Copyright by Nicholas Christopher Spinelli 2016

Home , Anne Dacier, Claire de Duras, Daniel Auber, Guillaume Dubois, Marquis de Custine, Renaud Camus

Nicholas Christopher Spinelli

2016

The Dissertation Committee for Nicholas Christopher Spinelli certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Family-Friendly: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel,

1770-1850

Committee:

______Alexandra Wettlaufer, Supervisor

______Lisa Moore, Co-supervisor

______Hervé Picherit

______Lynn Wilkinson

______Chad Bennett

Family-Friendly: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel,

1770-1850

Nicholas Christopher Spinelli, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2016

Dedication

For the family I have always known––and for the family of friends I have discovered along the way.

Acknowledgements

I extend my deepest gratitude to Alexandra Wettlaufer, my dissertation supervisor, and to Lisa Moore, who co-supervised this dissertation, for their unwavering support throughout the completion of this project. Their steadfast mentorship and generous feedback have been invaluable in both the formation of my graduate research and in the evolution of this dissertation. My appreciative thanks also goes out to Hervé

Picherit, Lynn Wilkinson, and Chad Bennett, who all served as members of my committee, for their insightful comments and suggestions as these chapters came together.

I would like to further express my appreciation for the dissertation writing group with whom I exchanged several drafts and, more specifically, for the thoughtful peer- review––if not the occasional moments of laughter––shared with Stephanie Rosen,

Lindsey Gay, Jeffrey Boruszak, and Drea Brown as we set our attention to each other’s research projects.

For the kindness and patience of my friends––as well as that of my father,

Edward, and my brother, Justin––throughout this process, I am profoundly grateful.

Along those same lines, a very special thanks to Kaela and Brian Federle, who witnessed the development of this dissertation from the beginning and provided priceless encouragement along the way. Finally, I thank my mother, Rosalie, who was not able to see the end of this project––her passion for literature and wonderfully contagious habit of pursuing difficult questions were guiding principles in this endeavor.

Family-Friendly: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel,

1770-1850

Nicholas Christopher Spinelli, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2016

Supervisor: Alexandra Wettlaufer

Co-supervisor: Lisa Moore

This dissertation investigates the central significance of desire for the self defined as different-than-the-self––of an affect I articulate as homo-affinity––within the domains of Romanticism, Romantic love, and the French Sentimental novel. As expressed in my Introduction, this project is predicated on an analysis of the erotics of sameness, the literary trace of outlaw desire, and the exploration of a queer archive of feelings in the French Sentimental novel. Chapter One pertains to François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala/René (1801), in which I outline the Romantic topos that serves as a forerunner to the ideal of homo- affinity in the French Sentimental novel. In keeping with Chateaubriand’s autobiographical mode of fiction, the enchanteur’s reliance on reflexive metaphors yields a chiasmatic mirror through which his protagonists might envision another version of themselves and that, as such, conditions the experience of an expansive desire that encompasses passions toward incest, homosexuality, and narcissism––if not a newfound libertinage. In Chapter Two, I examine archival documents that obtain to the manuscripts of Claire de Duras’s Olivier, ou le secret (1821-1824) in order to expose the author’s careful treatment of the closet, which revolves around her creation of a linguistic polari

vi that could furtively portray the eponymous secret and its relevance among writers and intellectuals of Restoration France. Finally––in Chapter Three––I go on to posit that Stendhal, in Armance (1828), deliberately reinscribes and multiplies the erotically charged bonds that figure between knights in pre-Revolutionary novels and chivalric lore, so as to forge a trope for the expression of homosexuality––and even that of a homosexual subject––within his satire of Romanticism. Throughout these chapters, I illustrate how the interconnectivity of these topoi (such as the chiasmatic mirror, parlor polari, and Romantic chevalerie) constitutes a coherent expression of homo-affinity that spans the formation of the French Sentimental novel. In the end, I conclude that the prevalence of a (now queer) attraction toward sameness in Sentimentalism and Romanticism intertextually colored a handful of subsequent literary movements and, ultimately, determined the emergence of homo- affinitive (and equally non-heterosexual) narratives across the evolution of the French novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

vii

Table of Contents

Introduction: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel, 1770-1850...... 1

Defining Homo-Affinity...... 3

Genre: Sentimentalism and Romanticism...... 9

Familial Desire in the Sentimental Novel...... 15

Incest Before the French Revolution...... 17

Sentimentalism and the Queer Archive of Feelings...... 21

Chapters of Family-Friendly: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel, 1770-1850...... 31

Incest, Homos, or How Mirrored Selves Fall in Love in Chateaubriand’s Atala/René...... 37

Poetics of Mirroring and Homo-Affinity…...... …50

Mirroring and Extradiegesis…...... 54

The Autobiographical Outlaw in Chateaubriand’s North American Novels…...... 61

Queerer Implications of the Chiasmatic Mirror…...... 68

Parlor Polari in Claire de Duras’s Olivier, ou le secret...... 84

Polari and the Affect of Slippage…...... …. 88

Impotence, or the Olive Tree……...... …101

Redactions of the “Heart” and Same-sex Desire...... …107

Myth and Misunderstanding in Olivier...... 113

Decoding Louise’s Almond Tree...... 121

Chevalerie and The New Cruise-ade in Stendhal’s Armance...... 128 viii

Queer Babilanisme in Armance...... 134

The Homo-Affinity of Stendhal’s Chevalerie...... 145

Dueling and the New Cruise-ade…...... 159

Writing the Cruise-ade in Armance...... 170

Conclusion: Outing the Literary Legacy of Homo-Affinity in the French Novel...... 176

Bibliography…...... …187

Introduction: Homo-Affinity in the French Sentimental Novel

1770-1850

As proof of an exceptional bond, spontaneous desire has long exerted itself across the societal boundaries of nation, class, creed, and education in the Sentimental novel.

During the early nineteenth century, when the genre came to epitomize a literary dissent against the well-planned marriage, one cadre of French novelists further expanded the trope of Romantic love to cross family lines. In these Sentimental renditions of the incest prohibition, the familial couple basks in mutual resemblance, as both fated lovers and close relatives, until the whims of fortune ultimately and unfailingly tear them apart.

Despite its pivotal role in these love intrigues, the attraction to similarity that manifests through familial desire has scarcely been recognized in literary studies of Sentimental and

Romantic novels. Looking to the causal relationship between similitude and erotic desire, a phenomenon which I define as homo-affinity, this dissertation seeks to uncover the significance of the Romantic incest plot within the French Sentimental novel. As a model for love based on exceptional sameness, I argue that the homo-affinitive bond figures within a literary renegotiation of the family unit that occurred in the years that led up to and followed the French Revolution (1789-1799). In my review of the historical overlap between Romanticism and the Sentimental novel, I focus on the queer import of their tragic endings, whose promise of constraint cleared a parenthetical space for the representation of outlaw desire. Considering the extent to which homo-affinity and 1 homoeroticism simultaneously operate in the Romantic novels of François-René de

Chateaubriand (1768-1848), Claire de Duras (1777-1828), and Stendhal (1783-1842), I then conclude the theoretical portion of my introduction by addressing the queer historical aims of this dissertation. Along these lines, the chapter summaries testify to the evolution of the Romantic incest plot along the course of these novels, as I seek to articulate the relevance of familial desire to studies of queer history and Sentimentalism.†

Nearly a decade before the inception of Lesbian and Gay Studies (and later, Queer

Studies), Michel Foucault identified the origins of “homosexuality,” and thus its signified identity, as a discursive term, born out of psychological treatises and medical studies of the late 1860s.1 Consequently, some of the twentieth century’s mostly widely circulated texts concerning the representation of sex and gender treat the invention of the word

“homosexual” as a jumping off point for the literary epistemology of gay and lesbian identity, in light of its indelible effect on the West’s historical (as well as contemporary) understanding of sexuality. A crisis of knowledge still perpetuates in the history of

† Unless otherwise noted, all translations of sources cited in this dissertation are original and of my own work. 1 In Foucault’s well-known passage from Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (1976), which concerns the speciation of “the homosexual” in late-nineteenth-century Europe, the French critic contends that homosexuality emerged through the classification of “unnatural” (contraire) sexual relationships in the fields of medicine and psychiatry: “[i]l ne faut pas oublier que la catégorie psychologique, psychiatrique, médicale de l’homosexualité s’est constituée du jour où on l’a caractérisée––le fameux article de Westphal en 1870, sur les ‘sensations sexuelles contraires’ peut valoir comme date de naissance––moins par un type de relations sexuelles que par une certaine qualité de la sensibilité sexuelle, une certaine manière d’intervertir en soi-même le masculin et le féminin. L’homosexualité est apparue comme une des figures de la sexualité lorsqu’elle a été rabattue de la pratique de la sodomie sur une sorte d’androgynie intérieure, un hermaphrodisme de l’âme. Le sodomite était un relaps, l’homosexuel est maintenant une espèce” (59). 2 homosexuality, in which a theoretical schism divides queer historians between those who ascribe to a transhistorical narrative of homosexuality and others who contend that a twentieth-century same-sex subjectivity evolved from its iteration (starting in the nineteenth century) as a pathology.2 Yet in both cases, a question remains at the heart of the most recent queer criticism: how could historical homosexuals recognize themselves as distinct subjects in the absence of a signifiable heterosexual counterpart?

Defining Homo-Affinity

Throughout this dissertation I refer to a paradigm of attraction, which I define as homo-affinity, that echoes two complementary structures of homosexuality set forth by scholars of French literature. René Girard, in Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque

(1961), put forth the first of these structures, in which homosexual mediation figures as the fusion of a love object with its same-sexed mediator of desire. However, where I will revisit Girard’s framework regarding homosexual desire in Chapter One, for the purposes of this introduction, my definition of homo-affinity builds on Leo Bersani’s model of homosexual desire, as outlined in Homos (1995). When treating homo-affinity as a

2 In “Liberal Exclusions and Sex Between Men in the Modern Era: Speculations on a Framework” (2010), Charles Upchurch conducts an in-depth literary review of scholarly dissent with Foucault’s ontology of the homosexual. Upchurch lends particular attention to the school of historians who subscribe to the methodology of Robert Trumbach, who “are comfortable asserting that sodomites were a distinct and socially recognizable group within society, ascribing a strength and a clarity to the social category in a way that late-nineteenth-century scholars are reluctant to say was the case in their own period or even in the early twentieth century” (4). In his review, Upchurch cites over a dozen scholars of literature and cultural studies whose published works either reject or only partially accept Foucault’s historicism of sexuality, including those of: H. G. Cocks; Philip Carter; Linda C. Dowling; David Halperin; Tim Hitchcock; Morris Kaplan; Theo Van der Meer; Jeffrey Merrick; Rictor Norton; Patrick O’Brien; Harry Oosterhuis; Bryant T. Ragan; and Lawrence Stone. 3 precursor to the identitary concept of homosexuality, I concur with Leo Bersani’s assertion that “[h]omosexual desire is less liable to be immobilized than heterosexual desire in that, structurally, it occupies several positions” (58). In the above passage,

Bersani lends a wide purview to the “several positions” that homosexual desire can occupy, through which any instance of same-sex desire comes across as verifiably homosexual. Along these lines, the expansive scope of Bersani’s argument lends itself to free association as to the varying degrees of homosexual desire that are imbricated within other present-day sexualities, such as bisexuality and transgender desire, insofar as they defy the strict sense of opposition expected of heterosexual relations. Bersani then elaborates on the “privileging of sameness” that homosexuality epitomizes:

“[homosexuality’s] privileging of sameness has, as a condition of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the perspective of a self defined as different from itself” (59). Going forward, I repurpose this structure that traffics in a “desire for the same from the perspective of a self defined as different from itself,” seeing as it reflects a predecessor to homosexual desire that manifests in homo- affinitive love intrigues. Like Bersani’s homos, these Sentimental heroes and heroines do not desire a mirrored replica of themselves––rather, they yearn for another person whose attractiveness enables a transcendence of differential relationships. This indeterminacy reflects the potential for persons of varying of sex and gender to partake in homosexual relationships, seeing as “same-sex desire, while it excludes the other sex as its object, presupposes a desiring subject for whom the antagonism between the different and the same no longer exist” (Bersani 59). In extending the epistemology of homosexual desire

4 to the era that precedes its discursive invention, I argue that homosexuality’s indeterminacy of positions, which privileges a sense of sameness above all else, preceded its taxonomization as a same-sex phenomenon.

In designating the term homo-affinity, I further intend to articulate a paradigm of socially transgressive desire that preceded the discursive creation of the homosexual. In light of the proximity between same-sex desire and incestuous love intrigues within the

French Romantic novel, I also aim to illustrate the potential for homo-affinity between characters whose mutual attraction is based on a sense of sameness that is not qualified solely by their sex. That is to say, I am not spelunking Sentimental literature for gay men and women, but for an unlawful affective bond based on exceptional sameness. In the same breath, insofar as my readings concern the history of homosexuality, I hasten to affirm that the definition of homo-affinity need not exclude tropes of overwhelming attraction, if not desire, between two characters of the same-sex. Throughout this research, I have found that homo-affinity manifests as a force that draws on genealogical kinship, at the same time that it communicates same-sex eroticism within its poetic appropriation of the familial bond.

To contextualize the queer orientation of homo-affinity, I turn to Heather Love’s

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Loss in Queer History (2013). Where she underscores the prominence of shame in queer history, Love contends that “more capacious and de-idealized accounts of love and friendship would serve to account for the ambivalence and violence of the relation to the past—to what is most queer in that relation” (32). Much in the same way as Love, I do not seek to rehabilitate the incestuous

5 and queer connotations of homo-affinity into a positive, pride-oriented history. Indeed, insofar as this project touches on contemporary politics in queer history, I posit that accepting and explicating these morally dubious moments of queer desire in the novel constitutes a scholarly method of “[a]ttending to the specific histories of homophobic exclusion and violence...[which] is also a way of claiming homosexuality in the face of a call to abandon it” (Love 30). In identifying the presence of homo-affinity, I aim to shed light on French Sentimentalism as a genre conducive to a historically queer esthetic.

Hence this dissertation focuses on that which is queer in the coexistence of erotic advocacy and societal exclusion in these novels, which otherwise compel fictional perpetrators of incest and same-sex desire to expire in a literary closet.

There already exists a lineage of investigating the brother-sister (adelphique) incest bond in French literary scholarship that exemplifies the Romantic novel’s philosophical fascination with homo-affinity. A sense of double-vision abounds in these studies (which mostly flourished during the 1970s and 1980s) that conveys the metaphoric dissonance between sameness and opposition within the brother-sister romance. Whereas psychoanalytical readings of the French incest novel interpret such love intrigues as an attempt to surpass the limitations of the self, especially those delineated by sex and gender, I seek to repurpose these heteronormative studies by underscoring the fundamental role of family resemblance in the French Romantic novel.

Peter Thorslev, in his groundbreaking article, “Incest as Romantic Symbol” (1965), frames the passion between René and his sister, Amélie, in Chateaubriand’s René (1801) as a canonical example of the Romantic incest bond: “[i]dentical as they are in heredity,

6 in temperament, and in childhood experience, each is so responsive to the subtlest nuances of feeling or mood in the other’s mind that verbal or explicit communication seems almost unnecessary” (13). Despite the solidly gendered circumstances of these diegetic siblings, Thorslev’s reading of René epitomizes the tendency to attribute disembodied categories, such as “temperament” and “heredity,” to an “identical” bond in scholarly analyses of the Romantic incest plot. In similar fashion, Evelyn Hesse-Fink, in

Études sur l'inceste dans la littérature française (1979), describes the impetus for

Chateaubriand to narrate incestuous desire between René and Amélie, Chactas and Atala, as well as a number of minor characters in the Natchez series, in terms that resemble

Bersani’s definition of homo-desire: “[c]es unions doivent leur joie ineffable à la ressemblance des deux amants qui est renforcé par leur parenté. La fusion complète du sujet aimant avec l’objet aimé, l’abolition de toute distance et dissemblance serait le bonheur suprême” (123). Moreover, Hesse-Fink’s vision of the “complete fusion of the loving subject with the love object” also echoes the paradigm of homosexual mediation put forth by René Girard in Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque (1961), in which homosexual desire incurs a unique instance of slippage, framed therein as “une prépondérance toujours plus marquée du médiateur [du même sexe] et un effacement graduel de l’objet” (52).3 Whereas the studies mentioned above envision an incest binary

3 Girard’s definition of homosexual mediation involves the gradual obliteration of the opposite- sexed love object while the desiring subject draws nearer to the once distant, same-sexed mediator (of desire): “[o]n ne donne rien à voir ni à comprendre en ramenant le désir triangulaire à une homosexualité nécessairement opaque pour l’hétéro-sexuel. Les résultats seraient beaucoup plus intéressants si l’on renversait le sens de l’explication. Il faut tenter de comprendre certaines formes d’homosexualité à partir du désir triangulaire. L’homosexualité proustienne, par exemple, peut se définir comme un glissement vers le médiateur d’une valeur érotique qui reste encore 7 that transcends the gendered differences of siblings, and thus resembles a twentieth- century definition of homosexuality, in Variations sur l’interdit majeur: littérature et inceste en Occident (1988- 1990), Bertrand d’Astorg describes the rising action of the nineteenth-century incest plot as one which anticipates an “androgynous” union of opposite sexes: “l’attente de l’état androgyne, manifeste dans le vertige que le frère et la sœur goûtent l’un par l’autre…ne peuvent qu’enrichir le langage dans l’échange suractivé des sentiments, des mots et du plaisir des textes” (106). Erotically charged as desirous siblings may be, D’Astorg’s consideration of androgyny equally reflects the holistic metaphor of incest for Romantic Socialists, in which marriage between Adam and Eve in

Saint-Simonian theology, as well as that of the virgin Mary and her son Jesus in the works of Patrice Leroux (1797-1871) and Simon Ganneau (180?-1851), exemplified a perfect union of masculine and feminine principles within their conceptions of God.4

As these divergent studies make clear, when sounding the Romantic association between androgyny and incest, scholars of French literature tend to adhere to one of two conflicting visions, in which incestuous desire either transcends the societal trappings of masculinity and femininity in favor of exceptional sameness or collapses them into one

(“androgynous”) bond. What is more, even though Thorslev, Hesse-Fink, and D’Astorg,

attachée à l’objet dans le donjuanisme ‘normal.’ Ce glissement n’est pas, a priori, impossible, il est même vraisemblable dans les stades aigus de la médiation interne que caractérise une prépondérance toujours plus marquée du médiateur et un effacement graduel de l’objet” (52-53, emphasis mine). Girard’s models of internal and external mediation are discussed in more detail in Chapter One of this dissertation, pp. 75-76. 4 For the summary of these now obscure tracts, this chapter is indebted to Naomi Andrews’s history of incestuous and androgynous symbolism among Romantic Socialist texts in “Utopian Androgyny: Romantic Socialists Confront Individualism in July Monarchy France” (2003). 8 among other scholars such as Ben Wang and Naomi Andrews, dutifully identify the incest ideal in Romantic literature, their analyses stop short of examining the structures of mediation that subtend familial desire in the French Sentimental novel. The conceptual work of homo-affinity obtains to bridging the intellectual gap between these two prominent models of desire, not through an absolute equation between incestuous and homoerotic passions, but through delving the felicitous interplay between these two affinities for sameness.

Genre: Sentimentalism and Romanticism

Due to the broadly defined characteristics of Romantic prose, the overlap between terms used in this dissertation extends from the definition of gender to that of literary genre, even if for analogous causes. In keeping with the research put forth by Tim

Blanning, Margaret Cohen, and Nancy Yousef, I approach Romanticism as a movement that incorporates Sentimentalist motifs and philosophy within it, although Sentimentalism spans an even wider scope of genres and philosophies than the term Romanticism can encompass. Tim Blanning, in The Romantic Revolution: a History (2013), makes little distinction between Sentimentality and Romanticism as movements, perhaps because of their similar emphasis on interiority. In Blanning’s history of Romanticism, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau figures in a central role of the Romantic revolution, seeing as he “demonstrated in La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Confessions [that] the truly radical departure was to move from a mimetic aesthetic centered on the work to an expressive aesthetic that put

9 the creator at the center” (15, original emphasis).5 Taking up the analogy set forth by

Meyer Howard Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical

Tradition (1953), Blanning defines this philosophical and artistic shift as one of self- perception: “from now on artistic creativity was to be from the inside out...No longer does the artist carry around a mirror, to hold up to nature. A better metaphor for the creative process is the lamp, which shines from within” (15-16, original emphasis).6 Furthermore, in Blanning’s vision, the revolutionary quality of early Romantics, across the media of painting, music, and literature, can be seen in their “initiating a new phase in the long- running dialectic between culture of feeling and a culture of reason,” which had previously manifested between the artistic ages of Baroque and Classicism (xvi). Cohen, like many scholars specializing this period, also points to Rousseau as an originator of the genre, yet she purposefully distinguishes Sentimentalism from Romanticism, not to oppose the two schema of early nineteenth-century art, but to emphasize the specificity,

5 “What proved to be revolutionary was the rejection, not of academies, or even rules, but of the whole classical aesthetic based on the imitation of la belle nature. As Rousseau demonstrated in La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Confessions, the truly radical departure was to move from a mimetic aesthetic centered on the work to an expressive aesthetic that put the creator at the center” (15). 6 Abrams also describes this monumental change in British literary criticism during the early nineteenth-century as a “revolution,” spurred from a shift in artistic perception from “imitation” (or, the mirror) to expression” (or, the lamp): “In the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the transformation of the key images by which critics pictured the process and product of art is a convenient index to a comprehensive revolution in the theory of poetry, and of all the arts…The change from imitation to expression, and from the mirror to the fountain, the lamp, and related analogues, was not an isolated phenomenon. It was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemology––that is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception which was current among romantic poets and critics” (53, 57). While the extent to which present-day critics benefit from Abram’s study of Romanticism certainly deserves acknowledgement, I primarily refer to the term “Romantic revolution” as Blanning conceives it throughout The Romantic Revolution: a History, particularly because of Rousseau’s relevance within Blanning’s critical framework. 10 as well as the strong presence of women writers, that can be inscribed in the designation of the Sentimental novel: “[t]he designation Romanticism...obscures women’s prominent role in honoring a novelistic form that not only engages the question of freedom before

Romanticism but in fact constitutes the prehistory of the movement” (11).7 The placement of Chateaubriand’s novels in these respective frameworks evinces the careful decision that scholars must make when ascribing a literary movement to authors of this artistic period, for Blanning describes the enchanteur as a Romantic (158), yet Cohen defines his works as Sentimentalist, seeing as “sentimental codes constitute their dominant (in the structuralist sense) generic horizon” (29, parentheses in text). Moving forward, so as not to ignore the significance of either term, I refer to Sentimentalism as both the genre of writing and the philosophy of feeling that was imbricated within it, and

I make reference Romanticism as the sweeping “revolution” of artistic and literary production in the Europe and North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Any Romantic esthetic associated with the incest plot also figures as part of an era marked by writerly discontent with the French body politic. To approach

Sentimentalism as a genre requires a wide berth on the critic’s part, for its central feature relies on the vague condition of a Sentimental double-bind, in which protagonists must struggle (often hopelessly) between their allegiance to social duty and individual passion.

Margaret Cohen, after conducting extensive research of Sentimental novels that had long

7 “[T]he designation Romanticism has long obscured more than it reveals when applied to novels from the first half of the nineteenth century…Sentimentality is a poetics that predates 1789, first emerging in France, to my knowledge, with La Nouvelle Héloïse” (11, 33). 11 since fallen into obscurity, offers an expansive definition of the genre’s essential plot in

The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999):

The paradigmatic sentimental plot is a plot of double bind...Collective

welfare, which constitutes one term of the double bind, is aligned with the

unstable cluster of Enlightenment abstractions including the public good,

manners, society, reason, and other people’s well-being. Against this

imperative, the sentimental novel asserts the imperative to individual

freedom, which it associates with happiness, choice, nature, the private,

sentiment, and erotic love. (Cohen 34, emphasis mine)

The effusive feelings that characterize Sentimental narration materialize in the face of an

“unstable cluster of Enlightenment abstractions,” to borrow Cohen’s expression, whose moral prescriptions regarding public well-being also encouraged the consideration of one’s individual freedom as a natural right. Where the heroes and heroines of seventeenth-century tragedy, such as Racine’s Britannicus (1665) or Corneille’s Le Cid

(1637), deliberate the consequences of their actions before an audience, the pith of

Sentimentalism lies in its interiority and, as such, in its valorization of a new sense of duty that answers to the “heart” of the feeling self. As their protagonists suffer unending trials of their moral acumen, Sentimental novels attribute a sense of virtue to private introspection:

While sentimental heroines and heroes are idealized from their

introduction, the sentimental plot subjects its protagonists’ moral worth to 12 ample trial. Setting up the conflict between individual freedom and

collective welfare from its opening events, the sentimental plot

accumulates situations that test the protagonist’s ability to negotiate this

conflict as they simultaneously test the conflict’s force. (Cohen 60)

Despite a stark opposition between their implied audiences, where protagonists must constantly sound “the conflict between individual freedom and collective welfare” by way of the novel’s intimate (and thus highly personal) narratology, the resonance between the libertine novel and Sentimentalism comes into focus. But even though both genres pit their protagonists against the collective mores of their time, as Jeffrey Russel deftly summarizes in his account of “Courtly Love as Religious Dissent” (1965), “Romantic love cannot flourish where sexual fulfillment is easily obtainable, but only where obstructions are placed in its way” (9). Extricated from libertine conventions of the tell- all, the Sentimental novel nevertheless proceeds from a similar moral imperative as its more tawdry contemporary, particularly as it procures sympathy for misfits and outlaws on whom the quest for pleasure leaves its brand. As a product of political dissent, the devices that ensure the moral high ground of the genre transmit a familiar plea for erotic agency against the reality of discursive constraint. Even though the Sentimental double- bind undoubtedly separates Romanticism from pure libertinage, I insist on attending to the Romantic novel’s capacity for libertine double-speak, especially in the instances where its narrators must negotiate their respective obligation to both individual desire and unfailing virtue.

Another hallmark of the Sentimental novel, which Margaret Cohen defines as 13 tableau, exploits a similar of paradox between libertine and moralistic modes of narration. Whereas the double-bind enables Romantic protagonists to articulate their taboo desires, so as to test their strength of character, the narrative schism that occurs in tableau effectively fingers that which cannot be said. After the pangs of failed union or moral doubt swell to their apex, the use of tableau, which Cohen describes as a moment when “the novel’s underwriting conflict reaches such a level of intensity that it threatens to explode, [and] the narration loses access to the protagonist's interiority, as if overcome by the tension it represents,” marks the end of iterable torment by focusing on the voiceless body (65). Thus, in narrative tableau, the first person point of view suddenly changes perspective, shifting from an internal narrator to a third-person description of the scene at hand. Cohen relates Diderot’s treatise on Sentimentality in “Éloge de

Richardson” (1762) to her own interpretation of tableau, arguing that “a community of sympathetic readers [who are moved by the tableau effect] reassures the reader concerning the stability of ethical order in counterpoint to the disruptive actions represented by the novel” (69). This lapse in discourse underscores the significance of speechlessness in the genre as it primarily engages the sympathy of Sentimental readers whose emotional response must fill the void where an author exercises self-censorship. In regards to the eighteenth-century ideals at stake in the Romantic novel that are sheltered within instances of tableau, Cohen justly correlates categories of “[the] private, sentiment, and erotic love” among the criteria of personal agency that represented an

“imperative to individual freedom” for Sentimentalist authors (cited above). Much in the way Cohen envisions the double-bind, tableau also acts as a moral cover for the author

14 and their community of implied readers. Such a diegetic act intends to preserve

Sentimentalism’s claim to virtue, despite the genre’s equation between collective welfare and personal anguish. In this light, I want to consider an even smaller community of readers, for whom the coded nature of tableau enabled the preponderance of a literary closet throughout the Romantic novel. While not every reader could have been aware of the poetics that stand in for more explicit descriptions of incestuous and homoerotic desire, each of the novels studied in this dissertation proffers a particular symbolism of homo-affinity that traffics in these taboos. The centrality of the double-bind to the French

Romantic novel further speaks to the genre’s capacity to embody, if not preserve, a literary closet under the pretext of Sentimental virtue, as it interpolates circle of readers to read––or more properly to feel––within it.

Familial Desire in the Sentimental Novel

It is no coincidence that, while they negotiated the representation of the family unit, French Romantic writers, such as Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël (1766-

1817), wrote during the limited yet prolific period of marital divorces that arose from the laïque (secularist) notions of the Revolution. In French Divorce Fiction from Revolution to the First World War (2013), Nicholas White outlines how the “[the divorce question] spoke to the emerging association of marriage with romantic and erotic love (and thus to a bourgeois notion of marriage which grew in the eighteenth century),” while at the same time, it “contravened the Theory of Separate Spheres often associated with the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century” (29). Between 1792 and 1816, divorce was legal,

15 and highly accessible, with an average of 1 in 11 marriages ending in divorce during these years, and a stunning rate of divorce at one of every four marriages established in

Paris (White 26). While the Romantics studied here did not depict divorce, their renegotiation of primary affective bonds, in depictions of both incestuous love and homoerotic desire, reflects a short-lived period in which the bourgeois family unit was in the process of being redefined and nascent ideals of Romantic (even Sentimentalist) love, as well as the fixity of separate spheres, stood in an open paradox.

When it comes to deconstructing the Sentimental conception of the familial bond,

English studies of the familial desire and of the incest plot have enjoyed significant attention. For the purpose of French studies, these accounts from British literature inform a wider history of the incest plot in the Sentimental novel, even though the treatment of familial desire by French authors of the same period differed widely from that of their

Anglophone neighbors. Investigating incest across the Channel, Mary Jean Corbet chronicles the English public’s perception of incestuous relationships, in both popular media and literature, in Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to

Virginia Woolf (2008). Much in the way White frames divorce, she argues that

“[r]econceiving nineteenth-century middle-class incests...enables us to revise our analysis of marriage-and-family fictions...” (19). Generally speaking, the connotations of poverty and ignoble miscegenation (however imagined) attached to incest in British literature of the nineteenth-century differs from that of urban France, whose eighteenth-century philosophers––namely Denis Diderot (Supplément au voyage de Bougainville [1772]) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (Du Contrat social [1762])––treated incestuous bonds and

16 divorce between their idealized characters with admiration (White 68). Despite such a divergence in their literary histories, the reconsideration of primary affective bonds in this project, just as Corbet’s, is “intent on considering the residual impact of alliance—in its focus on delimiting or expanding the boundaries of kinship through marriage and reproduction—on sexuality” (18). Where Chateaubriand, Duras, and Stendhal construct a

Sentimental double bind around familial desire, their novels evince the post-

Revolutionary negotiation of what modern psychoanalytic critics have termed the primacy of affective bonds. In her cultural history of sensationalist literature, Mixed

Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992), Anne

Cvetkovich argues that: “[w]ithout a history of the construction of affect, the cultural work of melodrama, which takes for granted and naturalizes sexual, Romantic, and familial desire, or personal affective relations, cannot be adequately understood” (118). In concert with Cvetkovich, I argue that contemporary interpretations of the post-

Revolutionary family unit must consider the anachronistic quality of terms such as

“heterosexuality,” as well as the supposedly default position of the husband and wife as the primary affective bond within the family unit.8

Incest before the French Revolution

Where scholars of English literature necessarily approach nineteenth-century depictions of incest in the context of its connotation with the sins of Britain’s lowest

8 “[T]he deconstruction of primary bonding also illuminates how the structures of affective life within modern middle-class culture are constructed by the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality” (Cvetkovich 118). 17 classes, the prevalence of incestuous affairs among the nobility in France resulted in a widespread tolerance of the practice that carried on after the fall of the Ancien Régime. In her recent study, L’Inceste romanesque au siècle des Lumières: de la Régence à la

Révolution (2011), Jacqueline Chammas examines the intersection of political philosophy and the French incest novel as they evolved along the course of the eighteenth century.

Throughout her treatise, which stands out for its interrogative depth among a lean corpus of research on the subject, Chammas examines a moral paradox that incest symbolized in both fiction and philosophy of the siècle des Lumières. Rather than a symptom of moral weakness, Chammas argues that philosophers and writers incorporated incest into examples of natural desire, effectively peddling them as an element of the idealized virtue that subtended much of the era’s philosophy: “[l]’idée de nature––dans sa loi et dans son droit––est prise d’assaut dans les représentations de l’inceste. Autour d’elle vivent de grandes valeurs––vertu, bonheur, liberté––que les personnages s’approprient et mettent en pratique à leur façon…” (31, original emphasis). Despite its intellectual association with the moral rectitude of the natural world (in the context of both the social collective

[loi] and the individual [droit]), the incest plot remained a prurient subject in tell-all publications of the eighteenth century. Thinly veiled tales of familial desire proliferated in French memoirs and romans à clé that related the private scandals of authors such as

Voltaire and Claudine de Tencin, along with Louis XV’s ongoing affair with the Nesle sisters (21-22). Chammas emphasizes the philosophical tension found at the pith of the eighteenth-century incest plot: “les romans de l’inceste [font] la promotion de la liberté, complément du bonheur; mais paradoxalement, pour cela, il faut prouver l’existence du

18 secret. Il faut le dévoiler” (35). The incest plot often contrasts the pursuit of one’s natural right to happiness with the virtuous imperative of honesty, and thus with the “unveiling” of those desires, even if they run against the grain of propriety. Drawing on her superlative work, this dissertation takes up Chammas’s vision of fictionalized incest to the extent that it presented Romantic authors with a moral puzzle from which they construed their own metaphors for (purportedly) natural desire in the decades following the Revolution. It is in this light that French Romanticism, with its focus on the post-

Revolutionary body politic, takes up the philosophical roots of the French incest plot as a part of a culturally specific Sentimentalist tradition.

The legal bearings of incest dramatically changed following the French

Revolution, yielding a decriminalized act in place of a crime that once incurred the death penalty for citizens of the lower classes. Although the (male) members of the new

Republic benefitted from the expansion of their erotic liberties under the Napoleonic code, which persisted through the Restoration, an older judicial framework surrounding familial desire had operated under generations of the Ancien Régime’s former subjects, for whom the legal definition of incest conveyed the distinct categories of affinité naturelle and affinité (ou inceste) spirituelle. Chammas brings these two concepts to the foreground of her historical inquiry, along with their legal definitions as reviewed by contemporary legalists such as Jean Domat (1625-1696), Pierre-Jacques Brillon (1671-

1736), Dom Calmet (1672-1757), Daniel Jousse (1704-1781), and Muyart de Vouglans

(1713-1791), whose judicial histories informed the philosophical definitions of incest found in Ferrière’s Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique (1740-1761) and the

19 Encyclopédie (1751-1765). 9 Among these authors, Brillon offers a salient, if not generic, explanation of the action that qualifies a man as an incestueux, as early as 1717: “celui qui s’unit charnellement à sa parente à un degré prohibé, ou qui ayant fait un vœu solemnel de chasteté, s’abandonne à la fornication; ou bien qui abuse d’une vierge qui a fait le même vœu” (513). Where the moralistic tone used to describe incest varies between the sources above, their definitions of affinité naturelle––or desire between relatives of the same immediate family––and affinité spirituelle, which occurs (in various scenarios) between the clergy, nuns, and lay people, remain structurally consistent. Much in the way Margaret Cohen envisions a specific community of Sentimental readers who question the political regulation of individual freedoms, Chammas underscores the subaltern motives of novelists who portrayed incest in the eighteenth-century France:

“[p]our les romanciers de l’inceste, le lecteur est un allié à qui on révèle l’existence effective de lieux secrets…L’inceste romanesque en devient un défi lancé aux autorités qui broient la ‘liberté naturelle’” (35). As Chammas argues, by exposing a supposed taboo as commonplace among the upper classes, several authors who depicted incest in late eighteenth-century novels employed familial desire as a trope that flouted the royal constraint of “natural liberty.”

9 The phallic lens through which incest is articulated in Chammas’s study reflects the eighteenth- century vision of pleasure in Europe as a one-sexed phenomenon, which until the early nineteenth-century was male by default. However, as Thomas Laqueur emphasizes in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1991), acknowledging this epistemology of pleasure does not serve to efface women or women’s desires from present-day histories of sexuality: “[i]t is probably not possible to write a history of man’s body and its pleasures because the historical record was created in a cultural tradition where no such history was necessary. But…recounting the [misogynist] history of interpreting woman’s body is not the grant the male body the authority it implicitly claims. Quite the contrary” (22). 20 Sentimentalism and the Queer Archive of Feelings

Along with conducting close readings of the Romantic incest plot in the contexts of both homo-affinity and Sentimentalism, this dissertation also aims to contribute to a recent tradition of debate surrounding what scholars of Queer Studies describe as the archive of queer feelings. For all its cogency, in “Lost and Never Found: The Queer

Archive of Feelings and Its Historical Propriety” (2013), Sara Edenheim gives reason to pause before the adoption of such a term as she unpacks a nebulous and wide-reaching epistemology behind the current academic search for queer feelings. Along these lines,

Edenheim rightfully complicates the definition of the word “archive” through a sophisticated critique of its supposed function in the methodologies of affective and queer history scholars, such as Judith Halberstam, Anne Cvetkovich, and Frank Ankersmit:

Either way, the mission to write history is imperative according to both

Halberstam and Ankersmit. The objects in the queer archive of feelings are

foremost supposed to represent feelings and experiences, that is, the

objects will in themselves, or through their historicizing context, bring

forth certain feelings and ‘lives’ (only assumingly metaphorically) that ask

for narrativization and comprehension…There is no epistemological

explanation of how these objects will transmit these feelings through their

sheer presence in an archive or archival setting. (53, original emphasis)

In the above passage, Edenheim’s criticism revolves around a scholarly suspicion of our ability to recover the suppressed (if not erased) past that basks in its sense of doubt, 21 permeating the italicized terms, “represent” and “bring forth,” underlining the positively unknowable quality of past “lives.” Edenheim expresses this counterpoint more clearly through her contention with Anne Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma,

Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), regarding the latter scholar’s project of

“address[ing] traumatic experience through witnessing and retelling”: “[o]n the contrary,

[Lacanian trauma] evades memory, and even if remembered, it is always through the necessary ‘afterwardness’ (Nachträglichkeit) that gives the traumatic event its symbolic meanings and symptoms” (Cvetkovich 241; Edenheim 55, original emphasis). Here,

Edenheim’s focus on Lacanian trauma serves as a theoretical tie to her close reading of the transhistoric sinthomosexual (and its sinthome) that Lee Edelman outlines in No future (1994): “Edelman’s is a methodology of antihermeneutics…when we find [what we are looking for], we should not expect to know it. The hermeneutical requirement to make the object of study speak and to expect the unspeakable to speak as well is quite the opposite” (58, original emphasis).10 Without assuming such a complete understanding of past lives, I contend that, where Lee Edelman himself implores queer critics “to figure an unregenerate…sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance [sic]…exposes aesthetic culture…as always already a ‘culture of death’,” the expenditure of our time and energy

10 Rather than the historical archive, Edelman takes aim at the “fantasy of queer futurism” in his formation of the term sinthomosexuality: “I am calling sinthomosexuality, then, the site where the fantasy of futurism confronts the insistence of a jouissance that rends it precisely by rendering it in relation to [that death] drive” (38, original emphasis). The “sint-” prefix that Edelman adds to the root “homosexual” forms a portmanteau that combines a sign for non-productive desire with his revision of Lacan’s symbolic term, “sinthome”: “[d]esignating a locus of enjoyment beyond the logic of interpretation…the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance [sic] constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive” (113). 22 in feeling up the archive, so as to encounter esthetic traces of outlaw desire, agrees with the sinthomosexual jouissance he defends in No Future (48).11 Seeing as this project looks toward an often overlooked era that, except for us scholars who indulge their fascination with looking for queer experience in dusty novels, remains largely unexamined, avoiding use of the term “archive” simply because it carries with it polemic value seems to preclude the archival bearings of queer historical research.12

Keeping the term’s limitations in mind, I nevertheless refer to the queer archive of feelings in this project insofar as it evokes the overlap between inscribed, historical matter and the phenomenon that John Dewey describes as esthetic experience (whose connection with the last term I will attend to shortly). The queer archive serves as a means to trace the inscription of queer feelings, and especially those incurred by the constraints of the closet, across the Sentimentalist texts examined in this dissertation.

Following Edenheim’s lead, and in light of Jacques Lacan’s influence in the field of

Queer Studies, I am compelled to briefly address a prominent difference between the

French psychoanalyst’s theories of signification and his remarks regarding the potential for written language to serve as a conduit for unconscious erotic desire. In “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient” (or “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”) (1957),

11 Edelman assigns this task as a way to actualize “the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order intent on misrecognizing its own investment in morbidity, fetishization, and repetition…” (47, emphasis mine). 12 So as not to overlook the goal of Edenheim’s argument here, I have included the conclusion to her critique of the archive as a productive entity: “[t]o look at history’s symptomatic relationship to time is to see the public research archive as an uncanny institutional figure of the futility of the preservation and reproduction of life. After all, the only things found in an archive are dead matter and dust, and that is very queer indeed” (58). 23 Lacan recalls how the case of a famed patient Freud portrayed in Fetischismus (1927), who fetishized the application of Glanz auf der Nase (shine on the nose), provoked an intellectual backlash against early psychoanalysis. Since literature, in Lacan’s words, already attended to human sexuality centuries before psychoanalysis, critics volleyed against Freud’s claim that the written form (la lettre) of language (langage) conveys the whims of the unconscious mind:

C’est cet abîme ouvert à la pensée qu’une pensée se fasse entendre dans

l’abîme, qui a provoqué dès l’abord la résistance à l’analyse. Et non pas

comme on le dit la promotion de la sexualité dans l’homme. Celle-ci est

l’objet qui prédomine de beaucoup dans la littérature à travers les siècles.

(33)

Lacan later pauses on the truth value of writing, in spite of its propensity to operate within a significative vacuum, seeing as it brings to light certain desires that would otherwise remain unconscious: “[s]i j’ai dit que l’inconscient est le discours de l’Autre avec un grand A, c’est pour indiquer l’au-delà où se noue la reconnaissance du désir au désir de reconnaissance” (35).13 To the contrary of Edenheim’s Lacanian criticism of the archive, the agency of la lettre––as the vehicle of written language––functions beyond

13 For Lacan, the act of writing his short treatise on “L’instance de la lettre” facilitates a meeting between the unconscious “Other” and the “lie” that is the awakened ego of the author himself: “Autrement dit cet autre est l’Autre qu’invoque même mon mensonge pour garant de la vérité dans laquelle il subsiste. À quoi s’observe que c’est avec l’apparition du langage qu’émerge la dimension de la vérité” (35). 24 the boundaries of the waking ego, from where it relays uncensored discourse that consciousness often obfuscates.

To make use of the critical opposition between the death of the author and its portent to a queer archive of feelings, I focalize on the affective relationship between inscribed text and the reader. The literary trace, as it is conceptualized in this dissertation, borrows from a broad corpus of esthetic philosophy that spans the queer historical readings performed by Gary Ferguson, John Dewey’s philosophy of artistic expression, and the respective theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan on the temporality of writing.14 In “Pour un passé queer: lire l’homosexualité aux débuts des temps modernes”

(2008), Ferguson compiles a lineage of texts that, while queer, cannot easily be classified as proof of either constructivist or essentialist identities, despite pressure within Queer

Studies to reclaim these structures in literary history. Examining pre-modern works that range from Montaigne to the poetry of Sappho, Ferguson advocates for a method of reading that considers the unique eroticism of historically queer texts, so as to “trace” a middle ground between historical queerness and that of the present: “[i]l nous importe…de reconnaître de ce à quoi les témoignages du passé nous invitent si souvent, c’est tracer––souplement, soigneusement, banalement––une voie moyenne” (129, original emphasis). Even if by coincidence, Ferguson’s vision of tracing a historical

“path” through close reading interpolates the theory of inscription that Roland Barthes

14 When defining the writerly trace, this necessary variation between schools of criticism underscores the degree to which the Philosophy of Emotions remains understudied, or even identified as a discipline, in both literary and Queer Studies, despite its relevance to the prospective formation of a queer archive of feelings. 25 outlines in “La mort de l’Auteur” (1968). When advocating for “The Death of the

Author,” Barthes famously examines the act of writing as one of inscription, which produces, first and foremost, the record of what would otherwise be an unretrievable moment in time:

[I]l n’y a d’autre temps que celui de l’énonciation, et tout texte est écrit

éternellement ici et maintenant…[L]e scripteur, ayant enterré l’Auteur…ne

peut donc plus croire…que sa main est trop lente pour sa pensée ou sa

passion, et en conséquence…il doit accentuer ce retard et ‘travailler’

indéfiniment sa forme ; pour lui, au contraire, sa main, détachée de toute

voix, portée par un pur geste d’inscription (et non d’expression), trace un

champ sans origine… (4, original emphasis)

In Barthes’s framework, writing occurs as a unique act of “enunciation” that leaves behind a “trace” of the exact moment that coincides with its inscription. Divorced from any act of individual “expression,” which Barthes imagines as a scenario where personal

“thoughts or passion” might linger while an author struggles to describe them, writing emerges only in the immediacy of the infinite “here and now,” unencumbered by the linear confines of the past or present. In all its materiality, inscription evinces the confluence between the author and the moment of lived experience that person records as writing. Where Barthes’s distinction between expression and inscription separates the personalty of the author from textual discourse, I insist on revisiting Lacan’s equation between life, death, and writing in “L’insistance de la lettre”: “[c]ertes la lettre tue, dit-on quand l’esprit vivifie. Nous n’en disconvenons pas…mais nous demandons aussi 26 comment sans la lettre l’esprit vivrait” (20). Through a comparative reading of these theories I contend, much as Lacan and Ferguson, that an author leaves behind a personal trace in their writing, especially in relation to the erotic. Furthermore, in turning to

Barthes’s definition of inscription as a temporally unique act, this dissertation recognizes the novel as an artifact befitting an archive of feelings, whose scope extends from a given novel to the historical period in which it is written.

While bearing the non-linear temporality of the trace, this definition also considers the esthetic philosophy of John Dewey, whose theory of artistic expression bridges a gap between the lifeless act of inscription envisioned by critics such as Lacan and Barthes and the appreciator’s experience of art objects in present time. In the interest of identifying a specific archive of queer feelings, the peculiar “appetites” that spur esthetic creation, such as Dewey describes them in Art as Experience (1934), stand to define a transhistoric community of readers who empathize with homo-affinity in the

Sentimental novel.15 Through the American philosopher’s eyes, esthetic experience is one in which the significative capability of art coalesces, for creator as well as purveyor, through the transformation of raw emotions into an esthetic object. This reshaping of emotions occurs by way of “expression” in Dewey's theory: “[e]xpression is the clarification of turbid emotion; our appetites know themselves when they are reflected in the mirror of art, and as they know themselves they are transfigured” (80). Artistic

15 Admittedly, I do not seek to define a transhistorically queer community beyond this cadre of readers who identify with feelings of homo-affinity. Any greater “queer” community would otherwise be delineated ex post facto and in light of the term “queer” as it has evolved over the course of the twenty- and twenty-first centuries. 27 experience spans a continuum between the emotions that prompt creation and the work that results from clarifying unarticulated feelings into art. Ultimately, a creator’s “turbid emotions” become an esthetic object that, like a “mirror,” reflects the otherwise intangible “appetites” and “turbid emotion[s]” that inspired the object itself. Furthermore, in Dewey’s view, these feelings accompany esthetic experience, seeing as

“…experience...is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful experience which is esthetic experience” (19). Although Dewey presents several intricate arguments regarding expression in Art as Experience, most important to the sake of my argument is the dualistic quality of Dewian esthetic experience, which undermines any supposed barrier between the self and other as emotions are aroused

(though not imposed) by esthetically inscribed objects. However subjective, the experience procured from art is in no way divorced from the esthetic object that we interrogate.

As I will argue in Chapters Two and Three, through meticulous use of intertextual poetics, Duras and Stendhal contributed to a Sentimentalist code that enabled their portrayal of outlaw sexuality. Without ignoring the intentional representation of homo- affinity in these novels, an esthetic survey of the archive of queer feelings also calls for us to draw, at the very least, on the trace of raw emotions and appetites that drive esthetic experience. Following this logic, the ability to classify a text by the feeling out of queerness alone tempts with its immediate salience. And for queer readers, such a judgment reflects the pertinence of an esthetic object to queer experience in the present, no doubt. Yet as far as the accuracy of such claims are concerned, queer historians stand

28 to benefit from keeping in mind Sarah Edenheim’s conclusion (regarding the public research archive) that “the only things found in an archive are dead matter and dust, and that is very queer indeed” (58). Along these lines, especially in regards to the queer archive of feelings, this dissertation examines the queer trace in the French Sentimental novel as a subjective experience that arises within the same context of morbidity and narrative doubt that typify research archives.

Working through the trace of queer feelings in the Sentimental novel inevitably leads us to a dualistic image of homo-affinity that draws on both normative and queer paradigms of desire. When juxtaposed with the uncommon degree of sameness that draws

Romantic lovers together, the visibly heterosexual bearings of familial love in the

Romantic novel conveys a mixed legacy, seeing as homo-affinity largely occurs in the context of sexual difference. In light of its opposite-sexed appropriateness, any erotic threat embodied in homo-affinity is also susceptible to the bourgeois normalization that

Lisa Moore confronts in Dangerous Intimacies: Towards a Sapphic History of the British

Novel (1997), through which “dangerous intimacies between women [were] written into the narrative of hegemonic culture and its foundational violences [were] written out”

(20).16 To account for the inconsistency with which homo-affinity does and does not negotiate same-sex desire, the genre’s dependence on paradoxical thinking deserves

16 In Dangerous Intimacies: Towards a Sapphic History of the British Novel (1997), Lisa Moore cites Jane Austen’s Emma as a gauge of the domestication of same-sex desire among women in the British Sentimental novel: “[in Emma,] Sapphic desire has been carefully disentangled from its colonial associations and is no longer a threat to the bourgeois ascension narrative…dangerous intimacies between women have been written into the narrative of hegemonic culture as its foundational violences have been written out” (20). 29 remembering. Through a process philosophers of emotion describe as simulation,

Sentimental novels both sympathize with and admonish their tortured protagonists to produce emotional knowledge. Kendall Walton, in “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime:

On Being Moved by Fiction” (1997), posits that rather than relegating our connection with fictional characters to the realm of the unreal, “we need to recognize that [through fiction] we imagine feeling fear, pity, and admiration––fear, pity and admiration of the kinds we might actually feel in ‘real life’” (12).17 In the interest of Queer Studies, the intrigue of such simulation lies in delving the real-life implications of familial desire, which casts itself toward a wider audience than a strict reading of either homosexuality or incestuous desire can encompass. When attending to the simulation of a homo-affinitive love intrigue, the structural overlap between sameness and difference in the Sentimental novel surfaces within the genre’s poetics of attraction. At times, the homoerotic metaphor that survives within the domain of homo-affinity contradicts the Sentimental novel’s inherited association with heterosexual romance. Yet, alternatively, when the trope of familial desire in Romantic novels does not ring as homoerotic, the question as to what feelings certify such a judgement also deserves our attention. As Susan Feagin argues in

“Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction” (1997), fiction can produce emotional knowledge regardless of whether all readerly emotions possess a name, for “[a]rt

17 Walton’s argument in favor of Simulation theory takes aim at the common assumption that fiction already and always inspires sympathy in the context of the unreal: “[Simulation theory]…will help to counter a surprisingly prevalent assumption that imagining and make- believe (which I understand in terms of imagining), or the kind of imagining central to my theory, can only be a clinical, antiseptic, intellectual exercise, and so cannot have a central role in explaining the genuinely emotional responses to fiction that appreciators (often) experience” (2). 30 educates the emotions…by expanding our knowledge of the myriad ways affective states can be identified and distinguished from one other” (11).18 To make the most of their literary investment in sensibility, Romantic and Sentimental novels merit close readings that consider the modalities of homo-affinitive and queer feelings within them. Through inquiry into a more capacious structure of attraction than terms such as homosexuality, narcissism, or incest alone can signify, these readings stand to elucidate the vestiges of queer desire that subsist, however tacitly, in the ideal of the Romantic couple.

Chapters of Family-Friendly: Homo-affinity in the French Sentimental Novel,

1770-1850

In Chapter One, “Incest, Homos, or How Mirrored Selves Find Love in

Chateaubriand’s Atala/René,” I examine a Romantic love intrigue based on family resemblance that Chateaubriand develops in his first novel Atala/René (1801). In this two-part work, the brother-sister bond coincides with the spontaneous desire expected of elective romance. However, rather than a repetition of the incest plot that proliferated in the eighteenth-century, Chateaubriand underscores the complementary nature of these siblings who, despite the differences in their gender, represent near-doubles of each other.

This sense of sameness manifests through a rhetorical device that I define as the chiasmatic mirror, which emphasizes the inverse relationships between several characters

18 Feagin stresses the potential for similar aesthetic nuances to differentiate art emotions that otherwise occur as a pattern “for which we hitherto had no name”: “[T]he aesthetically more interesting cases occur when art emotions involve a restructuring of experience, which we can try to capture by sorting out, for example, enmeshed patterns of overlapping emotions…or by trying to identify a pattern for which we hitherto had no name” (11, original emphasis). 31 in Atala/René, who each embody a paradoxical subject that is at once Christian and

Pagan, native and colonized, or hero and outlaw. In terms of genre, such reciprocity between protagonists calls to a crisis of self-knowledge that originated in the eighteenth- century Sentimental novel, especially as it manifests in the Clarens community of

Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. As scholars such as Maurice Regard, Jean-Paul

Clément, and Jean-Claude Berchet demonstrate in their respective studies of

Chateaubriand’s œuvre, biographical events from the author’s life often resurface through the lens of fiction in his novels. Keeping his self-consumed manner of writing in mind, I consider the enchanteur’s complicated love affairs, which include a profound attraction to his sister Lucile and the lesser-known tryst between François-René and his friend

François Tulloch, as a well of lived experience that Chateaubriand aestheticizes through fiction. As one of its earliest iterations in the French Sentimental novel, the outlaw desire for the self defined as different-than-the-self that motivates these love intrigues serves as a touchstone for the structure of homo-affinity. As Atala and René evidence, the homo- affinitive bond is not reducible to one paradigm of attraction, and as such it cannot be understood as simply incestuous, narcissistic, or homoerotic in nature. Indeed, as I will illustrate, each of these modes of desire arise in meaningful proximity as a newly forged trope of expansive desire in Chateaubriand’s twin novel.

Chapter Two, “Parlor Polari in Claire de Duras’s Olivier, ou le secret,” delves into the coded language that Duras invented in order to convey the eroticized secret of

Olivier to her audience of Restoration salonniers. The unpublished novel, which the duchesse penned in reaction to the aborted marriage between her daughter, Clara, and

32 Astolphe de Custine, inspired a handful of authors to continue in Duras’s literary élan, such as Henri de Latouche (1785-1851), Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857), and Stendhal

(1783-1842). In parsing the poetics of slippage, deletion, and misprision she embedded in her roman à clef, I argue that Duras’s cryptic narrative deserves consideration as an historic predecessor in the evolution of homosexual slangs in Europe. Just as British

Polari lost meaning beyond the time and place of its original currency, Olivier succeeds in veiling the mystery that plagues its eponymous protagonist from any reading of the novel’s diegetic text. Duras primarily composes her epistolary code through intertextual allusiosn to Ovid’s Heroides and the ancient letters of its heroines, as she conjures mythological symbols such as Theseus’s Black sail, Odysseus’s voyage to the land of the lotus eaters, Penelope’s marriage bed, and the suicide of Phyllis. Whereas these tokens of faith and perdition obtain to Louise’s love for her cousin, Duras construes a separate metaphor for the hero’s secret that draws on the iconic valence of the olive tree. As Anka

Muhlstein and Denise Virieux have demonstrated, the author inscribes an analogy from the sermons of Augustine of Hippo within Olivier’s name (a homonym of that tree in

French) that pertains to physiological impotence. The close association between Olivier and an almond tree he once gave to Louise further complicates the arboreal symbolism in the novel insofar as it calls to the Ovidian myths of Attis (in Fasti) and Phyllis (in

Metamorphoses) that the author interpolates in the deaths of her protagonists. In contrast to the novel’s intertextual erotics, this chapter focuses on Duras’s redaction of same-sex desire from her manuscripts, particularly as it surfaces in the excised relationship between Olivier and his rival (M. de Rieux). The author’s effort to obfuscate the secret in

33 Olivier resonates in a narrative dynamic of misprision that shelters an ingenuous Louise–

–who aligns herself with the long suffering heroines of the Greek mythology––from the rarefied allusions to hermaphroditism and impotence that Duras ascribes to her cousin.

Drawing on allegories of chaste romance, madness, and the castrated devotees of Cybele,

Duras engenders a language surrounding intersexuality that was legible, if not as imposing as the concept of the two-sexed god(dess), to the classically educated invitees of her salon. In laying bare the eroticism of the myths Duras interpolates, this chapter identifies an archive of feelings inscribed in Olivier’s walk-in closet, as well as the import of that closeted narrative in our interaction with the Sentimental novel’s queer past.

Chapter Three, “Chevalerie and the New Cruise-ade in Stendhal’s Armance” centers on the poetics of knighthood through which Stendhal fashioned a queer protagonist in the likeness of Duras’s Olivier. Critical scholarship of Armance has more often than not focused on the depiction of impotence, as both a sociological and physical complex, in Stendhal’s first novel. To preface the queer readings that run throughout this chapter, I begin by outlining a counter-narrative to heterosexist interpretations of

Octave’s babilanisme, an Italian term for impotence that Stendhal attributed to his character in private letters. In their respective studies of Armance, Paul Morand, Anka

Muhlstein, and Dominique Fernandez underscore the similarities between the infamous reputation of Astolphe de Custine (whose break with Clara de Duras inspired the original

Olivier) and the homoeroticism of Stendhal’s protagonist. Following this vein of criticism

I contend that, to a significant extent, Stendhal incorporates both the rumors of impotence

34 attributed to Custine and the marquis’s brand of homosexuality avant la lettre into his rendition of Octave. Along with such overtures toward the life of Custine, the abundance of signifiers for Greek love and Napoleonic friendship that permeate hero’s suicide in

Greece effectively set the vicomte de Malivert apart from his Romantic predecessors. In casting Octave as a specific type of character, who desires to consume and be consumed by his fellow men, Stendhal distinguishes the expansive desire associated with homo- affinity from his protagonist’s cruise-ade. Contrary to the Romantic love that Armance espouses for her cousin, the overture toward the myth of Endymion that occurs through

Octave’s death belies the same-sex eroticism of his quest to take up chivalric roots in

Greece as a (French) Knight of Malta. The parody in Stendhal’s equation between impotence and Restoration chevalerie thus solidifies as the vicomte’s obsession with knightly conduct comes to epitomize a perversion in itself. Under the pretense of defending his noble stature, the vicomte de Malivert attacks a variety of lesser men–– which includes schoolmates, rural peasants, and the family valet––until he succeeds in finishing off a Restoration dandy named M. de Crêveroche. However, where the vicomte’s outbursts beget rumors of his madness in the novel, Stendhal also elicits empathy for the liminal existence that Elizabeth Freeman has described as “time out of joint.” In regards to a queer past, the hero’s fantasies of combat (which inspire duels and swordplay in the novel) mediate the physical connection Octave seeks from the men he imagines to be rivals. On the other hand, and beyond the search for military glory,

Stendhal also implicates the epistolary novel and its popularity during the Bourbon

Restoration in his trope of chevalerie. Following the scene in which Octave scribbles

35 letters with his own blood, the novel’s depiction of letter-writing then culminates in overt imitation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782). When the false letter penned by the chevalier de Bonnivet ultimately divides Octave and Armance––and meanwhile enables Octave to end his life in the birthplace of Greek love––Stendhal exposes the libidinous truths that Sentimentalism otherwise censors through its moralistic double-bind. Where Stendhal teases apart the poetics of homo-affinity that would soon be fashioned into specific typologies under the auspices of Realism, the veiled eroticism of his first novel nevertheless follows in the footsteps of Sentimental predecessors such as

Duras and Chateaubriand. In such paradoxical (if not tongue-in-cheek) prose, Armance resonates with historical queerness by virtue of its heroic protagonist––who promises to be misread, precisely because his kind cannot yet be named.

Incest, Homos, or How Mirrored Selves Fall in Love in

Chateaubriand’s Atala/René

Contemporaries of the silver-tongued “Cat” (Chat, as friends would tease him) did not fail to notice the eroticism of his North American novels, whether in the thumping passions of his virginal Atala (1800); the charged exposition of incestuous desire in René

(1801); or through the hedonistic moorings of Les Natchez (1826). This chapter opens by articulating the narrative structure that gives rise to a reflexive, and at times autobiographical, poetics that resonates in the early novels of François-René de

Chateaubriand (1768-1845), who also proffered an account of his years in exile (1791-

1799) as memoir in the Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1822-1846). Delving the uncertain boundary between memoir and fiction in these novels, I turn to the findings of his most recent autobiographers, Jean-Paul Clément and Jean-Claude Berchet, as well as the criticism of two prolific editors of the chevalier’s collected works, Charles-Augustin

Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) and Maurice Regard, to draw on the scholarly tradition of reading Chateaubriand’s novels as a partial reflection of his lived experience. Before addressing the queerness of their love intrigues, I offer close readings of several coups de théâtre that subtend the erotic stylings of the North American novels, especially from

Atala (1800) and René (1801). One can hardly ignore the sublimation of erotic pleasure that permeates impossible unions between these heroes and heroines, who are tortured–– not just by their intractable chastity––but by the criminal status of their passions.

37 Although the readings in this chapter primarily focus on Chateaubriand’s first novels, which have often been published as a single work split into two so-called novellas

(Atala/René), I revisit the ways and means of their production as a single narrative entrenched in Chateaubriand’s own years in exile to emphasize the intertextuality that runs throughout them. In terms of genre, this chapter examines the re-invention of the incest plot in one of France’s earliest Romantic narratives and investigates the import of homo-affinity in Chateaubriand’s North American novels. However marred by tragedy, the model of Romantic love in both Atala and René (and in the later Natchez) celebrates the reciprocal nature of protagonists who recognize an exceptional sameness between themselves. As Atala and Chactas venture into the wilderness, opposing tropes of civilized and savage, master and slave, native and exilé, as well as family and outsider, collapse into a two-fold symbol of reflexivity, through a device I define as the chiasmatic mirror. In light of the preponderance of homo-affinity in Chateaubriand’s first novel,

Atala, I close this chapter by illuminating the traces of a literary closet that permits the enchanteur to negotiate the legitimacy of outlaw desire under the auspices of France’s restored faith in Christianity.19

In their time, Atala and René enjoyed immense success as they shaped a nascent

Romanticism in France and whetted the reading public’s appetite for a voluptuous

19 A letter sent to Pauline de Beaumont (1768-1803) on March 6, 1801 from Chateaubriand’s lifelong friend, Josèphe Joubert (1754-1824), provides one of the earliest written records of what would become Chateaubriand’s most famous nickname: “Le livre [Atala] est fait et, par consequent, le moment critique s’est passé. Il réussira parce qu’il est de l’enchanteur” (Joubert 273). 38 rendering of Christian aestheticism in the Génie du Christianisme.20 Chateaubriand’s first literary triumph came with the North American novels, which––in the words of Sainte-

Beuve––provided the sort of colorful poetics and sensual style that a downtrodden Paris craved in the aftermath of the Revolution.21 An old guard of philosophes and leftover members of the grand monde of eighteenth-century letters, such as André Morellet

(1727-1819) and Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764-1811), met Chateaubriand’s fantastical style with the derision seen in Jean-Baptiste Say’s (1767-1832) anonymous critique for the Décade philosophique (1801).22 Nevertheless, Chateaubriand’s admirers devoured the call to Romantic reverie, and thus the uncertainty of fiction and truth in the novel’s exotic landscape; of dream and reality in their supernatural bearings; and, as time would prove, in the permeable boundaries between memory and fantasy in their narratives.23

Traversing the forests of a faraway Nouvelle France, Chateaubriand’s protagonists all the

20 In his biography of Chateaubriand (1998), Jean-Paul Clément describes how the religious revival of Catholicism during the early years of the nineteenth century resonates through Chateaubriand’s use of biblical imagery in the Génie du Christianisme: “Le ‘sensualisme’ religieux qui flotte encore dans l’air imprègne non seulement les anciens révolutionnaires mais les chrétiens eux mêmes…Comment s’étonner que le futur auteur du Génie du Christianisme n’a pu s’abstraire de son siècle et de son esprit?” (118). 21 In his extensive study of Chateaubriand’s life and letters, Étude sur Chateaubriand (1828), Sainte-Beuve elaborates on the widespread, if not polarized, discussion of Atala among the reading public in Post-Revolutionary France: “Critique, raillerie, louange, tout en définitive grossissait la vogue, et le succès d’Atala fut prodigieux. Déchirée par les uns, dévorée par les autres, elle occupait l’attention publique qui, pour la première fois depuis douze années, avait loisir de se reporter aux choses littéraires” (64). 22 Say describes Atala as more ingenuous in its mysticism than “what certain persons would like us to take for the height of the sublime”: “[O]n a un système à soutenir…et, pour y parivenir, il faut forcer les évenments, se jeter dans un monde mystique, et décrire des scènes étrangères, extravagantes, que certaines gens ont voulu nous faire prendre pour le comble du sublime” (6). 23 Bernard Faceteau’s “Note on Chateaubriand’s Atala” (1933) reviews letters printed in the Abeille Américaine (1816), putting a fine point on the doubts regarding Chateaubriand’s account of his journey to the Southern United States. Chateaubriand’s habit of distorting the truth in his travel writing is treated at length in Michel de Jaeghere’s Le Menteur magnifique: Chateaubriand en Grèce (2006). 39 while experiment with the strictures of European taboo under the firebrand of a new

Christianity––whose literary trappings were as embellished as they were seductive.24

Seeing as he draws on the mythos of the bon sauvage, Chateaubriand’s role as a bard of passion in the New World shelters him from any outrage that a contemporary European setting might have provoked, particularly because of his tendency toward what Say dismissed as “des scènes étrangères, extravagantes” (cited above). Nonetheless,

Chateaubriand’s pretense of escapism simultaneously invites the reader to parse the fantasies of erotic and moral agency that abound in the North American novels.

The survival of Atala beyond the early years of the Directory was due in no small part to its sensuality, estheticized to satiate France’s thirst for a newfound Christianity, which gained fervent converts under the auspices of Napoleon. Along with the novel’s illegitimate sequels and parodic copycats, the embrace of Atala and Chactas at the moment of her evanescence was forged into a telos of the popular Romantic imagination, immortalized by the painter Girodet in the Salon of 1808, painted on Sèvres porcelain

(Jaquotot 1829), and dispersed in woodcuts and papiers peints for Chateaubriand’s more plebeian admirers. Depicting the episode as a thinly veiled love scene, Marie-Joseph

Chénier laid bare the novel’s erotic undertones in epigrammatic verses of Les nouveaux

24 In “Chateaubriand’s ‘Atala’ as a Source of Inspiration in Nineteenth-Century Art” (1978), David Wakefield demonstrates how Chateaubriand’s style, that “attractive” aesthetic of biblical imagery, helped to shape the genre of French Romantic painting: “[Chateaubriand] is the exact antithesis of the bald, discursive style of eighteenth-century prose to which the public was accustomed…He realized that the best way to win back his own incredulous generation to Christianity was to make religion attractive, and to do this he conjures up a train of seductive images in the reader’s mind” (15-17).

40 saints (1801), proffering lines such as “[a]h! vous parlez du diable? il est bien poétique/

Dit le devot Chactas, ce savage érotique” (6).25 Decades later, Honoré de Balzac lampooned Parisians for their gleeful consumption of Atala knock-offs in Le Père Goriot

(1835), sending Vautrin, the scoundrel “[qui] n’aime pas le femmes,” to René-Charles

Pixérécourt’s (1773-1844) vaudeville play, Mont Sauvage (which, as Mme de Vauquer points out, is inspired by Le Solitaire) (215). An informed reader of 1834 would have recognized the author of Le Solitaire as Charles-Victor Prévot d’Arlincourt (1788-1856), an infamous “inversif,” yet Eugène de Rastignac’s landlord mistakes the name of the beloved novelist, “que nous aimons tant à lire,” for a certain Atala de Chateaubriand.26

During the reign of the Second Empire, Gustave Flaubert took aim at the famed trope when he rewrote the saintly heroine’s death in Madame Bovary by denying Emma the heavenly cathexis that Chateaubriand afforded his dying indienne.27 The aspersions

Realists such as Balzac and Flaubert cast on Atala epitomize the effort on behalf of writers under the July Monarchy and Second Empire to stamp out and supplant

25 Chénier also mocks the libidinous images of Atala and Père Aubry, which belie a false saintliness, with striking wit: “J’entendrais des sermons prolixement diserts/ Du bon monsieur Aubry, Massillon des déserts./ Ô sensible Atala! tous deux avec ivresse/ Courons goûter les plaisirs…de la messe” (7, ellipsis in text). 26 Phillipe Berthier chronicles the history of this “invert” (inversif) play (whose title, Le Solitaire, also serves as an epithet for Père Aubry throughout Atala) in a footnote to his edition of Père Goriot (1995) (215, 328). As Richard Berrong points out in “Vautrin and Same-Sex Desire in ‘Le Père Goriot’” (2002), Le Solitaire was derived from another play that is associated with homosexual desire, Thomas Ottway’s Venise Sauvée (Venice Preserv’d) (1682). In Père Goriot, Vautrin makes a nod toward Ottway’s play when he exclaims the he “knows it by heart”: “pour moi...il n’existe qu’un seul sentiment réel, une amitié d’homme à homme…[les protagonistes] Pierre et Jaffier, voilà ma passion. Je sais Venise sauvée par cœur” (196). 27 Emma’s last moments are met with scourges of vomit, tinged black from the her dose of arsenic, and the caterwaul of a street urchin outside her window instead of the death of a Romantic heroine––that very telos set forth in Atala––she anticipates. 41 Sentimentalism within the nineteenth-century novel. At the same time, an allusion to homosexual identity underscores these pastiches of Chateaubriand’s first novel. By interpreting these parodic narratives as mutually inclusive, I contend that these fictional moments evince, not only the well-known prejudices against Romanticism as a facile and effeminate genre, but the historic connotation of Chateaubriand’s early works with a homosexual public that circulated among the salons of Paris.28 Indeed, beyond the confines of homosexuality, Atala and its subsequent iterations under Romanticism evolved into an erotic touchstone for readers who felt the pangs of “criminelle passion,” those deviant citizens who could later be classified under various types and physiognomies, and whose otherwise indeterminable experience of desire encumbered the precise gaze of Realism.29

Before outlining the role of mirroring in Chateaubriand’s North American fiction, the acute complexity of Atala’s plot merits a close reading in terms its confessional dénouements, for it is within these critical passages that Chactas and his beloved must parse their relation to the outlaw desires discussed in this chapter. The enumeration of secrets that drive the plot of his first novel, whose sinful connotations also color the love

28 The likeminded compatriots of Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857), one of France’s first homosexuals to openly live with his male partner, Edouard Sainte-Barbe (1794-1859), were particularly fond of reading René in their salon. George Rousseau and Caroline Warman recount the contemporary reaction of Astolphe de Custine, whose salon “was a milestone in homosexual history,” to Atala’s companion novel (René) in “Made From The Stuff of Saints: René and Custine’s Search for a Homosexual Identity” (2004). Throughout their article, the authors underscore the intersections through which the erudite Parisian self-identified with the protagonist’s “mystery” and “melancholy,” and posit that, “using both explicit and embedded references to René, Custine could code his messages of love” (17). 29 Amélie’s admission of “criminelle passion” for her brother, René, is discussed in detail on p. 50 of this dissertation. 42 intrigues of René, evinces an uneasy acceptance of Romantic love––even in its own terms––during the early years of the genre. The stories of Atala and René are narrated as oral histories, recounted between Chactas, René, and Père Aubry, who divulge their past through what Luke Bouvier, in “How Not to Speak of Incest: Atala and the Secrets of

Speech” (2002), describes as “a three-fold structure of secrecy, which gradually comes to light.”30 Whereas René revolves around one secret—the reason for Amélie’s withdrawal from her brother—the plot of Atala can be understood as a series of hidden truths and the consequences that any confession of those secrets incurs. In 1725, René arrives in la

Nouvelle France, where he befriends a Natchez sachem (Chactas) who is nearly fifty years his senior. Sharing memories from long ago, the old storyteller begins from a youthful decision he made to leave his adoptive father, a priest named Père Lopez, for fear of wasting away in the confines of the Spanish mission. At the beginning of his tale, the lone Natchez is swiftly recaptured by lifelong enemies of his tribe, the Muscolguges.

Though promised a hero’s death at the hands of council elders, Chactas finds himself infatuated with Simhagan’s daughter, Atala—who again and again offers Chactas the chance to escape into the wilderness. Proving his dedication, Chactas remains in the

Muscolguges camp to await his execution, as he all the while asserts that he cannot live apart from her. Atala saves Chactas’s life at the very moment the executioner’s axe falls, and that act of treason then compels them to escape from the tribe. Exiled outlaws who

30 Bouvier underscores the narrative pattern of “speaking and not speaking” the truth regarding incestuous passion between brother and sister in the novel: “In Atala…[narrative] reflection takes place precisely through these problematic, interrelated structures of incest, secrets and the contradictory ‘preteritive’ movements of speaking and not-speaking. The narrative of Atala itself is organized around a three-fold structure of secrecy, which gradually comes to light” (5). 43 must depend on one another to survive, the couple flees the growls of crocodiles and weathers through an unforeseen tempest together, as they press along a Romantic backdrop whose flamboyant mise-en-scène echoes both the crescendos of their passion and a sense of present danger. Mysteriously, Atala begins to waste away after abandoning society, and the confessions she will divulge over the rest of the novel are announced as

“une pensée cachée au fond de son âme,” which is not yet admitted, but deflected in her

“regard passionné, qu’elle reportait vers le ciel avec une profonde mélancolie.”31

Although Chateaubriand’s indulgence in mawkish narrative drew criticism, he nevertheless provided the novelistic voice for a generation of re-catholicized exilés. And yet, for as newfangled as the Romantic novel appears to be in 1801, the New World setting of Atala (and later, Les Natchez) actually puts Chateaubriand’s first novel in line with the eighteenth-century exotic-erotic incest plot, which he legitimizes in Christian terms as a sublime confessional. In her intensive study of the eighteenth-century incest plot, Jacqueline Chammas dedicates an entire chapter to the study of “inceste cosanguin exotico-utopique,” in which she chronicles the role of familial incest throughout a category of libertine novels that dispatched otherwise inflammatory philosophy to distant lands and exotic utopias: “[d]’une décennie à l’autre, et ce jusqu’à la Révolution, les récits utopiques et exotiques de l’inceste pousseront leur réflexion jusqu’à ébranler les

31 “Je la surprenais attachant sur moi un regard passionné, qu’elle reportait vers le ciel avec une profonde mélancolie. Ce qui m’effrayait surtout, était un secret, une pensée cachée au fond de son âme, que j’entrevoyais dans ses yeux” (57).

44 fondements mêmes de la société” (39).32 When Atala renders her first confession, such an incestuous desire materializes in the exotico-utopique territory of the Muscolguges. The heroine explains she is not the daughter of a Muscolguge sachem, but the love child of a

Native American convert and a Spanish priest who (as fate would have it) is none other than Père Lopez. Brother and sister reunited, rapt in the beauty of an untamed landscape, pouring out their passions for one another, the couple nearly surrenders to temptation before a lightning bolt strikes a tree, casting it at their feet.33 Church bells ring in the distance, and a solitary priest named Père Aubry emerges from the haze of the thunderstorm to lead the brother and sister to safety in his cave. The next day, after having instructed the lovers in a simpler form of Christianity, le Solitaire guides Chactas through the local landscape—during which time Atala stays behind to rest. Meanwhile, in a case of dramatic irony that produces yet another confession, the heroine reconciles her state of exile with vivid memories of her dead mother, as well as the Queen of Angels (la

Reine des Anges), who have been appearing to her in visions of perdition since she set out from camp. When the men return, the heroine informs Chactas and the hermit of an oath her mother made, in which Lopez’s infant daughter would exchange her chastity to gain eternal salvation for her mother. Père Aubry reassures the shaken woman that such a

32 In L’Inceste romanesque au siècle des Lumières: de la Régence à la Révolution (2011), which is cited extensively in my Introduction, Chammas pointedly summarizes how “[l]e pays de nulle part devient un laboratoire pour expérimenter l’interdit, son évolution et ses aboutissments” in the writings of philosophers such as Verias, Foigny, Swift, Holberg, and Montesquieu (39). 33 While Chactas does not share a consanguine bond with Atala, neither the narrator nor the diegetic protagonists specify their relatedness as adopted siblings. In the instances when Chactas does not refer to his adopted sister as the antonomastic “fille de Lopez,” the siblings interpolate each other simply as “frère” and “sœur.” 45 fanatical act can be expunged with a simple letter to the bishop of Quebec—an ecumenical possibility that devastates Atala. In her final admission, Chactas’s sister reveals that she has already swallowed a dose of poison, and there is no antidote. Her convulsive death is punctuated by the priest’s commentary and glosses on her death as a moral exemplum before Atala––having partaken in her last Eucharist––accepts her fate as virgin martyr. Celestial harps and the words of angels materialize from thin air; Père

Aubry spreads a holy unction across her forehead and, invested with the tremulous authority of the Almighty, sends off her soul: “[p]artez, âme chrétienne : allez rejoindre votre Créateur!” (86). Choking on his words, face inundated with tears, the present-tense

Chactas interrupts his story-telling. Atala’s wooden grave marker, along with the location of her resting place, was lost in a flood years ago. As opposed to the “Kingdom” the exilés purportedly seek, Joyce Lowrie underscores the “celebration of Exile” that runs throughout Chateaubriand’s first novel in “Motifs of Kingdom and Exile in Atala”

(1970):

The Kingdom…is the poetic and skillful celebration of Exile…[T]his

celebration includes the affirmation of love for its own sake, within the

context of exile, without fruition, the affirmation of transiency in terms of

religion and the ideals of ‘virtue’… (9, original emphasis)

As Lowrie points out, the act of running away goes hand in hand with the Romantic

“affirmation of love for its own sake,” presenting the reader with an exodus compelled by the prescripts of both Christianity and the eighteenth-century quest for virtue. But unlike the exotic kingdoms found in earlier utopian novels, Chateaubriand supplants the 46 discovery of a promised land with the valorization of exile itself, as well as the erotic possibilities that ––if only momentarily––thrive beyond the limits of society. A paean to their harrowing journey toward salvation, the religious rhetoric of Père Aubry ultimately confirms the liminal nature of a love affair in exile, as it all the while absolves Atala (and the implied reader) of any outlaw sympathies experienced over the course of novel.

The enchanteur clarifies this expansive poetics of desire in Atala’s companion novel. In contrast to the prelapsarian setting of North America, the incest plot in René unfolds amidst the nostalgic landscape of Combourg. Against the background of eighteenth-century Brittany, and without recourse to the native ignorance that spares

Atala’s and Chactas’s souls, an unambiguous passion between brother and sister takes the foreground as the novel’s Sentimental double-bind. Blind in his old age, Chactas plays the role of listener in René, along with Père Souël, who both weigh in on the young protagonist’s tale of Romantic ennui. After recounting how he left his home to travel the

Scottish highlands, René then recalls a previous lapse into melancholy that befell him on returning to France, during which time he languished in an obscure corner of Combourg.

Ignored by the sister he reveres, René resolves that he might only escape existential misery by taking his own life. Uncovering his macabre intentions across the aether,

Amélie promptly returns to him, and the two share a blissful reunion. But she soon abandons René, leaving behind a cryptic letter that bequeaths him with all her earthly possessions––in which Amélie avers her intention to become a nun. Bereft at the loss of his last family member, René attends his sister’s initiation into the order, describing the intricacies of a rite through which she must perform her death to the mundane world.

47 After several phases of the ceremony have passed, and just before she completes her vows, René leans in to hear a prayer Amélie offers sotto voce, in which she begs to be forgiven for a “criminal passion” in which her brother played no part: “Dieu de miséricorde, fais que je ne me relève jamais de cette couche funèbre, et comble de tes biens un frère qui n'a point partagé ma criminelle passion!” (139). René instantly realizes his sister’s incestuous desire for him, and, confused beyond his wits, he mounts the sepulcher on which his sister has been lain to then writhe against her death shroud:

À ces mots échappés du cercueil, l’affreuse vérité m’éclaire; ma raison

s’égare, je me laisse tomber sur le linceul de la mort, je presse ma sœur

dans mes bras, je m’écrie: ‘chaste épouse de Jésus-Christ, reçois mes

derniers embrassements à travers les glaces du trépas et les profondeurs de

l’éternité, qui te séparent déjà de ton frère!’ (140)

René, still raving, is carried off by the crowd. Faced with definite separation from his sister, he leaves Europe behind him and moves to la Nouvelle France. The novel ends with a letter that informs him of his sister’s death in religious service––itself an allegory for the displacement of her earthly desires––that describes Amélie as both victim and martyr of her spiritual devotion, “morte…de son zèle et de sa charité” (144). In her efforts to comfort René, the mother superior then confirms that, of all the nuns the she had seen pass on, Amélie was the happiest to leave this earth.34 Within such rhetoric that

34 “[Elle est] morte victime de son zèle et de sa charité, en soignant ses compagnes attaquées d’une maladie contagieuse. La Supérieure ajoutait que depuis trente ans qu’elle était à la tête de la maison, elle n’avait jamais vu de religieuse…qui fût plus contente de quitter les tribulations du monde” (144). 48 overtly praises Christian grace, the second hand account offered to René nevertheless occludes any portrayal of his sister’s evanescence. Atala and Amélie both perish as victims of their spiritual zeal, yet the indienne who regrets her suicide, and pointedly not the passion she bears for her half-brother, is afforded an ecstatic apotheosis. The body count that figures in the epilogue to the novel, in which René, Père Souël, Chactas, and the last of the Natchez tribe are massacred as victims of the French and Indian War, traffics in a similar valence of meaning. Hence a salient metonymy for the Ancien

Régime, if not Western civilization at large, snuffs out the converted Natchez and paganized Catholic, respectively. Applying the logic of mercy and sainthood to otherwise senseless tragedies, Chateaubriand maintains a tropic futility against contradicting the hegemonic order, which figures as the religious and moral prescripts of society whether in France or the New World. Nevertheless, Chateaubriand’s choice to revive Les Natchez from the annals of his youth, with all its homoerotic, polyamorous, and incestuous love intrigues, stands in counterpoint to the death that closes off the “contagious” passions that fuel the intrigue of both novels.

In Atala, the element of sameness that is imbricated in family relations, as well as the chiasmatic make-up of both protagonists, are circumscribed within Chactas’s and

Atala’s homo-affinitive relationship. The reflexive quality of this intersection between separate characters is never explicitly mentioned in the novel. However, one can readily recognize a series of binaries that are embodied in both characters, such as savage and civilized, Christian and Pagan, outlaw and citizen, or native and colonized. Despite their initial differences, after Chactas and Atala encounter one another, these polarities

49 progressively blend into a hybrid identity that is shared between them: she becomes an outlaw and exilé in the presence of Chactas, and he both converts to Christianity and integrates into Western society with the hope of joining Atala in the afterlife. As a narrative of this intermixture, the romance of Chateaubriand’s first novel revolves around an affective bond that materializes from the discovery of physical and sentimental similitude between protagonists, around a kind of desire I have previously defined as homo-affinity. The following readings of Atala and René examine the proximity between homo-affinity and the exile narrative in these novels, particularly in the instances where such a bond based on sameness offers refuge from opposition and outsiders—as it manifests through the mirroring of perceptible sex, gender, and family resemblance between protagonists.

Poetics of Mirroring and Homo-Affinity

Over the course of the novel, this act of fusion between Chactas and Atala also reveals their attraction toward a circumstance I refer to (within the domain of homo- affinity) as exceptional sameness. Incestuous desire, as its predominant sign, unifies the complex poetics of attraction that run throughout the North American novels. Moreover, the late discovery of Chactas’s and Atala’s relation through Père Lopez, which resolves the mystery as to why these two characters are so promptly and overwhelmingly attracted to one another, sets Atala apart as Chateaubriand’s clearest narrative of homo-affinity. By first emphasizing difference, that distinct prerequisite for exogamy, Chateaubriand constructs a chiasmatic relationship between Chactas and Atala. Once viewed as apparent

50 opposites, the lovers are later revealed to be kin, and the effect of this transformation yields a romance between subjects who share an uncanny similarity. Tragically, this near- sameness is already riddled with an exception that bars them from the union they desire, which surfaces as the indomitable fate born from Atala’s vow of chastity. Whereas

Amélie and René are introduced as siblings in René, and the interrelatedness of several tribe members in Les Natchez is stated early on, the source of profound attraction between Chactas and Atala remains unexplained at the moment both characters recognize their passion for one another. In delaying the discovery of the two lovers’ family relation,

Chateaubriand prepares the reader to parse a classical love story, one of sudden passion and tragic loss, whose exotic setting in the New World sufficiently sets it apart from the

European and Middle-Eastern settings preferred by classical playwrights such as Racine and Corneille, as well as the authors of European antiquity. What stands to surprise the reader, then, is Chateaubriand’s creation of a Romantic love intrigue in which erotic attraction does not appear as an unreasonable force, as it would under Classicism, but as a complex intersection of similarity between characters––and thus a phenomenon of preference––that, in its most irresistible form, draws on the relatedness between lovers as members of the same family.35

After her secrets have been shared, the reader can then grasp the complexity of the chiasmus between her and Chactas’s (however diegetically) lived experience. Much

35 As one of the earliest models of French Romanticism, Atala (as well as René) set a precedent of departure from the literary style of the eighteenth-century style that, as Louis Nadeau (1822-188?) quipped in his Étude sur Chateaubriand (1871), “en s’éloignant des grandes sources de la poésie, était devenue sèche et âpre, et remplaçait les grandes émotions du cœur par d’ingénieux traits d’esprit” (167). 51 like the reversed image a mirror presents on its reflective surface, the cumulative differences that Chateaubriand enumerates between his protagonists result in a chiasmatic sense of difference: Chactas’s parents were Natchez, and his adopted father, Christian;

Atala’s parents were Christian and her adopted father, a Native American. Chactas was saved from the Natchez wars and brought to the San Augustin mission, whereas Atala was returned from a failed Catholic mission to tribal life in the wilderness. Chactas’s father (Outalissi) was a sachem, before he was adopted by a Spanish priest; Atala’s father is Spanish, yet she was adopted by a Muscolguges sachem. In this reflexive relationship, one protagonist has experienced what the other has not to such a degree that both seem to have lived nearly the same life, divested between two opposing persons. Yet, betraying any analogy of a mirror, Chateaubriand’s use of chiasmus does not rely on any original image to be reflected or copied, but rather the author contrasts two sides of an intricate matrix of relatedness. Through this device, which may be envisioned as a chiasmatic mirror, Chateaubriand emphasizes the force of attraction that draws his protagonists together, just as the use of chiasmus in poetry and rhetoric delights readers through the inversion of terms––whose interchangeability in turn produces a salient, if not mysterious, coincidence of meaning.

Extending his use of this chiasmus, Chateaubriand strips away the embodied gender of both protagonists during their “première promenade de l’amour” (“first walk of love”) when he construes a metaphor for their attraction to one another that draws on the reciprocal relationship between sign and signified. Once Chactas forces the “cord” that bound him to a tree in captivity into the hands his beloved, the narrative sense of

52 individuality that marks both protagonists as distinct characters then diffuses into a poetics of substitution:

Notre promenade fut presque muette. Je marchais à côté d’Atala; elle

tenait le bout de la corde, que je l’avais forcée de reprendre. Quelquefois

nous versions des pleurs; quelquefois nous essayions de sourire…un geste

vers le soleil couchant, une main tendrement sérée, un sein tour à tour

palpitant, tour à tour tranquille, les noms de Chactas et d’Atala doucement

répétés par intervalle… Oh! premiere promenade de l’amour […]

(45, ellipsis and space in text)

In the absence of speech (apart from “les noms de Chactas et d’Atala doucement répétés par intervalle”) the exchangeability of each lover for the commensurate other replaces any dialogue that might otherwise confuse such a clear display of poetic substitution between them. First presented as individuals who stand side by side, the two characters then dissolve into an indeterminate “nous” (we or us), whose genderless synecdoches of

“une main tendrement sérée” and “un sein tour à tour palpitant” at once designate the body of a distinct protagonist and neither one of them in particular. At the level of sentiment, the first-person plural expresses unison when Chactas and Atala weep or otherwise attempt to smile (“[q]uelquefois nous versions des pleurs; quelquefois nous essayions de sourire”), as they share alternating moments of passion and tranquility under the sign of “nous.” During the couple’s first walk together, love occurs as a union of feelings, facilitated by the interchangeability of love objects and through the poetic

“corde” (cord) which ties them together as substitutable entities. What is more, 53 Chateaubriand extends this metaphor when later revealing the couple’s family relation vis

à vis Père Lopez. By virtue of a relatedness whose authenticity can be traced through genealogy––and thus through a matrix of family ties––Chateaubriand’s illustrative example of love based on sameness then culminates in the fortuitous recognition of incestuous desire.

Mirroring and Extradiegesis

Going as far back as Edmond Biré’s introduction to the complete works of

Chateaubriand (1904), critics have acknowledged the author’s self-consumed mode of production, noting in particular the author’s reimagination of his own “succès réservé” while stylizing the Mémoires d’outre-tombe.36 As Clément summarizes, the process of revision––seen in Chateaubriand’s poetic license when inscribing his memories––often reveals an attempt to “transfigure” the narrative of his lived experience: “[p]our

Chateaubriand, le présent ne vit vraiment que transfiguré par l’histoire” (399). From the very first publications of his work, the uncertain boundaries between fact and fiction in the author’s œuvre have motivated scholars to cut through the epistemological fog of

Chateaubriand’s writing, as they search for the hard facts, those events that actually happened, from which he constructed a prolific career in fiction, journalism, and

36 In his “Introduction” to the Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1904), Edmond Biré (1829-1907) suggests that the draft Chateaubriand sent to a circle of friends before publication reflects his confidence in the “guaranteed success” of those memoirs he had perfected over the previous twenty-five years: “Avant de se remettre à l’œuvre, de retracer sa vie sous l’Empire et sous la Restauration jusqu’en 1828…peut-être songeait-il à se donner par là un avant-goût du succès reservé, il le croyait du moins, à celui de ses livres qu’il avait le plus travaillé et qui était, depuis vingt-cinq ans, l’objet de ses prédilections” (v-vi). 54 autobiography. Much like the bullet it supposedly spared the author from in battle, and like his role on that Belgian battlefield, the existence of his first manuscript of fiction, Les

Sauvages (1797) (also known as René et Céluta and Les Natchez), cannot be verified except through the viscount’s own memoirs (MDT 1075).37 It appears Chateaubriand assembled a series of sketches in exile that were dismantled for purposes of publication, first redacted for the production of Atala and René, then redistributed as leftovers that pepper Le Génie du Christianisme and fill out “Fragments” (1838) (Berchet 270; Regard

149). Rooted in his voyage to the United States in 1792 as an aristocratic émigré, the germ of Chateaubriand’s early works consisted of an amalgam of memoirs, gothic narratives, histories lifted from the travel writing of earlier explorers, and swaths of philosophical reflections, which engage the two centuries of philosophy that reigned in the intellectual salons of Paris prior to the Revolution. In regards to the final work in the series, Les Natchez, any attempt to determine an original version from his youth proves even more daunting, seeing as that novel was resurrected from 2,393 pages of Les

Sauvages that were out of the author’s reach for seventeen years (1799-1816), after he abandoned them in a suitcase while staying in London (Regard 152).

Following his return to France, Chateaubriand’s biography is just as often traced through his love affairs as it is through the chronology of his publications. This kind of timeline starts with Henriette du Belloy (1769-1838), then proceeds through the names of

37 Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the Mémoires d’outre-tombe correspond to Jean-Paul Clément’s revised edition (1997), in which the books and chapters of Chateaubriand’s memoirs are numbered as one holistic volume, as opposed to the four volumes found in Maurice Levaillant’s et Georges Moulinier’s 1947 edition. 55 Natalie de Noailles (1774-1835), Claire de Duras (1777-1828), Delphine de Custine

(1790-1857), and Hortense Allart (1801-1879). Meanwhile, he erected figurative chapels to Pauline de Beaumont (1768-1803) and Juliette de Récamier (1777-1849) in the

Mémoires d’outre-tombe and––from the selective memory of his mistresses––cast the heroines and female villains of his fiction under the sign of la Sylphide. Agnès Verlet outlines the autobiographical poetics of the absentee Dame d’amour that Chateaubriand developed over a lifetime in Les vanités de Chateaubriand (2001): “ce que Chateaubriand emprunte principalement aux poètes latins, dans l’invocation à Cynthie comme dans les

Mémoires eux-mêmes, c’est le jeu littéraire d’une adresse à la femme absente, qu’elle ait nom Pauline, Natalie, Delphine, Juliette ou la Sylphide” (44, emphasis mine). By his own account, Chateaubriand remained a discreet lover (amant), despite the creative inspiration he garnered from his lovelife as a near “bachelor” (garcon).38 Counter to the author’s penchant for cutting incriminating facts out of his monument, as Jean-Paul Clément explains in Chateaubriand: biographie morale et intellectuelle (1999), historians and literary scholars are often compelled to uncover the presence of Chateaubriand’s dalliances in his writings: “[s]ur ses amours, Chateaubriand a fait preuve d’une très grande pudeur…[L]es amours, célèbres ou inconnues, de l’Enchanteur demeurent un fonds prospère, ouvert sur la posterité” (415-416). Seeing as several of these relationships were encoded into his novels and memoirs, the influence of Chateaubriand’s published

38 Chateaubriand at times referred to himself as a bachelor (garçon), despite his marriage to Céleste (née Buisson de la Vigne) (1774-1847) that lasted over fifty years: a.) “…il ne m’en resterait que le vide et les regrets: vieux garçon sans estime, ou trompé ou détrompé, vieil oiseau répétant à qui ne l’écouterait pas ma chanson usée” (MDT 520); b.) “Ainsi qu’il l’avait annoncé à Hortense Allart [après la mort de sa femme]: il resta garçon” (Clément 414). 56 works and literary persona on some of the nineteenth century’s greatest authors, as well as Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and André Gide (1869-1951) in the early twentieth- century, makes the transliterated love life of France’s first Romantic author such a “rich source, open to posterity.”39 Looking beyond the arsenal of knowledge that pertains to

Chateaubriand’s intimacies among the noblewomen of post-Revolutionary France, a fuller inquiry into these romances that subsist within the enchanteur’s fiction must attend to the narratives of queer desire that saturate his earliest works. Among the female protagonists of Chateaubriand’s fiction, it is his first, Atala, that has remained the most difficult to attribute to any extradiegetic personality. In decades past, the mystery as to what figure inspired Atala has given way to several interpretations: she is the first novelistic occurrence of la Sylphide (Verlet 186-187); or his beloved sister, Lucile

(Clément 46, 506); or a native Arawak woman that Chateaubriand encountered in the

Caribbean (Painter 210). However, the discordant interpretations of such a real-world image among scholars are not due to a lack of verifiable information, as I will argue, but to a tangible reticence to discuss the complicated nature of Atala’s composition, as an alternative iteration of René’s Amélie, and thus an incarnation of both incestuous and homosexual desire.

When critics project as to the extradiegetic roots of Atala, the diversity of their opinions reflects the intertextual nature of her composition that draws on both the

Mémoires d’outre-tombe and Chateaubriand’s working manuscripts. Following a similar

39 For more regarding Chateaubriand’s influence on Realist and Modernist authors, see B.F. Bart’s “Flaubert, Plagiarist of Chateaubriand” (1950) and Margaret Mien’s “Chateaubriand, a Precursor of Proust” (1971). 57 vein of thought, Maurice Regard aptly summarizes the self-referential quality of

Chateaubriand’s novelistic writing: “[s]ous mille déguisements, dans ls régions les plus diverses, Narcisse ne retrouve que lui” (xiii).40 Elsewhere, Jean-Claude Berchet sheds light on the import of Chateaubriand’s break with fellow traveler François Tulloch to reveal the indices of same-sex desire embedded in the character of Atala.41 However, in every one of these cases––much like la Sylphide––Atala and Amélie most apparently exist as a poetic amalgamation of ideal signs that appealed to the Romantic author in his youth. Yet unlike the sylph that enchanted Chateaubriand when he took on the role of nineteenth-century troubadour, these first heroines from his fiction represent a love that is not only unattainable, but whose incestuous appeal is forbidden within the strictures of

Western society. In Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (2008),

Jennifer Yee emphasizes both Romantic zeitgeist and the author’s lived experience as factors that influenced his own revisions in Les Natchez:

Chateaubriand’s American corpus is precariously balanced between the

two eras of his life; the publication of Atala and René separately, like the

revisions to the epic as a whole, tend to edulcorate its subversive aspects.

But the shift is not one to be detected through genetic criticism. (40)

40 In the same passage, Regard makes a fine point of the inward-looking nature of Chateaubriand’s fiction: “Il existe un divorce entre l’imagination créatrice et le rêve, et Chateaubriand était trop rêveur pour insuffler la vie à des êtres qui lui fussent extérieurs” (xiii). 41 Berchet’s biographical investigation of Chateaubriand and François Tulloch’s relationship is discussed in pp. 65-67 of this dissertation. 58 As she highlights the absence of corroborating avant-textes for the early editions of Atala and René, Yee traces a genealogy of critics, including Gilbert Chinard, Jean Pommier, and Pierre Barbéris, who all interpret heavy-handed Christianity in these novels as a mark of Chateaubriand’s divided loyalties toward secularist eighteenth-century philosophy and the evolving morality of France during Napoleon’s directory and the Bourbon

Restoration. Along these lines, Yee poignantly cites Michel Butor’s assessment in

“Chateaubriand et l’ancienne Amérique” (1964), in which the French critic dwells on

Chateaubriand’s artistic struggle with an inner “demon,” which he partially “rebaptized” for the needs of a Catholic State: “[ses grandes œuvres sont] des compromis entre ce démon si prodigieusement fécond et inspiré, d’où vient la matière, et l’ambassadeur qui va ensuite s’efforcer de maquiller, de baptiser cette progéniture demi-sauvage” (Butor 3).

Where Les Natchez stands out for its revisions to the narratives of Atala and René twenty-seven years after their first publication, the earlier North American novels remain a product of the historic and socially inscribed constraints on their creation.

Acknowledging the fluidity between imagination and experience in his fiction, as a tendency which extends even into his autobiography, I approach the novels born from

Chateaubriand’s youth as an esthetic artifact that obtains to the ontology of Romantic love, and with it homo-affinity, in the French Sentimental novel. In the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, the possibility of a fixed history, or of definite accounts of personal relationships, is distorted through a lens of the present that is privileged with hindsight.

Even though the temporal distance between the author and his memories of youth plagued him throughout his life, Chateaubriand’s rediscovery of Les Sauvages provided

59 an unrevised connection to a younger self. Even after he transposed the hefty verse poem, a twelve book compilation that was the first publication of Les Natchez, into some four hundred pages of prose fiction, well-meaning friends, such as Astolphe de Custine, still regarded it as juvenalia (Regard 155). On the other hand, Maurice Regard, in his introduction to Les Natchez (1962), posits that Chateaubriand at last succumbs to

“authentic Sadism” in the final North American novel: “[c]ette cruauté [dans Lez

Natchez]…appartient au sadisme authentique. Dans l’œuvre domine…une soif de s’exalter par les passions…un désir de souiller la vertu et la beauté” (154). Besides what remains of his letters and correspondence, Chateaubriand’s final rendering of that manuscript is one of the few documents spared from his impulse to remove his time in exile from the historical record. In this light, I argue that the author’s quest to preserve

“tout le jeune René” in Les Natchez, in contrast to the scars of deletion of that undermine the fidelity of the Mémoires, sets that narrative apart as an artifact of queer nostalgia. 42

When revisiting the fictional realm of the Natchez, Chateaubriand’s foray into sadism and “exalting of the passions”––to quote the words of Maurice Regard––finally enables the proliferation, and even a coming out, of homo-affinity in his final American novel. As they claim a presumptive ethos of native virtue, the heroes and heroines of these North

American novels embody a post-Revolutionary negotiation of the legitimacy of incest,

42 Chateaubriand explained such efforts to conserve his younger self in a letter to Paul-François Dubois (1793-1874) (January 9,1827): “[Dans Les Natchez,] [j]’ai conserve le jeune René en ajoutant tout ce que le temps m’a appris” (Faure 44). It is worth noting that Chateaubriand did alter the plot over his two-year redaction of the prose version (Regard 153). However, unlike the abrupt voids of biographical information that linger in the Mémoires, the traces of these changes are preserved in the verse poem of “Les Natchez.” 60 same-sex desire, and the Sentimentalist erotics that motivate a Romantic version of what

Rousseau described as the expansion of the self.

The Autobiographical Outlaw in Chateaubriand’s North American Novels

In literary criticism of the time, René and Atala were widely received as a new

Christian mythology, lauded for the compromise between stoic and sensual motifs with which Chateaubriand painted the lovers’ second chance at entering the Garden of Eden.

As such, the North American novels did not function as a roman à clef—yet, with considerable certainty, we can trace the origins of several characters, along with their incestuous and homoerotic love intrigues, to events from Chateaubriand’s life in exile.

Even though several scholars have affirmed that that author’s sister, Lucile de Caud (née

Chateaubriand) (1764-1804), inspired Amélie’s appearance and personality in René,

Maurice Regard contends that the real life brother and sister never acted on the kind of passion explored in the novel: “[d]ans les bois, tous deux goûtaient le ravissement d’être ensemble…Mais Chateaubriand ne permettra pas que l’on osât mettre en doute la pureté de leurs sentiments” (Regard 105). Similarly, Jean Paul Clément inquires whether any desire for Lucile to be seen in René results, above all, from his writing a “feminine double” of himself: “Amélie n’est pas le modèle de la Lucile des Mémoires d’outre- tombe, tant les chaptires qui lui sont consacrés semblent composés, arranges pour faire de la sœur aimée le ‘double féminin de l’auteur’” (46-47). Admiring a feminine copy, a sister, a muse, a novelistic mirror of the author himself, Chateaubriand’s fixation on the bounded sameness of endogamy, seen in his refractive rendering of Lucile, is epitomized

61 in the title of Geoffroy de la Tour du Pin’s Chateaubriand…lequel? (Chateaubriand… which one?) (1972). Referring to Chateaubriand’s obsession with the history of his own noble heritage, La Tour du Pin cites aristorcratic endogamy as “un grand principe accepté dans les milieux de la nobilité provinciale,” which surfaces in “l’inceste––cet obstacle cher à René et qui a fait l’objet d’un nombre infini de gloses abyssales dans la psychanalyse en suivant les vapeurs sulfureuses de l’amour interdit” (210). If the fictive

René’s passion for Amélie cannot be mapped onto Lucile de Caud with precision, the poetics of homo-affinity, in which the Breton heroine simultaneously represents familial sameness and a love of the self defined as different-than-the-self, evidence the inward- looking elements of Chateaubriand’s fiction.43 Moreover, the success of René as an archetype of the French Romantic male, cannot be interpreted as merely coincidental to the author’s novelistic exploration of potentially incestuous, transgender, and narcissistic modes of desire.

In keeping with interpretations of autoeroticism and cross-gender composition in

Chateaubriand’s writings, Jean-Claude Berchet argues the illicit love that Amélie espouses for her brother draws on the novelist’s abrupt break with Jean François Tulloch, a travel companion who abandoned the author during his journey in North America to then take up the cloth. In his recent biography (Chateaubriand [2013]), Berchet conducts a close reading of Chateaubriand’s cryptic explanation for his split from Tulloch in Essai historique sur les révolutions (1797), in which the Breton author expresses discomfort at

43 I outline this quality of homo-affinity, which draws on Leo Bersani’s definition of homosexuality in Homos (1995), on pp. 5-7 of this dissertation. Hereafter, I use of the shorthand term, “self defined as different-than-the-self,” to refer to this aspect of homo-affinitive desire. 62 the arrière pensée (“an ulterior motive”; literally, “a thought in the back of one’s mind”) he perceived in his friend’s eyes.44 Berchet’s investigation of correspondence surrounding Tulloch’s sudden departure yields nothing less than a watershed discovery, which proves that, at the very least, Tulloch left America due to the shame that stemmed from the desirous nature of his and Chateaubriand’s relationship. Curiously, the biographer lays the burden of feeling on Tulloch, framing Chateaubriand as an incidental seducer of his close companion, even though the testimony of a fellow passenger

(referred to only as M. Garnier) takes no such position. As a matter of fact, Garnier recounts that Tulloch faltered from knowing Chateaubriand too well: “Tulloch, protestant converti…qui malheureusement connut trop, pendant la traversée, M. de Chateaubriand, qui alors ne pensait pas bien, se dégoûta de son état et revint en Angleterre” (172, quoted in Berchet). From Berchet’s point of view, Amélie’s secret, that unrequited passion for her brother, evokes a reluctant confession of love on Tulloch’s behalf, and her death in religious service—a fictional act of closure of on Chateaubriand’s:

Saisi par le remords et cédant sans doute à de pressantes objurgations de

son confesseur, Tulloch aurait alors préféré rompre sans explication. Dans

ce que Chateaubriand lui-même qualifie de roman (pour le déclarer ‘fini’),

se laisse peut-être entrevoir une situation analogue à celle qui est au cœur

de la fiction de René. (171-172)

44 Chateaubriand ends a long footnote on his relationship with Tulloch in the Essai by accusing his ex-compatriot––whose “heart” struck an exceptional “harmony” with his own––of harboring such an arrière pensée: “J’ai peu trouvé d’hommes don’t le cœur fut mieux en harmonie avec le mien que celui de T[ulloch]; cependant mon ami avait dans les yeux une arrière pensée que je ne lui aurois pas voulu” (641). 63

Without denying the viability of this reading, the resonance between Francois Tulloch and the figure of Atala also remains too great to ignore. The resemblance between the author’s heartbreak in New England and the love intrigue of Atala, as a story of two exilés traveling the New World that purveys a passion disallowed by religious conviction, and which culminates in Atala’s “dark secret behind her eyes,” gives rise to the same instance of fictional killing off that plagues René. This similar fate corresponds to the common root of both novellas, which Chateaubriand composed as two parts of a larger narrative, as well as the intersection of desires that are symbolized in both heroines.

Nevertheless, studies of Atala, René, and Les Natchez, such as Berchet’s and Clément’s, continue to indulge in a piecemeal interpretation of the North American novels as if each were a self-contained text, resulting in a fragmented consideration of their overlapping narratives. This practice not only privileges the linear vision of the Realist novel that would supplant Sentimentalism, but ignores the poetics of homo-affinity, in all its queerness, that runs between these novels.

Whereas as the Mémoires and Voyage en Amérique (1827) transmit both a belated and autobiographical account of his travels in exile, Chateaubriand’s Sentimentalist rendering of a fantasized America marks Atala, as well as its counter-narrative to the marriage plot, as an aestheticization of queer desire. From this perspective, the fate of death in search of exodus, which constrains any previous depiction of incest and the passion for sameness at end of these novels, fingers a rupture between outlaw lovers that is bound to inspire what Heather Love defines as “bad feelings—shame, depression, and regret…in contemporary readers” (8). In Feeling Backward (2013), Love calls attention 64 to the kinds of texts that communicate “earlier forms of feeling, imagination, and community that may offer crucial resources in the present,” as we “[attend to] the specific histories of homophobic exclusion and violence—as well as their effects” (30). Rather than providing a definite answer as to what character corresponds to which real-life personality, my readings underscore the sentimentality of grief in the twin novels as a means of recovering estheticized queer experience, however fictionalized. On the one hand, the less nuanced of the two novels openly conveys despair over an incestuous bond, which surfaces as René vacillates between melancholy and madness, between nostalgia for an innocent past and his despair regarding the fate of Amélie. In Atala, however, loving outlaws fall silent before a sadistic order of existence only to be shortly after destroyed in the shadow of ignorance, as victims of an affinity that incurs inevitable–– and yet senseless––punishment. To the extent that these seemingly heterosexual romances obtain to an archive of queer feelings, the iconic thesis that Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick lays out in her introductory chapter to Epistemology of the Closet (1991) bears repeating:

[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of Western culture must be, not

merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that

it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual

definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical

analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern

gay and antihomophobic theory. (1, emphasis mine)

65 Approaching historical queerness from a perspective that is nevertheless suspicious of its

“decentered” position also calls for Sally O’Driscoll’s ethic of “Outlaw Readings:

Beyond Queer Theory” (1996), in which “Outlaw theory...might investigate the ways in which the breaking of sexual taboos can call identity categories [straight, gay, lesbian, etc.] into question without necessarily constituting an identity” (7). The queer element in

Chateaubriand’s fiction, whether intentional or otherwise, challenges us to contemplate questions of sexual resistance (as an effect of outlaw desire) inscribed within his now canonical works. The uncovering of queer moments in Atala that destabilize the societal regulation of sexuality and gender (within the purview of fiction) in turn contributes to a historic narrative that revels in its defiance of the taboo––and which does so beyond the margins of heterosexuality––within one of the earliest iterations of the French Romantic novel.

Indeed, considering the inescapable nature of constraint in Atala, the queer reader stands to resonate with the perceptible attraction toward acts of incest, miscegenation, and anathema that compel the heroine’s suicide.45 The Sentimental double-bind, which facilitates the kind of desperate circumstances that goad these protagonists toward moral failure, circumscribes the queer possibilities of Atala by at once removing them from society and branding them as perpetual outsiders. The reason Chactas is constantly on the

45 In her landmark article on gender expression, “Imitation and Gender Subordination” (1991), Judith Butler accounts for an intangible force that compels the production of queer gender despite the menace of constraint, in which both forces operate outside a person’s control: “There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today…[gender] is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions” (12, original emphasis). 66 run is established early on in the novel, when the Natchez protagonist explains that he must part with his adoptive father (Père Lopez) on pain of death.46 During his time in

Saint Augustine, the mission slowly enervates the protagonist’s life force, taunting him in his captivity with the sight of treetops from a faraway forest: “[j]e dépérissais à vue d’œil: tantôt je demeurais immobile pendant des heures, à contempler la cime des lointaines forêts...mon âme était tout entière à la solitude” (39). Exodus from the mission involves either running into the hands of his enemies, so he may die as a prisoner in his native land, or surviving on the outskirts of the Muscolguges territory as an outlaw.

Chactas inevitably flees in the hopes of freeing the “soul,” that feeling self, and the physical body from a detrimental lack of kingdom, as well as certain death in the colonial city. Rather than their physical union, that act which Chateaubriand delays time and time again, acts of treachery and suicide also mark the lovers of Atala as outlaws. Whereas

Chactas is constrained by his connectedness to place, the contradiction that defines

Atala’s double-bind is located at the juncture of soul and body, which figures as an impossible nexus between divine and earthly desires. When the couple sets out into the wilderness, and Chactas realizes that both protagonists have called Père Lopez their father, such a revelation in turn redoubles the heroine’s desire for the man she discovers to be her brother: “[c]’en était trop pour nos cœurs que cette amitié fraternelle qui venait nous visiter, et joindre son amour à notre amour. Désormais les combats d’Atala allaient devenir inutiles…” (63). That the passionate kiss which follows indulges in such “amitié fraternelle,” whose force operates by triangulation in regards to their relatedness to Père

46 “...ô mon père, tu le vois toi-même: je meurs si je ne reprends [sic] la vie de l’Indien” (39). 67 Lopez, and thus through the mediation of a priestly father, conveys the complexity of the novel’s poetics of attraction. But despite such consanguine desire, religion (and

Christianity in particular) nevertheless stands as an incontrovertible barrier between these tortured lovers: “‘[b]eau prisonnier, j’ai follement cédé à ton désir; mais où nous conduira cette passion? Ma religion me sépare de toi pour toujours… O ma mère! qu’as-tu fait?…’

Atala se tut tout à coup, et retint je ne sus quel fatal secret près d’échapper à ses lèvres”

(44, ellipses and spaces in text). In the latter apostrophe, the allusion to some “fatal secret” that is rooted in her mother's actions (“O ma mère...qu’as-tu fait?”) implies that the discursive force of Christianity, which categorically “separates” the two lovers, has been imposed upon her (44). In this way, the author establishes Atala’s conflict between erotic desire and her obligation to a sacred oath as a premise of plot. The reader then follows a kind of passion play in which the heroine is torn between her erotic agency and the untenable laws of society, which Chateaubriand evokes through both the voice of the undead mother and a god that Atala erroneously perceives as the omnipotent religious order.

Queerer Implications of the Chiasmatic Mirror

The affect of belonging that accompanies Atala’s attraction to Chactas demonstrates the means by which homo-affinity operates as a gradient between definitions of self and other, especially where it draws the heroine toward the discovery of their reflexive and unlawful bond. In “reciprocating” the sacrifice of Chactas, Atala’s decision to free her beloved also makes her an outlaw. It follows that any possibility of

68 tenable love between them occurs in a realm beyond the surveillance of society and the law. But in spite of such flirtation with outlaw desire, the self-policing of the conscientious heroine continues beyond the boundaries of civilization, under the sign of piety. This ironic tension resonates throughout their night-time walk in the forest, when–– against the throes of temptation––Atala repeatedly explains that their religious differences definitively rule out any possibility of marriage. Yet after denying the

Natchez prisoner several times, her sudden decision to run away with Chactas represents an unwelcome conversion that leads Atala to betray her own religious beliefs with little explanation aside from an overwhelming devotion to her “idolatrous” lover:

Cette nuit, j’ai séduit le jongleur par des présents, j’ai enivré vos

bourreaux avec de l’essence de feu, et j’ai dû hasarder ma vie pour vous,

puisque vous aviez donné la vôtre pour moi. Oui, jeune idolâtre, ajouta-t-

elle avec un accent qui m’effraya, le sacrifice sera réciproque. (55)

As she bribes bards and inebriates executioners to repay Chactas’s deed, all against the interest of her own tribe, Atala trades an obedient life for that of a fugitive. Thereafter,

Atala necessarily adheres to her ideal of religious virtue in spite of her and Chactas’s

“reciprocal” status as outlaws. Leo Bersani, in Homos, modeled such a paradigm of the

“gay outlaw” narrative on the literary voice of Jean Genet, who:

…repeats society’s accusation of him as a homosexual outlaw,

meticulously seeking out every ramification, every implication of that

accusation…He is willfully offering transgressive spectacles to others,

making himself into a gaudy performer of their most lurid views of 69 him…Through these tableaux he defiantly––and nondialogically––

addresses society's interpellations of him. (161)

Rather than soliciting the kind of “lurid” image that Genet would abide in the twentieth century, Chateaubriand manages to align the lovers along an axis of outlaw desire without eliminating the religious barrier between them. Nevertheless, insisting on their chastity only multiplies the viscount’s opportunities to illustrate the type of exotic-erotic outlaws that defined the eighteenth-century utopian novel. Torn between virtue and the whims of fate, their dependence on one another in the wild figures as a paradoxical exile in which their exodus serves, not to resolve the impossibility of their physical union, but to delay the sacrificial death that Atala portends as inevitable.

Outlaw as they may be, this impenetrable barrier between Chactas and his beloved nonetheless embodies the chiasmatic mirror that at once once separates the lovers and enables the recognition of their exceptional sameness. Where it coincides with the poetics of mirroring, homo-affinity functions as a reflexive, and thus non-linear, form of mediated desire. Mediation in the novel, as conceptualized in René Girard’s critical opus Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque (1961), occurs generically in one of two categories, external or internal, depending on the tangibility of the mediator whom the subject seeks to imitate. In Girard’s framework, the novels of Chateaubriand and other Romantics are defined as separate from the truth-seeking narratives of later

Realists, as well the chivalric tradition that preceded them, since:

Le vantieux romantique veut toujours se persuader que son désir est inscrit

dans la nature des choses ou, ce qui revient au même, qu’il est l’émanation 70 d’une subjectivité sereine, la création ex nihilo d’un Moi quasi-divin.

Désirer à partir de l’object équivaut à désirer à partir de soi-même: ce

n’est jamais, en effet, désirer à partir de l’Autre. (24, original emphasis)

Yet we witness a clear preponderance of desire for the other in the triangulation between

Chactas and Atala, who savor their relatedness to Père Lopez through their affection for one another. After they flee the wrath of the Muscolguges, Chactas assumes her tears are shed for the tribe she left behind, yet the heroine disabuses him of any notion that the forest was ever her homeland: “[e]nfant des hommes, comment pleurerais-je ma patrie, puisque mon père n’était pas du pays des palmiers?” (62). When she admits that Père

Lopez (and not Simhagan) fathered her, Atala cries for lack of patrie, since it turns out she has always felt dispossessed of any homeland or heritage. In realizing their family relatedness, the amorous brother and sister recover a sense of patrie in each other, relishing the vestiges of a life once shared with their now inaccessible father. Much like the phenomenon of chiasmus itself, the concurrence of erotic and familial affection appears to occur by chance in Atala, even though the protagonists’ incestuous desire echoes the motif of homo-affinity that Chateaubriand inscribes throughout the novel. In this allegedly random process, the instinctual attraction between protagonists occurs as a singular coincidence, at once stemming from an unpredictable coup de foudre (lit.

“thunderclap,” fig. “love at first sight”) and a prescient sense their incestuous bond.47

47 “Coup de foudre” conveyed two figurative meanings in the late eighteenth century—one, “au figuré…évènement imprévu, étonant et acablant,” (1787) and the other, “[l]a naissance subite d’un amour violent” (1801) (Féraud 601; vol. 1; DAF 278). In light of these historical definitions, 71 What is more, the brother and sister regain a sense of patrie that results from external mediation, for a want of their priestly father that is rooted in the memories of both protagonists. Without ignoring Girard’s poignant observation of the Romantic belief in

“desire [that] is written into the nature of things,” we must consider the poetics of relatedness that are imbricated in incest, in which a desire for sameness as members of the same family cannot be removed from the family structure itself and the ties of interrelatedness that construct it. Just like incest, the function of spontaneous affinity in

Chateaubriand’s work, that “creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine ego,” need not be dismissed as a simple delusion that evades any instance of triangulation. Indeed,

Chateaubriand’s dependence on spontaneity in the North American novels deserves to be parsed in a separate paradigm that excels in perverting the mediated desires now recognized as lieux of the French novel.

This mirroring at once reflects a greater phenomenon in Chateaubriand’s first novel and pertains to the formation of homosexual mediation as identified by René

Girard. Despite his dismissal of spontaneity, Girard acknowledges the variations in triangulation that defined the Romantic period when he delineates how, at large, “[les]

œuvres romanesques se groupent donc en deux catégories fondamentales––à l’intérieur desquelles on peut mutiplier à l’infini les distinctions secondaires” (17-18).48 As Girard

the symbolic motifs of thunder and lightning in Atala directly metonymize the “devastating” and “violent” forces that originally accompanied the Romantic concept of “love at first sight.” 48 “Nous parlerons de médiation externe lorsque la distance est suffisante pour que les deux sphères de possibles dont le médiateur et le sujet occupent chacun le centre ne soient pas en contact. Nous parlerons de médiation interne lorsque cette même distance est assez réduite pour que les deux sphères pénètrent plus ou moins profondément l’une dans l’autre” (41, original emphasis). 72 points out during his ground-breaking discussion of homosexual desire in the Realist novel, “[o]n ne donne rien à voir ni à comprendre en ramenant le désir triangulaire à une homosexualité nécessairement opaque pour l'hétérosexuel. Les résultats seraient beaucoup plus intéressants si l’on renversait le sens de l’explication” (52). Following the same logic as Girard, in regards to the triangulation that mediates homosexual desire in the works of Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), there is no reason that narratives of incestuous desire should appear opaque to readers of Romantic novels.

Indeed Girard’s insight into the collapsing that occurs in such examples of homosexual mediation, in which we observe a “noticeably increased preponderance of the mediator and a gradual obliteration of the object itself” pertains to the poetic shape of familial love between Chactas and Atala (cited above; 10, n.3). To the contrary of instances of homosexual mediation treated by Girard––in which Marcel’s Albertine is obliterated

(“[elle] se révèle insignifiante” [195]) and Pavel Pavlovitch’s wife (“[qui] se porte comme garant de sa valeur érotique” [52]) secures her husband’s erotic worth in the eyes of rival Veltchaninov––the incestuous desire that manifests itself in Atala excludes the possibility of triangular separation between the subject and object, seeing as both protagonists bask in their affection for the fatherly and familial mediator. Where a cutting out of the unnecessary love object characterizes Girard’s framework, in which homosexual triangulation transfers attention from a false love object toward the true object of desire (which is the same-sex mediator), familial desire in Atala fans the protagonists’ flames of passion precisely because both lovers share a common mediator.

73 When bridging homo-affinity with a homosexual reading of their love affair, any interpretation of Chactas and Atala as a failed homosexual couple depends on the role of discursive silence that surrounds the incest taboo in the Romantic novel. The unexpected relatedness of Chactas and Atala exemplifies the dualistic nature of mediated desire between hero and heroine, as one that evokes both incestuous and same-sex eroticism. As

I have argued, such duality depends on a chiasmatic tension between sameness and opposition and, as such, pertains to what scholars of Queer Studies such as Leo Bersani describe as homosexual desire in the present day. However, Chateaubriand clearly imbricates such a desire for the self defined as different-from-the-self within the familial body, rather than the same-sex attraction that marks homosexuality following its very definition in the late nineteenth century. In this light, a queerer reading benefits from addressing the discursive void that engulfs any name for Chactas’s and Atala’s love for one another. Luke Bouvier emphasizes the lack of discourse regarding incest as an example of Derridean “‘falling silent’ toward…an impossible, ‘unspeakable’ union” in

Chateaubriand’s first novel (6). In short, Chateaubriand avoids taking a risqué stance regarding brother-sister incest by impeding incest from ever taking place. He thus obviates the act of naming, as Bouvier explains, through “a gesture that would appear to coincide with the very imposition of the incest prohibition itself [interditz]…Chactas and

Atala are left speechless before the call to civilization and the disappearance of ‘incest as such,’ which never appeared in the first place” (6). Ben Wang, in “Writing Self, and the

Other: Chateaubriand and His Atala” (2005), uncovers the act of silencing that occurs through the novel’s remarkably estheticized theology, which allows Père Aubry to stifle

74 Chactas’s complaints regarding Christianity and effectively forces the hero to convert following the death of his beloved:

Chactas’s arguments and protests are swiftly overcome by a dazzling

image, a symbol of the transcendent realm beyond human conception.

However unanswerable his questions and however lame Père Aubry’s

responses, it does not matter. Chactas is compelled to succumb…This,

indeed, is the beauty of religion, a religion ‘qui a fait une vertu de

l’espérance.’ (15)

In silencing the locus of outlaw desire through ineffability and death, Chateaubriand commits his own acts of narrative flight, diverting his previously empathetic portrayal of homo-affinity to Père Aubry’s eulogy of happily never after, which the priest gilds with the praises of “that religion, so divine, which has made a virtue of hope.” At face value, which is to say without considering the symbolic poetry of Atala, the love depicted between brother and sister lends to a perhaps facile reading of incest as the uniquely unspoken taboo before which they “fall silent.” To the contrary, the wide spectrum of attraction that enumerates through their chiasmatic relationship to one another, which intermingles the trappings of incestuous desire and homosexuality among other affinities, inspires the kind of silence that accompanies ineffability just as much as it plays on the interdiction of the unspeakable.

This silencing effect that results from Chateaubriand’s use of tableau also reflects a trope of impossible self-knowledge that is central to the Sentimental novel. In the context of Sentimentalism’s moral relativity, where the implications of a protagonist’s 75 actions are never absolute, the use of tableau, which Cohen describes as a moment when

“the novel's underwriting conflict reaches such a level of intensity that it threatens to explode [and] the narration loses access to the protagonist's interiority, as if overcome by the tension it represents” (65), marks the end of iterable inner-torment by focusing on the materiality of the body.49 In Romantic Intimacy (2013), Nancy Yousef identifies a similar crisis of knowledge that stayed with Sentimental literature long after its manifestation in

La Nouvelle Héloïse. Torn between her passion for virtuous conduct (hence for her husband, M. de Wolmar) and the unrelenting attraction she feels for Saint-Preux, Julie often questions the true nature of her intentions, or at the very least her constancy, and thus “[t]he heroine's self-doubt internalizes the kind of inscrutability that typically obtains between persons in a world where all thoughts, all sentiments, are emphatically and evidently not held in common” (68, original emphasis). Yousef carefully demonstrates the degree to which the characters in La Nouvelle Héloïse know each other’s personalities, along with their past actions and intentions, as the interior self is emptied into the public discourse of Clarens. She concludes that “Rousseau’s utopian structure ensures that each one is always knowable by others, but the epistemic insecurity thus resolved nevertheless erupts again within his heroine rather than between her those with whom she dwells” (69, original emphasis). Whereas Yousef is primarily concerned with the (im)possibility of knowing others, as well as the self, in Rousseauvian sentimentality, Chateaubriand enacts a change to the Sentimental narrative by reinforcing

49 I further discuss Margaret Cohen’s work on Sentimentalism in my Introduction to this dissertation; see pp. 11-17, 22. 76 self-knowledge through homo-affinity––which shifts the possession of self-knowledge from a virtuous public to an interchangeable other. Such an appeal to a community based on similitude stands to inform the cause for those moments of ineffability that readers may parse today either as Derridean falling silent or the excision of the feeling heart incurred by tableau in the French Sentimental genre.

Siblings within the same triangulation of desire––Chactas and Atala constitute, not rivals, but complements to one another, as mutual admirers of their lost father and viable substitutes for the attainment of their distant patriarch. Such familial desire is expansive insofar as it does not bypass or ignore the mediator but rather embraces the recognition of present mediation, and thus the enjoyment of self-expansion. The desire to fold others into the feeling domain of selfhood reflects both Rousseau’s and the

Encyclopédie’s discourse on the expansive quality of amour-propre, which in the North

American novels motivates the erotics of extension that in turn fans the protagonists’ desire to commit incest. In the article concerning “Amour,” whose author remains unknown, the Encyclopédie explains the reason for (non-incestuous) “amour filial et fraternel” as follows: “[u]ne fortune, un nom commun, même naissance & même

éducation, quelquefois même caractere; enfin l’habitude de se regarder comme appartenant les uns aux autres, & comme n’ayant qu’un seul être” (370; vol. 1, emphasis mine). In “Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘The Desire to Extend Our

Being’” (2004), Laurence Cooper traces the intellectual conception of expansive desire back to “Rousseau’s view self-love…[in which] human beings, who, after all, are motivated exclusively by one kind of self-love or another, seek to be all that they can be.

77 Human being as such is expansive” (5).50 In Atala, as well as René, this expansion occurs on an impressive scale, interpolating the self, the self defined as different-from-the-self, the origins of the self (as both patrie and the pater), and by extension their divine creator.

As a consequence of these persons’ similarity to and interchangeability for one another, this poetics of homo-affinity interpolates several potential love objects (all of which are qualified by their similitude) rather than any binary relation between the self and other.

The phenomenon Girard names as “distinctions secondaires” in triangulation also evokes the indeterminacy in this expansive desire, as well as its refusal to result in a singular love object, as it distorts the shape of direct––which is to say traditional––schema of triangulation in the novel (18, cited above). By way of its polyvalence, in Atala, spontaneous love (that Romantic belief in instinctual and inexplicable attraction) and mediated desire operate within the domain of homo-affinity without contradiction.

Furthermore, throughout the North American novels, the concurrence of infatuation

(which appears to occur as a whim) and the more structured effect of triangulation function in tandem, as an alloyed desire for one’s perfect complement who embodies both spontaneous and mediated desire.

If Atala were to be rebuked for committing suicide and ultimately forgiven of her temptations before she perishes, its moral discourse would not be as remarkable as the

50 Cooper frames the Rousseauvian will toward expansion as an interstitial desire––between amour proper and amour de soi–– that motivates certain agents to extend themselves beyond the mere preservation of a more limited version of the self: “[T]he pursuit of maximized existence manifests itself as the desire to extend [one’s] being. This desire for extension appears both (a) in amour-propre, in which case it manifests itself as the desire to be everything, and (b) in amour de soi, in which case it manifests itself as a more benign reach for extension…assuming that amour- propre and amour de soi…can, and do, coexist in the same soul” (5-6). 78 fantastical imagery or exotic settings of the novel, since the lieu of impossible love resonates throughout the Sentimental genre. However, when she learns that the priest could have nullified the vows to her mother by simply writing a letter, Atala’s distress underscores the futility of her death and complicates any example of virtue that she might have embodied in martyrdom. Not only is the heroine’s death committed in vain, but

Atala’s despair at learning that she could have been “cured,” further demonstrates her status as a victim of religious vows: “[q]uoi! dit-elle…il y avait du remède! Je pouvais

être relevée de mes vœux!” (78). The ambiguous treatment of her transgressive actions sets Chateaubriand’s heroine apart, as a contradictory epitome of sinner and saint, whose throes of carnal desire are suddenly legitimized and whose suicide is pardoned by the very religion that has hitherto chastised her heretical passions. When the bond of exceptional sameness breaks in these North American novels, such all-consuming desire provokes drastic reactions in the face of isolation––of once-shared knowledge reduced to the self––that accompanies tableau. Atala consumes her fatal dose of poison, René mounts the sepulcher at his sister’s dedication, and Outougmiz bleeds himself to death in

Les Natchez when mourning the loss of René. A specious reading of these scenes might retort that such actions are typical of tragic love stories, yet such a reading would not consider the common thread of incestuous desire that ties them together. Much as in the allegorical Garden of Eden, with the knowledge of outlaw desire comes swift constraint and the end of a fleeting utopia. Given the casuistic of Père Aubry, Atala remains the only novel of Chateaubriand’s that negotiates the fixity of punishment for defying the mores of the earthly Church. To the contrary, it bears mentioning how Outougamiz

79 espouses no guilt for his brotherly affection in Les Natchez. Rather, his death memorializes the bond he shared with his beloved chevalier. True love, then, accompanied by frenetic desire, is found in family resemblance—discovered between

Chactas and Atala, denied between Amélie and René, and eventually created when René and Outougamiz are joined as brothers-in-law. Interpolating the feelings that are inspired by their Romantic tragedies, we present-day readers can approach Chateaubriand’s

Sentimentalist depiction of failure surrounding sexual union, community, and survival as a transhistorical repudiation of the fate of homo-affinitive desire.

In similarly open-ended fashion, Chateaubriand reveals the moralistic pith of the novel during Atala’s spectacular death, when Chactas’s sympathetic narrative remains unresolved despite the moral deliberation of Père Aubry. In fact, the contradiction between Sentimentalist and casuistic rhetoric facilitates a form of double speak in all the

North American novels that explores the legitimacy of outlaw desire, albeit from a safe distance. Controverting the heroine’s religious convictions, the solitary priest reveals that a time and place that allows for outlaw couple’s happiness does exist, but this promised land is immediately couched in the conditional past, as always-already unattainable for the dying indienne. Beset with despair, Atala realizes that she could have given herself to

Chactas without provoking divine punishment and that ultimately she “could have been happy”: “[i]l est trop tard, il est trop tard! s’écria-t-elle. Faut-il mourir, au moment où j’apprends que j’aurais pu être heureuse!” (78). Chateaubriand masterfully layers these speculative events to the effect of empathy, evoking a sense of divine injustice, for the religion which drives her to suicide unexpectedly allows an exception ex post facto,

80 offering mercy only after her vow of chastity has driven her into the grave.51 Here, the relativity of punishment, implying that Atala’s death could have easily been avoided, all things remaining the same, sets the exemplum of Chateaubriand’s narrative apart from that of most Sentimental novels.52 With a tongue-in-cheek analogy, Joyce Lowrie frames

Père Aubry’s casuistic as a poorly executed diversion from Chateaubriand’s largely

Sentimentalist argument:

Although this cry of disbelief serves as a pretext for Father Aubry’s

vehement protestations, it is not contradicted in convincing terms. It is as

if the reader were a jury who, after having heard a powerful point made by

the lawyer, but one which could be objected against, is asked to ignore the

point. The point can be stricken from the record but not from the minds of

the jury. (7)

Rather than providing a clear example of virtue, the long-winded death scene draws on the conflicting effects of sentimentality and rationalism, in which all parties fervently

51 When Père Aubry questions Atala as to why she had not previously mentioned this vow of chastity, the heroine retorts that “heaven” had separated her from the priest in her time of need: “[m]a fille, vous eussiez dû m’avertier hier au soir.’/’Hélas! mon père, dit Atala, je vous ai cherché la nuit dernière; mais le ciel, en punition de mes fautes, vous a éloigné de moi. Tout secours eût d’ailleurs été inutile” (79). In spite of Père Aubry’s rhetoric, Atala recognizes the hand of fate––which constitutes an integral element of her religious understanding––as the force that compels such extreme punishment for her erotic desires. 52 As opposed the Sentimental novels which Margaret Cohen examines in The Sentimental Education of The Novel (2001), the death of the heroine in Atala results from a conflict which ultimately proves to be entirely avoidable: “[w]hile Sentimental heroines and heroes are idealized from their introduction, the sentimental plot subjects its protagonists’ moral worth to ample trial. Setting up the conflict between individual freedom and collective welfare from its opening events, the sentimental plot accumulates situations that test the protagonist’s ability to negotiate this conflict as they simultaneously test the conflict’s force” (60). 81 extol the faith that drives Atala to mistakenly commit suicide precisely because her death should have been unnecessary. For an empathetic reader, the feelings evoked by the vivid account of Atala’s suffering stand in open contrast with the priest’s religious discourse, as they are duly countered, but not undone, by Pére Aubry’s eulogy of Christian grace.

Still, Chateaubriand’s two-sided rebuttal to her “indiscreet vow” produces a meaningful disharmony, which at once exploits and extinguishes the erotic impulse that drives the intrigue of the novel. On the one hand, Atala is pardoned for her suicide, and on the other, she endures not only a baroque death that is charged with sexual sublimation but also forced separation from her beloved. Rightfully, one wonders whether her confession was even necessary for absolution, as Atala’s pure intentions stood to save her in the afterlife: “[Dieu] vous jugera sur vos intentions, qui étaient pures, et non sur votre action qui est condamnable” (81). More than the clemency of her eternal soul, Atala’s confession serves Chateaubriand’s narrative as a medium for the novel’s ecstatic dénouement, for scenes of tortured seizing, passionate trembling, quivering lips, and singing angels. To the contrary, her “condemnable” death––which obliterates the voice and incarnation of outlaw desire––is couched in an act of metalepsis. Through the priest’s final counsel, the défenseur du christianisme saves Atala and Chactas, as well as his first novel, from accusations of libertinage, and thus from any suggestion that their incestuous passions could flourish without the consent of Western society.53 Behind every moment

53 In his preface the Pléiade Edition of Atala, Maurice Regard summarizes the libertine lineage of Chateaubriand’s heroes: “Prévost, Restif, Sébastien Mercier avaient donné la vie à des êtres du même sang, violent et excessif. Le héros passionné est fréquent au XVIIIe siècle; il l’était même déjà au XVIIe. L’originalité de l’Enchanteur est de l’avoir promu au rang de protagoniste, comme le grand et unique interprète d’une sensibilité moderne qui se complaît dans les régions 82 of disrupted union lies the question as to why, or even how, such lovers cannot remain together. In omitting a clear explanation as to what purpose Atala’s death serves,

Chateaubriand’s silence speaks volumes. To the extent that Chateaubriand relegates his romance of homo-affinity to the faraway deserts of Florida, I contend that the author’s proclivity for containment, for approaching and then closing off narratives of outlaw desire, engenders a kind of literary closet. As such, Atala evokes a realm of queer possibilities, disjoined from European society, communicated through paradoxical poetics and tortured romance, into which the sympathetic reader might temporarily enter.

As Lowrie concludes in “Motifs of Kingdom and Exile in Atala,” “[e]xile is not nearly as important, in Atala, as is the celebration of Exile” (10, original emphasis). Indeed, it is in that solitary and liminal space that outlaw romance, whose inevitable obliteration is heralded in the very act of flight, can fully materialize. As Chactas and Atala navigate the throes of homo-affinity, their exodus excels, not in escaping constraint, but in celebrating the ephemeral delay of erasure, in approaching the realization of their incestuous passion despite its promise of death and impossible satisfaction.

incertaines et malsaines des confessions mal faites ou des sermons profanes de Masillon” (Regard xv-xvi). 83

Parlor Polari in Claire de Duras’s Olivier, ou le secret

After she put her manuscripts on the shelf in 1824, Claire de Duras’s (1777-1828) third novel, Olivier, ou le secret (1822), remained a kind of secret itself, although it was not a very well kept one. The unpublished novel circulated between invitees of her salon, eventually finding its way into the hands of authors and critics who lacked the noble status to attend Duras’s soirées. In the years that followed, Henri de Latouche (1785-

1851), Stendhal (1783-1842), and Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857), responded in kind to

Duras’s treatment of the secret, publishing novels that imitated the plot and love intrigue of Olivier. Unable to overcome an unnamable fault in his character, the Romantic hero fails to marry his beloved: such is the fate of the tortured couples in Latouche’s Olivier

Brusson (1826), Stendhal’s Armance (1828), and Custine’s Aloys (1829). Duras’s original novel remained widely inaccessible to the public until 1971, when Denise

Virieux published her critical edition of Olivier, forging a cohesive text from one of the surviving manuscripts as a “first edition” (107). Up to that point, its legacy was primarily preserved in the novels that attempted to ridicule, refute, or best the duchesse’s brazen manuscript, whose secretive topos would be taken up yet again in Latouche’s Fragoletta

(1829). Insofar as Duras’s critics and copistes cast their heroes as impotent, effeminate, and perhaps even as homosexual, Olivier furtively shaped the variety of cross-gender novels, such as Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1831), Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), and Alexandre Dumas’s Fernande (1844), that proliferated during the

84 July Monarchy. In Romantic fashion, Olivier and his cousin, Louise, name incestuous desire as the secret that prevents them from marrying each other. Nevertheless, Duras imbues these letters with metaphors of castration, hermaphroditism, and homosexuality from Greek mythology, composing her own polari to be explored by the savvy reader.

Approaching Olivier as a secret that tells on itself through extradiegetic means, I will demonstrate the affective success of the Duras’s narrative, which prevents its protagonists, and thus the reader, from resolving the mystery that plagues the novel.

Laying bare the eroticism of the myths Duras interpolates, I also aim to expose her construction of a walk-in closet in Olivier, so as to explore the plurality of meanings it envelops, along with the prospect of feeling backward that accompanies the contents of that closet for a present-day vision of the queer past.

This chapter will focus on Duras’s creation of a narrative structure in Olivier that obscures the novel’s secret from a majority of readers, who lack the selective knowledge of mythology required to decipher the novel’s aberrant sexuality. In the same vein as scholars of gay and lesbian history, such as Diarmuid Hester, Fabio Cleto, and Gary

Simes, I argue that gay slangs of the twentieth century, such as British Polari, descended from a historic avenue of speech that seeks to both express and conceal the existence of homosexuality. Where these scholars focus on twentieth-century texts, however, I examine the function of such subversive poetics in the Sentimentalist narrative of Olivier, which serves the same purpose of double-speak that Saphia Nair identifies in sapphic romans à clef from the interwar period. Along these lines, consulting Denise Virieux’s and Anka Muhlstein’s twentieth-century readings of Olivier as a roman à clef, I contend

85 that the apocryphal fate of the novel reflects Duras’s own encounter with the closet. Most explicitly, Duras incorporates Greek mythology into Louise’s letters by describing symbols that pertain to Penelope and Ariadne of Ovid’s Heroides (c. 25-16 BC), mentioning the lotuses discovered by Odysseus in one letter, and Theseus’s black sail in another. Yet the richest example of this poetics revolves around the symbolism of

Louise’s almond tree, and thus the ovidian Phyllis, which Duras substitues for an olive tree (the homonymic olivier) in the Nangis’ garden. Insofar as Duras evokes the feminine protagonists of the Heroides in her novel, this study follows in the steps of Linda

Rouillard, who studies Duras’s reworking of ovidian myth in “The Black Galatea: Clare de Duras’s Ourika” (2004). However, in reading the hero’s bloody suicide as an implicit allusion to the works of Ovid, I also argue that the stand-in amandier calls to the castration of Attis and Agdestis in the Fasti (8 AD), who come part and parcel with the tree’s origin story in Greek myth.

Analyzing the author’s use of slippage, deletion, and deception, I examine three narrative techniques that work in concert to antithetically conceal and expose the novel’s implied truths. Linguistic slippage is the primary method through which Duras constructs the edifice of the walk-in closet, distending the scope of the secret by making several projections of it equally possible. As we infer from the gossip exchanged at the galerie de

Rouville (Letter 29), the protagonist might be impotent, might fear the consequences of an incestuous marriage, or might not be attracted to women—and the open-ended possibilities behind these insinuations has led several scholars, such as Denise Virieux

86 and Pierre Bayard, to maintain that Olivier is not a novel that portrays homosexuality.54

Regarding acts of deletion, I will examine Duras’s redactions in several manuscripts to illustrate how the secret conveyed a single truth in an earlier version of the novel, before

Duras removed allusions to homoerotic desire from the text. Where slippage and deletion preserve the novel’s mystery, Duras construes moments of misprision and dramatic irony to emphasize the effect of misunderstanding in the novel’s intrigue. When Louise opines that her cousin protects the almond tree in her mother’s garden as a gesture of undying love, she epitomizes the reader who lacks a verisimilar understanding of her Romantic hero and his secret. However subtle, Duras’s mockery of a clueless noble class manifests in Adèle’s letters to Olivier, as well as Louise’s proclamation that only one barrier

(Olivier’s betrothal to another woman) can separate the cousins from each other.

Ultimately, the author’s conspicuous deception––by way of dramatic irony––reflects the novel’s raison d’être, trafficking in the perspective of an informed reader who witnesses the fallout of misprision. In this way, Duras ribs a conventional Restoration audience for its limited vision of erotic desire at the same time she procures sympathy for Louise and her cousin’s lost cause.

54 After exploring the similarities between Astolphe de Custine and Duras’s Olivier, in her essay “Le sujet d’Olivier,” Virieux nevertheless insists that “Mme de Duras ne fait pas allusion dans son roman à l’homosexualité de Custine” (42). For Virieux’s reading of these similarities, see 112-113 of this dissertation. 87 Polari and the Affect of Slippage

The predominant mode of linguistic slippage in Olivier occurs through a poetics that resembles homosexual slangs, such as Polari, that first arose toward the end of the nineteenth century. Gary Simes’s “Gay Slang Lexicography: A Brief History on the First

Two Gay Glossaires” (2005) and Paul Baker’s Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men

(2002) chronicle Polari as a specifically British phenomenon, even though similar gay vocabularies existed in the United States, Australia, and South Africa.55 Baker emphasizes the senselessness that still veils the vocabulary of British Polari speakers, even to modern-day homosexuals, yet the impetus to mask their speech remains clear:

“[t]he words in the Polari speaker’s lexicon tell us what aspects of their lives they considered important enough to give names to––perhaps because there were no existing

English words; or…because the existing words and meanings were somehow inappropriate” (4-5).56 In light of the historic circumstances of British Polari, I use the generalized term polari (as a common noun) to convey a currency of metaphoric speech that arises as a condition of outlaw sexuality. Such discourse, like gay slang, enables a medium to speak that bars those who are not in the know from grasping its significance.

In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: a Reader (1999), Fabio Cleto

55 Although Simes dedicates the greater share of his study to British Polari, he justly mentions the emergence of gay slangs in other English-speaking geographies: “Gays in other English-speaking countries, being as elsewhere a socially marginalized minority, developed their own lingo, too, and nowhere more richly than in South Africa, where moffies have created the largest and liveliest gay word-hoard outside of the United States” (7, original emphasis). 56 Baker previously argues that the social context in which Polari was used reveals as much about its linguistic purpose as any lexicography that may be ascribed to the vocabulary itself: “Taken out of context, a simple list of words (given with pronunciations, meanings, spellings and possible origins) does not tell us a great deal about how Polari was used” (4, parenthesis in text). 88 explains the emergence of Polari in terms of its proximity to homosexual “camp,” whose origins he attributes to itinerant theater and circus communities in late nineteenth-century

Britain:

The nomadism implied by the etymology and theoretical framework of

camp as ephemeral architecture justifies its linguistic nomadism,

producing a language articulated…in cyclic itineraries, made up of the

‘illegal,’ improper and temporary, occupation and reorientation, of the

culture’s common places… (31)

In the above passage, Cleto justly stresses the interplay between the word “camp” in

English and the “linguistic nomadism” of gay slang following its consolidation in the late nineteenth century. Yet in the same breath, Cleto’s argument reaches beyond the British demarcations of Polari when he cites the survival of camp language in the bathmology of

Roland Barthes’s autobiography (Roland Barthes, 1975) and the jeux d’esprit that pepper

Renaud Camus’s Buena Vista Park (1980) (31). Where this rhetorical leap jars for all its abruptness, I would like to expand on the sensible comparison Cleto makes between

British and French historical modes of gay argot. When defining a pre-homosexual polari

(in relation to the discursive invention of the homosexual), Barthes’s semiotic description of bathmologie sheds light on the process of making slang and neologisms for a specific audience:

Un néologisme n’est pas de trop, si l’on en vient à l’idée d’une science

nouvelle: celle des échelonnements de langage. Cette science sera inouïe,

car elle ébranlera les instances habituelles de l’expression, de la lecture et 89 de l’écoute…[S]on principe sera une secousse: elle enjambera, comme on

saute une marche, toute expression. (Roland 71, original emphasis)

When creating a vocabulary along these lines, the act of invention demands that refashioned speech “jump” over the significative relationships between sign and signified to the extent that the “habitual” paths to meaning are couched between the actual

“échelonnements de langage” at play. The quest to recover the linguistic moorings of

“homosexual” slangs from France, whose lexicons accreted unusual metaphors that span the “layers of language,” to borrow Barthes’s expression, manifests in Claude

Courouve’s widely consulted Vocabulaire de l’homosexualité masculine (1985), as well as his Tableau synoptique de références à l'amour masculin: auteurs grecs et latins

(1986). Through her own polari, in the instances where she signals any one of the sexual taboos nested within the novel’s secret, Duras goads the uninitiated reader to gloss over a sophisticated code of erudite allegories from Catholic doctrine and ancient Greek mythology. Through these oblique signifiers, she engenders a symbolic lexicon that runs the gamut of St. Augustine’s parable of the olive tree, to the castrated galli of Cybele, to the transfiguration of Phyllis into an almond tree in Ovid, and in doing so communicates a host of subversive signifieds the secret potentially embodies. But rather than the public connotations of mobility mentioned by critics in the twentieth-century, Duras’s invention reflects the classical education of restoration salonniers, their eighteenth-century taste for

90 Greek mythology, and the protocol of secrecy that shaped the symbols with which she built her own code.57

In keeping with the closed nature of the literary salon, Duras’s use of the epistolary genre in Olivier transmits a tangible failure on behalf of her protagonists to communicate the truth behind the secret to one another. Through the proliferation of double-entendres and metaphors steeped in narrative irony, the duchess engenders a mode of poetic representation that proves to be even more complex than the double-speak of polari. As Duras employs Sentimentalist tropes of mirroring and impossible love, her open-ended metaphors hinge on the naïve interpretation of Olivier’s secret offered by

Louise. But time and time again, Olivier counters the concerns expressed in his cousin’s letters, obfuscating the secret to the effect of irresolvable slippage between their perspectives. The comte de Sancerre’s mysterious description of “walls of crystal” that separate the cousins from each other (Letter 12) yields a metatextual analogy for such slippage: “[i]l y a des êtres dont on se sent séparé comme par ces murs de cristal dépeints dans les contes de fées: on se voit, on se parle, on s’approche; mais on ne peut se toucher” (147). The barrier imposed by these transparent walls, through which the cousins “see each other, hear each other, approach each other, but cannot touch each

57 In a well-known passage of his Souvenirs contemporains d’histoire et de littérature (465-472), Abel-François Villemain (1790-1870) describes the atmosphere of Claire Kersaint de Duras’s salon, whose attendees included: Pozzo di Borgo (1764-1842), Francois-René de Chateaubriand, Rosalie Constant (1758-1834), Astolphe de Custine, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), Alexandre Duval (1767-1842), Louis de Fontanes (1757-1821), Sophie Gay (1776-1852), Delphine de Girardin, née Gay (1804-1855), Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Clara de Rauzan (1799- 1863), Abel de Rémusat (1788-1832), Claire de Vergennes, comtesse de Rémusat (1780-1824), Joséphine de Sainte-Maure, née Damas (1797-1839), Sophie Swetchine (1782-1857), and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838). For a detailed account of Duras’s salon, see Gabriel Pailhès, La duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’après des documents inédits (1910) (386-442). 91 other” evokes the chiasmatic mirror that separates Chactas and Atala and presages the

“mur de diamants” that surround Octave in Armance.58 Notably, although her style differs drastically from that of the enchanteur’s, who referred to the Duras––throughout correspondence that spans over a decade (1814-1827)––as his “chère sœur,” the platonic rapport she maintained with Chateaubriand necessitated a familiar kind of “limite tracée,” as Gabriel Pailhès (1847-1910) describes in La duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’après des documents inédits (1910): “elle s’arrêtait où commence l’amour. Dès les premiers rapports, ce fut la même limite tracée…On y voit [dans leur correspondance]

Mme de Duras très attachée et très séduite, mais libre et fière dans ce lien…” (20).59 In the realm of fiction, Duras plays off the grey area between erotic love and friendship when she construes a figurative obstruction of reciprocal knowledge, which here pertains to desire, between the cousins. Olivier’s glassy simile thus draws on the Romantic symbolism of the mirror so as to cast doubt on the ideal (if not the existence of) chiasmatic sameness. The ironic antithesis between opaqueness and clarity in these walls conveys a valence between the secret and truth, and by extension one of (in)experience and familiarity. As Denise Virieux explains in her introduction to Olivier, the epistolary genre provides a particular opportunity to analyze a character’s subconscious motives:

58 Virieux contends this image became a cliché of Olivier among the duchess’s circle of readers when she identifies the imitation of Duras’s “murs de cristal” in the “mur de diamant” that Stendhal describes (via Octave) in Armance: “l’image pouvait avoir suffisamment frappé les auditeurs de la Duchesse pour qu’ils la colportent” (216). 59 As Pailhès argues, the personal (if not expository) tragedies that surface in the fiction of the duchesse contrast with those of Chateaubriand’s heroes and their mal du siècle: “Le mal de René?...Tout autre est le mal qui torture et brise les héros de Mme de Duras, dans Ourika et dans Édouard. Sous des noms de romans, les tristesses qui s’y traduisent sont absolument biographiques et personelles; des larmes y coulent, dont l’amertume fut longuement savourée” (28). 92 “[l]e roman épistolaire favorise la subtilité de l’analyse: l’auteur souligne les modifications que le rapport au destinataire introduit dans la conscience du personnage qui écrit, et dévoile ainsi au lecteur des profondeurs psychologiques dont le personnage n’est pas conscient” (73). Considering the protagonist’s familiarity with his guarded secret, this dynamic of metaphorical slippage reveals itself––not only through the slickness of crystalline walls––but in Olivier’s effort to cast the impossibility of their union as a dictate of the supernatural. Within this mode of narration, the weight of an epistolary novel’s “rapport au destinataire” fingers the potential for meaningful acts, of both expression and occlusion, to occur in the same diegetic letter (or even phrase)–– depending on which side of the figurative glass the reader is situated.

By exploiting the multivalence of metaphorical slippage, Duras conveys the

(im)possibility of naming a historically homosexual subject through the language of polari. In turn, her aptitude at fulfilling the roles of both fluent and silenced speaker sustains the affect of closetedness in Olivier. Whereas the coded metaphors that run throughout the novel deal in the inscription of speech, the prominence of silence in Eve

Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet obtains to instances of purposeful restraint within

Duras’s narrative. As she honed her manuscripts, Duras struck through a number of passages that offered insight into the hero’s secret (which I examine further on in this chapter), preventing even the savviest reader from uncovering the pith of the novel’s subject matter. These deletions result in an affective experience of silence that companions closetedness, complicating the match-game of decryption that defines the roman à clef. In the Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick explains the interplay

93 between the state of closetedness, silence, and disclosure: “‘[c]losetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence––not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the disclosure that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (3). Duras’s sporadic deletions epitomize the kind of silence “that accrues particularity by fits and starts,” as she nicks away at accidental acts of disclosure to then expand the novel’s sense of mystery. Saphia Nair describes the role of the coded novel as a medium for twentieth-century women writers to convey same-sex desire in Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading “Romans à clef”

Between the Wars (2012):

As long as no potentially censorious reader was forced to acknowledge a

‘truth’ that might be deemed obscene, these writers could draw attention

to the unspeakable without ‘speaking’ it, producing a space for the

representation of same-sex desire that could only be filled by the

knowledge of the reader. (5)

In “Queer Cryptograms, Anarchist Cyphers: Decoding Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled

Swarm: A Novel” (2012), Diarmuid Hester draws on Nair’s conceptualization of encrypted truths that survive “as long as no censorious reader [is] forced to draw attention” to them (Nair 5). Parsing Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), which “scrambles the salient features of Barnes’s relationship with Wood and renders them decipherable only to a small clique of queer subcultural writers,” Hester goes on to argue that this use of the roman à clef “telegraphs the later use of polari by gay subcultures after World War

II” (8). Duras’s poetics of the secret exploits this very tension, engendering a polari to be 94 deciphered by astute readers, facilitating––to borrow the words of Nair––“a space for the representation of same-sex desire that could only be filled by the knowledge of the reader.” Even though early drafts nearly expose the hero’s homoerotic desire for M. de

Rieux, Duras takes away the keys to her roman à clef in the final drafts. In doing so, she makes way for a capacious closet that hordes not one obscene signified but a host of aberrant desires, such as incestuous longing and a homo-affinity that arises from emasculation. In keeping with the societal taboos that characterize Duras’s novels, this expansion of the secret’s purview tends to a larger phenomenon of erotic closetedness. As author of the secret, the creation of a Romantic polari evinces her effort to disclose its significance and, furthermore, to field the limits of discursive constraint within and without the walk-in closet. On the other hand, where Duras enumerates metaphors for queer desire, all the while dressing them up in respectable language, the jouissance shared by the author and her implied reader when communicating the unspeakable occupies just as much of the closet as the silence that envelops its secret.

For the greater part of Olivier, ou le secret, the apparent taboo, which is addressed in a series of diegetic letters, lies in the attraction between the two cousins (Olivier and

Louise) who cannot marry for fear of public ridicule. However, when Olivier’s rival, M. de Rieux, mocks the protagonist at a gathering in the galerie de Rouville, Duras destabilizes the context of the actual secret––as well as the reader’s ability to decode it–– through an ingenious exercise of poetic slippage. In Letter 29, Louise observes the libertine M. de Mucidan and the recently reformed M. de Rieux exchanging gossip over a game of tric-trac:

95 Enfin, je vis monsieur de Mucidan se pencher sur le tric-trac et dire

à monsieur de Rieux quelques mots tout bas. Olivier alors…

poussant la table dans un mouvement d’une extrême violence…se

montra tout à coup à eux. Monsieur de Mucidan et monsieur de

Rieux avait l’air embarrassés; une légère nuance de moquerie sur

les lèvres de monsieur de Rieux changea en irritation la disposition

conciliante que j’apportais. (180)

The two players were previously unaware that Olivier, who sits on a sofa obscured by one the room’s columns, could overhear their banter. As she watches both parties, the comtesse de Nangis (Louise) witnesses the revelation of a secret, which agitates Olivier:

“[h]élas! Olivier l’entendait trop bien! Je le vis pâlir, rougir; deux fois il se leva comme pour aller à eux” (179-180). Louise’s vantage point presents the reader with a mise-en- abîme that reflects the novel’s own narration of the unspeakable, insofar as we (just as the comtesse de Nangis) can see its effect on Olivier, who first turns white and then blushes after hearing it said aloud, but are disallowed from hearing the content of the secret itself.

Although Louise surmises that M. de Rieux has uncovered her desire for Olivier in the preceding letter (28), the violence seen in her cousin’s reaction casts doubt on any supposition that the secret exchanged could be as banal as the incestuous desire that preoccupies Louise up to this point.

As the altercation in the galerie de Rouville makes clear, the heroine is confronted with disparate secrets that underscore the slippage between sensation and meaning in

Duras’s epistolary narration. By portraying Olivier through Louise’s perspective, the

96 novel gains affective intensity as it aligns the reader’s vision with that of the frustrated, if not clueless, comtesse. The fact that Olivier rises and then hesitates twice before approaching the men who gossip about him implies a subordinate scenario behind the hero’s secret that is indexical to a complex relation of cause and effect, or perhaps of insult to injury, that defies classification as a simple truth. In her edition of Olivier,

Denise Virieux attempts to reconstruct the facts discussed at the game table: “le comte de

Rieux n’a-t-il pas découvert le secret d’Olivier et ne sait-il pas l’amour des cousins? Le vieux marquis de Mucidan n’est-il pas un cynique qui…est fort capable de prendre sa revanche des railleries de Louise…[?]” (231). Virieux dutifully frames the politics of gossip in this scene, yet when the editor treats it, above all, as an exposition of the cousins’ intense affection for one another, her reading sympathizes with Louise’s fear of being found outlaw rather than focusing on the transfigurative moment that destabilizes our perception of the secret. As she all the while emphasizes her anxiety, Duras underscores the heroine’s unwitting investment in her cousin’s perceptible masculinity.

Through the novel’s courtly busybody, M. de Mucidan, the author pits an unsympathetic character against the hero to imply a range of emasculating possibilities, from incestuous desire, to questions of impotence, to that secret central to the novel––the unnamable reason Olivier retreats from his cousin. In Duras’s hands, the secret remains sheltered in this indeter\minable web of signified vices, whose effect is seen but not heard. This purposeful instance of mystification also manifests in another secret that Duras weaves into the same letter, which regards the duel between Olivier and M. de Rieux: “il avait blessé monsieur de Rieux, mais heureusement pas dangereusement; il allait chercher un

97 chirurgien. Monsieur de Rieux voulait tenir la chose secrète et Olivier le désirait aussi”

(180). If Olivier redeems his honor in the duel that follows his rival’s bavardage, the protagonist’s complicity in keeping the duel “secret,” coupled with the superficial nature of the wound sustained by M. de Rieux, redoubles diegetic suspicions about the comte de

Sancerre’s virility rather than silencing them. In light of the secret’s complexity, the deceptive singularity of the novel’s title, which announces only one mystery (le secret), epitomizes the linguistic play that Duras embeds into her treatment of it. Louise may perceive the gossip about her beloved, and she may be privy to the otherwise secret duel between her suitors, but the hero never discloses the original truth that spurs both events at the galerie de Rouville. Operating beyond the reach of an ingenuous Louise, this technique of slippage subtends the efficacy of the closet in Olivier, as it proves to be impenetrable at the same time that its valent parts might be envisioned, inviting the attentive reader to explore possible interpretations which are otherwise too base to be insinuated by a writer of Duras’s upright reputation.

When scrutinizing that which is left unheard in this scene, the distant perspective conferred to the comtesse de Nangis, which places the discourse of the men out of earshot, leaves only the setting of the galerie to be interpreted. Along these lines, Duras’s choice of tric-trac for the rivals’ parlor game conveys a rich metonymy of the Restoration salon, which conjures both its eighteenth-century association with roués such as M. de

Mucidan and the fashionable reappearance of the game following the Revolution.

Gesturing toward the returned émigrés of Napoleon’s empire, the authoritative Académie universelle des jeux (1806) attributes the latter phenomenon to the game’s inherent

98 “nobility”: “…le beau monde, qui a de la politesse, s’y applique avec beaucoup de soin, en fait son Jeu favori, et le préfère aux autres Jeux. En effet, ce beau Jeu a tant de noblesse et de distinction, que nous voyons qu’il est plus à la mode que jamais” (50). Yet tric-trac’s role as a parlor game long precedes its revival in the noble salons of the

Restoration and, by virtue of its survival across several centuries of French political history, readily symbolizes the survival of French high society. The lineage of the game reaches back to the middle ages, to a time when the jeu de tables (also jeu de dames) began a slow and constant evolution into the intricate variation of backgammon that

Duras portrays in the galerie de Rouville.60 Within this metonymy, tric-trac inevitably conjures the game’s complex jargon, along with its components such as the “case du diable,” the “coin de repos,” and perhaps most evidently, the “dames” (“checkers,” also a homonym of “ladies”) that are manipulated on the board. As a testament to the scope of terms used to describe tric-trac, the Académie universelle des jeux provides eighty-six definitions in its “Explication des termes généraux” (31-45), as well as descriptions of the eight jans (of different names) that may be played (5-14) and an overview of the various methods by which the envied dames battues are acquired (87-93).

In a stroke of masterful contrast, Duras portrays a game renowned for its terminology in a scene that lacks the language needed to understand its players. In similar

60 Jeanne de Mayenne (12??-126?) played on the versatile symbolism of the “jeu de tables,” which she used in her badge of nobility, as early as 1265. In “The Tric-Trac Window of Le Mans,” Meredith Lillich uncovers several noble “puns” from a colorful window (1265-1269) at Le Mans cathedral that depicts medieval players at a “jeu de tables” that preceded tric-trac: “[i]ts heraldry includes a rare example of a woman’s cadence or ‘badge,’ about which we know almost nothing…and we are allowed a privileged glimpse of noble concerns, mores, and wit in the border lands of Saint Louis’ kingdom” (28, 31). 99 fashion, any words which might express the secret at the novel’s core remain inaudible, and perhaps incomprehensible, to Louise (and by extension, to the reader). Olivier, who prefers to fix his attention on a wood print, seats himself apart from the tric-trac set, his line of vision blocked by a column. Through such symbolic positioning, Duras pairs the act of speculation with metaphors for containment by pointing toward the potential values produced from a boxy game table or a framed print. This sense of blockage compounds in

Duras’s mise-en-scène, which disassociates the hero from M. de Mucidan and M. de

Rieux’s interest in playing with “dames,” putting a fine point on his disinterest in manly pastimes, which include chasing ladies of their stature. When Olivier overhears their conversation, the tension between vision, dialogical constraint, and meaning illustrates an occurrence of closeted speech in which the hero’s frustration gives away his own familiarity with the rumor whispered by the old libertine. These guarded words and the implication of shame they carry, which manifest in the protagonist’s embarrassment and anger, are central to the staging of the gallery that effectively pits the reader’s sympathy for Olivier against what Foucault defines as the “bénéfice du locuteur” in Volonté de savoir (1978):

Tenir un discours où se joignent l’ardeur du savoir, la volonté de changer

la loi et le jardin espéré des délices—voilà qui soutient sans doute chez

nous l’acharnement à parler du sexe en termes de répression; voilà qui

explique la valeur marchande qu’on attribue…au simple fait de prêter une

oreille à ceux qui veulent en lever les effets. (13-14)

100 In the face of their ardeur du savoir, Duras engages the reader in a dynamic of discursive constraint when she denies the satisfaction of a “bénéfice du locuteur” by refusing to name the insult at hand. Portraying only Louise’s vision, Duras composes the scene for a reader who is in the know. Louise reports the happenings at Rouville as odd––yet the relationship between these metaphors escapes her because their metonymic actions transmit Olivier’s secret through a poetics that surpasses the confines of everyday language.

Impotence, or the Olive Tree

At the paratextual level, Duras tied Olivier, ou le secret to a parabolic figure for impotence and, in so doing, invited readers to examine the deeper significance of the hero’s name. Linking the religious connotations of the olive tree to Duras’s narration of the secret, Anka Muhlstein (in Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857): le dernier marquis

[1996]) and Denise Virieux have both examined how Stendhal originally planned to adopt the name Olivier for the protagonist of his first novel, Armance. Stendhal’s interest in appropriating Duras’s title for the hero who would eventually be named Octave, as expressed in his well-known letter to Prosper Merimée (1826), evidences the legibility of

Duras’s intertexual code to a select group of readers: “[j]’ai prix le nom d’Olivier…à cause du défi. J’y tiens parce que ce nom seul fait exposition…Si je mettais Edmond ou

Paul, beaucoup de gens ne devinerait pas le fait du Babilanisme…” (Correspondance 96).

In his first novel, Armance, Stendhal expanded the term babilanisme to his own ends, exploiting an Italian slang term that dates back to the Renaissance to imply the sexual

101 impotence that plagued Romantic heroes.61 However, as Virieux argues in an essay that prefaces her edition of Olivier, “L’énigme,” Stendhal failed to “expose” his hero’s impotence to the uninitiated reader despite his reliance on an omniscient narrator: “[t]out en privilégiant…le point de vue de Mme de Malivert…sa présentation du héros, malgré son insistence sur la condition maladive d’Octave, semble insuffisante” (50). Considering the success with which Duras constructs an extradiegetic code around the figure of

Olivier––in the context of Stendhal’s failure to communicate such “Bablianisme” through mere use of physiognomy––I concur with Yves Citton and Anka Muhlstein’s respective interpretations of the name Olivier as a synecdoche of the parable of the wild olive tree in the works of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) (Citton 45; Muhlstein 155).

Transmitting a truth that both reveals and hides itself within the symbolism of the infertile olive tree, Duras crafts an iconic figure from its antique roots and effectively communicates that which otherwise proved unnamable, even for the likes of Stendhal.

Indeed, it is this poetics of classical signifiers that enables Duras to manipulate the meaning(s) of Olivier’s secret through metonymies that extend beyond the character’s diegetic image.

As she draws on an age-old allegory for fertility, itself a product of Saint

Augustine’s sermons, Duras announces her interpolation of ancient symbolism in the very title of Olivier. While the Roman bishop’s original parable of the olive tree can be found in his theological defense against the claims of Faustus (Contra Faustum

61 I discuss the etymology behind Stendhal’s use of babilanisme in detail in pp. 137-140 of this dissertation. 102 Manicæum; bks. 9, 21) (c. 400), a monastic collection of books that profoundly shaped medieval Catholic doctrine, Augustin Poujoulat transliterated a simplified version of that allegory as a sermon (“CC. Grandeur du Christ” [1808]) intended for liturgies during the week of Epiphany:

Jesus-Christ a réuni les deux en un, afin de nous faire aimer l’unité de sa

personne, afin aussi de nous inspirer une ardeur indefatigable à recueillir

les rameaux qui, après avoir été greffés sur l’olivier franc en ont été

détachés par l’orgueil…et que Dieu est assez puissant pour greffer de

nouveau. (183)

In this allegory, which justifies the proliferation of Gentiles (who are called to take up the

Judaic roots of Christianity), the branches of the wild olive tree––which bear no fruit unless grafted onto a domesticated cultivar––carry a salient equation between moral dereliction and sterility.62 Regardless of whether Saint Augustine, champion of monogamy against the ascetic current of the early church, intended his sermon to be interpreted as an allegory of fertility, the image of “lopping off” a wild olive branch easily lends itself to connotations of emasculation and impotence if taken out of context of the original sermon. Elsewhere, especially in Saint Augustine’s sermons on Catholic

Martyrs, symbols of broken branches, blinded hearts, and keys that unlock the secrets of

62 The allegory of the infertile olive tree, which draws on the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans (9), recurs throughout Augustine’s writings. Aside from its role in Contra Faustum Manichaeum, it is prominently featured in two corresponding sermons for Epiphany (chs. 202, 203), which are included in Augustin Poujoulat’s translation of his complete works (1808), and in Chapter 21 of De Civitate Dei contra Paganos (or City of God) (426 AD). 103 Christ––which are integral to his metaphor of the wild olive tree––bear a striking resemblance to Duras’s depiction of the secret in Olivier. After comparing unbelievers to boughs broken off the tamed olive tree, the theologian elaborates on the sense of mystery that “veiled” even the hearts of the Maccabees (famed martyrs of the Old Testament who are venerated in the month of August) before the arrival of Christianity:

Si ces martyrs ne confessaient pas encore manifestement le Christ, c’est

que le mystère du Christ était voilé encore…Et quand la voile disparaît,

c’est pour montrer ce qu’il recouvrait; et si ces secrets n’étaient pas

ouverts, c’est qu’on n’en avait pas rapproché encore la clef de la croix.

(Poujoulat 494)

Considering the tropes from Greek and Roman mythology that Duras refashions under the Judeo-Christian sign of the olive tree, the relations between her novel and Classical myth reflects a profound intellectual undertaking in Olivier’s intertextual relations, as well as an aesthetic code that basks in its transhistoricism.63 Only the most educated among Restoration society would recognize a double-entendre in the Nangis’ almond tree or the lotuses of Homer’s Odyssey that Louise mentions in passing. Nevertheless, when she evokes messianic figures like Attis and Adonis within the trappings of liturgical

63 Nearly ten years before the creation of Olivier, Duras wrote of her profound interest in Latin poetry to her friend Rosalie Constant (January, 1812): “Ma chère, vous ai-je dit que j’apprenais le latin? Cela m’amuse beaucoup. Il y a deux ans que j’ai commencé, et j’entends assez couramment pour être frappé des beautés. Je lis Horace en ce moment…Nous ne faisons que piller ces pauvres anciens: ils ont pensé pour nous qui ne pensons plus…Mon cher latin me prépare une foule de plaisirs nouveaux, celui qu’on ne connaît guère, de lire un chef-d’œuvre pour la première fois, avec son jugement bien formé” (Pailhès 92). 104 prose, Duras repurposes the pantheistic moorings of post-Revolutionary literature (which permeate works such as Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs [1807] or Benjamin Constant’s De la religion [1824-1831]) to the effect of pastiche, taking aim at the very image of the

Romantic hero as martyr.64 Along these lines, naming her final novel after one of the few phallic icons of the New Testament, Duras champions the capacity of her protagonist to

“expose” (however ambiguously) the symptoms impotence, sterility, and moral aberrance associated with the mal du siècle.

Where the poetics of slippage obfuscates what ultimately can be understood,

Duras’s affective narrative of the closet depends on that which cannot be expressed outright, as seen in the traces of deletion that line her working manuscripts of Olivier.

Rather than the fragmentation of meaning that accompanies slippage, the hero’s violent reaction to Louise and M. de Rieux’s private meeting (Letters 22-24) epitomizes discursive constraint in the novel. The prelapsarian tension between the will to know and self-preservation fills Olivier’s gaze when he “fixes his eyes on [Louise,]” in expectation of her response to the claim that she plans on marrying M. de Rieux:

Et ses yeux se fixèrent sur les miens comme s’il attendait de moi une

réponse. ‘Vous savez bien, lui dis-je…ce n’est pas monsieur de Rieux que

je choisirais.—Et qui donc?’ s’écria-t-il. Mais au même instant…il mit sa

main sur ma bouche, et s’écria avec un accent déchirant: ‘Ne le nommez

64 The significance of the Attis and Agdestis myth in Olivier is treated in pp. 124-129 of this dissertation. 105 pas pas! Ne le nommez pas! Louise je ne veux pas le savoir, laissez-moi

vivre quelques jours encore.’ (170)

Whereas Duras places Louise out of earshot in the galerie de Rouville (thus facilitating slippage), when Olivier forces his hand against Louise’s mouth to prevent her from expressing the desire to marry her cousin, it is the unspeakable truth that sustains the psychology of chaste desire in the novel. If Louise admitted her intention to pursue only the comte de Sancerre, his competitor would lose all value that was conferred on him through triangulation. Empowered through the illusion that he must compete with the virile comte, yet faced with the confirmation that the converted roué is actually of little interest to Louise, the silence Olivier forces on his cousin belies the hero’s dependence on the object of his jealousy. Undoing the stalemate between Louise’s dueling suitors would threaten Olivier’s survival, at once facilitating Louise’s desire for conjugal life and robbing the relationship between Olivier and the comte de Rieux of worth. When he pleads for Louise to keep her feelings to herself so that he may “live a few more days more,” the correlation between discursive repression and Olivier’s survival brings the fragility of such triangulation to the forefront of Duras’s narration. Ensuring the hero’s well-being, the secret exists within this same paradigm of discursive constraint, concealed behind––if not propping up––the heterosexual edifice of mediated desire between hero and rival.

106 Redactions of the “Heart” and Same-sex Desire

Where they reinforce the image of homo-affinity between cousins, intentional acts of deletion, and hence of textual suppression, further underscore the potential queerness of the Romantic novel. In regards to the letter in which Louise is blocked from answering

Olivier’s question (23), Virieux argues that the rhetoric surrounding the word jumeaux

(twins) as Duras describes the connection between the two cousins serves to reinforce the

Romantic topoi of narcissistic love and the âme-reflet, and so announces a tragic end to the novel.65 Remarkably, Olivier’s own description of the magnetic “attraction” between him and his cousin in the letter (24) that follows contains a significant alteration: “je suis sans cesse tourmenté du besoin de te retrouver, et mes pensées, mon cœur, mon âme,

[…mon corps sont,] tout ce qui est en moi, est attiré vers toi comme l’aimant vers le pôle qu’il chérit” (172, 273 variation in brackets).66 When Duras rubs out the imagery of

Olivier’s “body” from his confession, the tie that draws the cousins together loses its carnal eroticism. A force of nature dominates this sexless image of magnetism, in which two blocks of metal bump against each other and stick, drawn together as opposites (in the physical sense of contrasting currents), yet fixed in a non-penetrative engagement.

Along with the words “mon corps” (my body), Duras also changed the expression “tout moi est attiré” (“every part of me is attracted”) to a more elaborate phrase, “tout ce qui est

65 “La comparaison avec les jumeaux renchérit sur l’image fraternelle et sur le thème narcissique de l’âme-reflet (lettre XXXIV): l’unité rêvée devient identité de destin et annonce le drame final” (228). 66 In her edition of Olivier, ou le secret (1971), Virieux meticulously transcribes the variations and strikethroughs found in one of Duras’s working manuscripts from the private archives of the château de Chastellux (241-290). All variations cited in this chapter are quoted from Virieux’s edition of Olivier. Also see, “L’Établissement du texte” (Virieux 104-107). 107 en moi est attiré” (“all that is within me is attracted”), highlighting the interiority of

Olivier’s affinity. Whereas Duras later encodes homosexual attraction in the symbolism of his almond tree (Letters 29-31), the redactions in Letter 24 convey a love that transcends the gendered indices of the body, as Olivier describes a union that enjoins permutations of the generalized self rather than the penetrator-penetrated dichotomy associated with heterosexual desire.

Yet it is in light of this unsexed union that Duras’s revision of homo-affinity as a

Romantic trope surfaces. Where she erases any allusions to Olivier’s homosexuality,

Duras shifts her focus to the untenability of the cousins’ homo-affinitive connection by emphasizing the suspicions of infidelity that suffuse their relationship. This kind of revision is most apparent in the heroine’s determination to marry Olivier: “son mariage seul serait un obstacle invincible. Je lèverai tous les autres [causés sans doute par une délicatesse excessive]” (171, 272 variation in brackets). In the unrevised variation,

Louise’s certainty of the cause for Olivier’s condition––when she denounces “all those other [obstacles] caused without a doubt by an excessive delicateness [in him]”––stuns when compared to the sense of mystery that defines the novel. Left unedited, the phrase casts Olivier as a passive groom to be carried off and wed so long as he is available, compared to the herculean efforts of Louise, who remains ever-ready to “lift” any obstacle (impotence or otherwise) between the cousins. Relying on the enigma that stands between them, Duras eventually restores the equal footing between two homo-affinitive lovers by means of erasure. Subsequently, the most candid descriptions of Olivier’s secret

108 are also removed, as is the opportunity for licentious free-association on behalf of the reader.

When we consider Duras’s most drastic change to her manuscript, in which the author strikes through allusions to a homoerotic relationship between Olivier and M. de

Rieux, Louise’s doubts that Olivier has been betrothed to another woman convey a pronounced sense of irony. In one variation, Olivier lives with his rival following their duel: “mais [l’impression de] ce duel [sur Olivier est bien plus profonde, il passe sa vie chez M. de Rieux et]...Son changement est affreux” (181, 278, variation in brackets).

Virieux compares this omitted relationship with the strange obsession that Octave takes up with his valet in Armance (after having pushed his servant out of a window) and notes, as well, that the duel scene in Stendhal’s pastiche occurs in an entirely different context

(between Octave and a fatuous journalist): “une variante nous dit qu’il passe ses journées chez le comte de Rieux (un peu comme Octave se dévoue au doméstique…Armance, chap. III). Chez Stendhal, le duel est traité tout autrement: il n’a rien à voir avec le secret d’Octave…” (232, parentheses in text). Without forming an argument around such a poignant observation, Virieux highlights one of the greatest differences between Duras’s

Olivier and Stendhal’s imitation of it. In Armance, Octave’s obsession with Julien appears an act of sadism above all else, and, without the context of Olivier’s jealousy in

Duras’s novel, the valet’s fate cannot be associated with Octave’s duel in any clear manner. Along these lines, I insist on reading the overlap between felled rival and live-in companion as the discursive limit neither of these authors were willing to breach in the final version of their novels. In collapsing these two roles, a traditional instance of

109 mediated desire transforms into one of homoerotic triangulation, in which the object of aspiration (here, Louise) serves as a means to an end, that medium by which two rivals eventually come to possess what they actually desire––which is one another. Following the duel, M. de Rieux essentially (if not unceremoniously) disappears from the text, so the last obstacle that stands between Louise and the comte de Sancerre is none other than the indomitable secret itself. Olivier’s “terrible change” occurs not only as a reaction to wounding M. de Rieux, but to the paradox of competing homo-affinities, when he is faced with a dichotomy of affections that draws him toward his exogenous male companion as well as the incestuous reflection of himself in Louise. Through her excisions of the text, Duras succeeds in veiling any latent homosexuality within its diegesis to such an extent that Denise Virieux validly claims that “Mme de Duras ne fait pas allusion dans son roman à l’homosexualité de Custine” (cited above; 89, n. 54). Yet

Virieux still recognizes the homoerotic overtones that color the relationship between the hero and his rival, Saint-Hilaire, in Henri de Latouche’s rendition of Olivier: “[a]u lieu de la jalousie névrotique à l’égard du rival viril…[Latouche] laisse supposer une attirance suspecte chez le héros pour un caractère tout opposé au sien” (44). Considering

Latouche’s pastiche of this situation, as well as the scene’s resemblance to Astolphe de

Custine’s sudden departure to England (where he began a life-long relationship with his lover Édouard Sainte-Barbe), I contend that Duras once intended to signify a preferential and same-sex desire as the condition that plagues her hero, especially in the “terrible

110 change” that follows the redacted duel.67 However, once the narrative of the rivals’ life together is deleted from the novel, the reasoning behind Olivier’s suicide becomes all the more opaque, and any choice to be made between these competing affinities remains securely closeted.

Such success in concealing the hero’s nature goes hand in hand with her

Sentimentalist mode of representation, especially when Duras conjures the image of

Olivier’s “heart.” Much in the way the author nearly permits Louise to profess her familiarity with the hero’s “excessive delicateness,” another sizable redaction from Letter

23 reveals an even more prolix––if not enigmatic––assertion on the heroine’s part:

[Que pouvez vous avoir a me cacher?] Qui partagera vos peines si ce n’est

moi? [Il ne me répondit point—Depuis longtemps, lui dis-je, je

soupçonnais la cause de ce chagrin secret…avez-vous pu croire que vous

parviendrez à dissimuler avec moi? Depuis l’enfance] Ne suis-je pas

accoutumé à lire dans votre cœur? (171; 271-2, variation in brackets)

The few words that Duras chooses to include in the final version of this passage play on the very purpose of her redaction, seeing as the author deprives Louise of the ability to accurately “read Olivier’s heart.” In refusing to divulge these suspicions, the duchesse

67 Rather than M. de Rieux, Virieux highlights the role of Lord Exeter in Olivier as a probable avatar of the real-life Sainte-Barbe: “[M]ais Mme de Duras doit savoir que Custine s’est embarqué pour l’Angleterre le 22 juillet et qu’il en est revenu le 10 octobre avec Edward Saint- Barbe qui se fait appeler M. de Brent…ainsi lord Exeter, l’ami d’Olivier, qui, semble-t-il, accompagne le héros à son retour d’Angleterre, porte également le nom d’une ville…On peut remarquer aussi qu’Edouard de Sainte-Barbe [sic]…est né à Lymignton, devant cette île de Wight où les héros d’Olivier font un bref et mélancolique voyage” (42). 111 also magnifies the sense of unknowability, even unreadability, that surrounds her male protagonist. When Louise no longer asks the kind of leading questions that undermine her cousin’s effort to hide the secret (such as the comtesse’s pointed retort to his silence,

“could you have believed you would get away with hiding this [dissimuler] from me?”), the reason for Louise’s frustration is transfigured. In this shift, obstructed desire for her cousin then changes to certain ignorance of Olivier’s reason for leaving her. Duras goes on to omit Louise’s longstanding knowledge of her cousin’s “heart,” removing the words

“depuis longtemps” (“for a long time”) and “depuis l’enfance” (“since childhood”) along with the previous questions put to her cousin. The removal of these allusions to the duration of time alter the wide scope of knowledge once attributed to an earlier iteration of Louise, who always understood the source of Olivier’s secret. The historical implications of this redaction not only rule out any reading in which impotence figures as the hero’s singular weakness, but also suggest that Duras understood homosexuality as a quality intrinsic to one’s character, whose particular affinities were inscribed in one’s heart before adulthood. But even in the final version of the text, Louise’s capability to

“share his pain” arises from the homo-affinitive connection––in all its reflexivity–– between the comtesse and her dandyish cousin. Unable to consummate such desire on her own, it is no wonder Louise shares her cousin’s fate after he puts a bullet a through his heart and, in doing so, obliterates himself and any legible trace of the secret that both enjoined and separated them.68

68 Duras’s description of Olivier’s suicide is quoted on p. 128 of this dissertation. 112 Myth and Misunderstanding in Olivier

Through her use of intertextual metaphors, Duras nevertheless constructs a profound instance of misprision that relays the audacious subject that inspired Olivier’s creation (rather than the diegetic secret itself). A profound misunderstanding revolves around the sentimental value of an almond tree that Olivier gave to Louise in their youth.

Rather than alluding to the tree’s tendency to bloom before the end of winter––an unordinary trait for which the species was renowned at the time of the Restoration––

Louise ends Letter 31 with a reference to the opiates of Homer’s Odyssey: “[a]ie pitié de moi, j’ai tort, je le sais…qu’on est heureux de pouvoir juger raisonnablement le sentiment…Adèle le bonheur ressemble à ces plantes qui enivrèrent les voyageurs de notre vieil Homère, quand on en a goûté tout le reste est fade…” (183). Underscoring

Adèle’s ability “to judge sentiment reasonably,” opposed to Louise’s poor understanding of Olivier’s melancholy, Duras associates the narrowness of Louise’s perspective with that of a desperate lotus-eater, bereft of her numbing flower. As with the tric-trac scene in the previous letter (29), a surface-level reading aligns us with the pangs of Louise, who here acknowledges her own suffering as a barrier to lucid reasoning and thus a harbinger of tragedy. In the same breath, Louise’s reference to Homer’s lotus-eaters stands out for its abruptness, seeing as the significance of that symbol is not taken up or responded to in any letters from other characters in the novel. In “The Black Galatea: Claire de Duras’

Ourika” (2004), Linda Rouillard demonstrates Duras’s mastery when reshaping the myths of the Metamorphoses (especially those of Galatea and Pygmalion) in her first novel, Ourika (1823), in which “Duras’s récit revises the ovidian myth to reconsider the

113 dynamics between creator and created” (3). Following her description of the almond tree in Olivier, Duras embeds her third novel with a clin d’œil toward Greek mythology that subtends the iconic significance of the comte de Sancerre’s gift. Although the almond tree is featured only in passing in the works attributed to Homer, its significance runs much deeper in Ovid’s Heroides and Fasti. In this light, I argue that the symbolic appropriation of the amandier from Ovid’s œuvre and the interpolation of the Odyssey in

Louise’s account of her anguish are both integral to Duras’s reformation of ovidian romance in Olivier.

Where allusions to homeric lotuses or the black sail of Theseus in Olivier easily lend themselves to mythological interpretation, Duras construes the novel’s richest icon by contrasting the etymology behind the hero’s name with an almond tree that Louise regards as metonymic substitute for him. When the comtesse de Nangis visits her mother’s garden (Letter 31), she becomes overwhelmed by the idea of Olivier’s sudden departure and embraces an amandier that the comte de Sancerre gave Louise on her eighteenth birthday:

Ses progrès insensibles n’ont été interrompus ni par le chagrin, ni par les

larmes, ni par la mort. Je l’embrassai en pleurant. Le jardinier me dit qu’il

avait proposé à Olivier d’abattre cet arbre parce qu’il était trop près de la

maison, mais qu’Olivier avait défendu qu’on y touchât. C’est le même

motif qui nous le rend cher. (182-183)

Losing her footing in reality, Louise conceives a false epiphany on seeing the tree.

Instead of facing the absence of Olivier or the fact that she was once married to the comte 114 de Nangis, Louise absorbs herself in jejune vows of affection that align more with the long march of time than the Sentimentalist crises of the novel. Tearfully contemplating its survival, nostalgic for a distant adolescence, and regretting their failed union, Louise embraces the tree as a stand-in for her cousin. Under the sway of the letter’s sentimentality, the reader risks sympathizing with Louise’s delusions. However, as is the case with the game of tric-trac, the heroine’s vision remains glaringly incomplete as she elaborates on an offhanded comment from her mother’s gardener instead of examining her cousin’s motives for protecting the tree. Hence, a Sentimentalist reading delves only half of the narrative significance at hand, since it remains uncountered by Olivier’s own reasoning in the matter. What is more, Louise’s sentimentality proves to be the cause for a sardonic misunderstanding at the center of her lovesickness, as she extols an overgrown tree (which the gardener should otherwise cut down) as a symbol of enduring love.69

Hermeneutically speaking, Olivier’s attachment to the tree––which he “forbade from being harmed”––presents the reader with thinly veiled instance of castration anxiety.

Nevertheless, when it remains intact, Duras imbues it with a subversive equation between the hero and a flowering tree, that feminine double of the olivier, whose wild variants produce cyanide rather than edible almonds.

As Duras substitutes one symbolic tree for another, she interweaves two incompatible narratives that each purport to explain Olivier’s withdrawal from Louise.

69 While it is tempting to read Louise’s embrace as a rather visible attempt to hold on to a metaphorical substitute for Olivier’s phallus, the fact that Louise’s naivety remains constant throughout the novel relegates such a reading of Louise’s erotic agency to the realm of unconscious (instead of explicit) desire. 115 By way of this manoeuver, she constructs a narrative lens of misprision that stands to separate truth from fiction for the initiated reader. Recounting the tree’s steadfast growth,

Louise offers her own interpretation of “le même motif qui nous le rend cher,” and it is the duality of this motif (motive, also motif) that belies the heroine’s misunderstanding in that scene. Regarding Louise’s allusion to the lotus-eaters of Homer, Virieux describes the moral confusion that occludes her judgment: “[e]n se rapprochant d’Olivier, Louise agit à l’encontre de la sagesse commune…mais elle n’est pas en plein accord avec elle- même” (232). Uncertain of Olivier’s true motives, as well as Louise’s mental stability, one must parse that which remains unspoken in her letter so as to extract meaning from the heroine’s faulty vision. For all its present absence, the lack of Olivier’s voice in the

Nangis’ garden undermines Louise’s explanation as to why her cousin preserves the almond tree. While Louise demonstrates a particular understanding of his condition, the impressions of her cousin’s behavior (which she relays to her sister throughout the novel) also make manifest her affective experience of the secret.

Louise in turn reflects the mythological symbolism of the almond tree as it appears in homeric and ovidian legend. Through Olivier’s desperate cousin, Duras incorporates the distinctly separate figures of Phyllis, Penelope, and Agdestis into the fabric of the novel’s polari. On her end, Louise envisions herself as the constant lover rewarded, that tropic heroine composed in the first two epistles of Ovid’s Heroides, first as Penelope and then as Phyllis, who remained chaste until their lovers came back to them. The intertextual parallels between Ulysses’s return to Penelope (in the twenty-third song of the Odyssey) and the import of the secret for Louise and her cousin can hardly be

116 ignored. In Homer’s epic, to prove to his wife that he is indeed her husband, Ulysses reveals a privileged fact known only to him and his wife:

Et en voicy une grande preuve…Il y'a avoit dans dans ma cour un bel

olivier de la grosseur d’une grosse colomne. Je fis bastir tout autour une

chambre à coucher, quand elle fut achevée, je coupay les branches de

l’olivier…je l’applanis pour en faire le bois de lit…Voilà de bons indices

que je vous donne. (512-513)

Whereas Dacier’s above translation (1716) elaborates on Ulysses’s response when he persuades Penelope to accept him, Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort’s verse translation of the Odyssey (1782) succinctly narrates the revelation of the hero’s “secret,” which lies in their marital bed that was built from a transformed olive tree: “[a]u milieu du palais un superbe olivier/ tout chargé de rameaux, levait son front altier/…et sur ce fondement ma secrette industrie/ fait régner l’élégance avec la symétrie” (23 v. 189-190, 195-196, emphasis mine).70 When Louise reflects on Ulysses’s encounter with the lotus eaters,

Duras conveys a fantasy that her beloved might to return to her, subtending a hope that the secret regarding her own Olivier might be revealed. As she clings to a substitute for her cousin in the flesh, this dynamic of misprision amplifies the sense of bias in Louise’s mythical vision. By casting herself in the Classical trope of attendant Penelope, Louise attributes the secret to an act––rather than questioning whether it conceals a terrible flaw

70 “[M]ais s’il est veritablement mon cher Ulysse, il luy sera bien aisé de se faire connoistre plus seurement, car il s’est passé entre nous des choses secretes, qui sont connuës de nous deux.Voilà ce qui peut me porter à le reconnoistre” (Dacier 505-506). 117 in the hero himself. If this allegory of the hidden olive tree interpolated only the myth of

Ulysses and Penelope, then the secret, as a poisonous vice (rather than the character of the man it plagues), would alone be implicated as the catalyst for the novel’s tragic ending. In that case, Louise’s attempts to make known her acceptance of his condition so that Olivier may overcome its deleterious effects would appear well-founded, if not epic in scale.

However, where Louise’s allusion to the lotus eaters of Homer recalls the separation of Penelope and Odysseus in the Odyssey, Duras’s dualistic portrayal of the amandier pertains to its distinct etiologies in Greek mythology. Depending on which myth one chooses to believe, the almond tree either sprung from the corpse of lovelorn

Phyllis or the castrated phallus of Agdestis. In this vein, Louise and her cousin represent a divergence in Classical knowledge that evolved in eighteenth-century France, as the mythological bearings of the almond tree were revised by encyclopédistes and philologists of the period. In his compendium of ancient mythology, which enjoyed immense popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Explication historique des fables, où l’on découvre leur origine et leur conformité avec l’Histoire anciennne (1711), the abbé Antoine Banier describes the myth of Phyllis and

Demophoon with Catullus’s version of it in mind:

Phillis étoit fille de Lycurgue Roi de Thrace; Demophoon étant passé chez

elle, s’en fit aimer: mais…il fut obligé de partir pour aller prendre la

possession du Roiaume d’Athenes…il promit a Phillis de revenir dès que

ses affaires seroient finies, & lui marqua à peu près le temps: mais le

118 terme étant expiré, la belle Phillis qui le crut infidele, se pendit de

desespoir…On publia pour donner du merveilleux à cette aventure, que les

Dieux l’avoient changée en Amandier…on prétend [reprit Alcidon] que

comme l’Amandier fleurit pendant que le vent Zephire souffle…on dit que

c’étoit l’Amant de Phillis qui venoit la visiter, & qu’elle se réjouissoit de

son retour en s’épanouissant. (494-495)

Even in Banier’s popular version of the myth, the narrator casts a shadow of doubt on the metamorphosis of the suicidal princess (whose name, Φυλλίς, means “leaves” or “petals” in Greek), leaving the readerly Alcidon to insist on the allegory’s connotation with the almond tree, which blooms when caressed by the West Wind (Zephyr). By the time of the

Encyclopédie (1751-1765), Phyllis’s association with the almond tree was supplanted in scholarly work by the Agdestis myth––an origin story from Ovid’s Fasti, in which the two-sexed god is castrated, thereafter becoming Cybele (Rhea).71 Counter to the efforts of

Enlightenment scholars to resurrect a clearer origin story of the almond tree in ancient mythology, Duras revives and rewrites the myth of the Phyllian heroine through Louise’s death, taking aim at the generic expectations of a reading public who, not unlike Alcidon of Banier’s pedagogy, idealized the prospect of life imitating art. With the exploits of

Ulysses on her mind, Louise nonetheless implicates herself in the role of an ovidian

Phyllis, dealing in love letters that––much like the almond tree’s blossoms––will testify to her longing beyond the fate of chaste death.

71 These sources are discussed in detail in pp. 124-129 of this dissertation. 119 As the comtesse fades into oblivion over the course of the novel’s epilogue, Duras invokes the image of the torch-bearing women of the Heroides to demonstrate the extent to which Louise’s despair arises from her status as a Romantic reader. The resemblance between Louise and the Phyllis of Ovid’s Heroides (as two abandoned women who waste away while waiting for the return of their beloved) paints an antithetical vision to the constancy for which Penelope is rewarded in The Odyssey. Duras’s epilogue more explicitly takes up the metaphor of Phyllis and Demophoon by depicting Louise at the foot of her family’s oak tree. In the final pages of Olivier, the heroine sits before the

Chêne de Beauval––where she so often met with her cousin––and continues to waste away across the seasons.72 Much in the way Phyllis returned to the shore nine times to watch for Demophoon’s return (in an act of devotion remembered as “The Nine Ways”),

Louise progressively embodies the rooted figure of a tree, returning every day to their meeting place, weathering the inclemency of the seasons in stolid vigil: “[d]epuis ce jour, elle a accompli chaque jour ce triste pélérinage; par les neiges et les glaces de l’hiver, au soleil brûlant de l’été, sous les pluies de l’automne, elle se rendait à son rendez-vous solitaire, elle ne paraissait pas sentir le changement des saisons” (201). Virieux justly singles out the stoic narrative of the epilogue, opposing the numbness of Louise to the

Sentimental heroines of Sophie Gay and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni: “[l]a sobriété de cette peinture est…exceptionelle dans le roman de l’époque: Louise n’est pas une pathétique

Ophélie…Elle n’est plus qu’attente” (240). The singular ending of Olivier not only

72 “Le lendemain à huit heures, elle retourna au Chêne de Beauval; marchant à pas lents, elle atteignit le pied de l’arbre…et, immobile, elle sembla oublier le temps” (201). 120 conjures the same dangers for Louise that Phyllis runs with Demophoon, but underscores her inability to name the reason for her cousin’s death. Regarding the cause behind

Phyllis’s suicide in the epistles of Ovid, Laurel Fulkerson, in The Ovidian Heroine as

Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (2009), exposes the complexity of Phyllis’s so-called naivety: “her status as an overactive reader actually causes her own destruction, for she is, in effect, seduced into the fictional world. Far from being a naïve victim of her lover Demophoon, as she often has been seen, she is a victim of her own belief in the potential of poetry to serve as a model for life” (26). Through perfect imitation of Ovid’s attendant lover, Duras undermines the conventions of the

Sentimental novel with biting irony, for Louise’s unwavering fidelity ultimately does not provoke any thrill of effusive feeling, but instead reveals Romanticism’s drastic conditioning of its public. Having disappeared into the aether herself, Louise constitutes an archetype of the closet’s victim. Ever the conventional reader, when she blends into the fiber of an unfeeling tree, the heroine imitates the Sentimental genre to the point of deserving her own metamorphosis––as a newly forged icon of Romantic extremism.

Decoding Louise’s Almond Tree

On the other hand, Olivier’s protection of his literal almond tree transmits the most brazen of insinuations regarding the secret. Evoking the story of Cybele and Attis in

Louise’s letters, Duras interpolates a castration myth that served as an etiology of both the almond tree and the galli, priests who emasculated themselves to worship the Mother of Gods (Cybele, Rhea). On the one hand, Duras’s use of this myth emerges in

121 meaningful proximity to the question of Olivier’s impotence. Yet alternatively, rather than providing a simple key to decode her hero’s secret, the Attis myth deals in a wide- reaching poetics of familial desire––itself a perplexing story of passion for incest between intersex gods, whose threat to order on Olympus, in the case of Agdestis, Attis, and

Cybele’s priests, must be resolved through severing the victim’s phallus. While the association of Phyllis with the almond tree regained popularity during the nineteenth century, it is Attis who is cited in the origin myth of the amandier in Jaucourt’s article

(“Sangar”) for the Encyclopédie (1765) (617; vol. 14), as well as in the works of both

Charles Dupuis and Benjamin Constant on ancient religion. In a literary gesture reminiscent of the Restoration itself, Duras at once confronts the scholarly obsolescence of the phyllian heroine and participates in the Revolutionary exegesis of the Attis figure, whose Phrygian cap once inspired the cut of the bonnet rouge.

Drawing on allegories of chaste romance, madness, and the castrated galli, Duras presents a coded symbolism for an intersex subject that was legible, if not as imposing as the figure of Agdestis itself, to the classically educated invitees of her salon.

Reconstructing a comprehensive version of the myth of Attis and Cybele that was available to readers under the Bourbon Restoration requires textual corroboration between accounts––and across several variations in Greek mythology––of the castration of the detiy Agdestis, the birth of Attis from an almond, and the ovidian narrative that inspired Quinault and Lully’s successful opera, Atys (Attis) (1676). Whereas the protagonist of Atys stabs himself to death (just before Cybele changes him into a sacred pine tree), readers of Pausanias and Strabo encountered more prickly renditions of the

122 myth in the centuries following the Renaissance that unbosomed the transformation of

Agdestis into Cybele (via emasculation) and the birth of Attis from Mother of Gods’s dispatched phallus. Compared to contemporary sources, Charles-François Dupuis’s secularist masterpiece, Origine de tous les cultes ou Religion universelle (1794), provides his epistemology of the Agdestsis myth with stunning clarity:

La tradition de ce pays faisoit d’Atys un Androgyne, né à peu près…d’une

éjaculation de Jupiter, pendant son sommeil. La terre…donnait naissance à

un être, qui avoit les organes de la génération des deux sexes, et auquel on

donna le nom d’Agdestis. Les dieux effrayés de ce monstre, lui

rentranchèrent le membre viril, lequel se changea en un superbe amandier,

qui portait les plus beaux fruits. (258)

Keeping his distance from radicals such as Dupuis, in his publication of Œuvres complettes d’Ovide (1799), Jean-Charles Poncelin de La Roche-Tilhac lifts his translation of the Metamorphoses directly from Antoine Banier’s edition (1737). In the explication for the text, Banier writes that Arnobius’s (284-305) rendition of the Attis myth links the almond tree––as well as the pomegranate––to Agdestis, and thus to the sexless love affair of Cybele and Attis:

D’autres auteurs, cités par Arnobe, ont mêlé dans cette fable des

circonstances impénétrables. Nana, disent-ils, en touchant une grenade ou

un amandier qui s’étoit formé du sang d’Agdistis, que Bacchus avait fait

mourir, conçut Attis, qui…fut si cher à Cybèle, qu’elle fit pour lui les

folies que je viens de raconter. (Banier 371; Tilhac 424). 123

Benjamin Constant, whose cousin (Rosalie) remained one of Duras closest friends throughout her life, provides yet another description of Attis’s castration in De la religion––which was published one year after Duras put aside her work Olivier (1825):

“Agdistis, à qui sa mutilation n’avait laissé qu’un sexe, s’enflamme pour Attys, et dans sa fureur jalouse, lui fait subir le même traitement que celui qu’elle avait éprouvé des dieux

(PAUS. VII, 17; STRAB. X, 3, XII, 2.) Rien assurément de moins grec que tout cela”

(322, parenthesis in text). As seen throughout Duras’s construction of the closet, the infusion of the figure of Agdestis into the extradiegetic symbolism of the novel does not expose a simple truth. Rather it conveys the complexity of desire for sameness, coupling a chaotic representation of non-binary gender (which runs the extreme ends of hermaphroditism and castration) with depictions of incestuous desire and hysteria that unravel at the climax of these myths. In light of its queerness, opposed to the mores of

Restoration France, Constant’s final comment on the Agdestis myth––in which he states that “there’s nothing more Greek than that”––bespeaks its potential to make Duras’s contemporaries blush. In drawing on such a taboo etiology of the almond tree, Duras construes an affective experience of illegibility that promises to either chafe the circle of readers who are in the know or resonate in otherwise vain attempts to out Olivier’s secret.

Thus the threat to the almond tree in the Nangis garden presents us with a mise- en-abîme of emasculation that figures within and without the novel, as it calls to intertextual relations with the origin myth of Attis and the diegetic metaphor of impossible satisfaction to which it pertains. For Olivier, the twenty-foot tall almond tree, planted in the earth by Louise’s hands and caressed in the hero’s absence, serves as 124 figurative medium for their otherwise impossible intercourse. Even though such means for sublimation rely on a symbol of unfulfilled desire from Greek myth, and although

Duras plays up the chaste nature of the cousins’ relationship, Olivier and Louise later take the daughter of the unnamed gardener, Suzette, as their shared godchild. Whereas the gardener cannot hew Olivier’s symbolic stand-in, the hero eventually cuts himself down when he is driven mad in the days before his marriage to Louise, on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday. The extraction of Suzette, who is drenched in blood from his injured body, ties the imagery of birth and death to that of Olivier’s symbolic castration, aligning the anniversary of Olivier’s death with Louise’s birthday:

“Mme la Comtesse était évanouie sur les marches de la Croix, et M. le

comte était étendu à ses pieds, baigné dans son sang et un pistolet à côté

de lui!…Nous voulûmes secourir M. le Comte, il fallut enlever de force la

petite Suzette, elle s’était jetée sur son corps, elle criait: ‘Mon parrain!

Mon cher parrain!’ Nous levâmes l’enfant toute plein de sang, mais…il

était mort, la balle avait percé le cœur.” (200)

The result is a pell-mell interpolation of the myth of Attis and Cybele, if not the blood of

Adonis from which opiates sprung, through a poetic sforzando that harmonizes with the imagery of castration attributed to the almond tree in Greek mythology.

When she focuses on the material elements of the scene, on unconscious bodies and pools of blood, Duras leaves the poetics of slippage, misprision, and deletion that pervades Olivier unresolved. As far as the audience is concerned, Duras’s polari otherwise stands to mislead (if not frustrate) conventional readers, whose narrowed 125 interpretation of the text cannot seize on a definite meaning behind hero’s secret. One of the most complex rearrangements of Louise’s letters (15 and 23) sheds light on Duras’s effort to baffle outside readers. At some point, the author integrated the deleted allusions to the hero’s “délicatesse,” as well as descriptions of a “susceptibilité” that has plagued him since childhood, into the written complaint Adèle sends to Olivier (Letter 15):

“Olivier, Olivier! Je ne veux pas vous croire, j’aime mieux vous deviner, et voir dans un tableau déchirant les fantômes créés par une susceptibilité excessive. Voilà le fruit de cette délicatesse, de cette sensibilité qui depuis si longtemps trouble votre vie” (149).

When these ideas are delegated to Adèle’s pen, rather than her sister’s, the cliché of the troubled Romantic comes across as just that, an image of a haunted dreamer in the vein of

René or young Werther, whose whims of melancholy are merely the symptoms of an

“excessive susceptibility” to nerves. Associating the hero’s fruitless love-life with his melancholic disposition, Adèle serves as the voice of reason on behalf of her fellow members of the noble class. Duras dampened the language in the line that follows, switching out the damning fragment, “[voilà le tort],” for the more precious “voilà le fruit de cette délicatesse” (256, variation in brackets), whose modest tone links Adèle’s rebuke to the arboreal symbols of (in)fertility that surround his name. Virieux also identifies a valence of meaning in Adèle’s letter when the marquise states that she “prefers to figure out [deviner]” the cause for Olivier’s behavior on her own: “[c’est un] jeu sur le mot, puisque précisément Adèle ne devine pas” (217). The irrelevance of Adèle’s advice, rigid as the formulaic dépit amoureux it attempts to solve, makes manifest the limits of

126 aristocratic wisdom whose prescripts exceedingly fail Olivier and his cousin.73

Accordingly, the marquise’s Sentimentalist maxim, “ces cœurs souffrants et malheureux trouvent pourtant à la fin le cœur qui leur répond,” resonates with its own macabre irony, insofar as it evokes the Romantic idealism that actually precipitates the destruction of both Olivier’s heart and its eponymous secret at the end of the novel (149).

73 As Virieux explains, the marquise believes that Olivier’s worry stems from a crisis of miscommunication between cousins (dépit amoureux), the kind of climatic noeud (knot) that defines neoclassical love stories: “Adèle pense se trouver devant une situation de dépit amoureux où il suffit de faire cesser le malentendu pour rapprocher les amants” (Virieux 218). 127

Chevalerie and The New Cruise-ade in Stendhal’s Armance

Ever since Stendhal first published Armance (1828), the hero of the novel, Octave de Malivert, has often been regarded as an epitome of the impotent male in nineteenth- century French literature. In this chapter, however, I challenge the kind of reading that reduces Octave to the easily approachable figure of a passionate (and, ostensibly, heterosexual) man pitted against his lack of virility. Engaging the scholarship of

Dominique Fernandez, Anka Muhlstein, and Georges Klebentstein, I aim to delineate the often overlooked tradition of interpreting Armance’s hero as an early iteration of a homosexual character in French fiction. In keeping with the historicist arguments of these scholars, I lend particular attention to instances where the protagonist mirrors the biographical image of Astolphe de Custine, whose rendering in Claire de Duras’s Olivier

(1822) and Henri Latouche’s novel by the same name (1827) inspired Stendhal’s

Armance. To examine the mediation of desire that occurs through chevalerie, the readings in this chapter focus on the juncture between homoeroticism in the novel and

Octave’s obsession with his inherent right to combat, as a descendant of both the Knights of Malta and the noblesse d’épée. On the one hand, Stendhal crafts a pastiche of the

Romantic desire for sameness from the outset of the novel, especially when he embellishes the incestuous affection shared between Octave and his mother or elsewhere narrates the budding romance between the hero and his cousin-bride. But for Octave, it is the passion for engaging his male rivals in battle that threatens the possibility of

128 marriage. Along the course of the novel, Octave’s performance of knighthood results in a handful of violent episodes through which the protagonist actualizes his fantasies of noble masculinity from before and after the Revolution by merging the imagery of a

Romantic hero, the questing knight, and the letter-writing libertines of Choderlos de

Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782). Delving into the narration of same-sex intimacy within Stendhal’s first novel, this chapter aims to articulate the paradigm of homosocial and homo-affinitive desire that Stendhal inscribes within his trope of Restoration chevalerie.

For nearly a century, the focus that the majority of Stendhalien critics have lavished on the failure of coitus in Armance has occluded any discussion of the novel’s actual eroticism. This critical insistence on overlooking Octave’s sexuality continues to haunt such vague readings of the protagonist’s comportment, in which his constant frustration appears as a symbol of aristocratic ennui rather than one of obstructed sexual desire. Victor Brombert, in Stendhal: roman et liberté (1991), offers an explanation that typifies this line of thought: “[l]’impuissance en question n’est pas une déficience uniquement physiologique, mais celle de toute une classe sociale” (52). In his preface to the Pléiade (Gallimard) edition of Armance (2005), after dutifully addressing Paul

Morand’s assertion that Octave was a repressed homosexual, Phillipe Berthier dismisses queer readings of Armance as a fruitless search for a single key to the novel: “[p]our d’autres, ce n’est pas d’impuissance qu’il sied de parler, mais d’homosexualité: alors, selon Morand, tout s’éclaire (encore!)…[mais] on se demande en fait si, soumis à ces

‘éclairages’ divers, le roman n’en finit pas de s’obscurcir” (868). Berthier’s omission of

129 the homosexual reading put forth by Dominique Fernandez from such a substantive review of literary criticism belies a canonical decision to restrict Octave’s sexuality to a heterosexual paradigm of vision.74 Furthermore, as part of a literary collection renowned for its academic authority, whose publicists proudly tout the “bible paper” on which it is printed, the absence of a contemporary reading of Armance (1991) that was no less compiled by a sitting member of the Académie Française from its critical review evidences a remarkable investment in excising homosexual desire from the historical record of French literature.75 Where it is necessary to acknowledge that Berthier’s broader framework puts questions of sexual politics aside, the French critic nevertheless shines a light on Stendhal’s investment in illustrating the “maladie du siècle” throughout his introductory essay, especially when he reconciles Octave’s inculcation in the royalist setting of Andilly with the post-Revolutionary politics of the Restoration:

[Octave] n’hérite pas seulement de l’indemnité [pour la Révolution], mais

d’un certain nombre de traits d’époque, typiques de ce…que Stendhal

nomme ‘la maladie {du} siècle’, et on doit l’inscrire, à part entière, dans la

lignée qui, de Chateaubriand à Musset, ausculte une pathologie dont est de

74 In his “Notice” to the Pléiade edition of Stendhal’s Œuvres romanesques complètes, Phillipe Berthier offers a critical history of the reception of Armance that summarizes dozens of sources, from books, to scholarly articles, to archival documents and Stendhal’s personal correspondence. See pp. 859-892. 75 The marketing copy on the homepage for Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade anthologies highlights the material and scholastic quality of these editions, whose “bible paper” reflects their distinguished reputation among literary critics: “[l]e premier dessein de la collection est de proposer, au format poche, les œuvres complètes des auteurs classiques, en préservant un grand confort de lecture. D’où le papier bible, le petit format, la couverture de cuir souple et le soin porté à la composition typographique. Après-guerre, la ‘Pléiade’ devient aussi une collection de référence, par le renforcement de son appareil critique” (Gallimard). 130 plus en plus mise en évidence l’étiologie socio-historique. (865, braces in

text)

In the above passage, Berthier convincingly makes the case that Octave’s condition deserves consideration in sociological and historicist etiologies of the Romantic male.

And while I concur with Berthier’s argument, the critical rejection of the novel at the time of its publication also bears acknowledgment in this regard, seeing as it speaks to the post hoc relevance of Armance to literary historians rather than the novel’s influence among the reading public of the late Restoration. By otherwise treating Octave as a typical case of the mal du siècle, this kind of structuralist reading neglects the significance of the protagonist’s ecstatic exit from the Romantic narrative, in which he refuses to bear the ethical weight of the Sentimental double-bind. Yves Citton offers a divergent analysis of Octave’s suicide that expands the meaning of Romantic impotence beyond that of a purported failure to penetrate one’s object of desire. In his seminal study of impotence in French literature, Impuissances: défaillances masculines et pouvoir politique de Montaigne à Stendhal (1994), Citton underscores the fact that Octave succeeds in physically consummating his marriage with Armance: “[f]ace à un Autre, qui n’exige plus rien, c’est le sujet lui-même qui se révèle insatisfait, insatiable, en défaut seulement par rapport à ses propres phantasmes” (341). Octave’s self-destruction appears as the sole solution to erotic fantasies that reach beyond the realm of what the hero can achieve, even after the couple consummates their marriage. However, where Citton rightfully concentrates on the diminished importance of the “Other” in Octave’s death, he

131 also ignores the hero’s preference for sameness, relegating the desire to consume oneself to hyperbolized “delusions” of supposedly heterosexual pleasure.

Whereas structuralist readings of Armance have previously overlooked the similarities between same-sex and incestuous desire when parsing Octave’s particular

(im)masculinity, Stendhal openly portrays homo-affinity in his first novel to the effect of satire.76 Unlike the attraction to sameness depicted in Olivier, Atala (1801), and René

(1801), the infatuation that arises between Octave and his female relatives distinguishes between incestuous desire and the homoeroticism it sublimates. The most apparent example of this trope arises when the narrator corroborates the vicomte’s questionable virility with the eroticized relationships he maintains with his mother and her first cousin,

Mme. de Bonnivet. Several scenes in Armance smack of incestuous desire, from the

“sorte de passion” with which Octave loves his mother (as well as the jewels she rewards him in secret) (90), to the magnétisme that colors Mme. de Bonnivet’s affection for her

“philosopher” (philosophe) nephew (132-133), to the brimming “passion d’une mère” with which Octave’s mother kisses his fiancée (220). But rather than a homo-affinitive attraction to the self defined as different-than-the-self, Octave’s sudden infatuation with

76 In regards to his respective use of both parody and caricature as forms of satire in Armance, the ambiguities of Stendhal’s moral position in the novel hinge on the pronounced distance between an author and the satirical voice that takes aim at its object of ridicule. Jean Weisgerber, in “Satire and Irony as Means of Communication” (1973) offers a theatrical analogy of this parallel process, which shelters the real-life author from being identified with the “persona” through which satire is transmitted: “The satirist is a kind of playwright hiding behind his mouthpiece––the persona–– and looking at the show while staging it; the persona addresses the victim and directs the attention of the audience to the norms the satirist thus alludes to. The persona and the victim are the actors of the play. The author and the reader are watching from outside, although deeply involved in the process” (6).

132 Armance awakens a desire to substitute his virtually absent phallus. Drawing on the setting of Duras’s Olivier, Stendhal constructs an intricate metonymy for the vicomte’s fetishization of the phallus when the cousins stroll through the bosquets of Andilly:

Elle s’appuyait sur le bras d’Octave et l’écoutait comme ravie en extase.

Tout ce que sa prudence pouvait obtenir d’elle, c’était de ne pas parler; le

son de sa voix eût fait connaître à son cousin toute la passion qu’il

inspirait. Le bruissement léger des feuilles agitées par le vent du soir

semblait prêter un nouveau charme à leur silence. (167)

The narrator then lingers on the “intoxication” that Armance’s “beautiful arm” inspires in the vicomte, even after he returns to Mme d’Aumale: “Octave n’était pas encore remis de l'ivresse qui venait de s’emparer de lui; il voyait toujours ce beau bras d’Armance pressé contre sa poitrine” (168). Rather than envisioning a homo-affinitive reflection of himself,

Octave fantasizes about his cousin’s arm, at once isolated from Armance’s body and pressed against his chest. As Stendhal steeps the couple in a crepuscular scenery, whose rustling leaves merely “seemed to lend a new charm to their silence,” he also undermines any purported reciprocity of desire between them through the voice of the omniscient narrator. While adrift in his fantasies, Octave relishes the fragmented image of his cousin’s body, which he envisions as the remedy for a particular, yet unnamed lack. This metaphor further draws on a prior encounter between the vicomte and his valet (whom

Octave takes by the arm and then tosses out of a window) that predicates the hero’s

133 attachment to his cousin’s arm on a failed homosexual bond.77 Without coincidence, the prospect of possessing such a “beau bras”––enabled through the feminization of an otherwise phallic image––catalyzes Octave’s love affair with Armance. Much like the novel’s peregrinating cousins, homoeroticism and incest occur as distinct and yet intertwined desires within the scope of homo-affinity. Yet, when the cousins fall in love,

Stendhal takes care to separate these phenomena as distinct regimes of desire, contrary to the nebulous ideal of self-expansion that proliferated throughout prior iterations of

Sentimentalism. So divided, the dreamy vision of her arm represents a dualistic (if not omnivorous) potential, transmitting both the vicomte’s fetishization of the phallus (via

Armance’s disassociated limb) and a manner by which Octave might actively please his beloved.

Queer Babilanisme in Armance

The sublimation of phallic imagery in the bois d’Andilly obtains to a letter

Stendhal sent to Prosper Mérimée (1826), in which the author expressed his hero’s intention to buy a prosthetic phallus to use in Marseilles. In this piece of correspondence, which is often invoked as evidence for Octave’s sexual impotence, Stendhal foremost explains his goal to depict Octave (whom he originally named Olivier) as a “babilan.”

Among concurring critics, George Rosa has most extensively cited Stendhal’s babilansime as slang for the physiologically impotent male in his article for The Modern

77 A close reading of Octave’s defenestration of the valet features in pp. 162-165 of this dissertation. 134 Language Review, “Byronism and ‘Babilanisme’ in Armance” (1982), despite the fact that such a concrete interpretation depends on the wide-reaching ontology of one critic,

Pietro Paolo Trompeo, from his Nell’Italia romantica sulle orme di Stendhal (1924).78

When addressing Mérimée, Stendhal outlines several precisions that clearly regard

Octave’s attempt to overcome “impotence” during his honeymoon with Armance: “[e]lle l’adore, et avec la main, il lui donne deux ou trois extases chaque nuit….En 2826, si la civilization continue…je raconterai qu’Olivier a acheté un beau godemiché portugais, en gomme élastique…” (Correspondance 98). The sustained attention Stendhal pays to

Olivier’s dildo in his letter to Mérimée matches the tone expected of libertine writers, such as the marquis de Sade or the comte de Mirabeau: “[je raconterai] qu’il s’est proprement attaché à la ceinture, et qu’avec ledit, après avoir donné une extase complète

à sa femme, et une extase presque complète, il a bravement consommé son mariage, rue du Paradis, à Marseille” (Correspondance 98, original emphasis). When Octave fixates on

Armance’s “beau bras” in the bosquets of Andilly (instead of presenting her with a “beau godemiché” in Marseilles) the inversion of the above scenario indicates the extent to which Stendhal recast Octave’s attainment of the phallus in his novel. Nevertheless, seeing as Stendhal equates the figures of the “impuissant” and the “babilan” in his own

78 Berthier also cites Trompeo’s chronology of babilanisme in his “Notice” to the Pléiade edition of Armance (879). However, Trompeo’s modest description of the “impotente” or his “impotenza” hardly uncovers any discrete signified meaning for those terms beyond the signifier of impotence itself: “codesta cautela…si tratta de’ due vocaboli babilan (impotente) e babilanisme (impotenza), derivati dall’italiano babilano o babbliano. Babilan è Octave de Malivert, il nevrastenico eroe del primo romanzo di Stendhal, Armance…” (197). 135 words, any relationship to be found in Armance between the dildo and his babilan depends on a metaphorical “impotence”:

Il y a beaucoup plus d’impuissants qu’on ne croit. Une femme que vous

voyez le lundi a un Olivier …mon pauvre Olivier est odieux. Les gens

sages diront: ‘Que diable! quand on est babilan, on ne se marie pas.

Olivier vient gêner sa femme et Lord Seymour, qu’il s’en aille, bon

voyage!’ (Correspondance 96, original emphasis)

Instead of the banal implication that physiological impotence is common, it is the pornographic quality of Stendhal’s letter, through which he conveys the “odious” character of his protagonist, that attributes a sexual identity to such “an Olivier.” Seeing as Octave marries Armance, perhaps even with the aid of an elided dildo, Stendhal’s claim that “when one is a babilan, one doesn’t get married” ties Stendhalien babilanisme to a greater phenomenon than physiological impotence or, along the same lines, such a widespread complex as the mal du siècle. In the preface to his edition of Armance (1991),

Dominique Fernandez questions whether the letter’s copia of vulgar imagery, seen in a

“beau godemiché portugais,” or a babilan’s “langue officieuse,” stands to throw his destinataire off the scent of Octave’s homosexuality: “[o]n peut se demander si cette effronterie dans la révélation du ‘secret’ d’Octave ne sert pas à cacher le vrai mystère de ce jeune homme: qui ne serait pas une impuissance physiologique, mais un dégoût homosexuel des femmes” (7). Even though Fernandez’s proposition depends on his intuitive reading of the novel’s “secret,” defining Octave as an impuissant insofar as

Stendhal conceives of the term in no way strikes out the novel’s depiction of same-sex 136 desire. Rather, it informs us of the interrelatedness between these queer subjects in

Stendhal’s first novel. Where Stendhal traffics in vague terms such as the polyvalent impuissant and the erudite babilan in his letter to Mérimée, the capacious significance of

“impotence” (impuissance) most clearly conveys an idiosyncrasy between virility and the naturalized image of sexual penetration. In turn, these monikers paint the babilan/impuissant as obsessed with obtaining a tangible phallus, whether to prove one’s virility or subsume the masculinity of others.

For its keen attention to the hero’s babilanisme, this well-worn approach to

Armance as an “impotence novel” nevertheless provides a necessary framework from which to examine the correlation between same-sex desire, homo-affinity, and the conceptualization of impotence in the Romantic novel. In this regard, the counter- narrative that approaches Stendhal’s first novel as recognizably queer deserves its place in the debate surrounding Octave’s secret. A sub-cultural lineage of reading the vexed existence homosexual hero in the plot of Armance reaches back at the very least to

French literary criticism of the 1950s. In more recent years, Dominique Fernandez has put forth the most explicit of such readings, in both his preface to Armance (1991) and his Dictionnaire amoureux de Stendhal (2013). Georges Kliebenstein, through his

Enquête en Armancie (2005), juxtaposes Stendhal’s “submissive” (soumise) portrayal of homosexuality in Armance against the more “obvious” (patent) example of Balzac’s

Vautrin.79 In “Custine, Stendhal, et le Romantisme” (1959), Phillipe Sénart forges a

79 “[C]hez Stendhal, à la différence de Balzac, il n’y a pas d’homosexualité patente, pas de Vautrin; cette érotique reste soumise, quand elle existe, au même régime de silence que le babilanisme” (158). 137 similar argument when he reads Octave de Malivert as fictionalized version of one of

France’s first openly homosexual authors, Astolphe de Custine: “[i]l suffit de se borner à une évidence: Aloys et Octave expriment le même complexe moral et mental d’impuissance” (9). In Le dernier marquis (1996), Anka Muhlstein emphasizes the similarity between Octave’s sentiments of monstrosity and those of the marquis de

Custine’s Aloys (1829): “le cri d’Aloys…qui fait écho au ‘je suis un monstre’ d’Octave

[chez Stendhal]––soit…une horreur de soi qui s’appliquent beaucoup mieux à un homosexuel accablé par la violence des interdits de la société qu’à un amoureux transi”

(156). And Paul Morand, in “‘Armance’ ne rime peut-être pas avec…impuissance?”

(1953), iterates the same conclusion with admirable clarity in his mock dialogue for the

Nouvelle nouvelle revue française: “tout le comportement d’Octave, incompréhensible et absurde s’il s’agit d’impuissance, devient naturel et clair s’il s’agit de goûts homosexuels” (2). Going forward, I maintain that the concept of impotence, writ large–– which might reflect a broad array of traits, as scholars such as Phillipe Berthier and Yves

Citton have suggested––fails to provide an all-encompassing metaphor for Octave’s comportment in the novel.80 Against the grain of such analyses that limit themselves to the societal implications of male physiological impotence, I insist on approaching the poetics of sexual failure that surround Stendhal’s hero as a primary iteration of the nineteenth-century concept of male homosexuality that offered a pithy figure to be taken up by future generations of French novelists.

80 Bethier and Citton’s structuralist interpretations of Armance are treated on pp. 132-135 of this dissertation. 138 As Stendhal’s private notes and correspondence prove, the author composed his own extra-diegetic code for same-sex desire from contemporary figures like Custine and

Percy Jocelyn, whose names he used to fill a lexical void for the scandals they signified in the public eye. Following his break with Clara de Duras, vicious accusations regarding

Custine’s impotence circulated among the Parisian literati.81 Because Armance capitalized on the scandal surrounding Duras’s unpublished Olivier, Anka Muhlstein describes the impuissance attributed to Octave as an allusion to Custine’s reputation as a sodomite: “Octave est-il Astolphe [de Custine]? Comment ne pas y penser? Stendhal disposait de bien peu de modèles pour dépeindre un jeune aristocrate inverti” (155).

Indeed, Stendhal’s conflation of impotence and homosexuality through the term babilanisme coincides with the actual valence between (unfounded) gossip and the more apparent reason Custine broke with Claire de Duras’s daughter. In his unflinching biography, Le marquis de Custine: le courage d’être soi-même (1987), Olivier Gassouin underscores the contradictory evidence against rumors of Custine’s babilanisme that was laid bare following the birth of Saint-Simon’s son, Enguerrand (which the biographer attributes to the “sincere affection” that inspired the Custines to conceive): “[e]n 1821, conseillé par sa mère, il épouse Léontine de Saint-Simon pour laquelle il n’éprouvait pas d’amour, mais une sincère affection…L’année suivante, ils eurent un fils, Enguerrand, preuve qu’Astolphe n’était pas un ‘babylan’ comme le bruit en avait couru” (33-34). But

81 Yves Citton describes such gossip that surrounded Custine after his break with Claire de Duras’s daughter, which continued to circulate despite all evidence to the contrary: “Le problème est que tous ces raconteurs n’ont guère de base réelle…Omniprésente dans les rumeurs, [l’impuissance] ne s’ancre nulle part dans les faits” (302). 139 even though the marquis overcame both his amorous preference for Édouard Sainte-

Barbe and expectations of sexual failure with Léontine in their marriage to produce an heir, Stendhal repeatedly employed a euphemism for Custine’s sexuality by equating him with Percy Jocelyn––an Irish bishop who was famously convicted of sodomy in 1822 after having been caught in flagrante delicto with a hustling soldier. Bringing the homosexual overtones of this metaphor to light, Michael Lucey and Georges Kliebenstein respectively focus on Stendhal’s dependence on the name “évêque de Clogher” as an antonomastic to imply same-sex desire––if not the act of sodomy––throughout the author’s personal letters. One example of this habit is preserved in the Grenoble manuscripts of Lucien Leuwen (1834), where the bishop’s name covers for a narrative secret other than Octave’s: “Lord Link = évêque de Clogher. Mais cela ne peut pas se dire” (158, quoted in Kliebenstein). Much as Kliebenstein has remarked, Stendhal’s dependence on these monikers for men associated with sodomy carries with it a narrative

“contagion,” especially when the author broaches the discursive limits of silence within his correspondence: “ici…le silence s’étend, par une espèce de contagion, à la dénonciation même, qui préfère l’antonomase à l’emploi du mot ‘direct’” (158). Since they are barely namable in his personal notes, it is hardly surprising these fictionalized outcasts and their vices remain unnamed in Stendhal’s novels. But in this solipsistic equation––in which Octave is to some extent derived from Duras’s Olivier, is a babilan and is Custine, is (like Lord Link) a bishop of Clogher––the dizzying slippage between proper nouns belies their differential and yet profound interrelatedness as keys to

Octave’s condition. In The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality

140 (2003), Lucey also identifies the significance of Custine’s and Percy’s public image in the formation of a new “type” of character: “Stendhal would link together the sexual behavior and aristocratic background of ‘people like’ Custine and Percy Jocelyn to the end of producing an enigmatic and perhaps vaguely pathologized type” (99). As with the cases of Lord Link and Ron, the intersection between Octave’s aberrant sexuality and the trappings of the noble class resonates with historical “‘people like’ Custine and Percy,” even if, to draw on Stendhal’s words, “it cannot be said” as such in the novel. Meanwhile, the author’s exercises in antonomastics contain any prolix definition of the category that encompasses the babilan, the évêque de Clogher, and Custine in silence.

As close readings of Octave’s fixation with his rivals illustrate in this chapter,

Armance transmits what Phillipe Sénart and Yves Citton have framed as a particular

Romanticism that Custine embodied in his biographical life. Citton poignantly observes that, for Olivier-like figures in Romantic literature, the anxiety of sexual failure preempts acts of flight, which figure in the protagonist’s death to society: “[l]es seuls actes que ces

‘héros’ sont capable d’imaginer relèvent tous de la fuite: suicide et retraite religieuse des

Olivier (et d’Aloys), départ en Amérique, duel-suicide ou voyage-suicide d’Octave”

(318). In the above comparison, the inclusion of Aloys among the canon of Olivier novels effectively reiterates the confusion between impotence and homosexuality as it occurs in

Duras and Latouche’s versions of Olivier, Stendhal’s first novel, and Custine’s roman à clef. Continuing in this vein of thought, Citton argues that under the auspices of

Sentimentalism, the flight of the impuissant transmits his reflex to run, not only from love, but from the long arm of the law:

141 Les sévères principes moraux dirigeant la conduite des protagonistes de

1820 en font les adeptes d’un rigorisme passéiste…[E]n voulant réaliser

ensemble lien amoureux et lien conjugal, on surimpose aux relations entre

deux amants un cadre juridique dont l’emprise sera déterminante sur le

modèle d’impuissance régissant [ces] textes.” (309-310)

Yet a more detailed explanation as to how the marquis’s public affairs shaped these

Olivier-like characters lies in the reason why the real Aloys jilted Claire de Duras’s daughter, not for fear of physiological impotence, but from that same consequence that

Dominique Fernandez attributes to Stendhal’s hero: “après examen des preuves, rien n’empêchera de penser…qu’Octave est à la fois homosexuel et impuissant: impuissant avec les femmes par goût des garçons” (11). In fact, Fernandez’s focus on the

“impotence” Octave experiences with women, which results from his “preference for boys” (garçons), corresponds with the once criminal status of male (physiological) impotence as a non-act that was punishable by law before the Revolution. 82 As Phillipe

Sénart propounds in “Custine, Stendhal, et le romantisme” (1959), Custine’s complex image––that of a well-off member of the noble class, who nevertheless described himself as “naturally beyond nature”––resurfaces through Octave in measure with the marquis’s autobiographical novel:

82 Relaying the history of the debitum conjugale (the duty to satisfy one’s spouse) from the days of Saint Paul up through the Anicen Régime, Citton elaborates on the judicial exigencies of Sentimentalist marriage: “[i]nsister à inscrire la relation amoureuse dans le cadre matrimonial revient donc également à faire d’un simple appel sexuel intersubjectif une obligation publique frappée du sceau de la loi” (310). 142 Ce visage [d’Aloys/Octave], c’est celui du héros romantique tel que, pour

son malheur, Astolphe l’incarna. Ainsi, la vie de Custine, qui a osé écrire

‘Je suis naturellement hors nature’…a une valeur de symbole: c’est le

romantisme vécu, le romantisme souffert. Elle a aussi une valeur

d’exemple, car elle est le romantisme jugé. (10)

Custine’s survival beyond the limits of social order stood to epitomize, as Sénart eulogizes, “Romanticism lived, Romaniticism suffered.” But in Stendhal’s hands, the fictional version of such a real-life Romantic exemplifies the repercussions that await those who imitate the movement to its extreme. Through his commandeering of the queer

Romantic, if not its extradiegetic avatars, Stendhal lays bare the paradox of his generation’s nostalgia for a noble past––depicting his hero’s flight, and thus his imitation of life before the Revolution, as a voluptuous call to the grave.

In the interest of queer literary history, and before moving on to readings of chevalerie and the cruise-ade in Stendhal’s first novel, the attenuated relevance of André

Gide’s edition of Armance in this lineage of homosexual readings merits discussion.

Without having read Duras’s Olivier (which remained unpublished in his lifetime), Gide seized on the term babilanisme from Stendhal’s correspondence in his introduction to the novel. A well-known admirer of Stendhal, Gide paid homage to the novel in Les Faux- monnayeurs (1925), but surprisingly he never mentions homosexuality in the preface to

Armance (1921).83 No small number of critics have noted Gide’s candor regarding

83 In “Stendhal et André Gide” (1951), Everett Knight brings forth Stendhal’s influence on the works of Gide, which surfaces in the odd protagonist who “dare[s] to be onself”: “le point de 143 impotence in that essay, which was republished in the same year as his treatise on homosexuality, Corydon (1924). For scholars who shy away from the homoerotic overtones of Armance, Gide’s silence likely reads as a native informant’s own admission of defeat: after all, even a homosexual can see that Octave was unhappy because of his physiological impotence. To the contrary, Fernandez also speaks (through his use of the generic pronoun “on”) for the homosexual critic, as well as the implied reader, when he casts doubt on Gide’s treatment of the secret in Armance: “[o]n regrette que dans sa préface à Armance, publiée dans la NRF en août 1921, republiée en 1924…il s’en soit tenu à la version de l’impuissance, sans oser une autre explication du ‘secret’” (16).

Elsewhere, Paul Morand––himself a purveyor of the mondain class of France’s Third and

Fourth Republics––deems that “Gide a dû avoir deviné le vrai secret d’Octave, le secret d’un frère” (3). Indeed, Morand’s assessment that the editor of Armance “must have guessed Octave’s real secret” seems all but confirmed in light of Gide’s homosexual character, Édouard, who draws close to his nephew Olivier in Les Faux-monnayeurs

(1925), which was published only a year after Corydon.84 The decision to read Octave as a personification of impuissance in terms of inactivity (be it as a sentiment or a social phenomenon) during the years following the Revolution, which influences the lion’s share of Stendhalien criticism, fails to attend to Armance’s resonance with queer readers who have returned time and time again to the charged images of dildos and onanism that

départ, c’est la règle que Gide, encore très jeune, tire de ses premières lectures de Stendhal: ‘Oser être soi. Il faut le souligner aussi dans ma tête’” (10, original emphasis). 84 As with main character of Les Faux-monnayeurs, the name of Olivier’s uncle coincides with the title of one of Claire de Duras’s three novels, Édouard (1825). 144 pervade the author’s letter to Mérimée. We can never know how Gide would have interpreted Armance if he had read Duras’s Olivier. Yet it stands to reason that

Armance’s roots in her unpublished salon novel, as well as the oft-cited letter that describes Octave as an “Olivier,” transmitted the homoerotic desires that foment within those novels to Gide, despite Stendhal’s refusal to name the his own hero’s fatal condition.

The Homo-Affinity of Stendhal’s Chevalerie

To open the following exposition of Stendhal’s cruise-ade, it is in the interest of clarity that I take the narration of Octave’s suicide in Greece, which concludes Armance, as a point of departure. In this erotic pastiche of knighthood, Stendhal interpolates a broad range of chivalric figures that includes warriors of ancient Greece, medieval

Knights of Malta, the letter-writing nobles of Liaisons dangereuses, an exiled Napoleon

Bonaparte, and revolutionary insurgents from the Greek War of Independence (1821-

1832). The titular cruise-ade in this chapter recombines a homological translation of the

French croisade that in English yields the dissimilar nouns “cruise” and “crusade.”

Insofar as Octave’s chivalric intentions provide a model for such an equation, this term is intended to delight in the common etymology of these words and their comparative meanings, so as to evoke the religiopolitical scrimmage between Europe and the Middle

East that spanned the Middle Ages in proximity to the homosexual activity of cruising

(OED). Beyond sharing a linguistic root in common, these two concepts intersect at their respective orientations toward contact with the self defined as different-than-the-self. The

145 motivation behind the Crusades, which imbricated homosocial conquests for land and military glory along an oppositional axis of religions––and, pointedly, not of sexual difference––furnished an opportunity for men to encounter their exotic other (who nonetheless fought for the same Holy Land) on the battlefield. As an analog to the crusader’s will to plunder, homosexual cruising occurs as a function of spontaneous desire for the same sex, notably in public spaces, but on the condition of anonymity––if not the unknowability of the stranger. In Le Plaisir du texte (1973), Roland Barthes extends the real-life structure of gay cruising (here, draguer) to the writer’s relation with his unknown reader: “[é]crire dans le plaisir m’assure-t-il––moi, écrivain––du plaisir de mon lecteur? Nullement. Ce lecteur, il faut que je le cherche (que je le ‘drague’), sans savoir où il est. Un espace de la jouissance est alors créé” (6). Barthes, on the lookout for a reader in-kind, participates in what he envisions as literary cruising, which engenders a

“space for jouissance” throughout his writerly search to please both the destinataire and himself. The pre-eminence of looking in Armance, at once a narratological echo of

Stendhal’s bent toward the informed reader, reveals itself through the protagonist’s hunger for combat––whether at home or abroad. Reflexively, as the following readings demonstrate, it is the homosocial luster of chevalerie that permits the hero his cruise-ade.

Octave’s fascination with chivalric figures from past and present, which underscores their symbolic import in his experience of babilanisme, reflects a queer frame of reference that Elizabeth Freeman describes as “time out of joint.” In Time

Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), Freeman underscores the interdependence between our perception of time and the strictures of social class:

146 In its dominant forms, class enables its bearers what looks like ‘natural’

control over their body and its effects…In turn, failures or refusals to

inhabit middle and upper-middle-class habitus appear as, precisely,

asynchrony, or time out of joint. And as denizens of times out of joint,

queers are a subjugated class…even as many of us occupy other positions

of power including the economic. (19, original emphasis)

The scope of the above argument largely concerns the growth of capitalism in the late- nineteenth century and beyond (and thus the proliferation of the middle and upper-middle classes), yet Octave’s failure to embody the noble duties expected of him results in the same subjugation that Freeman attributes to “denizens of times out of joint,” particularly as it undermines his economic power and social rank. The fragmented sense of time that runs throughout Armance conveys the hero’s fractured privilege in his present age, which denies him the pleasures afforded to noblemen of days past. This paradox between dreaded impuissance and active fetishization mirrors the polarized role that Freeman attributes to queers who have historically trafficked in “a certain counterpoint between now and then”:

[G]ay men, lesbians, and other ‘perverts’ have also served as figures for

history, for either civilization’s decline or a sublimely futuristic release

from nature, or both…Sexual dissidents became figures for and bearers of

new corporeal sensations, including those of a certain counterpoint

between now and then… (7, original emphasis)

147 The moral ambivalence that attends Octave’s dreams of heroism arises from the ambiguity between impotence and sexual dissidence in Armance. The balance between idealist and outlaw shifts in spectacular fashion, however, when the hero’s suicide in

Greece signals both the return to a collapsed homosocial order and his incompatibility with of the emergent ideal of linear time. This indeterminacy extends to the novel’s satirical bearings, for as deranged (if not caricatural) as Octave’s fantasies of knighthood seem, they ultimately stand to parody a generation of narrow-minded readers, capitalists and nobles alike, who failed to grasp the reason behind the hero’s final jouissance.

For Armance’s self-styled knight, the revolution in Greece signifies a juncture in time that portends his opportunity to encounter the homosocial intimacy that marked both chivalric romans and Greek epics. Just as the hero is torn between royalist traditions and the political populism of post-Revolutionary France, the privileged rank that accompanies

Octave’s noblesse oblige brings about an achromatic call to battle. On the one hand,

Stendhal’s antique source for the geography of Greece, Jean-Jacques Bethélemy’s (1716-

1795) monumental Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788), reflects the philhelenistic leanings of a novel that supposedly focuses on events of the present day

(Berthier 861). On the other, when Octave prepares to travel to Greece with his courageous servant, Voreppe, the resemblance of the vicomte to an itinerant François-

René de Chateaubriand––who embarked with his hand-servant to record the Voyage en

Grèce (1807) (and later the Itinéraire [1811])––harks back to the Romantic conflation of

148 Greek hero and crusading knight in the enchanteur’s prose.85 Where Stendhal does not directly implicate Chateaubriand in Octave’s first (and failed) voyage to Greece, when the hero invokes the right to noblesse oblige, the novel paints a familiar obsession with heroic self-fashioning as an alternative to domesticated existence among the Restoration aristocracy. When plying his ambitions to visit Greece, Octave first appeals to his mother’s reverence for their military lineage: “[c]hère maman, un homme qui porte le nom de Malivert et qui a le malheur de n'avoir encore rien fait à vingt ans, doit commencer par aller à la croisade comme nos aïeux” (177). Despite the extreme measure of the comparison, Octave unflinchingly likens himself to the Knights of Malta from which he descended, determined to embark on his own “crusade.” In contrast to the vicomte’s classmates, who view Octave’s penchant for swordplay as a sign of madness, the superlative condition of his request––which sways Mme de Malivert––requires that he set out “sword-in-hand”: “…n’est-il pas naturel qu'un gentilhomme la voie l'épée à la main?” (177). When addressing the elderly marquis de Malivert, Octave instances noblesse oblige as a pretext for his fixation with crusading: “[n]oblesse oblige.…je tâcherai d'assister à un combat [en Grèce] et reviendrai auprès de vous, un peu plus digne peut-être du beau nom que vous m’avez transmis” (178, original emphasis). The symbolic valence of Octave’s noblesse, which alternates between the avventura of landless knights and the moral clemency that facilitated libertinism during the siècle de

Lumières, depends on the vicomte’s claim to free agency as a member of the noble class.

85 “Tout conspirait contre lui; il aidait son domestique le brave Voreppe, à emballer des pistolets; le bavardage de cet homme, enchanté, de partir seul avec son maître, et de disposer de tous les détails, le distrayait un peu” (183). 149 Moreover, Octave’s aspirations to liberate Greece as an inherited duty (rather than one of republican patriotism) all too clearly epitomize the unsuccessful reconciliation of monarchism and democracy that plagued French politics throughout most of the nineteenth-century. The profound divestment of phallocratic order following the

Revolution, which Octave counters by reclaiming the “beau nom” of his male ancestors, spurs the hero to incarnate a chevalerie that he ascribes to yet another group of absent men––who in this case effuse a potential for (familial) communion with the symbolic pater.86 The peculiar knighthood of Stendhal’s hybrid chevalier most obviously parodies the social and political compromise between royalist and republican ideals that yielded the Bourbon Restoration. But at the same time, Stendhal succumbs to the paradoxical esthetic of Romanticism when he portrays the hero as a crossover between nineteenth- century aristocrat and ancient crusader.87

In truly Romantic fashion, Octave also discovers a reflection of himself among family. Accordingly, such similitude surfaces through the cross-gender nature of

Armance, whose androgynous image coincides with her place in the heraldry of the

Zohiloff line. After he realizes his cousin has lost respect for him, Octave conceives an effort “to reconquer Armance’s esteem” in militaristic terms: “[Octave] désirait

86 In “Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Utopia” (1988), Jean-Jacques Goux describes the function of “paterial-ism” in the works of the renowned duelist as a spiritual ideal that suppresses the reality of the “biological” genitor: “[i]n its opposition to materialism, idealism not only proclaims and maintains the difference between pater and genitor, the split between spiritual and symbolic engendering on one hand and simple biological reproduction on the other hand, but tends to make the latter secondary, thus repressing it. It is ‘pater-ialism’” (5). 87 Stendhal’s narrator says just as much through the inner monologue of the elder Malivert, that “tender father of the nineteenth century,” who regrets his son’s “heroic” character: “Le marquis…n’avait point l'âme de ses aïeux du temps de Louis le jeune; il était père et un tendre père du XIXe siècle…il se fût volontiers accommodé d’un fils moins héroïque” (178). 150 passionnément reconquérir l’estime d’Armance; ce n’était pas une entreprise aisée. Cette jeune fille avait un caractère singulier. Née sur les confins de l’Empire russe…Mlle de

Zohiloff cachait sous l’apparence d’une douceur parfaite une volonté ferme…” (114).

The vicomte relates the “unusual” character of his Russian-born cousin, who hides her

“firm will beneath the appearance of perfect softness,” in a metaphor of displacement that mirrors his own (im)masculinity. Furthermore, the manly pastimes of shooting pistols and plotting out historic campaigns bespeak Armance’s military upbringing, which the narrator equates with her Russian physiognomy toward the beginning of the novel. When describing her “Circassian beauty,” Stendhal fingers the androgynous appearance of the comtesse as that which sets her apart from other French women: “[r]ien n’était commun dans le contour de ces traits…pour répondre exactement à l’idée que l’on se fait en

France de la beauté qui convient à une jeune fille” (116).88 Octave’s interest in Armance, if not her “uncommon” virility, then develops into a family affair when her adoptive uncle, M. de Bonnivet, petitions the feu du roi to receive his niece’s right to the cordon bleu. To their misfortune, the Bonnivets eventually fail to ascend to the Ordre du Saint-

Esprit, whose blue sash and white medallion announced the most prestigious of chivalric orders in Bourbon France.89 But before the Zohiloff claim to knighthood proves to be a

88 The narrator’s choice of words when describing her “Circassian beauty” recalls the cross- dressing knight of Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Vie et amours du chevalier de Faublas (1790), as well as the Caucasian setting of the novel that later inspired Daniel Auber's and Eugène Scribe’s opera, La Circasienne (1861): “Elle était remarquable par ce que j’appellerais, si je l’osais, la beauté russe: c’était une réunion de traits, qui …offraient, il faut l’avouer, un singulier mélange de la beauté circassienne la plus pure et de quelques formes allemandes un peu trop tôt prononcées” (116). 89 Once the highest order of knighthood in France, the Ordre du Saint-Esprit was inaugurated by Henri III in 1578 as a means to unify the Catholic nobility during the Wars of Religion (1562- 1598). The order was disbanded once during the French Revolution (1792) because of its close 151 red herring, the illusion that Armance can satisfy her cousin's thirst for chevalerie nearly deters the hero from his destiny in Greece. When he happens on a dueling pistol inscribed with her name, another memory of the comtesse––embedded in a map of the battle of

Missilonghi––prompts Octave’s return to Poitiers: “[i]l prend une carte de la Grèce; en la dépliant, il fait tomber une de ces aiguilles garnies d’un petit drapeau rouge, avec lesquelles Armance marquait les positions des Turcs lors du siège de Missolonghi”

(183).90 The implied imagery behind the flag Octave “drops,” at once a transparent metonymy of his babilanisme, belies the eroticism inherent in the cousin’s encounter with an imagined Orient. On the one hand, Armance’s and Octave’s fascination with the abject Turk reflects a vast lineage of Orientalist intrigues in French literature, in which the narrators of famed works that range from the Chanson de Roland, to Les Mille et Une

Nuits, to Les Lettres persanes, to Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire aestheticize a fictional incursion of the Muslim world. On the other, the specific location of Missolonghi, where

Lord Byron perished as a Greek national hero (1826), entangles a metonymy of the libertine poet within the same lieu as their cherished memento.

Elsewhere in Armance, Stendhal focuses on Octave’s fascination with knighthood in place of the metaphors for homo-affinity, babilanisme, and same-sex desire encoded within this chevalerie. But in the abrupt finishing off of the hero’s crusade, where the

association with the Bourbon dynasty and once again in 1830, following a short-lived revival during the Restoration (1815-1830). For a more detailed account of the order’s history, see Hervé Pinoteau’s introduction to État de l'Ordre du Saint-Esprit en 1830; et la survivance des ordres du roi (1982), pp. 11-20. 90 “Tout à coup il aperçoit ces mots gravés en caractères abrégés sur la garniture d’un des pistolets: Armance essaie de faire feu avec cet arme le 3 septembre 182*” (183, original emphasis). 152 pose of a lifeless Octave copies that of the Greek god Endymion, Stendhal inserts his most overt equation between knighthood and homosexuality. This ending, in effect, provides the clearest point of departure for the exposition of same-sex and homo- affinitive desires in Armance. Stendhal mediates this queer vision of knighthood through a handful of coded metonymies that coalesce in the final pages of the novel, which all draw on Octave’s asynchronous conception of heroism. When Octave convinces himself that Armance no longer loves him, he sets out to commit suicide in Greece, under the pretense of aiding in the Greek revolution:

Là il lui apprit qu' il avait fait vœu d'aller montrer en Grèce que malgré

son dégoût pour les manières militaires, il pouvait manier une épée…Le

vaisseau se trouvait par le travers de l'île de Corse. Le souvenir d’un grand

homme mort si malheureux apparut à Octave et vint lui rendre de la

fermeté. Comme il pensait à lui sans cesse, il l'eut presque pour témoin de

sa conduite. (241-242)

For the hero of Armance, Greece embodies the overlap between those political revolutions that redefined France in the dawn of the nineteenth-century and the fixity of a heroic past. There––as expressed through double-entendres that connote the realization of his phallic obsessions––he finds both the opportunity to “handle his sword” in the fashion of knightly ancestors and a chance to commune with the memory of France’s

Revolutionary emperor, whom Octave imagines as the “witness” to his escapade in

Greece. Thus imbued with the charges of legal witness––to the protagonist’s marriage and to a spontaneously written will and testament Octave signs on his voyage––as well as 153 that of chivalric comrade, the spectre of Napoleon takes on multiple meanings ascribed to a témoin. Contrary to any previous depiction of the hero’s physiological impotence, the capital role conferred to Napoleon, whom the hero “ceaselessly thinks about,” inspires an uncharacteristic “firmness” in Octave at the same time it blatantly contradicts the “disgust for military manners” he professes to Armance. In the liminal space between France and

Greece, Octave treats Napoleon with the same reverence as the knightly figures that inspire his martyrdom, and this sea change at once signals Octave’s immersion in queer time and his exit from the sociopolitical confines of his class status. Once freed from the moral strictures of Andilly, any caricature of physical impotence comprised within the novel’s babilanisme disintegrates as Octave makes his way to the land of crusades and the birthplace of Greek love.

All along Armance, the motivation that drives his knightly quest escalates in its eroticism as a longing for military camaraderie is supplanted by that of attaining the male gaze. When Octave approaches suicide, the hero succeeds forthwith at garnering such admiration in his endymionic death. Brian Martin, in Napoleonic Friendship: Military

Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (2011), sheds light on an homologous case of homosocial desire from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1830). In that novel, Napoleon’s passing acts as a catalyst for Julien de Sorel’s longing for “soldier comrades”:

For the surgeon-major, Julien thus represents the perpetuation of his

memory and a link to the future. But for Julien, the death of his beloved

officer––like the Emperor’s death in 1821––severs all ties to the

154 Napoleonic past. Having lost his military mentor, Julien now longs for

other soldier comrades. (Martin 107)

But instead of the “link to the future” that the old man invests in Julien, Octave’s brush with Napoleonic glory directs him toward a more distant past than the exploits of the

Grand Armée. Despite their opposite roles as social climber and noble quitter, Julien and

Octave represent two facets of an eroticized heroism in Stendhal’s fiction, insofar as their same-sex desires are filtered through the masculine image of Napoleonic friendship.

However, where the prominence of ex-soldiers in Le Rouge et le noir purports to the future remembrance of Napoleon’s army, Octave’s quest in Armance goads him toward the oblivion of a forgotten homosocial past. Inspired by the sight of Napoleon’s tomb, as well as the affection of an Italian crew that mans the eastbound vessel, Octave’s arrival in

Greece lends him the necessary courage––not to fight as a revolutionary––but to end his life by swallowing a mixture of foxglove and opium:

Octave tomba dans une grande faiblesse et demanda les prières des

agonisants, que quelques matelots italiens récitèrent auprès de lui…Le

nom de la Grèce réveilla le courage d’Octave: Je te salue, se dit-il, ô terre

des héros!…Au point du jour, on le trouva sans mouvement sur le pont,

couché sur quelques cordages. Le sourire était sur ses lèvres, et sa rare

beauté frappa jusqu'aux matelots chargés de l’ensevelir. (243)

The bravery that the name of Greece “awoke” (réveilla) in Octave, not unlike the fermeté that Napoleon inspires the hero, signals the sexual innuendo that Stendhal weaves into the

155 above passage. The presence of Italians alone implies a range of interpretations, all of which remain as possible as they are obscured, from Napoleon’s Corsican roots, to the

Romantic portrayal of Italians as effeminate, to the libertine “vice italien” (or “amour italien”) that signified sodomy dating back to the Renaissance. Regardless of their nationality, however, Stendhal’s focus on the crew obtains to the age-old reputation of sexual avidity among sailors, if not the marriage-like system of matelotage that proliferated among French male pirates (boucaniers) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.91 These thinly-veiled symbols for Octave’s excitement, hailing from opposite ends of history, convey the continuity Octave perceives between the Napoleonic army, his own knightly origins, and the “heroes” of ancient Greece. But in contrast to Octave’s chivalric visions, Stendhal ultimately casts his own hero––whose smiling lips and “rare beauty” hold sway over the sailors who bury his body––as the young shepherd who chose eternal sleep and endless youth over the affection of the Moon goddess (Selene, Diana).

Through this portrayal of death by opium (which sprung up from the blood of Adonis in its Hellenistic etiology) Stendhal relegates his protagonist to a more ancient era than age of crusaders, or even heroes. After he consumes himself, Endymion-Octave comes to embody one of the great narcissists of Greek myth and in so doing finally attains the adoration of men. Once forged into a telos of auto-erotic and exhibitionist pleasure, the hero then quits the pretense of chevalerie construed throughout the novel.

91 B. R. Burg discusses the history of matelotage and its legal framework at length in Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century (1985), pp. 132-138. 156 Beyond his satire of the Sentimental genre, Stendhal also utilizes Octave’s endymionic death to incorporate post-Revolutionary art into the novel’s scope of parody, particularly as it manifests in the resemblance between the final scene of Armance and two of Anne-Louis Girodet de Trioson’s masterworks. At first glance, the absence of feminine characters at Octave’s death mirrors the all-male iconography of Girodet’s first success, Le Sommeil d’Endymion (1791). In Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the

Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), Alexandra Wettlaufer examines the predominance of the male form in Girodet’s revision of that myth, which the artist amplified by excluding Diana from its mise-en-scène: “[i]f his predecessors highlighted the heaving breasts and titillated smile of Diana, relegating the sleeping––and strategically draped––shepherd to a secondary position, Girodet shifts the viewer’s focus and the central tension of the visual narrative to the male figure and the male gaze” (44).

In posing the lifeless hero on a stack of nautical cords, splayed out beneath the full moon,

Stendhal refashions Girodet’s homoerotic vision through a Romantic lens steeped in the austere (if not impractical) virtue of antiquity. But rather than the figure of Endymion, it is Octave’s burial in this scene that corresponds to Stendhal’s criticism of Girodet. In

Promenades dans Rome (1829), Stendhal takes aim at the painter’s rendition of Atala portée au tombeau (1808), which he decries for its lack of innovation in a new artistic age: “le visage de Chactas nous apprend-il quelque chose de nouveau sur la douleur d’un amant qui ensevelit le corps de sa maîtresse? Non; il est seulement bien conforme à ce que nous savons déjà” (247, original emphasis). Insofar as he reprises the Endymion of

1791 in Armance, Stendhal takes care to defy any conformity to the pre-Revolutionary

157 aesthetics of which he accuses Girodet’s Atala portée au tombeau.92 To this extent, illustrating a character beyond the confines of “what we already know,” Stendhal repeatedly gestures toward the actualization of same-sex desire as a product of Octave’s suicide. Following the illness he feigns at sea, the vicomte’s death on the harbor constitutes both the articulation and closure of his personal crusade to glean the male gaze. Ambiguous enablers in this endeavor, the seamen deflect their attention through the auspices of faith, producing an intertextual image that recalls Atala’s death by poison–– which Girodet immortalized on canvas––and the eroticized tenor of Christianity that runs throughout Chateaubriand’s œuvre. In this final act of devotion, Stendhal expressly charges the sailors with deposing Octave in the grave, whose cunnic image connotes the same lack of manhood that Girodet conferred onto Endymion, if not the vicomte’s sexual inversion.93 Stendhal most likely casts this baroque ending as a satire, whose object of ridicule proves to be as expansive as the homoerotic symbolism from which it draws.

Nevertheless, Octave’s death constitutes a refusal to re-inscribe a tragic ending, that holdover from neo-classicism that continues to be allotted to impossible couples in the

92 Keeping Girodet’s contributions to Romantic painting in mind, one might read Stendhal’s critique of Atala au portée tombeau as an indication of artistic jealousy, rather than a substantive difference in their ideologies. As Wettlaufer argues, the “poetic” quality of Girodet’s first masterpiece, which Balzac reprises in Sarrasine (1831), bespoke the Revolutionary streak in the painter’s works: “…Endymion (which will play a crucial role in Balzac’s Sarrasine) announces the major themes of Girodet’s later aesthetic, but more importantly emblematizes his nascent theory of ‘poetic’ painting. Endymion’s poetic aspirations constitute Girodet’s own response to the politics and aesthetics of Revolution, and in turn embody his initial effort to posit new definitions of art, the artist, gender, and genre in the wake of the dissolution of established paradigms” (32). 93 As Wettlaufer illustrates, Girodet guides our gaze toward Endymoin’s “darkened sex” in the structure of his painting: “[e]choing the circular structure that had characterized earlier versions of the tale, Girodet brings our gaze down from the heavens, away from Diana and the moon, to the human shepherd and his darkened sex” (44). 158 Romantic narrative. While the portrayal of Octave’s madness can hardly be read as sympathetic, the queer aspect in this rejection of the Sentimental double-bind lies in the place Stendhal clears for the shameless and onanistic ecstasy that characterizes the hero’s suicide in Greece.

Dueling and the New Cruise-ade

Before idyllic closure, Stendhal otherwise depicts Octave’s resistance against homoerotic desire in his tendency toward violence, whose affective image harmonizes with the frustration that accompanies impotence in the novel. When the vicomte lashes out at an unassuming laquais for blocking his path, the hero’s cruel streak purports to

Stendhal’s exposition of the impuissant: “Octave, furieux, s’était écrié: ‘Qui es-tu pour t’opposer à moi! si tu es fort, fais preuve de force.’ Et en disant ces mots, il l’avait saisi à bras-le-corps et jeté par la fenêtre” (104). When expounding as to Octave’s violent temperament, the narrator goes on to describe the morning when Octave returned with three wounds from a sword-fight: “[sa mère] l’attendit inutilement toute la nuit, il ne reparut que le lendemain et dans un état singulier; il avait reçu trois coups de sabre, à la vérité peu dangereux” (105).94 The attack occurs during one of the hero’s fugue states, when Octave rides into the night and out of the narrator’s purview. In this passage, the laconic descriptions of both events stand apart from the Sentimental narrative, so as to

94 Moreover, it is his confrontation with female desire, in the form of the comtesse de Claix’s gratuitous flattery, that catalyzes this fugue state: “…[Mme de Claix] lui faisait un compliment fort vif, lorsque tout à coup les traits d’Octave se couvrirent de rougeur, et il quitta le salon d’un pas dont il cherchait en vain à dissimuler la rapidité” (105). 159 convey the function of either scene as token evidence within Stendhal’s rendition of an

Octave/Olivier. In “Les clefs d’Armance et l’ambivalence du génie romantique du Nord,”

C.W. Thompson connects coded symbols within the textual Armance to historic events that surrounded its creation, citing contemporary rumors of buggery and impotence that pertained to Astolphe de Custine, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Lord Byron, which also resurface in Stendhal’s first novel. The most apparent of these connections lies between a wounded Octave, left in an “état singulier,” and Astolphe de Custine’s infamous ambush by a group of soldiers in St. Denis (1824) (3). Thompson further uncovers the similarities between Octave’s imbroglio with his valet and journalistic gossip regarding an impotent

Girodet (who, according to Delécluze’s Journal [1825], admitted to beating his servants) and Byron’s famed defenestration of a woman (11). In his hermeneutic preface to

Armance, Dominique Fernandez also identifies the impulse that precedes both diegetic events as a search for homosexual intimacy: “Octave cherche le contact physique…avec le jeune valet, mais, comme il ne peut obtenir ce contact dans la tendresse d’une étreinte, il l’obtient dans la véhémence d’une empoignade” (13). As Thompson’s and Fernandez’s readings demonstrate, the chivalric imagery of these events broaden the potential for a queer reading of knighthood in Armance. Starting with the duel, Stendhal crafts a talisman of obstructed homosexual desire that alludes to homoeroticism within and without the its diegesis. In this typification of the Romantic impuissant, Stendhal displaces homosexual desire through the normative mediation of physical violence. The eroticism of the chivalrous encounter, at once inspired and disallowed by the masculine decorum of the duel, recurs as a visible motif in Armance, even as Stendhal recasts it in

160 various settings. Moreover, it is the episodic narration of Octave’s outbursts that qualifies them as a cruise-ade, for through these altercations Octave time and time again achieves physical, if not frustrated, contact with men of variable class status and social standing.

Starting with Octave and the valet’s topsy-turvy relationship, Stendhal explicitly frames these homoerotic connections along the lines of knighthood. The servitude that

Octave imposes on himself, to prove his “excessive remorse” after he tosses the family servant out of a window, inverts the power dynamic between the two men: “[p]endant deux mois Octave se constitua le domestique du blessé; il avait fini par lui donner trop d’argent, et chaque jour il passait plusieurs heures à faire son éducation” (104-105). After he seeks a contest of strength with the acquiescent laquais, Octave’s false move in effect draws the two men closer together. Where Octave cannot overtly resurrect the rapport between knight and page (valet), he adapts to the strictures of Restoration nobility, abdicating class privilege so he may tutor and serve his valet as a fellow “domestic.”

Curiously, Stendhal’s narrator lingers on the rehabilitation of the servant, whom the

Maliverts spoil with gifts and platitudes in exchange for secrecy: “[t]oute la famille désirant le silence de cet homme, il reçut des présents, et se vit l’objet de complaisances excessives qui en firent un mauvais sujet que l’on fut obligé de renvoyer dans son pays avec une pension” (104-105). Stendhal encrypts the above anecdote with double- meanings, seen in the verb “se constitua,” which reverberates with connotations of taking on debt, as well as self-imposed surrender, and the description of the laquais as a

“mauvais sujet,” portraying the servant as both unfit for his duties and a walking taboo.

Once afforded a tender relationship under the auspices of same-sex domesticity, Octave

161 acts out of homo-affinity for his valet––which the narrator casts as remorse over their botched scuffle. Through the vicomte’s care during his servant’s convalescence, Stendhal thus evokes the homosocial intimacy between knights and their pages. Meanwhile, the machinations of the vicomte’s family ensure silence from their laquais, whose pension and presents mold him into what modern queer scholars can recognize as a sugar baby–– or at least a variation on Phillipe I’s (1640-1701) mignons (such as the chevalier de

Lorraine [1643-1702]) and the shepherdess-handmaidens maintained by Marie Antoinette

(1774-1792). In recounting the relationship between vicomte and valet, Stendhal thus jars the closet door, if only for a brief moment, permitting a glance at the possibilities of both homo-affinity and same-sex desire that proliferate when Octave upends the contemporary exigencies of class society.

As these aspirations of knighthood continue to consume the hero, Octave’s fixation with fighting accompanies his search for sustainable intimacy with other men.

Following the hero’s run-in with a saber, the narrator rationalizes the fits of violence that descend on Octave: “[l]es médecins pensaient que cette monomanie était tout à fait morale, c’était leur mot, et devait provenir non point d’une cause physique, mais de l’influence de quelque idée singulière” (105-106, original emphasis). However subtly,

Stendhal underscores the eroticism of Octave’s obsession by describing it as a case of monomanie, that compulsion which the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1835) exemplified with the phrase “monomanie érotique,” fingering same-sex desire as the

162 object of his “moral” crisis.95 The vicomte’s obsession with fighting, which his doctors distinguish from any physical condition (such as physiological impotence), often manifested during his days at the École polytéchnique: “ses camarades avec lesquels il avait des querelles fréquentes, le croyaient alors complètement fou, et souvent cette idée lui évita des coups d’épée” (105). The contemporary response of Octave’s doctors and peers already yield the symptoms that would define the pathologized homosexual in the late nineteenth century, burdened with madness, moral dereliction, and an erotic fixation that accumulates in psychosis.96 To the dismay of his entourage, Octave carries out fantasies of knighthood in fits and starts, brandishing his sword, beseeching duels with classmates, wielding the touchstone from which we derive the phallus (φαλλός [sword]).

It is also no coincidence that these episodes occur just before he considers joining the priesthood, that alternative path toward homosocial communion. But Stendhal ultimately defers any profound exposition of the protagonist’s choice between taking the cloth and joining the military to Le Rouge et le noir’s Julien Sorel. In Armance, Octave’s monomanie announces his commitment to knightliness through a process of feeling backward, itself a consequence of the vicomte’s repressed want for physical intimacy with his peers, as he quests for that fantasized bond expected between male warriors of the noblesse d’épée.

95 The 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française defines monomanie as follows: “[e]spèce d'aliénation mentale, dans laquelle une seule idée semble absorber toutes les facultés de l'intelligence. Monomanie érotique. Le traitement de la monomanie” (224, original emphasis). 96 Michel Foucault’s history of this typology is reviewed in the introduction to this dissertation, see pp. 4-5. 163 The queer element of such chevalerie stands out for its dependence on liminal time, whose equally homosocial and transhistorical elements accumulate pell-mell throughout Octave’s performance of knightliness. While Octave engages a variety of male rivals that range from a valet to a bona fide knight––and all the while frames these violent encounters against the background of military friendship––the hero must also confront his cross-gender attraction to Armance and her chivalric lineage. Unable to find purchase in a homosexual past or homo-affinitive present, the vicomte opposes himself to the quintessentially normal stature of the men he chooses as rivals, who chiefly succeed in adhering to the capacities that Restoration society expects of them. Beyond the grand monde of Andilly, Octave’s general hatred of soldiers, whose potential for social climbing only improved in Napoleon’s grande armée, most apparently contradicts his education at the École polytechnique. Against the grain of mediocrity, Octave envies the chevalier de Bonnivet for his impressive wordplay at Poitiers––even though the status of the chevalier not only lies below that of the vicomte’s but carries with it legacy of the

Napoleon’s Légion d’honneur (1802) that diluted the prestige of nineteenth-century knighthood. As it turns out, despite the remarkable variation between his rivals, Octave fixates on the chevalier de Bonnivet, (and previously on the marquis de Crêveroche) for the same reason he accosts his unassuming valet, to indulge in his eagerness to joust with a worthy opponent.

Hence, even though he easily wins the affection of Mme d’Aumale and Armance,

Octave cites his disapproval of their male admirers as a pretense to chevalerie. Following

Octave’s tussle with his valet and swordplay with peasants, the most elaborate duel of the

164 novel involves a pair of unlikely opponents––one, an émigré dandy, and the other, a

Napoleonic veteran––which Stendhal imbues with distinguishing homoeroticism. During his visit with Mme D’Aumale at her loge in the Théâtre-Italien, the vicomte receives an offensive billet from M. de Crêveroche, who “avec moins d’esprit ou plus de suffisance que les autres…se croyait distingué” (186). When he stares off strangely, spluttering with laughter, Octave seems inebriated by the jealousy he inspires in the eyes of Crêveroche:

“[c]e mot de rival qu’il employa en se parlant à lui-même le fit pouffer de rire; son regard

était étrange. ‘Qu’avez-vous donc, dit Mme d’Aumale?’—Je pense à mes rivaux” (187, original emphasis). A spate of allusions to Octave’s impuissance further bestow the chapter (21) with sense of erotic irony. Although three years have passed since Octave last practiced fencing, and six months since he fired a pistol, the vicomte’s willingness to duel betrays the fact that his hand “trembles like a leaf” when holding a firearm.97 Seeing as Octave wins the duel despite his poor odds, his injuries (the first bullet pierces his buttock [cuisse] and the second, his shooting arm) enable a narrative foreplay that delays and yet hardly influences the end result of the duel. As Octave prepares to shoot his last round, an air of military camaraderie accompanies the imminent victory he shares with his domestic, Voreppe, and his witness, M. Dolier, whom Stendhal characterizes as former soldiers of the Napoleonic army: “le domestique d’Octave, ancien soldat, ayant mouillé le mouchoir avec de l’eau de vie, ce qui le fit serrer très ferme; ‘je me sens assez

97 “Tendez le bras vers moi. Vous tremblez comme la feuille[, dit M. Dolier].––C’est un malheur que j’ai toujours eu’, dit Ocatve” (187). 165 fort’, dit Octave à M. Dolier” (189).98 As reflected by the invigorating effect of

Voreppe’s “moistened” bandage on the vicomte’s right arm, which his faithful servant sets “stiff” with alcohol, Stendhal construes a palpable and homosocial triangulation around Octave’s winning shot. In the meantime, Octave’s demi-pensionnaire cousin plays witness as Voreppe cares for the master’s gushing buttocks and arm, whose symbolic proximity to anal sex coincides with the harried triage that accompanies war–– as well as the re-enactment of battle–– for these weathered soldiers. Because he draws on the sublimated camaraderie of his entourage, that homosocial class engendered by the

Napoleonic wars, Octave achieves his first duel of arms with a steady aim, dropping his otherwise formidable opponent in supernatural (and thus Romantic) fashion.

At the opposite end of the field, M. de Crêveroche exudes a more peculiar variation of knightliness, whose conspicuous dandyism contrasts with the stolid posture of a soldier. Insisting they take tea before their duel, wielding stilted language in his letters and a maniéré (heavy-handed) politeness in person, the marquis conjures an image of the nostalgic émigré, whose anglophilia justifies his penchant for preciosity. In the same way Octave experiences a state of profound ecstasy at the bois de Moudon (“the happiest moment in life” even), Crêveroche’s comportment at the duel appears all the more effusive, “plus affecté et plus dandy qu’à l’ordinaire” (188, original emphasis).99

While it bears mention that an anachronistic interpretation of Restoration dandies as

98 “Il se souvint enfin d’un M. Dolier, officier à demi-solde, qu’il voyait fort peu, mais qui était son parent” (187). 99 Octave repeatedly mentions the happiness he associates with the duel: “Dans l’état où étaient ses affaires, la mort était pour lui le premier des bonheurs…”; “…Octave le plus heureux des hommes, obtinrent…qu’on rechargeait les pistolets” (188, 189). 166 effeminate and somehow attuned to homosexual desire may tempt modern readers with its facility, Stendhal clearly imbues the relationship between Crêveroche and his witness,

M. de. Meylan, with the same devotion that Voreppe espouses for his master: “Octave s’était aperçu que le témoin de M. de Crêveroche était un être subalterne peut-être poussé dans le monde par sa bravoure, mais au fond en état d’adoration constante devant le marquis; il adressa quelques mots piquants à celui-ci” (188). As a matter of fact,

Meylan’s rank of subalterne conveys an artful dualism, for this synthesis of solider- servant, which transmits both the military status of Octave’s dueling party and the pecking order of the noblesse de robe, also recalls the chivalric page. What is more,

Creveroche’s adoring inferior–– whose “valor” (bravoure) secures him access to the

Parisian monde––brings to mind Voltaire’s maxim on courtly gossip, which Jean-

François Féraud (1725-1807) anthologized in his Dictionaire critique de la langue française (1787-88): “les subalternes, témoins de tout l’intérieur d’une Cour, savent des choses, que les parlements et les chefs de parti même ignorent, ou ne font que soupçonner” (618, original emphasis).100 It is unsurprising, then, that Meylan’s biting words, which silence both the marquis and the sympathetic M. Dolier, pertain to Octave’s secret: “M. de Meylan fut réduit au silence par un mot ferme de son ami, et le témoin d’Octave ne put plus décemment ouvrir la bouche” (188). As a foil to any unspoken acts of babilanisme, the vituperating subalterne wields his own expertise in chivalrous

100 The Dictionaire critique de la langue française cites Voltaire’s epigram (from Le siècle de Louis XIV [1751]) under the entry “subalterne.” Féraud’s dictionary also quotes Jean-Baptiste Gresset’s Le Méchant (1747) in the same entry: “C’est un fat subalterne, il est né trop timide,/ On ne va point au grand, si l’on n'est intrépide” (618; vol. 3). 167 matters, seeing as he delves the vicomte’s condition just moments after Voreppe binds his wounds. Furthermore, the eccentric trappings of the duel stand to obscure subtler associations with homoeroticism and the institutionalization of sexual expression between men that emanate from Crêveroche’s busybody. One “firm” word, however censored, thus expands the boundaries of the closet that define its fellow impotence novels, such as Claire de Duras’s Olivier, as it openly plays on the hero’s suspected impuissance yet confines any opportunity to pronounce Octave’s condition to the savvy shared by Stendhal’s ideal readers. Through this use of physiognomy in Armance,

Stendhal engenders a pastiche of chevalerie that conflates the homosocial order of

Restoration society with fantasies of a bygone era, signified respectively as the

Napoleonic wars (1799-1815) and the days of French emigration to England (1779-1815) that had recently fostered exceptional intimacy between exiled nobles.

As part and parcel of this typology, the affect of misanthropy that luxuriates between Octave and his rival makes plain the hero’s ineptitude, if not for lack of experience, at homosocial intercourse. The divergent reactions of hero and rival, once

Meylan reveals Octave’s secret, mask the overt eroticism of a duel that continues as a consequence of unreciprocated “rage”: “M. de Crêveroche, rouge de colère, et Octave le plus heureux des hommes, obtinrent…qu’on rechargerait les pistolets” (189). On his side of the field, Octave’s willingness to receive a knightly death––coupled with his reflection on the duel as a stroke of fortune––speaks to the hero’s active romanticization of the encounter with his rival: “[l]’heure silencieuse que l’on mit pour aller de Paris à Meudon fut pour Octave l’instant le plus doux qu’il eût trouvé depuis son malheur. Il n’avait

168 nullement cherché ce combat” (187-188). The decision to fire a second round then underlines an affective dissonance between the duelists, whose polar dispositions at once encumber and enable their desire for close contact. Such displacement further resounds in

M. de Crêveroche’s raisonnement for pursuing the second round: “furieux de la crainte de ne pouvoir danser de quelques semaines, à cause de son écorchure à la jambe, [il] proposa en vain de tirer à bout portant” (189). As he fumes over a prospective stay from dancing, the dandyish marquis seeks yet another opportunity to penetrate his rival by demanding the next round be reprised at point blank range. But oddly enough, after he unexpectedly wins the duel, Octave assimilates the marquis’s cold deameanor: “M.

Dolier ne put s’empêcher de plaindre ce beau jeune homme expirant, et dont on voyait les membres se roidir à quelques pas d’eux. ‘Ce n’est qu’un fat de moins’, dit froidement

Octave” (189). Where Octave and his opponent share their misanthropic tone in common,

Stendhal juxtaposes the regret M. Dolier shows over the fallen marquis against his cousin’s lack of sympathy, who claims to have ridden the world of “one less fool.” Here,

Stendhal most obviously underscores the disparity between the lived experience of a

Napoleonic veteran and the failed repurposing of knighthood in the minds of Restoration aristocrats. As an appropriate response, a typical ex-soldier of the grande armée not only mourns the loss of a “handsome young man,” but arranges for Octave to recuperate in the care of his trusted gardener. As it so happens, the rural chaumière and philanthropic

169 manner of Dolier’s kept man presage the figure of Fouqué in Le Rouge et le noir, who in that novel espouses a signature, if not homosexual, devotion for his best friend (Julien

Sorel).101

Writing the Cruise-ade in Armance

In the same measure that M. de Crêveroche incites an unnecessary duel with his billet, Octave’s drastic reaction to that missive announces the erotics of epistolary writing in Armance. When the bloodied vicomte reaches for pen and paper after their duel,

Stendhal marks a drastic transformation in Octave’s conception of chevalerie, which thereafter enjoins heroic and libertine visions of knighthood through the art of writing. In that passage, Octave exudes a characteristic bizarrerie when he decides (for lack of ink) to write in his own blood, with the smoothest left hand one could hope for: “Octave eut l’enfantillage d’écrire avec son sang qui coulait encore un peu à travers le bandage de son bras droit. Il écrivit de la main gauche, et avec plus de facilité qu’il ne l’espérait” (190).

The litote, enfantillage, and the unexpected ease with which Octave commands his weaker hand communicate a narrative break with reason, as he jumps headlong into writing a stilted love letter––as well as an ad hoc will and testament––to Armance.

Consequently, even as she dotes over her cousin, the comtesse obeys an order from

Octave to burn what appear to be his final words, for fear of the scandalous potential contained within them: “[d]ans l’égarement de sa douleur, en présence d’une femme de

101 “Il ne reprit connaissance qu’une heure après, dans la chaumière d’un jardinier, bon homme fort humain et que M. Dolier avait commencé par bien payer en entrant chez lui” (189). 170 chambre, elle osait la porter à ses lèvres…Malgré ses sanglots, Armance entreprit de copier cette lettre, elle s’interrompait à chaque ligne, pour la presser contre ses lèvres”

(194). When she kisses the original letter––as well as each line of her facsimile of it–– beside a sleeping Octave, Stendhal portrays the act of letter-writing as the height of intercourse between the two cousins. Touching her lips to the traces of her beloved, which he scrawled with the blood spilt from his duel, Armance closes the immense distance between signifier and signified that often accompanies the act of writing.

Contrary to his depiction of swordplay in Armance, Stendhal relegates the cousins’ first epistolary encounter in the novel to the realm of the orifice, to pressed lips and gushing wounds, creating a Sentimentalist foil to the libertine phenomenon that Peter Brooks describes as “Words and ‘the Thing’” (1989).102 This homage to the libertine genre echoes in a metonymic mise-en-abîme when the heroine copies Octave’s sanguineous letter in ink, for even though the original draft must be destroyed, its fulsome discourse only proliferates as the letter is censored and constrained.

Ultimately, chivalric rivalry is mediated by way of the pen in Armance. As a means to best Octave, who plans to marry his cousin, the newly arrived chevalier de

Bonnivet concocts an elaborate ruse in order to convince the commandeur de Soubriane

102 In his short article for A New History of French Literature (“Words and ‘the Thing’”) (1989), Peter Brooks pauses on the reflexive bond between the erotic (la chose) and the words used to convey it (le mot) in the libertine epistolary novel: “In a novel [Liasons dangereuses] that is ostensibly devoted to the pursuit of erotic pleasure, the sexual act itself is constantly elided, and erotics reinvested in the letter. Merteuil in letter 33 comments that Tourvel…will have no strength left to defend herself against la chose, the thing itself…But one may wonder whether la chose has any existence outside le mot (the word). Even the seduction of [Mme] Tourvel has no existence until it becomes a letter” (4). 171 to write false letters in the footsteps of Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses

(1782). The parvenu of Andilly acquires a used copy of the novel, which he pays to have rebound into “magnificent book” that suits the commandeur’s materialistic tastes, and stains a particularly useful page with coffee: “[u]n ouvrier…revêtit d’une reliure superbe le roman où l’on employait l’artifice de fabriquer des lettres. Le chevalier prit ce livre magnifique, l’apporta à Andilly et tacha avec du café la page où la supposition des lettres

était expliquée” (234). In Stendhal’s tacit metaphor, the epistolary novels of 1827 are merely pre-Revolutionary books with fresh covers, whose libertine intrigues have been

“rebound” in a Sentimentalist esthetic. Yet this manoeuver carries within it a denser metonymy for the erotics of textual relations, as Stendhal depicts the chevalier’s interaction with the book in all its physical and symbolic richness, from borrowing, to rebinding, to the unseemly act of “staining” one of its central pages. In his imitation of

Laclos’s novel and its fictional nobles, Octave’s rival actively seeks the érotologie that

Jean-Pierre Dubost relates as an essential quality of libertine writing in “Érotologie,

érotographie, libertinage: d’Élephantis à Madame de Choiseul Meuse, combien d’intertextes libertins?” (2007): “le ‘genre libertin’ est un effet en retour de l’érotologie libertine moderne, dans sa relation à l’érotographie qui l’exprime…qui dans le cas de la culture occidentale a ses origines dans l’Antiquité et ne cessera d’être présent au cours des âges…” (9, original emphasis). Just as Octave invests himself in letter-writing after his duel with Crêveroche, the chevalier de Bonnivet acquiesces to this “effet en retour” through his successful creation of the false letter––precisely so he may revel in its aestheticized eroticism that reaches toward the past. But timing makes all the difference

172 for Octave’s final challenger, whose investment in epistolary érotologie falls in line with the interests of his noble peers, whom the narrator derides as “les produits gangrenés de la nouvelle génération [qui luttent] avec la légèreté de l’ancienne” (235). Paratextually,

Stendhal himself engages with the libertinism of the siècle de Lumières through his act of

Laclosian letter-writing––even as he caricatures “the new generation’s struggle” against the aristocratic follies of the Ancien Régime.103 When pitted against a knight that epitomizes the present age, whom the gentry of Andilly designate as “une sorte de rival pour Octave” (209), it is no wonder that Octave falls at the hand of Bonnivet. Insofar as the vicomte molds himself after obsolescent knights, his rival benefits from the

“chevalier de Laclos’s” novel, which serves Bonnivet as a Restoration chant de guerre

(235). Where Stendhal’s version excises the kind of affection that the comte de Valmont bestows on his rival in Liasons dangereuses, the false letter in Armance basks in its adaptation to, rather than the imitation of, Laclosian rivalry. Fittingly, the cyclical trace of this textual effet en retour further manifests in Laclos’s own protagonist, who was modeled after the switch-hitter (Valmont) of Crebillon fils’s Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (1726-1738). As Stendhal emphasizes in his intertextual dialogue with

Liaisons dangereuses, no matter whether it is carried out with the pen or the sword, the phallic fantasy of penetrating one’s rival remains a timeless, if not constant, incentive for the knightly contest.

103 The commandeur de Soubriane counters the enthusiasm of the chevalier de Bonnivet when he casts aspersions on the style of Laclos’s novel as inauthentic: “—Toujours aujourd’hui, aujourd’hui! reprit le commandeur, votre Laclos n’était qu’un fat. Je ne sais pourquoi vous autres jeunes gens vous en faites un modèle. Ses personnages écrivent comme des perruquiers. etc., etc.’” (235). 173 The realization of both homo-affinity and same-sex desire in Armance reflect a satire whose bearings, to borrow C.W. Thompson’s words, correspond to the “openness” and “indeterminacy” of Romantic tastes, rather the rather than the physical deficiency of impotence.104 Along these lines, the conflation of Romantic and Greek love in Stendhal’s first novel also acts as a figurative Trojan horse to the extent that it (re)locates an

Octave/Olivier’s place in antiquity, instead of championing any sense of virtue in the

Sentimentalist present. Just as Claire de Duras set Olivier at the eve of the Revolution and

Chateaubriand penned fictions of a pristine New World, Stendhal engages in his own

Sentimental, which is to say revisionist, exposé of the erotic past. But through its parodic lens, Armance besets a more volatile figure in current time that purports not only to the mal du siècle, but to the untenability of both Restoration society and its half-hearted censure of the Sentimental double-bind. Although their nostalgia lingers in the recent past, other dissidents with the hybrid era abound in Andilly, from the chevalier de

Bonnivet, to Octave’s servant (Voreppe), to Dolier, to Armance and her adoptive mother.

Whereas the novel’s heroine aspires to the Sentimentalist pursuit of homo-affinity, the men who seek out their rivals subsume its consummate sameness within their lust for chevalerie––for penetrating and being penetrated by their challengers. It is from this liminal politics, which balances a libidinous past with the impotence of his own age, that

Stendhal frees Octave. After having long been plagued with isolation from men of his

104 “À notre avis pourtant, ce qui a dû produire une association initiale, dans les idées de Stendhal, entre des êtres aussi différents (dans les succès et dans les revers) que Byron, Custine et Girodet- Trioson, c'est moins quelque notion d'impuissance, que l'idée d'un esprit romantique, dont la vie serait surtout marquée, jusque dans ses goûts sexuels, par I'ouverture et par l’indétermination” (21). 174 own kind, Octave progressively immerses himself in the hope of becoming a newfangled knight. His short lived role thus reflects the fate of Stendhal’s chevalier of 1827, whose obstructed desires drive him to consume his own likeness and whose demolition enterprise cannot efface, but rather comes to symbolize, the same-sex eroticism of the cruise-ade.

175

Conclusion: Outing the Literary Legacy of Homo-Affinity

in the French Novel

To conclude the readings put forth in this dissertation, I aspire to shed light on the survival of homo-affinity in the evolution of the French novel across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where homo-affinity manifests as brother-sister incest in Atala, in the Polari of Duras’s Olivier, and through the erotics of Stendhalien chevalerie, we are confronted with a Romantic narrative of queer and outlaw desire that future novelists adopted in their own genres of fiction. Therefore, this intellectual venture stands to open the way for further study of homo-affinitive novels as an archive of queer feelings. Along these lines, I emphasize the extent to which each of these original novels relied on symbols of antiquity in their Sentimentalist renderings of longing for the self defined as different-than-the-self. In the context of this dissertation, the most apparent examples of homo-affinity’s lineage occur as the intertextual echoes of Chateaubriand, Duras, and

Stendhal in the works of authors who refashioned their metaphors of desire for sameness.

By demonstrating the long-lived resonance of such imagery in French literature, I contend that the Romantic vision of homo-affinity stands to inform readings of historic and present day texts that otherwise resist definition as Sentimental novels. Finally, in underscoring its perseverance into the twentieth century, this conclusion proffers a trace of outlaw desire that acknowledges the role of homo-affinity as a queer permutation of

Romantic love that survived beyond the primary era of its invention. 176 The outlaw aesthetic of homo-affinity resounds in its subversion of the discursive safeguard that the Sentimental double bind serves to reinforce in the Romantic novel.

Rather than painting bonds based on exceptional sameness as libertine or ribald, the attention paid to the emotional deliberations of these protagonists brings the opposition between public constraint and personal liberty to the foreground in these novels. Familial desire constitutes the clearest indicator of homo-affinity, whose mere appearance in a text calls into question the naturalized structure of the family unit. Where homo-affinity often invokes the moral implications of the incest taboo, a prurient sameness that subtends familial desire, which can exist as both chaste and taboo––or as dually heterosexual and queer––also manifests in the type of kinship formed through homosocial communities.

As the works examined in this dissertation demonstrate, the desire for congress between adopted brother and sister, mother and son, aunt and nephew, or friendly cousins mirrors the motives of dueling knights and noblemen, whose actual achievement of such passion for similitude remains obstructed in the diegesis of the Romantic novel. As a narratological resolution to these disallowed bonds, a desire for self-consumption abounds in their suicidal endings. The moralistic double-speak surrounding these love intrigues, which only lends a liminal purview to the desire for sameness, thus results in a self-defeating aesthetic that is equally didactic and mimetic in nature. Where homo- affinity may prove to be defensible under the auspices of Sentimentalism, contemporary society will ultimately refuse the approbation of an ostensibly non-(re)productive desire for sameness. To the inverse of the twentieth-century attitude Foucault describes in the

La Volonté de savoir, when these authors relegate their protagonists to past modes of

177 being, their forays into homo-affinitive romance negate any present or future existence for the queer outlaw. C’était hier, le bon sexe.105

Whereas the metaphoric structure of homo-affinity purports to incestuous and homosocial ties, the conflation of homosexuality, onanism, and impotence within this same poetics of desire makes clear the import of productive coitus as a foil to homo- affinity. But in spite of its multivalence, as I have argued, each of these authors underscores specific elements from the Romanticization of the familial bond that stem from lived experience. Their novels merit consideration as an archive of queer feelings to the extent that they reflect an aestheticized account of Chateaubriand’s early relationships with Lucile de Chateaubriand and François Tulloch, as well as Duras’s break with her prospective son-in-law, Astolphe de Custine. In similar fashion, the fact that Stendhal expressed his dire intent to depict a babilan to Prosper Mérimée also bears remembering.

While the personal motive for his obsession with babilanisme remains a mystery,

Stendhal’s decision to write Armance in the footsteps of Duras, as well as Henri

Latouche, led him to pilfer from the intimate details of others’ lives as he created his own hero, Octave de Malivert. Like the biographical narratives inscribed in these novels, the generic status of Olivier and Armance as romans à clef also reflects their dependence on allusions to the extradiegetic world in order to convey the unspeakable. In this way, these novels represent not only the aesthetic rendering of queer desire through fiction, but the

105 Foucault outlines a modernist optimism regarding the sexual liberation of Western society in his introduction to La Volonté de savoir: “Nous, depuis des dizaines d’années, nous n’en parlons guère sans prendre un peu la pose: conscience de braver l'ordre établi, ton de voix qui montre qu’on se sait subversif, ardeur à conjurer le présent et à appeler un avenir dont on pense bien contribuer à hâter le jour…À demain le bon sexe” (14, emphasis mine). 178 particular interaction between each of these authors and the discursive limits of the erotic.

In each of these novels, this tension results in a metonymic code that varies widely in its composition, from Chateaubriand’s new-world symbolism, to Duras’s encoded Polari, to

Stendhal’s clins d’æil toward the public scandals of his time. Yet a keen investment in the ideal reader always accompanies the portrayal of these Sentimental protagonists, whose queer desires are otherwise illegible to an audience that cannot decipher, or at least sympathize with, the coded metaphors at hand.

To illustrate the legacy of homo-affinity in the greater evolution of the French novel, I outline several lines of inquiry in the following paragraphs that allow for a prospective analysis of this trope beyond the confines of Romanticism. Just as

Chateaubriand first narrated homo-affinity in his portrayal of the chiasmatic mirror, the earliest novels in this chronology center on the mirrored nature of siblings. At least four of George Sand’s works take up the trope of homo-affinity, as evidenced in the final exile of the heroine of Indiana (1831) and her cousin Ralph, as well as in the efforts of

Gabriel’s (1839) cross-gender noble to win the hand of their cousin, Astolphe.

Elsewhere, as Julie Kristeva uncovers in Proust and the Sense of Time (1993), the quasi- incestuous relationship between Madeleine and her foundling in Sand’s François le champi (1848) resurfaces in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu when the narrator’s mother reads him that novel just before his famed conception of the

“madeleine.”106 But within Sand’s brand of Social-Sentimentalist literature, La Petite

106 Kristeva stresses the subdued (if not veiled) influence of Sand’s romans champêtres on Proust’s narrrator: “[R]eadings from George Sand come to form a special link between the son and his mother…The mother is still shown as reading two of George Sand’s texts up to the 179 Fadette (1849) features the most salient instance of homo-affinity by way of its twin protagonists, who are mirrored to point of sharing the same sex and bodily composition.

After Landry eventually grows into his heterosexual desire for Fadette, a dejected

Sylvinet supplants the exceptional bond once shared between the twins with military camaraderie by enlisting in the Napoleonic army. Nearly fifty years later, Rachilde narrates an eroticized relationship between the Fertzen brothers with characteristic decadence in Les Hors nature (1897), in which the elder Reutler confesses his sexual desire for cross-dressing Paul-Eric at the close of the novel.107 In the twentieth century, the adoration that René Crevel’s autobiographical narrator espouses for the reflection of his own body in Mon corps et moi (1925), which multiplies in the mirrors of his family’s home, brings the narcissistic leanings of homo-affinity to the foreground:

Grâce à l’indulgence de cette glace, je m’aimais comme à douze ans,

lorsque, ma famille couchée, j’allais dans la galerie, allumais les lustres et,

par la complaisance des miroirs qui me multipliaient, jouissais d’un corps

que mes mains aimaient à caresser sans d’ailleurs savoir de quelle façon

l’utiliser pour un plaisir précis. (124-125)

typewritten manuscript destined for Le Fiagro, usually dated 1909, in which Proust finally crosses out La Mare au diable [1846]. François le champi is left on its own in the bedtime episode which precedes that of the madeleine” (35). 107 Reutler wields a metaphor of horseback riding to express his desire for Paul-Eric that at once depends on the figurative cheval (horse) and implies the fraternal bond associated with chevalerie: “Ah! Là, près de moi! Ton cheval me devance un peu...on dirait, dans la nuit, que sa clarté pâle est le rayonnement projeté par le souffle exaspéré du mien. Je ne sais pourquoi nos chevaux tremblent ainsi sur cette route?...Eric, laisse-moi penser vers toi” (228, ellipses in text, original emphasis). Notably, before the above dénouement, cross-gender byzance in the brothers’ relationship incurs a “terrible hermaphrodisme” between them (194). 180 In Julien Gracq’s gothic novel, Au château d’Argol (1938), drinking in one’s own reflection occurs at the narrative level, as a leitmotif of doubling assimilates the castle’s three visitors (the male friends Albert and Hermenien, in particular) to one another and carries on the chiasmatic poetics of kinship that proliferate in Chateaubriand’s fiction.108

After the July Monarchy, the homosocial eroticism of homo-affinity flourishes in a fictionalized demi-monde, whose liminal nature mirrors the disruption of present time and place that Romantic authors had previously inscribed in their depictions of knightly conduct. Whereas Emma’s death in Madame Bovary (1857) evokes the evanescent heroine of Atala, Gustave Flaubert concludes his satire of Sentimentalism in Éducation sentimentale (1869) with an allusion to homo-affinitive chevalerie. As an elderly Fréderic

Moreau reminisces with Charles Deslauriers over his past intentions of writing a chivalric novel, the pair of old friends pause on a memory of their failed visit to a brothel, making a fine point of the homosocial preference they shared for one another as young men:

“[cette visite] fit une histoire qui n’était pas oubliée trois ans après…––C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur!’ dit Frédéric.––Oui, peut-être bien? C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur! dit Deslauriers” (157). Elsewhere, the setting of the maision de plaisir unites several short stories in which Guy de Maupassant explicitly addresses incest, which occurs as a terrible accident in “Monsieur Jocaste” from Gil Blas (1883), as well as in “L’Ermite” (1886) and “Le Port” (1889). In Bel Ami (1885), however,

108 In her article, “The Doubles in Julien Gracq’s Au Château d’Argol,” Andrée Douchin-Shahin summarizes the narrative mirroring that recurs in Gracq’s Doppelgänger novel: “[i]n Au Château d’Argol, doubling is not only a fundamental trait on the syntactical and the semantic levels but it is also so compounded that the narrative resembles a kaleidoscopic pattern of multiple reflections” (2). 181 Maupassant more purposefully marries the bond shared between ex-soldiers with the milieu of Third Republic journalism. In his exposé of fin-de-siècle excess, Georges

Duroy and Charles Forestier’s rise and fall in Paris debuts with a round of beer and cigars that leads them to the vice-laden backroom of the Folies Bergères, replete with muscled gymnasts and libidinous men, where Georges’s superior officer goads him to indulge the advances of two mannish prostitutes. In the following century, Proust inscribes familial desire between the Prince de Foix and his son as a parallelism to the affinity that defines a coterie of purported homosexuals in Le Temps retrouvé (1927), dubbed “les gigolos,” which include the Prince de Foix (fils) and his close friend, Saint-Loup.109 The increasing portrayal masculine friendship in marginalized spaces over this period suggests a transformation in the performance of chevalerie under the class structure of capitalism. In turn, this tendency––previously seen in Octave’s fixation with matelots (sailors) in

Armance––presages the graphic eroticism between men that interfuses the homosocial institutions of merchant sailors, the navy, police, and houses of prostitution in Jean

Genet’s Querelle de Brest (1948).

Homo-affinity thus carries into twentieth-century French literature as an admixture of Romantic tropes and Sentimentalist lieux that traffic in the desire for the self defined as different-than-the-self, even while it occurs in narratives that might otherwise exemplify the more finite categories of the incest novel or of gay and lesbian fiction. In

109 As Maria Paganini-Ambord argues in Reading Proust: In Search of the Wolf Fish, Proust combines incestuous and same-sex desire in the Prince de Foix’s love for his homosexual son: “In Le Temps retrouvé, it is the desire for incest between son and father that tries to come to light, and in which one sees the Prince de Foix in love with his own son” (57) 182 André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), an incestuous and same-sex relationship that abides between Édouard and his uncle, Olivier, reverberates in the accidental suicide of his brother Phillipe (Phiphi).110 Before his ill-fated game of Russian roulette, Phiphi’s embrace with Bruno recalls the homosocial affection ascribed to chevalerie, especially when the younger brother imagines himself and Bruno as taking part in “l’accolade des preux chevaliers” and plants two kisses (“deux gros baisers d’enfant”) on his friend’s cheek.111 Phillipe’s fantasy of homosocial intimacy marks both the equestrian etymology of his name (Φιλιππος, “fond of horses”), in all its contrast with the femininity of a homophonous “fifi,” and the fraternity associated with knighthood as central to Gide’s reconfiguration of the hero from Duras’s Oliver and Stendhal’s Armance. In her

“Postface” (1981) to Anna, Soror (1935) from the following decade, Marguerite

Yourcenar cites Chateaubriand’s Atala as a novel that inspired her rendition of brother- sister incest between a pious Miguel and Marguerite, who rely on the biblical myth of

Amnon and Tamar to express their love for one another.112 Furthermore, the chivalric underpinnings of homo-affinity come to surface in Yourcenar’s novel when the hero sets out for battle on the Barbary coast with a forgotten Muslim ancestor in mind. As with the

110 Gide’s intertextual usage of the name Olivier from Claire de Duras and Stendhal’s novels is examined in pp. 146-147 of this dissertation. 111 “Mais Ghéridanisol se montrait résolu à pousser la plaisanterie jusqu’au bout. ‘Eh bien! à demain, dit-il, avec un bizarre sourire d’un coin de la lèvre seulement. ––Si on l’embrassait!’ s’écria Phiphi dans l’enthousiasme. Il songeait à l’accolade des preux chevaliers; et soudain il serra Boris dans ses bras. Boris eut bien du mal à retenir ses larmes quand Phiphi, sur ses joues, fit sonner deux gros baisers d’enfant” (412). 112 In her postface to Anna, Soror, Yourcenar relates her version of brother-sister incest to the novels of John Ford (1586-ca.1639), Goethe (1749-1832), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), and, finally, to Chateaubriand’s René: “Enfin, un lecteur français ne peut oublier René où Chateaubriand, pensant à coup sûr à sa sœur Lucile, a pris pour donné centrale l’amour incestueux d’Amélie et sa fuite au cloître” (4). 183 exotic heroes who inspire Octave in Armance, Miguel’s search for clemency subverts the typical image of the chevalier, especially when he visualizes a Turkish crusader as his spiritual pater from the noble past: “quelque ancêtre inconnu ou nié qui avait combattu sous le Croissant…l’assurait que tout homme tué dans un combat contre les infidèles est forcément sauvé” (43).113 This kind of disjuncture between present time and familial desire serves as a pretext for Yves Berger’s Le Sud (1962), in which an Avignonnais father inculcates his children with the belief that a Romantic utopia once existed in the

New World. In that novel, the long shadow of Chateaubriand’s fiction, which inspires the family to recreate a pristine American wilderness around their home, then recurs as an incestuous bond between Virginie and the brother she later initiates into present-day

France. The theological and erotic implications of shared genealogy also pervade Guy

Hocquenghem’s novelistic account of the AIDS epidemic in Ève (1987). As a dying

Adam searches for familial roots, the hero’s exploration of the past culminates in an incestuous threesome with his onomastic siblings, Seth and the eponymous Ève. Bill

Marshall, in Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity (1997), describes the dynamic between these mirrored relatives as a form of mediation akin to homo-affinity:

[A]lthough Adam and Eve do have sex together with Seth, and their

relationship is ‘transgressively’ coded as incest more than heterosexual,

the novel emphasizes a relation between persons, an annihilation of

113 In the above passage, Miguel’s comportment also echoes the jouissance of self-annihilation that Octave repeatedly achieves in Armance: “[C]ertain d'accomplir sa mort comme il avait accompli sa vie, il sanglotait sur son bonheur…Un obscur instinct, hérité peut-être de quelque ancêtre inconnu ou nié qui avait combattu sous le Croissant, l’assurait que tout homme tué dans un combat contre les infidèles est forcément sauvé” (43). 184 separate personalities which nonetheless forms a whole, in a way which

seems to assert a frontier between them and the world. (78)

As seen in these novels, the portrayal of homo-affinity shifts from the decades-long genesis of a tropic desire for sameness to the usage of that very trope as an intertextual metaphor. While the list of novels that draw on the coded imagery of homo-affinity is in no way limited to the works of the authors mentioned above, their engagement with its literary lineage provides a clear point of departure for the consideration of homo-affinity as a fully formed, if not previously unnamed, Romantic bond in twentieth-century French fiction.

The literary trace of homo-affinity belies the formation of an archive of feelings within the French novel, in which the dislocated past is constantly aestheticized as a realm of queer (im)possibilities. On the one hand, the steady reiteration of homo-affinity in the decades following the literary peak of Romanticism demonstrates the capacity of

Sentimentalist writing as a conduit for feeling backwards. Indeed, any linear trajectory of progress to be found along the evolution of homo-affinity obtains to a preponderance of retrospection in these narratives that both subtends and enables their expression of queer desire in the quasi-present tense. In a similar vein, the trope of mirroring that ties together incestuous, homosexual, and homosocial desires as a univocal mode of attraction also affirms the immediacy of the present that is indexed in the physical phenomenon of reflection. Rather than optimism in futurity, then, the recognition of desire for sameness unfailingly promises the force of constraint against itself. In effect, an ephemeral resistance to the abnegation of homo-affinity characterizes the novels in this diverse 185 corpus as a literary negotiation of survival that reverberates––however paradoxically––in the death of outlaw protagonists. Bookended between its discovery and obliteration, the representation of a liminal potential for love based on sameness persists in the

Sentimental novel by virtue of both the archival imprint and the occasional iteration of these narratives on the behalf of readers. Quintessentially, as a desire that stems from the recognition of one’s reflection in someone else, homo-affinity thrives in the familiarity of a fleeting here and now, and in its inscription throughout the annals of history, as it faces away from that chronological opposite and other—the unknowable future.

186 Bibliography

Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical

Tradition. 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Académie universelle des jeux. Vol. 3. Paris: Costes, 1806.

Andrews, Naomi. “Utopian Androgyny: Romantic Socialists Confront Individualism in

July Monarchy France.” French Historical Studies 26.3 (2003): 437-457.

Arlincourt, Charles-Victor Prévot d’. Le Solitaire. 2 vols. Paris: Béchet Aîné, 1821.

Astorg, Bertrand d’. Variations sur l’interdit majeur: littérature et inceste en Occident.

Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Auber, Daniel and Eugène Scribe. La Circassienne. Paris: Tresse, 1861.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Œuvres complètes de Saint Augustin. Ed. and trans.

Augustin Poujoulat. Vol. 7. Paris: Victor Palmé, 1808.

––. De civitate dei (City of God). Ed and trans. William M. Green. 7 vols. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press: 1989.

Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice,

and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Baker, Paul. Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. London: Routledge, 2002.

Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot. Ed. Phillipe Berthier. Paris: Flammarion, 1995.

––. Sarrasine. La Comédie humaine. 1831. Vol. 6. Ed. Pierre George Castex. Paris:

187 Gallimard, 391- 438.

Banier, Antoine. Explication historique des fables, où l'on découvre leur origine et leur

conformité avec l'Histoire ancienne. Paris: François le Breton, 1711.

Bart, B.F. “Flaubert, Plagiarist of Chateaubriand.” Modern Language Notes 65.5 (1950):

336-339.

Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Éditions du

Seuil, 1968. 61-68.

—. Roland Barthes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

––. Le Plaisir du texte. 1973. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002.

Bayard, Pierre. Symptôme de Stendhal: Armance et l’aveu. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1979.

Bellemin-Noël, Jean. L’Auteur encombrant: Stendhal/Armance. Lille: Presses

Universitaires de Lille, 1985.

Bennett, Chad. “Oscar Wilde’s Salomé Décor, Des Corps, Desire.” ELH 77.2 (2010):

297-324.

Berchet, Jean-Claude. Chateaubriand. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.

Berger, Yves. Le Sud. Paris: Grasset, 1962.

Berrong, Richard. “Vautrin and Same-sex Desire in ‘Le Père Goriot’.” Nineteenth-

Century French Studies 31.1/2 (2002-2003): 53-65.

Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

188 Biré, Edmond. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. In Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand.

François-René de Chateaubriand. 1848. Eds. Edmond Biré and Charles-Augustin

Sainte-Beuve. Vol. 13.1. 1st ed. Paris: Garnier, 1904. Reprinted edition. Nendeln:

Kraus, 1975. iii-lxi.

Blanning, T. C. The Romantic Revolution: a History. New York: Random House, 2011.

Bouvier, Luke. “How Not to Speak of Incest: Atala and the Secrets of Speech.”

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30.3-4 (2002): 228-242.

Brillon, Pierre-Jacques. Nouveau dictionnaire civil et canonique de droit et de pratique.

Paris: Gosselin, 1717.

Brombert, Victor. Stendhal: roman et liberté. 1968. Rev. Ed. Trans. Victor Brombert,

1991. Reprinted edition. Paris: Éditions Fallois, 2007.

Brooks, Peter. “Words and ‘the Thing’.” A New History of French literature. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1989. 527-542.

Burg, B. R. Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-

Century Caribbean. 1983. Rev. ed. New York: New York University Press, 1995.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside Out: Lesbian Theories,

Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1991.

13-31.

Butor, Michel. “Chateaubriand et l’ancienne Amérique.” 1964. Œuvres complètes. Ed.

189 Mireille Calle-Gruber. Vol. 2. Paris: Éditions de La Différence, 2006. 491-524.

Camus, Rénaud. Buena Vista Park. Paris: Hachette, 1980.

Carter, Philip. “Men About Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early

Eighteenth-Century Urban Society.” Gender in Eighteenth-Century England:

Roles, Representations and Responsibilities. Eds. Hannah Barker and Elaine

Chalus. New York: Longman, 1997. 31-57.

Chammas, Jacqueline. L’Inceste romanesque au siècle des lumières: de la Régence à la

Révolution (1715 - 1789). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011.

Chateaubriand, François-René. Œuvres Romanesques et Voyages. Vol 1. Ed. Maurice

Regard. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

––. Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes,

considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française. London: Deboffe,

1797.

––. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Vol. 1. Ed. Jean-Paul Clément. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

––. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Vol. 1. Eds. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier,

1947.

Chénier, Josèphe-Marie de. Les nouveaux saints. 3rd ed. Paris: Daubin, 1801.

Citton, Yves. Impuissances: défaillances masculines et pouvoir politique de Montaigne à

Stendhal. Paris: Aubier, 1994.

Clément, Jean. Chateaubriand: biographie morale et intellectuelle. Paris: Flammarion,

190 1998.

Cleto, Fabio. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: a Reader. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Cohen, Margaret. The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1999.

“Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.” Gallimard. Nouvelle Revue Française, n.d.

Web. 13 Oct 2016.

Constant, Benjamin. De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses

développements. Vol. 2. Paris: Béchet, 1825.

Cooper, Laurence. “Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘The Desire to

Extend Our Being.’ The American Political Science Review 98.1 (2004): 105-119.

Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to

Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Courouve, Claude. Vocabulaire de l’homosexualité masculine. Paris: Payot, 1985.

—. Tableau synoptique de références à l'amour masculin: auteurs grecs et latins.

Paris: C. Courouve, 1986.

Crébillon (fils), Claude Prosper Joylot de. Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit. 1726-

1738. Ed. Étiemble. Paris: Folio Classique, 1977.

Crevel, René. Mon corps et moi. 1925. 3rd. ed. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1974.

191 “Crusade, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 13 October

2016.

Custine, Astolphe de. Aloys, ou, le religieux du Mont Saint-Bernard. 1829. Paris:

Librairie Fontaine, 1983.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public

Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

––. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Dever, Carolyn and Margaret Cohen. The Literary Channel: the Inter-National Invention

of the Novel. Eds. Carolyn Dever and Margaret Cohen. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2002.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. 1934. Reprinted edition. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise. 2nd vol. Berlin: Lagarde, 1801.

Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. 6th Ed. Vol. 2. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1835.

Diderot, Denis. Contes et romans. Eds. Michel Delon, Jean-Christophe Abramovici,

Henri Lafon and Stéphane Pujol. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

Douchin-Shahin, Andrée. “The Doubles in Julien Gracq’s Au Château d'Argol.” Studies

in Twentieth-Century Literature 8.2 (1984): 273-29.

Dubost, Jean-Pierre. “Erotologie, érotographie, et libertinage: d’Eléphantis à Madame

Choseuil-Meuse, combien d’intertextes libertins?” Du genre libertin au XVIIIe

192 siècle. Eds. Jean-François Perrin and Philip Stewart. Paris: Éditions Desjonquères,

2004. 39-48.

Dumas (père), Alexandre. Fernande. Paris: Le Vasseur, 1844.

Dupuis, François. Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle. Vol. 2. Paris: H.

Agassé, 1794.

Duras, Claire Kersaint de. Olivier, ou le secret. 1821-1824. Ed. Denise Virieux. Paris:

José Corti, 1971.

––. Ourika. Édouard. Olivier, ou le secret. 1823; 1821-1825; 1821-1824. Eds. Marie-

Bénédicte Diethelm and Marc Fumaroli. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.

––. La duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’après des documents inédits. Ed. Gabriel

Pailhès. Paris: Perrin, 1910.

Edelman, Lee. No Future. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Edenheim, Sarah. “Lost and Never Found: the Queer Archive of Feelings and Its

Historical Propriety.” differences 24.3 (2013): 36-62.

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc. Eds.

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. 1751-1765. ARTFL. University of

Chicago: Encyclopédie Project. Eds. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe. Web.

http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.

Facteau, Bernard. “Note on Chateaubriand’s Atala.” Modern Language Notes 48.8

(1933): 492-497.

193 Faure, Gabriel and François-René de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand, Dubois et le

‘Globe’: douze lettres inédites de Chateaubriand. Ed. Gabriel Faure. Paris:

Artaud, 1944.

Feagin, Susan. “Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction.” Emotion and The Arts.

Eds. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 50-

62.

Ferguson, Gary. “Pour un passé queer: lire l’homosexualité aux débuts des temps

modernes.” Queer: écritures de la différence? Ed. Pierre Zoberman. Vol. 2. Paris:

L’Harmattan, 2008. 117-132.

Fernandez, Dominique. “Le Secret d’Octave.” Armance, ou quelques scènes d'un salon

de Paris en 1827. Stendhal. 1828. Paris: P.O.L., 1991. i-xxi.

—. Dictionnaire amoureux de Stendhal. Paris: Plon-Grasset, 2013.

Féraud, Jean-François. Dictionaire critique de la langue française. 3 Vols. Marseille:

Mossy, 1787-1788.

Ferrière. Claude-Joseph de. Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique. Paris, 1740.

Flaubert, Gustave. L’Éducation sentimentale. 1869. Œuvres complètes. Eds. Bernard

Masson and Jean Bruneau. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964. 7-163.

––. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 3. Eds. Claudine Gothot-Mersch, Jeanne Bem, Yvan Leclerc,

Guy Sagnes and Gisèle Séginger. Paris: Gallimard, 2013.

––. Œuvres. Eds. A. Thibaudet et R. Dumesnil. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

194 Foucault, Michel. La Volonté de Savoir. 1976. In Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. 1. Paris:

Gallimard, 1998.

Fradenburg, Louise, and Carla Freccero. Premodern sexualities. New York: Routledge,

1996.

Freccero, Carla. Queer/early/modern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories Perverse

Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Fulkerson, Laurel. The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in

the Heroides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Gassouin, Olivier. Le marquis de Custine: le courage d’être soi-même. Paris: Lumière et

Justice, 1987.

Gautier, Théophile. Œuvres, choix de romans et de contes. Ed. Paolo Tortonese. Paris:

Robert Laffont, 1995.

Genet, Jean. Querelle de Brest. In Œuvres complètes. Vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.

201-415.

Gide, André. “Préface à Armance.” Essais critiques. Ed. Pierre Masson. Paris: Gallimard,

1999. 544-555.

––. Les Faux-monnayeurs. 1925. Eds. Frédéric Maget and Agnès Verlet. Paris:

Gallimard, 2011.

––. Corydon. 1924. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

195 ––. La Porte étroite. 1909. Paris, Gallimard, 2011.

Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset, 1961.

Girodet, Anne-Louis de Trioson. Le Sommeil d’Endymion. 1791. Paris: Musée du

Louvre.

—. Atala portée au tombeau. 1808. Paris: Musée du Louvre.

Goldzink, Jean. “Question sur la naissance du recit libertin des Lumières.” Du Genre

libertin au XVIIIe siècle. Eds. Jean-François Perrin and Philip Stewart. Paris:

Éditions Desjonquères, 2004. 74-85.

Goulemot, Jean-Marie. Ces livres qu’on ne lit qu’avec d’une main: lecture et lecteurs des

livres pornographiques au XVIIIe siècle. Aix-en-Provence: Éditions ALINEA,

1991.

Goux, Jean-Jacques. “Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac’s

Utopia.” Representations 23 (1988): 105-117.

Gracq, Julien. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. Ed. Bernhild Boie. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

Halperin, David. How to Do The History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2002.

Hamm, Jean-Jacques. Armance, ou, la liberté de Stendhal. Paris: H. Champion, 2009.

Hesse-Fink, Evelyne. Études sur le thème de l’inceste dans la littérature française. Bern:

Herbert Lang, 1971.

196 Hester, Diarmuid. “Queer Cryptograms, Anarchist Cyphers: Decoding Dennis Cooper’s

The Marbled Swarm: a Novel.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 45.2 (2012):

95-112.

Hocquenghem, Guy and René Schérer. Le Désir homosexuel. 1972. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

––. Ève. Paris: Albin Michel, 1987.

Homer. L'Odyssée traduite en françois, avec des remarques. Ed. and trans. Anne Dacier.

Vol. 3. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1716.

––. L’Odyssée d’Homère traduite en vers françois. Ed and trans. Guillaume Dubois de

Rochefort. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1782. 614-631.

Jackson, John E. “Le modèle (neo-classique).” Le Corps amoureux: essai sur la

représentation poétique de l'éros de Chénier a Mallarmé. Neuchâtel: Éditions de

la Baconnière, 1986.

Jaeghere, Michel de. Le Menteur magnifique: Chateaubriand en Grèce. Paris: Les Belles

Lettres, 2006.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: an Introduction. Washington Square: New York

University Press, 1996.

Jaquotot, Marie-Victoire. Plaque réctangulaire, décorée d’‘Atala’ ou ‘La Mort d’Atala.’

1829. Paris: Musée national de céramique.

197 Joubert, Josèphe. Pensées, essais et maximes de J. Joubert, suivis de lettres à ses amis et

précédés d'une notice sur sa vie, son caractère et ses travaux. Ed. Paul Raynal.

1st ed. Vol. 2. Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1842.

Kliebenstein, Georges. Enquête en Armancie. Grenoble: ELLUG, 2005.

Knight, Everett. “Stendhal et André Gide.” The French Review. 24.6 (1951): 461-470.

Kristeva, Julie. Proust and the Sense of Time. Ed. and trans. Stephen Bann. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient.” 1957. Écrits. Ed. Jacques

Lacan. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. 490-526.

—. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” Écrits: The

First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. 2nd ed. New York: W.W.

Norton, 2006. 412-444.

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de. Liaisons dangereuses. Ed. Catriona Seth. Paris: Gallimard,

2011.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Latouche, Henri. Olivier. Paris: Chez U. Canel, 1826.

—. Fragoletta: Paris et Naples en 1799. Paris: Levavasseur, 1829.

Lillich, Margaret. “The Tric-Trac Window of Le Mans.” The Art Bulletin. 65.1 (1983):

23-33.

198 Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 2007.

Lucey, Michael. The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian

England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Martin, Brian Joseph. Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and

Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France. Durham, N.H.: University of New

Hampshire Press, 2011.

Marshall, Bill. Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity. Durham: Duke University

Press, 1997.

Maupassant, Guy de. Romans. Ed. Louis Forestier. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.

––. Contes et nouvelles. 2 vols. Eds. Louis Forestier and Armand Lanoux. Paris:

Gallimard, 1974-1979.

Merrick, Jeffrey. “Sodomitical Inclinations in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris.”

Eighteenth-Century Studies 30.3 (1997): 289-295.

Mien, Margaret. “Chateaubriand, a Precursor of Proust.” The French Review 45.2 (1971):

388-400.

Moore, Lisa L. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

199 ––. Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2011.

Morand, Paul. “‘Armance’ ne rime peut-être pas avec…impuissance?” La Nouvelle

nouvelle revue française. 1.5 (1953): 927-932.

Morris, Charles. “Archival Queer.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.1 (2006): 145-151.

Muhlstein, Anka. Astolphe de Custine (1790-1857): le dernier marquis. Paris: Grasset,

1996.

Nadeau, Louis. Étude sur Chateaubriand. Dissertation, Université de Grenoble, n.d.

Reprinted edition. Paris: Durand, 1871.

Nair, Sashi. Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading Romans à Clef Between the Wars.

New York: Palgrave, 2012.

O’Driscoll, Sally. “Outlaw Readings: Beyond Queer Theory.” Signs 22.1 (1995): 30-51.

Ovid. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide traduite en François, avec des remarques et des

explications historiques. Ed. and trans. Antoine Banier. Vol. 2. Paris: Huart, 1737.

––. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide. In Œuvres complettes d’Ovide. Ed. Jean-Charles

Poncelin de la Roche-Tilhac. Trans. Antoine Banier. Vol. 2. Paris: Debarle, 1799.

––. Heroides. Ed. and trans. Harold Isbell. New York: Penguin, 1990.

––. Ovid’s Heroines. Ed and trans. Clare Pollard. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2013.

––. Fasti. Ed. and trans. James George Frazer. 1931. 2nd rev. ed. Ed. G. P. Goold.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

200 Paganini-Ambord, and Christie McDonald. Reading Proust: In Search of the Wolf Fish.

Trans. Caren Litherland and Kathryn Milun. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1994.

Pinoteau, Hervé. État de l’Ordre du Saint-Esprit en 1830; et la survivance des ordres du

roi. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1983.

Pixerécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de. Le Mont Sauvage. Paris: J.N. Barba, 1821.

Quinault, Phillipe and Jean-Baptiste Lully. Atys, tragédie en musique, ornée d’entrées de

ballet, de machines & de changements de théâtre. Paris: Ballard, 1676.

Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery). Les Hors nature. 2nd ed. Paris: Sociéte du

Mercure de France, 1897.

Rosa, George. “Byronism and ‘Babilanisme’ in Armance.” The Modern Language Review

77.4 (1982): 797-814.

Rouillard, Linda. “The Black Galatea: Claire de Duras’s Ourika.” Nineteenth-Century

French Studies 32.3-4 (2004): 207-222.

Rousseau, Georges S., and Caroline Warman. “Made From The Stuff of Saints:

Chateaubriand’s René and Custine’s Search for a Homosexual Identity.” GLQ: a

Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.1 (2001): 1-29.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du Contrat social. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 3. Eds. Bernard

Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. 347-470.

201 Russell, Jeffrey B. “Courtly Love as Religious Dissent.” The Catholic Historical Review,

51.1 (1965): 31–44.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin. Étude sur Chateaubriand. In Œuvres complètes de

Chateaubriand, précédée d’une étude littéraire sur Chateaubriand par Sainte-

Beuve. Ed. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Vol. 1. 1st ed. Paris, Garnier, 1828.

Reprinted edition. Nendeln: Kraus, 1975. 3-232.

Sand, George (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin). François le champi. 1847-1848. Ed.

André Fermigier. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

––. La Petite Fadette. 1849. Ed. Martine Reid. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

––. Gabriel. 1839. Paris: Des Femmes, 1988.

––. Indiana. 1831. Ed. Béatrice Dider. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Say, Jean-Baptiste. “Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le désert; par François-

Auguste Chateaubriand.” La Décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique, 19

(1801 [an IX]): 219-228.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2008.

Sénart, Phillipe. “Custine, Stendhal, et le romantisme.” La Revue de Paris 66.12 (1959):

133-142.

202 Sibalis, Michael. “Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution.” Gay Life and

Culture: A World History. Ed. Robert Aldrich. New York: Universe, 2006. 102-

23.

Simes, Gary. “Gay Slang Lexicography: A Brief History on the First Two Gay

Glossaires.” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 26

(2005): 1-159.

Stendhal (Beyle, Henri). Œuvres romanesques complètes. Ed. Philippe Berthier. Vol. 1.

Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

––. Promenades dans Rome. Ed. Vittorio Del Litto. Grenoble: Jerôme Millon, 1993.

––. Correspondance de Stendhal. Vol. 2. 1821-1834. Eds. Vittorio Del Litto and Henri

Martineau. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

Thompson, C.W. “Les clefs d’Armance et l’ambivalence du génie romantique du Nord.”

Stendhal Club. 25.100 (1983): 520-547.

Thorslev, Peter Larsen. “Incest as Romantic Symbol.” Comparative Literature Studies

2.1 (1965): 41-58.

Trompeo, Pietro Paolo. Nell’Italia romantica sulle orme di Stendhal. Rome: Leonardo Da

Vinci, 1924.

Trumbach, Robert. “Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public

Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of

Homosexuality 19.2 (1990): 105-24.

203 ––. Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in

Enlightenment London. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Verlet, Agnès. Les vanités de Chateaubriand. Paris: Librairie Droz, 2001.

Villemain, François. Souvenirs contemporains d’histoire et de littérature. Paris: Didier,

1855.

Wakefield, David. “Chateaubriand’s ‘Atala’ as a Source of Inspiration in Nineteenth-

Century Art.” The Burlington Magazine 120.898 (1978): 13-24.

Waller, Margaret. The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic

Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

Walton, Kendall. “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction.”

Emotion and The Arts. Eds. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1997. 37-49.

Weisgerber, Jean. “Satire and Irony as Means of Communication.” Comparative

Literature Studies 10.2 (1973): 157-172.

Wettlaufer, Alexandra. Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion

in Post-Revolutionary France. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

––. In the Mind's Eye: the Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.

White, Nicholas. French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War.

Oxford: Legenda, 2013.

204 Wilkinson, Lynn. “Culture and Power in Balzac's Rubempré Novels: The View from

Bourdieu.” Romance Quarterly 55.2 (2008): 153-160.

Yee, Jennifer. Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction. Oxford:

Legenda, 2008.

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Anna, Soror. 1935. In Comme l’eau qui coule. Paris: Gallimard,

1982. 7-76.

––. “Postface d’Anna, Soror.” In Comme l’eau qui coule. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. 241-

253.

Yousef, Nancy. Romantic Intimacy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013.

205