SOURCE: “Speech in Action: Language, Society, and Subject in Germaine de Staël's Corinne,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 4, July, 1995, pp. 393-408.

A central preoccupation in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807),¹ and one which is returning to contemporary agendas with a political urgency equal to that of its feminist theme, is the problematic of the relation between the individual subject and the social and political community. In his influential collection of lectures, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985),² Jürgen Habermas has renewed the debate with two fresh contributions: his concept of the “communication community,” and his meditations on modernity's consciousness of time. In this essay, I use Habermas's insights to illuminate the modernity of Corinne, and in particular to explore the mechanics and the meaning of the heroine's improvisation exercises, which, I argue, are simultaneously improvisations of self and improvisations of society. At the same time, I want to maintain a feminist perspective (not one of Habermas's preoccupations) with a consideration of Staël's emphasis on the distinctive role of the ideal feminine voice in the improvisatory process. The “modernity” of Corinne, read in these selected perspectives, is twofold. It presents a dynamic model of the subject's founding in intersubjectivity, within a process of discursive exchange in which the individual is engaged both as an autonomous self-creating subject and as a representative of the groups of which society is constituted. It also presents a ground-breaking account of creative feminine voice as the fulcrum of the model, speaking a subject that is both open and receptive to otherness and resistant in its own right.

THE MODERN PERSPECTIVE

I) SUBJECT TO REASON: HABERMAS AND THE COMMUNICATION COMMUNITY

In its own context, Habermas's theory of the “communication community” addresses a different agenda from Madame de Staël's text, and it is important to avoid temptations to anachronism and opportunism in bringing the two together. A short preliminary account of Habermas's position should bring out both the differences in their perspective and the areas of significant overlapping interest.

In his preface to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas explains that his aim is to reconstruct the philosophical discourse of modernity in the light of the challenge from the neostructuralist critique of reason. The modern definition of modernity, he argues, arose in the course of the eighteenth century with the replacement of the Christian concept of the world of the future as a world still to come, a last day yet to dawn, by a secular concept which “expresses the conviction that the future has already begun. It is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.”³ The concept of modernity implies the inauguration of a new historical-philosophical perspective, in which the present finds itself as it recognizes its status in history, but not as a carrier of the norms of the past; rather, it defines itself in terms of the radical break it has made with the past (pp. 6-7). Habermas evokes Walter Benjamin's productive characterization in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of the time-consciousness of modernity, a now-time (Jetztzeit) shot through with fragments of Messianic time: an authentic, startling awareness of the immediacy of the present, lit by openings to an unknown future which spring directly from renewed perception of the past.⁴

Other thinkers have been less successful than Benjamin in finding ways of formulating the relationship between past and present that secure the independence and innovative capacity of the immediate moment without cutting it off entirely from its formative origins. As Habermas sees it, the problem of modernity has from the start been that of finding philosophical justification for its own norms and values. In the process of wrestling with that problem, philosophers from Hegel to Nietzsche (most recently, in the generation preceding our own, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) have succeeded in discrediting notions of reason, subjectivity, and subject, which are rooted in Enlightenment thinking. And, along with these notions, they have discredited the beneficial products of Enlightenment reason on which the structures of contemporary Western society were built, what Habermas describes as “the rational content of cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals (and also instrumentalized along with them.”⁵ Among such benefits, Habermas lists speculative thought (“the specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences … beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge”); universal principles of law and morality which, he says, have been incorporated into the formative structures of societies and subjects (“the institutions of constitutional government, into the forms of democratic will formation, and into individualist patterns of identity formation”); the new, varied, and qualitatively different kinds of aesthetic experience which become available to a subjectivity liberated from merely conventional and end-directed activity; and, not least, the enriched range of values proper to self-realization that such aesthetic experiences help engender (p. 113). (It is worth noting at this early stage that these are all values—creativity, freedom, innovation, democratic ethics—which are embodied in Corinne.)

Habermas develops his concept of the communication community as a way of enabling contemporary thinking to reconcile the notion of values and the notion of modernity. To re-establish the notion of values, it is necessary to restore the concept of validity. Since Nietzsche, with his assimilation of reason and power, and his insistence that all individual evaluations and formulations of the world are subjective and interested, it has been impossible to sustain the original presumption of Enlightenment philosophy that individual subjects participate in an objective and universally valid Reason. Habermas proposes that thinking should no longer start from the notion that Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida have rightly challenged of a metaphysically isolated subject, observer, and dominator of the world, the sole validator of its self-established norms (p. 296). The subject should be conceived of as grounded within intersubjectivity, and for that there needs to be established a “paradigm of mutual understanding” founded in the way the speech community works. Habermas defines this community as “an interpersonal relationship structured by the system of reciprocally interlocked perspectives among speakers, hearers and non-participants who happen to be present at the time. On the level of grammar, this corresponds to the system of personal pronouns. Whoever has been trained in this system has learned how, in the performative attitude, to take up and transform into one another the perspectives of the first, second and third persons.”⁶

Habermas argues that subjects are effectively constituted in this paradigm, since they are accustomed to the interactions of the language community, to shifting subject positions within discourse, experiencing being I, you, s/he as positions with equal power, having to recapitulate and understand the positions of others before they themselves speak. He argues further that this speech situation must be considered as a segment of the “lifeworld” that forms the horizons of those who participate in the interlocutory exchange. The lifeworld “offers a store of things taken for granted in the given culture, from which communicative participants draw consensual interpretative patterns in their efforts at interpretation” (p. 298). The values and working assumptions of the lifeworld are consolidated in groups (“The solidarities of groups integrated by values and the competences of socialized individuals belong, as do culturally ingrained background assumptions, to the components of the lifeworld,” p. 298) and are reproduced through the medium of communicative action. In this paradigm, participants in the communication community are not conceived of as masterful subjects but as individual speakers with group origins: “interaction participants … no longer appear as originators who master situations with the help of accountable actions, but as the products of the traditions in which they stand, of the solidary groups to which they belong, and of the socialization processes within which they grow up” (p. 299).

The writing of Corinne is certainly unconscious of any need to tackle the philosophical problem of the grounding of values, which is where Habermas starts. But the text equally certainly addresses the philosophical and political questions Habermas associates with that problem (questions of competing subjectivities and groups) and looks for solutions in similar directions. In its simplest terms, the problem for Staël's novel is to find less oppressive and more productive modes of coexistence for individuals, groups (men/women, fathers/sons), and nations, and the solution incorporates two notions: the concept of the individual as product of the group, and the idea of communicative action as the point where the “lifeworld” (to use Habermas's term) is actualized and reproduced. In Staël's novel, however, there is one significant difference. The lifeworld is not merely reproduced through Corinne's improvisations and exchanges but is also re-formed. Corinne, half-Italian and half-English, finds herself not simply reproducing the values and competences of the groups that produced her, but acting as a point where a multitude of different national, class, and gender values intersect and interact, opening the potential for something radically new.

II) THE FEMININE VOICE

Feminist interpretations of “the feminine voice” oscillate, sometimes disconcertingly, between two poles. On the one hand, there are Lacanian-inspired versions of speech disempowered by its origins in a language constructed in the Name of the Father, a symbolic in which woman is simply non-existent and the best that can be managed is a hysterical or silent deployment of women's status as victim. On the other, there are celebratory visions of the feminine capacity to produce a Utopian discourse, which can both found a distinctive feminine identity and embrace a plurality of others. Staël's Corinne negotiates between the two extremes. It clearly acknowledges the limits set to women's speech by the discourse(s) of patriarchal society.⁷ But in the last analysis it also offers a construction of the ideal feminine voice as one which aims to generate from within those limits a different model of speaking and being, directed towards openness, pluralism, and the negotiation of change.

There has in recent years been an explosion of innovative feminist criticism exploring the nature of the feminine voice in Corinne. Two books are of particular importance. Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (1991) includes some excellent essays which offer insights into the interplay of male and female discourses in Staël's work, exploring its biographical and psychoanalytical hinterland, the tensions between repression and self-affirmation, self-realization through speech and the failure of communication.⁸ Marie-Claire Vallois's stimulating monograph Fictions féminines: Madame de Staël et les voix de la Sibylle (1987)⁹ reads Corinne as a quest for the absent mother and the recovery of archaic female space, a “drama of displacement and substitution that deconstructs language as privileged cultural edifice,” and argues that in place of language the gestures of fragmentation offered by Corinne, grounded in the ultimate ruin of the self that is suicide, convey women's struggle for authentic communication.¹⁰

In a considerable number of these critics, emphasis leans towards the negatives in the text, such as Corinne's death or the landscape of ruins and tombs from which she speaks. As a result, attention has been over-directed towards the disempowerment of the female by the irresistible power of the Father, to female failure and silence, and to the concept of an essentially female inheritance of things falling apart, fragments cobbled desperately together.¹¹ My own reading would emphasize, out of a consciously complex text, the countervailing forces which Staël herself foregrounds in, for example, her presentation of Corinne's competences as musician and poet and her particular skill in interweaving her voice with other voices to put differences and dissonances in unifying harmonies. In this process, she is shown taking fragments of traditional airs, motifs, and rhythms and bringing them to coherence through rhythms and variations of her own inspiration. Or again, Staël offers a passage set in the ruins of Ancient Rome (discussed in detail below), where Corinne speaks not as a woman scrabbling to recover sense from the ruins of a dead world but as a member of an artistic tradition that links across the ages musicians, poets, and, most of all, architects—those builders of the new, skilled in the remaking of the perspectives of ancient landscape. As artist, Corinne shares the capacity for remaking tradition of some of her male predecessors. She invents her own inheritance, remaking her language as the great artists of Renaissance Italy she invokes remade theirs. The parallel might be drawn with contemporary writers such as Hélène Cixous or Julia Kristeva, whose feminine voice acknowledges its identity with its male modernist forerunners, Mallarmé, Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett, architects of new linguistic worlds.

Every word in Staël's text recognizes the constitutive force and the dominant pull of the past, inscribed in that vast sequence of present landscapes over which Corinne travels and whose history both she and the narrative voice evoke (France, England, and all the varied regions of Italy, city-states and rural landscapes), and carried by the individuals of different cultures who make up Corinne's various audiences. Corinne herself, though, is not a hostage to the past, or to tradition, or to any of the cultures she addresses. Her mixed parentage, her formative years spent in both Italy and England, her fluency in many languages, her diverse artistic talents, are all so many passports to free movement. She lives by making her own choices, emphasizing her autonomy. She chose Italian rather than English as her language and nationality because, as she explains, she recognized the parallels between her own talents and preferences and those of Italian society (both prize culture, thought, poetic speech). She chooses her own destiny. Her decision to leave for Naples with Oswald, despite the comte d’Erfeuil's warnings, is stamped by clear assertion of her own self-knowledge and her will to determine her own purposes: “Je souffre, je jouis, je sens à ma manière, et ce serait moi seule qu’il faudrait observer, si l’on voulait influer sur mon bonheur” (1:265). Corinne's choices are potent ones that determine the destinies of others. Crossing the sea to Naples, with Oswald, she takes the veiled moon for her symbol; in the concluding tableau of the text, on her deathbed, she makes it the orientating focus of the transformed community she leaves behind.

Failure and silencing are at least as much a masculine as a feminine fate in Staël's text, which offers a range of examples of good men destroyed by unfortunate fate, weak men destroyed by their own lack of nerve, and sons overawed and silenced by patriarchal power. Oswald, locked to duty, obsessed by the responsibility he feels to perpetuate a patriarchal order figured not only by his own father but by the English state that summons him to war, is not merely the ungrateful lover but also the representative, in this lifeworld, of all sons. As Castel-Forte explains, men's capacity for creative speech is limited because they are rooted in social formations, by their work and duties. Women are freer. Were that not so, all men might follow Corinne's example: “nous suivrions ses traces, nous serions hommes comme elle est femme, si les hommes pouvaient, comme les femmes, se créer un monde dans leur propre cœur, et si notre génie, nécessairement dépendant des relations sociales et des circonstances extérieures, pouvait s’allumer tout entier au seul flambeau de la poésie” (1:51). Castel-Forte's own statement is a model of the conceptual prejudices which, as much as their social commitments, limit men's capacity to initiate change. Where he posits mutually exclusive alternatives (dream or engagement, feeling or action, poetry or politics, private or public spheres), Corinne begins with the presumption that all possibilities can be reconciled. This is the difference that makes unlocking the closed categories of the present and creating a fresh future pre-eminently, for Staël, a function of feminine voice.

IMPROVISING SELF/IMPROVISING SOCIETY

The remainder of this essay will look at some of the key improvisatory moments of the novel and try to substantiate the contentions made above with a critical analysis of the processes and nature of the “communication community” realized through Corinne's voice. Certain key characteristics recur. The predominant discursive mode is one of negotiation and reconciliation. Apparently contradictory standpoints, viewed from a larger, distancing perspective—the third-person position, taken by Corinne—are separately analysed and grasped in their difference, and then reformulated to create a dynamic invocation of something new. Construction of an improvisation is a matter of mixing learned discourse, technical skill, and rhetorical competence with spontaneous and enthusiastic inspiration.¹² The starting material consists of poetic clichés, quotations, borrowings from the common cultural stock. This material—the social given—is transformed as Corinne glimpses through it some inspiration of her own. At its best, her improvisations are a fusion of subjective and collective inspiration, bringing together personal and public preoccupations. In that form, they move into rhythms of her own invention and the building blocks of poetic cliché are replaced, we are told, by original lyrical prose. We never actually discover what fresh rhythms and syntax that prose might consist of: all the text offers are the French representations of the presumedly Italian original. What Corinne makes possible are the conditions of a different performance. The different performance itself is not capable of direct representation, being one that can only be fully grasped in the presence of its making.

Presence is the mark of Corinne's first improvisation (which is also her first appearance in the novel), which takes place on the Capitol and marks her incorporation into the pantheon of Italian poetic genius. The episode is dramatically delayed in the narrative (vol. 1, book 3) by a lengthy preliminary account of Oswald's journey to Italy, its motivation, and his guilt-ridden attachment to the past. The contrast between the two character presentations is striking. Oswald's tale is a third-person, single-dimensional narrative of his actions and thoughts, conducted predominantly in the past historic. It reads as a relentless self-accounting of son to father, establishing a monolinear continuity between past, present, and a predictably drab future. Corinne is not a tale but a presence, a speech-product, generated by a plurality of voices in a range of tenses in which the past has its role but where the present quickly dominates. Corinne appears as pre-eminently a subject in discourse, a construction in the present voice.

The narrative voice of the text, dominant in the presentation of Oswald, is muted for Corinne into a supporting function. It enables her to make an authoritative entry onto a public stage which contemporary readers would otherwise expect to be the particular province of masculine subjects. It presents (subordinated into indirect speech) a series of mediating and legitimizing voices which before she opens her own mouth establish her as a subject in her own right. Through those same voices, it identifies the range of different speaking positions in the Italian communication community (people, aristocracy, laymen, poets) and a new element—the English private and political sensibility represented by Oswald—all of which her voice will in turn address, legitimize, and transform.

Corinne moves through the various personal pronouns identified in Habermas's analysis. She first appears as “she,” both in the adulatory clichés of the crowd (“c’est une divinité entourée de nuages,” 1:45) and in the introductory panegyric delivered by her noble friend Castel-Forte, the father-figure who throughout the text displays a lover's devotion. Castel-Forte establishes her in threefold person: as the object of her Italian audience, as a subject in her own right, and as mediatory third (1:50). What Italy appreciates, he says, is her ability to bring unity out of diversity, uniting knowledge of many languages and cultures. He emphasizes the originality of her talent, the spark of distinctive genius she displays in all her artistic talents: “cette trace de feu, cette trace d’elle.” And equally, he identifies her social place and mediatory function: “Corinne est le lien de ses amis entre eux.” Corinne mediates time, harmonizing past, present, and future. The product of Italy's climate and culture, she also figures the best of what Italy might be: “Nous nous plaisons à la contempler comme une admirable production de notre climat, de nos beaux-arts, comme un rejeton du passé, comme une prophétie de l’avenir.” Corinne herself, in effect, embodies for Italy Walter Benjamin's Messianic moment: the bearer of a reformulated past, tradition recuperated and transformed in the living delight of the present, caught up in the dynamic promise of an equally delightful, unknowable, living future.

Oswald's first response to the eulogies offered by Corinne's fellow citizens is a jealous desire to compete: “Déjà lord Nelvil souffrait de cette manière de louer Corinne; il lui semblait déjà qu’en la regardant il aurait fait à l’instant même un portrait d’elle plus juste, plus vrai, plus détaillé, un portrait enfin qui ne pût convenir qu’à Corinne” (1:47). Corinne's improvisation responds to the range of competing interests in the audience—competing not only with each other but also with her, in their desire to make her the image of their own desire. She turns competition into negotiation. Her speech takes an overview of its audience, identifies its polarized elements (Italy and Oswald), and reproduces and recombines selected characteristics of each. The theme of her improvisation, and its first movement, is dictated by the crowd: “la gloire et le bonheur d’Italie.” The second movement incorporates Oswald, taking its subject from the mourning he is wearing for his father. Corinne sings of death Italian style, which is not, in her version, the obliteration of the isolated subject, but entry into a glorious cultural community, life lived in the light of an unknown posterity: “Peut-être un des charmes secrets de Rome est-il de réconcilier l’imagination avec le long sommeil” (1:58). The narrative voice returns to prominence to point out to the reader that it is not the given material but what Corinne does with it—the form and style of her improvisation—that is the strength of her work. Contrast is its key, produced by her thematic yoking of death and glory, and by the distinctive tonal variation of her voice, which combines the sonority of the Italian language with her own compassionate timbre. The crowd acclaims her in acknowledgment of the understanding conveyed by her voice. The narrative voice further emphasizes that in her turn Corinne is herself transformed and empowered by her own act of speaking, redefined within the collective response: “elle venait de parler … l’enthousiasme le remportait sur la timidité. Ce n’était plus une femme craintive, mais une prêtresse inspirée, qui se consacrait avec joie au culte du génie” (1:59).

At her best, as she explains to Oswald, Corinne's improvisations are an enthusiastic collocation of personal and public statements. This double definition of individual subject as simultaneously engaged in public and private speech, reaching for new perspectives for the common good beyond the limits of the given,¹³ is the model she urges on Oswald as she guides him round Rome in the second improvisatory moment I want to consider (1:83-133). In effect, this is a sequence of improvisations elaborating that first insight which sparked on the Capitol between her, Oswald, and the crowd: that death in Italy is a doorway to new life. Speech here engages transformatively with the Roman landscape to unlock the creative energies of past communities crystallized in its crumbling buildings and monuments. In the present, the creative potential of both Oswald and Corinne is released as, in dialogue, they reformulate their perception of the ruins as the raw material of a future: “Ils étaient des amis qui voyageaient ensemble: ils commencaient à dire nous” (1:99). The transformation is more obvious in Oswald, who starts in the near-silence of a language mortgaged to his dead father and ends declaring “vous avez réveillé mon imagination” (1:131). But Corinne, too, is changed in this relationship, confronting and coming to productive terms with a degree of material resistance to her enthusiasms unmatched since her disastrous childhood visit to England.¹⁴ The past, even as represented by Oswald, can be a constitutive, not a destructive force.

Corinne, in Oswald's own words, interprets Rome to him (1:93). Her speech repositions him within the cultural landscape in every possible sense, physical, moral, and intellectual. It rearticulates his structures of perception, changing the relationships between himself and the things he sees, and, potentially, between the things themselves. The ruins remain ruins, but in Corinne's version they exist in a context where continuity of larger values, not supersession of individual objects and persons, is the centre of interest. Corinne urges Oswald away from an exclusive focus on isolated details (including, by implication, his father's death) towards the larger comprehension of an expanding, interrelated whole (1:96). In a planned progression through the Pantheon, commenting on its pagan symbolization of the divinity of life, by Hadrian's tomb, and towards St Peter's, she reads out of the ruins the continuity of such concepts as nobility and beauty, freedom, and disinterested socially-rooted morality.¹⁵ Her rhetorical skills are enhanced by a sense of theatre which turns the material landscape into a well-planned stage. As her argument reaches its climax, Oswald is allowed to see Saint Peter's for the first time, in full dazzling sunlight, the living embodiment in modern Italy of Corinne's thesis. She emphasizes its status as an artefact, designed by Michelangelo to blend pagan images and Christian dogma so as to release death into life: “[L]a pensée est détournée de la contemplation d’un cercueil par les chefs-d’œuvre du génie. Ils rappellent l’immortalité sur l’autel même de la mort; et l’imagination, animée par l’admiration qu’ils inspirent, ne sent pas, comme dans le Nord, le silence et le froid, immuables gardiens des sépulcres” (1:98). This demonstration that traditional discourse is not an absolute but a construct, and that it is in the hands of succeeding generations to reconfigure it, is not lost on Oswald, who sets against the Latin tradition the cold gloom of his own Ossianic mythology and, already, acknowledges his disinclination to choose change: “Ici, vous voulez oublier et jouir; je ne sais si je désirerais que votre beau ciel me fit ce genre de bien” (1:98).

Oswald understands fully that Corinne represents for him his opportunity to negotiate a passage out of the dead-end of patriarchal philosophy and politics: “recevoir par l’imagination une vie nouvelle, renaître pour l’avenir, sans rompre avec le passé” (1:61). The competitiveness that from the beginning, on the Capitol, first attracted him to her now stands in his way. Even in the first dazzling flush of love, standing with her in the ruins of the Coliseum at the end of the second day of their tour of Rome, he cannot respond to her attempts to write a pluralist version of history that is a charter for other voices and values. Corinne is dismayed as he argues the case for the self-centred ego: “L’imagination exaltée peut produire les miracles du genie; mais ce n’est qu’en se dévouant à son opinion, ou à ses sentiments, qu’on est vraiment vertueux: c’est alors seulement qu’une puissance céleste subjugue en nous l’homme mortel” (1:107). His possessive, would-be dominant voice, speaking the language of his father, clings to its rights of denial and interdict. For him, the past is a way of avoiding, not facilitating, renewal in the present: “il répétait souvent à Corinne, que s’il n’avait pas eu dans son pays de nobles intérêts à servir, il n’aurait trouvé la vie supportable que dans les contrées ou les monuments tiennent lieu de l’existence présente” (2:24). In this spirit, he pries Corinne away from the varied interactions of her community (her friends, her public activities) and into exclusive dialogue with himself—a discourse of two isolated subjects with no present third to resolve it. As they travel away from Rome across the lonely Pontine marshes (“où l’on ne voit pas une seule habitation,” 2:7), Corinne drifts into silent sleep, in the foul air, while Oswald, in a new protective role, finds fresh speech: “bien qu’il fût silencieux naturellement, il était inépuisable en sujets de conversation, toujours soutenus, toujours nouveaux, pour l’empêcher de succomber un moment à ce fatal sommeil” (2:8). The crisis comes when the two exchange the stories of their lives, at Oswald's instigation: Oswald in speech, which concludes with the manuscript of his father's last words that he gives Corinne to read out, and then Corinne, in writing. In this way, subjects-in-process become irretrievably fixed in the past, and in the past, subject to the Father, Corinne is necessarily lost. In the first conversation that follows Oswald's reading of Corinne's account (2:117-19), the balance of pronouns marks a new inequality: in Oswald's speech, “je” predominates, whereas for Corinne the leading pronoun is chiefly “vous.”¹⁶

The conclusion of the novel, after Corinne has returned Oswald's ring, charts Corinne's construction of another communication community both like and strikingly different from the one in which her story opened. Having abandoned Rome, too marked by memories of Oswald, she settles in Tuscany, drawn by its republican spirit, the purity of Florentine Italian, and its fine instances of Renaissance art. In this last, most difficult, extended improvisation, her only interlocutor, to begin with, is the notebook in which she writes disjointed utterances of a grief almost impossible to express. But gradually another audience collects, first in the form of the faithful Castel-Forte, then the penitent Oswald, and finally (a new element) the Englishwomen who are Corinne's closest family: her niece Juliette and her sister Lucile, Oswald's daughter and wife. This extension of the communicative community creates in Italy a liberating opportunity for those English female voices whom English politics have suppressed. It also creates a way of holding open a future place in the community to an Oswald (and by extension, an England) Corinne herself can only reject.

Corinne's final discourse is not in itself an improvisation. Lacking the energy for extempore creativity, she writes out her text, which is delivered before the Academy of Florence by a young woman. The text gestures towards a community that echoes out into time and space. Through her mediator, Corinne addresses her fellow citizens, God, Italy, posterity, Rome, as well as the “tombeaux silencieux” to which she must finally turn. The parallels are emphasized between this final act of communication and that on which the narrative opened. The subject—death—is that presented by Oswald at the beginning, but, as then, made Corinne's own with a steer towards life. The voice of the young presenter, like Corinne's younger voice, modifies the message by its tone, providing a contrast which brings serenity into despair. Death in Italy, as in that first improvisation, is demonstrably a way of living in the community of creative genius. As her niece Juliette repeats Corinne's song for Oswald in the domestic sphere, the young singer pursues Corinne's public address.

What is finally to be made of the deathbed tableau, and the symbol of the veiled moon, is settled in the closing utterances in which the reader is invited to participate, drawn into the communication community of the text by the direct address of the narrative voice. In its own final improvisatory twist, the voice of the text takes the past tense of the death of Corinne and the remorse of Oswald, identifying the latter—the squandered potential of the son—as the key problem for resolution. The voice turns past into active present, free of guilt, concluding on a note that leaves future options structured, certainly, but still open for further discussion by the next speakers in the chain. (“Se pardonna-t-il sa conduite passée? Le monde qui l’approuva le consola-t-il? se contenta-t-il d’un sort commun, après ce qu’il avait perdu? Je l’ignore; je ne veux à cet égard ni le blâmer ni l’absoudre,” 2:303.) The death of the heroine does not represent the failure of feminine voice; what Corinne establishes is the continuity of that network of voices which is the feminine text, both in itself and in its interpellation of the reader's world. Speech in Corinne, caught in action, consolidates and extends the community of language, society, and individual subject.

Notes

1. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie, ed. Claudine Herrmann, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1979). References are to this edition. I have modernized the spelling in all quotations.

2. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), trans. Frederick Lawrence, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). References are to this edition. I am grateful to Lois McNay's book Foucault and Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) for first drawing my attention to Habermas's notion of a discourse ethics and its interest for “feminist and other attempts to understand the intersubjective dimension of social relations” (McNay, p. 182). As I complete this essay, I note the advertised appearance of a new collection of essays for January 1995 by Johanna Meehan (Habermas and Feminism, London: Routledge).

3. Habermas, “Modernity's Consciousness of Time and its Need for Self-Reassurance,” Philosophical Discourse, p. 5.

4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), first published as Schriften (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955).

5. Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno,” Philosophical Discourse, p. 113.

6. Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centred Reason,” Philosophical Discourse, pp. 296-97.

7. Limits vary, according to the text, between Italy, where women have relative freedom of speech, and England, where public order has been made dependent on the subordination and silencing of women's voice.

8. Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, ed. Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). See particularly in this collection Frank Bowman, “Communication and Power in Germaine de Staël: Transparency and Obstacle,” Ellen Peel, “Corinne's Shift to Patriarchal Mediation: Rebirth or Regression?,” and Margaret Higonnet, “Suicide as Self-Construction.” Higonnet's essay concludes on an aside close to my present theme, picking up Staël's social theory of art, her linking of language and social power, and the relationship of creative speaker and audience in improvisation: “By linking the genius of her heroines to the public performance of inspired dialogue and fragments, Staël underscores the dynamic role of reception that is central to her social theory of art” (p. 81). For another angle on the theme of performance and audience in Corinne, see Nancy K. Miller, “Performances of the Gaze: Staël's Corinne, or Italy,” Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For completeness, I also note Simone Balayé's collection of essays on Corinne, Madame de Staël—écrire, lutter, vivre (Geneva: Droz, 1994), which I have yet been able to consult.

9. Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions féminines: Madame de Staël et les voix de la Sibylle (Saratoga, Calif.: ANMA Libri, 1987).

10. I adapt here the admirable summary of Higonnet (p. 80), which it would be hard to better.

11. However, see the short but pointed pieces in Gutwirth et al, by English Showalter (“Corinne as an Autonomous Heroine”) and Nancy K. Miller (“Politics, Feminism and Patriarchy: Rereading Corinne”).

12. Corinne offers her own analysis of how her improvisations are constructed in an early informal conversation with Oswald (1:75-78).

13. “[J]e me sens poète, non pas seulement quand un heureux choix de rimes ou de syllabe harmonieuse, quand une heureuse réunion d’images éblouit les auditeurs, mais quand mon âme s’élève, quand elle dédaigne du plus haut l’égoïsme et la bassesse, enfin quand une belle action me serait plus facile: c’est alors que mes vers ont les meilleurs. Je suis poète, lorsque j’admire, lorsque je méprise, lorsque je hais, non par des sentiments personnels, non pour ma propre cause, mais pour la dignité de l’espèce humaine et la gloire du monde” (1:77-78).

14. Well known but worth recalling here is the political context of the composition of Corinne, which Madame de Staël began in the summer of 1805, a month after Napoleon had been crowned King of Italy, when it was still her hope that union with a strong and well-organized France might reinvigorate the creative potential of the new state. The Corinne-Oswald couple play out the interaction of complementary strengths and weaknesses out of which a new community might be forged.

15. The social rooting of values continues to be developed throughout the text, most notably in Corinne's comments on the open-air living represented in the architecture of Pompeii: “Il semble que le caractère des entretiens de la société doit être tout autre avec de telles habitudes, que dans les pays où la rigueur du froid force à se renfermer dans les maisons. On comprend mieux les dialogues de Platon, en voyant ces portiques sous lesquels les anciens se promenaient la moitié du jour. Ils étaient sans cesse animés par le spectacle d’un beau ciel: l’ordre social, tels qu’ils le concevaient, n’était point l’aride combinaison du calcul et de la force, mais un heureux ensemble d’institutions qui excitaient les facultés, développaient l’âme, et donnaient à l’homme pour but le perfectionnement de lui-même et de ses semblables” (2:23).

16. See for example the exchange towards the end of this sequence: “Cruel! s’écria Corinne avec désespoir, vous ne répondez rien, vous ne combattez pas ce que je vous dis! Ah! c’est donc vrai! Hélas! tout en le disant, je ne le croyais pas encore—J’ai retrouvé, grâce à vos soins, répondit Oswald, la vie que j’étais prêt à perdre; cette vie appartient à mon pays pendant la guerre. Si je puis m’unir à vous, nous ne nous quitterons plus, et je vous rendrai votre nom et votre existence en Angleterre” (2:118).