Towers and Mirrors: Aspects of Space in la Princesse De Cl[acute{e}]ves (2000)

Mme de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cl[acute{e}]ves creates an imaginative space at once lofty and confining where order is ensured through the exclusion of what threatens. The novel's imposition of form on chaos is concretized in the architecture of Versailles as it is in Lacan's story of the fortress: each maps the subject's problematic desire for mastery. Literature, as much as the visual arts, has a spatial dimension. Through its structure, the grammar and vocabulary of its language, literature maps out a way of relating to the world. Just as a painting organizes form and color on a canvas, or architecture defines physical spaces for habitation, literature articulates a space of possibility for the human subject. Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cl[acute{e}]ves was conceived in an age when the intellectual and creative forces of a society were channeled into the dream of supremacy that was Versailles. Versailles, more than any other French royal residence, is the visible result of an aesthetic designed to express superlative luxury and power. In its architecture and dress, entertainment and manners, Versailles was intended to serve as a model of excellence for the rest of Europe: exuberant, unrivaled, but also tightly controlled by the monarch who was as much an arbiter of style as he was director of affairs of state. Mine de La Fayette's novel is haunted by a similar dream of perfection. Her main female protagonist achieves an iconic status as a result of her incomparable and ultimately unapproachable virtue, attained principally through the alienation of 'natural' feeling. I wish to argue that the pattern of idealism and alienation which characterizes the Princesse's psychology repeats in a literary structure something of the spatial dynamic of the French court. For the glory of Versailles, and of the symbolic Sun King at its center, was maintained by the ruthless expulsion of natural feeling and the alienation of the public from the private self. This is reflected in Versailles's etiquette and its architecture. If it is only to be expected that the court life which La Fayette knew at firsthand would inform her imaginary conception of court life in a novel, the comparison between a place and a story also assumes a collective experience of style. Two aesthetic works from the same century inevitably reflect similar ways of defining the self in relation to the environment. At the same time, the particular relation between self, body and environment represented in these two products of 17th-century taste finds a reciprocal equivalent in aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis, notably in Jacques Lacan's definition of the ego in terms of a spatial identification with an alienating image. The study of contemporary architectural and social orders as a means of accessing the underlying shape of the novel's psychology will be pursued in this essay in several ways. Versailles's ambitious typology is initially compared to the novel's desire to define stylistically an ideal human persona who occupies a place of superiority and elevation in relation to others. Establishing such an ideal persona is seen to entail, in both cases, severe restrictions on the expression of emotions, to the point where the latter are denied validity and the subject of this imposed tyranny becomes alienated from his or her most basic desires and feelings. The Princesse de Cl[acute{e}]ves, in her own way, is caught up in the theater of appearances that defined Versailles, the fantomic nature of social ritual also being mirrored on the moral plane in the novel, as the Princesse is more faithful to the memory of the Prince than she was loving to the man who was her husband. Introducing a threat of chaos into this serene pagea ntry, however, is the passion the Princesse feels for Nemours. While the coupling of virtuous innocence with sexual passion has injected its particular frisson into numerous works of fiction, what sets La Fayette's work apart from most is not the degree of force required to expel this threat but, I will suggest, the way in which this forceful expulsion saps the narrative of its power to affirm and generate alternative possibilities. …