Corinne in the North. Madame de Staël’s Infuence on Sophie von Knorring and August Strindberg

Abstract

Since its publication in 1807 Mme de Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie has become a fundamental reference point for many women writers, who have found in it a prototypical representation of the confict between genius and current defnitions of femininity. Translated into Swedish in 1808-09, Co-rinne inspired writers such as Fredrika Bremer and Sophie von Knorring. The latter ofered, in her 1836 novel Kvinnorna, a rewriting of de Staël’s novel, using it to refect on a woman’s place in a patriarchal society and on the relationship between art and femininity. Later on, when the Woman Question became a widely debated topic, echoes of Corinne can be found even in one of the stories that August Strindberg collected in Giftas II, this time deployed in a misogynist key. Studying the way in which the myth of Corinne is rewritten in diferent social and literary contexts provides an in-teresting key to analysing the ideological positions involved in the Woman Question and to discussing gender bias in aesthetic matters