Corinne: The Third Woman
[In the following essay, Schor examines the relationship between death and femininity in Corinne.]
On eût dit que dans ces lieux, comme dans la tragédie de Hamlet, les ombres erraient autour du palais où se donnaient les festins.
Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie
In March, 1992, while on leave in Paris, I prepared a synopsis of a paper on death in Staël's Corinne that I proposed to give at the annual fall meeting of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. A month later I was being operated on at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine for a life-threatening liver failure.
Little did I realize at the time that I was entering a new stage in my life, a stage of serial illnesses from which I have yet to emerge. Consequently, what I viewed with apt modesty as a “small” paper has come to seem to me despite its restricted dimensions a strangely prophetic project insistently calling into question the very relationship of the mind and body I had spent a lifetime repressing. Did I feel the need to write about death because I was in fact and unbeknownst to me silently dying? And when did that dying begin, when I sat at my word processor before my illness declared itself in full-blown visible, visualizable, and quantifiable symptoms but heralded its crisis in so called “non-specific” symptoms: extreme fatigue, depression, loss of inspiration? Shortly before his unexpected and untimely death my father produced two atypically morbid works: a large self portrait in livid hues of muddy greens and ghoulish blues—the face of a drowned man—and an oversize brass mask where in one empty socket one could see a doll-like male figure dangling from a spring—the effigy of a man who has hung himself. Did life imitate art when my father's heart failed him or did some Lethe-like fluid guide his hand as he created those works?
Like so many other projects I was engaged in at the time, the paper on Corinne was a casualty of my illness and recovery. The celebration of the life work of Mme Tison-Braun, the beloved teacher who first awakened and recognized in me an interest in French literature, is the happy occasion of my at last but with no lesser sense of urgency writing the paper I had outlined when I still counted myself among the healthy.
.....
I want in what follows to make and, hopefully, substantiate an outlandish claim: because of the disparity between the chronology of events and the narrative organization of the material, when Corinne first appears in the novel that bears her name, she is already dead, a victim of patriarchy, a gendered ghost, the ghost of gender. In other words, Corinne is neither, as the narrator suggests, a mere retelling of the archetypal story of Sheherazade, who enlists narrative in the deferral of death,1 nor, by the same token, a reworking of what Peter Brooks has called Freud's masterplot, the dawdlings and detours of the death-driven Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Death in Corinne is not the telos to be avoided, but the disaster which has already occurred, which sets the narrative in motion and brings it finally to its foreordained conclusion, the physical enactment of a symbolic death.
Much has been written about women and death in art and fiction, and a consensus has emerged regarding the proliferation of dead or dying female figures in the European art produced during a time period extending from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Following Michel Foucault's periodization, which dovetails with that of Philippe Ariès, Elizabeth Bronfen in her ambitious Lacanian exercise in “thanatopoetics,” Over Her Dead Body, sees the end of the eighteenth century as marked by an epistemic shift in the function and representation of death. What characterizes this new understanding of death is its ambivalence: viewed as a means of attaining scientific truth, the corpse is simultaneously seen as a source of pollution which must be distanced from the city; viewed as a means of individuation, death constantly threatens the living with the return of the repressed Other:
By the nineteenth century, “love” and “death” were culturally constructed as the two realms where savage nature could break into “man”'s city, at the same historical moment that society believed that its achievements in technology and rationalism had served to colonise nature completely. Since it combines these two disruptive elements, the dead body of a woman served as a particularly effective figure for this triumph over “violent nature” and its failure to expulse the Other completely; a superlative figure for the inevitable return of the repressed.2
There are in fact (at least) two epistemic shifts which coincide at the turn of the eighteenth century: on the one hand death is reconfigured, secularized, individualized, on the other, femininity is invented through the convergence of a set of emerging disciplinary discourses and in response to increasingly urgent political pressures (OHDB 78). Hence the feminization of the corpse, the killing of women form a nexus which becomes by mid-century a stereotype: “her dead body.” It is this coming together that distinguishes post-revolutionary literary and pictorial representations of dead women from those that immediately precede that historical break in France, for of course representations of women as dead or death itself goes back as far as classical mythology; as Madelyn Gutwirth observes:
A fascination with female frailty certainly recurs in Western art with some reliability over the centuries, remaining one of the stock of topoi available to it. But no glut of such foredoomed figures exists in modern times before the waning of the Age of Enlightenment and in the century that copes with this heritage.3
The crucial factor is that what is at stake in both Bronfen's and Gutwirth's studies is the triangle constituted by death, femininity, and a male author or artist. Or, to paraphrase Bronfen: Her body/His text. Gutwirth mentions only one woman in her article, Mme Riccoboni, and not in her capacity as a writer, rather her role as a critic of Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses. Bronfen does include two novels by women in her book, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but she reserves her discussion of women writers and artists and death for a final chapter entitled, “From muse to creatrix—Snow White unbound.” This transmutation is emphatically a twentieth-century phenomenon. What tends then to get lost in these accounts is the specificity of representations of dead women in pre-twentieth-century works by women artists and authors. Even when they are cited, gender difference is elided.
It may well be that in the historical context in which Corinne appeared it was impossible for a woman writer, however rebellious, to break with the dominant models of representation. And yet Corinne is in so many other respects an iconoclastic novel that it strains credulity that Corinne's dead body is indistinguishable from that of Ellénore, Benjamin Constant's counter example in Adolphe, and that what distinguishes them is unrelated to the sexual divide that separates their authors. It is the same difference as that between suicide and matricide.
From the very first page the prominence of death in this deeply melancholic early romantic novel is made clear, but it is not, as one might expect, the heroine's, or any other woman's for that matter, but the hero's father's. When we first encounter Oswald Lord Nelvil he is on a journey to Italy for medical reasons: “La plus intime de toutes les douleurs, la perte d’un père, était la cause de sa maladie” (“The most personal of all griefs, the loss of a father, had provoked his illness” (C 28/3). Implicit in this phrase is a maxim which goes something like: his father's death is man's greatest sorrow. When, as is the case for Oswald, that irreparable loss is overlayed with guilt, then the disease is as we in time discover incurable. Afflicted with a bad case of what Margaret Waller has wittily called “the male malady”4 (a.k.a. the mâle de siècle), Oswald is a severely depressed Oedipus. It is in this state that he encounters Corinne, who is at the very pinnacle of her success. I am referring, of course, to the celebrated scene of her crowning at the Capitol. From that moment on Corinne takes it upon herself to cure the unhappy Oswald. This is tourism as therapy: she will cure him by making him see Italy and its beauties, for like Oedipus at Colonnus Oswald in Italy is blind, sightless: “Oswald parcourut la Marche d’Ancone et l’Etat ecclésiastique jusqu’à Rome sans rien observer” (“Oswald crossed the Marches and the Papal States as far as Rome without noticing anything” [C 46/17]); “il ne remarqua point les lieux antiques et célèbres à travers lesquels passait le char de Corinne” (“he took no notice whatever of the ancient places traversed by Corinne's chariot” [C 53/22]). The cure is homeopathic, in that it fights grief with grief; the burden of Oswald's mourning of his dead father is offset by a visit to the cemetery outside the city gates where Corinne guides Oswald to the funerary monument dedicated by a Roman citizen to the memory of his dead daughter, Cecilia Métalla.5
But above all to see Italy is to see Corinne; the cure for Oswald's undone grief work is gazing at Corinne. Gazing at Corinne is a moral imperative for Oswald, for as the prince Castel-Forte enjoins him: “regardez Corinne” (“Behold Corinne” [C 58/25]).
What does it mean to “behold” Corinne? Corinne, when Oswald first sees her, is the picture of health; at the height of her powers she is the most animated of heroines. It is this animation that I want to hold up to scrutiny, for it is illusory; the solar Corinne conceals a cold lunar landscape. She radiates a life force that is the after-glow of a star long dead. In this strange temporality, the reading of the novel that would have Corinne waste away as a result of Oswald's craven abandonment is a partial reading that too readily accepts conventional causality as its organizing principle, that is too quick to charge the male protagonist—absent a male author—with murder. It forgets one of the crucial lessons of Lacan's mirror stage, the impossibility of representing the body in pieces except from the perspective of the body as whole. The disjointed body of the infant can only be reconstructed from the vantage point of an imaginary identity. In the words of Jane Gallop: “The image of the body in bits and pieces is fabricated retroactively from the mirror stage. It is only the anticipated ‘orthopedic’ form of totality that can define—retroactively—the body as insufficient.”6 Corinne must reach the pinnacle of success for her underlying inexistence to become visible. Stardom—and Corinne, the performance artist, is nothing if not a star—is ghostly, a state of haunting.
Let us recall that when Corinne at last provides the key to the enigma of her identity, her missing patronym, she makes the following crucial avowal: after her father Lord Edgermond's death in England, she is driven into exile by her step-mother, who makes a diabolical bargain with her:
… si vous prenez un parti qui vous déshonore dans l’opinion, vous devez à votre famille de changer de nom et de vous faire passer pour morte.
[“… should you decide on a course of action that will dishonor you in public opinion, you owe it to your family to change your name and pass for dead.” (C 382/267)]
Oui, sans doute, m’écriais-je, passons pour morte dans ces lieux où mon existence n’est qu’un sommeil agité. Je revivrai avec la nature, avec le soleil, avec les beaux-arts, et les froides lettres que composent mon nom, inscrites sur un vain tombeau, tiendront, aussi bien que moi, ma place dans ce séjour sans vie.
[“Yes! Why not?” I exclaimed. “In this place where my life is no more than a troubled sleep, let them think me dead. With nature, with the sun, with the arts, I shall come alive again; and in this lifeless world, the cold letters of my name engraved on an empty tomb will surely take my place as well as ever I could.” (C 383-84/268)]
Though by virtue of its history Italy is the land of ruins and crumbling tombstones, England by virtue of its rigid ideology of separate spheres is at least for women the “land of the living dead” (MM 76-79).7 English society is a cemetery where a brilliant public woman like Corinne can only be buried alive, racked by nightmares—“perchance to dream.” To leave England is to rise Lazarus-like from the dead, yet at the same time to leave England is to leave behind more than the lifeless letters that make up one's patronym, rather one's mortal envelope; to return to Italy is to (re)enter the land of the living but to do so in spectral form.
Si la vie est offerte aux morts dans les tombeaux, ils ne soulèveraient pas la pierre qui les couvre avec plus d’impatience que je n’en éprouvais pour écarter de moi tous mes linceuls, et reprendre possession de mon imagination, de mon génie, de la nature.
[Were life offered to the dead in their graves, they would not lift off their tombstones with greater impatience than I felt to cast off my shrouds, and repossess nature, my imagination, and my genius. (C 385/268)]
Paradoxically, however, Corinne can only arise from the dead by faking her real death, staging her disappearance. Well before Oswald journeys to Italy to restore his health, Corinne is rumored to have done the same, so that Oswald on page one repeats Corinne's earlier gesture, for in what Derrida calls the “logic of spectrality”8 there is no separating the first time from its repetition.
Ma belle-mère me manda qu’elle avait répandu le bruit que les médecins m’avaient ordonné le voyage du midi pour rétablir ma santé, et que j’étais morte dans la traversée.
[My stepmother gave me to understand that she had spread word of my death on a trip to the south prescribed by the doctors for my health. (C 386/269)]
Every crossing in Corinne evokes the fatal passage of the Styx: thus, when at the end of the novel Oswald returns to Italy with his wife and child, the river Taro is transformed into a dangerous torrent:
le brouillard était tel que le fleuve se confondait avec l’horizon, et ce spectacle rappelait bien plutôt les descriptions poétiques des rives du Styx, que ces eaux bienfaisantes qui doivent charmer les regards des habitants brûlés par les rayons du soleil.
[The fog was so thick that the river merged with the horizon, and the spectacle recalled the poetic descriptions of the banks of the river Styx, rather than the benevolent waters meant to charm the eyes of a population burnt by the rays of the sun. (C 558/397)]
The extraordinary Corinne that Oswald sees is then posthumous, not literally a dead female body, but a dead female soul: “on dirait que je suis une ombre qui veut encore rester sur la terre, quand les rayons du jour, quand l’approche des vivants, la forcent à disparaître” (“It is as if I were a shade still wanting to remain on earth when the light of day, the approach of the living, compel it to disappear” [C 522/371]), she writes when she is wasting away. She does not become a ghost because she was abandoned, rather, she is abandoned precisely because of her ghostliness.
From the moment of Corinne's publication readers were stumped by the pairing of Oswald and Corinne: what do these two characters have in common? what does Corinne, the exceptional woman, see in Oswald, the conventional albeit new “sensitive” man? What prevents Oswald from choosing the profound Corinne over her superficial half sister Lucille? There is, of course, no single answer to this question, and over the years the answers have ranged from the humorous (Eliot's in The Mill on the Floss) to the scathing: the readings of contemporary feminists who view Corinne as a paradigm of the exceptional woman and the post-revolutionary killing into allegory of woman. Curiously, the psychoanalytic dimension has been neglected, yet it sheds light on this conundrum: Oswald abandons Corinne not only because of his father's law, not only because he is culturally unsuited to love a woman who does not adhere to the ideal of domesticity, but because Corinne represents death in the manner of Freud's third woman in his neat little essay of 1913, “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” Unlike Freud's archetypal male, however, who fools destiny by selecting the inevitable, Oswald, who otherwise is always placing himself in harm's way, flees death in the shape of a comely woman, “the fairest, best, most desirable and the most lovable of women.”9 Because Oswald is a narcissist he rejects the Other and the Death-Goddess is the ultimate Other. The third woman is the woman who subverts the function assigned Woman in the male imaginary, that of guarantor of man's exclusive subjectivity and sense of phallic invulnerability. Is it any wonder then that narcissistic men, whose very self is threatened by female alterity and the death it signifies for their majestic Ego, chose unthreatening love objects that enhance their sense of omnipotence and immortality?
And what of the third woman? Can the third woman die? Yes: there is a double dying in Corinne. But in Corinne the Goddess of Death is dumb no more, Atropos speaks, writes, and what is more leaves a legacy. Not only does she stage her death, but she stages her swan song. More important, by the means of feminist pedagogy, the transmission of her wisdom to Lucille and Lucille and Oswald's daughter Juliette, she lives on. The specter of the exceptional woman haunts the nineteenth century.
Notes
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Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie (Paris: Folio, 1985), 133; Corinne, or Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987), 81. Subsequent page references to these editions will be given within the text under the abbreviation C, with the English page numbers in italics.
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Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 86; hereafter abbreviated as (OHDB).
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Madelyn Gutwirth, “The Engulfed Beloved: Representations of Dead and Dying Women in the Art and Literature of the Revolutionary Era,” in Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), 198.
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Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994). Hereafter (MM).
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This detail is glossed by Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 172-73.
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Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 86.
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Cf. Jean Starobinski's congruent description of Corinne as “une morte-vivante” (“a living-dead woman”) in his article, “Suicide et mélancolie chez Mme de Staël,” in Madame de Staël et l’Europe, Colloque de Coppet (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 246. Starobinski's concern is the psychology of Staël and her heroines. The (virtual) abandoned woman is kept alive through the artificial means of a love whose withdrawal determines an “ontological catastrophe” (247).
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Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 24.
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Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” Character and Culture (New York: Collier, 1963), 76.
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