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Paul et Virginie and the Myths of Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Clifton Cherpack
Clifton Cherpack*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
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Abstract

A recent defense of Paul et Virginie argues that the status of this work as a masterpiece can be appreciated if we concentrate on its poetic qualities and disregard its often contradictory didacticism. Yet this didacticism can be seen to be integrated into the work's “poetry” if we note that it functions on three levels. The first level is characterized by the demonstration of the irresistible conditioning effect of civilization, even in remote colonies. The second level is informed by the basic pessimism regarding life on earth that pervades the text. Subtending these is a solid mythical foundation which combines what Denis de Rougemont calls the “Tristan myth” with what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth of the hero.” The form, style, and message are harmoniously unified in the story itself, but the implications of the work's narrative frame and its survival as literature tend to belie its celebration of death.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , March 1975 , pp. 247 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), ii, xxxi. In an earlier passage, Etiemble explains his subjective reactions to the false sentimentality, timid lasciviousness, and bourgeois greed that he finds in this work: Histoire des littératures, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, iii (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 863–65.

2 Introd. to Paul et Virginie, ed. Trahard (Paris: Garnier, 1964), p. xlviii. See pp. xxv-xliii for a useful résumé of readers' reactions to the work from the time of its publication to the present. All subsequent references to the work are to this edition, hereafter cited in the text as Trahard.

3 “Une Question de terminologie littéraire: Paul et Virginie, pastorale,” Annales publiées par la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse, 3 (1953), 191.

4 Henri Coulet, in arguing that Paul et Virginie is a “grand roman,” also plays down the ideological aspects of the work and states that its essence is too mysterious to be captured in words : Le Roman jusqu'à la Révolution (Paris : Colin, 1967), i, 460–67. Vivienne Mylne, in The Eighteenth-Century French Novel (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1965), shares Fabre's and Coulet's scant regard for Bernardin's didacticism. Calling him a “muddle-headed theorist,” she says: “We may well be wasting our time if we try to reconcile Saint-Pierre's ideology with his plot” (p. 257).

5 See Mylne, pp. 245–48, for an acute discussion of the narrative techniques used in this work.

6 See Joyce Lowrie's “The Structural Significance of Sensual Imagery in Paul et Virginie,” Romance Notes, 12 (1971), 351–56.

7 See, e.g., Eleanor Terry Lincoln's editorial introd. to Pastoral and Romance (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

8 “Et in Arcadia Ego,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), pp. 223–54; rpt. in Pastoral and Romance, pp. 25–46.

9 For this double function, see Mia Gerhardt's Essai d'analyse littéraire de la pastorale dans les littératures italienne, espagnole, et française (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1950), pp. 81–82, 183, and 296.

10 Trans. Montgomery Belgion (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1956).

11 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: World, 1956), p. 30.

12 See Ben E. Perry, The Ancient Romances (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 68.

13 Lest it be thought that the ecphrasis tradition is a characteristic of the pastoral romance alone, it should be noted that other kinds of romances, like Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, also begin in this way.