Susan Broomhall
Book Review
Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin, Memoirs
of the Count of Comminge and The Misfortunes of Love. Edited
and translated by Jonathan D. Walsh. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The
Toronto Series, Vol. 48, ITER Academic Press & Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies (Toronto, Canada & Tempe, Arizona, 2016), 147 + xiv
pp. ISBN: 9780866985543
1> This volume brings together two of Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin’s prose
works, the Memoirs of the Count of Comminge (1735) and her last novel, The
Misfortunes of Love (1747). Both were published anonymously during the
lifetime of their author, a remarkable interlocutor within the social and
political scene in Paris whose tumultuous and passionate life surely inspired
some of the reflections on particularly female feeling forms, modes of
affective expression, and opportunities for emotional experience with which
these two works are fundamentally engaged.
2> Strong
passions underpin the Memoirs, which
narrate the ill-fated love of cousins, Adélaïde de Lussan and the Comte, whose
father has sworn eternal hatred for his brother, and whose perspective and
feelings the reader follows through various unlikely scenarios of the roman d’aventure. The love that binds
these protagonists is felt and expressed primarily as suffering. Its experience
is not found in the joy of marriage but in commitment to a particular form of torment
and grief that drives decisions to choose other partners and retreat to remote environments
such as the monastery. It is an agony for and of love, for example, that sees
Adélaïde chose to watch in silence (while disguised as a fellow monk) over the
anguished Comte rather than reveal herself as the lover that he believes he has
lost to the grave.
3> The
Misfortunes of Love, as the title indicates, works over a similar theme but
through the viewpoints of three women, in a sophisticated framework of
interwoven voices and connected experiences. Although distinguished by their
class, the wealthy heiress Pauline, the nun Eugénie and the jailer’s daughter,
Hippolyte, nonetheless share stories of the betrayal, loss, forgiveness and
friendships forged by destructive love and acceptance of marital duty. Forceful
passion can be disastrous, Tencin’s work suggests, but love can also be
indulged, perhaps even enjoyed, as suffering, and directed into binding commitments
in the form of deep and fulfilling companionship.
4> Tencin published
at least one other novel, Le Siège de
Calais, and is considered the possible author of several other contemporary
works (although Walsh does not explore these suggestions in his Introduction). Read
together, the particular two novels that he has chosen to translate in this
edition form logical counterparts and offer valuable counterpoints. Neither are
set in the contemporary world of Tencin, yet both explore challenges for, and
cults of, emotional expression of both men and women very much of her time.
5> One might, therefore, expect pointed commentary
on contemporary social and moral strictures of love for men and women from this
leading salonnière. However, neither
historical nor socio-political contexts matter much to these texts, in which
focus and action is thoroughly contained to the experience of a feeling self.
Its narrative is not the implausible plot but the trajectory of how love can be
experienced within a particular feeling self, as an evolving intellectual and
bodily practice of pleasure and pain, even pleasure in pain, and in relation to
decisions and actions that love, in its various forms, motivates. Where Tencin
does offer innovation, certainly, is in depicting an emotional and affective
journey that is accessible to any feeling self, male or female, and of any
class: these are indeed ‘other voices’ in the literature of her time.
6> These are
texts that draw readers into an imagined and felt community of empathy—readers,
much like the friends and allies within the stories, are people who are
uniquely sensible to feel with the protagonists. Both this readerly pact of
sensibility and the works’ exploration of sentiment evidently captured the mood
of the reading public through the Ancien Regime and into the early nineteenth
century. Abbé Prevost claimed that the Memoirs
would be read by ‘everyone with taste’ in his review in Le Pour et contre (vol. 7, 1735, p. 292), even if he was less
convinced by the ‘bizarre conclusion’ and strength of feeling (or ‘passion’)
between the lovers. Popular with the fashionable set, the works were widely
translated and even adapted into theatre pieces at the end of the eighteenth
century.
7> Walsh
highlights the generic conventions in which Tencin’s works can be located, the ‘cult of
suffering’ in which they participate, and her protagonists’ spaces for feeling,
including the monastery and wilderness, which anticipate the gothic. He
situates Tencin’s work primarily within contemporary emotional practices of
literary men, most notably Prevost (about whose Cleveland Walsh is currently preparing a study for publication). In
doing so, he perhaps misses an opportunity to articulate thoroughly what the
female author working within a tradition of the historical novel that was then
dominated by women, might bring to that conversation. The Introduction offers
most to those who are already aware of the conventions and contributions of
that literature. In that sense, readers who come to the works for the first
time here may struggle with the scholarly apparatus that surrounds the
translations. The preface that precedes Walsh’s Introduction, by leading Tencin
editor and scholar Michel Delon (translated here by Walsh), proceeds even more
so than the Introduction from assumptions of readers’ deep familiarity with the
works.
8> At a
first reading, then, one might be persuaded of Prevost’s opinion, that these
works are well written, albeit somewhat ‘sterile’, pieces in the French
classical style (he intended the Memoirs).
However, a deep appreciation of Tencin’s complex exploration of the misfortunes
of love, misfortunes capable of both pleasure and pain, is the reward of repeated,
careful engagement with these works. Walsh’s translations and commentary enable
Tencin’s voice to be heard in a growing scholarly conversation about gender,
genre and emotions in literary culture and reader experience.
_____
Professor
Susan Broomhall is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at
The University of Western Australia and was a Foundation Chief Investigator in
the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions. She is author of various studies of women’s writings, emotions and
experiences in early modern Europe, particularly France. She is currently
working on a monograph on emotions and power in the correspondence of Catherine
de Medici.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Ten (2017): Artefacts
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