“The History of the Dutchess de C------” was serializd by
the New York Magazine, or Literary Repository in its January through
July 1790 issues. Introducing the novella, the editors noted that it “is
extracted from a Work of much Merit, not generally known here, entitled,
‘Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education,’ first translated from the
French of Madame la Comptesse de Genlis, and published in the English Language,
in London, in 1784. The Editors presume it will not be unentertaining to their
fair Readers.”
The text’s subsequent publication history suggests that they
presumed correctly; it was reprinted at least eleven times in the United States
between 1792 and 1823, in cities spanning New England and the mid-Atlantic
region.
Still, the story, like the novel from which it was
excised, remains, like its author, ‘not generally known here.’
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746-1830) was famous during her lifetime as a
prolific author who published some 140 volumes of plays, novels, and memoirs;
as a sometimes controversial moralist who was publicly hostile towards the philosophes;
as the private tutor to the children of the Orléans branch of the French royal
family (among whom Louis-Philippe would become King of the French in 1830); and
as one of Napoléon’s confidants. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
most of her books were translated into English within the year of their French
publication and were widely read by English and American audiences. A
biographical sketch of Genlis that ran in the New York Weekly Visitor and
Ladies’ Museum in 1817 observed that her “numerous works have, for a series
of years, been regularly translated into the English language, are in constant
request, and have identified their author with the English name, and, as it
were, naturalized her.”
Genlis’s ‘naturalization’ into Anglo-American literary
culture and the substantial volume of her work that circulated in the United
States make a compelling case for her inclusion in studies of the early
American novel. The status of her work in the United States also raises
questions about the parameters of ‘the American novel’ as a category,
furthering the process of disciplinary self-examination that has been ongoing
in the field of early American literature since the canon revisions of the
1970s and 1980s, and that has gained further traction through the
trans-Atlantic turn of the last two decades.
The provocation that I would like to offer is this: at
what point does a French text—translated into English, uprooted from its
original context, edited invisibly to suit the commercial or ideological agenda
of American publishers, consumed by American readers who necessarily imported
to the text their own distinctive concerns and interests—emerge reinvented as
an American novel?
The novella was originally an embedded narrative subplot
of Genlis’s popular (but very long, at four volumes) 1782 pedagogical novel Adèle
et Théodore, and was published as an independent volume in Lausanne, France
in 1783—allegedly because it was tonally and aesthetically incongruous with the
rest of the book, although commercial motives may have been another factor.[1]
English translations of the story as a stand-alone text followed shortly
thereafter in London’s Lady’s Magazine in 1786, where it was serialized
under the title “Female Fortitude, or the History of the Dutchess of C----,
Written by Herself”; and as one of the selections included in Thomas Holcroft’s
anthology Beauties of Genlis in 1787. Both of these editions follow the
text of the story as it was originally written in Adèle et Théodore,
rather than translating the 1783 Lausanne edition, which included an editors’
preface and two extra paragraphs at the story’s beginning.
The New York Magazine serialization, like the
ensuing American editions of the text as a book (and like the British Lady’s
Magazine serialization), presented the text as a novella, rather than as an
excerpt of a longer work. Subtracting the substantial interpretive apparatus
that surrounded the Dutchess’s narrative as it appears in Adèle et Théodore,
as well as in the Lausanne edition of the novella, certainly altered the text’s
meaning in ways that its author would likely have considered significant: in Adèle
et Théodore, the narrative's moral is carefully weighed and discussed by
Madame d’Almane, her daughter Adèle, and her friend Madame de Vilmours. In reading Adèle et Théodore, readers would have
encountered the Dutchess of C**** one and a half volumes into the story of the
Baron and Baroness d’Almane and their children Adèle and Théodore; readers
would by this point be well-versed in Madame d’Almane’s (which is, essentially,
Genlis’s own) educational theory: Adèle is raised on a strict diet of carefully
curated literature, writing exercises, and experiential moral training (heavily
emphasizing the need for absolute transparency between the daughter and mother).
In this context, the Dutchess’s story would read as a cautionary tale: as
Madame d’Almane explains to her daughter, “all [the Dutchess’s] misfortunes
arose solely from her want of confidence in her mother.” And, as the Dutchess
emphasizes throughout her narrative, all of her unhappiness stems from “the
greatest misfortune that could happen to a young woman, that of not having
looked on her mother as a true friend and confidante.”
As revealed in the title of this blog post—which was also
the title that Baltimore publisher Edward J. Coale used for his 1812 edition of
the novella, so blame him for the spoilers—the Dutchess’s ‘misfortunes’ involve
a very bad marriage. As a young woman, she falls in love with the Count of
Belmire, but chooses to keep the romance a secret from her parents, who arrange
her marriage to the Duke of C**** before Belmire can return from abroad in time
to marry her. Because she has allowed herself to become attached to Belmire,
the Dutchess develops an uncontrollable antipathy for the Duke of C**** (who is
also old and ill-tempered and, as she realizes too late, psychotic), and
complains about him in letters to her friend, the Marchioness de Venuzi. The
Duke discovers her letters, demands to know the identity of the lover she
alludes to in them and, when she refuses to give up Belmire’s identity,
separates her from their infant daughter, fakes her death to their servants and
to a doctor, and locks her in a dungeon beneath a castle “twelve leagues from
Naples.” Realizing that only her captor knows she is still alive, she exlaims,
“Alas! … I no longer live but to you?”
As Chris Roulston has argued, the novella belongs to what
Michelle A. Massé first coined the “marital gothic,” a subgenre that thematizes
the “discrepancy between the romantic ideology of marriage and its praxis.”[2]
In contrast to the idealized romantic love that the Dutchess imagines Belmire
could have offered her, her experience of marriage is one of absolute physical
imprisonment and psychological torture. The novella’s gothic setting enacts the
genre's typical preoccupation with boundaries, containment, and liminality, as
when the Dutchess describes their approach to the castle:
[W]hen we arrived at the castle, we crossed a draw-bridge; the rattling of the chains made me shudder; at this moment I looked at the Duke. What is the matter with you, said he? The ancient appearance of this castle seems to surprize you. What! do you think you are entering a prison! He uttered these words with a forced and malicious smile, and I observed his eyes sparkling with an inhuman joy, which shocked me.
Over the course of her imprisonment, to ensure her
complete isolation, the Duke delivers the Dutchess food and water through a
"turning-box" in the wall, which as Genlis explains in a footnote
is “a kind of machine used in nunneries; being a round press or cupboard,
made to turn on a pivot, and fixed in the wall. When the open part is turned to
the exterior of the wall … In the conclave of the Cardinals at Rome, they
employ a similar machine.—By this method the unfortunate Duchess of C----
regularly received, in the sequel, not only food, but a supply of linen and
clothes, whenever they became indispensably necessary.” Thus even this one
point of contact with the world outside of the Dutchess' dungeon blocks any
visual or auditory access.
Despite the intensity of the novella's gothic themes and
its vivid depiction of wife abuse, the apparatus of Adèle et Théodore
insistently seeks to reconcile the violence of the story with the moral offered
by Madame d’Almane and by the Dutchess herself: that the Dutchess’s nine-year
imprisonment was caused by “the fatal imprudence of [her] conduct" in not
confiding in her mother; and that her parents, in choosing an inappropriate
spouse for her, are also culpable. The Lausanne edition's preface emphasizes
the dangers of jealousy, and in Adèle et Théodore, the narrative is
followed by Madame de Vilmours' reaction:
Oh! what a monster of an husband!—Shall we now complain of ours!—Shall we think much of any little contradictions that may fall out, after such an example of patience, resignation, and courage!—I feel myself humbled in thinking, how far I am from that degree of human perfection! Oh! surely I should have gone mad in that vault; I should have died, or rather, I should never have entered it; for I should have told all; I should have declared every thing.
The narrative's original contexts, then, seem to avoid what is perhaps most striking not only to twenty-first century readers, but also to the publisher of the 1812 Baltimore edition: that The History of the Dutchess of C---- is a sensational and disturbing account of spouse abuse. As Mary Seidman Trouille notes in her reading of the
novella, "It is a paradox puzzling to readers today that many female
authors who, like Genlis, pointed to the constraints of patriarchal social
structures, suggested only modest reforms."[3]
Yet, as the Baltimore edition's title suggests, American readers may have interpreted the story differently. New
York Magazine subscribers, according to the editors, were unlikely to
have read Adèle et Théodore in 1790; their encounter with the
Dutchess' narrative, then, would have been independent of Genlis' moral and
pedagogical message. Reading the narrative within the pages of the New York
Magazine, they would moreover have seen it contextualized within vibrant
conversations on subjects depicted through titles ranging from "On
Women" (an article appearing after the first installment of "The
History of the Dutchess de C-----," ironically advising women not to read
novels) to "On the Means of Preserving Public Liberty" to "The
Right Constitution of a Commonwealth Examined." Situated within one of the
most successful miscellaneous magazines of the 1790s, "The History of the
Dutchess de C----" showcases the imbrication of 'the woman question' and
other ongoing debates about politics and governance in the early republic.
[1]
Histoire intéressante de madame la duchesse de C***. Écrite par elle-même.
Traduite de l’Italien. [The interesting history of Madame the Duchess of C***.
Written by herself. Translated from the Italian.] Lausanne: Henri et Luc
Vincent, 1783. In the introduction to this edition, the editors write, “The
History of the Duchess of C*** charmed the readers of Adèle; but
many found it misplaced in a work intended for youth … This piece, executed
upon the highest tone of the ‘romanesque’ genre, appeared to them disharmonious
with the work as a whole; this is what obliges us to detach it, and to present
it separately to the public” (“Préface des éditeurs,” iii—my translation).
[2]
Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham,
U.K.: Ashgate, 2010); Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the
Gothic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992).
[3]
Trouille, Wife-abuse in eighteenth-century France (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 2009): 269.
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