From Charles de Mouhy’s La Paysanne Parvenue to Eliza Haywood’s The Virtuous Villager: A Study in Translation

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyse two translations of a French novel, La Paysanne Parvenue ou les Memoires de Madame la Marquise de L.V. (1735-8), by Charles de Fieux. In the first chapter we know its author, its life career and in particular how the work was structured. In the following chapter, chapter 2, we see the context where the translations of this novel were done. Indeed they were written in the 1740s, in 1740 The Fortunate Country Maid by an anonymous translator, and two years later The Virtuous Villager, or The Virgin’s Victory (1742) by the writer and translator Eliza Haywood. In these years the phenomenon Pamela exploded, indeed in 1740 “Pamela” by Richardson was published and it had effect on the kind of novels and on the characteristics of the characters. Moral novels now spread in England and in the Continent, the vicious ones were not appealing anymore; and the prevailing character was that of a poor virtuous girl who had to face many vicissitudes but at last she preserves her virtue and she was rewarded for it. The character of La Paysanne Parvenue corresponds exactly to that successful of that period, maybe for this reason Haywood decided to do a translation, although one already existed. Nevertheless she considered it too literal and it did not do justice to the spirit of the original work. Haywood, as we can see in chapter three, was a controversial writer but also a well-known and authoritative translator. In chapter four, the last chapter, we see the translation in that period and then we move on to a close analysis of two episodes in order to see if she is right in her statement. We make a comparison between the two texts with the source text and with each other on content and on lexical and syntactic features.