Corinne: The Third Woman

Corinne: The Third Woman Naomi Schor On eût dit que dans ces lieux, comme dans la tragédie de Hamlet, les ombres erraient autour du palais où se donnaient les festins. Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie IN MARCH, 1992, while on leave in Paris, I prepared a synopsis of a paper on death in Staël’s Corinne that I proposed to give at the annual fall meeting of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. A month later I was being operated on at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine for a lifethreatening liver failure. Little did I realize at the time that I was entering a new stage in my life, a stage of serial illnesses from which I have yet to emerge. Conse­ quently, what I viewed with apt modesty as a “small” paper has come to seem to me despite its restricted dimensions a strangely prophetic project insistently calling into question the very relationship of the mind and body I had spent a lifetime repressing. Did I feel the need to write about death because I was in fact and unbeknownst to me silently dying? And when did that dying begin, when I sat at my word processor before my illness declared itself in full-blown visible, visualizable, and quantifiable symptoms but heralded its crisis in so called “non-specific” symptoms: extreme fatigue, depression, loss of inspiration? Shortly before his un­ expected and untimely death my father produced two atypically morbid works: a large self portrait in livid hues of muddy greens and ghoulish blues—the face of a drowned man—and an oversize brass mask where in one empty socket one could see a doll-like male figure dangling from a spring—the effigy of a man who has hung himself. Did life imitate art when my father’s heart failed him or did some Lethe-like fluid guide his hand as he created those works? Like so many other projects I was engaged in at the time, the paper on Corinne was a casualty of my illness and recovery. The celebration of the life work of Mme Tison-Braun, the beloved teacher who first awak­ ened and recognized in me an interest in French literature, is the happy occasion of my at last but with no lesser sense of urgency writing the paper I had outlined when I still counted myself among the healthy. Vol. XXXIV, No. 3 99 L ’E sprit Créateur * * * I want in what follows to make and, hopefully, substantiate an outland­ ish claim: because of the disparity between the chronology of events and the narrative organization of the material, when Corinne first appears in the novel that bears her name, she is already dead, a victim of patriarchy, a gendered ghost, the ghost of gender. In other words, Corinne is neither, as the narrator suggests, a mere retelling of the archetypal story of Sheherazade, who enlists narrative in the deferral of death,1nor, by the same token, a reworking of what Peter Brooks has called Freud’smasterplot , the dawdlings and detours of the death-driven Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Death in Corinne is not the telos to be avoided, but the disaster which has already occurred, which sets the narrative in motion and brings it finally to its foreordained conclusion, the physical enactment of a symbolic death. Much has been written about women and death in art and fiction, and a consensus has emerged regarding the proliferation of dead or dying female figures in the European art produced during a time period extend­ ing from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Following Michel Foucault’s periodization, which dovetails with that of Philippe Aries, Elizabeth Bronfen in her ambitious Lacanian exercise in “thanatopoetics ,” OverHerDead Body, sees the end of the eighteenth century as marked by an epistemic shift in the function and representation of death. What characterizes this new understanding of death is its ambivalence: viewed as a means of attaining scientific truth, the corpse is simultane­ ously seen as a source of pollution which must be distanced from the city; viewed as a means of individuation, death constantly threatens the living with the return of the repressed...