SOURCE: “Corinne: The Third Woman,” in L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 99-106.

In the following essay, Schor examines the relationship between death and femininity in Corinne.

On eût dit que dans ces lieux, comme dans la tragédie de Hamlet, les ombres erraient autour du palais où se donnaient les festins.

Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie

In March, 1992, while on leave in Paris, I prepared a synopsis of a paper on death in Staël's Corinne that I proposed to give at the annual fall meeting of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. A month later I was being operated on at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine for a life-threatening liver failure.

Little did I realize at the time that I was entering a new stage in my life, a stage of serial illnesses from which I have yet to emerge. Consequently, what I...