Mother-Daughter Mirroring in Madame de Sévigné's Letters: Identity Confusion and the Lure of Intimacy

Mother-Daughter Mirroring in Madame de Sévigné's Letters: Identity Confusion and the Lure of Intimacy Katharine Ann Jensen TO READ THE MARQUISE DE SÉVIGNÉ'S LETTERS to her married daughter, the comtesse de Grignan, is to see represented an intense emotional involvement. Indeed, most often, mother and daughter seem more intensely involved with each other than with anyone else despite each woman's active social life and, in particular, Grignan's demanding responsibilities as wife of a provincial governor and mother of several children. How do we interpret this powerful mother-daughter involvement from the standpoint of intimacy? Any consideration of intimacy in the Sévign é-Grignan relationship must rely exclusively on the mother's perspective of that relationship because Grignan's letters to Sévigné were destroyed by her own daughter, Pauline de Simiane, when Sévigné's letters were first published in 1725.' Thus we have access to Grignan's responses and self-portrayals only through the mother's versions of them, which tend to foreground her own desires and perspectives. Yet Sévigné's desires dominate our reading experience not primarily because of the peculiar monovocalism of the correspondence but because she dominates the mother-daughter relationship psychologically in the first place. She consistently demands that Grignan reflect maternal desires and follow maternal dictates rather than have aspirations of her own. How, then, does Sévigné's wish to control her daughter affect mother-daughter intimacy and the love that Sévigné certainly felt for her only daughter? Among the many possible ways to understand intimacy, such as sharing familial or domestic details, exchanging confidences, or loving or identifying with another, I will be defining it in psychological terms of mutual recognition, which implies psychic difference within the intimate bond. On this basis, we shall see that despite Sévigné's intense and enduring involvement with her daughter, despite her genuine desire to be lovingly connected to her daughter, the mother's domination works against intimacy by precluding her and her daughter's recognition of each other as differentiated subjects. In analyzing Sévigné's desire to control Grignan, it is crucial to appreciate how cultural views of ideal mother-daughter relations would likely have authorized her dominance. In aristocratic circles of seventeenth-century France, an ideal of mother-daughter relations as mirroring enjoyed currency. In her study 108 Spring 2004 Jensen of the Sévigné correspondence, Michèle Longino Farrell cites François de Grenaille's 1640 conduct book, L'Honneste fille, as representative of the reflective ideal.2 My own research on Grenaille's manual shows that it was part of a conservative, anti-salon polemic that sought to maintain the traditional class and gender hierarchies so unsettled by salon practice and ideology, which allowed non-nobles to learn aristocratic manners and accorded women linguistic, literary , and sexual power.3 Mother-daughter reflectivity was a behavioral ideal intended to consolidate and reproduce both aristocratic privilege and Catholic investments in female virginity, chastity, domesticity, and subordination to men. Above all, a mother was supposed to form her daughter in her own virtuous image. Yet in one of his expressions of mother-daughter reflectivity, Grenaille reveals that mothers might find gratification in molding their daughters into second virtuous selves not simply because they would be fulfilling their Catholic, aristocratic duty; mothers could also invest narcissistically in their molding project and exercise both power and ambition: "Les femmes ne servent pas seulement à ... former [les honnêtes filles], mais comme elles en prennent le dessein sur elles-mêmes, et que pour produire une fille la mère fait son image; on peut encore dire qu'elles ont le même droit sur leur ouvrage qu'a un Peintre sur son portrait."4 With rights over their filial self-image and "chef-d'œuvre" (part 1, 181), mothers are clearly accorded dominance in the mirroring relationship , while daughters are expected to be subordinate to maternal authority. Moreover, the painterly metaphor Grenaille uses here elevates the maternal work of creating an alter ego, promising implicitly that a mother can attain through her daughter the fame an artist gains through his paintings—when the finished filial product and...