The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers

by Toru Dutt

Set in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers is a novel of possibilities and limitations; of love, marriage and domesticity, and the heartaches and joys of growing up. Fifteen-year-old Marguerite, fresh from her convent education and extremely religious, returns to her family and experiences the first stirrings of love, only to find herself entangled in a complicated net of relationships. The story traces Marguerite's growth through adolescence to maturity and marital happiness. Written in secret and discovered by the author's father after her death, this poignant novel is a unique and unexpected outcome of the intellectual, linguistic, and cultural ferment of nineteenth-century colonial Bengal.

Genres: Fiction, Classics

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Toru Dutt was born on March 4, 1856, in Calcutta, to father Govin Chunder Dutt and mother Kshetramoni.

Toru was the youngest child, arriving after sister Aru and brother Abju (who died in 1865). Their cousin was the poet and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt. Both girls honed their English and French during a four-year residence in England and France, starting in 1869 at the French School at Nice, then in London in 1870, where The Dutt Family Album was published, and last in Cambridge in 1871, where the sisters attended the "Higher Lectures for Women." The family returned in September 1873 to their city house in Rambagan and their garden residence at Baugmaree.

Toru produced her first volume of poetry, A Sheaf, in 1876: it held 165 translations from French writers, eight by her sister Aru and the rest by herself, including "My Vocation" by Jean-Pierre de Béranger. After her best friend and sister Aru died of consumption on July 23, 1874, Toru determined to make a "sheaf" of poems for her native culture and proceeded to acquire Sanskrit in 1875-76. Though ill herself, she wrote her Ancient Ballads and Legends at this time.

She died on August 30, 1877, also of consumption, and is buried at C. M. S. Cemetery in Calcutta. Her father ensured that her manuscripts -- two novels, one in English and one in French, as well as her new "sheaf" -- were published in London and Paris.

Reviews

[Pragya · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[P · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most interesting part of the novel is not in the novel at all. It's a fragment of a letter included in the Introduction where Toru Dutt writes to a friend, "We do not go much into society now. The Bengali reunions are always for men. Wives and daughters and all women-kind are confined to the house, under lock and key, a la lettre, and Europeans are generally supercilious and look down on Bengalis. I have not been to one dinner party or any party at all since we left Europe. And then I do not know any people here except our kith and kin, and some of them I do not know" (xvi). This fragment provides us with the backdrop to the inane fantasy of Marguerite D'Arvers.

There are no characters of color; instead Dutt seeks to escape into the skin of the people who avoid her company. Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the violence of such self-erasure. Here is a young imagination, internally colonized, loathing its racial identity and wishing to inhabit European ideals of beauty and culture. If we want to know how Bengali women were inculcated with such colonial ideas, we can find no better example than the crudity of this childish author who has not yet learned to cloak her desires in ambiguous language.

Against the stifling homosociality of the Bengali expatriate community where she was relegated to the status of a worthless unmarried female, Dutt wove a tale of a French girl who is treated with exaggerated courtesy by every person she encounters in the novel space. While Toru Dutt was too brown for the life she wanted to lead, her fictional alter-ego is described as pale and the anxiety to perform paleness registers on the reader because nearly every character towards the latter half of the novel repeats, "Marguerite, you are looking so pale!" Dutt's vanity was fulfilled by forcing each character to laud Marguerite's great beauty and goodness, over and over again as an obsessive refrain. Other young women are kept firmly in the background and older women are allowed to enter into the novel-scape only if they, too, partner the men in heaping praise on Dutt's alter-ego. In fact, Marguerite has very little personality aside from being beautiful (passively) and good (in a limp emulation of supposed Christian virtue). Bengali racism and colorism inflect descriptions of male characters. For instance, Marguerite slobbers over a count whose skin is so white, we are informed, that she can see his blue veins starkly outlined.

Unpublished in the author's lifetime, Diary of Mme. D'Arvers was misfiled under the name of the French woman, Clarisse Bader, who wrote one of the introductions. Bader's patronizing introduction foregrounds the colonial rationale for such a mistake. The novelty of a brown Indian girl writing an entire novel in French, Bader seems to suggest, is a novelty akin to a monkey writing a Bible verse.

What if Toru Dutt had written a different novel? One that was less of a self-coddling fantasy? Lonely and far from the company of friends, Dutt found escape into the character of the favored Marguerite. But I can't help imagining a novel which would have boldly reflected French society in its exclusions--not from the vantage point of one donning whiteface---but anchored in her own, unacceptably brown and irrevocably female desiring subject body.

[Roselyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating :2.75/5

[Debojit Sengupta (indianfiction_review) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading about the life of Toru Dutt makes me bow down in respect. She was an accomplished writer, translator and poet by the time she was barely 20, that too in the 19th century when writing in English language was a rare phenomenon in India. The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers was written in secret by Toru, in French originally and was published posthumously when the manuscript was discovered by her father after her death. I was just amazed to be reading a book by a Bengali author written in French and then translated into English, this is a such a rare rare book.

I have not read many romance novels, to be honest I haven't read any of the classic romance novel by the likes of Jane Austen or Emily Bronte, but from what I've read about this book, it is supposed to be in the same level as the classic English novels. I almost felt like Toru Dutt was writing about her own feelings and dreams through the character of Marguerite.

The story is written in the form of Diary entries by Mademoiselle Marguerite, a young girl of 15 living in a small town of Brittany in 19th Century France. It follows her life as she is experiencing the first trials and tribulations of love in her life. I loved all the characters in the book and specially the relationship between the narrator and her father. The book also talks about the importance of family in a girl's life. It is written beautifully with so much emotion and it feels like it comes straight from the author's heart. The ending would probably bring a lump in your throat, so tragic and heart wrenching.

I'm glad to have read this book.

[Solo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply interesting when read with awareness and appreciation of the historical and biographical context Toru Dutt existed within. Otherwise reads like self-insert fanfiction rife with naive romantic idealization of the self and the lover, accurate to the average female teenage experience, stained and restrained by a truly morbid streak of melancholy. I prefer Toru Dutt's poetry, but this was worth the read just to get a closer look at her mind.

[nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible and devastating

[Makenna Brar · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more exciting when I think about it as a pseudo-Gothic novel (castle with mysterious chambers, innocent maiden, family + madness). Unfortunately, the Gothic elements are few and kinda far between. The author, Dutt, is pretty fascinating, though, so that knowledge helped augment the reading.