Fournier Kiss, Corinne (2021). Literatura, płeć i naród w XIX wieku. Germaine de Staël i George Sand w dialogu ze swymi polskimi siostrami. Varsovie: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)This study examines how Mme de Staël and George Sand, who expressed a benevolent interest in Poland on numerous occasions, were read, perceived and received in nineteenth-century Polish society; particular emphasis is placed upon the appreciation of their works in the years 1840–1850. The “and” of the title, placed between the two French women of letters, is thus to be understood not only as a conjunction intended to link them successively – that is, serving to indicate that the analysis of first one author, then the other, will be provided in order to grasp the specificity of each of these writers– but also and above all as an “and” linking the two women in a context of simultaneity. The focus is primarily on the joint circulation of Mme de Staël and George Sand from France to Poland, which I believe to be in keeping with the way these two exceptional women were received in the latter country.
This is, indeed, one of the great peculiarities and originalities of the Polish reception of Madame de Staël and George Sand: if Madame de Staël enjoyed a certain (modest) reception immediately upon production of her works, she enjoyed a second reception at the moment when Sand started to write. In other words, when the Sand phenomenon began to be talked about in the Polish literary sphere, it brought in its wake a rediscovery of Mme de Staël, some of whose works were (re)read concomitantly with the novels of her compatriot – just as if the “Lady of Nohant” shed new light on the “Lady of Coppet”, or even as though she could be understood only in direct filiation of the latter, as if the resemblance between their works was so striking that a cross-discussion and cross-reading of them were patently obvious.
This is especially true of the reception of Mme de Staël and George Sand by women writers, whether this reception is manifested in an official way (critical material already published at the time) or not (egodocuments): those who have commented on Sand’s work have often been inspired to come back to Staël’s work, sometimes to embrace it in the same impetus of admiration, sometimes, on the contrary, to integrate it into the same movement of depreciation, or again, to confront it from competing perspectives – critical positions which, however, are invariably accompanied by the recognition, for better or for worse, of their rare “genius”.
The book consists of three main parts. The first, entitled “Poland in the Thought and Works of Mme de Staël and George Sand”, points out that Mme de Staël and George Sand were the first French women writers to show a real interest in the Polish and Slavic world, and that they were able to appreciate certain aspects of it according to criteria that were not French, but specific to the Polish nation and the Slavic “race”. They both felt empathy towards the Poland of the partitions and sometimes even went on to identify affinities between the destinies of Poland and France. Mme de Staël, however, in her attempt to understand this nation, limited herself to its politics and history, whereas Sand went much further, since, thanks to her friendships with prominent Polish intellectuals and national artists (Mickiewicz, Chopin, Grzymała), she proceeded to a true cultural immersion; she thus questions all the stereotypes of the time on Poland and little by little constructs her own image of it, which, in addition to her correspondence, she also expresses in her remarkable essay of comparative literature, the “Essai sur le drame fantastique” [“Essay on the fantastic drama”], and in her novelistic cycle Consuelo (which, although featuring Bohemia, also speaks of Poland, since, under the influence of the Panslavic ideas advocated by Mickiewicz in his lectures at the Collège de France, Sand also takes the liberty of mixing the two “sister nations”).
The second, and by far the most important part, is devoted to the comparative analysis of French and Polish texts and is entitled “Mme de Staël and George Sand: Which Receptions in Poland?” It begins by taking stock of the question (i.e. what are the receptions of the two women writers in Europe and in Poland) and then sets out the particular approach of this book. Whereas the few studies produced so far devoted to the reception of the two French women writers in 19th-centruy Poland limit themselves to a survey of the translations of their works, or fragments of their works, to the identification of allusions, mentions and accounts of their biographies (which are the subject of real myths) and of their works in the press and in critical articles, the aim here is to proceed in the mode of textual analysis and confrontation. Some 19th-century Polish texts written by women reveal subtle aesthetic and ethical breaks with respect to the agreed-upon “horizon of expectations” of the time, which reactivate those introduced by Mme de Staël and George Sand in their national literature. This is manifested, for example, in the way of appropriating, through a specific style, a genre hitherto reserved for men (a question that forms the topic of a sub-chapter devoted to female travelogues); it is also manifested in a way of nuancing and valorizing characteristics, hitherto represented as negative, of consecrated female figures (the topic of a sub-chapter devoted to the figure of the witch); finally, it manifests itself in a way of authorizing female characters to claim vocations identical to that of the male characters (a question dealt with in a sub-chapter devoted to the figure of the female artist).
From the sub-chapter on “Female Travelogues in France and Poland”, it is striking that Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s monumental travelogue, W Alpach i za Alpami [In the Alps and beyond] owes much less to the men’s travelogues that Rautenstrauchowa explicitly draws upon in her book as reading sources, than to the viatical literature of Mme de Staël and George Sand and to the new Romantic and even post-Romantic elements introduced by them. The Staelian “roman-voyage” Corinne ou l’Italie and the Sandian travelogue Un Hiver à Majorque [A Winter in Majorca], paved the way for a female travel narrative that can compete, in terms of information and erudition, with the kind of “dictionary” that characterised traditional male travel narratives, but leaving room for sentimentality and subjectivity; the second part of Dix années d’exil [Ten Years of Exile] by Mme de Staël and the Lettres d’un voyageur [Letters from a Traveler] by George Sand also encourage Rautenstrauchowa to maintain the proven conventions of the female travelogue by playing here and there the game of improvisation and, above all, by respecting a whole rhetoric of negation (apologies, devaluation of the self, recourse to male authorities, etc.).
The following sub-chapter, dedicated to “Female Characters in French and Polish Novels: the Figure of the Female Artist”, establishes, with the help of precise textual analyses, how much Narcyza Żmichowska’s novel Książka pamiątek (Book of Souvenirs) owes to Mme de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie and George Sand’s Consuelo – certainly at the level of the plot, but also and above all in its conception of enthusiasm, which is obviously borrowed from Mme de Staël, while taking into account the connotations added to it by George Sand. While the concept of enthusiasm has a male definition in the Romantic period, which revives the Platonic thesis of an artist who is the interpreter of a divine power that deprives him of his reason, these three women writers use it, on the contrary, to characterize a state of creation (of the woman artist) which, while rooted in supernatural inspiration, is firmly controlled by reason and includes an ethical dimension.
The last sub-chapter of the second part, entitled “Female Characters in French and Polish Novels: The Figure of the Witch”, is based on the idea that while the shocking nature of the seventeenth-century trials has been expressed by historians as well as by some nineteenth-century writers, Eliza Orzeszkowa and George Sand show in their novels that the persecution of witches had not yet said its last word in the nineteenth century and that it continued to function as a socio-cultural strategy tacitly accepted by the community in order to deal with certain disorders – and in particular those related to women who take on too much power or independence in relation to the norms established for their sex. Thus, both La Petite Fadette [The Little Fadette] and Dziurdziowe [The Dziurdzia] feature a young woman of great goodness, profound wisdom and exceptional knowledge of the medical properties of plants, but who, at a time when events perceived as unnatural occur in the village (cows running out of milk or the appearance of will-o’-the-wisps), is arbitrarily accused of witchcraft and complicity with the devil. With the difference that where Sand’s story goes in the direction of progressive social acceptance of Little Fadette, Orzeszkowa’s story evolves in the opposite direction, with the total rejection of Petrusia by her village and concludes with the murder of the “witch”.
The third and last part, a kind of extended synthesis, bears the title “Women's Writing in France and Poland: Constraints and Creativity”. It first observes that if, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a slow “feminization of culture” was taking place, this was nevertheless paid for by the submission of the woman-writer to harsh constraints in her way of writing (style), in her choice of literary genres and in her representations of female characters. Mme de Staël and George Sand do not hesitate to break all these constraints and to encourage other women writers to do the same.
Official Polish criticism perceived very well the danger that the reading of the works of Mme de Staël and George Sand could represent, and in order to exclude these two authors from any influence on Polish letters, it shifted the focus from their writings to their “scandalous” and unacceptable biographies. Nevertheless, some Polish women writers, including Narcyza Żmichowska, Eliza Orzeszkowa and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa, were able to disregard these criticisms and to understand the value of these women writers and what they could bring to the progress of their own writing – namely, to their way of considering women’s issues in a much broader framework, that of the social, political and national emancipation of a whole people and country, and that of a new education resisting all prejudices, which was alone capable of promoting the emancipation of women.
Item Type: |
Book (Monograph) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature |
UniBE Contributor: |
Fournier Kiss, Corinne |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 370 Education 700 Arts > 780 Music 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 890 Other literatures 900 History > 910 Geography & travel |
ISBN: |
978-83-66898-07-3 |
Publisher: |
Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN |
Language: |
Polish |
Submitter: |
Corinne Ingrid Fournier Kiss |
Date Deposited: |
23 Jul 2021 15:15 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 15:51 |
Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Pani de Staël, George Sand, Polska, podróż "w rozdaju żeńskim", podróż romantyczna, kobieta artystka, Entuzjazm, czarownica |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/156994 |
Actions (login required)
 |
Edit item |