[In the following essay, Danahy explores Desbordes-Valmore's relationship as a woman writer to the highly gendered poetic canon.]

Les femmes, je le sais, ne doivent pas ecrire;
                                                  J'écris pourtant

—Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Une Lettre de femme)

Freud thought that all men unconsciously wished to beget themselves, to be their own fathers in place of their phallic fathers and so “rescue” their mothers from erotic degradation. It may not be true of all men, but it seems to be definitive of poets as poets. The poet, if he could, would be his own precursor, and so rescue the Muse from her own degradation.

—Harold Bloom, Yeats

Among the politicized forces circumscribing women's place in the literary tradition are paradigms of genre which create what I will call the “en-gendered” canon. Not only is the canon brought into being as a body of writings structured by genre, but, in a dual process, it is simultaneously patterned along sexual lines, with each genre explicitly assigned a sexual paradigm. Poetry was made male, while the novel, as the genre of otherness, was made female.¹

I will argue the paradox that control of the canon rests as much with the canonized, as with their canonizers. Writers themselves build reading models and schemata that shape norms prior to and in ignorance of their own canonization; they articulate and transmit formal criteria or lingering images which subsequently regulate not only who will be inscribed in the canon but where, why, and how they will be inscribed. To the extent that one's place in the canon was assigned by genre, it follows that this assignment was controlled by those who held in their hands the power and the instruments to shape the genre in important and influential ways, among which was precisely the formulation of gender-specific images embodying generic paradigms. In other words, gender-specific paradigms of genre are one of the mediating structures that give writers, as well as readers, access to the canon.

The assignment of genders to genres is inherent in a doxological process such as this, because, by its very nature, canonization entails a respect for the paradigms of the past. But to show that discourse about genre simultaneously inscribes a covert discourse about gender is a difficult task, related, in Sandra Gilbert's words, to the effort to “decode and demystify all the disguised questions and answers that have always shadowed the connections between textuality and sexuality, genre and gender, psychological identity and cultural authority.”² As elusive as this pattern may prove to be, however, it derives from and re-presents Cixous's now famous “tyranny of the binary,” which she defined as “the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems—everything, that is, that's spoken, everything that's organized as discourse … it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition. …”³ In other words, the designation of poetry as male and the novel as female implies a literary hierarchy that systematically re-produces the sexual hierarchy. By reading through and beyond an accumulation of nineteenth-century examples, we can see how the hierarchy of genres crystallized in esthetic canons which operated dialectically, negatively to feminize the novel, but more importantly for our purposes here, positively to masculinize poetry. Thereby, the tyranny of the binary systematically controlled the formation of the French literary tradition itself.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore consciously experienced this engendered canon as part of a system intimidating to women. The Romantics, of course, often contrasted booklearning, which deformed and denatured the human individual, with the spontaneous, original, creative “natural” self. But Desbordes-Valmore personalized and politicized this conventional theme by satirically depicting the educational and literary systems as a male-dominated environment and attributing their stultifying effects precisely to this environment. Also aware that the standing of women was both prescribed and proscribed in the genre “of the masters,” as she put it, she wrote of herself in “A M. Alphonse de Lamartine”:

Before the solemn songs you bring,
Sung alas by both an angel and a man,
This lyre, mute and without string,
Incomplete and knowing not how to sing,
Hardly dares to use the voice it can.(4)

In writing about the sonnet as the canonical form of poetry, she resorted to images of confinement or imprisonment. “This regular genre belongs to men only, who count it a great pleasure for themselves to triumph over their very thoughts by confining them to this brilliant shackle.”⁵ She knew the works of Louise Labé, dedicated a poem to her, and even lived in Lyon, but in forty years wrote no more than three sonnets among six hundred poems.⁶ Nor did she respect the tradition of alternating so-called masculine and feminine rhymes from one stanza to the next.

To see the paradigmatic pattern at work, placing women poets in the tradition, circumscribing—that is, re-placing—Desbordes-Valmore's potential for canonization, we turn first to a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine named Virey (1775-1847). Numerous works on science and hygiene made him a respected authority on women and he captured the dominant ideology of the time in a succinct formula encompassing the interlocking pattern of social and esthetic, sexual and literary categories. “That frivolity of taste,” he declared, “those eternal fluctuations in ideas and penchants will forever keep women below the level of perfection in the sciences, letters, and the arts.”⁷ Virey can ascribe his norm for imperfection in letters to one gender, because the norm he had in mind for perfection was indubitably ascribed to the other gender. And we know that this other, unenunciated norm for the superiority or perfection of letters was inevitably already and always poetry, because the novel was held to be intrinsically and generically inferior for the same reasons that women were—the superficiality and irregularity of their nature. By thus sexualizing literature, Virey operates a displacement, for he attributes qualities of mind and body to women which, when they appear in literature as esthetic and ethical qualities, were attributed primarily to the novel. The hidden cultural preferences of phallocratic discourse dictate a text in which inferiority in letters was coded to mean the novel, while the full embodiment of perfection meant poetry. Virey's formula elides these connections, but his elision, although hiding the displacement, leaves behind traces of the displacement of these gender-genre connections.

The general privileging of the male inherent in the paradigms leads one to hypothesize a hierarchical preference among genres based on the engendering of the canon. This hypothesis is confirmed by the pervasive use of genre names as value-labels that denigrate or elevate. Just as novelists were not yet admitted to the French Academy, which remained, two centuries after Boileau, the symbol, bastion, and patron of the literary establishment, the very words for novel, roman and romanesque, remained derogatory while corresponding parts of speech designating poetic qualities—adjectives, adverbs, and the like—remained laudatory. The term novelistic was used to designate works of art that were poorly constructed, lacked intellectual, moral, and esthetic substance, and carried no credibility or prestige. Novelistic prose, less polished and less significant than “poetic” prose, was inherently inferior. Throughout the century, the “poetic values” identified in published reviews remained far more crucial to the success of a novel than its “novelistic value.” Indeed, “valuer” and “romanesque” remained mutually exclusive terms, and the novel was still widely referred to as “frivole” and “léger,” the same coded words Boileau had used to “feminize” the genre.⁸ And one anonymous critic writing in La Revue des Deux Mondes, typically summarized the hierarchy of genres in the following way. Discussing why any and every tone, thought, style or subject is permissible in the novel, he explained in a burst of vivid imagination that the novel is the epic bedecked in female clothing, promiscuous, indiscriminate, and unselective: “It is an epic in a negligé and struts about at will; it renounces neither the looseness of intimate conversation nor the hard and fast forms of poetry.”⁹

The verbal strategems of major novelists like Balzac who showed due respect for the canons of propriety and accepted engenderized esthetic norms which demeaned the name of his own genre, can serve to indicate the conceptual contortions required to rationalize the engendered canon. Genre labels inscribe a consistent, systematic polarity of opposites that are based on sexual analogy and that codify and regulate literary inspiration on behalf of men.

In contrast to generic paradigms of domesticity and feminine degradation of novels and novelists found in Illusions perdues, for instance, the image of the poet is associated with male potency. Speaking of Lucien, the narrator notes: “To this poet … the present seemed without worry. Success filled the sails of his bark. He had at his command the tools needed for his projects: a well-furnished house, a mistress Parisian society was jealous of, a carriage and team, and, finally, incalculable sums in his inkstand”.¹⁰ The horses, the swelling of his sails and his “liquid” treasure all engender poetry as much as a calling to Holy Orders does in the following remark about Lucien. “Neither the miller nor his wife could suspect that, besides the actor, the prince and the bishop, there is a man who is as much prince as actor, a man clothed in a magnificent priesthood, the poet. …” Similarly, the narrator of La Muse du département belittles Dinah de la Baudraye, the so-called “tenth Muse,” for her “novelistic pretentions,” while the man for whom she yearns is labelled a “poetic ideal.” Typically, Balzac's narrator may treat the image as lost, problematic, ironic, or illusory, but poetry is nonetheless masculinized as the measure of a higher, different standard at the same time that the quintessential standard for beauty—the Orient, existence, evil, misfortune, or whatever—is labelled “poetic.”

Consequently, the dilemma of novelists working in a female-identified genre did not confront the brotherhood of poets who could encourage each other to conform to same-sex canons of esthetic propriety. Vigny proclaimed in “La Maison du berger” that the destiny of poetry was to “gleam on a male brow.” “La Mort du loup,” which furnishes an enduring Romantic figure of the poet, sheds light on Vigny's proposition. Not incidentally or accidentally, it is one that falsifies the behavior patterns of wolves under attack and replaces what an experienced hunter like Vigny probably knew with the poet's own projection of paterfamilias, sole protector of his offspring and his silent, passive helpmate. Ignoring the initial slip, Vigny overdetermines the utterly stereotypical father figure with the impressive and symbolically appropriate physical characteristics (“ongles crochus,” “gueule brûlante,” “mâchoires de fer,” and “deux yeux qui flamboyaient”) which “poetize” him. His “great marked paws” yield a kind of writing that contrasts with the vile utilitarian documents of city dwellers (“le pacte des villes”—pun intended?). The wolf leaves behind on the earth scratches that humans may interpret as traces of his presence or passage. “These fresh marks,” inscribe “the powerful moves and the mighty claws” of Vigny's ideal embodiment of the poet.

When Lamartine wrote to Desbordes-Valmore that “Providence … marked us in the cradle for one of its most noted gifts,”¹¹ he may have had in mind at some unconscious level a visible anatomical mark as the sign of his own poetic birthright and destiny. At any rate, in “A Madame Desbordes-Valmore,” he allegorized the vocation of the poet as two kinds of boat. The greater one, transporting only male passengers, sails on “like a stallion sowing, in its wake, white froth from its bit.” The lady poet, on the other hand, is called to the “frail crew” working under “humble sail” and lest the sexual patterning escape her notice, Lamartine reintroduced it on “the floating household.” The woman, “leaning against the swaying mast that she grasps in one hand, held suspended from her breast a suckling child,” while “the man of the house plowed the furrowed seas.” Lamartine's text is strangely reminiscent of Balzac's cited above, for both incorporate “esquif” and “équipage,” although the metaphorical vehicles vary in each case.

Turning to Baudelaire's essay singling out Desbordes-Valmore as “a soul of the elite,” we can see how the engendered canon becomes an overriding force.¹² Ironically, the female poet figures only as an exception that does not threaten or problematize the pervasive interlocking pattern masculinizing poetry and feminizing the novel. It is true that Baudelaire assigns her to the aristocracy or, rather, to an aristocracy, the one he calls “natural,” and which we know from other texts is only a second-class, external one opposed to the greater “unnatural” or spiritual aristocracy of dandies and creators of genius. Two adjectives, feminine and natural, recur throughout the essay as code words for her poetry; she is a poet of nature and her style is natural, i.e., simple, direct spontaneous, from the heart. To epitomize her work, Baudelaire concludes that unlike a French or Italian garden, she remains “un simple jardin romantique et romanesque.”

We must of course read this reading of the female poet in conjunction with all of Baudelaire's other texts on esthetic values, where invariably, the qualities of the vegetal, organic, and irregular symbolize the antithesis of true form in poetry. From such a vantage point, his analysis filled a double function. First he praised her for embodying the “eternal feminine,” but to the extent that she incorporates through her femininity the profuse, wild, and uncultivated forces of earthiness that Baudelaire scorned elsewhere, his analysis enabled him to bring into play his esthetic rejection of Romanticism. Thus he articulated the canons for discounting poetry by women. In the same essay, he self-consciously addressed himself to his implied reader and cast this privileged figure in the masculine singular. Desbordes-Valmore does not, in other words, belong to the male elite of fellow poets, whom he takes also as his proper audience in the imagined dialogue.

Consequently, the very terms Baudelaire used to commemorate Desbordes-Valmore as the feminine poet par excellence institute an ironic strategy for reading women poets that covertly preserves intact masculine paradigms for the poetic process and product. But because these terms contain a hidden agenda, rejecting Romanticism in general and rendering the masculinization of poetry immune to criticism, they help us understand the generalized obstacles to creating canonical paradigms for difference. On the other hand, Desbordes-Valmore's conception of her vocation for poetry and images of the poet related to it, because they set her apart from the engendered paradigms, will clarify the politics of tradition that has resulted in a canon that is both gender-based and gender-biassed.

Although women of Desbordes-Valmore's time were consigned to being “muses,”¹³ on the off chance that some of them might become poets in their own right, their proper place in a man's world, the brotherhood of poets, was “naturally” prescribed as the “feminine press” of the day. Titles alone on the publications in which Desbordes-Valmore's work appeared make the point. These included Hommage aux Dames, Hommage aux Demoiselles, Guirlande des Dames, Les Femmes poètes, Almanach des Muses, Almanach des Dames, Almanach des Demoiselles, Chansonnier des Dames, Chansonnier des Grâces, Chansonnier des Belles, and Conseiller des femmes. To contemporaries, they signalled that women poets, authorized or empowered only to write for other women, would not gain or be granted access to the canon.

Viewed differently, however, this circumscribed audience shows up on the other side of the ledger of literary history, no longer as a liability, but as an asset. The poet's consciousness of being female enables her to speak of and to her muse as a kindred spirit, free of the sexual tensions that befall men speaking of and to their Muse. The tones of defensiveness, hostility, or embarrassment that frequently characterize lyric apostrophes based on the usual male/female rhetoric are remarkably absent. Able to speak woman to woman (as in “A Madame A. Tastu”), she finds in sororal bonds a source of strength, to which she attributes her creativity, candor, and courage in speaking.

Speaking about or against the politics of tradition is not Desbordes-Valmore's principal way of placing women poets in French literature. Rather, this placement occurs with her insistence on the practice of poetry as a verbal form of intersubjectivity. It is less a topic she speaks about than a topos she speaks from and which gives her a way of speaking about things. On one level, she engages her readers in it, by not using falsely generic nouns and pronouns in the masculine singular to speak paradigmatically or universally. Rather, she impersonates one sex or the other explicitly. Thus, she grammatically encodes the speakers of her poems, as well as the speakers in her poems, while embodying speaking voices in vegetation, animals, birds, and even inanimate objects, as well as humans. As a result, the poetic “I,” or central, controlling consciousness, speaks concretely and individually as a male at times, as a female at others, and as nonsexed at still others. The richness of impersonations is a defining characteristic of her voice.

Many of her poems, for instance, consist of dialogues between animals. Among those which are deliberately gendered, sometimes the dialogue is between two females as in “Le Pélican ou les deux mères” (a fascinating debate between proponents of opposing ideologies of motherhood, where one mother is “il” and the other, “une autruche,” is “elle”) and sometimes between two males as in “Deux chiens” (where she playfully imagines two dogs speaking to each other). By contrast, “Les Deux ramiers” are imagined as “the gentle and discrete models for lovers” and “Les Deux peupliers” as “married,” but the implied gender differences remain unimportant and unmarked, since the couple is not stereotyped by sex roles. In fact, this, like many of her “love” lyrics, can be read as a statement not restricted to heterosexual relationships, but about female friends and the bonds between them.

The same variability prevails among human speakers. In addition to mixed-sex dialogues, some poems stage all male speakers, others all females. And even where a dialogue form is not consciously adopted, the speaker is sometimes gendered male, at other times female. The speaking subject even shifts from “Je” to “on,” in “Point d'adieux,” or to “nous” in “Nocturne II,” while the gender of the speaking subject is kept textually indeterminate. Moreover, in poems which embody only a male or female speaker, the implied audience directly addressed is sometimes gender-marked as male (“Le Prisonnier de guerre”) and sometimes as female (“L'Amour”). But the gender of a particular poem's intended audience may also be left indeterminate and finally matter no more than the gender of the speaker.

For engendering the self-image of the poet, Desbordes-Valmore shows the same di-morphism in her embodiments and the same vocal versatility. The child is one of her favorite figures for the poet; in referring to herself as well as her daughter, she frequently makes the word “enfant” and its adjectives masculine. One might suppose, therefore, that its gender does not vary grammatically in her work. Such is not the case, however, for a mixing of the “dominant” and “muted” patterns and voices occurs. The speaker of “L'Impossible” yearns for “Un rêve! où je sois libre, enfant, à peine née, / … Quand tout vivait pour moi, vaine petite fille!” [A dream! where I am free, a child, hardly born. / When everything was alive for me, vain little girl], and in “Ame et jeunesse” the soul of the speaker addresses its body as “belle enfant” (See also “Plus de Chants”). This gender code-switching occurs not only from one poem to another, but even within poems, like “Tristesse,” where the poet speaks of herself as “isolée,” but echoing the past participle of “L'Impossible” from the same collection, she is also “ce pauvre enfant heureux … qui, né pour le malheur … je le regrette encor, ce pauvre enfant, c'était moi” [this poor happy child … who, born for unhappiness, I regret it still, this poor child, it was me.] And in “L'Église d' Aroma,” the speaker embodies herself as female but switches to masculine pronouns and adjectives toward the end of the poem and in midline: “Et me voilà pareille à ce volage enfant” [And there I am like this flighty child] (See also “Qu'en avez-vous fait?”). In “La Vallée de la Scarpe,” her own portrait of the artist as a young female, she exclaimed, “Oh! qui n'a souhaité redevenir enfant!” echoing a line perhaps borrowed from Byron: “Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!” For the Englishman's (and Baudelaire's) rather blithe, falsely universal paradigms, “La Vallée” provides the appropriate revision. Although she leaves the word “enfant” in the masculine, the context of the poem makes it abundantly clear that her poetic “Je,” returning nostalgically to its origins, is gendered differently.

If no one gender prevails among Desbordes-Valmore's personae, the reason seems to be that the poet was neither compelled nor afraid to prefer one over the other. Engendering the female poet as male or embodying herself in male speakers and projections did not threaten the identity and unity of her self-concept. On the other hand, she does not accept the male as paradigm for the universal or the poet in particular. Rather, because the projection of the self-image is not consistently or automatically embodied, the reader is put on alert not to take gender for granted; it is problematic and careful attention is required to determine how the pronouns “le” and “la” affect meaning, because the text will engender itself in different ways.

Despite its title, “La Voix Perdue” reverberates with such a tone of self-assurance. The speaker creates two roles, a mother and a daughter, and the mother in turn recounts the metamorphosis of Philomela into a nightingale.

On a dit qu'autrefois, au sein d'une famille,
Il vécut sous un front brûlant de jeune fille.
Cet être harmonieux aimait l'ombre et les fleurs;
Nul ne pouvait l'entendre et retenir ses pleurs.
Rossignol, il chantait aux errantes étoiles;
Jeune fille, il pleurait, dérobé sous ses voiles.
The legend says, in the family's bosom,
Beneath the brow of a young girl it lived.
This creature of harmony loved both flowers and shade
And no one heard it without shedding a tear.
Nightingale, it sang to the wandering stars;
Young maiden, it sobbed invisibly beneath its veils.

Through a series of metamorphoses, the plumed progeny, springing from Philomela's forehead, incorporates the speaking subject, the poetic consciousness or “I” of the poem. First, the mother identifies empathically with her own offspring, seeing in her a reflection of herself, while the daughter in turn is expected to see herself reflected in the young girl, Philomela. But the mother's situation vis-à-vis her offspring is also reflected by and equated with Philomela's, from whose body the bird will spring. Thus, the roles of progenitor and progeny seem interchangeable, as do the three female figures, equated with the same thing and, consequently, with each other. As the dominant speaker in the poem, the older female is identified both directly and indirectly with what the nightingale figures. Escaping from the head of the young girl, it embodies the poet's functions because “it eases the way of the exiled” and speaks “to a mother simple like myself and to a child as shy and charming as you.” Also like the poet, “it is destined to be alone, to cast its sobs, free, between the heavens and the earth.” The bird is male-gendered grammatically (le rossignol) and because he travels with “sa compagne.” Despite this fact, however, the older female is reassuring her offspring—and through this figure, her own poetic self-projection—that the changes one may experience, such as “la voix perdue” or switches in gender, need not be feared as the loss of identity or the poet's voice.¹⁴

Beyond impersonation and gender code-switching, Desbordes-Valmore imagines the poet as having a special ability, that of transforming one self, one speaker, one subject into another. For her, childbearing is a figure of poetic identity and the intimate, organic, and special relationship of the speaker to her own text often leads to such figures of parent and child. In “Un Nouveau-né,” she says to and about her son Hippolyte, “Adieu! … I am no longer the happy chrysalis, / Where the soul of my soul throbbed for nine months.” This poem reflects the belief then current that the sights, colors, sounds, and rhythms experienced by a pregnant woman were actually communicated to the foetus. Being a creative mother therefore involves selecting appropriate sensory input as textual detail and in the poem she makes these connections explicit. Because the cocoon imagery obviously suggests a womblike existence for the caterpillar, it provides the privileged image of her vocation and work as a period of gestation or slow transformation.

Real caterpillars secrete the strand with which they make their cocoons directly from their mouths. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar orally creating a cocoon around and from itself and emerging as a new form of life suggests that poetry is a verbal cocoon in which the usual relationships between subject and object or self and other are redefined. This is the issue on which we will want to re-mark the differences which set Desbordes-Valmore apart from the engendered canon.

In Women Writers and Poetic Identity,¹⁵ Margaret Homans showed how construing relations between the speaking subject and the other, the world of persons and things, in terms of subjects and objects leads to the alienation of the female voice, because it means construing relationships in terms of male subject and female object. She concludes that women had great difficulty identifying their consciousness with the speaking subject of most poetry because the Judeo-Christian tradition excluded all women since Eve from control over language and because the romantic view of Mother Nature made woman an object rather than the center of subjectivity. In Desbordes-Valmore's work, however, the presence of difference is not tied to the usual distinctions attendant upon subject/object relationships and the time-honored philosophical issues to which this dichotomy gave rise. The intersubjectivity she achieves with the body of her text means that the speaking subject does not present or structure herself as trapped in the subject/object dichotomy, either as an alienated voice speaking to or about objects, or as an autonomous self dominating them. Nature is thus not the object of contemplation adopted from male poetry as an alien body of fearful, external forces which can swallow up subjectivity in wild vegetation. Rather, the caterpillar embodies the butterfly, the one becomes mysteriously the other, without converting the self or the other into an object of destruction or subjugation. Neither creature is superior, neither inferior.

Thus, in “Elégie,” the poet changes one female identity for another, “resembling a chrysalis, / Which prepares its radiant destiny brooding beneath its cold, dark shield.” Her images confer value upon a form of life not usually valued positively, life cut off from the outside world, shrouded, veiled, wrapped up or in limbo. Similarly, to evoke the writings of Louise Labé, which she called “feuilles parlantes”, she penned the following lines, doubly appropriate for two poets who lived in the silk capital of Europe.

O Louise! on croit voir l'éphémère éternel
Filer dans les parfums sa soyeuse industrie;
Fiévreux, loin du soleil, l'insecte se consume;
D'un fil d'or sur lui-même ourdissant la beauté,
Inaperçu dans l'arbre où le vent l'a jeté,
Sous un linceul de feu son âme se rallume!
Oui! ce sublime atome est le rêve des arts;
Oui! les arts dédaignés meurent en chrysalides,
Car tu l'as dit: longtemps un silence invincible,
Etendu sur ta voix qui s'éveillait sensible,
Fit mourir dans ton sein des accents tout amour,
Que tu tremblais d'entendre et de livrer au jour.
Louise, we seem to see before us the ever ephemeral
Weaving its silken industry in and out amidst the scents …
Feverish, far from the sun, the insect consumes itself,
Warping itself with the beauty of a golden thread,
Overlooked in the tree where the wind cast it,
Beneath a shroud of fire its spirit rekindles;
Yes, this sublime atom is the dream of the arts;
Yes, the arts, disdained, die in their cocoons, …
For you yourself have said it, a long invincible silence,
Covering up your voice which was awake with feeling,
Stifled in your breast all love of sound,
You trembled to hear sound or confide it to the day.

But she will not be interred within the conflicts that mark her condition; rather, the invincibly inaudible speaker (“l'éphémère éternel”) begins her work among the odors or lingering memories of flowers, Desbordes-Valmore's usual metaphor for her unspoken sexual activity. By an effect akin to synesthesia, the olfactory sensation yields to an impression of blazing glory, so that what has been inhaled, organically ingested by the insect, becomes a visual image as it passes through its body. The shroud of fire made from golden threads is spun from the very substance of the caterpillar's dying flesh. For the process to be complete and subject/object boundaries transformed, the embodiment of poetry requires paradox: the metamorphosis that takes place unseen in obscurity shines forth brightly.

Nowhere is the poet's refusal to subscribe to the engendered canon and her re-formulations of the traditional subject/object dichotomies made more clear than in her treatment of the mother-daughter relationship inscribed in the imagery of Mother Earth which is related to the theme of death. And nowhere is her commitment to difference and to the life of intersubjectivity made more vivid, for she has a dyadic, rather than a polar sense of organic growth, which grounds her consciousness of di-morphic transformations in the soiled matter of permeability. Perhaps because the poet had buried daughters, as well as a mother, images of a future as well as a past self, a progenitor as well as progeny, the earth is never a figure that threatens wholly to absorb her in its bosom or womb.

The organic transformation of flower into fruit supplies an important cluster of images for the kind of intersubjectivity in question. And the pattern which the images establish reiterates the relationships noted in “La Voix perdue” between the mother and the daughter, Philomela and the bird. In “La Tombe lointaine,” Desbordes-Valmore postulates a double identification; first, she identifies her mother with flowers (“Les fleurs de ton visage / Languissent sur le mien.” “Vers ta grâce ignorée, / Comme on va droit aux fleurs”). Visually, the progenitor's life lingers in the fleshtones of the daughter which are then metaphorically transferred, when the poet identifies herself, through sensory contact, with the analogous metamorphosis of the flower into a fruit. Thus the di-morphic object exteriorizes the organic rapport in which the daughter prolongs the mother, as the fruit does the flower. The poet stresses physical resemblances, as well as the biological and emotional bonds the two share. In reiterating the feeling that she is the prolongation of her deceased mother's life “par tes charmes … par tes larmes,” she connects her mature identity, embodied at first only as the fruit, ultimately with her power to sing songs. She evokes both her mother's and her own “maternels pouvoirs,” specifically in the sound of the former's voice. She asks her mother, “Ce fruit que je respire / L'as-tu vu dans sa fleur? / Ce chant que je soupire / En plains-tu la douleur?” [This fruit I breathe in / Did you see it as a blossom? / This song I sadly sing / Do you pity its suffering?] In this series of parallel displacements, the flower which the mother once saw has become the fruit which the daughter now inhales, while it in turn becomes the song which the poet exhales. The daughter born of the mother is identified with the fruit of the poet.

But the embodiments of the poet in poetry preserve difference. The shared object remains the same organism, but enjoys a common life in two different forms. Difference is also preserved by distinguishing the senses brought into play to appropriate the di-morphic object. While ordinary mortals, a mother or daughter, would be restricted in their separate contacts with an object, each to her own sense organs alone, the poet has enhanced organic connections with both flower and fruit interchangeably. Hence, the poet grounds intersubjectivity in the subtext of organic sharing that mother and daughter enjoy, the one in smelling, the other in seeing.

Elsewhere, reversing direction, the female poet's special power to be di-morphic and speak in a variety of embodiments enables “La Mère qui pleure” to make herself the prolongation of her deceased child, envisioned as a departed bird, whose song the mother's voice prolongs posthumously. If “l'enfance est poète,” as we have seen, so too is the “maternal séjour.” Identification with Mother Earth, whether through burial, descent or return to the “pays natal,” is constructive, rather than destructive, because it furnishes the poet with a self-image. Nature, in being “la Maison de ma mère,” is also the “maison du moi.” Having a mother, being a mother, having a child, being a child, these separate aspects of her self can unite in earth where these figures are buried. But because it is not a completely closed off, inert refuge, it does not unequivocally threaten her with going to seed, irreversibly vegetating, or being wholly swallowed up. But by the same token, she cannot detach herself completely from it. When she unites in death the child she had with the child she was, the mother is there to denote, to remind her of the poet's call. Conversely, when she merges the mother she is with the mother she had, the child is there to remind her of the same calling. Since the ties to Mother Nature are not unilateral, she can switch around the bonds in renewing her efforts to figure out the poetic self. The di-morphic figure which Mother Earth yields unifies her consciousness of self as poet, because it offers alternative ways of re-membering, projecting herself into the earth and identifying with it. “Ma mère nous enfante à l'éternel séjour,” she exclaims in “Les Sanglots,” and often speaks of the cemetery as a garden, a hot house, or a playground.¹⁶ In that metaphorical place and way, the poet successfully metamorphosed language on her own terms, remaking the androcentric Romantic cliché of the “femme-fleur” into a concrete, vivid, bodily experience.

Desbordes-Valmore preserves difference in a third and final sense, more fundamental and general than the ways we have discussed thus far. In her practice, intertextuality is the form of intersubjectivity specific to poets. In evoking the origins of poetic genius, the poetic process, or the poetic product, most Romantics accepted the analogy that, as a tree naturally came only from another of the same species, like was born from like.¹⁷ The poetic subject, on the other hand, fixed for itself a vantage point from which to view this unilinear march from forebear to offspring, life to death, in terms of mutually exclusive polarities, locked in an either/or relationship. Either one was alive or dead, parent or child.

Similarly, the canon valorizes the transmission of poetry from one poet or generation to the next by means of an inheritance or inspiration received from a man's Muse or a Heavenly Father. In Desbordes-Valmore's time and place, legacies still passed primarily from father to son, while the idea of inspiration implied another exclusive attribute of omnipotent divine males, the creation of form ex nihilo. As a subject, the poet either possessed creativity or, on the contrary, was possessed as an object by it. To be inspired, moreover, was to be chosen in a special moment from on high, as noted in Lamartine's remark above, anatomically (and therefore automatically) determined at, and by, birth.

To the extent that Romantics used this ideology (the poet is poet, by virtue, not of work, but of nature, of being born a certain way) to reserve poetry to the dominant gender, but also to deny the need for a father, a teacher, or a guide, then women poets had a greater chance to be free of it. They felt no need to affirm it because they had no need to deny the helping “hand” of an oedipal father in their vocation, as do men in the Freudian account. On this point, Desbordes-Valmore echoes Lamartine: “Jamais aucune main sur la corde sonore / Ne guida dans ses jeux sa main novice encore. / L'homme n'enseigne pas ce qu'inspire le ciel.” [Never did a hand on the musical string guide in its play his hand still novice. Man is not instructed in what heaven inspires] (“L'Ame de Paganini”).

Desbordes-Valmore speaks of herself, her vocation, and work neither in terms of being heir to a poetic tradition, nor of being inspired, neither in terms of possessing nor of being possessed—by feelings, poetic furor, or even men. A tomb is the only inheritance she speaks of, and even that she cannot rely on: “L'ironie embaumée a remplacé la pierre / Où j'allais, d'une tombe indigente héritière, / Relire ma croyance au dernier rendez-vous!” [An embalmed irony has replaced the stone where, indigent heir of a tomb, I was going to reread my belief in the last reunion.] The primacy of a male authority figure is factored out, moreover, by the kind of parent and child images she uses. In “La Jeune fille et sa mère,” it is the girl's willingness to ask her mother to authorize her story that brings the poem into being, just as, in the poem after it, “La Visite au hameau,” the daughter becomes the source or pretext authorizing the mother's monologue.

To the divine ideology of creating form ex nihilo, she prefers figures of transformation within life and designates as a maternal embodiment the hope that creation is not the ultimate form of destruction, but that destruction of the worm, the cocoon, or the flower, ultimately means that creation—of the fruit, of a butterfly—will prevail. For her, the kind of tension-ridden oedipal anxities evoked above, in the epigraph from Bloom, simply did not and indeed could not possibly furnish the driving force behind intertextuality and canon formation. Rather, for the woman poet, for a woman to be a poet, intertextuality occurs once one has agreed to nurture the other's form in utero. In regard to intertextuality, therefore, before she can read or re-write the text of the other, she must be its mother. Thus, the feeling of being double takes on a very different meaning, because a kind of intratextuality must precede intertextuality, just as the intrauterine subjectivity in a poem like “A mon fils avant le collège” seems to precede intersubjectivity. Likewise, she says to her son in “Un Nouveau-né,” referring to his foetal state, “D'hier nous sommes deux.” But before being two, the di-morphs are one prenatally. Not the physical fact alone of maternity, but the consciousness she developed of it, enabled her to achieve the richness of intertextuality—measured by her numerous citations, paraphrases, translations, imitations, etc.—which in fact she achieved. Projecting herself into children of both sexes as self-images fostered this ability to embody both self and other and speak interchangeably, as caterpillar and butterfly, flower and fruit, that makes her a female poet. But the poet speaks of the birth of poetry and her capacity to give birth without stridently or defensively restricting fecundity to phallic in-semination and re-production. In the surprising life of caterpillars, both males and females of the species live through the kind of maternity figured in the uterine image of the chrysalis.

What all the image patterns suggest, with their various role reversals, impersonations, and gender code-switching, is a kind of maternity, germination, transformation, and intersubjectivity not restricted by biological gender or genital sexuality. Thus, she defines the creative process in terms of “both/and” rather than “either/or” relationships, because one substance or life form is metaphorically incorporated or compounded into another kind. To borrow Nancy Chodorow's words, Desbordes-Valmore had a sense of “permeable boundaries,” which permitted her to circulate freely among life forms, not so much exchanging one identity for another, as interchanging them, making one another, being both one and an other. As we have seen, before being embodied in the fruit, the earlier, the flowering, larval, or mothering self embodied it. A reciprocity between progenitor and progeny, source and issue, spring and stream is set up that collapses boundaries and demarcations or erases the river banks and sharp edges. This reciprocity means that the poet's fruit cannot belong to a progenitor, any more than the progeny does to its mother, the worm to its butterfly or, for that matter, the butterfly to its worm, the fruit to the flower, or vice versa.

In addition to motherhood, Desbordes-Valmore's careers as actress and opera singer doubtless contributed to her experience of intertextuality in terms of a re-sounding, rather than a re-vision of the “inherited” texts of male predecessors. A sort of buzzing serves as the appropriate image. Combining languages and quotes within quotes, in “Imitation libre de Thomas Moore ‘When the first summer bee,’” we hear the voice of a speaker who sidesteps the engendered canon, “steals” her way around it, precisely because she is strong in her convictions, sure of her identity. With the honey bee, nature's tireless female worker, she brings together playfully several of the phrases and images that defined intersubjectivity above, including the sexual interplay.

A tes lèvres, mon âme immobile, épuisée,
Renaîtra pour mourir sur une seule fleur.
L'insecte entr'ouvrira mille jeunes calices,
Ma bouche sur ta bouche en boira les délices,
L'abeille aux fleurs, moi sur ton sein;
Pour elle et moi, quel frais larcin.
On your lips my soul, lifeless and worn,
Still will spring solely to die on a single bud
Gently will the insect pry thousands of tender petals apart,
My mouth on yours will drink in its delights
The bee on the flowers, me on your bosom,
For the two of us, how fresh is theft.

What Marceline Desbordes-Valmore says and how she speaks, put her at odds with the usual accounts of and the usual ways of accounting for the poetic canon and for that reason her works did nothing to ensure her standing in that canon. Unfortunately, for instance, they do not appear in the recent French anthology of poems by women, The Defiant Muse, which was published by the Feminist Press as part of its series with the express purpose of challenging masculine hegemony over the genre. In the editor's preface, Domna Stanton summarizes some of the obstacles to creativity faced by women poets.

… the system that brands all female authors as deviant creates even more formidable obstacles for the woman poet than for the prose writer.

Enshrined as the highest, most esoteric language in Western thought, poetry has been considered the property of a priestly figure whose gifts derive from or refer back to the godhead. …

From this perspective, it is understandable why the inferior, vulgar, indeed prosaic language of prose offered women comparatively greater freedom …

… in contrast to prose, the conventions of poetry, the noblest, the priestly language, may have a repressive impact on women's writing.¹⁸

Generalizations of this sort have some historical substance and pedagogical validity, but they may also produce unwanted side effects. For they leave intact the engendered paradigms which all along have made it difficult to determine the very existence, let alone the quality of poetry by women of Desbordes-Valmore's caliber.

Denial of access, not to poetry, its language, tradition, experience, training or reward, but denial of access to the canon results in the perception that poetry by women is scarce and/or inferior. When one poses the question in terms of the politics of constructing the canon, the need to explain why women did not write more or better poetry self-destructs, for the canonizers—readers and publishers—rather than women writers, appear to be the ones handicapped. When one starts out by explaining the scarcity or inferiority of poems by women, one may finish without ears to hear, without further need to discover those who did speak out or ways to appreciate what they were saying. Within the framework of difference, however, Desbordes-Valmore was only too happy to turn a so-called disadvantage dialectically to advantage. She welcomed the long-term benefits of not participating in cultural conditioning that only worked against women who would be poets and rejoiced at feeling free.

Le front vibrant d'étranges et doux sons,
Toute ravie et jeune en solitude,
Trouvant le monde assez beau sans l'étude,
Je souriais, rebelle à ses leçons,
Le coeur gonflé d'inédites chansons.

[“Plus de chants”]

Temple throbbing with strange and gentle sounds
Ecstatic, young, on my own,
I found the beauty of the world without books
Rejecting its lessons, I smiled
My heart swelled with songs unscored.

“Women,” she wrote in “Une Lettre de femme,” “are not supposed to write. Yet I write.” Verlaine made this line the first one he quoted from the only woman he ranked among the “poètes maudits,” writers in limbo, the canon of the cursed.¹⁹

Notes

1. I have made the argument about the novel elsewhere; to do so in detail would be beyond the scope of this essay and the purpose of this volume. See my “Le Roman est-il chose femelle?” Poétique 25 (1976): 85-106. See also Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: P. U. F., 1963). Josephine Donovan suggests that the gender formation of the literary canon was instituted as part of the classical tradition in her discussion of Aristotle's Poetics (See “Critical Response 2 “Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 [Spring 1977], 606-07). The classical hierarchy of canonical genres derived from a gender hierarchy, because Aristotle relied primarily on gender-biassed examples to define canons of propriety and appropriateness, which equated women with nonpoets or nondoers, the inferiorized nonpractitioners of poesis. Leslie Rabine (in Reading the Romantic Heroine [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985]) and Peggy Kamuf (in Fictions of Feminine Desire [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982]) have shown, on the other hand, that romance (le roman), narrative prose fiction, became the genre of patriarchy's political unconscious as early as the twelfth century, because it became the place, structurally and ideologically, where patriarchal culture struggled to repress and represent women in order to resolve its conflicts with nonpatriarchal values.

2. “What do Feminist Critics Want?” ADE Bulletin 66 (Winter, 1980): 19.

3. Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 44.

4. All citations are from Les Oeuvres poétiques de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, ed. Marc Bertrand (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1973), 2 vols. All translations are mine. See, e.g., the series “A mon fils” and “Hippolyte,” “Jeune homme irrité sur un banc d'école,” “Laissez-moi pleurer,” “Les Jours d'été,” and O. p., 755 and 757. For what follows, see 225 and “Au revoir,” 395, where the poet opts for the novel as a generic self-image: “You no longer take interest in me. / Like the detached leaves of an agreeable novel that have been read, you believed you read me and the page is over.”

5. Lettres de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore à Prosper Valmore (Paris: Editions de la Sirène, 1924), 2, 151. See also O. p., 2, 798, 690, and the preface to Bouquets et Prières. In Lettres, 2, 303, she recounts a personal example of the inability of male poets to accept their female counterparts as professional equals.

6. Nancy Vickers has demonstrated that in the Petrarchan tradition of poetry, “his speech requires her silence,” that is, the male poet/lover renders the female beloved passive, seen, desired, dis-membered, re-membered. See “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 95-109.

7. Yvonne Knibiehler, “Le Discours médical sur la femme,” Mythes et représentations de la femme au dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Duchet (Paris: Champion, 1976), 48. Prominent physicians and medical scientists of the day actually cited novel reading as a cause of hysteria among women; Knibiehler, 51.

8. What conservatives made taboo as a threat to their sense of order, some Romantics construed as a generic advantage. Hugo, for instance, proclaimed that The Revolution “is in the novel speaking softly to women” (“Réponse à un acte d'accusation”). For Hugo, just the same, women were no more apt to become poets than they were soldiers: “I dream of war in my restless soul; I would have been a soldier, had I not become a poet” (“Mon enfance” cf., “He is a genius, because, more than the others, he is a man.” in “Le Poème éploré se lamente”).

9. See Marguerite Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France: The Critical Reaction 1815-1848 (Geneva: Droz, 1961), 114 and 52-60, and 177-178. For further examples, see Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Martineau (Paris: Garnier, 1961), 444, 503, and 506. See also Pierre Barbéris in Histoire littéraire de la France (Paris: Editions sociales, 1973), 4, Part 2, 237.

10. Illusions perdues, ed. Adam (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), 440, and, for what follows, 543, 250-51, 272-73, and 293. Louise de Bargeton stood in awe of “toutes les existences poétiques et dramatiques” (46). “Romanesques affectations” and “poétique idéal” typify Balzac's use of genre labels that evoke further binary oppositions between negative and/or positive and feminine and/or masculine in, for instance, Le Père Goriot, La Muse du Département, and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariés. See Richard Bolster, Stendhal, Balzac et le féminisme romantique (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1970), 36-44, 47-49, 54-57, 65, and 77 and Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972), 285.

11. O. p., 1, 357 and for what follows, see 2, 819.

12. Baudelaire, “Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains,” Oeuvres complètes, ed. Le Dantec and Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 718.

13. Jeanine Moulin, La Poésie féminine (Paris: Seghers, 1966), 57-59.

14. The speaker's poem is itself a strange metamorphosis of the well-known myth dedicated to her daughter Inès who lost both a beautiful singing voice and her life to tuberculosis. Before acquiring a poetic voice of her own, moreover, Desbordes-Valmore had experienced a similar loss of voice physically. Concerning the Philomela myth and its importance when it comes to re-placing women writers in the tradition, see Jane Marcus, “Liberty, Sorority, and Misogyny,” in Representations of Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 88-91 and “Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic,” Tulsa Studies (Spring-Fall 1984), 79-96. See also Pat Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle,” Stanford Literary Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 25-53.

15. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

16. In its simplicity and intensity, “Inès” is the poem which makes the earth mother as much a poet as childhood was.

17. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), 172-218.

18. Domna Stanton, The Defiant Muse (New York: The Feminist Press, 1986), xv, xvi, and xxiv. For other contemporary views linking poetry generically to males and the novel to females, see: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 660, 688, and 783-784; Germaine Brée, French Women Writers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 38, 69, and 80-81; Christiane Rochefort, “Are Women Writers Still Monsters? in New French Feminisms, ed. Marks and Courtivron (New York: Shocken Books, 1981), 185; and Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 43-47, 81-84, and 119-26. Specific accounts of the dearth of “good” female poets emphasize the ways in which they have been handicapped by lack of education, encouragement, time, discipline, and the like, or, worse yet, silenced for various reasons—historical, linguistic, psychological, and philosophical. But the body of Desbordes-Valmore's writing suggests that when one sets out to show why women did not write more poetry than they did or better poetry, because female poetry, by definition, does not conform to prescribed standards of the engendered canon, what results is not listening appreciatively to women poets on their own terms, trivializing them instead in terms of the condescending patriarchal preconceptions of females as minor poets, seen in Lamartine's image of the “frèle équipage.”

19. Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits, ed. Décaudin (Paris: SEDES, 1982), 62. See also Eliane Jasenas, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique (Geneva: Droz, 1962), 125, 155-61. Germaine Brée noted that not a single woman poet is mentioned in any of the surveys and anthologies she consulted in preparing Women Writers in France, nor were any included on the “Agrégation” lists studied by Thiesse and Mathieu. Of the fifty-four anthologies I surveyed, seventy percent contained nothing by Desbordes-Valmore.