This slim volume, published anonymously in 1669, was among the most influential works of its century. Today the letters are generally attributed to Guilleragues, but 17th-c. readers never doubted that they were, as the original edition proclaimed, ‘traduites en français’. These readers did not consider the possibility that this could be a work of literature and instinctively took the letters for the authentic account of the woman whose voice we hear in them. Early readers were not interested in the identity of this woman, who describes herself only as a Portuguese nun and calls herself simply Mariane, although they did try to determine that of the unfaithful French lover to whom the letters were addressed. The theory identifying the letters' author with an actual Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, dates from the 19th c. For her first public, Mariane was beyond identity, a primal voice of female passion. Sévigné, for example, identified the archetypal woman's writing expressed in a burning love-letter simply as ‘une portugaise’.
The five original ‘portugaises’ read like an extended cry from the heart. Mariane's obsession with her passion is so all-consuming that she sacrifices the external world to it. It is ultimately unclear, for instance, whether she exclaims ‘my love’ to the man who has betrayed her or to her passion personified. In an effusion that early readers saw as the authentic, unbridled female voice, but that recent critics praise as controlled disorder, Mariane pours out a tale of abandonment that becomes a victory over abandonment as she transfers her passion to writing.
Letters portugaises is still usually published anonymously. Such indeterminacy is appropriate for a work that has most often been admired for its intense authenticity. The five ‘portugaises’ define the paradox of letter-writing as a genre poised between the real and the fictional.
[Joan Dejean]
