11. This scene recalls Edouard's threat to kill himself unless Pauline vows to wed him; she, too, faints away.

12. Cf. letters to Narbonne of 2 and 23 October 1792 (Jasinski, 2:37, 53).

13. Elsewhere Staël emphasizes nature's indifference to human emotions. When Delphine visits the waterfall of the Rhine, she is struck by the contrast between her private sorrow and the majestic, impassive movement of the waters (OC, 7:151-52). She is again horrified by the brilliant sun shining on the morning of Léonce's execution.

14. According to Diesbach, this scene is a replay of Staël's impassioned defense and rescue of Jacques de Norvins before General Lemoine under the Terror (200-01).

15. Noreen Swallow maintains that the heroine's death marks the ultimate stage in the repressive process by which patriarchal society undermines her independence, fragments her identity, and nullifies her personality: “In feminist terms, Delphine's death is … the total eradication of a woman of intelligence and sensitivity whose qualities have been constantly devalued and whose potential has been destroyed. It is the establishment's final triumph” (“Portraits: A Feminist Appraisal of Mme de Staël's Delphine,” Atlantis 7, no. 1 [Fall-Automne 1981]: 75; hereafter cited in the text [as Swallow]).

16. The Belmont ménage reverses the sex roles of the principals: “In the ‘perfect union’ of the Belmonts, the wife plays precisely the sort of role which society had always assigned to the male partner in marriage: she provides for his needs, and his whole life, intellectual and moral, is filtered through her” (Gutwirth, 126).

17. “Delphine is Mme de Staël as she conceived herself to be morally and as she would have liked to be viewed physically” (Diesbach, 245). Staël's description of herself to Ribbing in a letter of 1 December 1793 tallies with Delphine's character: “All my thoughts and feelings slip out in spite of myself, and my only strength lies in the truth” (Jasinski 2:510).

18. Gutwirth considers Suzanne Necker a far more important source: “The sole importance Talleyrand has as a model was as an inspiration for the depiction of perfidy in a charming and dearly loved friend” (118). Jasinski detects a resemblance between Sophie de Vernon and Narbonne, especially in connection with her flippant wit and love of gambling (2:xviii).

Works Cited

Diesbach, Ghislain de. Madame de Staël. Paris: Perrin, 1983.

Jasinski, Béatrice W., ed. Correspondance générale. 6 vols. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962-74; Hachette, 1985; Klincksieck, 1993.

Solovieff, Georges, ed. Choix de lettres de Mme de Staël (1778-1817). Paris: Klincksieck, 1970.