Œuvres complètes: Romans, contes et nouvelles Tome 1: Mademoiselle de Maupin (review)

If cross-dressing is about the incongruity of appearances, Théophile Gautier's first novel Mademoiselle de Maupin is a study in ambiguous surfaces that can be read for a multitude of meanings. Chronicling the story of a maiden-turned-chevalier, the text has evoked a complex and often contradictory critical reception ever since its 1835 publication. Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz's edition of the novel offers readers a comprehensible version of the text as she elucidates many of the cultural, literary, mythological, and historical references that may be obscure to a 21st-century reader. Her introduction and footnotes to Gautier's novel do more than just situate the reader vis-à-vis the text, however, as they simultaneously consider and address many of the critical debates inspired by the work which is, as Geisler-Szmulewicz notes, republished about every ten years in France and more sporadically abroad (13). Addressing both the text and the scholarly attention it has received, this edition, which includes a bibliography of scholarly work published primarily in French and English, offers readers access to a novel that is very much situated in the literary, social, and political turmoil of Paris in the 1830s.

While the novel may have received more critical attention than any of Gautier's other works, there seems to be little consensus on how such a text and its polemic preface are to be read. Geisler-Szmulewicz describes the difficulty readers and critics have had in merely locating the text within a specific literary genre, noting that ". . . revendiqué d'abord par les romantiques, il l'est aussi par les néo-classiques, puis par les défenseurs de l'art pour l'art" (8). Addressing later claims defining the novel as erotic or decadent, Geisler-Szmulewicz demonstrates how such claims neglect key aspects of the novel, as Gautier evokes various novelistic codes only to later subvert them (39). Blending an epistolary format with lengthy interjections from a third-person narrator and seemingly spontaneous bouts of theatrical dialogue, the text does not fit easily into any category, a key point, as Geisler-Szmulewicz insists, in Gautier's work: "Impossible pour Gautier d'exprimer une position unique, stable et dogmatique, quand il s'agit de réfléchir à la question, centrale dans le roman, de l'identité de l'artiste, de son rapport au monde et à l'oeuvre" (53). Looking beyond genre, her own approach is to view the text as a space in which the young author (he was only 23 when he wrote the novel) could articulate, and presumably explore, his own stance vis-à-vis literature: ". . . ce roman est aussi le lieu où sont réunis tous les grands principes auxquels Gautier se montrera fidèle jusqu'à la fin de sa carrière, une oeuvre qui informe l'ensemble de sa production poétique et romanesque" (9). Given the significant amount of attention paid to genre since the novel's initial publication, it seems fair to state that Mademoiselle de Maupin requires a certain amount of generic decoding, which Geisler-Szmulewicz adequately provides.

Like the novel's genre, Gautier's preface has undergone multiple interpretations. Contradicting those who would call it a manifesto or view it as a key to understanding the novel, Geisler-Szmulewicz reads the preface as a romantic response to and against the critics of the era (17). Since attacks on critics, seen as artistes manqués, were a convention of the time, she insists that Gautier's preface was not as novel as later critics have maintained (21). While Gautier is often credited with coining the term "l'art pour l'art," Benjamin Constant had already used the expression as early as 1804 and the defense of "pure art" was a common stance by the 1830s (20). Viewing the preface as a sort of signature, similar to the infamous red vest worn to the opening night...