Sade, Florian, Baculard d'Arnaud. Histoires anglaises (review)

314 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 Michel Delon, éd. Sade, Florian, Baculard d'Arnaud. Histoires anglaises. Cadeilhan: Zulma, 1994. 189pp. FFrIlO. ISBN 2-909031-35-7. First, we should offer a word of thanks to and for publishers such as Zulma and Desjonquères who have begun to provide us with relatively affordable modern editions of minor and neglected eighteenth-century texts. Not everyone can read such works in their rare earlier editions. Students especially, but also professors who want to include these texts in a course, should appreciate an activity that does not always receive the recognition it deserves. This volume includes "nouvelles" by (in order of presentation, despite the listing on the cover) Baculard d'Arnaud, Florian, and Sade, as well as a fine introductory essay by Michel Delon, the distinguished Sade expert. Delon explains that these three texts all belong to the subgenre of "histoire anglaise" because they illustrate both the century's fascination with England and the English novel, as well as its infatuation with sentimentality. A number of eighteenth-century narratives were characterized in their titles as regional or national since they contained plots and characters deemed typical of those areas. Late in the century, Anglomania lost its original philosophical emphasis to become almost a synonym of "sensibilité," a term that covers a wider semantic range than "sentimental." While Delon illustrates each story's adherence to the stylistic and rhetorical commonplaces of the English and sentimental genres, he also shows how these three stories profit by being read together. Details that seemed innocent in Baculard acquire a terrible new meaning when Sade uses them. Such an intertextual reading redeems these novellas for today's reader. Indeed, once we look and read beyond the individual text, it is somewhat uncanny how these tearful, overly emotional, and gesticulatively exaggerated stories can touch a modern nerve. What these three stories most resemble, in my opinion, is television soap operas. Current issues are broadly evoked; the evil characters are by far the most compelling and complex (relatively speaking of course!); and conventional morality is given lipservice even as it is totally undone by the reality depicted. One of today's concerns that lies just below the surface in these texts is that of wife beating. These sentimental heroines are abused emotionally if not physically by the men who "love" them. Long suffering, ever faithful, tears always present in her eyes to match the bruises on her soul, the eponymous heroine of Baculard's Fanny, histoire anglaise is seduced and then abandoned to raise her child alone until, many years later, the repentant but weakwilled Thaley returns. The phony marriage Thaley had arranged to seduce Fanny seems a light disguise both for his rape and her consent to his abuse. Only such an anachronistic reading succeeds in giving real meaning to abstract and lifeless terms such as "posséder" (p. 41) or "ma victime" (p. 86). Delon's comments on tears and their function in this subgenre (pp. 19-20) are brief but excellent. Sade's heroine in Miss Henriette Stralson, ou les Effets du désespoir, nouvelle anglaise behaves no differently. Despite repeated aggressions (the term is not too strong for kidnapping, highway robbery, forced sequestration, attempted rape), Henriette fails to break with Granwel. Each time she excuses him: he is too powerful to thwart, the courts would never believe her accusations, or her family expresses interest in such an apparently ideal suitor! What indeed was the marital reality that this sentimental fiction alluded to? Obviously it shared something with the aristocratic escapades reflected in contemporary licentious novels, but there must have been some fundamentally different behaviour present there too. Once we accept Sade as rewriting Baculard, revisiting the same themes and the same situations, the juxtaposition of their "English stories" is informative and enhances both of them. Baculard's coup defoudre is a sentimental standard that achieves banality: "Fanny REVIEWS 315 parla: chaque mot se lance en traits de flamme dans le cœur de Thaley, et achève de le subjuguer ; il veut donner les ordres à James [Fanny's father and his tenant]: il n'est plus le seigneur, le maître de Fanny, de la fille...