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Extravagant Narratives
Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form
By Elizabeth J. MacArthur PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06793-3
CHAPTER 1
The Genesis of Epistolary Narrative in the Seventeenth Century
Ah! j'en meurs de honte: mon désespoir n'est done que dans mes lettres?
— Lettres portugaises
Women, Salons, and Letter Writing
In seventeenth-century France letters were part of a codified system of social relations. Seventeenth-century men and women wrote letters not only to maintain contact with distant friends but also to carry out their daily social business. All interactions among members of the upper classes, from the declaration of passionate love, to the expression of condolences on the death of a relative, to the offering of thanks for a political favor, were governed by the conventions of honnêteté and mondanité, conventions of polite, well-bred behavior. Letters played a central role in these codified social relations. Sentiments from gratitude to sympathy to advice were expressed in highly conventionalized letters. Dorothy Backer writes of love, for example:
Love was rigorously patterned — disciplined, we might say — to meet standards of civilization, dignity, and honor, even when (especially when) it was illicit. The love letter was an indispensable element in the pattern.
As Versini writes, "Pratique épistolaire et honnêteté se rejoignent done étroitement [Epistolary practice and courtesy are thus closely linked]."
The conventions of appropriate social behavior were developed and put into practice in the salons of the précieuses, the most important upper-class social setting in seventeenth-century France. Beginning in 1618 with the Marquise de Rambouillet's famous chambre bleue, and continuing, despite a decline after the court's move to Versailles in 1682, until the Revolution, women presided over regular gatherings of writers and nobles. The men and women who met in the salons of the précieuses chatted about literature and love, political and personal gossip, aiming always for light, elegant, and clever conversation and graceful behavior. They played verbal games, critiqued recent literary works, wrote portraits and maxims, and discussed topics ranging from love to politics to morality. Regular participants referred to each other by pseudonyms, fictional names to correspond to the fictional world they were creating. Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet, for example, was known as Arthénice, an anagram of her name.
Salon behavior and conversation were highly codified, governed by the women in whose alcoves they were held. Those who attended were both creators of and players in a carefully staged performance. As Backer writes of the Marquise de Rambouillet, "She knew she was setting a stage, and the actors when they arrived must know too that they were in an exceptional place and on display before an audience consisting of each other" (37). Backer describes the précieuse construction of a refined and predictable world, in contrast to the grimy and dangerous world outside, as "the imposition of form and ritual on a community that was wallowing in lust, blood, and dirt" (9). The conventions of salon behavior were based on literary models such as L'Astrée (1607–27), whose protagonists, happy and virtuous shepherds, spend their time "examining all the facets of a theme which has no issue" (Backer, 38). Salon pseudonyms resembled the names of the characters in L'Astrée and other early seventeenth-century novels. Many of the activities at the salons were also explicitly theatrical, involving disguises and role playing (see Picard, 47–48, for examples). Salon life consciously strove to imitate fiction. "II devait done arriver qu'on vît les moeurs se modeler sur la fiction [It was to be expected, then, that customs were modeled on fiction]," writes Picard, "les héros de roman servir de types idéaux qu'on cherche à imiter, à égaler, à surpasser même [that novelistic heros served as ideal types which people sought to imitate, to equal, even to surpass]" (75–76). The men and women who frequented seventeenth-century salons fashioned a work of art, structured and beautiful, out of their own lives.
Not only in the salons but throughout noble and court society life was viewed as an artfully constructed illusion. The most extraordinary example was of course Louis XIV's Versailles, where thousands of nobles and administrators danced an elaborate and demanding dance whose costumes, steps, and timing were determined by the king. As Demorest writes, "Louis XIV sera le danseur, l'acteur, et surtout l'exigeant metteur-en-scène d'un spectacle glorieux joué pendant près de cinquante-cinq ans sans un jour de relâche [Louis XIV will be the dancer, the actor, and above all the demanding stage-director of a glorious spectacle acted for almost fifty-five years without a single day off]." For Demorest even political action in the seventeenth century was theatrical: "En somme, la Fronde a confirmé que Phomme n'est qu'apparence et que la nation entière est appelée à jouer sur une seule scène pour le salut public [In sum, the Fronde confirmed that man is but appearance and that the whole nation is called to act on a single stage for the public good]" (81). This imitation of literature in life extended to the level of individuals, when lovers copied their passionate epistles from collections of fictional love letters and based their behavior on fictional models. Versini comments:
Un siècle où une précieuse relit L'Astrée avant de rencontrer un homme qu'elle croit "homme à sentiments," pour rapprendre le langage du coeur ... est familier de ces confusions entre vie et littérature, ou plutôt habitue à les voir s'entraider.
[A century when a précieuse rereads L'Astrée before meeting a man whom she considers a "man of feeling," to relearn the language of the heart ... is well-acquainted with these confusions between life and literature, or rather accustomed to seeing them help one another.] (242)
An essential difference between the salons and the court, however, was that in the salons the role of metteur-en-scène was played by women. Women determined what behavior was acceptable, women were "the arbitrators of taste and language" (Maclean, 120). Within the closed realm of the salons women could create literary works (portraits, maxims, conversations), judge the works of others, and of course construct entirely new rules for social interaction and linguistic precision. Rather than being isolated at home, under the authority of their husbands, these women gathered together and developed their own authority and their own intellectual sphere. While many were married, others succeeded in putting off marriage indefinitely. The Marquise de Rambouillet's daughter, Julie d'Angennes, for example, prolonged her courtship for fourteen years (she was thirty-eight when she married); Backer writes that "[s]he held out for perpetual postponement" (88–90).
This resistance to decisive closural acts such as marriage in fact characterized the attitude of most précieuses. As Ian Maclean explains, all of these salons
attempt to recreate the escapist world of the romans de chevalerie and the pastoral tradition inside the confines of their meeting-places. In this "romanesque" world, sensibility and refinement are sovereign qualities, and there is a universal preoccupation with love and heroism, "service" and dangers, where consummation and marriage are asymptotes which, if reached, would herald the return of everyday reality. (142–43; see also 153)
Since marriage would break the illusion of an ideal life and force the woman back into the world controlled by men, women preferred to remain single and to flirt rather than consummating affairs. "[E]vidence from feminist tracts suggests," observes Carolyn Lougee, "that what précieuses wanted was the freedom long enjoyed by aristocratic men either not to marry or to engage in a marriage which did not claim the sum total of their affections" (25). As long as they were unmarried, their possibilities for the future appeared open, limitless. "Préciosité offered women a system of existence conceived of as an antidote to their plight as wards and wives," writes Maclean (152). Marriage represented the closure of these possibilities, and the end of freedom and power. Scudéry's Carte de Tendre reflects the précieux desire to suspend closure; on her famous map of affections, "love never leads to sexual fulfillment but remains in perpetual physical suspension" (Backer, 196).
Backer suggests that the précieuses escaped into an illusory social world rather than attempt to transform an unacceptable outer reality. "They settled for the mirage, the comedy of the alcovist, the spiritualization of love, the incoherent and lazy dabbling in literature" (292), she writes in her conclusion. Her words ("settled for," "mirage," "lazy") reveal a harsh judgment of the quality of the conversations and literature generated at the salons and an especially harsh judgment of the salon process of structuring one's life and society as fictional creations. As she writes in an earlier chapter:
Civilization was not the control but the denial of the brute world of physical force and mindless instinct. It was a man-made, artificial construction, not transforming but covering up the uneven powerful earth on which it rested. It was a stage set. (82)
It can be argued, however, that the précieuses had a decisive influence on social behavior and values, on literary criticism, and even on the expansion of social mobility. They may have acted on a stage set, but their actions affected the "real" world. Lougee demonstrates, for example, the role of salons and their code of honnêteté in helping assimilate the bourgeoisie into the aristocracy; "salons were the indispensable sociocultural adaptive mechanism by which the integration of the newly ennobled into the structure of orders was completed" (212). Similarly, Picard argues that in the salons, "[l]a passion des belles-lettres et de la bonne conversation ... abolissait tous les préjugés de classe et de rang [the passion for belles lettres and good conversation ... abolished all prejudices of class and rank]" (65). Because women controlled the salons, and because members of the bourgeoisie frequented them, antifeminists associated salons with frightening social upheavals (Lougee, 71). Above all, the salons gave women social and intellectual authority: the power to determine the course of at least a part of their own lives and the opportunity to create and to judge literary works. The "spiritualization" and "incoherence" of which Backer accuses the précieuses may be interpreted as signs of a desire to avoid consummation and coherence, which were governed by men. During the hours they spent in the salons, women lived a world they had constructed. Within this limited realm they were able to choose freedom and flexibility over the "closures" of the outside world.
Letters played an essential role in the social interactions codified in the salons, and the popularity of the genre must be attributed at least in part to the conventions of preciosity. "Ce genre littéraire [This literary genre]," writes Daniel Mornet, "s'est organisé en même temps que la société précieuse et en partie par elle [was organized at the same time as the society of preciosity and in part by it]." Because of the rules of epistolary behavior and the place of letters in the larger social context, letters were never simply a transparent representation of the writer's sentiments. As Bernard Bray observes, "Prendre la plume pour écrire une lettre, c'est entrer bon gré mal gré dans ce système conventionnel [To pick up the pen to write a letter is to enter necessarily into this conventionalized system]." In order to help letter writers conform to conventional expectations, dozens of letter writing manuals appeared, containing precepts on epistolary style and model letters for use in different situations. While some of these sample letters were fabricated specifically for the purposes of the manuals, others were copied from actual correspondences or even, by the end of the century, from epistolary novels. Janet Altman describes the "epistolary situations" outlined in these manuals as "repeatable, social, aristocratic, and above all public; epistolary communication in the letter manuals and anthologies ... reflects the social rituals of courtly and salon life."
Letter writing inevitably involved a conscious structuring effort, not only to follow epistolary conventions but also in anticipation of a public beyond the correspondent. Letters were often read aloud in the salons or circulated among acquaintances, to be admired and criticized. In some cases they were even published against the wishes of their author, as when Villedieu sold the correspondence of his former lover Desjardins to the publisher Barbin. Montpensier's cavalier references to halting the mails in order to read people's private correspondence are thus only the extension of the seventeenth-century attitude toward letters as carefully crafted works, worthy of attention and open to public view. Several times in her memoirs Montpensier mentions this practice; for example, "j'étois à Orléans, où je me divertissais à faire prendre tous Ies courriers qui passaient, n'ayant plus autre chose à faire [I was in Orleans, where I amused myself by having all the passing couriers picked up, no longer having anything else to do]." As Bernard Bray writes of the potential audience for letters in the seventeenth century, "dans l'acte même d'écrire une lettre tous les publics sont impliqués [in the very act of writing a letter all audiences are implied]."
Like the salons, letter writing enabled women to structure their own lives, however briefly, and to create works of art. Letters (and sometimes novels) were the only kind of writing women were thought to be able to do well, and even women with no literary pretensions did not hesitate to write letters. Altman's article demonstrates that in the seventeenth century personal letters were not considered suitable for publication, which may help explain why women were able to write them and were thought to be good at it. In their correspondences women could attempt to shape the plots of their own lives, and when, at the end of the century, they began to write epistolary novels they were able to invent plots that accorded greater freedom and power to women. Perhaps it is no coincidence that as salons declined in importance, letter writing and the use of letters to tell stories increased. Like the salons, letters were artful transformations of reality, like the salons they allowed women to escape the closures traditionally imposed by society, and like the salons women's letters were perceived, though obliquely, as a threat to the stable social order.
In the late seventeenth century, the salon and court codes of behavior, which emphasized social relations above all, combined with the influence of a few important epistolary models from the past, notably Ovid's Heroides and Abelard and Heloise's correspondence, led to an explosion of interest in letter writing (particularly love letters) and to the birth and flowering of the epistolary novel. I would like to study a selection of early epistolary texts in order to see the relationships among real correspondences, letter manuals, and epistolary novels, and to understand the development of the first French epistolary fictions. The three texts I will focus on, Marie-Catherine Desjardins's Billets galants, Edmé Boursault's Lettres de Babet, and the anonymous Lettres portugaises, all appeared in 1668–69, a year that might be said to mark the birth of the epistolary novel. These three contemporary texts demonstrate the convergence of love letters, letter manuals, and epistolary novels, and together provide a fairly representative picture of the epistolary form in the second half of the seventeenth century. They also provide clues as to the functioning and interpretation of any epistolary text. Desjardins's Billets galants, explicitly about the relationship between letters and lived experience, suggest that letters can never simply mirror life. The many seventeenth-century letter manuals, including those of Boursault, show how groups of letters, usually love letters, begin to engender narratives, and point to the fundamental characteristics of epistolary narrative. The Lettres portugaises and their critical reception reveal the many potential sources of metonymy in the epistolary form, whether on the level of individual sentences or of the status of a whole correspondence, and suggest the critical preference for metaphor. Rather than imposing a theory on these texts, I will investigate what they themselves have to say about letter writing, story telling, and the relationship between the two.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Extravagant Narratives by Elizabeth J. MacArthur. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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