Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: 1830s French Romanticism

Mademoiselle Mars as Doña Sol in the 1830 world premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. I love how her costume is so clearly 1830s-Does-Renaissance.

During the first ~6 weeks of shelter-in-place, I felt distracted by everything and could hardly read a word, but four months in, I’ve settled into a routine. I’m reading more, and writing more, and am in two book clubs, and I want to get back in the habit of posting review roundups of books I’ve read lately.

First up: a novel and a play that are both key works of French Romanticism. (Interestingly, both are structured as a love quadrangle involving a maiden, an old man, a young man with nefarious intentions, and a young man with noble intentions.) No, this isn’t the most expected reading for Spring 2020, but this is what happens when you are in a book club and an occasional play-reading group with Ilana Walder-Biesanz. Our reading of Hernani, something we’d planned on doing for over a year, was originally meant to coincide with San Francisco Opera’s summer 2020 presentation of Verdi’s opera Ernani. And we couldn’t let little things like a pandemic, the opera’s cancellation, and Ilana’s sudden out-of-state move stop us from introducing some of our friends to this classic melodrama!

Hernani, or, The Pledge; or, Castilian Honour, A Tragic Drama by Victor Hugo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hernani, Victor Hugo's controversial and influential melodrama, is the very definition of "cloak and dagger": each of its five acts includes at least one moment where a disguised person jumps out of the shadows and reveals their true identity, and at least one moment where swords or daggers are drawn. The subtitle Castilian Honor indicates the play's major theme: the characters all behave in ways we would consider bizarre and preposterous (even some people at the time of the play's premiere in 1830 found it ludicrous) because they are all driven by adherence to an arcane code of honor and chivalry.

The plot is twisty and the emotions run high, yet the play is saved from incoherence by being tightly focused on a core of 4 characters in a love quadrangle. Doña Sol is in love with aristocrat-turned-bandit Hernani, betrothed to the old duke De Silva, and pursued by King Carlos of Spain himself. As is usual in these kinds of plays, the hero and heroine (Hernani and Sol) are kind of stock romantic figures and the anti-villain (Carlos) is the most fun character -- or, in other words, the baritone is always more interesting than the soprano and the tenor. (Of course Verdi adapted this play into an archetypally Verdian opera with archetypal voice assignments.)

I can't remember which translation of the play I was assigned to read in my theater-history course in college, but I think it was probably more modern than the version I read this afternoon: James Kenney's blank-verse English translation from 1831, just a year after the play premiered in France. Kenney's preface notes that his version is "freely adapted," and indeed, he retitled it The Pledge and inexplicably changed the names of two of the main characters: Doña Sol becomes Donna Zanthe, and Don Ruy becomes Don Leo. Still, he retains all of the major plot points -- his changes mostly seem limited to trimming the play's long speeches (Carlos' soliloquy at the tomb of Charlemagne is reduced from some 160 lines to 25 lines!), and cutting or conflating some minor characters. I am sure there are better translations out there for scholars who want a more accurate version of the play as Hugo wrote it, or for actors and directors who would prefer language that's less archaic and faux-Shakespearean (e.g. "No, don't think of him!" instead of "Nay, think not of him!"). Still, Kenney's cuts make this version a fast-paced read and his flowery style certainly suits the melodrama mood.

Indiana by George Sand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From the height of the Romantic era comes this story of the romantic travails of the beautiful young Indiana: married off to a retired army colonel, tempted by the attractions of a cynical playboy, ignorant of the merit of the childhood friend who has always loved her. The tone is unabashedly melodramatic; Wikisource has a mid-1800s illustrated edition and it is amusing to see how many of the images feature characters swooning into each other's arms or falling at each other's feet.



Both in its own day and in ours, Indiana has been read as a feminist cry for liberty and equality, yet for me, it was more successful as a histrionic but entertaining romance than as a piece of social commentary. It is difficult to take the characters and situations seriously, and Indiana comes across as an archetype—an idealized, objectified damsel in distress—rather than a real woman.

Then again, since this was George Sand's first novel under her male pseudonym, maybe she worried that if she made her heroine too complex and realistic, the jig would be up. Immediately following the book's most radical passage of feminist commentary, a fiery letter written by Indiana to her ex-lover ("the religion you have devised I will have nothing to do with; all your morality, all your principles are simply the interests of your social order [...] but it is all falsehood and impiety") Sand has the (male) narrator denounce the "blind vanity" and "idiotic credulity" of women, protesting that Indiana is just a "naturally foolish" woman and not an "exceptional character." I wonder if in her later books, once people knew that "George Sand" was actually Amantine Dupin, she was able to drop this pretense and write more honestly from a woman's perspective.

I would have preferred to read Indiana in the Oxford World Classics translation from 1994, which also includes explanatory notes that might've helped me make better sense of the passages where Sand reflects on 1820s French politics. But in a global pandemic, beggars can't be choosers, and I ended up reading it in George Burnham Ives' translation from 1900. Still, it was pretty readable, not as dry and Victorian as I had feared, and when I occasionally cross-referenced it with the French text on Wikisource, it appeared to be complete and accurate.