Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Chapter Two "Women's Poetry": The Case of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Chapter 1\vo "Women's Poetry" The Case of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's career as a published poet spanned nearly fifty years.! It began in 1813 with the appearance of solitary pieces in various almanacs (Almanach des muses, Chansonnier des graces), a popular forum for women's poetry at the beginning of the century. In 1819 she published her first collection, Elegies, Marie et romances. While this received little attention, those to follow were widely read, bringing to Desbordes-Valmore a new popularity and literary associations with prominent Romantic poets. During the next decade, several augmented editions of her poetry rode the wave of interest in elegiac poetry unleashed by Lamartine's Meditations poetiques (1820).2 After Les pleurs (1833), DesbordesValmore 's popularity declined, a fate shared by most women poets after the first Romantic period: "aux environs de 1840, il se faisait une reaction contre la litterature des femmes. [...] On se detoumait de la poesie sentimentale, plaintive et personnelle " (Jasenas, Critique 62). Pauvres fleurs (1839) and Bou- . quets etprieres (1843) did not successfully maintain her literary renown. Beginning in the mid-1830s, in the face of critical failure and financial need, she devoted much of her writing to novels and children's literature, more profitable genres. Increasing poverty accompanied her advancing age, and in her final sixteen years, she published no poetry, having tried in vain to find a publisher for her last collection (Poesies inedites appeared posthumously in 1860). We can reconstruct one version ofDesbordes-Valmore's personallife from an autobiographical interpretation of her poetry. She writes nostalgically about childhood, a time of innocence and hope. She celebrates her parents, her sisters, and her children , making of the family a central theme in her poetry. She 43 Chapter Two chronicles the private tragedies, including the loss of four of her children, that punctuated her life. We see her too as an impassioned lover, a devoted friend, the defender of the disenfranchised , and a woman ofletters whose poems communicate with both male and female poets of her day. But Francis Ambriere's massive biography of Desbordes-Valmore (Le siecle des Valmore ) reveals still other aspects of her life not always evident in her poetry. Several of her children were illegitimate, and she took lovers while married. She scraped by, supporting her family, including her husband, through a life of constant movement and various careers, most notably as an actress. This biography gives the impression of tenacity and independence rather than frailty, and suggests that the poet's familial devotion did not rule out an extramarital quest for pleasure and companionship. Several readers have suggested that Desbordes-Valmore manipulated her image in her poetry. Christine Plante contends that she conformed to prescribed notions of feminine modesty, piety, and domesticity out of self-preservation: "Dans cette modestie feminine, il y a peut-etre une bien habile pirouette, une reverence faite au bon gout, aux autorites litteraires et morales et aux regles des censeurs pour mieux se concilier leur indulgence et leur protection" ("L'art sans art" 174). Plante's "peut_etre" leaves room for doubt, illustrating once more the uncertainty surrounding Desbordes-Valmore's poetry. Eliane Jasenas's analysis ofDesbordes-Valmore's self-packaging gives her somewhat less credit in suggesting that she altered her tone because she could not bear negative criticism. Jasenas relates the story of a critic who "avait fait Ie reproche, juge fort grave, de profaner la religion en melant Dieu al'amour." She proposes that Desbordes-Valmore, whose poetry subsequently became more pious, responded with fear and acquiescence: "elle s'est empressee de faire penitence. Elle se dit que peut-etre elle a trop parle" (Critique 56). Barbara Johnson brings the question of sincerity to the forefront of her study on Desbordes-Valmore. She suggests that Desbordes-Valmore engaged in conscious rather than ingenuous self-packaging, styling herself as a faithful wife and virtuous mother to cultivate "the absolute voice of the native informant from the field of the 'eternal feminine.';'3 After destroying this myth with the help of Ambriere's painstak44 Women's Poetry: Desbordes-Valmore ing biography, Johnson suggests that Desbordes-Valmore tailored her poetic image and output to conform to contemporary expectations and to project "an unthreatening poetics of sincerity " ("Gender" 170). Given critics' stubborn insistence on reading women's poetry literally, Johnson argues, DesbordesValmore 's sincerity has gone unquestioned, and her poems have been accepted as transparent...