The Jilted Friend: Omniscient Narration in Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves and L’Histoire d’Henriette d’Angleterre

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a new reading of La Princesse de Clèves by refracting it through Lafayette’s earlier Histoire d’Henriette d’Angleterre and that work’s subtext of jilted friendship and offset social perspective. Lafayette’s experience of having a prestigious younger friend, Princess Henriette, commission a memoir of her life, only to drop the project partway through, pushed Lafayette to recognize how much she had already discerned about the princess even without the latter’s insider information. Drawing on trenchant observations culled from the sidelines of the court, Lafayette developed narrative techniques that valorized what she had observed from afar and from below. Importantly, Lafayette expanded these techniques in La Princesse de Clèves, creating a memorialist narrator and perspicacious characters whose powers of observation and whose ideas about manners resemble her own in the memoir. Though the novel’s narrator has often been described as omniscient, the earlier memoir reveals that Lafayette understands such discernment as deeply rooted in the social. Though painfully aware that she was not the kind of flashy, younger friend Henriette truly favored, Lafayette highlights the value of her years and the solidity of her manners, rooted as they are in ‘la civilité des conditions ordinaires’. In both texts, Lafayette shows readers that at the crossroads of the court, every observer and point of view deserves notice. This reading helps us understand La Princesse de Clèves as less elitist than many previous readers have claimed. It also highlights the larger role of unequal friendship in prompting early modern conversations about manners and bringing prescriptions about them into writing.