SOURCE: “Portraits: A Feminist Appraisal of Mme de Staël's Delphine,” in Atlantis, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall, 1981, pp. 65-76.

In the following essay, Swallow assesses Delphine as it depicts “the oppressive effects of patriarchal hegemony.”

Madame de Staël has suffered from superficial and fallacious criticism disposed to dismiss her novels as clumsy, dated romans à clef. Certainly there are weaknesses in Staël's writing—she is, for example, annoyingly prone to prolixity and repetition—but her contribution as a writer of fiction has been unduly minimized, especially by critics prepared to see no more in Staëlien theme and characterization than hysterical retaliation and posturing self-pity. Approached thus, her two major works of fiction, Delphine and Corinne, become mere outbursts of self-dramatization, their many characters reduced to vindictive portrayals of resented relatives and out-of-favour lovers.¹ And such criticism assumes that, the novels' sensational value having inevitably declined, Delphine and...