Madame de Sévigné by Charles G.S. Williams (review)

140ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW market if the title could be taken literally since it is really only for "...Students of English Literature." DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State Univernty Charles G.S. Williams. Madame de Sévigné . Boston: Twayne Publishers, G.K. Hall, 1981. 167p. Professor Williams's book is primarily a chronological study of Madame de Sévigné's development as a person and as a letter-writer. The emphasis is placed on the events of her day and the people she knew and wrote to, while Williams's frequent insights into her literary personality and art are made more in passing than in the form of a systematic analysis. His prose style is often stilted and, on occasion, unclear. An interesting feature of the book is the comparison made between Madame de Sévigné's letters and the works of several authors whoseinspiration and style either influenced or paralleled hers. Her correspondence thus reveals the playfulness and verbal inventiveness of the précieux writer Voiture as well as the mordant wit and irony of her cousin Bussy-Rabutin. She betrays a Moliéresque sense of the ridiculous in her social tableaux and in portraits of her contemporaries, while the allconsuming maternal love she expresses in letters to her daughter achieves a tragic intensity and desperation reminiscent of Racine as well as an heroic degree of devotion that recalls Corneille. She was capable of analyzing the workings of the human heart with the cold logic and precision of her friend La Rochefoucauld. In letters from the mid-1670's to the early 1680's, she wrote of her spiritual anxiety in the face of life's emptiness and the thought of death with the anguished soul-searchingof Pascal and other Jansenists, whom she so admired. Ultimately, her correspondence can be looked upon as a "human comedy" of the Age of Louis XIV, and she was able to capture the complexity and human presence of the people she observed with the fullness of vision and sympathy of a Balzac or Proust. The format adopted by Williams permits him to trace the evolution of Madame de Sévigné's epistolary persona. In the brilliant early letters, writingis an extension of conversation with all the wit and banter to be found in a salon. The letters to Madame de Grignan are the products of a daily ritual of writing that sought to maintain the spiritual communion of mother and daughter despite physical separation. Letters written during the moral crisis of her middle years are "spiritual exercises," existential meditations on human vulnerability and the soul's humble submission to divine transcendence. The letters of the last years are more serenein tone and are in many ways a deliberate echo of her "epistolary past." Although they are not explicitly designated by Williams as such, his study reveals traits in Madame de Sévigné's outlook and style which announce eighteenthcentury Pre-Romanticism. These include her impressionistic sensitivity to nature and country life, the themes of memory and relived experience, and the idea of love as the center of life. Moreover, her use of the letter-form to express intense emotion, love and anguish, prepares the way for the epistolary novel. JAMES P. GILROY University of Denver ...