The Princess of Cleves

School of Fontainbleau, Gabrielle d'Estrees and One of her Sisters, c. 1594, Louvre

By Madame de Lafayette, trans. Robin Buss, London, Penguin, 2004, p. 185

This is one of my favorite books!  I've read it four times for the joy of being drawn into the gossip, intrigue,  and psychological complexity of the French court during the reign of Henry II (1547-1559).  The Princess of Cleves is a beloved classic text of French literature. Nicolas Sarkozy caused an uproar when he suggested that a "sadist or an idiot" was responsible for putting questions about this novel on a French civil service exam.  Shouldn't everyone study one of the world's literary landmarks?

A young woman is brought to court and married off to a kind, respectable man, the Monsieur de Cleves, but quickly falls in love with her heart's true desire, the Duc de Nemours.  Smiley argues that Madame de Lafayette asks the same question as Marguerite de Navarre in The Heptemaron:  Does romantic love ruin a virtuous woman?  The Princess of Cleves, desperate to fight her sincere love for the Duc de Nemours, confesses her passion to her husband.  The M. de Cleves respects his wife for her virtue but despairs over her love for another.  He dies.  The Princess is now free to marry the Duc de Nemours but retires to a convent.  In time, Nemours forgets his love for the Princess.

This is the first recognizable modern novel on The List.  De Lafayette combined a step-by-step exploration of the heroine's mind with an expert depiction of court life.  The Princess decides not to marry Nemours because she feels partly responsible for her husband's death, and, more astutely, she fears that the Duc's love would cool with a change of circumstance.  Romantic love is not marital love, and so long as their love affair remains unrequited, their love is equal.  If she yields, their love becomes unequal.  

The French court blurs the line between romantic and political relationships.  The erotic is the political.  At the same time, courtly culture is concerned with traditional Catholic notions of personal morality.  For example, Smiley notes that the Princess does not give in to her passion for the Duc while married because she is aware that he cannot protect her from scandal.  Extra-marital entanglements are the norm, yet there is clearly a price, in terms of reputation, for such liaisons.

Finally, The Princess of Cleves offers a wonderful depiction of Early Modern female identities.  This is not a world that admires transparency.  The Princess flees the court for the countryside when the burden of maintaining appearances (i.e., hiding her desire) becomes too painful.  The Queen yearns for the Vidame de Chartres because, in part, she needs to confide in someone.  The premise of courtly culture is that nothing is as it appears to be. At the very least, the protagonists have three selves: one for the public court, one in their private household, and an introspective self.

The Heptameron

Diane the Hunter, School of Fontainbleau, 1550-1560,  Louvre Museum

By Marguerite de Navarre, London, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 542

Inspired by The Decameron, this text is composed of seventy-two short stories written or compiled by Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), sister of Francois I and patron of Rabelais. Five men and five women take refuge from misadventure in a Pyrenean abbey and they agree to pass the time telling stories.  Unlike Boccaccio's work, however, the participants stipulate that all their tales must be true. The Heptameron was composed during the Reformation, and the mood of the work is considerably darker than The Decameron.   

The rules and rites of marriage are the means to explore both religious foment and changes in aristocratic hierarchy.  Marguerite specifies that the tales should address the question: can a woman know romantic passion and remain virtuous?  The religious controversies the 16th century set the stage for the rise of the novel.  Every sinner was responsible for avoiding sin and demonstrating the presence of God's grace in his or her life.  This prompted an awareness of one's inner life and the inner life of others.  According to Smiley, novels organize themselves around a character's inner life and especially inner conflict. 

The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story

Watercolor by Max Beerbohm,
Two Lines of Orphans: Can You Pick Out Zuleika?

By Max Beerbohm, illustrated by the author, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 350

Max Beerbohm was a caricaturist, prose writer, and man about town in Edwardian London. After the text's initial publication in 1911, Beerbohm added over eighty watercolor illustrations to a special copy that Yale University Press reproduces here for the first time. The writing and the illustrations are charmingly fey and graceful.  Zuleika Dobson is an upper-class fairy tale: our heroine is an irresistibly beautiful femme-fatal who sweeps into Oxford and by the force of her charm sets off a wave of mass suicides among undergraduates.  The tone is sparkling, light, and I am reminded of novels by Anita Loos and P.G. Wodehouse. Aldous Huxley claimed that Zuleika Dobson portrays an Oxford culture that was swept away by the two World Wars.

For me, this novel is about the dangers of rereading.  I first encountered Zuleika about three years ago and  was enchanted.  Reading the book was like falling headlong into a world of aristocratic aesthetes.  I loved the fanciful elements in the story: sculptures weep, pearl studs change color as the characters fall in love or grieve, Greek gods laugh at the folly of romance, and ghosts roam freely throughout Oxford.  One of the pleasures of reading is how a book can change my mood.  The act of reading itself is one of pleasurable absorption.  This time around, the novel felt like a Twilight of the Elites tale.  Who cares what a bunch of over-privileged toffs get up to?

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar,  1597-1599, National Gallery of Art

By Anonymous, New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p.118

This narrative tells the story of a poor young man who struggles to find a master, and therefore a livelihood, in 16th century Spain.  Identified as the first picaresque novel, a tale about petty criminals or disreputable members of society, Lazarillo de Tormes revolves around a marginalized protagonist during Spain's Golden Age.  Lazarillo cycles through masters who are types--a greedy priest, a lying friar, and an impoverished nobleman who is too full of his own dignity to work. Beyond this novel's lively critique of the Catholic Church and Spanish social life, it is an important literary precursor to Vanity Fair and Huckleberry Finn.

The early novels on The List are proving to be, in the words of Ms. Smiley, "uncongenial works."  Lazarillo has an engaging voice, but the tale felt fragmentary and crude.   I love the history of Early Modern Europe and want to hear stories from those who are usually silenced.  I was, despite all that, distracted.

Madame Bovary

Isabelle Hubert as Madame Bovary, 1991

By Gustave Flaubert, trans. Lydia Davis, New York: Viking, 2010, p. 342


Reading Madame  Bovary is an exercise in ambivalence.  I want to strangle the heroine because she is so self-absorbed and conventional.  On the other hand, her search for romantic transcendence feels quite familiar to my own longings.  Emma Bovary is married to a provincial doctor who she dismisses as an oaf.  Motherhood leaves her cold.  She has a series of extramarital affairs, shops her way to financial ruin, and swallows arsenic when her disappointments overwhelm her. This plot outline, however, misses the point of the novel.  

Madame Bovary is a psychological portrait.  Emma wants to remake herself in the model of romantic heroine.  Her identity is grounded in a fantasy of aristocratic splendor and amorous achievement. She is especially alive to the power to material elegance.  She dresses herself in the height of fashion, and her home is constructed as a stage set that highlight her personal attributes.  

For Emma, outward beauty is a sign of inner grace.  Flaubert brings the physical world alive for the reader through the articulation of concrete detail.  The ladies at a ball, for example, shimmer before us:

"Along the line of seated women, painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half concealed smiling faces, and little gold-stoppered bottles twirled in half-open hands whose white gloves showed the outlines of their nails and hugged their flesh at the wrist. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, sparkled on chests, clinked on bare arms."

I keep expecting Emma to achieve emotional connection, but her poetic desires are forever undercut by the brutish or the mundane. Ironic juxtaposition between a romantic ideal and a prosaic reality, rendered in lyric objective prose, is at the core of Flaubert's style. Emma spends a night at the opera seeing Lucie de Lammermoor, for instance, yet she grows bored and wants to leave before the performance is over.  Instead of finding identification with Lucie, "[t]he mad scene was not at all interesting to Emma, and the heroine's acting seemed to her exaggerated."

Flaubert took over four years to compose the novel, he discarded much of the material he produced, and Lydia Davis's translation is equally concerned with precision. Julian Barnes offers a thoughtful--if somewhat snippy--evaluation of the translation here.  Notes at the back of the book explain obscure cultural references, and the introduction provides an overview of Flaubert's working processes and aesthetic goals.

Apollo's Angels: a History of Ballet

Suzanne Farrell rehearsing with Balanchine and Arthur Mitchell

By Jennifer Homans, New York, Random House, 2010, p. 643

This is the first cultural history of ballet--ever.  Homans is a scholar and former professional dancer so she comes at her topic with a unique perspective.  I loved when she wrote about dance conveying more than words; its a special kind of exchange between artist and audience that is beyond language.  She ended on a negative note: Ballet is dead.  May have prompted The New York Times dance critic to offer this alternative view.  A book for all balletomanes to treasure.

Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self

Edouard Manet, Olympus, 1982

by Peter Fonagy, Gyorgy Gergely, Elliot Jurist, Mary Target, New York, Other Press, 2004, p. 576.

This amazing book fuses developmental psychology and psychoanalytic theory in an exciting definition of attachment theory: attachment is not an end in itself.  It produces a representational system of psychological states.  Mentalization is the process by which we understand that having a mind mediates our experience of the world.  Mentalization (or the Reflective Function) is how we know ourselves--through a gradually elaborated inner organization--and others. The stakes are higher here for psychoanalytic thinkers: one can only develop a self with the intentional mind states via the hard-won acquisitions in the attachment stage. 

The understanding of the "I" is the understanding of complex internal structures.  The attachment stage, in this way, is a life-long process.  The understanding of the "I" (our internal processes are so opaque!) as a mental agent grows out of interpersonal experience.  The baby's understanding of herself as a physical organism with a mind is not a genetic given; its a constructed capacity.  To reiterate, self-reflection and the capacity to reflect on other minds are constructed capacities that evolved out of early experiences.

The building blocks of the organization of the self are affect regulation, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the experience of self-agency.

Affect regulation is the modulation of emotional states but it can also be used to develop the self.  (Internal states that are not mirrored back to the enfant by the caregiver adequately undermine appropriate labeling.  These emotions remain confused, experienced as unsymbolized, and hard to regulate.  This may lead to the child equating internal experience with external reality.  The child may feel that emotions inevitably spill out into the world)  Fonagy et al. introduce the concept of "mentalized affectivity" which marks the mature capacity to regulate feelings and discover the subjective meaning of one's own feelings. 

Mentalized affectivity stands at the core of the therapeutic process.  It announces the gap between internal experience and external reality.  Healing can come from processing shame (or other troubling emotions) via mentalization.  Individuals come to conceive of new narratives that explain the behavior of others or themselves.  Mentalization is a creative process that engenders new narratives, alternative interpretations and differing perspectives. 

The relationship between analyst and patient recapitulates the dynamics at the attachment stage.  Fonagy describes his working method as the constant availability and active offering of the analyst's mind so that within it, the client may discover her own self.  An analyst enters into the mental world of the client and only gradually show him through contact with his mental experience, that it is a series of representations that can be played with, shared, and changed.

This book won a ton of awards.  Its the most important book I've read on self-modulation and internal growth.  I chose Manet's Olympia as the illustration for this book because she is such a proud and self-aware subject!