Madame de Staël: 'Delphine' and 'Corinne' (review)

Students making their first contact with French eighteenth-century fiction through Corinne will find useful material in this study. An introductory chapter on Staël's writings on literature homes in on themes that will be central to the analyses of the two main texts: Staël's role in fostering revolutionary approaches to artistic creation and using them to question French political structures; the nature of her feminism and its contradictions; her interest in national character and in the role of national political institutions in shaping individual personality and literary production. The explosive potential of her fiction is clearly brought out. A woman of such independent and radical mind, simply by bringing together the personal and the political, must inevitably end by upsetting the establishment apple-cart, especially when Napoleon had charge of it. Annoying Napoleon is not of itself proof of political radicalism, and Goodden's account of the contexts in which Staël wrote misses some opportunities to help students dig below the surface of ideological conflicts. For Delphine, for example, she says little about the larger debates on divorce and offers no pointers to the importance of the issue in the economics of the Revolution; though in that context, referring pertinently to the shifting relationships of religion and politics, she does make clear the rationale of the 1801 Concordat between Napoleon and the Pope that left Staël's position in the novel so exposed. Discussions of both novels are inflected towards character studies, the moral implications of positions and actions, and how 'sympathetic' characters seem to the reader. These replace the texts effectively in the context of their original writing and reading. For present-day students in search of fresh questions to ask of the text, Goodden's account of Delphine usefully slips in the concept of socially structured gender roles, with references to 'feminized' masculinity, and 'man's institutionalized position in the world' (p. 29); and the section on structure and style in the same chapter includes an informative account of the epistolary mode and the different concepts of realism and authenticity that readers of the period would bring to bear on Staël's adaptations of it. The chapter on Corinne covers all the main thematic bases. Oswald is analysed as the representative 'man of sensibility' and Corinne under the rubric of 'Art, Genius and the Autonomous Heroine', the symbolic relation of Corinne to Italy is explored, and attention is drawn to Staël's heavy-footed attempts to create an innovatory blend of fiction and the travel guide. The bibliography includes an addendum of major new work on Staël published in 1999 while the volume was in press.