FRENCH 304 MALE AND FEMALE PERSPECTIVES IN THE 18TH-CENTURY NOVEL

Drawing from feminist inquiries into the politics of exclusion and inclusion in literary history, the course examines, in dialogue with masterpieces authored by men, novels by major women writers of the period.  Though much admired in their time, these novels were subsequently erased from the pages of literary history and recovered in the late twentieth century.  In this course we will reconsider this particular literature of female dissent along with key novels by men as part of a crisis in legitimacy that led to the French Revolution. Works by Prévost, Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin, Françoise de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos, Isabelle de Charrière. 

Women were immensely influential in eighteenth-century France, as educated leaders of salons, as readers, patrons, and, most importantly for our concerns, as novelists whose works were both highly regarded and enormously popular.  And yet prior to recent feminist scholarship, their novels were virtually excluded from the "canon", the body of works literary historians and authors of pedagogical manuals designate as "great books".  The result of a series of ideologically informed "gentlemanly choices" whose effect was to erase or rewrite as trivial the contributions of women, the history of the novel, as feminist scholars have demonstrated, is an incomplete and distorted one which calls for revision.  The rediscovery and new availability of these long forgotten works amounts to a "revolution" in literary studies.  In this course we will reconsider this particular literature of dissent along with major novels by men as part of a crisis in legitimacy that led to the French Revolution.

To appreciate fully the novels of women writers such as Tencin, Graffigny, Riccoboni and Charrière, we must return them to history.  This means double reading.  We will read them as part of a powerful tradition of women's writing.  That tradition most notably includes Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, an enabling transgression of literary and social codes whose controversial ending suggests an alternative to the standard choice for the heroine between marriage and death.  We will be especially attentive to the marks of female signature, to traces of the process of coming to writing, which indicate the peculiar status of this literature within the dominant male tradition.

But we will also read women's novels in dialogue with the recognized masterpieces of their male contemporaries, looking at each in the light of the other and examining their points of intersection to arrive at a richer, more balanced, more "bicultural" understanding of the history of the novel.  Standard features of the eighteenth century novel -- feminocentric plots revolving around love and sex, seduction and betrayal -- will thus be perceived as gender-inflected.  Finally, we will consider how men and women writers responded to the formal and aesthetic questions raised by the novel as a genre just coming into its own and how they voiced -- differently -- the social and political concerns of their time.  Reading the dominant culture from the margins of women's dissent will not only bring out the most important themes of the period but also suggest some of the Enlightenment's most serious blind spots.

Tentative reading list:

Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves

Prévost, Manon Lescaut / Tencin, Mémoires du Comte de Comminge

Montesquieu, Lettres persanes (extraits) /Graffigny, Lettres d'une Péruvienne 

Riccoboni, Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd /Rousseau, La Nouvelle Hélöise

Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste

Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses / Charrière, Lettres de Mistriss Henley publiées par son amie (1784)