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Subaltern Readers in Nineteenth-Century French and Italian Novels by Fiammetta Di Lorenzo Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Roberto Dainotto, Advisor ___________________________ Anne F. Garréta ___________________________ David F. Bell ___________________________ Paola Gambarota ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 i v ABSTRACT Subaltern Readers in Nineteenth-Century French and Italian Novels by Fiammetta Di Lorenzo Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Roberto Dainotto, Advisor ___________________________ Anne F. Garréta ___________________________ David F. Bell ___________________________ Paola Gambarota ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 i v Copyright by Fiammetta Di Lorenzo 2019 Abstract In this work I analyze the ways the figure of the fictional subaltern reader in Italian and French novels of the 19th century tends to dramatize her or his exclusion from the public sphere, while attempting, at the same time, to institute new forms of commonality with his or her reader. At a historical moment in which the reading of printed matter aims to constitute a “public sphere” (Immanuel Kant), a “common sense” (Antonio Gramsci), and an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson), the fictionalized reader is often a critical figure whose role is to question the national community. In the section devoted to the Italian novel, taking as my standpoint Vincenzo Cuoco’s Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 as well as his contributions to the formation of national public opinion, I outline a history of the Italian novel as the history of a conflict between different communities imagined by two readers of Cuoco: Alessandro Manzoni and Ippolito Nievo. In other words, I consider their novels as different responses to the problem raised and addressed for the first time by Cuoco: that of the emergence of the lower classes as a new historical subject. I argue, therefore, that the representation of a peasant woman reading I Promessi sposi, in Nievo’s novel Il conte pecoraio (1857), is an intentional reversal of the patronizing policies expressed by the iv party that was destined to prevail, during the Risorgimento and beyond, over the democrats. On the French side, the brief appearance under the July Monarchy of a new kind of reading heroine, struggling for self-emancipation rather than lured by escapist temptations, bear witness to the women’s growing demands for citizenship rights and for a reconfiguration of the national community issued by the Revolution of 1789 and based on their exclusion. As the Jacobin Sylvain Maréchal had exemplified in 1801, women should not be allowed to read. Within this context, heroines such as Théophile Gauthier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and, above all, Stendhal’s Lamiel, show not only the emancipatory power of reading, but a paradigmatic shift of focus from authority to readership. While impossible in the fragmented society issued by the French Revolution, Stendhal’s fictional readers still bear witness to a desire for a community in which the divide between author and reader would be overcome. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 1. The Rise of the Italian Novel .................................................................................................. 11 1.1 A Prohibited Genre Necessary to Italy ........................................................................ 12 1.2 “This Fable Is Our Own History” ................................................................................. 29 1.3 Manzoni’s Passive Revolution ...................................................................................... 57 1.4 Change in the Village...................................................................................................... 78 1.5 Can Peasants Read Manzoni? ........................................................................................ 93 2. Subaltern Reader as a Woman ............................................................................................. 128 2.1 Genealogy ....................................................................................................................... 128 2.1.1 Policing the Novel .................................................................................................... 129 2.1.2 Why Women Should Not Read (Labor vs Reading) ........................................... 133 2.1.3 Reputation Against Representation (Maréchal nous voilà) ............................... 147 2.1.4 Suzanne Against the Elders .................................................................................... 163 2.1.5 The Empathetic Turn ............................................................................................... 172 2.2 Lamiel.............................................................................................................................. 182 2.2.1 Gothic Settings .......................................................................................................... 182 2.2.2 “Reading for the Plot” ............................................................................................. 191 2.2.3 “En attendant la révolution:” Reading to Plot ..................................................... 202 Conclusions................................................................................................................................. 217 vi Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 219 vii Introduction In the comic dialogue Les héros du roman (1664) Nicole Boileau imagines a mythological afterlife crowded by the ancient heroes who populated French novelistic production in the first half of the 17th century. At the end of the parade, which shows each of these heroes in maudlin attitudes and concerned only with pains of love, Boileau introduces an unnamed Frenchman. Mercury asks him whether he knows those illustrious people. The answer is worth quoting: « Si je les connais? Hé! Ce sont tous la plupart des bourgeois de mon quartier » (Boileau 2010, 218). The target of Boileau’s irony is well known: the never-ending novels by authors like Mademoiselle Scudéry, La Calprenède, Gomberville, Desmarets. These authors were guilty, in his view, of lese-Aristotelian-majesty, since their classical heroes were not emplotted in actions worthy of their (original) dignity, in accordance with the principle of decorum. They were represented, rather, as dealing exclusively with (bourgeois) sentimental struggles. The punch line pronounced by the anonymous Frenchman betrays the main anxiety that moves Boileau: the fear that the novel, thanks to its capacity to penetrate wide strata of society, could be both the field and the vehicle for a dangerous disruption of hierarchies. What is implicit in Boileau’s attack, in other words, is the acknowledgment of the modelizing and “reflexive” potential of the novel. The main example of this modeling potential of the novel is of course Don Quixote (1605), which not only thematizes the reader whose life is conditioned and 1 modeled by books, but also his becoming a written hero, read in turn by the people he meets in his adventures. The representation of the reader acting according to parameters set in books can be understood, within the context of the Counter-Reformation, as a response to the greater autonomy of the individual, propelled by Luther’s reflections, when confronted with the written texts. The figure of the reader in Don Quixote and its several parodies can thus be seen as a literary device that questions the autonomy of the individual vis à vis the authority of the written text. While the reader’s attempt at imitating fictional characters is an acknowledgement of the authority of written texts, its eventual failure and the consequent irony open up the divide between words and things that Foucault situates precisely in this historical period (Foucault 1994, 46–50). It is however after the historical fracture caused by the French Revolution that both the novel and the representation of the reader play a crucial role in conjunction with the configuration or, in the French case, of the reconfiguration of the national community. I want to analyze the ways in which the figures of the subaltern readers tend to dramatize their exclusion from the public sphere, while attempting, at the same time, to institute new forms of commonality with their “real” readers. At a historical moment in which the reading of printed matter aims to constitute a “public sphere” (Immanuel Kant), a “common sense” (Antonio Gramsci), and an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson), the fictionalized reader is often a critical figure whose role is to question the national community.