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The Paradise Setting of Chateaubriand's Atala
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
The landscape description of the New World that begins Chateaubriand's Atala has suffered from misguided criticism. Hostile critics have approached it “scientifically,” denying the authenticity of its details; admirers have rarely offered more than a theory of exoticism. Neither of these approaches uncovers the governing analogy that shaped the landscape details: the setting of Atala as an approximate paradise. The New World is “le nouvel Éden,” adapted to a tradition of garden paradises, particularly that of Milton's Paradise Lost. While recalling its mythical model, however, the features of Chateaubriand's landscape simultaneously and ironically suggest a fallen condition by presenting dualities in a state of tension. This ambivalence sets up a double relationship to the paradisiacal theme treated in the novel. The terrestrial paradise is recalled as the appropriate setting for another Fall. The conflicting properties of the symbolic locale do not achieve the expected synthesis and the story of the ill-fated lovers parallels the mythical Fall analogue. The emphasis then shifts to the celestial paradise, the religious (and Romantic) reconciliation of opposites. This remains tentative, however, for the final image of the novel is of the “new Eden” deprived of its sacred context rife with dualities.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974
References
Note 1 in page 535 For a sympathetic discussion of Chateaubriand's borrowings, see Gilbert Chinard, L'Exotisme américain dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand (Paris: Hachette, 1918), esp. pp. 247–64.
Note 2 in page 535 E.g., Oscar Kuhns in his “Introduction” to Chateaubriand, Atala, ed. O. Kuhns, Heath's Modem Language Series (Boston: Heath, 1905), p. v: “Everywhere he sought, —not clear thoughts or convincing arguments,—but picturesque descriptions, poetic rhapsodies, and melancholy reflections on the vanity of life.” Even Chinard, p. 264, claims that the landscape descriptions were “composés en vue d'un effet grandiose,” without explaining this effect in detail.
Note 3 in page 535 Chateaubriand translated Milton's Paradise Lost in 1836 and critically discussed the English epic in both his Génie du Christianisme ( 1802) and the Essai sur la littérature anglaise (1836).
Note 4 in page 535 Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 41. The paradisiacal analogies begin, as Sanford shows, with Columbus himself.
Note 5 in page 535 Atala. René. Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, ed. Fernand Letessier (Paris: Gamier, 1965), p. 30. Subsequent references are to this Gamier edition and are placed in the text.
Note 6 in page 535 In Œuvres complètes, iv (Paris: Gamier, 1929–38), 175; henceforth cited as O.C. The italics are mine.
Note 7 in page 535 The Johns Hopkins Studies in Romance Literatures and Languages, 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), p. 55. Adolf Kohler, Quellenuntersuchung zu Chateaubriands “Les Martyrs,” Inaugural dissertation, Universität Leipzig (Leipzig: Druck von O. Leiner, 1913), p. 28, precedes Miller in suggesting a relation to Milton.
Note 8 in page 535 The text of Milton's Paradise Lost is taken from that published on facing pages with Chateaubriand's prose translation, Le Paradis perdu, in O.C, xi, 276, 136. The French rendering is literal in each case: “ce délicieux bocage” for “delicious grove” (p. 277) and “le délicieux Paradis” for “delicious paradise” (p. 137). There is a third use in Milton not indicated by Miller: “this delicious place” (Paradise Lost iv.729).
Note 9 in page 535 This is both asserted and amply demonstrated by A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). See esp. pp. 70–73.
Note 10 in page 535 Again Miller, p. 37, following Kôhler, p. 29, points to the Miltonic parallel: “The river which waters Eden recalls the one described in Paradise Lost.” Milton employs the traditional division of four (see O.C, xi, 140–41).
Note 11 in page 535 From Chateaubriand's own description in the “Préface de la première édition” (1801), included in the Gamier edition, p. 9.
Note 12 in page 535 See Bernard A. Facteau, “Note on Chateaubriand's Atala,” Modern Language Notes, 48 (1933), 492–97, for an addition to the information compiled by Joseph Bédier, “Chateaubriand en Amérique. Vérité et fiction,” in Etudes critiques (Paris: Colin, 1903), pp. 125–294.
Note 13 in page 535 The term “negative formula” is derived from Howard R. Patch, The Otherworld according to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), p. 12, where it refers to the tendency to employ the technique of describing what paradise was not so as indirectly to imply what it was. The term is also used by Giamatti, pp. 84–85. The typical device of no winter, no labor, no unappeased hungers, etc., is shifted into high gear by Chateaubriand as “not describable.”
Note 14 in page 536 “Chateaubriands Verhàltnis zu Milton,” Festschrift zum 14. Neuphilologentage in Ziirich 1910 (Zurich : Zùrcher and Furrer, 1910), pp. 20–23.
Note 15 in page 536 None of Dick's evidence can support the militant claim of plagiarism he later launched at Chateaubriand in his “Plagiat, Nachahmung und Originalitàt bei Chateaubriand,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 3 (1911), 394–410.
Note 16 in page 536 Génie du Christianisme, ed. Pierre Reboul, 2 vols. (Paris: Gamier, 1966); see ii, 152–60, on the Jesuit colonies in Paraguay.
Note 17 in page 536 In the “Préface de 1805,” also included in the Gamier edition, Chateaubriand claimed that religion “corrige les passions sans les éteindre.” See p. 175.
Note 18 in page 536 For a fuller treatment of this problem, see my as yet unpublished thesis, “Paradise and the Fall as Theme and Structure in Four Romantic Novels,” Diss. Wisconsin 1968, pp. 121–27.