The Wasting Away of Romantic Heroines

The reader of nineteenth-century French novels soon becomes accustomed to a mysterious phenomenon, namely, the dying of relatively young women from a malady that seems to have no physical cause. The prototype for this phenomenon is probably Rousseau's Julie, who dies several days after diving into the water to save her son's life. The nineteenth-century novel presents abundant examples of this almost archetypical figure; Corinne in Germaine de Staël's novel of the same name, Ellénore in Constant's Adolphe, Madame de Rênal in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Valentine in George Sand's novel of that title, Madame de Couaën in Sainte-Beuve's Volupté, and several of Balzac's heroines, such as Madame de Mortsauf in Le Lys dans la vallée, are just some of the young women whose demise is mysterious, incompletely explained, and which appears almost to be self-willed. The creators of Corinne, Ellénore, and Henriette seemed to know instinctively what contemporary physicians are begrudgingly beginning to admit about the human body and the diseases that destroy it: that emotions such as grief and loneliness can kill. It is difficult to compare writers whose ideological stance and æsthetic sense differ so widely as is the case with Staël, Constant, and Balzac. Yet, it seems evident that in their approach to the deaths of their heroines in these three novels, all acknowledged the effects of loss of love on health. (NR)