Madame de Stael-The Dangerous Exile

Madame de Stael-The Dangerous Exile 

 

By: Anjelica Goodden

 

How does writing beget exile, and exile writing? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? What geography may be traced by desire when absence separates the writer from what she most desires? ‘Exile made me lose the ties that bound me to Paris,’ Germaine de Stae¨l remarked in 1814, ‘and I became European.’ She wrote this towards the end of her third and final stay in England, feeling that it summed up the paradoxes of her exile loss that had become gain, pain become pleasure, and punishment reward. Being banished from the city of her heart’s desire may have spurred her creative imagination, but it also made her suVer as though she had been driven from paradise: her reply to a friend who attempted to console her for being conWned to the family chateau at Coppet was ‘I prefer the gutter of the rue du Bac’, the street in Paris where she had begun her married life. [download]

  

Format : Ebook.Pdf