Corinne: The Third Woman

Author(s): Naomi Schor

Source: L'Esprit Créateur , Fall 1994, Vol. 34, No. 3, Le Centre Absent (passage,
métamorphose): En Hommage à Micheline Tison-Braun (Fall 1994), pp. 99-106
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26287597

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 Corinne: The Third Woman

Naomi Schor

On eût dit que dans ces lieux, comme dans la tragédie de Hamlet, les ombres erraient autour
du palais où se donnaient les festins.

Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie

IN aMARCH,
paper on death in Staël's
1992, while Corinne that I proposed
on leave to give
in Paris, at the
I prepared a synopsis of
annual fall meeting of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. A month
later I was being operated on at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine for a life
threatening liver failure.
Little did I realize at the time that I was entering a new stage in my
life, a stage of serial illnesses from which I have yet to emerge. Conse
quently, what I viewed with apt modesty as a "small" paper has come to
seem to me despite its restricted dimensions a strangely prophetic project
insistently calling into question the very relationship of the mind and
body I had spent a lifetime repressing. Did I feel the need to write about
death because I was in fact and unbeknownst to me silently dying? And
when did that dying begin, when I sat at my word processor before my
illness declared itself in full-blown visible, visualizable, and quantifiable
symptoms but heralded its crisis in so called "non-specific" symptoms:
extreme fatigue, depression, loss of inspiration? Shortly before his un
expected and untimely death my father produced two atypically morbid
works: a large self portrait in livid hues of muddy greens and ghoulish
blues—the face of a drowned man—and an oversize brass mask where in
one empty socket one could see a doll-like male figure dangling from a
spring—the effigy of a man who has hung himself. Did life imitate art
when my father's heart failed him or did some Lethe-like fluid guide his
hand as he created those works?
Like so many other projects I was engaged in at the time, the paper
on Corinne was a casualty of my illness and recovery. The celebration of
the life work of Mme Tison-Braun, the beloved teacher who first awak
ened and recognized in me an interest in French literature, is the happy
occasion of my at last but with no lesser sense of urgency writing the
paper I had outlined when I still counted myself among the healthy.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

I want in what follows to make and, hopefully, substantiate an outland

ish claim: because of the disparity between the chronology of events and
the narrative organization of the material, when Corinne first appears i
the novel that bears her name, she is already dead, a victim of patriarchy,
a gendered ghost, the ghost of gender. In other words, Corinne is neither,
as the narrator suggests, a mere retelling of the archetypal story of
Sheherazade, who enlists narrative in the deferral of death,1 nor, by th
same token, a reworking of what Peter Brooks has called Freud's master
plot, the dawdlings and detours of the death-driven Beyond the Pleasur
Principle. Death in Corinne is not the telos to be avoided, but the disaster
which has already occurred, which sets the narrative in motion and
brings it finally to its foreordained conclusion, the physical enactment of
a symbolic death.
Much has been written about women and death in art and fiction,
and a consensus has emerged regarding the proliferation of dead or dying
female figures in the European art produced during a time period extend
ing from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Following
Michel Foucault's periodization, which dovetails with that of Philippe
Ariès, Elizabeth Bronfen in her ambitious Lacanian exercise in "thanato
poetics," Over Her Dead Body, sees the end of the eighteenth century as
marked by an epistemic shift in the function and representation of death.
What characterizes this new understanding of death is its ambivalence:
viewed as a means of attaining scientific truth, the corpse is simultane
ously seen as a source of pollution which must be distanced from the city;
viewed as a means of individuation, death constantly threatens the living
with the return of the repressed Other:

By the nineteenth century, "love" and "death" were culturally constructed as the two
realms where savage nature could break into "man" 's city, at the same historical momen
that society believed that its achievements in technology and rationalism had served to colo
nise nature completely. Since it combines these two disruptive elements, the dead body of a
woman served as a particularly effective figure for this triumph over "violent nature" and
its failure to expulse the Other completely; a superlative figure for the inevitable return o
the repressed.2

There are in fact (at least) two epistemic shifts which coincide at the turn
of the eighteenth century: on the one hand death is reconfigured, secu
larized, individualized, on the other, femininity is invented through th

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 SCHOR

convergence of a set of emerging disciplinary discourses and in response

to increasingly urgent political pressures (OHDB 78). Hence the fem
inization of the corpse, the killing of women form a nexus which
becomes by mid-century a stereotype: "her dead body." It is this coming
together that distinguishes post-revolutionary literary and pictorial rep
resentations of dead women from those that immediately precede that
historical break in France, for of course representations of women as
dead or death itself goes back as far as classical mythology; as Madelyn
Gutwirth observes:

A fascination with female frailty certainly recurs in Western art with some reliability over
the centuries, remaining one of the stock of topoi available to it. But no glut of such fore
doomed figures exists in modern times before the waning of the Age of Enlightenment and
in the century that copes with this heritage.3

The crucial factor is that what is at stake in both Bronfen's and Gut
wirth's studies is the triangle constituted by death, femininity, and a male
author or artist. Or, to paraphrase Bronfen: Her body/His text. Gut
wirth mentions only one woman in her article, Mme Riccoboni, and not
in her capacity as a writer, rather her role as a critic of Laclos's Liaisons
Dangereuses. Bronfen does include two novels by women in her book,
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but she
reserves her discussion of women writers and artists and death for a final
chapter entitled, "From muse to creatrix—Snow White unbound." This
transmutation is emphatically a twentieth-century phenomenon. What
tends then to get lost in these accounts is the specificity of representations
of dead women in pre-twentieth-century works by women artists and
authors. Even when they are cited, gender difference is elided.
It may well be that in the historical context in which Corinne ap
peared it was impossible for a woman writer, however rebellious, to
break with the dominant models of representation. And yet Corinne is in
so many other respects an iconoclastic novel that it strains credulity that
Corinne's dead body is indistinguishable from that of Ellénore, Benja
min Constant's counter example in Adolphe, and that what distinguishes
them is unrelated to the sexual divide that separates their authors. It is
the same difference as that between suicide and matricide.
From the very first page the prominence of death in this deeply
melancholic early romantic novel is made clear, but it is not, as one
might expect, the heroine's, or any other woman's for that matter, but
the hero's father's. When we first encounter Oswald Lord Nelvil he is on

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 L'Esprit Créateur

a journey to Italy for medical reasons: "La plus intime de toutes les
douleurs, la perte d'un père, était la cause de sa maladie" ("The most
personal of all griefs, the loss of a father, had provoked his illness" (C
28/5). Implicit in this phrase is a maxim which goes something like: his
father's death is man's greatest sorrow. When, as is the case for Oswald,
that irreparable loss is overlayed with guilt, then the disease is as we in
time discover incurable. Afflicted with a bad case of what Margaret
Waller has wittily called "the male malady"4 (a.k.a. the mâle de siècle),
Oswald is a severely depressed Oedipus. It is in this state that he encoun
ters Corinne, who is at the very pinnacle of her success. I am referring, of
course, to the celebrated scene of her crowning at the Capitol. From that
moment on Corinne takes it upon herself to cure the unhappy Oswald.
This is tourism as therapy: she will cure him by making him see Italy and
its beauties, for like Oedipus at Colonnus Oswald in Italy is blind, sight
less: "Oswald parcourut la Marche d'Ancone et l'Etat ecclésiastique
jusqu'à Rome sans rien observer" ("Oswald crossed the Marches and the
Papal States as far as Rome without noticing anything" [C 46/77]); "il
ne remarqua point les lieux antiques et célèbres à travers lesquels passait
le char de Corinne" ("he took no notice whatever of the ancient places
traversed by Corinne's chariot" [C 53/22]). The cure is homeopathic, in
that it fights grief with grief; the burden of Oswald's mourning of his
dead father is offset by a visit to the cemetery outside the city gates where
Corinne guides Oswald to the funerary monument dedicated by a Roman
citizen to the memory of his dead daughter, Cecilia Métalla.5
But above all to see Italy is to see Corinne; the cure for Oswald's
undone grief work is gazing at Corinne. Gazing at Corinne is a moral
imperative for Oswald, for as the prince Castel-Forte enjoins him:
"regardez Corinne" ("Behold Corinne" [C 58/25]).
What does it mean to "behold" Corinne? Corinne, when Oswald
first sees her, is the picture of health; at the height of her powers she is
the most animated of heroines. It is this animation that I want to hold up
to scrutiny, for it is illusory; the solar Corinne conceals a cold lunar land
scape. She radiates a life force that is the after-glow of a star long dead.
In this strange temporality, the reading of the novel that would have
Corinne waste away as a result of Oswald's craven abandonment is a par
tial reading that too readily accepts conventional causality as its organiz
ing principle, that is too quick to charge the male protagonist—absent a
male author—with murder. It forgets one of the crucial lessons of
Lacan's mirror stage, the impossibility of representing the body in pieces

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 SCHOR

except from the perspective of the body as whole. The disjointed body of
the infant can only be reconstructed from the vantage point of an
imaginary identity. In the words of Jane Gallop: "The image of the body
in bits and pieces is fabricated retroactively from the mirror stage. It is
only the anticipated 'orthopedic' form of totality that can define—retro
actively—the body as insufficient."6 Corinne must reach the pinnacle of
success for her underlying inexistence to become visible. Stardom—and
Corinne, the performance artist, is nothing if not a star—is ghostly, a
state of haunting.
Let us recall that when Corinne at last provides the key to the enigma
of her identity, her missing patronym, she makes the following crucial
avowal: after her father Lord Edgermond's death in England, she is
driven into exile by her step-mother, who makes a diabolical bargain
with her:

. . . si vous prenez un parti qui vous déshonore dans l'opinion, vous devez à votre famille de
changer de nom et de vous faire passer pour morte.

[". . . should you decide on a course of action that will dishonor you in public opinion, you
owe it to your family to change your name and pass for dead." (C 382/267)]

Oui, sans doute, m'écriais-je, passons pour morte dans ces lieux où mon existence n'est
qu'un sommeil agité. Je revivrai avec la nature, avec le soleil, avec les beaux-arts, et les
froides lettres que composent mon nom, inscrites sur un vain tombeau, tiendront, aussi
bien que moi, ma place dans ce séjour sans vie.

["Yes! Why not?" 1 exclaimed. "In this place where my life is no more than a troubled
sleep, let them think me dead. With nature, with the sun, with the arts, I shall come alive
again; and in this lifeless world, the cold letters of my name engraved on an empty tomb
will surely take my place as well as ever I could." (C 383-84/26«?)]

Though by virtue of its history Italy is the land of ruins and crumbling
tombstones, England by virtue of its rigid ideology of separate spheres is
at least for women the "land of the living dead" (MM 76-79).7 English
society is a cemetery where a brilliant public woman like Corinne can
only be buried alive, racked by nightmares—"perchance to dream." To
leave England is to rise Lazarus-like from the dead, yet at the same time
to leave England is to leave behind more than the lifeless letters that
make up one's patronym, rather one's mortal envelope; to return to Italy
is to (re)enter the land of the living but to do so in spectral form.

Si la vie est offerte aux morts dans les tombeaux, ils ne soulèveraient pas la pierre qui les

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 L'Esprit Créateur

couvre avec plus d'impatience que je n'en éprouvais pour écarter de moi tous mes linceuls
et reprendre possession de mon imagination, de mon génie, de la nature.

[Were life offered to the dead in their graves, they would not lift off their tombstones with
greater impatience than I felt to cast off my shrouds, and repossess nature, my imagination
and my genius. (C 385/268)]

Paradoxically, however, Corinne can only arise from the dead by faking
her real death, staging her disappearance. Well before Oswald journey
to Italy to restore his health, Corinne is rumored to have done the same
so that Oswald on page one repeats Corinne's earlier gesture, for in wha
Derrida calls the "logic of spectrality"8 there is no separating the first
time from its repetition.

Ma belle-mère me manda qu'elle avait répandu le bruit que les médecins m'avaient ordonn
le voyage du midi pour rétablir ma santé, et que j'étais morte dans la traversée.

[My stepmother gave me to understand that she had spread word of my death on a trip to
the south prescribed by the doctors for my health. (C 3867.269)]

Every crossing in Corinne evokes the fatal passage of the Styx: thus,
when at the end of the novel Oswald returns to Italy with his wife and
child, the river Taro is transformed into a dangerous torrent:

le brouillard était tel que le fleuve se confondait avec l'horizon, et ce spectacle rappelait
bien plutôt les descriptions poétiques des rives du Styx, que ces eaux bienfaisantes qu
doivent charmer les regards des habitants brûlés par les rayons du soleil.

[The fog was so thick that the river merged with the horizon, and the spectacle recalled th
poetic descriptions of the banks of the river Styx, rather than the benevolent waters meant
to charm the eyes of a population burnt by the rays of the sun. (C 5581397)]

The extraordinary Corinne that Oswald sees is then posthumous, not

literally a dead female body, but a dead female soul: "on dirait que je
suis une ombre qui veut encore rester sur la terre, quand les rayons du
jour, quand l'approche des vivants, la forcent à disparaître" ("It is as if I
were a shade still wanting to remain on earth when the light of day, th
approach of the living, compel it to disappear" [C 522/371]), she writes
when she is wasting away. She does not become a ghost because she was
abandoned, rather, she is abandoned precisely because of her ghostliness
From the moment of Corinne's publication readers were stumped by
the pairing of Oswald and Corinne: what do these two characters have in
common? what does Corinne, the exceptional woman, see in Oswald, the

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 SCHOR

conventional albeit new "sensitive" man? What prevents Oswald from

choosing the profound Corinne over her superficial half sister Lucille?
There is, of course, no single answer to this question, and over the years
the answers have ranged from the humorous (Eliot's in The Mill on the
Floss) to the scathing: the readings of contemporary feminists who view
Corinne as a paradigm of the exceptional woman and the post-revolu
tionary killing into allegory of woman. Curiously, the psychoanalytic
dimension has been neglected, yet it sheds light on this conundrum:
Oswald abandons Corinne not only because of his father's law, not only
because he is culturally unsuited to love a woman who does not adhere to
the ideal of domesticity, but because Corinne represents death in the
manner of Freud's third woman in his neat little essay of 1913, "The
Theme of the Three Caskets." Unlike Freud's archetypal male, however,
who fools destiny by selecting the inevitable, Oswald, who otherwise is
always placing himself in harm's way, flees death in the shape of a come
ly woman, "the fairest, best, most desirable and the most lovable of
women."9 Because Oswald is a narcissist he rejects the Other and the
Death-Goddess is the ultimate Other. The third woman is the woman
who subverts the function assigned Woman in the male imaginary, that
of guarantor of man's exclusive subjectivity and sense of phallic invul
nerability. Is it any wonder then that narcissistic men, whose very self is
threatened by female alterity and the death it signifies for their majestic
Ego, chose unthreatening love objects that enhance their sense of
omnipotence and immortality?
And what of the third woman? Can the third woman die? Yes: there
is a double dying in Corinne. But in Corinne the Goddess of Death is
dumb no more, Atropos speaks, writes, and what is more leaves a legacy.
Not only does she stage her death, but she stages her swan song. More
important, by the means of feminist pedagogy, the transmission of her
wisdom to Lucille and Lucille and Oswald's daughter Juliette, she lives
on. The specter of the exceptional woman haunts the nineteenth century.

Duke University

Notes

1. Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie (Paris: Folio, 1985), 133; Corinne, or Italy, trans.
Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987), 81. Subsequent page ref
erences to these editions will be given within the text under the abbreviation C, with the
English page numbers in italics.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 86; hereafter abbreviated as (OHDB).
Madelyn Gutwirth, "The Engulfed Beloved: Representations of Dead and Dying
Women in the Art and Literature of the Revolutionary Era," in Sara E. Melzer and
Leslie W. Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New
York: Oxford UP, 1992), 198.
Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic
Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994). Hereafter (MM).
This detail is glossed by Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing
(New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 172-73.
Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 86.
Cf. Jean Starobinski's congruent description of Corinne as "une morte-vivante" ("a
living-dead woman") in his article, "Suicide et mélancolie chez Mme de Staël," in
Madame de Staël et l'Europe, Colloque de Coppet (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 246.
Starobinski's concern is the psychology of Staël and her heroines. The (virtual) aban
doned woman is kept alive through the artificial means of a love whose withdrawal
determines an "ontological catastrophe" (247).
Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 24.
Sigmund Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," Character and Culture (New
York: Collier, 1963), 76.

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