“I recommended him to read Corinna” (Austen): Germaine de Stael’s meditative travel novel

Lucy Honeychurch looking up at a Florentine church or sculpture, from 2008 Room with a View (Forster’s novel, Andrew Davies version closer than M-I-J)

Dear friends and readers,

I had planned to write a blog on Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy because I remembered loving it when we read it on WWTTA (I now discover) in 2003; it would be a link between my last blog on Julia Kavanagh (whose French Women of Letters ended on Stael as a superlative and important woman writer of the later 18th century and romantic period) and the next one to come, the first of another group of reports on an 18th century conference, this one on French women writers of the 18th century, especially Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, their epistolary fiction, and one of the best sessions I attended, sheerly on Stael’s Corinne. One paper compared De Stael’s book to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the film adaptation by the same name by Fielding and Andrew Davies!

Sylvia Raphael’s translation of Corinne, detail from Domenichino’s portrait of Stael as The Cumaean Sybil

Renee Zellweger as our modern sybil, in pajamas, with drink by her side, cigarettes, diet sheet, and among her books and magazines (a replay of Austen’s Elizabeth?)

Alas, I’m in the ironic position of discovering this was one of those books I read with others on the Net a few years ago now where we really had full talk on the book weekly, including close readings by list members. I say ironic, because this amount of prose is just too much for one blog: what I need to do is make a new region on my website and work hard to put the postings on attached to each part of the book — as I used to do, e.g., for Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. I no longer have the ambition or idealism (see comment on blog).

A compromise could be to put a few that I and/or others wrote with others on Corinne here, but there are really so many and quite a number excellent because the book itself is so rich. Among other things I compared two later 20th century translations, Sylvia Raphael’s translation with Avriel Goldberger’s with one another and an anonymous 1807 translation into English by someone with the elegance of Radcliffe and the ability to convey intense emotion by natural diction of the time that we find in Austen (she either read this one or the novel in French).

I found the 1807 translation the most satisfying (after the forceful poetry of Stael’s French); Goldberger got abstractions correctly, but she was embarrassed by the abjection and melancholy of Stael and would become stilted; she says in her introduction that Corinne rouses resentment; I suspect she thinks that because she can’t bear the demand for idealistic conduct combined with retreat and a desire for adulation. One of the people on WWTTA was reading Isabel Hill’s Victorian translation and said Hill often became irritated by Stael’s radicalism and the translation turn hostile to its source text.

We also as a group discussed the love relationships which put the transgressive heroine at such a disadvantage, individual characters and scenes, the mores of the UK versus France and Italy with respect to women, not to omit Germaine de Stael herself.

Germaine de Stael (1766-1821)

What I liked most about the novel was its meditative travelogue parts and meditations on classical literature and poetry. So for this blog offering a sense of the experience of Corinne, I choose out of all the postings we wrote, a few on Books 11 to 12 and 18.

One must tell the story first — to situate the meditations. As the book opens we are asked to believe a woman named Corinne lives independently in Rome and is the center of adulation for her talents as singer, entertainer, and saloniere (not called that but it’s what she is). A young Scots Britishman, melancholy, virtuous, a man of sensibility, Oswald, comes to Italy, plays the part of a conventional hero (a rescue) and they fall in love. With excruciating slowness with much doubt about how they will feel about one another after they trangress, they enter a liaison. At first all is bliss, but this quickly devolves into discomfort when the world despises her and he is influenced by this. They part.

He is then inveigled to marry a Lucille, who his family has long wanted him to marry: a narrow, obtuse utterly selfish young woman who bores him. Scenes in Scotland soon include Corinne who records the stifling conformist life. Corinne becomes an advocate of Oswald to Lucille (who doesn’t like him much) and Lucille becomes pregnant. (This is a repeat of part of the story of Delphine where the heroine behaves similarly to a male, narrow-minded, fierce, domineering, when he marries and impregnates another woman.) As I recall, Corinne gives birth to a, or she takes over her rival’s, daughter by Oswald.

The story ends with Corinne’s return to Italy, Oswald following her, her dying, and looking to be replaced by the daughter who will not (we presume in most stories) live better, but re-enact the mother’s story. Some of the readers found Corinne’s conduct at the last vampiric: she will live on through the grief and memory she causes in Oswald and the new daughter; she will make the girl another like herself. For my part if anyone was vampiric (draining the life out of someone) it was Lucille over everyone she met (rather like Rosemary Vincy in Eliot’s Middlemarch).

I have omitted many ins-and-outs, the politicized feminist and other Enlightenment themes, and the long passages of meditation over landscape, very Ossian some of them. Her literary idols are however neoclassical (she loves history as done by Gibbon), and Corinne’s understanding of literature as reflecting cultures is that of her author, Stael. What follows is commentary on two such meditations as embedded in the story.

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John Robert Cozens (1752-97), Vesuvius seen from a jetty in Naples

Book XI: Naples and the Hermitage of St. Salvador

Chapter 1:

The first sentence makes it manifest they are lovers: “Oswald felt all the pride of triumph in carrying off his conquest” (p. 317)

So it is a conquest.

For once he felt no contradictory regrets or reflections. Now we get an Intense description of countryside signaling the presence of malaria. I wonder about this poetic connection between a landscape of sickness and the two having sex where sex is a conquest for theman. Now we are told how Oswald watches over Corinne, and the narrator bursts out:

Ah! should not female sensibility be forgiven those heart-rending regrets which are attached to the days when they were beloved, when their existence was so necessary to that of another, and when they constantly found themselves supported and protected! how dreary the solitude which succeeds those periods of bliss! and how happy they whom the sacred ties of matrimony have softly conducted from love to friendship, without experiencing the torture of one cruel moment! (1808 trans, p. 319)

Euphoria during the times of early sex is seen through the eyes afterwards when the man has tired of the woman. De Stael has no belief in long-standing erotic attachments which maintain tenderness.

Moving onto meditations on society from the trip in Naples:

De Stael’s idea is man up north can have no relation “but with society” while down south because of the warmth he can relate to nature (p. 322). Elsewhere “life … proves insufficient to gratify the faculties of the mind” (this reminds me of Johnson); “here it is the faculties of the mind, which are insufficient for the complete enjoyment of life …” Superabundance of sensations inspires musing indolence (p. 322). The 1807 translator does her best to do the description well, but neither the 1808 woman nor Goldberger comes near it, so here is the original French:

Pendant la nuit, les mouches luisantes se montraient dans les airs; on eut dit que la montagne etincelait, et que la terre brulant lassait echapper quelques unes de ses flammes. Ces mouches volaient a travers les arbres, se reposaient quelquefois sur les feuilles, et le vent balancait ces petites etoiles et variait de mille manieres leurs lumieres incertaines. Le sable aussi contenait un grand nombre de petites pierres ferrugineuses qui brillaient de toutes parts; c’etait la terre de feu conservant encore dans son sien es traces du soleil, dont les derniers rayons venaient de l’echauffer (Balaye, p 288)

This landscape projects the erotic experience going on, as after the above we are told Corinna “engrossed,” “enraptured,” Oswald pressed her to his bosom (p. 323). He goes to and moves away, “impelled by respect to her who was to be his companion for life” (p. 323). So Public Displays of Affection are disrespectful? Yes for the this period and milieu they were. We see no PDAs in Austen.

We are to assume this holding back is just because they are in public. But De Stael suggests we are to admire Oswald for this. It is a sacrifice. Here we have an overvaluing of the male. This is no sacrifice

They are about to retire and we know make love. An ominous fear overcomes her; the clouds cross the moon and frown on their love. Has he not this evening controlled himself? (p. 325). He didn’t behave disrespectfully to her in public. Then we are told that she would have given herself to him in the assurance that the act itself from him was a promise of marriage; her acknowledgement of his power over her inspires him with more respect for her. This is what we are told. Her offering herself up to him as very vulnerable is from a psychological standpoint manipulative masochism. Masochism is defined as a way of manipulating and controlling others through offering yourself up as victim. You also make yourself their focus. A focus for their power.

Chapter 2:

Now we are back to the eighteenth century meditations on culture. She suggests (as was then common — this is in Montesquieu) that the Neapolitan climate is responsible for lack of work and accumulation ethic. She sees it touristically surely (it’s the economic arrangements that count here). We are shown a life of pleasure, yet very fond of money (p. 327). They are deficient in a sentiment of dignity. Their virtue surprises her as there is nothing enforcing or rewarding it — as she sees this. She sees energy of government as instrumental in getting people to act (p, 328). She mentions /Abbe Galianai as one of those who are conspicuous and possess high degree of talents of pleasantry and reflection (p. 328).

Galiani wrote a very important treatise on grain; why important? It’s about how customs and laws and government operations lead to or can prevent famine. It’s one of the earliest documents to really examine the relationship of money, economic arrangements and the living standard (ability to eat) of the average person. Abbe Galiani and Carraccioli had been frequenters of the Necker salon.

The hero and heroine now come on stage; they watch Vesuvius from their balcony, brief suggestive:

This reverie of fire descends to the sea, and its
waves like those of the latter manifest the rapid and continual succession of an indefatigable movement …

The watcher astonished; feels he or she is “contemplating the universe.” They agree to climb it.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), Sunset near Naples 1780s

First chapter 4:

It is a fascinating chapter for anyone who has been to the ruins of Pompeii. In the book the Ruins of Pompeii not far off as they set out for Vesuvius. Pompeii is she says “antiquity’s most curious ruin,” in fact at that time you could see the city and all its doings frozen in time, p 204. This is ruins upon ruins, tombs upon tombs, p 204; sense of a long time looked upon of human suffering. She looks at the houses and figures out the way the people lived. Meditation on history and its goals and value: how do men endure the gift of life … in the presence of this landscape he opens his soul to her first.

Pompeii, photo taken 2008

Book XVIII: The Florentine Years

Corinne now turns back to art and the imaginative world to relieve her grief and to restore herself. In Chapter 3, we are back to visiting churches (p 364). It comforts Corinne to think that many great souls or famous souls were despised during their lives, misunderstood, rejected, and now (when they
are no longer a threat to people now living) celebrated. She grows stronger in their presence. There is a good choice of quotation:

Michelangelo:

I am grateful for sleep, and even more grateful to be marble; While injustice and shame last, Not to see, and not to feel is the great goal, the task, Therefore do not wake me, and speak low

Alfieri:

Alone at my sunrise, alone at my sunset, I am alone here still

In Chapter 4 Corinne goes to a Florentine Gallery and there is a good meditation on the idea that “what touches us in works of art is not the misfortune but the soul’s power over the misfortune” (p 368). Corinne sits down and pens her grief, portrays her suffering. Then we get a remarkable comment:

It was the cry of grief, ultimately monotonous as the cry of birds in the night, too fervent in expression, too vehement, too lacking in subtlety: unhappiness it was, but not talent. Good writing requires a base of genuine — but not harrowing — emotion … most melancholy poetry must be inspired by kind of verve implying intellectual energy and pleasure. True grief is not fruitful: it produces only a somber restlessness that incessantly leads back to the same thoughts. Thus did the knight, pursued by a lamentable fate, vainly wander around and about a thousand times, only to return always to the same place (p 368).

The above is brilliant in French. Goldberger does do ample justice to the meditative thoughtful passages of the book. She is good on the travel/art parts. Again I am reminded of Wordsworth’s idea that poery comes out of the past “recollected in tranquillity.” The past is never frankly implied, but it’s clear from Wordsworth’s poems (e.g., “Michael”) that we are talking of harrowing of the soul.

Chapter 5 brings Corinne thinking about her situation and what she comes out with is superbly beyond anything in the Clarisssa line of self-blame and prudential lessons. De Stael is herself a woman and she is lucid and does not scourge Corinne over what happened during her liaison with Oswald:

“I was witty, true, good, generous, sensitive. Why did all that go so very wrong? Is the world truly malicious? … What a pity! … I will die without anyone’s knowing what I really am, even though I am famous … there is something barren in reality, something that one tries to change in vain … Nature, too, is cruel … I am seized with the desire to break free of unhappiness, to return to joy … Ah why are happy situations so ephemeral … Is pain the natural order of things? (p 369).

De Stael cannot see evil without trying to explain it away and find good or turn it into. We remember how she turned from the gothic in the early parts of the book. This is the real flaw of Corinne: an inability to face the world’s ceaseless injustice and cruelties. Well Austen’s Jane Bennet said she preferred to give things a candid turn or life became too painful for her.

Austen’s sybil-traveller Elizabeth touring Derbyshire (1995 P&P, Andrew Davies’s script)

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Upcoming: the three 18th century sessions on women’s novels of the 18th century, ending on Corinne.

Merchant-Ivory Jhabvala, Room with a View, people on their way to Florentine gallery

Ellen