Delphine (review)

118 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10.1 Germaine de Staël. Delphine. Translated with an introduction by Avriel H. Goldberger. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. xlii + 468pp. US$50.00 (cloth); US$22.95 (paper). ISBN 0-87580-567-1. Having reviewed the Balayé-Omacini edition of Delphine in an earlier issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1993, vol. 5:2), I was looking forward to reading and commenting on this translation—the first in almost two hundred years— as an agreeable but not especially taxing supplementary chore. "Affaire d'un week-end, deux au maximum," the review editor assured me with characteristic cheerfulness. Alas, even in the convention-bound world of academic reviewing, the best laid plans gang aft agley. As things turned out, the hefty volume would be my companion (before work, after work and, on more than one occasion, instead of work) for over a month, as my admiration for the power of Staël's writing and the sustained excellence of Avriel Goldberger's version continued to grow. No one familiar with De l'Allemagne or De la littérature... will question Staël's status as a major figure in European cultural history. But a major novelist? A year ago, the idea would have struck me as far-fetched; it now seems quite plausible. Certainly Delphine can stand alongside La Nouvelle Héloïse as a careful and profound exploration of the dynamics of frustrated passion. But what kind of a novel is it, exactly? Literary historians, less prone these days to apply labels but who, like their predecessors, still operate along wellmarked diachronic lines, often point to the date of composition ("le siècle avait deux ans," as Hugo would grandly declare in another context) as a source of its fundamental ambivalence. And indeed almost every page of Delphine seems at once to reflect the delicate sensibilities and careful moral distinctions of Richardson and Rousseau, while at the same time anticipating the radical libertarianism of a Saint-Simon or a Sand. This Janus-look, staring simultaneously backwards and forwards, is echoed even in the jacket design. On the front cover, a splendid portrait of the Comtesse de Ceres by Vigée Le Brun invites the reader into the aristocratic salons frequented by the young Germaine Necker; while on the back, we are promised "a work rich in implications for the rethinking of women's evolution as writers and as persons." There will be readers who will find in this ambivalence a source of quiet pleasure and enlightenment . Others—probably more numerous—may feel compelled to make a choice and view the work as the product of either a latter-day philosophe or a preRomantic idéologue. The translator stands squarely and unambiguously in the latter camp. Her substantial introduction, while providing the biographical and historical background necessary for informed reading, lays the emphasis on Delphine as victim of social conformism and patriarchal power. It is a natural and, in 1995, perhaps unavoidable bias, and one that will undoubtedly help the novel to reach a wider audience. And of course Staël does have a great deal to say, here and elsewhere, about the status of women in the final, turbulent years of the eighteenth century. But after spending several weeks with Delphine, I find it impossible to ignore how much is left out by a purely feminist approach. By focusing on gender rôles, the critic may obscure the obvious fact that Léonce—and throughout the novel, men generally—are just as much victims of social prejudice and conformism as women. Such an approach also sells short the tragic REVIEWS 119 overtones of the central story, as hero and heroine, in their efforts to be worthy of each other, pile obstacles in the way of their happiness with a tenacity worthy of Rodrigue and Chimène. Above all, feminist readings run the risk of diluting the novel's historical dimension. Thirty years before Balzac, Staël understood what was not yet clear to her protagonists: that in the modern world, whether in 1792 or 1802 or any period of political upheaval thereafter, survival depends not on looking to the past (Léonce's preference...