SOURCE: “The Voices of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Deference, Self-Assertion, Accountability,” in French Forum, Vol. 22, No. 3, September, 1997, pp. 261-77.

In the following essay, Kaplan examines gender-related and political themes in Desbordes-Valmore's poetry.

A focus on the “feminine” versus the “feminist” aspects of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poetry introduces the wide range of poetic and political attitudes in French Romanticism. Critical assessments of her works from Sainte-Beuve, through Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine (who canonized her among his Poètes maudits) tend to view her primarily as a woman (as Eliane Jasenas has shown), a female of the species with conventional attributes: sentimentality, naïveté, sheer passion, motherhood, simple faith, and a life resigned to suffering.¹ In other words, the stereotypes usurp the biography as much as the putative life usurps the texts.

Desbordes-Valmore defined herself with an uncommon variety of female personae: in addition to “mothering”—family responsibilities and socially legitimated love—she...