128
PARTISAN REVIEW
material in psychiatry might be traced
to
the Freudian legacy of exclu–
sively child-centered analytic theory. A psychiatrist friend whom I
queried on this issue, Dr. Anna Fels of New York, had this
to
say: "It's
a fascinating lacuna. Mothers' confessional statements about their
daughters seem to be one of the last taboos. There is apparently some–
thing too frightening about contemplating the difficulties of mother–
hood. All such flaws are seen as highly pathological."
Out of a very narrow spectrum of possibilities, I chose to focus on a
seventeenth-century french writer who was truly the patron saint of the
maternal memoir form, Madame de Sevigne. Scvigne's letters
to
her
daughter, written over a span of twenty-five years, have never been
properly included in the autobiographical or the memoir canon, even
though they fulfill most of the conditions set out by historians of life–
writing. The personal, meditative components of Scvigne's letters pre–
sent the gradual unfolding of character over time. They offer the essence
of the autobiographical act-the history of a personality. As for her his–
torical set pieces, including her missives, they give us the most vivid
memoirs we have, matched only by Saint-Simon's in their brilliance, of
French high society in the seventeenth century.
Before I attempt to unravel the skeins of fact and fiction in her writ–
ings, I'd like to talk about Madame de Sevignc, who is hardly known in
this country. Born in
162.6,
she was a woman of the lesser nobility. She
had lost her father and mother by the time she was eight, and both of
her beloved grandparents, who were her legal guardians, died the fol–
lowing year. She was brought up by a trio of doting, bookish uncles who
gave her a more brilliant education than any other woman of her time.
She was married off at age eighteen
to
a dissolute Breton playboy, the
Marquis de Sevigne, who died on the day she turned twenty-five while
dueling over the favors of a hooker called La Belle Loulou.
In
165
l,
Madame de Sevignc finds herself a widow with nothing
much
to
survive on beyond her charm, her wit, her pleasant (though not
outstanding) looks, and her superh education. She also has two small
children, a boy and a girl,
to
bring up. The obsessive passion she will
later pour into her letters to her daughter, whom she spoils and flatters
outlandishly from the start, must be viewed in the light of two pivotal
biographical facts: her own unfulfilled need for maternal love, and an
innate aversion
to
heterosexual relations created hy the humiliation she
suffered in her own marriage. This antipathy leads her
to
turn down
marriage offers from some of the most captivating men in france, among
them the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, and the fourteenth attendant of
finances, Nicolas Fouquet. It also leads her
to
celehrate widowhood
