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Lyric and Memory: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “Tristesse”
- French Forum
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 42, Number 2, Fall 2017
- pp. 217-232
- 10.1353/frf.2017.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
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Accounts of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry tend to be preoccupied above all with the question of gender, variously castigating her for conforming to feminine stereotypes or celebrating her resistance to the male model of poetic authority. Starting from the premise that this question can only be tackled by situating her verse in the context of Romanticism and reading it with careful attention to poetic form, this article undertakes a close reading of the poem “Tristesse” from Les Pleurs (1833), taken as an example of her distinctive and intricate lyric treatment of the theme of memory. The speaker of this poem describes the changed landscape around her childhood home to meditate on disillusionment and loss and, in contrast to a widespread tendency in this kind of poem, refuses to identify with the stability of nature. “Tristesse” problematizes spatial references and underlines that memories are internalized by the pysche. It refuses to idealize the past, but instead shows how articulating memories in the present is both a painful acknowledgement of what is lost and a creative way of overcoming that loss. This link between creativity and mourning is particularly evident in the unusual emphasis on the very process of recovering memories and in the speaker’s preoccupation with her own voice being heard. Close attention to the structure and texture of “Tristesse” demonstrates that it is both an original articulation of the general concern with temporality in this period and one inflected by the female perspective.