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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1975 (1975)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1975

(1975)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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The single-voice epistolary novel in Madame de Charrière's fiction: communication or self-exploration?

Recognition of the purely technical accomplishments of Madame de Charrière's fictional work has been traditionally obscured by two distinct yet complementary critical trends clearly detectable in the studies in which her name has appeared. Almost all critics dealing with the late eighteenth-century novel in general have indiscriminately classified her best-known work with that of other women authors of the period, few of whom can claim to arouse the reader's interest in the technical aspects of their novels. On the other hand, those more specifically concerned with Madame de Charrière have invariably allowed the real or supposed autobiographical elements of her novels to divert attention from any close examination of their narrative technique.

 

These attitudes on the part of Madame de Charrière's critics can be at least partially explained by her preference for the single-voice variants of the epistolary genre. It cannot, of course, be denied that by the middle of the seventeen-eighties the unilateral letter-collection had become, if not yet a worn-out, still a well-worn narrative device, already declining towards its eventual eclipse. Thus Madame de Charrière's frequent adoption of a ready-made, even banal novelistic form can at first glance be thought to deprive her work of any important measure of technical originality. An yet, if her initial choice of a narrative vehicle was conventional, the very particular uses to which she turned the supposedly restricted single-voice epistolary formula resulted, in at least one instance, in technical experiments which, though unobtrusive, are nonetheless quite astonishing in the context of contemporary fiction.

 

Mistriss Henley is both the first and perhaps the most fascinating example of Madame de Charrière's original handling of the solo-voice letter-novel. Consisting as it does of only five relatively short letters (and one note) all addressed by Mrs. Henley to a totally passive, non-characterized female acquaintance, this book has been quoted as being typical of that branch of the epistolary novel which Jean Rousset has described as the ‘journal camouflé’1., the least demanding and usually among the less interesting of contemporary techniques. The letters of which a novel of this type is composed bear a close resemblance to entries in a diary by reason of their inherent self-sufficiency, the rôle of the fictional recipient being reduced to that of a purely conventional and often useless presentational device.

 

But it is not possible to see in Mistriss Henley, the shortest and structurally the least complex of the best fictional productions of

Madame de Charrière's maturity, something other than a camouflaged diary? Could one not, with even greater justification, discern in the use of the particular epistolary variant chosen by Madame de Charrière for Mistriss Henley a technique which, precisely by virtue of the unusual if still passive rôle of the recipient, allowed for a believable pre-twentieth-century presentation of semi-conscious self-exploration?

 

It should be kept in mind that Madame de Charrière's use of the epistolary technique in other novels suggests that she was not only acutely aware of, but must have been particularly interested in the rôle of the silent addressee in lending credibility to the existence of a unilateral letter-collection. One may remember that in the first of the Lettres écrites de Lausanne, Madame de Charrière took great pains to acquaint the reader with the personality and situation of the cousin to whom Cécile's mother is writing: the comments upon the cousin's news which fill the first three pages of the opening letter naturally suggest the stimulating presence of the reader as opposed to the inanimate ‘letter-box’ of the camouflaged diary.



illustratie
11. Page de titre des Lettres Neuchâteloises.


Even more interesting is the part played by Cécile's mother when she in turn becomes William's confidante. By assuring William of a reader who is undoubtedly sympathetic, both by nature and because the interests of her daughter may well be affected by William's possible influence on his charge; by subtly suggesting, moreover, that William's choice of confessor was dictated by the resemblance he detects between Cécile's mother and the forsaken Caliste of his tale, Madame de Charrière was able to present a narrator-hero who differs from his contemporaries in the peculiarly unanalytic, unperceptive, indeed incurious turn of his mind. William, unlike virtually every other hero of first-person narrative, does not appear to consider himself perspicacious or even interesting.

These negative characteristics are essential to the story, turning as it does around William's complete inability to understand himself or those around him. Yet such traits risked making his written confession highly improbable had it been presented merely as an unmotivated outpouring of feeling. The existence of William's letter-confession is explicable only in the context of the enframing circumstances of its composition, inspired as it is by the expressed interest and peculiar qualities of a recipient whose rôle thus acquires a considerable degree of importance.

 

If, however, Madame de Charrière did not in general see in the single-voice epistolary novel a barely distinguishable variant of the intimate journal, it remains true that in the case of Mistriss Henley the letters, unlike those of the novels mentioned earlier, are indeed addressed to a person about whom not the slightest information is vouchsafed except the fact that she is a woman. Mrs. Henley has no apparent reason for choosing this particular friend as a confidante rather than any other. Nowhere in the book can be found the least mention of the invisible friend's personality; there is only one brief indication that she ever replies to Mrs. Henley's letters. To these facts, which would seem to justify the claim that this virtually nonexistent addressee represents a useless, easily dispensable device, must be added the further consideration that Mrs. Henley initially decided to set down the occurrences of her daily life and her reactions to them with the vague idea that such an account of the trials of conjugal existence might be publishable as a feminist counter-part to the distressingly prejudiced Mari Sentimental, whose perusal had prompted her first letter:

 

‘Vous dirai-je la pensée qui me vient? Si ma lettre ou mes lettres ont quelque justesse et vous paraissent propres à exciter quelque intérêt, seulement assez pour se faire lire, traduisez-les en changeant les noms, en omettant ce qui vous paraîtra ennuyeux

ou inutile. Je crois que beaucoup de femmes sont dans le même cas que moi. Je voudrais, sinon corriger, du moins avertir les maris; je voudrais remettre les choses à leur place, et que chacun se rendît justice.’2.

 

And yet the technically conventional didactic novel - or fictional treatise - which the opening pages of Mistriss Henley would seem to announce does not, in fact, materialize. ‘Je voudrais remettre les choses à leur place, et que chacun se rendît justice’: the wider scope of Mrs. Henley's announced ambition is no more than a cover for an infinitely more urgent, if only half-recognized need to explain to herself, and exclusively for her own benefit, the distressing emotional reactions to apparently normal situations which she can neither stifle nor readily justify.

 

It becomes increasingly clear that Mrs. Henley's letters, from their original conception as publishable documents of general interest and utility, come to be of value only as a personal attempt at self-discovery. As is apparent from many passages which unfortunately cannot be quoted convincingly out of context, Mrs. Henley is aware of the tangled state of her thoughts and feelings. She hopes that by giving a detailed, faithful account of the small happenings and unsatisfactory relationships of her life, she may be able to cast light on the reasons for her apparently ill-grounded unhappiness, for her ‘puérils chagrins’. And indeed the careful assembling of the facts of her case does sometimes - fleetingly - seem to clarify her self-evaluation: ‘en relisant ma lettre, j'ai trouvé que j'avais eu plus de torts que je ne l'avais cru’.3. But since she is totally lacking in the clinically detached powers of self-analysis of an Adolphe, and equally lacking in the gloomy self-satisfaction of other pre-Romantic heroes of the first-person novel, Mrs. Henley, who portrays herself throughout the novel as being unintellectual and emotionally immature, is temperamentally quite incapable of fully conscious self-analysis. Only by unconsciously identifying a part of herself with the ‘chère amie’ she is ostensibly addressing can Mrs. Henley achieve the necessary interior distance, the necessary measure of objectivity from which to examine her situation.

 

Thus the obsessive question that recurs throughout the letters, the echoing ‘ai-je eu tort?’ is neither rethorical nor directed at the confidante, but seeks an answer from Mrs. Henley herself: ‘aurais-je eu encore tort, toujours tort, tort en tout? Non, je ne veux pas le croire...’4. By setting down the facts, ostensibly for the subsequent judgment of a reasonable outsider, Mrs. Henley, although unaware of so doing, is actually pleading her case before

her own reason; rather than an interior monologue, the letters constitute an anguished interior dialogue between the emotional and the would-be rational selves. It can therefore be considered that the most fascinating aspect of Mistriss Henley is not Madame de Charrière's introduction of the passive recipient of the letters as an unacknowledged alter-ego of the letter-writer, but rather her use of the epistolary form to present that mental process which precedes conscious self-analysis; that is to say, the actual confrontation of the analytic faculties with the emotions upon which they will be brought to bear. Prevented by the novelistic conventions of her century from invading her character's mind by the arbitrary expression of unspoken, not fully formulated thoughts, Madame de Charrière found in the letter technique a perfectly believable device that allows the heroine to reveal the thought process itself. By using the fictional confidante as a lookingglass to reflect whatever image of herself the letter-writer chooses to examine, the author was able to achieve the simultaneous presentation of two levels of consciousness, differentiated both for the reader and for the writer herself by the distinction between the first and second-person pronouns. The usual form of the diary, or any other written form of the interior monologue, can present only a single voice, a single view-point, the final consolidation of previously fluid streams of consciousness, whereas Mrs. Henley's letters reveal her in the very process of ordering her thoughts prior to reflecting upon them.

 

That this is so, that Mistriss Henley presents only the preliminary, exploratory stages of self-examination, is clearly suggested by the fact that once the heroine has assembled enough data about herself to begin to suspect the full implications of her emotional state, she is frozen into the silence that provides so powerful a conclusion to her story. As soon as she comes to the bleak realization that the laborious sifting of painful memories - ‘la tâche est longue et peu agréable’ - is unlikely to uncover for the emotional self any excuse that might be acceptable to the reasoning self; as soon as she faces the possibility of having to admit inwardly, as she has already admitted to her husband, that she is ‘not a reasonable woman’ and can therefore no longer escape harsh self-judgment - ‘je me blâme et me méprise d'être malheureuse’ - Mrs. Henley will stop writing, paralysed by the proximity of the emotional abyss to which her preliminary attempts at self-justification have led her:

 

‘Ma situation est triste, ou bien je suis un être sans raison et sans vertus. Dans cette fâcheuse alternative d'accuser le sort, que je ne puis changer, ou de m'accuser et de me mépriser moi-même, de quelque côté que je me tourne, les tableaux qui se présentent à mon imagination, les détails dont ma mémoire est chargée, abattent

mon courage, rendent mon existence sombre et pénible. A quoi bon faire revivre, par mes récits, des impressions douloureuses, et retracer des scènes qui ne peuvent être trop vite ni trop profondément oubliées. Pour la dernière fois vous verrez mon coeur; après cela je m'interdis la plainte: il faut qu'il change ou ne s'ouvre plus.’5.

 

The acknowledgment of the supposedly abnormal feeling of alienation which, in Romatic writing, will serve as a point of departure for the semi-masochistic, semi-admiring exploration of the psyche, marks for Mrs. Henley the extreme limits of self-enquiry; the ultimate failure of her attempts to justify her emotions determines the uselessness, indeed the impossibility of any scrutiny of her state of mind. The book comes to an end at precisely that point which marks the boundary between description and systematic analysis.

 

The preoccupation with the technical possibilities of transposing interior dialogue into formally structured fiction that can be surmised from her composition of Mistriss Henley led Madame de Charrière to produce, many years after her first attempt, another curious hybrid novel of self-exploration. Although it can be perhaps more properly classed as a fictional diary, Sir Walter Finch et son fils William is closely related to the single-voice epistolary novel, and in fact offers interesting analogies with Mistriss Henley.

Each of the entries which make up the body of Sir Walter Finch et son fils William is specifically addressed by the father to the son. In a sense, and to a progressively lessening extent as the book continues and the child grows up, these entries resembling letters are addressed to someone unknown, the son who will one day read them being manifestly unable to do so on the date of the first entry:

‘Vous êtes né à Ivy Hall, Westmoreland, le premier juin de l'année mille sept cent quatre-vingt. Il y a quatre jours que vous vîntes au monde.’6.

 

Sir Walter's primary purpose in keeping a journal of William's growth to manhood appears to be to preserve for William's subsequent profit a more detailed and more objective record of the experiences of his youth than memory would be able to furnish:

 

‘Que nous nous connaissons tard, mon cher William! Il faut, avec un heureux hasard, un ami pénétrant et sincère pour nous montrer à nos propres yeux, et tandis que chacun nous voit, nous nous ignorons.’7.

Sir Walter, however, does not restrict himself to recording the development of his son, but allows himself to include in his memoranda experiences of his own whose narration could only be of very incidental benefit to the reader for whom they are destined: ‘J'ai jeté les yeux sur mes dernières pages. Je vois que j'étois occupé d'un objet dont il était assez inutile de vous entretenir. - Je ne veux cependant rien retrancher, ni rien effacer...’8. And again: ‘Dans ce récit, mon fils, j'ai plus pensé à m'amuser qu'à vous être utile.’9.

It is in fact the long and frequent digressions from the central theme of William's upbringing which provide the chief interest, both general and technical, of this novel.

 

Sir Walter, like Mrs. Henley, is an essentially lonely, introverted person. Intensely interested in human nature and, as a disciple of Montaigne, led to center this interest upon the study of his own reactions to the world around him, Sir Walter seeks to obtain the interior distance necessary for self-examination by addressing the exposition of his theories and the analysis of his experiences to an outside judge. The one difference, and it is an essential one, between the respective motivations which lead Mrs. Henley and Sir Walter to confide their thoughts to external listeners, is that Sir Walter, unlike Mrs. Henley, is fully conscious both of his need to create this interior distance, and of the artificiality of the means used to this purpose. In a most interesting and revealing passage Sir Walter, having tried to explain why it is that a reasonable person will so often continue to repeat his arguments to someone who is manifestly incapable of understanding them, suggests that any thinking person needs to exteriorize his thought-processes and, if denied a real recipient for his confidences, will create an artificial one:

 

‘Après un demi-quart d'heure de conversation on doit savoir à quoi s'en tenir, pour la vie, sur quelqu'un, quant à sa capacité d'entendement; pourquoi done vouloir encore essayer de lui faire entendre ce qu'il ne peut entendre? -- Il y a pourtant un avantage à cette sottise, pour celui qui vit avec des sots. Il s'entretient dans l'habitude de parler raison... Enfermé avec une buse, un oison, il seroit assez utile, et d'ailleurs assez consolant de s'imaginer que l'animal entendra un jour, si on ne se lasse pas de lui parler.-- Puissiez-vous, mon fils, n'avoir jamais besoin d'une illusion pareille! -- Ne seroit-ce point là le fond de la fable de Pigmalion?’10.

 

William is, for Sir Walter's purpose, the perfect confidant. Obviously as incapable as Pygmalion's statue of any active participation in the father's interior debates, the fact that he will at some time in the future read these ‘letters’ provides Sir Walter with a standard of

objectivity against which to measure his self-evaluation. ‘Il faut... un ami pénétrant et sincère pour nous montrer à nos propres yeux, et tandis que chacun nous voit, nous nous ignorons.’ Sir Walter will be the perspicacious and sincere friend who will allow William to know himself, but at the same time he will transform the infant William into the objective critic for whom he feels a need.

 

Any examination, however brief and inadequate, of the technical subtleties underlying Madame de Charrière's portrayal of psychological self-exploration through the medium of the letter must include at least a mention of the Lettres Neuchâteloises. This book, perhaps the best and certainly the most carefully constructed work of fiction produced by Madame de Charrière, neither can nor should be seen as anything other than a delightful example, in miniature, of the multi-voice epistolary novel, combining the immediacy and intimacy of first-person narrative with the omniscience and ubiquity of the impersonal approach. But provided that the danger of isolating any one element from so skilfully integrated a whole be borne in mind, it is of great interest to note the effects achieved by the internal chronological transposition of the six letters from Marianne to her friend which together constitute the central section of the novel.

 

The first letter to be received by Mlle de Ville after Marianne's initial encounter with Meyer, and which is also the first of Marianne's two accounts of the incident to be presented to the reader, is not, in fact, the first such account written by Marianne. It reflects not the fragile happiness of Marianne's instinctive emotional reactions to her first meeting with Meyer, but rather a caution born of subsequent deliberation, the caution which had prevented her from posting her first rhapsodical letter which, when reread, appeared to her almost delirious: ‘Je t'écrivis une lettre qui, après cela, me parut folle ...’11. In fact, the painful mutability of mood which is so poignantly suggested by the juxtaposition, in reversed order, of the two letters is already apparent in the originally unposted letter, in the course of which Marianne's analytic faculties can actually be seen to awaken, since the initial, unreasoned joy is replaced, at the very end of the letter, by the question that Marianne, to this extent like Mrs. Henley, asks not of her friend, but of herself: ‘Savoir, si M. Meyer sera l'âme de la vie entière de ton amie, ou si je n'aurais fait qu'un petit rêve agréable.’12.

The letter which Marianne, finding it irrational, at first leaves unposted is eventually sent out only in response to Mlle de Ville's understandable pleas for a clarification of the state of her friend's feelings. Since it is the only one of Marianne's letters to be motivated more by an inner need to put her tangled emotions into words than by a real desire to communicate with her friend, its existence as a unique example of selfexploration in what is otherwise one side of a fictional correspondence points rather to the differences than to the similarities between Marianne's grouped letters and those of Mrs. Henley. Indeed, although valuable as proof of Madame de Charrière's skill in supplying her characters with convincing psychological motivation for self-expression, the inclusion of this letter within the contexture of the Lettres Neuchâteloises taken as a whole merits an analysis of the author's epistolary techniques beyond the scope of the present study.

If, however, Madame de Charrière's exploitation of previously unsuspected potentials of the letter as a vehicle for an essentially modern kind of fiction was not restricted to her use of the self-exploratory letter, this single aspect of her art should go far towards freeing her from accusations of technical banality suggested by her reliance on supposedly conventional novelistic forms.

 

Christabel Pendrill BRAUNROT

 

University of Virginia


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