SOURCE: “Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, and Poetic Motherhood,” in French Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 315-30.

[In the following essay, Boutin compares late nineteenth-century essentialist interpretations of Desbordes-Valmore's poetry and that of Alphonse de Lamartine.]

Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine, born respectively in 1786 and 1790, were old enough to be the grandparents of later nineteenth-century readers such as Baudelaire and Flaubert, who were born just one year after the publication of Méditations poétiques. These readers identify Lamartine and Desbordes-Valmore's poetry with childhood, a time when they read or heard their mothers read these poems. Not only did the two precursors influence the thematic and metrical choices of their heirs—an influence widely recognized by critics—but they also shaped the later generation's conception of a gendered poetic voice.¹

The generational gap—in which Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine act as parental figures to younger poets—produces a mode of textual influence that revolves around imitation and rejection of the ancestral poet's voice. This phenomenon is not unlike the “anxiety of influence” described by Harold Bloom, but with a notable difference. Bloom proposes a theory of poetry based on paternal transmission, in which the poet anxiously measures himself against his illustrious father figures.² In contrast, the reception not only of Desbordes-Valmore but also of a feminized Lamartine strongly suggests that both poets were taken as mother rather than father figures, and as a result, the agonistic Oedipal model can only partially describe the imaginary identifications at work in their reception.

It may come as a surprise that both Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine were adopted as mother figures by the poets they influenced. Given their different genders, essentialism alone cannot explain their maternal legacy. Although essentialist, or even historicist, explanations are tempting, the two figures' own particular childhood experiences of the poetic are also an important source of their maternal personae. Mid-nineteenth-century readers solidified the critical perception of Lamartine's feminine persona, but the poet himself also contributed to the constitution of this avatar. A historicist view that sees Lamartine as exemplifying a wimpy generation of “sick heroes” and disempowered aristocrats is therefore not the sole reason for his perceived effeminacy.³ Rather, in his autobiographical writings about his childhood, Lamartine emphasized, even more than his classical readings, his affinity with his mother, who first exposed him to poetry through biblical readings and psalms.⁴ Likewise, Desbordes-Valmore was not perceived as a mother figure primarily because she was a woman (if that were the case, any woman writer would be elevated to the status of mother), but because she pioneered the vogue for sentimental Romantic poetry and became known for her poems on the mother-child relationship, including “L'Écolier,” “Le Coucher d'un petit garçon,” “L'Oreiller d'une petite fille,” and “Le Petit Peureux.” Moreover, her early experiences of the poetic stem from the non-academic domains of popular songs (the romance) and the opéra-comique, therefore making her a “maternal” figure from a delegitimized tradition (as opposed to the patrilineal heritage of classical academic training).⁵ When Rimbaud invokes this delegitimized tradition in “Alchimie du verbe” in terms of “refrains niais, rhythmes naïfs,” he is implicitly referring to Desbordes-Valmore.

Desbordes-Valmore's and Lamartine's childhood experiences of the poetic set the stage for their own readers' experiences. Reading their Romantic predecessors involved, for Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others, a reflective and even self-contradictory process: readers may encounter themselves, uncannily, in the text of another; but, conversely, the text may dispossess its readers when their voices are altered or emptied in the process of reading. It is at this moment of self-contradiction, as Barthes claims in Le Plaisir du texte, that the reader takes his pleasure.⁶

Baudelaire's tribute to Desbordes-Valmore, for example, generates such a moment of pleasure, as Baudelaire retrospectively casts himself as a young man and Desbordes-Valmore as a maternal figure. He begins his encomium to Desbordes-Valmore in Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains by citing a conversation with a male friend who has just received a confidence:

Plus d'une fois un de vos amis, comme vous lui faisiez confidence d'un de vos goûts ou d'une de vos passions, ne vous a-t-il pas dit: “Voilà qui est singulier! car cela est en complet désaccord avec toutes vos autres passions et avec votre doctrine”? Et vous répondiez: “C'est possible, mais c'est ainsi. J'aime cela; je l'aime probablement à cause même de la violente contradiction qu'y trouve tout mon être.”⁷

By beginning with this conversation, Baudelaire not only casts the entire reflection in terms of a confidence to the reader—suggesting that he is about to reveal something to us—but he also underscores the uncanny nature of the revelation, its ability to destabilize “violently” the subject's beliefs and arouse absolute love. Later in the text, Baudelaire qualifies this love as ravishment: “vous voilà enlevés irrésistiblement au fond du ciel poétique.”

Baudelaire's opening sentences closely follow Sainte-Beuve's earlier essay dedicated to Desbordes-Valmore. The author of Portraits contemporains had also alluded to the troubling situation facing the critic who reads Desbordes-Valmore's text:

C'est une chose bien remarquable, comme, en avançant dans la vie … on apprécie à mesure davantage un plus grand nombre d'êtres et d'objets, d'individus et d'œuvres. … Les ressources de la création … sont si complexes et si mystérieuses, que toujours, en cherchant bien, quelque composé nouveau vient déjouer nos formules et troubler nos méthodiques arrangements. …⁸

Like Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve first experienced frustration, but once he surrendered himself—his prejudices, his methods—he felt pleasure: “Le jour où l'on comprend enfin ce poète, … où l'on saisit sa beauté que l'inattention légère ou je ne sais quelle prévention nous avait voilée jusque-là, ce jour est doux et fructueux” (2: 92).

One reason why reading Desbordes-Valmore unsettles, and yet pleases after the reader surrenders to the text's charms, is the production in reading of what Baudelaire calls “la violente contradiction” between the desire for discursive mastery and the pleasurable loss of self. Baudelaire's reflection on Desbordes-Valmore is as much a self-portrait as it is a portrait of her. It is, in any case, a portrait riddled with contradictions.

Yet, the text forestalls its inevitable unveiling of a concealed affinity with the female poet. The process of distancing begins with male bonding. Both Sainte-Beuve's and Baudelaire's reviews posit a male reader whom Baudelaire refers to as “vous, homme réfléchi, et toujours responsable.” The reviewer assumes a male audience that distances him from the female poet; hence the misogynist comments interwoven in his praise: “il est vrai que si vous prenez le temps de remarquer tout ce qui lui manque …” or “Mme Desbordes-Valmore fut femme, fut toujours femme et ne fut absolument que femme” (146-47). If she is a great poet, she is so because she does not overstep the gender divide and imitate men; the “pastiche de l'esprit mâle” remains above all what Baudelaire condemns in “la femme Sand,” who for him stands at the opposite pole from Desbordes-Valmore. Nevertheless, Desbordes-Valmore will always lack the poet's most significant attribute, virility. Commenting on Baudelaire's text in “Gender and Poetry,” Barbara Johnson suggests that “the distance at which [Desbordes-Valmore] is placed by [this masculine discourse] indicates that there is something transgressive or embarrassing about being caught reading her.”⁹ And yet, despite their rational objections and even their embarrassment, they inscribe in their texts a feminine self as the object of their attention.

Embarrassed and conflicted, the reviewers grasp for each other's words. The series of reviews of Desbordes-Valmore share so many references in common that they virtually plagiarize one another. We might see Baudelaire's borrowings from Sainte-Beuve (as well as from Dumas, to whom I will refer later) as part of the process of distancing Johnson mentions. The comparison of Desbordes-Valmore's poetry with an English garden is borrowed directly from Sainte-Beuve's 1833 essay on Desbordes-Valmore. Baudelaire takes it up again at a decisive moment in his text, in order to express his self-contradiction obliquely. In a conversational tone, he writes:

Je rêve à ce que me faisait éprouver la poésie de Mme Valmore quand je la parcourus avec ces yeux de l'adolescence qui sont, chez les hommes nerveux, à la fois si ardents et si clairvoyants. Cette poésie m'apparaît comme un jardin. … C'est un simple jardin anglais, romantique et romanesque. Des massifs de fleurs y représentent les abondantes expressions du sentiment. … Le promeneur, en contemplant ces étendues voilées de deuil, sent monter à ses yeux les pleurs de l'hystérie, hysterical tears.

(148-49)

It is odd that Baudelaire uses English words here; by translating the expression “les pleurs de l'hystérie,” however, he speaks to the French Romantic fashion for anglomania as an alternative source of inspiration and expression, and he represents hysteria's othering of the self by means of linguistic alterity. The passage evokes the weeping, even hysterical, persona of Desbordes-Valmore in a way that makes clear the stereotypical connection between femininity and hysteria. At one level, such a reference to hysteria evinces the misogyny I referred to earlier. Indeed, like Sainte-Beuve before him and Barbey d'Aurevilly after him, he characterizes her poems as cries, sobs, songs and sighs. Barbey d'Aurevilly, for instance, claims in his 1862 review that “c'est, quand elle est poète, la poésie du Cri que Mme Desbordes-Valmore.”¹⁰ Desbordes-Valmore practices a poetics of the expressive body, necessarily far removed from the practices of the “homme réfléchi et toujours responsable.” It is precisely because she emphasizes expressivity and conforms to an essentialist definition of femininity that Desbordes-Valmore is praised and celebrated by generations of male critics.

Hysteria, however, is contagious. The sobbing promeneur is also a bisexual persona for the speaker who paints himself as a nervous yet “ardent” adolescent. He imagines that he is the son, while she is the mother: “… mais seulement dans les poésies de l'ardente Marceline vous trouverez cette chaleur de couvée maternelle, dont quelques-uns, parmi les fils de la femme, moins ingrats que les autres, ont gardé le délicieux souvenir” (147). By using the same word (“ardent”) to describe both Desbordes-Valmore and the adolescent, he suggests that her nature is in fact directly reflected in his eyes, “ardents” and “clairvoyants,” and that the pair are clear mirror images of each other. Baudelaire's review describes a reflexive movement in which Desbordes-Valmore's poetry becomes a mirror that returns his impressions.¹¹

His reading produces, therefore, not just a reflected or “disavowed femininity,” as Barbara Johnson argues in “Gender and Poetry” (178), but also a maternal self-image. Baudelaire's use of the word “hysteric” reminds us both of its etymological roots in the Greek word for “uterus” and of the nineteenth-century medical discourse on hysteria, also referred to as “mal de mère” or “mothersickness.”¹² Reading Desbordes-Valmore gives rise to a fantasy (or a pathology) where the critic is both son and mother, masculine and feminine, object and subject of study, the text and the reader. As Gérard Gasarian concisely diagnoses the problem, “hysteria is a reading disorder: it occurs at the moment when readers mistake their identity.”¹³

The adjective “ardent,” which Baudelaire applies both to himself and to Desbordes-Valmore, sums up the contradictory processes at work here. This word signifies the mirroring of “mother” and “son,” but it is also a keyword in the masculine discourse of rational objection and borrowed references. In fact, “ardeur” turns up first in an earlier text on Desbordes-Valmore, Alexandre Dumas's preface to Les Pleurs (1833), in which an imaginary stroll through the Scottish Highland stimulates “[les] facultés les plus ardentes pour écouter.”¹⁴ “Ardeur” later becomes a staple of subsequent Valmorean reviews and reappears in Robert de Montesquiou's “Félicité,” where he refers to “la contagieuse ardeur née de cette œuvre” (34). While “ardeur” seems a veritable key to the discourse of distancing, other terms are borrowed as well: the “promeneur” first occurs in Dumas; the “adolescent” is initially mentioned by Sainte-Beuve before it is developed by Baudelaire; Montesquiou refers to “bocages” after Sainte-Beuve; Verlaine reenacts the hysterical tears we saw in Baudelaire; and all the reviewers explicitly write for a male audience.

In Baudelaire's imagination, reflection on Desbordes-Valmore's poetics turns into reminiscence of the maternal bond, which Baudelaire clearly distinguishes from family ties and the bourgeois home—what he calls “la douceur du foyer” (“Crépuscule du soir”). On this point, Baudelaire opposes the “warmth of the maternal nest” evoked in Desbordes-Valmore's poetry to Victor Hugo's expression of the domestic joys of childhood. In his “Aux Feuillantines,” he describes a mother figure who is quite different from Desbordes-Valmore's: “Notre mère disait: ‘Jouez, mais je défends / Qu'on marche dans les fleurs et qu'on monte aux échelles.’”¹⁵ His mother stands for interdiction and order rather than a warm nest. What Baudelaire really celebrates in his review is not the patriarchal bourgeois family, but a nostalgia for the mother-infant bond. This bond may even exclude the father as the poet seeks his ties through matrilineal ascendancy. As a reader, Baudelaire thus positions himself as a son listening to and identifying with the maternal voice in the poetry of Desbordes-Valmore. This voice, a “delicious memory” for the grateful sons Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve, produces unequaled pleasure.

Like Baudelaire, Verlaine and Montesquiou-Fezensac would have read or heard Desbordes-Valmore's poems as children. As I have already suggested with respect to Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve, the critic reading Desbordes-Valmore is simultaneously inside and outside a masculine critical discourse. On the one hand, the critic is bound by a discourse of rationality and a set of conventional remarks; on the other, an ardent and delicious relation to the body of the text prevails, shifting the emphasis from portrait to self-portrait.

This relation to the text distorts the reader's rational project. Although they start off wishing to produce a rational and organized discourse, Verlaine and Montesquiou do not succeed in restraining their enthusiasm for long. As if echoing Sainte-Beuve's confession that Desbordes-Valmore “troubles our methodical arrangements,” the two decadent readers break free of their classifications and rigor. Verlaine's 1886 piece in Poètes maudits is subject to a débordement. On several occasions, he unsuccessfully fights this excess, but finally, like Baudelaire, Verlaine bursts into tears: “ici la plume nous tombe des mains et des pleurs délicieux mouillent nos pattes de mouches. Nous nous sentons impuissants à davantage disséquer un ange pareil.”¹⁶ Like other “not ungrateful sons” before him, Verlaine, whom Catulle Mendès once called “a Desbordes-Valmore in pants” (Jasénas 110), inscribes in the text a portrait of himself as “impuissant” or overwhelmed by excessive—but enchanting—femininity.

Of all the readers of Desbordes-Valmore, Montesquiou is the only one who attempts to articulate and to explain the enchantment and deviation induced by Desbordes-Valmore's maternal voice. Montesquiou was a devoted fan of Desbordes-Valmore; in 1894, he organized an event in her honor at which he gave a public lecture entitled “Félicité” (later included in Autels privilégiés). Reflecting back on past critiques, he identifies the reviewers' ardeur as the revival of their childhood spirit (“la mise en présence de leur âme enfantine”). “A tous,” he adds, “notre mémoire signe de ce nom ‘Un tout petit enfant s'en allait à l'école [from “L'Écolier”]’” (5). Reading Desbordes-Valmore effects an imaginary return to childhood and the maternal body.

Later nineteenth-century readers' reception of Lamartine parallels their response to Desbordes-Valmore. Their readings put into play an imaginary identification with the body of a text imagined as maternal, an experience that is at once enchanting and troubling. Readers such as Verlaine, Hérédia and Mallarmé trace their ascendancy not only to the maternal figure of Desbordes-Valmore but also to Lamartine. Verlaine would claim as much in “Hommes d'aujourd'hui”: “ce poète, notre plus grand bien au-dessus de Musset, notre plus noble bien en avant de Vigny, notre père et mère à tous, Lamartine!”¹⁷ For Verlaine, Lamartine was not only a father but also a mother figure. Indeed, his femininity resonates in his patronym, which is coded as feminine since its first syllable “la” is the French feminine article.

For José-Maria de Hérédia, Lamartine's name evokes clear childhood memories, as his is the first poet's name he remembers:

Lamartine! Son nom doucement sonore est le premier nom de poète qui ait caressé mon oreille. Ses vers sont les premiers que ma mémoire ait retenus lorsque, tout petit enfant, je m'agenouillais dans le grand lit maternel et que, joignant les mains, je récitais mot par mot, suivant une voix bien chère qui s'est tue depuis bien longtemps, la prière matinale:

“O Père qu'adore mon père!
Toi qu'on ne nomme qu'à genoux!
Toi dont le nom terrible et doux
Fait courber le front de ma mère!”(18)

Hérédia remembers echoing his mother's voice as a child as she sang Lamartine's “Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil.”¹⁹ Despite the quotation's general confusion of all figures of authority, Hérédia associates Lamartine primarily with the maternal caress. In fact, the place where he remembers echoing his mother's voice, the “lit maternel,” contains a partial anagram of the poet's patronym (l / i / m / a / t / r / n / e ❙ l / a / m / r / t / i / n / e). Furthermore, he retrospectively construes this moment as the origin of his own voice.

Like Hérédia, Mallarmé associates Lamartine with his childhood and his mother. As he wrote to Paul Verlaine in 1885,

J'ai perdu, tout enfant, à sept ans, ma mère, adoré d'une grand-mère qui m'éleva d'abord: puis j'ai traversé bien des pensions et lycées, d'âme lamartinienne avec un secret désir de remplacer, un jour, Béranger, parce que je l'avais rencontré dans une maison amie. Il paraît que c'était trop compliqué pour être mis en exécution, mais j'ai longtemps essayé dans cent petits cahiers de vers qui m'ont toujours été confisqués, si j'ai bonne mémoire.²⁰

These recovered juvenilia, entitled Glanes, gather together the adolescent's favorite poems. Among them can be found Lamartine's “Le Rossignol,” a poem permeated by a nostalgia for the mother.²¹ Another early poem, “La Prière d'une mère” (1859), also evinces Lamartine's tone, but, as Luigi di Nardis claims, the poem once again attests to much more than mere stylistic influence by revealing the intimate connections between Mallarmé's juvenilia and Lamartine's symbolic role as maternal substitute.²²

Desbordes-Valmore's role as poetic mother figure is a cliché of French literary history, but these passages demonstrate that Lamartine was just as present in the nurseries of his later nineteenth-century readers. In fact, a caricature by Nadar from the Revue Comique à l'Usage de Gens Sérieux from 1849 shows Lamartine playing lullabies in a state-regulated “Bureau des nourrices.” Given that he was as well known in the nursery as he was on the political stage, he could take on the job of “endormeur de marmots,” having lost the 1848 elections. The cartoon suited Lamartine the poet as well as Lamartine the politician. Lamartine was “une lecture de jeunesse,” as one critic, Raoul Rosières, points out in the Revue Bleue in 1891, the year of the centennial of Lamartine's birth. Alluding to the figure of the adolescent reader as Baudelaire did before him, our sons at sixteen, he adds “en conserveront toujours, ainsi que nous-mêmes, le charmant souvenir au fond de leur mémoire.”²³ Even today, Lamartine is one of the most commonly assigned poets for French school children.

One significant common thread through different readers' response to Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine is the tendency to use the language of fluidity to evoke the gendered poetic voice. Whereas a happy few, like the young Mallarmé and Hérédia, viewed Lamartine with nostalgia, more readers shared Flaubert's negative response to the poet and his fluid style. Read by Baudelaire or Flaubert, the poetry of Lamartine or Desbordes-Valmore awakens an ambivalent fantasy of the fluid maternal body. And in Montesquiou's description, reading Desbordes-Valmore activates a fantasy of the oceanic maternal body, an enchantment he compares to drowning or more precisely to “la lutte des barques contre une mer démontée, une phosphorescente mer faite de larmes et de flammes.”²⁴ Desbordes-Valmore's readers are like little boats fighting an oceanic phantasmagoria.

Ironically, Lamartine applies the image of the little boat to Desbordes-Valmore herself in “A Madame Desbordes-Valmore”: “Cette pauvre barque, ô Valmore! / Est l'image de ton destin.”²⁵ Michael Dahany has argued that the poem opposes two boats—one master of the seas, the other “humble voile sur l'onde / … que chaque lame inonde”—as it does two kinds of poetry, one virile, the other feminine.²⁶ In Lamartine's “A Madame Desbordes-Valmore,” the metaphor of the boat, then, figures a discourse on gender and poetry. Lamartine uses the nautical metaphor dismissively to safeguard his own masculine privilege as a writer and uphold an essentialist opposition between masculine and feminine poetic voice.

The image of the little boat on the wild sea pervades Lamartine's work. Through a strange transference, the water imagery in Lamartine's poetry appears to submerge his entire persona, and threatens to drown his reader too. Just imagine the poet adrift in a little vessel; he might well be sighing:

Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages,
Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour,
Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l'océan des âges
                              Jeter l'ancre un seul jour?

(38)

“Le Lac,” Lamartine's most famous poem, relies on the image of a small boat unable to drop its anchor in the current to depict the passage of time beyond the individual's control. Indeed, in Méditations poétiques, the barque appears frequently as a metaphor for the poet.²⁷ The novella Graziella devotes an entire episode to the narrator's boat, its peregrinations and its eventual shipwreck, since Lamartine's barques are inevitably threatened by storms and high seas.²⁸ For Lamartine's readers, however, the poet resembles most a leaky vessel, an image that neatly encapsulates his perceived faults. Sainte-Beuve asks whether he should abandon himself to the current (“se lâcher au courant de l'onde” 1:373). What many interpret as a facile style, “un art sans art” (Sainte-Beuve 1:370)—a frequent charge leveled at Desbordes-Valmore—leads them to point to a defect of character, what Baudelaire identifies as a lack of will-power and self-possession (“pas assez de volonté,” “pas assez maîtr[e de lui-même]” [274]). Taking things to amusing extremes, Verlaine restores the poet to his element in his caricature “Lamartine sortant de la douche frais et dispos, à Aix-les-Bains en 1825” (La Plume, 28 February 1896).²⁹ Ironically, this lack of mastery resembles the criticism leveled by Lamartine in “À Madame Desbordes-Valmore.”

As overflow often connotes femininity, his readers berate his fluid imagery as effeminate. In a letter from 1870, Lautréamont calls Lamartine a “femmelette” whereas Proudhon prefers the term “femmelin.”³⁰ And yet another mid-century reader, Leconte de Lisle, uses gender to dismiss Lamartine: “… cette langue est tellement molle, efféminée et incorrecte, le vers manque à ce point de muscles, de sang et de nerfs, qu'il est impossible d'en poursuivre la lecture et l'étude sans un intolérable malaise.”³¹

Flaubert's disgust with Lamartine is also well-known. The novelist returns frequently to his repugnance for the poet in his correspondence with Louise Colet. For Flaubert, Lamartine has only “female phrases.”³² “C'est un petit eunuque, la couille lui manque, il n'a jamais pissé que de l'eau claire” (2: 299). For Flaubert, as for Leconte de Lisle, Lamartine and the free-flowing style he practices lack the attributes of masculine writing—namely the attributes of the male body, muscle and hair—and therefore correspond to feminine phrases whose characteristics are those of the non-male body of the eunuch.³³ Flaubert's image of “clear piss” is all the more effective in deriding Lamartine's lack of masculinity because the image of clear, invisible ink is one frequently used to characterize women's writing. In an article on Poetae minores for the Revue des Deux Mondes, for instance, Charles Labitte writes that after reading women's texts, “… aucune n'a laissé de trace vive dans la mémoire: on garde seulement l'impression d'une certaine harmonie assoupissante” (my emphasis).³⁴ By comparing Lamartine's ink to the “assoupissant” style of women's writing, Flaubert effectively castrates him. Lamartine's style is aberrant because he is expected to adhere to the standard masculine style; had he been a woman, as Desbordes-Valmore was, his style might have been praised for its exemplary expression of an inferior feminine style.

Flaubert's excessive repugnance in this case is self-contradictory. As Janet Beizer has suggested, Flaubert's letters produce a split subject caught between affinity for Lamartine's fluid style and his rejection of its excess, between disavowed lyricism and practiced Realism, between repressed femininity and adamant masculinity.

A similar dynamic is at work in Madame Bovary. Flaubert can at once distance himself from his female character through narrative technique, and identify with her, as his famous dictum “Madame Bovary c'est moi!” suggests. One pertinent example of this ambivalence and rejection occurs in the episode of Emma and Léon's adulterous affair in Rouen in Madame Bovary (Part 3, ch. 3). Deceived by Rodolphe, Emma seeks once again true romance with Léon as they set out for a boat ride in the port:

Une fois, la lune parut; alors ils ne manquèrent pas à faire des phrases trouvant l'astre mélancolique et plein de poésie; même elle se mit à chanter:

Un soir t'en souvient-il? nous voguions, etc.

Sa voix harmonieuse et faible se perdait sur les flots.³⁵

In this episode, by singing “Le Lac,” Emma is engaged in exactly the kind of romantic behavior the novel deflates; it is equally this kind of sentimentalism that Flaubert actively condemns in his correspondence. In the passage quoted above, the image of the moon and its characterization as “melancholy star” summon the entire lexicon of Romantic clichés, not the least those found in “Le Lac” itself. The reference to “Le Lac” is at least partially ironic; Michael Kline has suggested that the use of “etc.” here shows a shift in narrative level that introduces commentary by the skeptical, disillusioned narrator.³⁶ Nevertheless, Flaubert's attempt to distinguish clearly between his contained, authorial voice and the overflow of sentimental voices—Lamartine's, Emma's, Louise Colet's—exposes his investment in both: his very feminization and rejection of Lamartine's lyrical voice are symptomatic of his own identification with, and obscure desire for it.

Although Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine both evoke for their readers an excessive, seductive and dangerous fantasy of and identification with the maternal voice, each author's persona and gender largely determine the nature of the fantasy. I have set Desbordes-Valmore against Lamartine (or vice versa) to expose the workings of the essentialist gender ideology that underlies nineteenth-century critical discourse on poetic voice. In the case of Lamartine, whom Flaubert and others perceive as inappropriately feminine, the poet is swept up and evacuated in the same terms used to describe so many female writers, including Desbordes-Valmore. Manifesting all the characteristics of “femininity,” Lamartine's poetics appear monstrous, whereas Desbordes-Valmore's, exhibiting similar qualities, seem natural and appealing. Therein lies the contradiction: although similar in many ways, Desbordes-Valmore invites a positive, ecstatic and fluid identification on the part of the reader, who, bathed, lulled and enchanted, fantasizes a return to the oceanic maternal body, whereas Lamartine often repels positive, unambivalent identification on the part of most readers, who, faced with a leaky vessel, are afraid of becoming one, and drowning.

Notes

1. Desbordes-Valmore's and Lamartine's poems are common sources for later poets. Many of Baudelaire's poems have Valmorean models; for instance, “L'Invitation au voyage” mimics the 5/5/7 rhythm of “La Petite Pleureuse à sa mère.” Desbordes-Valmore's use of hendecasyllabic meter was adopted by Verlaine and Rimbaud in such poems as “Il faut, voyez vous, nous pardonner les choses” and “Larme.” Rimbaud also acknowledges his debt to Lamartine in “Lettres du Voyant” and his “Ce qu'on dit des poètes à propos des fleurs” begins “Ainsi, toujours …” like “Le Lac.” Banville commemorates Desbordes-Valmore in “Celle qui chantait” (Les Exilés) and Lamartine in the preface to Odes funambulesques and in the essay “État de la poésie en 1889.” For the text of this essay, see Peter S. Hambly, “État de la poésie en 1889: un article oublié de Banville,” Littératures (Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail) 29 (1993): 177-84. Whereas the Lamartinean pretexts to particular Symbolist poems are usually noted in scholarly editions, Desbordes-Valmore's generally remain unnoticed. For her legacy, see Éliane Jasénas, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique (Geneva: Droz, 1962).

2. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1997).

3. The historical and sociological context of French Romanticism's “sick hero” has been studied recently by Allan Pasco, in Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter P, 1997).

4. Les Confidences (Paris: Pagnerre, Furne et Hachette, 1862) and Manuscrit de ma mère (Paris: Hachette, 1871) are just some of Lamartine's autobiographical texts that credit his mother, Alix de Lamartine, as the source of his poetic voice. See my article “Confessions of a Mamma's Boy: Lamartine's Manuscrit de ma mère,” French Literature Series 27 (forthcoming).

5. I borrow the notion of a delegitimized tradition from Marie Maclean's The Name of the Mother (New York: Routledge, 1994). Before she became a poet, Desbordes-Valmore was a professional actress whose many performances included Racine, Molière, Grétry, Rossini and Spontini. Her earliest publications (“Le Billet” [1807]) were not poems but romances; a selection of her romances is available in A.J. Boyer d'Agen, Les Greniers et la guitare de Marceline (Paris: Marcel Seheur, 1931).

6. The full quotation from Roland Barthes runs as follows: “Fiction d'un individu (quelque M. Teste à l'envers) qui abolirait en lui les barrières, les classes, les exclusions, non par syncrétisme, mais par simple débarras de ce vieux spectre: la contradiction logique; qui mélangerait tous les langages, fussent-ils réputés incompatibles; qui supporterait, muet, toutes les accusations d'illogisme, d'infidélité; qui resterait impassible devant l'ironie socratique (amener l'autre au suprême opprobre: se contredire). … Or ce contre-héros existe: c'est le lecteur de texte, dans le moment où il prend son plaisir.” Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 9-10.

7. The portrait of Desbordes-Valmore, part of the series entitled “Réflexions …,” was first published in Revue Fantaisiste July 1, 1861 and reprinted later in L'Art romantique. See Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) 2: 145-46.

8. Sainte-Beuve's first essay on Desbordes-Valmore initially appeared in La Revue des Deux Mondes in August, 1833, and was later reissued in Portraits contemporains (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882) 2: 91-144.

9. Barbara Johnson, “Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literature in French, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) 177. Reprinted in Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 101-28.

10. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, “Madame Desbordes-Valmore,” in Le XIXe Siècle. Les Œuvres et les Hommes. 3e partie. 1e série. Les poètes (Paris: Amyot, 1862) 148.

11. In this way, Desbordes-Valmore performs the mirror-role of the mother described by object relations psychoanalysts like Donald Winnicott. See “The Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971) 111-18.

12. For an overview of hysteria, see Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) 37.

13. Gérard Gasarian, “La Figure du poète hystérique ou l'allégorie chez Baudelaire,” Poétique 86 (1991): 177-78.

14. Written at the instigation of the publisher, Gervais Charpentier, Alexandre Dumas's preface to Les Pleurs appears to have nothing to do with the poems in the volume. See “Preface aux Pleurs,” in Desbordes-Valmore, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marc Bertrand (Grenoble: PU de Grenoble, 1973) 337-39. Desbordes-Valmore's biographer, Francis Ambrière, conjectures that Dumas was not familiar with her poetry when he wrote the preface (Le Siècle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et les siens [Paris: Seuil, 1987] 430); however, the fact that Dumas had dedicated a poem to her in 1826, in his Préludes poétiques and that she published in his review, Psyché, that same year, make it likely that they were acquainted. More curious still, Dumas mistakes “Le Petit Peureux,” published for the first time in 1830, for a poem he heard in his childhood. As he was 28 in 1830, he was decidedly too old for bedtime stories! Nevertheless, Dumas's preface gives a powerful reading of the poetry of Desbordes-Valmore insofar as it describes an acute state of receptivity to sound: “vous avez trouvé vos facultés les plus ardentes pour écouter.” Dumas makes the connection between Desbordes-Valmore's poetry and childhood memories of his mother, as will Baudelaire and others in later texts.

15. Victor Hugo, “Aux Feuillantines” Contemplations, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) 692.

16. Paul Verlaine, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in Poètes maudits, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: SEDES, 1982) 62.

17. Verlaine, “Hommes d'aujourd'hui,” Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) 828.

18. José Maria de Hérédia, “Discours de réception à l'Académie française,” Les Trophées (Paris: Lemerre, 1893) 239.

19. According to Anne-Marie de Brem and Marie-Renée Morin, “Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil” was Lamartine's most popular poem and was set to music by Berlioz, Lalo, Massé and Liszt. Lamartine et les artistes du XIXe siècle (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1990).

20. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) 662.

21. For a complete list of Mallarmé's gleanings, see Henri Mondor, Mallarmé, lycéen (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).

22. Luigi di Nardis, “L'Influence de Lamartine sur les poèmes de jeunesse de Mallarmé,” Journées européennes d'études lamartiniennes. Actes du Congrès II, Mâcon, sept. 1965 (Mâcon: Comité Permanent d'Études Lamartiniennes, 1965) 40.

23. Raoul Rosières, “Pourquoi on ne lit plus Lamartine,” Revue Bleue 1891: 185. Rpt in Recherches sur la poésie contemporaine (Paris: A. Laisney, 1896) 167-96.

24. The complete passage is worth quoting for its insight into the series of reviews of Desbordes-Valmore's poetry: “Nous sommes noyés d'efflorescences et d'effluves, de sourires, de soupirs et de souvenirs. C'est à cet assaut par une tempête de feux et de pleurs qu'il faut sans doute attribuer l'air d'incomplet et de vague même des meilleurs essais autour de cette œuvre. Étude sous formes d'articles, reprises avec ardeur, puis qu'on dirait rebutées, et qui ont de la lutte des barques contre une mer démontée, une phosphorescente mer faite de larmes et de flammes.” Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, “Félicité” (1894) in Autels privilégiés (Paris: Charpentier, 1899) 15.

25. Lamartine, “À Madame Desbordes-Valmore,” in Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) 526.

26. Michael Dahany, “Poète maudite,” in A History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 733.

27. Jean-Pierre Richard, “Lamartine,” in Études sur le romantisme (Paris: Seuil, 1971) 158.

28. Lamartine, Graziella, Episode IV-XXIV (Paris: Librio, 1996) 21-45.

29. See the note to “Sur un portrait de Lamartine” where Le Dantec (the editor) reminds us of the existence of this caricature (this note was removed from the 1984 edition), Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) 1177. For more caricatures of Lamartine, see Loíc Chotard, “Lamartine devant Nadar,” in Relire Lamartine aujourd'hui (Paris: Nizet, 1993) 69-80.

30. Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 401. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les Femmelins: grandes figures romantiques (Paris: Éditions “À L'Écart,” 1989).

31. Charles Leconte de Lisle, “Lamartine,” in Leconte de Lisle, articles, préfaces, discours, ed. Edgard Pich (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971) 170-71.

32. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 1: 210.

33. Flaubert seems unable to characterize female phrases, what we might call today écriture féminine, in terms of the explicitly female, rather than non-male, body. It goes without saying that a positive interpretation of Lamartine's fluid style might find in it a very modern expression of fragmented subjectivity. For such a reading, see Maurice Blanchot, “Situation de Lamartine,” in Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1975 [1943]) 175-79.

34. Charles Labitte, “Poetae minores” Revue des Deux Mondes, cited in Christine Planté, La Petite Sœur de Balzac: essai sur la femme auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1989) 81.

35. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Béatrice Didier (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1983) 292.

36. See Michael B. Kline “Evacuating Lamartine: Flaubert's Use of etc. as Shifter in Madame Bovary,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 18.1-2 (1989-90): 97-118.