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The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three Women Émigrées in London

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Book cover French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe

Part of the book series: War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850 ((WCS))

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Abstract

This chapter delves into the novels of three French noblewomen émigrées in London who published during their emigration or once they returned to Paris. It contributes to the renewal of the emigration historiography by highlighting the creative responses these novelists manifested through fiction writing. The émigré novel is presented as a sub-genre of the sentimental novel that deals with traumatic memories with greater authenticity and originality than previously thought. The analysis of three key literary motifs demonstrates that in re-enacting the uprooting and distress experienced not only did these female émigré authors show modernity but they also suggested ways of overcoming the literary and gendered norms enshrined in the pre-revolutionary sentimental novel.

ces romans m’ont fait du mal, ils ont été remuer au fond de mon âme un vieux reste de vie qui ne servira qu’à souffrir.

[These novels have hurt me, they stirred up, at the bottom of my soul, the last old remnants of life that will only bring more suffering.]

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am grateful to Dr Helen Bones and Dr Juliette Reboul for their invaluable feedback on my chapter. All translations have been carried out by the author. Letter from Claire de Duras to Chateaubriand, 5 April 1822, in Agénor Bardoux, La Duchesse de Duras (Paris: C. Lévy, 1898), 283.

  2. 2.

    Adèle Filleul, comtesse de Flahaut, marquise de Souza-Botelho, Adèle de Sénange, ou Lettres de Lord Sydenham, 2 vols. (Londres: Debrett; Hookham; Edwards; & chez De Boeffe, 1794).

  3. 3.

    Adèle de Souza, Émilie et Alphonse, 3 tomes (Paris: Charles Pougens, 1799); Charles et Marie (Paris: Maradan, 1802); Eugénie et Mathilde, ou Mémoires de la famille du comte de Revel, 3 vols. (Londres: L. Deconchy, 1811).

  4. 4.

    Claire de Kersaint, duchesse de Duras, Madame de Duras, Ourika, Edouard, Olivier ou le Secret, ed. by Marc Fumaroli and Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Mémoires de Sophie, suivi de Amélie et Pauline, ed. by Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm (Paris: Editions Manucius, 2011).

  5. 5.

    Éléonore-Adèle d’Osmond, comtesse de Boigne, Une Passion dans le grand monde, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867); La Maréchale d’Aubemer (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868); Récits d’une tante, Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond, 5 vols. (Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1921–1923).

  6. 6.

    Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le Romantisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 65.

  7. 7.

    François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Paris: Arvensa, Nouvelle Edition, 2015), Partie II, Livre I, XI. Génie du Christianisme; suite – Défauts de l’ouvrage, 572.

  8. 8.

    ‘plus portées à écouter leurs passions que la raison’; ‘ce sont des résistantes dans l’âme’ (they are rebellious minds), ‘entêtées […] comme, seule, une femme peut l’être’ (stubborn, […] just as women usually are), Jules Bertaut, Les Belles émigrées, (Paris: Hachette, 1953), 9.

  9. 9.

    Stéphanie Genand, Romans de l’émigration (1797–1803) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 11.

  10. 10.

    Katherine Astbury, Narratives Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, (Oxford: Legenda, 2012); Claire Jaquier, Florence Lotterie, Catriona Seth, eds., Destins romanesques de l’émigration, (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007).

  11. 11.

    Brigitte Louichon, Romancières sentimentales, (1789–1825), (Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 292. Chantal Bertrand Jennings, Un Autre mal du siècle, le Romantisme des romancières, (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2005).

  12. 12.

    Melissa Wittmeier argues that non-authentic émigré novels do not engage with the implications of uprooting as much as authentic émigré novels, in “The Eighteenth-Century Emigrant, Crossing Literary Borders”, L’Érudit franco-espagnol, Vol. 2, (Fall 2012): 93–106.

  13. 13.

    Isabelle de Charrière, Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés (1793) ed. by Colette Piau-Gillot, (Paris: Côté-femmes Éditions, 1993); Trois femmes, 1797, in Bibliothèque Numérique Romande, http://www.ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/charriere_trois_femmes.pdf, [accessed July 2018].

  14. 14.

    Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma, Explorations in Memory (John Hopkins University Press, 1998).

  15. 15.

    Bessel Van der Kolk, ‘Trauma and Memory’, in Bessel Van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, Lars Weisaeth, eds., Traumatic Stress, The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (London: The Guildford Press, 1996), 279–302, 296.

  16. 16.

    Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 16; 80.

  17. 17.

    See, for example, the memoirs of these noblewomen émigrées: Henriette Lucy Dillon, marquise de La Tour du Pin, Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, 1778–1815 (Paris: M. Imhaus & R. Chapelot, 1913); Elisa de Ménerville, née Fougeret, Souvenirs d’Emigration 1791–1797, (Paris: P. Roger, 1934).

  18. 18.

    Madame de Boigne returned to France in 1805 and started to write from the 1830s, even though her memoirs and novels were published posthumously. Madame de Duras returned in 1808, and wrote all her novels during a writing spree between 1821 and 1824.

  19. 19.

    Boigne narrates the extraordinary love story between Mary Kingston and the Colonel Fitz-Gerald. The lovers escaped the Kingston clan’s disapproval by boat, with Mary dressed as a man. Eventually they are caught and their illicit affair punished: Fitz-Gerald is assassinated; upon receiving his bloodied portrait Mary has a miscarriage and becomes mentally insane. Boigne insists: ‘on a inventé bien des romans moins tragiques que cette triste scène de la vie réelle,’ Récits d’une tante, 149–153.

  20. 20.

    ‘I only remember vividly the impression that the Ocean had on me. Even as a child, I already had an undying devotion that never became obsolete. I have always been seduced by its grey and green shades, so much so that the beautiful blue waters of the Mediterranean sea never made me betray them’, in Boigne, ibid., 79–80.

  21. 21.

    ‘With what heartbreak I contemplate this ocean that will separate me from everything I cherish’ in Boigne, Une Passion, 49.

  22. 22.

    Renaud Morieux, Une Mer pour deux royaumes. La Manche, une frontière franco-anglaise (XVIIe – XVIIIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). The link between exile and patrie which appears in Une Passion p. 87 is also present in Chateaubriand’s novel Les Natchez. The hero René is exiled in America and makes the link between the Ocean and his long lost home: ‘sans patrie, entre deux parties, à cette âme isolée, immense, orageuse, il ne restait d’abri que l’Océan’, (without patrie, in between two parts, to this isolated, immense and stormy soul, only the Ocean was left as a shelter), in René de Chateaubriand, Les Natchez, (Paris: Degorge-Cadot, 1872), 117.

  23. 23.

    ‘Seule, dans une terre étrangère’; ‘le besoin de s’éloigner de tout ce qui était réel’ and ‘de ne guère réfléchir’ in Souza, Adèle de Sénange, Préface, xxi–xxii.

  24. 24.

    Ronen Steinberg, ‘Trauma before Trauma: Imagining the Effects of the Terror in post-Revolutionary France’, in Experiencing the French Revolution, ed. by David Andress, (Oxford: SVEC 2013:05), 177–199, 194.

  25. 25.

    Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (New York: Cornwell University Press, 1988), cited in Astbury, Narrative Responses, 1; 168.

  26. 26.

    See note 21. Souza, Adèle de Sénange, 112–115.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., t.2, p. 188–9.

  28. 28.

    Juliana Schiesiari, The Gendering of Melancholia, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4.

  29. 29.

    Benjamin de Constant, Adolphe: anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu et publiée (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1816); Stendhal, Armance, ou Quelques scènes d’un salon de Paris (Paris: Urbain Canel, 1827).

  30. 30.

    See in particular Etienne de Senancour, Oberman, lettres publiées par M. Senancourt, 2 vols. (Paris: Cérioux, 1804) and Astolphe de Custine, Aloys, ou le Religieux du Mont Saint Bernard, (Paris: Vezard, 1829).

  31. 31.

    Duras, Amélie et Pauline, 156.

  32. 32.

    Duras, Edouard, 79; 94; 95.

  33. 33.

    Olivier is said to have suffered from an illness as a child that almost killed him which was seen as the cause for his impotence. Duras never reveals his secret but scholars are convinced her novel is about this delicate topic. See the Introduction by Diethelm, in Ourika, Edouard, Olivier ou le Secret, 57.

  34. 34.

    Schiesari, The Gendering, x.

  35. 35.

    Bertrand-Jennings, Un Autre mal du siècle, 9–10; 21. Her theory on female honour is developed in Masculin/Féminin, Le XIXème siècle à l’épreuve du genre, (Toronto: Centre d’Études du XIXe siècle Joseph Sablé, 1999), 103.

  36. 36.

    Boigne, Une Passion, 331. This is also the case for the exiled Émilie in Souza’s novel, ‘Je compte m’occuper de leur éducation; trop heureuse si je pouvais me créer ici des objets d’attachement!’, (I plan on doing their education myself; so happy at the prospect of perhaps finding objects of attachment here!) in Souza, Émilie et Alphonse, t.2, 176.

  37. 37.

    Philip Knee, L’Expérience de la perte autour du ‘moment 1800’, (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014), 215; 97.

  38. 38.

    Sophie is appalled by the atmosphere of suspicion when she arrives in Paris: ‘le titre seul d’émigré devait être un reproche’ (the mere status of émigré would be a reproach); and comments on the fact that the exile did not stop once back in France: ‘l’émigration n’était complète pour un émigré qu’à son retour’ (the emigration was not complete until the émigré returned), in Duras, Mémoires de Sophie, 133; 139 n18.

  39. 39.

    Ourika de Mme Duras, ed. by Christiane Chaulet Achour, (Saint-Pourcain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2006), 68. Madame de Ménerville in her memoirs also declared: ‘je n’ai jamais retrouvé une société aussi franchement unie’ (I have never found such a united society again); and ‘j’en regrette la douce illusion’ (I regret its sweet illusion), in Ménerville, Souvenirs d’émigration, 171–172.

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  1. Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Laure Philip

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  1. Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Laure Philip

  2. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands

    Juliette Reboul

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Philip, L. (2019). The Trauma of the Emigration in the Novels of Three Women Émigrées in London. In: Philip, L., Reboul, J. (eds) French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe. War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_7

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