Madame de Lafayette
When, in 2007, the French President scorned the idea that budding public servants should be required to read La Princesse de Cleves, the ensuing protests, whatever their purely political dimension, were a reminder of this work's iconic status. Naturally enough, perhaps, this spotlight left in the shade the other works attributed to Mme de Lafayette. There was also scant reference to the messy question of attribution. With no manuscript in existence the present attribution of La Princesse de Cleves was made ‘definitively’ only a century after its publication in 1678: for example, the 1764 reprint of the 1704 Paris edition cites La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, and Segrais as co-authors. Does this matter? True, we would still watch Hamlet if it were performed by the Royal Bacon Company. However, in the case of Mme de Lafayette, biographical details are still often used to shore up critical hypotheses. At the outset, therefore, one issue deserves attention: what does ‘Mme de Lafayette’ now imply?
Model Behaviour: Cocteau, Radiguet and LaPrincesse de Clèves
This article explores certain implications of the intertextual connections between two canonical French novels, Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) and Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du comte d’Orgel (1924), with particular emphasis on the question of literary individuation as it applies to the later work and its author. The functional importance of exemplary model works in respect of the modern French literary field is examined in the context of challenges to notions of literary tradition and transmission in the inter-war years. Radiguet’s literary individuation is seen as both practically enabled and theoretically problematised by the connection to the earlier text. The individuation process, complicated additionally in this instance by Radiguet’s literary and personal association with Jean Cocteau, is argued to unfold with respect to a classical imaginary that is facilitated by but independent of the actual classical intertext.
Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction
Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.