[In the following essay, Porter argues that Desbordes-Valmore's elegies in many cases transcend the gender stereotypes usually associated with female poets of the nineteenth century.]

Naïve, emotional, formally incoherent, limited to personal concerns, and weakened by a dependent attitude: such is the phallocratic stereotype of literature by women. Sophisticated, rational, wide-ranging, formally disciplined, and of broad social significance: such are supposed to be the attributes of “masterpieces” by men.¹ Easy to refute, and scarcely worthy of consideration when it comes to women's writing that transcends gender (such as we find in works by Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Madame de Staël [in her essays], Marguerite Yourcenar, and others from all periods of French literature), such stereotypes acquire an insidious, subtle power when it is a question of an “écriture féminine” where bearing and raising children and nurturing a family are given a prominent place. With the possible exception of Colette, no French woman writer has suffered more from the stigmatizing label of “féminité” than has the Romantic elegist Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859).²

To convince ourselves of this phenomenon, we have only to consider the disparaging evaluations of her work by capable scholars who have paid her prolonged and respectful attention and who, by coincidence, are themselves women, yet apparently influenced by the very critical blindness which they combat through the act of paying attention to a neglected woman author. Eliane Jasenas finds genuine but brief moments of inspiration in her works alternating clearly with contrived or lifeless passages.³ Jeanine Moulin (9-12) praises the vigorous lyricism of the “Rêve intermittent d'une nuit triste,” “Renoncement,” and “A Monsieur A.L.,” the last dedicated to the canuts massacred by government troops in Lyons in 1834; the spontaneity of her emotions; and her “natural [sense of] rhythm” (where have we heard that characterization before?). But she condemns the verbose sentimentality of other poems and, in general, Desbordes-Valmore's limited imagination, scanty acquaintance with literature, confused expression of feelings, and lack of artistic and emotional control. She is judged, in sum, to be “souvent négligente et geignarde. Manquant de réserve, elle abuse, à la mode de son temps, des plaintes et des sanglots, de l'interjection et de l'exclamation.”

Such evaluations from sympathizers would scarcely embolden us to try to add her to the canon. Nevertheless, a closer look at how Desbordes-Valmore actually constructs her elegies reveals a greater artistry and control than one might have expected despite the patent emotionalism of her surface content. Her lyric self may well often be housebound, weepy, and helpless; her implied author is not, as revealed by the ingenious structural and rhetorical mould in which the content is cast. Desbordes-Valmore's main problem is that she is not feminine enough: as we read, the strength of her assertions and her objectivity clash with our impressions of her effusions because we have not become accustomed to her original mode of rendering the elegiac tradition. In a word, she treats “female” subjects with a “male” authority in her greatest poems, disrupting the horizon of our expectations and thereby creating a sense of confusion and incoherence for the non-initiate.⁴

Three poems that at first glance appear particularly incoherent will provide materials sufficient for an initial sondage: “Sol natal” from Pauvres Fleurs (1839) and “Rêve intermittent d'une nuit triste” and “Les Sanglots” from the Poésies inédites (1860).⁵ In an important article, Michael Danahy has demonstrated how Desbordes-Valmore explicitly impersonates either sex in her verse and, at other times, keeps the speaker's gender textually indeterminate or switches from one textual gender to the other; thus “the reader is put on alert not to take gender for granted.”⁶ In the three major poems to be discussed below, however, Desbordes-Valmore consistently refers to her self as female.

Moreover, a content analysis of “Sol natal” produces predictable results. The dominant word families includes the emotional intuitive faculties (cœur and âme five times each for a total of 10 occurrences in 156 lines), family relationships (frère, sœur, mère, père, paternel, fille, and famille, with 21 instances), and suffering (triste, tristesse, lugubres; pitié; larmes, pleur[s], pleurant; gémissement, amer, souffrance, plainte, calvaire, tourment, chagrin, and related words, 24 times). A former senior colleague of mine, once offering unsolicited advice on how to teach the Renaissance love lyric in a survey course, neatly concluded “amour, fleurs, jeunesse, passons.” One might be similarly tempted to say of Desbordes-Valmore: “famille, cœur, souffrance, passons.” But let us now look closer.

The title “Sol natal” refers to a lamented loss, to the childhood of innocence and happiness that Desbordes-Valmore experienced in Flanders before she became an actress at age 13, touring for two years with her mother in order to earn passage to Guadeloupe, where lived a wealthy cousin whom they hoped might assist them, as they had been ruined by the Revolution (Desbordes-Valmore's father was a heraldic painter). At last they arrived in the Antilles only to confront a ruinous slave revolt and an outbreak of yellow fever that killed the mother; Marceline had to return to France alone. She continued her wanderings as an actress until 1822, and she frequently moved after that in order to find cheaper lodging.⁷ This elegy expresses intense nostalgia. In a contemplative, nurturant vein, Desbordes-Valmore replies to a fellow Fleming's appeal for sympathy and at length becomes a mother-surrogate for him, offering consolation. Her interpersonal role, then, is one stereotypically identified as “feminine,” one concerned with (emotional) “maintenance” rather than “task.” The trouble with Marceline Desbordes-Valmore in this poem (ironically speaking) is that she does not sufficiently respect the limits of the stereotype. We experience a clash between emotional intimacy and the generalizations that “defeminize” it, between the effusion and the power of the royal will communicated in self-assured third-person impersonal formulas:

Il sera fait ainsi qu'Henry me le demande,
Dans sa tristesse écrite à sa sœur la Flamande.
Il lui sera donné cette part de mon cœur,
Où la pensée intime est toute retirée,
Toute grave, et contente, et de bruit délivrée,
Pour s'y réfugier comme en un coin rêveur.

(1: 412, emphasis added)

The verses combine the ostensible helplessness of emotion with the mastery of analysis (“cette part”), and the immediacy of sentiment with the distancing of abstraction (“sa tristesse écrite”). The striking union of abstract and concrete evokes the same stylistic habit in the visionary odes of Victor Hugo, but Desbordes-Valmore is more intellectual than he. In a phrase such as Hugo's “une miette de l'infini,” for example (“Magnitudo parvi,” Les Contemplations),⁸ the tenor or feeling of human insignificance is communicated via the concrete (“miette”), whereas the vehicle or message is communicated via the abstract (“l'infini,” the vastness of the cosmos that elicits the human reaction; such formulas in Hugo are not uncommon). Desbordes-Valmore reverses the respective statuses of impression and expression so that the feeling is communicated via the abstraction (“tristesse”) and its vehicle via the concrete (“écrite”). In this example, her emotion, before being expressed, has already been intellectually processed and mastered through the distancing, generalizing act of abstraction, one that recalls Leo Spitzer's “klassische Dämpfung” in his essay on Racine's récit de Théramène (Phèdre V,7, treated in Linguistics and Literary History). The poet's faculty of memory (“la pensée intime”) is likewise characterized in a voluntaristic way (it can withdraw and maintain its composure) and is situated in the intersection of the abstract and the concrete (“coin rêveur”). In Desbordes-Valmore the abstract/concrete catachresis corresponds to a moment of self-possession, whereas in Hugo it reflects a moment of disorientation and confusion. We shall see that such virtual self-control does not, however, deprive our poet of the capacity for elaborating cosmic visions as grandiose as those of Hugo.

Verses 11-18 develop the metaphor of memory in a way that deepens the superficial vision of Lamartine's “Le Lac” and announces Rimbaud's “Mémoire,” where contemplation stirs up the sufferings of the past and where movement is reduced to immobility. But Desbordes-Valmore enriches her discussion of memory in two additional ways: it becomes the Muse that she invokes (vv. 15-40). A male poet can use a personified female entity as Muse; the Muse represents the inspiration born of the focus of desire. Desbordes-Valmore does not deploy either Lesbian eros or sisterly philia to this purpose, and the caritas she experiences in her relationship to her correspondent makes him as its object inferior to her, thus unable to provide the fuel for transcendence. By way of compensation, she designates as Muse an abstract mental faculty (her apostrophe to “Mémoire!” anticipates Valéry) addressed with the intimate tu, whereas her correspondent is addressed as vous: she depends for inspiration less on her interlocutor than on the strength of her own mind. She then dynamizes her memory by transposing the horizontal mirror of the water's surface to the vertical, where it becomes a veil swelling with the wind of a desire always already deprived of its object (the primordial mother): “Et sur ton voile ouvert les souffles les plus frais / Ne font longtemps trembler que larmes et cyprès!” The syllepsis “le voile [actualized]/la voile [implied]” combines in one image the impetus of desire and its frustration, with a secondary association to Veronica's veil and the death of the innocent. This bittersweet complex of ideas (you cannot remember your childhood without realizing that you have lost it) prepares the “Et in Arcadia ego” topos that will predominate in the vision of the native land arising from the transitional word “Là” (v. 41) once the invocation to memory has been completed. Since Mnemosyne, or Memory, is the mother of the Muses, she represents in and of herself the primordial mother, simultaneously figuring the pathway to and the goal of recuperation. Memories of the lost past elicit grief, but such grief, if shared, can become restorative. In the symbolic system of Desbordes-Valmore, tears figure mother's milk; empathic grieving nourishes the recipient and also the giver: both are emotionally “fed” by the interchange. Thus Desbordes-Valmore can write to her husband that “Je m'évanouis en dedans, quand je suis sevrée ainsi de t'écrire” and that “tes mélancholies me nourrissent.”⁹

Desbordes-Valmore, in short, presents a clear picture of the confusion of memory in interaction with the present. Her masterful use of versification in “Sol natal,” at first glance a casual series of rhyming couplets strewn with intermittent appearances of other forms, depicts the alternation of mental states: the embedded quatrains in rimes embrassées render the doubling of consciousness at those moments when the private becomes public, for example, vv. 2-6 (“How will I reply to Henry B.'s feelings in writing?”), vv. 33-36 (“How will I reply to him if he speaks of our childhood home?”), vv. 41-44 (his book is a mirror of our past). The sequence of heptasyllables among the alexandrines (vv. 93-116, beginning “Comme un rêve passager, / Partout où terre m'emporte”) imitates the instability of life in a land of exile; fear for the poet's children, as yet too weak to endure its rigors (vv. 143-46), is conveyed by the only quatrain (other than the two that further destabilize the heptasyllables) in rimes croisées. Such fears, which to a superficial observer might appear as mere histrionic anxiety, “typically feminine,” were not unreasonable in Lyons during the labor unrest of the early 1830s, when bullets and grapeshot were flying through the streets as striking workers (and some old people, women, and children who happened to get in the way) were being massacred by government troops.¹⁰ Desbordes-Valmore's bloody initiation to a strange city frames the evocation of the children's sheltered garden at the conclusion, one that creates closure by harking back to the irretrievable garden of the poet's own childhood.

Poets facing other danger and death tend to embody their fears in surrogates who assume the emotional weaknesses of the lyric self, leaving the latter to subsist as an imposing monument of artificially purified resolve. Thus Hugo, in “Mors” of the Contemplations, introduces weeping mothers calling out to Death: “Rends-nous ce petit être. / Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître?” (663), while the poet himself calmly contemplates the consoling mystery of the afterlife which only he can see. In her own poetic practice, Desbordes-Valmore creates many such surrogates, but, unlike Hugo, she does not dissociate herself from them: “Puis, sur nos toits en fleurs j'ai revu nos colombes, / Transfuges envolés d'un paradis perdu, / Redemandant leur ciel dans un pleur assidu” (vv. 50-52; in Charles Nodier's words, “nous suspendons le rêve de notre existence entre deux paradis”). Her compatriot's book of memories has comforted her by providing

De ces accents lointains qui désaltèrent l'âme,
Dont votre livre en pleurs vient d'humecter la flamme;
Jugez si ce fut doux d'y respirer enfin,
Ces natives senteurs dont l'âme a toujours faim!

(vv. 81-84)

A little later in the text, music and even prayer weep. But, as the passage just quoted suggests, the tears of nostalgia quench the thirst of loss and provide spiritual nourishment; they function like mother's milk to create a nurturant bond among the bereaved members of humanity. They do not attest, as they often appear to do in the verse of a male poet such as Hugo, to a passive helplessness, but instead to a transforming power whereby loss can be changed into recovery as it was already in Desbordes-Valmore's Muse figure. Thus “Dieu, par tant de pleurs daigne épurer ma voix” (v. 128), and, as she evokes her children in the final verses of the poem, the poet recovers her mother by taking her place.

“Le Rêve intermittent d'une nuit triste” (2: 531-33) consists of 56 hendecasyllabic rhyming couplets. It was composed in late November 1846 after Desbordes-Valmore's two weeks of vigil over her dying daughter Inès. As the poet falls into a feverish sleep, she dreams that Flanders, “la patrie absente,” has become a surrogate mother who will suckle her daughter, restoring to her the vital essence she is losing:

Du lait qui vous vient d'une source divine
Gonflez le cœur pur de cette frêle ondine
Le lait jaillissant d'un sol vierge et fleuri
Lui paîra le mien qui fut triste et tari.

(vv. 61-64)

At the same time, the metaphorical designation of the ailing daughter with the lower-cased name of the then healthier older one, Ondine, operates a wish-fulfilling substitution. But the truncated hendecasyllables (which surely inspired Verlaine)¹¹ reflect a frustrated aspiration to plenitude and harmony. Since I was once sheltered in Flanders, the land of my childhood, the unconscious reasoning seems to run, my sick daughter could be sheltered there too. Such a return appears to reflect the wish for regression, the feeling that “I am supposed to be a mother now, but sometimes I still feel like a child.” In the style of the eighteenth-century visionary ode, however, personified Liberty speaks in a prosopopoeia (vv. 32-40), exhorting suffering humanity not to despair. A “feminine” meditation on personal grief and helplessness is thus strongly modified by the strong poet's voice of authority announcing a moral principle of general validity. The assertion of the prosopopoeia modifies its context so that an expression of personal suffering stands revealed as a stoical statement of the need to endure and be responsible for others. The missing element, whose absence adds to the complexity of the poem, is the illusion of being able to transform the unsatisfying world through heroic action. The unusual eleven-syllable line, then, appears to have a two-edged function, the mimesis of frustration (like the forever-unresolved harmonies of Wagner's “Liebestod”) together with a dynamic demonstration of the formal mastery of the poet.¹²

“Les Sanglots” (2: 542-44), again from the posthumous Poésies inédites of 1860 (itself perhaps composed in 1853), carries the clash of nostalgia and poetic power to its logical extreme, so that desire transforms not only this world, but the next one as well. Alexandrine rhyming couplets are interrupted by three appearances of a refrain in pentasyllabic rimes croisées:

Ciel! où m'en irai-je
Sans pieds pour courir!
Ciel! où frapperai-je
Sans clé pour ouvrir?

The refrain does not—as refrains often do in the lyric—reassure, but generates an image of the coagulated, frozen world of damnation. The first three logical divisions, before the first refrain, express fear: “I dread purgatory more than Hell” (vv. 1-8, ending with an appeal to God), “for there I could hear the lamentations of the damned without being able to comfort them” (vv. 9-18, ending with an appeal to Christ), “I feel helpless” (vv. 19-30). The fourth section, which follows the first occurrence of the refrain, depicts a world without access to life or to God, “Sans prière, ni lumière, ni air” (vv. 35-50). After the second appearance of the refrain, the fifth section portrays a world without human sympathy, “Sans famille, ni livres, ni amis” (vv. 55-56), and the third and last instance of the refrain follows. This threefold repetition, bracketing the middle sections of the poem, creates an icon of imprisonment that reinforces the characterization of privation without recourse. The third and last part of the poem (logical divisions six and seven) provides a solution. The poet calls upon her mother as an intercessor (vv. 71-90), and then she and her mother join forces to descend into Purgatory to rescue their former companions (vv. 91-102). The final apostrophe to “ces dolentes âmes” (vv. 96-102) invokes sisterly solidarity, and the concluding image transforms a conflation of physical, emotional, and spiritual motherhood into the supreme redemptive principle: “Ma mère nous enfante à l'éternel séjour!” Thus the team of mother and daughter reunited achieves in their own Harrowing of Purgatory both divine and mythic status in a heroic action equaled only by Christ's prior Harrowing of Hell. As we move from beginning to end of the poem, the helpless, elegiac sobbing is transformed into an imposing epic achievement; nostalgia has been promoted to the rank of an eschatological principle; nor must we overlook that the scripteur's energetic depiction of privation is itself an assertion of visionary power.

Of course Marceline Desbordes-Valmore often appears more flowery and sentimental than I have chosen to represent her, but she is by no means only a weak, wailing woman. Eliane Jasenas, who was much more effective in rehabilitating her in discussions of the poems other than the three problematical ones which I have for that reason chosen, has shown how an explosion of vis poetica gives birth to an awakening of the world (“Jours d'été”) (Jasenas 28-32); how an innocuous, derivative surface conceals a powerful female sexuality (“Les Roses de Saadi”) (56-64); how the earthy old woman initiates the girl child and imparts vitality to God's otherwise colorless, cloistered world (“La Fileuse et l'Enfant”) (108-13). Deprived of a formal education, socialized to see herself above all as a wife and mother, Desbordes-Valmore nevertheless finds in religion a way of authorizing her visionary poetic force, and in a quasi-personified homeland and nature, she finds a way of establishing contact with the image of the nurturant mother-goddess who would 70 years later empower Colette's heroine during her train trip southward in La Vagabonde. When we find Desbordes-Valmore's verse uneven, inept, or incoherent, I would argue, our reaction often results from a failure to recognize—parallel to the subjects of pregnancy, motherhood, loss, and lamentation in her écriture féminine—the varied, assertive, controlling craftsmanship of the strong poet. So long as we validate women authors only in principle, without validating their literary production even when they sound like conventionally socialized women rather than politically correct ones, we shall miss seeing how their implied authors can transcend those socially prescribed gender roles that their lyric selves seem to embrace.

Notes

1. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore herself ironically accepts such a gender-based discrimination when she explains why she hardly ever writes sonnets: “Ce genre régulier n'appartient qu'à l'homme, qui se fait une joie de triompher de sa pensée même en l'enfermant dans cette entrave brillante.” Lettres de Marceline Desbordes à Prosper Valmore, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1924) 1: 151 (21 May 1839).

2. See Christine Planté, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, ni poésie féminine, ni poésie féministe,” Feminism, ed. A. Maynor Hardee and Freeman G. Henry, French Literature Series 16 (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1989) 78-93, who explains why even feminists dismiss Desbordes-Valmore: “Les motifs de sa ‘condamnation féministe,’ si on cherche à les expliciter et les développer, seraient à peu près les suivants: les thèmes de l'œuvre—poésie amoureuse, sentiment maternel, célébration intimiste—impliquent une image de la femme soumise à ses fonctions traditionnelles, et soumise à l'homme” (79; see Planté's defense against these charges, 80-81). Sympathetic nineteenth-century responses to her work include those by Baudelaire (“Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains,” III), Sainte-Beuve (in a routine but extensive biographical essay in his Portraits contemporains), and Verlaine (in an effusive chapter of Les Poètes maudits which concludes by reproducing “Les Sanglots” in full). See also the bibliography in Jeanine Moulin, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Poètes d'aujourd'hui 46 (Paris: Seghers, 1955, rpt. 1983).

3. Eliane Jasenas, Le Poétique: Desbordes-Valmore et Nerval (Paris: Delarge, 1975) 16. This study contains detailed comments on many individual poems. Jasenas also offers a number of helpful characterizations of individual collections of poems and an overview of Desbordes-Valmore's career in her Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique (Geneva: Droz, 1962) 9-11, 141-80.

4. In a noteworthy chapter on “Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) 163-81, Barbara Johnson cites Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly in support of her view that “The problem with Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is not that the misogynists excluded her but that they applauded her. What they loved was her total avoidance of monstrosity, her willingness not to impinge on male territory in any way” (165). I would argue that these usually astute critics have been blinded by the smoke screen of Desbordes-Valmore's self-depreciation (keenly analyzed by Johnson later in her study) and that it is this same smoke-screen that disappoints feminist critics because they have taken it at face value. Desbordes-Valmore deploys powerful prosody to analyze the helplessness of her poetic mask.

5. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Les Œuvres poétiques, ed. Marc Bertrand, 2 vols. (PU de Grenoble, 1973) (paginated continuously).

6. Michael Danahy, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and the Engendered Canon,” Yale French Studies 75 (1988) 129-47 (138). He emphasizes that at the time the novel was considered a “female” genre and lyric poetry a “male” one, so that the very act of writing lyric poetry by a woman constituted a symbolic crossing of gender lines.

7. An authoritative biography has been recently offered by Francis Ambrière, Le Siècle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et les siens, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

8. Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, 2: Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) 629.

9. Lettres 1: 207 (2 August 1839) and 2: 38-40 (12 December 1840); compare her “La Jeune Fille et le Ramier,” Œuvres poétiques 2: 510 (rain/tears are necessary to grow flowers).

10. See Moulin 100 and Jasenas, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique 142, for the influence of our poet's militant “Dans la rue” on the Communist Resistance poets of World War II.

11. Ferdinando Neri treats Desbordes-Valmore's influence on Verlaine in his Il Maggio delle fate (Turin: Chiantore, 1929; rpt. 1944) 165-83.

12. See Marc Bertrand, “Les Techniques de la versification de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore” (diss. Grenoble III, 1977) for an exhaustive study of her prosodic modernity.