Lyric and Memory: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's "Tristesse"

Journal article

Accounts of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry tend to foreground above all the question of gender. Nineteenth-century poets such as Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire viewed her as conforming to a stereotypically feminine role–natural, maternal, melancholic, and passive–and this perception persists in more recent criticism, such as Wendy Greenberg’s Uncanonical Women (106-107). However, commentators such as Michael Danahy, Christine Planté and Edward Kaplan have shown how she challenged the male model of poetic authority, and increasingly the critical focus has been on the manner in which her poetry itself dramatizes this tension between acquiescence and resistance, as explored in very different ways by Barbara Johnson, Gretchen Schultz and Aimée Boutin. At the same time, the formal innovations of her verse are being considered on their own terms, for instance by Michael Danahy, Laurence Porter and Aimée Boutin. It is essential that any assessment of her conformity to gender stereotypes and her place in the Romantic tradition take full account of the form as well as the content of the verse, as rightly emphasized by Planté (86). Her originality can only be truly assessed through close textual analysis, as this article will demonstrate through a reading of the poem “Tristesse”, a complex reflection on memory written in 1832 (1: 215-17).

Authors: Lunn-Rockliffe, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Journal: French Forum
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 217-232
• Publication date: 2018-01-25
• Acceptance date: 2017-07-20
• DOI: 10.1353/frf.2017.0024
• ISSN: 0098-9355