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1 Decline and Discovery Notes 1 Decline and Discovery 1. Following Charlotte Hogsett’s feminist usage, I refer to Madame de Staël, as she is generally known, as Staël. See Hogsett, The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), xiv. 2. For Staël’s major role in the formation of European Romanticism, see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of a European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s De l’Allemagne, 1810–1813 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), passim. 3. As this is not a philological study, I have cited Avriel Goldberger’s English trans- lation of Staël’s novel, which appeared as Corinne, or Italy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); references are given parenthetically within the text whenever convenient. I have also relied on Morroe Berger’s edition of Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character (New York: Doubleday, 1964), which contains extensive excerpts from On Literature, Germany, and Considerations on the Principle Events of the French Revolution.All footnote references from Berger’s edition are accompanied by corresponding (and supplementary) citations from Vols. I, II, and III of the Slatkine reprint of Oeuvres complètes de Madame la Baronne de Staël-Holstein, published in Geneva in 1967 after the Paris edition of 1861. 4. A crucial exception to this rule is Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl‘italiani, ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988). Written in 1824 although published only in 1906, Leopardi’s study is influenced by Staël’s treatment of the Italian character with which it agrees on several key points. See Rigoni’s Introduction, 7–8, 8n, 8–9; see also Roberto Melchiori’s “Commento,” 87n, 97–8n, 100–100n, 105n, 132n. On some aspects of Leopardi’s relation to Staël, exclusive of the question of national character, see Arnaud Tripet, “Esquisse d’une genèse leopardienne: Leopardi, lecteur de Madame de Staël,” in Mario Matucci, ed., Il gruppo di Coppet e l’Italia (Pescia, 24–27 Settembre 1986) (Pisa: Pacini, 1988), 41–52. Leopardi’s analysis of the Italian character had been preceded by Joseph Baretti’s valuable but much less trenchant An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), which was written in English. Other works in this vein include Pietro Calepio, Descrizione de‘costumi italiani (1727) and Carlo Denina, Considérations d‘un Italien sur l’Italie ou Mémoires sur l’état actuel des lettres et des arts en Italie et les caractères des habitants (1796). For a discussion of 234 NOTES Calepio and Denina, see Giulio Bollati, L’Italiano: Il carattere originale come storia e come invenzione (Torino: Einaudi, 1983), 50–3. More recent studies on the subject include Silvio Guarneri, Carattere degli italiani (Torino: Einaudi, 1948); Bollati, “L’italiano. Il carattere degli italiani come problema storico,” in Bollati, L’Italiano; Carlo Tullio-Altan, La Nostra Italia: aretratezza culturale, clientelismo, trasformismo e ribellione dall’ unità all’oggi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1986); Loredana Sciolla, Italiani: stereotipi di casa nostra (Bologna: Mulino, 1997). Guarneri attempts to deduce the Italian character mainly from literary examples and thus tends to treat the problem at too great a remove from every- day life. He also seems to deny the existence of such a character, given the variety and contradiction among Italians within their separate regions, classes, and occupations. From this perspective the national character has yet to be formed in the post–1945 environment, preferably in accordance with an ideal standard. In other contexts Guarneri refers to the Italian character as if it were synonymous with the moral fiber of the people. 5. Madelyn Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 278, 278n, 282–3; Ellen Moers, “Performing Heroinism: The Myth of Corinne,” in Jerome Hamilton Buckley, ed., The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 319–50; Paula Blanchard, “Corinne and the ‘Yankee Corinna’: Madame de Staël and Margaret Fuller,” in Avriel H. Goldberger ed., Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on Nineteenth-Century European Women Writers (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 39–46; Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo, eds., Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 227 (Bibliography); Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), 15–6; Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 27–8; Attilio Brilli, Il viaggio in Italia: Storia di una grande tradizione culturale dal XVI al XIX secolo (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 1987), 264; Linda M. Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 13–6; Nanora Sweet, “ ‘Lorenzo’s’ Liverpool and ‘Corinne’s’ Coppet: The Italianate Salon and Romantic Education,” in Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, eds., The Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion (Durham: Duke University Press, 247; 251–2; Jan Marsh, “Art, Ambition, and Sisterhood in the 1850s,”in Christina Campbell Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 37–38; in the same volume, Clarissa Campbell Orr, “The Corinne Complex: Gender, Genius, and National Culture,” 89–91; Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 3, 30, 31–5, 47, 58–9, 65–6, 76, 78, 81, 88–91, 142; Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 20; Robert Calvin Whitford, Madame de Staël’s Literary Reputation in England, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. IV, February 1918, no. 1 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1918); Michael O’Brien, “Italy and the Southern Romantics,” in O’Brien, Rethinking NOTES 235 the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 91–6; Ellen Peel and Nanora Sweet, “Corinne and the Woman as Poet in England: Hemans, Jewsbury, and Barrett Browning,” in Karyna Szmurlo, ed., The Novel’s Seductions: Staël’s “Corinne” in Critical Inquiry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 204–20. 6. Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist, 154–309; Colson, “Étude de la Société dans Corinne ou l’Italie,” Diss: Case Western Reserve University, 1970, 52. See also Monika Bosse, “Corinne ou l’Italie: Diagnostic d’une dilemme historique,” in Il gruppo di Coppet e l’Italia, ed. Matucci, 104n. 7. Romero, “Mme de Staël en la revolución feminina del siglo xix,” Cuadernos Americanos, CVII, no. 6 (1959): 159, noted in Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist, 214n. For an incisive analysis of the possible ambiguities of the title, see Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions féminines: Mme. de Staël et les voix de la Sibylle, Stanford French and Italian Studies, 48 (Saratoga, CA: Anima Libri, 1987), 111–3, 131. Vallois rightly sees the title as the “key” to the novel, which establishes an “equation” between Corinne and Italy. However, in a later essay Vallois places greater stress, which the title also sanctions, on the difference between Corinne and Italy. See Vallois, “Old Idols, New Subjects: Germaine de Staël and Romanticism,” in Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, ed. Gutwirth et al., eds., 88–9. 8. Hillard, Six Months in Italy,Vol.II (Boston: Ticknor, Read, and Fiedler, 1853), 404. 9. Notwithstanding his frequent disparagement of Staël, for what he sees as both her novelistic failings and misrepresentation of Italy, Stendhal sometimes praises her in the highest terms and, even though never adequately acknowl- edging his indebtedness, owes much to her writings on Italy and other subjects. Besides drawing upon Staël’s dichotomy between Northern and Southern Europe, Stendhal borrows her conception of Italy as an essentially “feminine” country where society does not exist and the people therefore remain “natural.” Staël’s Italians anticipate those of Stendhal in being free from convention, vanity, affectation, coquetry, ridicule, distinctions of rank, and the embarrass- ments of poverty, in short, from the tyranny or “regard” of the “other.” In Stendhal, as in Staël, the passionate Italians delight in love and the arts and pre- fer outdoor pleasures to the indoor comforts favored in the North. Stendhal is also influenced profoundly by Staël’s idea of the irreconcilable opposition between love and vanity and her recognition of the tension between art and society. For Stendhal, as for Staël, Italian naturalness contrasts with the frigidity and conventionality of bourgeois England. Stendhal’s dislike of Staël seems to have stemmed partly from the fact that she despised and criticized his idol Napoleon, who had sent her into exile. In contrast with Stendhal, who rightly realizes that Napoleon’s despotism in Italy had imposed many liberalizing and modernizing reforms, Staël minimizes these achievements, persisting in the view that Napoleon had primarily debased, brutalized, and exploited the Italian people. In this judgment she agrees with her friend Sismondi, who, as Franco Venturi notes, wrote to her in a letter during the first decade of the nineteenth century that under Napoleon Italy had sunk into the mud. For the relation between Staël and Stendhal, see Stendhal, Love (translation of De L’amour), 236 NOTES trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 25, 84n; Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence (1826) in Stendhal, Voyages en Italie,ed. Vittorio del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 326; Stendhal, Selected Journalism from the English Reviews, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Strickland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 168, 175, 243–4, 295; V. del Litto, La vie intellectuelle de Stendhal: Genèse et évolution de ses idées (1802–1821) (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 52, 67–70, 115–16, 163, 183–4, 233, 238, 272, 278–82, 309, 314, 341–5, 400, 422–3, 443, 472–4, 501, 510, 516, 575, 633–4; H.-F.
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