L'Écriture du regard dans la représentation de la passion amoureuse et du désir: étude comparative d'œuvres choisies de Madame de Lafayette, Rousseau, Stendhal et Duras (review)

Sandrine Léopold has written a lucid and well-organized account of looks of love in La Princesse de Clèves, La Nouvelle Héloïse, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. She adopts a psychocritical approach, situating her chosen fictional representations of the passionate gaze in relation to various Freudian and Lacanian constructions of narcissism and desire. The four novels appear particularly well chosen for Léopold's purposes. It is not always clear, however, whether she regards La Princesse de Clèves, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and La Chartreuse as somehow representative of all canonical French fiction and its limitations prior to Duras, or whether these novels are each accorded the status of praiseworthy exceptions, critically engaged in the sexual politics of the (male) gaze. At times Léopold presents Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein as a clear break away from the patriarchal assumptions inscribed within the other three texts and within canonical texts more generally; at other times Le Ravissement is grouped together with La Nouvelle Héloïse and La Chartreuse, leaving La Princesse de Clèves out in the cold as a fiction seemingly unaware of its own underlying assumptions. Léopold successfully traces the theme of courtly love through her various novels and deals very well with aspects of each of these, providing a particularly satisfying account of Fabrice's abduction of Sandrino in La Chartreuse (pp. 206–09). She is perhaps at her most authoritative and comprehensive when discussing Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. It is a pity, however, that she tends to restrict her observations to her four main texts and therefore to ignore the broader œuvres of her chosen authors. For example, although she does make some sensible use of Stendhal's De l'amour, Léopold neglects to make a series of potentially fruitful connections between La Chartreuse and his other novels, most notably Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel — the former dwells obsessively with male desire and the act of looking, and the latter presents a forceful account of female desire from the point of view of its female protagonist. Surprisingly, Léopold also ignores René Girard's account of mediated desire in Stendhal's fiction, even though his book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961), is listed in her bibliography, albeit in English translation, and his concerns often appear quite close to hers. Equally surprisingly, she seems to be unaware of Ann Jefferson's Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and its brilliant account of the various masks, disguises, and communications by sign that sustain the passion of Fabrice and Clélia. Léopold engages neither with Stendhal's problematic of the eye that cannot see itself (as presented in the Vie de Henry Brulard) nor with his cultural analysis of French vanity, even though, again, she deals with very similar concerns in relation to her other authors and theorists. Léopold presents a thoughtful and coherent account of her topic across her corpus of novels. Ideally she would have been given the space to develop this account still further.