No Simple Correspondence: Mme de Graffigny as "Epistolière" and as Epistolary Novelist

No Simple Correspondence: Mme de Graffigny as 'Epistoliere" and as Epistolary Novelist «1 Christine Roulston FRANÇOISE DE GRAFnGNY (née d'Happencourt) (1695-1758) is best known for her epistolary novel, Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), but she was also a prolific letter writer. Establishing a transparent connection between her identity as "épistolière" on the one hand, and as author on the other, appears, at first glance, unproblematic. It should be a simple and natural transition from daily letters to fictional ones. And yet, as Isabelle Landy-Houillon has pointed out, they are worlds apart.1 If anything, Graffigny 's letters and her novel are marked by their radical dissimilarity. Compared to Zilia's lyrical prose, Graffigny's letters are, according to Judith Curtis, "fragmented and conversational in the extreme."2 The relationship, then, is not one of smooth continuity but of rupture. Graffigny is not Zilia. At stake in this discussion, I believe, is the question of how female authorship gets constructed. As critics such as Katharine A. Jensen have argued, the relationship between women and letter writing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was imagined in terms of nature rather than culture.3 Women were more spontaneous and natural; they wrote from the body, hence their particular affinity with the immediacy of the letter form.4 As the epistolary style moved away from the formal rules of rhetoric that distinguished its Renaissance and Classical incarnations, women were suddenly at the forefront of this unpolished, conversational , and authentic writing. It is also the case that most novels written by women and men as well in the eighteenth century are epistolary in form.5 Graffigny herself was extremely conscious of the epistolary genre as a formal category. In her "Avertissement," where she asks "Comment peut-on être Persan?" she explicitly situates her novel alongside Montesquieu's Lettres persanes .6 Through Vera L. Grayson's excellent analysis of the composing of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, we are repeatedly made aware of Graffigny's acute sensitivity to the function, role, and meaning of being an author—above all of her fear of mediocrity (as she writes to her long-time friend François-Antoine Devaux: "Je veux que cela soit fort joli ou je le jette au feu pour que tu le trouves au niveau du médiocre"7) as well as her fear of being accused of plagiarism . The slow process of writing her novel, from 1745 to 1747, reveals a coming into being of authorship that confirms the disjuncture between the natural letter Vol. XL, No. 4 31 L'Esprit Créateur writer and the culturally aware author. It is precisely by turning away from the casual style of her letters that Graffigny can assume the authority of authorship. If her function as "épistolière" is a training ground, it is one that needs to be left behind for the novelist to emerge. At the same time, Graffigny's transition from "épistolière" to author is never complete, and is reenacted in different ways. For example, LandyHouillon has carefully traced the effects of bilingualism on Graffigny's intellectual development, showing that Parisian French remained to a certain extent the other or foreign language, whereas her letters were the home of provincial colloquialisms, embodying the domestic aspect of her writing (6781 ). Authorship therefore became tied to a foreignness within the fabric of the language itself. This foreignness, of course, is also inscribed explicitly within the plot οι Lettres d'une Péruvienne; Zilia, like Graffigny, is travelling from the margins to the centre of culture, from a primitive to a more sophisticated language, from quipos to script. The paradigm of transition, in terms of identity , language, and place, lies at the core of Lettres d'une Péruvienne. However , although the autobiographical parallels are tempting and obvious, it is Graffigny's complex response to language and genre that complicates the relationship between the letter as literature and as communication. Ironically, Graffigny was not a great lover of novels. According to Curtis, she was "more concerned to take up with developments in the theatre" ( 136). Grayson agrees, and also argues that theatre held considerably more prestige than novel...