The Limits of Howell’s Realism in Theory and Practice [A Modern Instance]

 

Endnotes appear in brackets.  References in parentheses refer to the original edition of Criticism and Fiction or to the Penguin edition of A Modern Instance which reproduces the 1977 University of Indiana edition.

 

     Probably the most influential American man of letters in the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells produced not only a great deal of fiction, but abundant criticism and reviews as well, introducing American readers to a wide range of foreign authors and advocating Realism.  Since he, like many writers of polemics, was prone to overstate his case, his exposition of the concept of Realism was not wholly consistent internally, nor was its application.  An examination of the ideas in his Criticism and Fiction (1891) and of their use in his novel A Modern Instance (1882) [1] clarifies the limits of his Realism in both theory and practice. 

     Howells opens Criticism and Fiction by agreeing with an author with whom he might be thought to have little sympathy, John Addington Symonds, who notes that Bolognese painting was once highly regarded, but, Symonds says, had come to be condemned for its “emptiness and soullessness.” (1)  Objecting to the fluctuation in artistic value judgements, Symonds proposes that art should be judged by permanent criteria and prescribes that paintings should be “simple, natural, and honest” (2).  He hopes that “the scientific spirit” might make men progressively more and more conscious of the “bleibende Verhältnisse” (“enduring relationships,” what might be called general truths) implied by artistic works such that, since  everyone has comparable experience of life, any reader may readily “test the excellence” of any work.  As an opening thematic statement, albeit at second-hand, this seems more obfuscatory than revealing.

     After all, apart from the gap between Howell’s very bourgeois American concerns and Symonds’ aestheticism (not to mention his homosexual themes), Symonds’ views raise more questions than they answer.  What to do with the many works which seem to fail the stated standard, that is, to some extent to be complex, artificial, and even misleading, yet have been celebrated by readers for centuries, such as Noh drama, the poems of the Troubadours, or The Faerie Queene.  Even less of the literature and art valued in the last century could be described as “simple, natural, and honest,” adjectives that do not apply to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or Pablo Picasso, to pick a few names at random.  And how in the world is one to know which are the important “bleibende Verhältnisse” when vision differs so from one artist to another?  Besides, must thematic implications be the heart of every work of art?  Finally, the notion that, given the right standards, everyman will be an equally qualified critic seems as unlikely as it is pointless, though the idea seems to have convinced Howells. [2]

     Howells’ own often-quoted formula seems straightforward.  “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (73)  He quotes with approval Burke’s claim that art must be judged neither by other art nor by critics but solely by fidelity to nature (7).  Nature, though, is itself problematic.  For Howells the word is capitalized to indicate its metaphysical significance, already a suspiciously unnatural sign.  “No author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent.” (14) 

     This insistence leads him to question conventional views of beauty.  Since in his view true art embraces the whole of the observed world, it cannot be judged by its prettiness: “The ugly delights as well as the beautiful.” (4)  He turns the tables on those (plentiful in his time) who would shrink from distasteful scenes.  “We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore ‘the worth of the vulgar,’; in believing that the superfine is better.” (81)

     The excessive gentility of the taste of his day to which he was responding is clear in the initial review of A Modern Instance in The Nation.  The critic objects to the vulgarity of Howells’ depiction of “cheap boarding-houses and restaurants, and of the internal economy of a newspaper establishment.”  Declaring “here is a collection of disagreeable people whom he would gladly forget,” he pronounces Howells characters “unpleasant individuals,” “people whom one does not care to number among his intimate associates,” “types of character from which we turn away with irritation.”  For him the novel focuses unpleasantly on “that which is ignoble.” [5]  

     Howells shared nonetheless a preference for the proper.  His characters were middle-class, not working class, and he shrank from any representation of the sordid or the really wicked.  Howells’ rhetoric identifies Realism with democracy and the great American middle class.  He quotes Daudet in support of the idea that European culture is worn-out.  “We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.” (135)  In contrast America has freshness and “the large, cheerful average of health and success” (129) as well as a wholesome classlessness noted by Matthew Arnold who “found no ‘distinction’ in our life” (138).  He calls for an end to “fine literary airs” in favor of “the dialect, the language, that most Americans know -- the language of unaffected people everywhere” (104).  “The arts must become democratic,” he proclaims, “and then we shall have the expression of America in art.” (140)

     If literature is simply “the expression of life,” every man is an equally qualified critic.  Howells welcomes the advent of a “communistic” era in taste in which he says, using Burke’s authority to reinforce a view that in recent years has been associated with reader response criticism, that “the true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” (8).  To Howells Grant’s Personal Memoirs, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century in America, is “a great piece of literature” (90) and possesses “natural” excellence (89) specifically because it is non-literary (43).  The assumption that every simple straightforward effect must necessarily be true and beautiful is, of course, an absurdity on its face.

     The apparent plain-spokenness in Howell’s formula for Realism, “nothing more and nothing less,” belies the elusiveness and editorial choice entailed in deciding what is “truthful” as well as what “treatment” best serves to express it.  Howells acknowledged that just recording facts will not automatically generate beauty.  In spite of his use of Keats’ well-known formula “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty (6), he plays Symonds’ wild card he had earlier introduced, the “bleibende Verhältnisse,” as a further qualification.  He specifically denies that an accumulation of data is sufficient, saying that when the writer “heaps up facts merely, maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish, too.” (15-6)  The simple ideal of mimesis has all but vanished.

     Howells readily accepts artful alteration of nature, praising in Gogol and Balzac “the touch of exaggeration which typifies” (19), though such efforts should be discreet since “intense effects” are “cheap effects” (151).  Most essential to his project is the preservation of the traditional claim that art teaches morality.  He quotes Juan Valera in favor of art for art’s sake only in order to object by maintaining that beauty is “a divine and spiritual principle” and thus “perforce moral” (60-61).  To him “as long as men are men and women are women” ethics will always be inferred, beauty inevitably “clothes” morality and art always has either a good or bad ethical effect (83).

     Howells is no Baudelaire, so he insists on the beneficial option only.  With the close association he imagines between beauty and ethics, he believes that novels should coax a reader into being be “a helpfuler and wholesomer creature” (106).  Thus licentious French novels cannot be aesthetically successful, and in fact stories of more virtuous love are “truer to life” (150). The moral role of literature is for him critical.  “If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (95).  Stories without retributive justice are “deadly poison,” (95) while mere entertainment will “clog the soul” (96).

     To Howells realism, truth, and beauty are identified, a link he seems to consider a novel insight in  spite of the precedent of Plato.  Thus, for him, asking “is it true” involves “the highest morality and the highest artistry” and “this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak.” (99)  “No one hereafter,” he maintains, “will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties.”  “No conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong.” (98) 

     Bartley Hubbard’s life is unquestionably shaped by moral considerations.  His career is a cautionary ironic American success story, from rags to riches like Horatio Alger’s popular novels which were popular when A Modern Instance was published, but Bartley, unlike Ragged Dick or Tattered Tom, had a corrupt heart and for that reason his eventual fall was as inevitable and as much a convention as their rise.  The critique of capitalism’s amoral rapacity inverts Alger’s optimistic enthusiasm about social mobility in America. [4]

     Other central concerns of the book are likewise ethical and social.  His observations about the potential for damage of newspapers governed primarily by the profit motive (as virtually all still are) and his implied acceptance of divorce in some cases may have excited topical interest, but, if so, such appeal has faded.  As a theory Howells’ Realism requires, apart from observation of lived reality, the assumption of a natural moral order uncreated by humans, embodied in a sort of Platonic form that conflates truth, beauty, and morality.  

     Though Howells opened with Symonds’ comment objecting to changing fashions in visual art, Howells in other passages enthusiastically accepted the evolution of standards.  He notes the overturning of neo-Classicism by Romanticism (15), and even speculates on some post-Realist era, though he usually depicts Realism as a climax in art’s evolution

     In practice Howell’s Realism promoted a focus on middle class characters, which is to say the group that composed the majority of his readers.  They are not only middle class, they are also generally of mixed character, neither exemplary heroes nor utter villains.  He fancies that such characters are more “real” than other varieties of humankind.  Likewise, he approvingly quotes Valdés’ condemnation  of “effectism,” by which he means seeking “vivid and violent emotions” through the means of displaying “invention and originality,” (65) preferring instead a prose style close to that of everyday educated speech.  To flaunt one’s idiosyncratic language would be to him vulgar.

     For Howells “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper” deserves representation.  He declares that “the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper must die out.” (12)  This judgement fails to recognize either the array of potential expressive possibilities of the image or the fact that Howells’ “realistic” grasshopper is every bit as artificial as the alternatives.  Yet for a time Howells represented progress.  He enlarged the scope of fiction and developed further a sense of American identity which he embodied in both theory and practice.  While he did move on from prior models to occupy territory already claimed in  France by Balzac and Zola, he remained an American, man of his times whose very limitations are perhaps more instrumental than his themes in his pictures of lived experience.  He was unaware that what he did not know, what he preferred not to express, was as significant what he included.  The fact that he was unconscious of such considerations only makes them more meaningful.    

 

  

1.  In Criticism and Fiction Howells had the scope to develop the ideas he had been promoting in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly.  To George Perkins A Modern Instance was Howell’s first major work of fiction.  See his “A Modern Instance: Howells' Transition to Artistic Maturity,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1974).

2.  See below for Howells’ notion of the coming “communistic” era of taste.

3.  As it happens, Alger, like Howells, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

4.  Howells was a progressive, though no radical.  Apart from supporting Lincoln’s presidential campaign, he defended those arrested for Haymarket “riot” and was active in the Anti-Imperialist Society.  He was a Christian socialist at a time when many, among them William Dwight Porter Bliss, Henry James Sr., and  William Henry Channing, found capitalism inconsistent with the gospel. 

5.  Atlantic Monthly, November1882.  This and similar attacks are detailed in Herbert Edwards, “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Nov., 1931).   

Water

 

     The world was once all water and all existing life was then at home in water.  Upon emerging from the seas, creatures in a way turned inside-out, such that we carry the primeval ocean about now on higher ground within us in bodily fluids, our great gangs of cells cooperating like a gang of walking jellyfish.  Water is an urgent requirement for all forms of life in spite of the fact that it contains no nutrients.   Long after life crawled onto dry land, just as the humanoid branch of great apes was developing, our ancestors continued to spend much of their time in the water according to the aquatic ape hypothesis developed independently by Max Westenhöfer and Alister Hardy, and our species adapted with such characteristics as hairlessness, fat attached (like blubber) to skin, and webbed fingers.  (Despite its imagination and suggestive power, this idea has received little support from other investigators.)

     Myths of origin using less scientific language most often begin in the water.  The opening of the Babylonian “Enuma Elish” describes the birth of the world out of an undifferentiated primal chaos when the waters divided into the fresh identified with Apsu and the salt which is Tiamat.  According to Genesis even before light the spirit was moving “upon the face of the waters,” and the Koran teaches that Allah made all living things from water.  The oldest Egyptian god was Nu, a personification of the watery abyss from whom the sun god Ra arose to order the world, first by hovering over them and calming them just as Jehovah had done.  Likewise in Hinduism the name of the archaic deity Narayana worshipped at Mohenjo-Daro is derived from the word for water and later accounts describe Prajapati’s emergence from the waters as the Hiranyagarbha or golden embryo from which the creation unfolds.  In the New Wiorld the accounts of both the Mayan cosmogony according to the Popol Vuh and the Zapotec version preserved by Fray Gregorio there was at first nothing but the expanse of the sea covering everything. 

      People did indisputably choose to live near water, and the growth of the earliest civilizations arose in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers where people could coax food production into surpluses sufficient to support idle aristocrats, administrators, and intellectuals.  Some think that extensive kingdoms developed primarily out of the need to manage water resources without undue conflict.  Interventions like dams, dikes, cisterns, sewers, and pipes were naturally first built for agricultural use, but even domestic arrangements for consumption and removal or waste appear as early the fourth millennium B.C.E. 

     Nonetheless, thousands of years passed before flushing water closets were designed in the sixteenth century by Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth and translator of Ariosto, who included a description of his invention in his allegorical satire The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a work with enough bite in its non-hydraulic implications to cause its author to be exiled from court.  (He left it to his valet to write a practical manual for those who wished to construct such a device.)

     Though it took a very long time for people to organize systems to avoid being offended by our own stink, hydraulic engineers had been successfully managing water from the very dawn of the Neolithic.  Such work occurred not only in the cradles of civilization but in more out-of-the-way spots like Papua, New Guinea where nine-thousand-year-old drainage ditches have been traced at the Kuk site.  In the fourth century B.C.E. resident of Jawa in Jordan built a walled town in the middle of the exceedingly dry Black Desert.  Their extensive earthworks prevented flooding during the seasonally destructive overflow of the Wadi Rajil, directing the waters into reservoirs for later use. 

     Thales of Miletus believed water to be the basic stuff of the universe, the substance out of which all things emerged.  Aristotle noted that this was a demythologized version of the creative work attributed to Okeanos and Tethys.  He adds that Greeks take oaths by water as it is “most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by.”  Two and a half millennia after Thales, his regard for water was thought by Nietzsche to be a worthy insight in spite of its inaccuracy as it embodied a monistic view free from mythology. 

     Pindar’s first Olympian ode, celebrating the victory of Hieron of Syracuse’s entry in the horse race, opens by declaring that for some, “water is best” (ἄριστον), but this turns out to be only the first term of a priamel.  Pindar instantly amends this survival-based intuition with the socially informed recognition that some people would prefer gold, then moves to his theme, the even more culturally determined choice of prestige gained by success in games (ἄεθλα). 

     Doubtless the loftiest role played by water as a symbolic actor is that it assumes in Laozi for whom it conveys the attributes of enlightenment: purity, simplicity, indestructibility, naturalness, submission, and humility.  The transparency of water makes it uniquely suited to represent an apophatic spirituality.  The manifold forms of water make it suggest the constantly changing phenomena of experience, while its essence remains always unchanged, “a deep pool” that will “come clean like still waters.”  At the same time, it is “restless, like the ocean,” forming “torrents that flow/ into river and sea” descending always, unresisting, going “unmurmuring to places men despise.” 

 

Nothing is weaker than water,

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.

 

If somehow, one can sidestep the sparks of ratiocination on the roiled surface of consciousness, perhaps the water which is the majority of the living body may assume the lead and conduct the self, unresisting, into harmony with what surrounds it. 

     Though today people commonly carry small water bottles about, swigging now and then to maintain hydration, in the past certain waters were ascribed more dramatic restorative powers.  Herodotus says that certain Ethiopians attained an average age of a hundred and twenty due to their regular use of a fountain of youth and his story was confirmed by numerous others.  According to the legends of Alexander his veterans, upon bathing in a stream that flowed into the Euphrates, found their youth restored.  The idea of rejuvenating waters percolated then through numerous accounts of the east, including romances and travelers’ reports.

     Among the most influential is the twelfth-century “Letter of Prester John” which describes a spring located in India “at the foot of Olympus” (considered by some to be in Sri Lanka) but also “not far from Paradise” which renders its drinkers perpetually thirty-two years old and free from disease to boot.  In  a strange anticipation of the aquatic ape theory, children in that land, the author adds, are raised in water and may spend three or four months at a stretch submerged.

     Two hundred years later, the travel book attributed to “Sir John Mandeville” (a pseudonym) describes a well in Polombe (likely modern Kerala) that “hath odour and savour of all spices,” though this changes hourly.  Drinking its waters cures all illnesses as well as bringing youth. The author accounts for these extraordinary powers by the fact that the spring arises from Paradise. 

     After Renaissance voyages enlarged the world by half, the location of this marvelous spring was transferred to the new found lands.  The sophisticated Italian humanist Peter Martyr d'Anghiera who served the Spanish court recorded the reports of a fountain of youth in the Bahamas, though he expressed his own skepticism about their truth.   Juan Ponce de León was first associated with the magic spring decades after his death in the Chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo.  The story was repeated and received revived attention through the memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda who had spent seventeen years among the Native people.  Referring to Ponce de Leon’s supposed quest, he claims to have known the location of the waters of youth, which regained in the Americas its Biblical geography, as according to Fontaneda Florida was the true location of the River Jordan, flowing out of Eden.

     That language is a reminder that the search for physical immortality is only the vulgar aspect of the spiritual grace conferred by baptismal waters.  The Mandaean Sabians who revere John the Baptist and were perhaps the first to practice the sacrament continue to perform full-body immersion.  Until the Middle Ages baptism was performed with candidates naked to signify their return to a primeval state, but even today most Christians continue to undergo this ritual of healing waters.  Their cousins in South Asia fancy similar benefits from contact with the waters of Mother Ganges, foul though it might appear to the visiting tourist. 

     Even the appreciation of the more natural qualities of water can lead to connoisseurship.  The savants in Athenaeus discuss the qualities of various drinking waters, finding that Paphlagonian sources “winy,” while a drink from the Corinthian spring Peirene is the “lightest” in all Greece.  He quotes Herodotus’ description of how the Persian king drank only water from the Choaspes which flows by Susa on its way from the Kush toward the Indus.  The deipnosophists’ contemporary descendants may find an entire supermarket aisle made up of waters, many of them touting not only their subtle flavors, but no end of vitamins and probiotics, our contemporary version of the quaint Victorian patent medicines.   

     Almost a phantom element, water has the most mysterious qualities, lacking any fixed form, transparent, odorless, able to rise invisibly from earth to sky and descend again independent of human desire.  We bathe in it and consume it and, for the rest of the day, walk about in one level or another of humidity, observing, perhaps, mists in the morning and clouds overhead in the afternoon.  Though we recognize it as a primal force, we have an intimacy with water and daily contact that suggests our kinship.  Water is always at hand to remind us of beginnings, of sublimity, of the unfathomable mysteries of the most commonplace things.  

The Rather Abstract Charm of Diderot’s La Réligieuse

 

     Diderot’s La Réligieuse is scarcely a novel at all.  Apart from the apparent accident of its composition and an elaborate metafictional apparatus, the book focuses less on action and events or on constructing credible characters than on the insistent repetition of the central figure’s suffering.  The image of Suzanne as a “damsel in distress” [1] is, in fact, the center of the story’s content.  Virtually every page is filled with her helpless laments and the whole work is presented as her appeal for a rescuer. 

     In this use of the image of a helpless woman, in need of a man’s intervention, Diderot was highly conventional, though he was innovative, even radical, in other ways.  The spectacle of a defenseless woman, threatened, often sexually, by a villain occurs universally.  The motif, one of the most widespread in world culture, appears in myths like those of Andromeda and Sita and in many heroines of the Yuan drama, through Scheherazade and European fairy tales such as “Snow White” and “Rapunzel,” to nineteenth century American melodrama, modern Bollywood movies, and bdsm pornography.

     In the last paragraph of her story, Suzanne summarizes her entire manuscript saying “je m'étais montrée à chaque ligne aussi malheureuse à la vérité que je l'étais (“I had shown myself in every line as unhappy as I was”).  Given such a simple and unchanging protagonist, Diderot might have concentrated on description (of which there is very little) or style (generally straightforward) or on theme.

     Diderot’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of Christianity might suggest that last alternative.  The fact is that prior to fictional treatments of the topic of convent life often had very little to do with the spiritual growth for which religious houses were created.  A good deal of the genre is rather overheated.  Often the nunnery was represented as an impediment to lovers, as in the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, or the Lettres portugaises of the Vicomte de Guilleragues.  Risqué tales also proliferated concerning this female world forbidden to men’s eyes, including Vénus dans le cloître, attributed to Jean Barrin and Le Portier des Chartreux attributed to Gervais de La Touche. 

     In La Réligieuse Diderot does not attack the church as a whole despite his hostility to Roman Catholicism.  Suzanne is a devoted believer who has no specific objection to the prayers and rituals she is expected to perform.  Her only protest, and presumably her author’s, is against the forced imposition of religious vows.  The depictions of one viciously sadistic Mother Superior and another, consumed by predatory homosexual desire (and unstable to boot) are balanced by the first, a generous-hearted mystic who seems really to belong in a convent.    

     Forced vocations were a reality; indeed, Diderot’s sister had died at twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent in which she had been placed due to her mental health, and the author had himself been confined in a Carmelite monastery at the age of thirty at the orders of his own father who wished to prevent his son’s marriage to Anne-Antoinette Champion.  The cloister walls held him scarcely a month, but the experience may well have provided him with memories that sharpen his account of Suzanne’s suffering. 

     However, neither that slender theme and nor the generous helpings of pathos, highly seasoned as it is with sex and violence, provides the book’s principal interest.  In recent years the text has gained increasing recognition for its conceptual and metafictional elements, what might be called a sort of proto-postmodernism (if the term is not too barbarous). [2]

     Even a simplified outline of the levels of fabulation in La Réligieuse can be dizzying.  The events of the plot are discernible only through multiple layers of refraction, distortion, irony, and deceit.  The text is presented, as were many early novels, as factual, a genuine series of letters, documents of lived experience, though from the start the fact of their publication throws that appearance in doubt.  Still, the narrator is, as she often reminds the reader, a perfect ingenue who says she writes “sans talent et sans art, avec la naïveté d'un enfant de mon âge et la franchise de mon caractère” (“without talent and without art, with the naivety of a girl of my age and with the frankness of my character”).  Her unworldliness is only perhaps too perfect, as she strains credulity when she cannot recognize lesbian love-making though it seems that both she and the Mother Superior reach orgasm.  

     Furthermore, this modesty topos is a highly conventional formula, recognized for millennia by rhetoricians.  Since Suzanne’s pleas are meant to be persuasive, to move the heart of her correspondent, and win his aid, they are appropriately rhetorical, though the use of such familiar devices may cast a wash of uncertainty over the story’s veracity. 

     The tension between reality and representation that inevitably accompanies fiction is, in the case of La Réligieuse, dramatically heightened by the peculiar circumstances of the book’s creation.  Suzanne’s heart-felt appeals are directed to the Marquis de Croisemare, a real person and a friend of Diderot’s.  Thus the “novel” breaks out of the page and into lived experience.  The letters were originally composed as part of an elaborate hoax to bring the Marquis to Paris, since he had several years before sought to intervene in the case of a certain Marguerite Delamarre who had been involuntarily confined in a convent.  The plan failed -- though the Marquis was taken in and responded with sympathy and offers of help, he asked his correspondent to his estate instead of coming to Paris. 

     Diderot continued to work on the letters over the next ten years.  In 1770 Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, included the book in his handwritten journal Correspondance littéraire, a periodical of tiny but influential circulation, along with the Marquis’ actual replies.  Diderot continued to work on the manuscript, modifying it as well as adding a “Préface-annexe” explaining the circumstances of its composition and altering some passages by Grimm and the Marquis.  (This “preface” was printed at the end of the text, a detail that puts the reader just a bit more off balance.)

     Finally, in 1796 the book was published in a generally available edition which proved so popular that it ran through fourteen printings by the turn of the nineteenth century.  By this time the Revolution had first outlawed lifelong religious vows and then attempted to suppress the church altogether.  La Réligieuse was associated in this revolutionary period not only with unorthodox religious views, but also with pioneering avant-garde artistic technique.  Diderot’s interest in interrogating the ideal of mimesis is evident in the very title of his story “Ceci n’est pas un conte” (“This is not a Story”).

     The book’s most radical characteristics points toward such new directions as performance art, metafiction, and collaborative composition.  The circumstances of its creation and its resulting form question the very bases of mimetic fiction, rendering the subject unstable and ambiguous and in that way La Réligieuse anticipates late twentieth-century trends at a time when much of European culture had not even yet engaged with realism. 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is in fact used by Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison but such threatened and oppressed women regularly appear in his other novels as well, as well as in the Gothic novels of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

2.  Consideration of Diderot, often centering on Jacques le fataliste et son maître or on “Ceci n’est pas un conte” occurs regularly in discussions of metafiction.  See, for example, Gamal Abdel-Fattah, Postmodern Literature and its Background, Marie-Laure Ryan, “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), Malin Strømberg, What Makes Fiction “Meta”? A comparative study of literary self-reflexivity from Sterne to Winterson, and Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.  Diderot’s metafictional role is also reflected in his appearance in Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage.