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MLN 119.5 (2004) 1058-1082



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Charrière's Untimely Realism:

Aesthetic Representation and Literary Pedagogy in Lettres de Lausanne and La Princesse de Clèves

University of Colorado at Boulder

In a review of the English translation of Sainte-Beuve's Portraits of Women, Henry James draws the reader's attention to the fact that one of the women had been lost in translation. The unexplained disappearance elicits an eloquent avowal of regret and a recommendation:

Let us add the expression of our regret that the translator has judged it best to omit the article on Mme. de Charrière, a lady no better known indeed than her sisters, but far more deserving of our attention. This person, a Dutchwoman by birth, and for a long time a resident in Switzerland—it is doubted she ever visited Paris—was a perfect mistress of a delightful French style, in which she composed two excellent novels as well as several inferior ones. From these two works M. Sainte-Beuve gives a number of extracts, all remarkable for strength and truthfulness. Mme. de Charrière looks like the first of the realists. But with the realists, as we have learned, one must proceed cautiously, and it is very possible that with all her merits Mme. de Charrière could not logically hope to figure in these chastened English pages.1

The exclusion of the chapter on Isabella van Zuylen, dame de Charrière (also known as Belle Van Zuylen), from an 1868 American publication is, perhaps, not much of a surprise.2 Although considerable in her own century, Charrière's reputation as a novelist declined [End Page 1058] steadily during the one that followed. Henry James' appreciation is probably the last, if not the only, nineteenth-century tribute to her talent made by an Anglophone man of letters of the first order. The fact that Charrière's absence became an occasion for high praise from an otherwise exacting judge of literary merit is, in itself, remarkable. No less remarkable are the terms that James chose to use in placing Charrière into the literary landscape: no sooner did he award her the distinction of looking "like the first of the realists," he qualified his assessment with a rather enigmatic reference to a "logical" impossibility of her appearing in what he wryly calls "these chastened English pages." James' warning concerning the treatment of the realists strengthens even further the sense that something was amiss in the realism he had just attributed to her.

James was not the first reader of Charrière's fiction to experience unease when having to determine which category it belonged to. While following rather closely the thematic agenda of the epistolary novel—the education of young women, sentimental and otherwise—Charrière considerably enriched the formal vocabulary of the genre. Yet her narrative innovations were not motivated by the pursuit of a perfect form. Extensively educated and insatiably curious, Charrière chose the novel as a vehicle of exposition that was more effective than a treatise could be. Her correspondence abounds in reflections on the key topics of the period—the social contract, religion and moral philosophy, politics and the vocation of art, and the French Revolution. If Charrière can possibly be called a realist, it is because of her ability to integrate her philosophical reflection into literary narrative. Interfering with, rather than violating, the rules of novelistic illusion accepted at the time, Charrière's plots exploit the expectations of readership so as to challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the novel's subject, be it a story of young people facing the social prejudices of their parents, as in Le Noble, a young woman about to enter society, as in Lettres écrites de Lausanne, an unhappy marriage such as is depicted in Lettres de Mistriss Henley, or a tale about a group of friends and lovers during the French Revolution, such as Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d'émigrés...

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