Language and Reality in Françoise de Grafigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Language and Reality in Françoise de Grafigny's Lettres d'une PéruvienneDiane Foumy Several recent studies have pointed out the complex and problematic nature of Françoise de Grafigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747). As Elizabeth MacArthur has shown, Grafigny's work challenges convention by its refusal of closure.1 Like its precursor, La Princesse de Clèves, Grafigny's novel rejects both marriage and death (or exile) as suitable conclusions, leaving the love intrigue suspended with a heroine determined, so to speak, to establish a room of her own. Another destabilizing factor—and perhaps a more important one—is the author's "double-voiced discourse" or what Nancy K. Miller describes as the reproduction of the female critical subject.2 By inventing a heroine who must negotiate between her marginalized "savage" world of Peru and the 1 Elizabeth J. MacArthur, "Devious Narratives: Refusal of Closure in Two Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novels," Eighteenth-Century Studies2\ (Fall, 1987), 1-20. See also Nancy K. Miller's discussion of the public's reception of die novel in "The Knot, me Letter, and the Book: Graffigny 's Peruvian Letters," in Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 153-54; Jack Undank, "Grafigny's Room of Her Own," French Forum 13 (1988), 297-318; and Paul Hoffmann, "Les Lettres d'une Péruvienne: un projet d'autarcie sentimentale," in Vierge du Soleil/Fille des Lumières, Travaux du Groupe d'Etude du xvine Siècle, Université de Strasbourg p (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1989), 5:49-76. 2 Miller, p. 137: "Thus, we might also claim tiiat when Zilia translates her own letters, she enacts and reproduces through her 'double-voiced discourse' (to borrow Susan Lanser's important formulation in '(Why) Are There No Great Women Critics?,' p. 86) me peculiar situation of the female critical subject: writing from the 'wild zone' perhaps, but trained to negotiate the spaces of the dominant structures (Showalter, 'Feminist Criticism in me Wilderness,' 20OfT). Zilia produces feminist writing." EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 3, April 1992 222 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION "civilized" world of the Enlightenment philosophes, Grafigny successfully depicts the unique plight of the female writer: one who participates in and works with the dominant (male) culture yet whose writing acts as a type of "cultural intervention" questioning and undermining that dominant discourse.3 Lettres d'une Péruvienne also owes its problematic nature and originality to its treatment of the relation of truth to language. The subject desires to ground truth in a system of signification, a quest represented by the displaced savage. The difficulty of integrating the savage into the "civilized" order, which expresses the constant frustration of the subject 's desire, is reflected in the instability and fluctuation of meaning within language. A victim of European imperialism, the Incan princess Zilia undergoes what seems to be an irretrievable loss of language. Her native Incan tongue is no match for the violent language of her Spanish aggressors, or the seductive language of her French captor, Déterville. After she begins the arduous task of integrating into a new cultural sphere (France), which makes possible the recovery of the knowledge and the identity she once enjoyed, she discovers that this new culture, with its corrupted forms of exchange, is full of lies, betrayals, and errors. Zilia's return from linguistic exile is thus not a recovery but a descent into new uncertainties; specifically, the loss of truth and impossibility of grounding it in a system of signification. The story of loss and retrieval is played out on a double register. Read as a sentimental novel, Lettres d'une Péruvienne narrates the loss, rediscovery, and betrayal of the heroine's Incan lover, Aza. As a BiIdungsroman , it recounts the loss, relearning, and perversion of language (that is, the heroine's ability to speak and write). While refusing any complicity with the male world of lies and betrayal grounded on artifice and self-interest, Zilia nevertheless follows suit, establishing her own system of social interaction ("friendship"), equally based upon a self-interested, abstract individualism. By making the "other" or third choice and securing her independence, Zilia accepts...