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Book Reviews/
Critiques de livres
Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History
by Melissa Sodeman
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
xii+186pp. US$50.00. ISBN 978-0-8047-9132-8.
Review by Amy Garnai, Tel Aviv University
In Sentimental Memorials, Melissa Sodeman innovatively examines the
work of four prominent women writers of the 1780s and 1790s. Through
a focus on the novels of Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith,
and Mary Robinson, Sodeman shows how sentimental novels of these
decades “reflect on and provide ways of thinking about the conditions of
cultural and literary survival” (3). Integrating women’s literary history,
book history, and the history of ideas more generally, she offers a lucidly
written, thought-provoking, and highly original account of a particular
literary and cultural moment; in doing so, she shows women’s writing
as self-reflexive and metacritical. Cognizant of their present and future
exclusion from the literary canon, these authors “memorialize ... the con
ditions of their writing” (9) at a time when sentimental literature was
losing its popular appeal.
Sodeman’s first chapter presents a discussion of Sophia Lee’s The
Recess (1783–85) in which she combines a detailed close reading of the
novel with an examination of the wider cultural concerns of the midto late eighteenth century, such as manuscript culture, authenticity,
forgery, and the availability of historical recovery. Relating the novel
to these contexts, and especially to James Macpherson’s Ossian poems,
Sodeman’s reading of The Recess offers a sustained analysis of Lee’s
awareness of “what cannot be recuperated” (30), what has been lost
in history through the illegibility of manuscripts, linguistic decay,
surrogation, and substitutions that pervade her novel on the level of
plot. This analysis is extended to include landscape theory, with the
perspectives of “prospect” and the “vanishing point” as indicative of the
irrecoverableness of history, “the simultaneous recessing of historical
characters and our own vanishing from their perspective” (45).
Chapter 2 focuses on a reading of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance
of the Forest (1791). The reader can see a view of the past in which
Radcliffe, similarly to Lee, acknowledges historical (but also developing)
technologies of reading and writing, while simultaneously insisting on
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, no. 4 (Summer 2016)
ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.28.4.739
Copyright 2016 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University
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our inability to recover the past. Addressing scenes of reading, Sodeman
interweaves in her analysis the epistemological concerns surrounding the
role of the found manuscript in culture more broadly, “the authenticity
of textual remains and [the] transmission of literary history” (55). Even
the absorptive reading experience cannot revive the past or supply
the crucial detail of its authorship. Sodeman’s discussion of Radcliffe’s
interpolation of lyric verse throughout The Romance of the Forest shows
how these lyric poems are also a kind of “sentimental memorial”; their
stilted forms and strained presence within the narrative call attention
to another dimension of Radcliffe’s awareness of the temporality of her
own literary endeavour as the sentimental gothic is being emptied of its
affective power and its cultural significance.
Charlotte Smith’s writing forms the topic of the third chapter.
Sodeman discusses Smith’s practice of literary quotation, together with
her personal experience of exile, as a way of understanding Smith’s
authorship as the convergence of formal practices and lived experience.
Smith’s frequent use of quotation underscores, for Sodeman, the way in
which the practice “may serve as an idiomatic marker of exile” (102).
Her close readings of Smith’s novels The Banished Man (1794) and The
Young Philosopher (1798) suggest how form—in this case, extensive
quotation of others’ works—calls attention to Smith’s own life story.
In this sense, Smith’s enactment of a “literary memorial” can be seen
as a representation of her exclusion, expressing the anxiety of her
(internal) exile, but also, in the shared expression of others’ words, as
the marker of a literary community. The discussion of the two prefaces
of The Banished Man is especially enlightening as it convincingly shows
Smith’s authorship in practice, and the tensions that emerge between
humanistic ideals and commercial practices.
Sodeman’s final chapter, on Mary Robinson, presents another example
of a woman writer recognizing the decline of sentimental fiction and thus
envisioning her work as a literary memorial. Unlike the other authors
discussed in this book, Robinson’s biography—she had been, of course,
mistress to the Prince of Wales—ensured that her fame, or rather, her
notoriety, would live on after her death and beyond the decline of the
sentimental novel. Nonetheless, as Sodeman shows, Robinson was also
concerned with the “ephemerality of sentimental form and ... the shortlived nature of literary fame” (114) more generally, connected to but also
moving beyond her personal story. The book history dimension of this
study is employed usefully in this chapter, as Sodeman relates Robinson’s
changing presence in the commercial literary marketplace. The chapter
concludes with a discussion of Robinson’s novels Angelina (1796) and
The Natural Daughter (1799) in order to show her metacritical reflections
on the passing of the sentimental form and its implications for the place
ECF 28, no. 4 © 2016 McMaster University
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(or what would soon become the removal) of this generation of women
writers from literary history.
Throughout this book, Sodeman’s command of different aspects of
eighteenth-century print culture is impressive, particularly in how she
integrates into her argument the development of publishing practices,
copyright legislation, and canon formation and their implications for
the woman writer. As such, this book is a welcome addition to both the
women’s studies and book history bookshelves. At the same time, some
elements of Sodeman’s argument could have been further strengthened
to give her readers, especially those who are less familiar with the field,
a fuller sense of Lee, Radcliffe, Smith, and Robinson’s participation in
this cultural moment. Throughout my reading of this book, I could
not help thinking that, in limiting her discussion to such a selective
number of works, she bypasses many other texts that chart the ongoing
development of her authors’ literary preoccupations and forcefully
support her claims. To state just a few examples, while Radcliffe’s The
Romance of the Forest is, to be sure, an important novel, The Italian
(1797) has much to say about manuscripts in relation to sentimental
novels (there, the recovered manuscript simply disappears) and to the
employment of the gothic aesthetic, as the “explained supernatural”
finally, decisively, gives way to the terrors of history. Likewise, any
discussion of Robinson’s recognition of the instability of the sentimen
tal structure would be enriched by acknowledging Walsingham (1797),
where the hero, who is discovered to be a heroine, tells much about
Robinson’s awareness of the inefficacy—in fact the collapse—of the
genre. Finally, Smith’s masterpiece, Beachy Head (1807), written at the
end of her life, provides important evidence to bolster Sodeman’s argu
ment as a whole. Although, of course, not a novel, it is surely a selfreflexive literary memorial, with a recovered fragment and a “guiltless
exile” (288); it is a testimony not only to Smith’s own situation, in which
authorship and exile converge, but also to the work of the women writers
of her generation and the tension between the perceived instability and
ephemerality of fame and their desire for a more permanent and lasting
remembrance of their writings.
Amy Garnai teaches in the Department of English and American Studies
at Tel Aviv University and in the Department of English at the Kibbutzim
College of Education. Her book Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s:
Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald was published in 2009.
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Les Femmes savantes, lettrées et cultivées dans la littérature
française des Lumières, ou la conquête d’une légitimité
(1690–1804), 2 vols., par Adeline Gargam
Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014.
1604pp. €195. ISBN 978-2-7453-2564-8.
Critique littéraire par Isabelle Brouard-Arends
Soulignons tout d’abord que l’ouvrage d’Adeline Gargam s’inscrit dans
la lignée des apports scientifiques considérables de ces dernières années
sur la connaissance des femmes des Lumières. La récente publication
du Dictionnaire des femmes des Lumières, sous la direction de H. Krief
et V. André en est une manifestation éclairante. Gargam y a contribué
par maints articles qui sont documentés à partir des recherches initiées
dans son travail de thèse édité ici par Champion. L’originalité et l’intérêt
de cette étude sont d’associer les « femmes savantes » avec les « femmes
lettrées » et « cultivées » permettant d’ouvrir ainsi un large panorama
de l’activité féminine pendant les Lumières en mettant en évidence leur
similarité et leur complémentarité. L’expression « Femmes savantes »,
utilisée dans le titre, dont la connotation comique propre à la tradition
moliéresque pourrait être restrictive, s’attache, en réalité, à analyser les
femmes lettrées et scientifiques qui écrivent et traduisent ou se livrent à
des calculs, des expériences et des démonstrations scientifiques de haut
niveau. S’y ajoutent les « femmes cultivées », qui, grâce à leur appétit
de savoir, entretiennent avec la culture une relation personnelle forte
et continue. Enfin, l’emploi des termes « conquête » et « légitimité »
traduit avec pertinence la lente et délicate progression intellectuelle et
sociale des femmes dans une société française encore peu encline à leur
reconnaissance. Le corpus construit à partir de plus de six cents textes du
xviiie siècle s’attache à circonscrire la res literaria avec l’objectif réussi de
faire éclater les genres et de regrouper littérature et science. La chronologie
étendue, 1690–1804, se justifie par le souci de considérer deux inflexions
décisives: le tournant épistémologique qui, sous l’impulsion de John
Locke, a modifié le discours anthropologique sur la femme et les effets de
la période révolutionnaire.
L’ouvrage est articulé autour de trois grandes parties. La première
intitulée « Les femmes savantes, lettrées et cultivées: approches littéraire,
historique et sociologique », axée sur l’accès des femmes au savoir, la
diversité de leurs rôles intellectuels et des milieux dans lesquels elles
se forment et évoluent, permet de comprendre leur différence et leur
caractère protéiforme. Elle a aussi le grand mérite de rompre avec les
discours reçus, notamment celui du peu d’importance quantitative des
femmes auteurs, contredisant ainsi les propos de R. Darnton sur la faible
présence des femmes dans la production littéraire (voir, Gens de lettres
et gens du livre, chap. 5, « Le grand massacre des chats », § 4). Avec ses
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531 noms recensés dans son étude, « Les femmes auteurs représentent
donc au temps des Lumières une réalité humaine d’une grande ampleur
quantitative. Leur nombre dénote un phénomène social et littéraire trop
longtemps mésestimé » (188). Notons qu’Adeline Gargam n’hésite pas
à reprendre des jugements établis pour les nuancer voire les rectifier,
documents à l’appui, comme elle l’a fait dans l’exemple précédemment
cité, permettant ainsi des avancées scientifiques utiles. Il faut saluer
l’énorme travail de dépouillement accompli. Pour appuyer ses propos,
l’auteur établit ainsi une typologie des femmes de lettres et de sciences,
dresse des tableaux qui témoignent de son degré d’investigation et de son
souci d’exhaustivité: voir parmi d’autres, le tableau n° 1: « Herboristes
et femmes à secrets à Paris pour l’année 1776 » (95). Il est suivi par le
tableau 2 des « Remèdes refusés par la Commission Royale de Médecine
dans les années 1778–1781 » (97). Ces deux exemples attestent d’un souci
d’exhaustivité remarquable.
La deuxième partie, « Femmes et savoirs dans les débats scientifiques
et littéraires », traite plus spécifiquement des discours scientifiques qui
étudient la nature féminine et son rapport au savoir. La question fait débat
et nourrit les controverses philosophiques et médicales des Lumières
reprenant des polémiques anciennes depuis l’antiquité. Elle aborde
également la controverse littéraire autour de la querelle des femmes,
de l’antiféminisme à l’utopie passéiste ou l’apologie: toutes les postures
discursives sont passées en revue. Les académies et les loges sont de
nouvelles arènes pour les discussions féministes. La montée en puissance
des femmes dans le panthéon littéraire et scientifique, leur présence
encore timide dans les loges et les académies, alimentent ces anciens
débats autour de la querelle des femmes. La réflexion débouche sur l’accès
à l’éducation dont s’emparent textes théoriques et fictifs qui révèlent de
fortes résistances à la prise en compte d’une réalité sociale et intellectuelle
mouvante. Gargam étudie les discours en interrogeant la manière dont
ces propositions et postures novatrices ont pu lever « l’hypothèque
lancinante d’un éternel féminin impotent et inférieur intellectuellement
à l’homme » (292). Elle visite à nouveau les textes de l’antiquité et leurs
successeurs à l’aune des discours des Lumières. Ce corpus propre aux
lumières s’appuie sur plus de 75 textes, cf tableau, 294–95, et commence
avec le texte de Locke, Essai sur l’entendement humain (1690). Il s’achève
avec l’ouvrage de Jean-Baptiste Lefèvre de Villebrune, Lettre à Mad ... sur
la question de savoir si les femmes sont aussi propres que les hommes à
professer les arts, sd. Articles de gazette, de l’Encyclopédie, du Dictionnaire
universel de médecine ainsi que le Recueil général des anciennes lois
françaises, dictionnaires et traités de jurisprudence ont été convoqués
pour servir une argumentation qui se fonde, par ailleurs, sur les travaux
universitaires les plus récents. Je renvoie à son panorama bibliographique
introductif (15–22).
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Ce travail de dépouillement a le mérite de mettre en évidence le
renouvellement des perspectives dans les rapports physiologiques de
l’homme et de la femme qui ne sont plus pensés en terme d’incomplé
tude, de défectuosité de l’une par rapport à l’autre mais plutôt d’altérité,
de dissemblance et de singularité. Il met à jour la prise en compte
de nouveaux éléments anatomiques comme la fibre, l’os et le sexe en
associant l’apport des femmes souvent passé sous silence et rétablissant
la part due à la recherche féminine. Le cas de Mme Thiroux d’Arconville
est particulièrement remarquable. Elle a considérablement enrichi la
parution française, en 1759, du Traité d’ostéologie de l’Ecossais Alexander
Monro, dont la traduction est attribuée, exclusivement, à tort, à JeanJoseph Süe, membre de l’Académie Royale de médecine. Mme Thiroux
d’Arconville y ajoute, en effet, une préface, une table des matières, et
illustre l’ouvrage de vingt et une planches en taille-douce. Son apport
essentiel fut dans la représentation d’un squelette de femme « pour faire
connaître les différences qui se rencontrent entre les os qui composent le
squelette de la femme et celui de l’homme » (Marie-Geneviève Thiroux
d’Arconville, Traité d’ostéologie, trad de l’anglais de M. Monro ... où l’on a
ajouté des planches en taille-douce ... avec leurs explications par M. Süe
[1759], 2:225). Jusqu’à cet apport scientifique, seul le squelette de l’homme
était représenté. La méconnaissance du squelette féminin était lourde
de conséquences notamment pour tout ce qui relevait de l’obstétrique.
L’ignorance de certaines sages-femmes et médecins accoucheurs sur les
particularités de la morphologie des femmes a été cause de nombreux
décès de parturientes et de nouveaux nés.
Le renouvellement des connaissances scientifiques, source de progrès
incontestable est activé par le « sentiment intérieur et unanime d’une
humanité menacée de décadence » (529). Les femmes, en particulier, sont
considérées comme des êtres fragiles organiquement et intellectuelle
ment. Cette fragilité entraîne de nombreux méfaits pour elles-mêmes
mais surtout pour les enfants dont elles ont la charge. Dès lors la question
éducative prend une acuité particulière. Quelle éducation? Pour quelles
femmes? Les 24 textes sur l’éducation féminine (tableau, 477) étudiés par
Gargam témoignent de cette préoccupation culturelle des intellectuels
des Lumières. Cependant, les pages conclusives du premier tome de
l’ouvrage dresse un constat en demi-teinte: « Les avancées proposées par
les textes du xviiie siècle furent ainsi bloquées par un contexte politique
de réfutation de l’émancipation féminine considérée comme un danger
pour le nouvel ordre public [napoléonien] » (530).
Le deuxième tome est consacré, en une troisième partie, aux repré
sentations des femmes savantes, lettrées et cultivées, dans les fictions
narratives et théâtrales. Un état des lieux fouillé affirme l’essor du person
nage féminin, la femme savante et lettrée, dans la fiction des Lumières,
dans le corpus théâtral comme dans le corpus narratif (dialogue, roman,
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nouvelle, conte). Elle devient un personnage obligé de la littérature des
Lumières avec une différenciation des formes de cette présence dans la
narration et le théâtre. La narration la met en valeur alors que le théâtre
lui propose plutôt des rôles secondaires souvent présentés sur le mode de
la dérision, voir les tableaux 1 à 4 (556–59). Gargam arrive à cette con
clusion que « la littérature établit une forme de déterminisme qui voudrait
que la culture de la femme fasse inévitablement son malheur social,
affectif, matériel et physique [...] Ces textes sont porteurs d’une idéologie
qui confirme la conclusion générale de notre état des lieux. La littérature
se fait le rempart d’un ordre par la “moralité,” au sens de la fin des fables
où la morale serait que se cultiver est dangereux pour les femmes et
cause leur ruine » (770–71). Cependant, cette conclusion relativement
pessimiste est tempérée par le dernier chapitre de ce deuxième volume
qui montre comment certaines figures féminines échappent à l’imagerie
normative de la dérision. Le savoir peut être considéré comme vertueux,
facteur d’attraction pour les hommes, il facilite l’éducation des enfants
et véhicule une parité sexuelle et sociale. Des auteurs comme Cazotte
et ses contes parodiques, Mme Leprince de Beaumont, Mme de Laisse,
Diderot ou Destouches et Mme de Genlis dans leurs pièces moralisantes
présentent des personnages de femmes savantes ou lettrées qui con
duisent leurs proches au bonheur. La narration n’est pas en reste avec
les romans de Lesage (Gil Blas de Santillane), Mme de Graffigny et
ses Lettres péruviennes, Mme de Staël dans Mirza. Ces textes, parmi
d’autres, infléchissent le regard et le jugement négatif sur les savantes et
lettrées dont le savoir devient un levier de séduction, de vertu conjugale
et d’outil éducatif. Dans un certain nombre de textes, le savoir devient
admissible pour la femme mariée et conciliable avec la maternité, tout
en cessant d’être uniquement une sublimation pour femme seule ou une
pathologie compensatoire.
Ce deuxième tome centré uniquement sur les représentations éclaire
remarquablement les problématiques soulevées par l’étude des faits. Il
révèle les mêmes complexités, les mêmes conflits et les mêmes difficultés
à résoudre de manière univoque le délicat accès des femmes à la recon
naissance. Gargam annonce dans son introduction qu’elle prépare
l’établissement d’un dictionnaire biobibliographique qui complétera
cette recherche. Elle illustre abondamment le texte par 36 figures, repré
sentant des portraits de femmes, des schémas scientifiques comme des
squelettes d’homme et de femme, figures 24 et 25. Le référencement des
nombreux tableaux auraient été utiles pour en faciliter la lecture autant
que nécessaire. Saluons, encore une fois, l’immense travail entrepris qui
donne à l’ouvrage une dimension encyclopédique.
Isabelle Brouard-Arends est professeure émérite à l’université Rennes 2
(France).
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The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice
by Tobias Menely
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
280pp. US$30.00. ISBN 978-0226239392.
Review by Alice Kuzniar, University of Waterloo
The Animal Claim impresses its reader on several accounts. Eloquently
executed, this work of strong erudition brings together an extraordinary
array of writers. Tobias Menely investigates Henry More, Hobbes, Hume,
Rousseau, Bentham, Thomson, Shaftesbury, Pope, Cowper, and Smart, all
with the same rich attentiveness. His theoretical texts range from Aristotle
to Benjamin, Agamben, and Derrida. He revisits issues important for
the eighteenth century through the lens of animal rights, namely the
discussions about the origins of language, the cultivation of sensibility,
and the rise of a public sphere or Öffentlichkeit. He covers significant
ground—moral and political philosophy, public periodical culture, as
well as poetry’s influence on the political community. Rare is the study
that sees eighteenth-century poetry as critical material for current debates
concerning animal rights. Should a book about the eighteenth century
ever attract readers in contemporary affect theory, The Animal Claim
will take this place of honour. It provides a justification of why the
rich field of animal studies should matter to affect theory today.
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida pointed to the widespread
assault on compassion: “War is waged over the matter of pity” (1997;
[New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 29). Even Derrida’s con
templation of the otherness in his own pet cat has led major thinkers
in the field of animal studies to belittle him. Nicole Shukin finds his
attitude “deeply idealistic” (Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical
Times [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 37), while
Steve Baker remarks that Derrida “seems to move surprisingly close to
an uncritical humanism” (The Postmodern Animal [London: Reaktion,
2000], 186), as if Baker himself shared with the postmodern artists he
investigates the “fear of the familiar.” The general assumption about com
passion and pity is that they indulge in sentimentality; they are charged to
be inauthentic, inappropriate, and invariably mawkish. They threaten to
feed off anthropomorphizing impulses, which is why Baker invokes the
derogatory term humanist against Derrida, possibly the worst designation
any scholar can give another today. The accusation of anthropomorphism
and humanism, however, assume that what is human is distinctive and
clear-cut, as if we know from the start what divides humans from animals.
The charge itself is deeply anthropocentric.
By the close of The Animal Claim, it becomes clear that this very
suspicion of sentimentality and compassion has its own history. The
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attack begins to be formulated by conservative factions in the British
Parliament around 1800 in order to stymy animal welfare legislation.
The conservative offensive painted animal welfare advocates as indulg
ing in ethical relativism and an overwrought sentimentality inap
propriate to the realm of political deliberation. As Menely copiously
demonstrates in his wide-ranging investigation of the animal in the Age
of Sensibility, emotion and compassion were not always so dismissed.
The marginalization of pity and sympathy can hence be archaeologically
retraced.
Menely’s starting point is that eighteenth-century writers conceptu
alized sensibility as a pre-linguistic form of communication involving
the voice as much as the body, the human as well as non-human animal.
This affective exchange was the basis for an open community where
entitlements could be apportioned not only among human beings but
also across the species barrier. Moreover, this pre-linguistic immediate
expression, shared by all, formed the basis for sympathetic identification.
The cry of the distressed animal needed no translation and demanded
urgent response. For several thinkers of the eighteenth century, it was
never questioned that animals had the ability to express states of agita
tion and suffering; additionally, humans had the intrinsic capacity to
understand creaturely feelings. Eighteenth-century semiotics, desiring
to recover the transparent and legible sign, found in this affective rela
tionship an originary form of communication. And insofar as poetry
comes closest to reproducing this direct utterance, it was the perfect
vehicle for representing the other’s voice, becoming its advocate, and
intervening on its behalf in custom and law. Such an immediately com
prehended bond with animal life and the capacity for responsiveness
to the animal voice—as well as the poetry that represents this bond—
precede legislation. Most powerfully, Menely equates collective life with
being exposed and responsive to the passions of others.
Another fascinating issue that Menely raises is the question: “If the
‘overhearing’ of internal soliloquy is a peculiar condition of the lyric,
what does it mean to overhear a poet speaking to—conspiring with,
con
soling, entreating—animals?” (120). In his chapter “Creature
ly
Advocacy,” Menely explores how Christopher Smart in Jubilate Agno
(written ca. 1759–63) and William Cowper in The Task (1785) grew
attentive to animal expression as a way of transcending their own dis
possession from a sovereign power and of coping with melancholia
through the vocational calling of the poet. Their depressive speechless
ness found an antidote through identification with animal suffering.
They could translate the animal voice into verse. “Creaturely Advocacy,”
of course, is but one chapter in this magisterial book that is uniformly
informative in content, thoughtful in questioning, and elegant in style.
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One can hardly criticize Menely for raising in his reader the desire to
see what its sequel would look like. He tantalizes with this closing state
ment: “Romantic aesthetics and a liberal understanding of rights without
responsibilities both emerge out of ... the purification of the separate
realms of aesthetics and politics, and the imperative to exclude from both
the rhetoric of sensibility” (201). Although the illustration on the cover
is William Blake’s Jack and the Wounded Stag of 1809, which depicts a
man pointing to a bleeding stag that has tears in its eyes, Menely does
not discuss Blake. I also wondered how such sensibility expressed itself in
the visual representation of animals in the fine arts, and whether parallel
developments were occurring in France and Germany.
Unfortunately, the only use of French and German introduces obvi
ous spelling errors—in the all-important citations of Lévinas in the front
matter and of Benjamin at the start of chapter 4. Apart from these mis
takes, The Animal Claim is immaculate. It is a must-read for scholars in
British eighteenth-century literary studies as well as scholars in animal
studies and in affect theory, especially insofar as these fields pertain to
political theory and legal studies.
Alice Kuzniar has been professor of German and English at the University
of Waterloo since 2008, after teaching 25 years at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, with guest professorships at Princeton, Rutgers,
and the University of Minnesota. Her books include Melancholia’s Dog:
Reflections On Our Animal Kinship (2006). She has just completed a book
entitled “The Romantic Art of Homeopathy.”
Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order,
1750–1830 by Evan Gottlieb
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014.
viii+214pp. US$59.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1254-7.
Review by Paul Youngquist, University of Colorado Boulder
All in favour of empire raise your hands. Uh, I see. Not many.
Imperialism is a difficult sociopolitical project to condone these days,
and not merely for the sins of its fathers (the Dutch, the Spanish, the
French, the British). Empire lives on in the operations of a global cap
italist economy that scripts the agencies of consuming humankind in
advance of its best intentions. For Romanticists still hungry (some would
say nostalgic) for a revolutionary solution to the problem of economic
domination, it is disheartening to realize that the history of globalization
leads back to the age of revolutions (the American, the French, the
Haitian). Did all that bloodshed in the name of freedom only grease the
machinery of capital accumulation? If revolution provokes empire, not
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the other way around, then what are we to make of Romanticism, once
understood as a revolutionary cultural movement, now implicated in
the long march of capital across the globalizing centuries?
In Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order,
1750–1830, Evan Gottlieb offers a backstory to globalization that rescues,
or tries to rescue, some of the literary work produced during the years
of his subtitle. He is justifiably irritated by criticism that reduces writers
once deemed progressive to lackeys of empire and its sustaining public
persona, the nation. He wants to work around those constraints to advance
an account of Romanticism that finds “emancipatory possibilities in the
conceptual developments of contemporary globalization” (153). That is
a surprising statement, coming from someone whose political commit
ments appear, if not exactly leftist, at least leftish. Commentators on the
right usually celebrate the “emancipatory possibilities” of globalization.
But Gottlieb tells a story that counters their idolatry of the marketplace
with the emergence, from the conceptual origins of globalization, of
progressive values still relevant to contemporary life. His “long dura
tional” (10) approach ideologically links the late eighteenth century to
the present, revealing Romantic-era writers to be keenly aware of “global
processes and dynamics that [are] increasingly reshaping their lives, their
nation, and their world” (2). Their planetary perspective turns peda
gogical where they share a “commitment, implicit or explicit, to teach
readers to think globally in ways that emphasize the horizontality, trans
versality, or mutually constitutive nature of the relations between peoples
and nations” (10). The global scope and transnational thrust of Romantic
Globalism gives scholarship a welcome push beyond (British) territorial
limits as the condition of cultural and critical engagement.
Gottlieb’s title indicates something of his method. Substituting
“Globalism” for “Imperialism,” he moves Romanticism beyond the
constraints of nation and empire. Situating “British Literature” in
a “Modern World Order,” he expands Romanticism to embrace the
globe. That “globalism” is a word of quite recent coinage, early 1940s,
according to the OED, hardly matters if the point is to read Romantic
literature as a user’s guide to later developments. Because “Romanticera authors experienced and critically negotiated some of the most
profound aspects of early modern globalization” (16), they can teach
us, their heirs, how to inhabit a globalized reality. Gottlieb eschews con
temporary descriptions of globalization, with their info-tech, money
transfers, and transnational corporations, approaching it more softly
“as a set of interlinked processes that grows out of and ... alongside
the modern nation-state consolidation” (4). While he never describes
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those processes in detail (a nod to Immanuel Wallerstein stands in for
analysis), he argues that Romantic writers observed them with such
acuity that their work acquires a cosmopolitan agenda, encouraging
readers “to adopt a recognizably modern global mindset and learn to
think of themselves as members of a nation-state whose economic,
political, and socio-cultural development is inextricably intertwined
with that of the rest of the planet” (10). With Romantic globalism,
British writing goes planetary.
Or some of it does. Gottlieb’s globalistas remain a pretty select crew.
One might be forgiven for wondering how Romantic they really are.
Romantic Globalism participates in the recent rehabilitation of Enlight
enment writing as less philosophical thesis to Romanticism’s antithesis
than more simply its primum mobile. Nothing moves dialectically these
days, least of all history. Continuity with Enlightenment now sets the
terms for intellectual engagement, rendering times of disruption and up
heaval (those American, French, and Haitian revolutions, for instance,
not to mention continual black rebellion in the Caribbean) embar
rassments of history requiring assimilation to enlightened ideals. The
days have passed, apparently, when Romanticism could be viewed as an
anti-Enlightenment project. Gottlieb’s thinkers have good enlightened
pedigrees, especially the ones who inaugurate the lineage he examines.
Scottish Enlightenment writers (or “Enlighteners,” as he calls them)
get the terraqueous ball of Romantic globalism rolling. David Hume,
for starters, understands the nation as a territorial entity that arises as
an effect of large-scale commercial exchange: “global forces and flows
preceded the consolidation of national entities and institutions” (20).
Adam Smith “seems to believe unfettered international commerce to be
the best method of ensuring both peace and prosperity” among nations,
a belief that “led him to take other progressive political positions,” such as
a sceptical regard of the economic benefit of colonization (25, 26). Both
Hume and Smith advance “broadly global rather than specifically imperial”
economic theories, which in turn acquire the force of orthodoxy through
the historicisms of human progress advanced by fellow Enlighteners Lord
Kames and John Millar. The upshot of all this Scottish Enlightenment
is “a more cohesive sense of global humanity” (40). The only thing it
would take to perpetuate the gains of Romantic globalism would be a
philosophical synthesis of relations among nations. Enter Immanuel
Kant, whose plan for perpetual peace posits an “international union of
nation states” guaranteeing the “cosmopolitan right” of a foreigner to
good treatment as a “principle of ‘universal hospitality’” (42).
Such is the enlightened lineage that gives rise to Gottlieb’s Romantic
globalism. On this premise, he advances some inventive readings
of Romantic-era literature. Anne Radcliffe’s gothic novels cultivate
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cosmopolitan sympathy and tolerance of difference. The poetry of
Felicia Hemans, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Anne Grant, albeit via very
different ideological agendas, measures British imperialism by a global
standard that holds it accountable to international accord. Byron’s poems
(specifically the oriental tales) explore a clash of civilizations that, for all
the easy talk of cosmopolitanism, ends tragically for the “levantinized”
protagonist. The novels of Walter Scott (completing the circle of Scotch
enlightening) promote an ethic of “global hospitality” (“the profound, and
profoundly moving, fiction that each of us is capable of extending uncon
ditional acceptance to all others”) and might ground international rights
and relations in a globalized reality (145). Scott, Gottlieb concludes, “may
be the first truly global author” (146).
Romantic globalism answers British imperialism with a world where
the claims of other nations qualify its ruling authority: “Britons needed to
learn to see themselves as members of a nation whose geopolitical destiny
was intimately bound up with those of the rest of the world, but also that
such relations could be conceived as cooperative and egalitarian rather
than competitive and hierarchical” (148). These are laudable sentiments.
Imagine the British co-operating with the French between 1750 and 1830!
But I am left with a few concerns. “Globalism,” as Gottlieb purveys it, is
another word for Europe. The “others” towards whom Radcliffe curries
sympathy and the extra-nationals to whom Scott offers hospitality are
Italian, French, or German. The one Gypsie in the bunch (from Scott’s
Quentin Durward) gets summarily hanged, and the touch of Byron’s
Turks proves fatal. Gottlieb’s globe extends as far north as Scotland, as far
south as Italy, and as far east as Greece. The ships of the British imperium
sailed daily beyond these limits. Gottlieb makes little or no mention of
China, India, Africa, the South Seas, or the Caribbean. His globalism is
provincially international and weirdly white. One wonders if the “global
hospitality” he advocates extends to Africans and Asians—which is to say,
the majority of the globe’s population. But it is a universal value, is it not?
Therefore it must.
Why the absence, then, of any sustained engagement (North America
aside) with the colonial infrastructure undergirding the European abil
ity to think the global? Gottlieb’s globalism limits the application of the
universal values of cosmopolitanism and hospitality to people quite
similar to the Enlighteners themselves. I am all for tolerance, peace, love,
and hospitality. But, in Romantic Globalism, such values seem reserved,
inadvertently perhaps, for People Like Us: heirs of an Enlightenment
tradition only equivocally disposed towards the savage, the uncivilized,
the levantinized, and the unenlightened. If “for Scottish Enlighteners, as
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for their Romantic successors, globalization appeared to offer ... greater
opportunities for Britons to reach out imaginatively to the rest of the
world,” then maybe it can do the same for Us (151). But how? That is the
ethical question.
Paul Youngquist is a professor of English in at the University of ColoradoBoulder. His areas of specialization include British Romanticism, Atlantic
studies, science fiction, and literary and cultural theory. He is the editor
of Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic (2013).
Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder
by Sarah Tindal Kareem
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
xiv+278pp. €55. ISBN 978-0-19-968910-1.
Review by John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Tindal Kareem’s book is a genuinely original work that displays
encyclopedic erudition and comprehensive scholarship encompass
ing many fields, including cognitive science and traditional history
of philosophy. Kareem seems to have read just about everything;
the thirty-page list of works cited is exhaustive, worth keeping as an
invaluable bibliography. I should add, however, that she tends to overannotate; even the simplest point comes with a barrage of footnotes
and references, which interrupts the flow of her argument. Nonetheless,
her close readings are intensely focused; the guiding thesis of the book
builds carefully over the several chapters as she examines her texts with
scrupulous attention. Overall, the intellectual and explanatory ambition,
theoretical richness and subtlety of her book are substantial as well as
often enough provocative. I am struck by the centrality of Hume’s work
in her approach, and I think her focus on “the problem of induction” that
he so notoriously isolated in the Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) is
the most revelatory and genuinely original move in her larger argument.
Kareem’s thesis grows out of what she admits at the outset is a truism:
that British novels in the eighteenth century offer readers more or less
realistic characters and events that become in the course of the nar
rative effectively extraordinary, unusual, or singular and to that extent
are a source of what she labels “wonder” and thereby no longer strictly
speaking “realistic.” As Kareem puts it in her opening paragraph,
“Eighteenth-century fiction brims with moments ... in which the
prosaic rubs up against the marvelous, moments frequently framed as
eliciting wonder” (1). Perhaps rather too grandly, she claims that she is
revising our view of the new realism that Ian Watt saw in the eighteenthcentury British novel by redefining it “with the inception of the fictional
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marvelous, but a marvelous defined not by its opposition to, but by its
integration with realism” (2). However, her book is not very strong on
specific examples in the end, since she discusses just a few novels in
detail and refers only briefly to a handful of others. Her thesis, as she
develops it, expands upon her initial observation about “wonder” to
make the larger claim that Enlightened, secular modernity as it emerges
in the eighteenth century depends, at least in narrative fiction, upon
striking or perhaps in maintaining just this particular balance between
the prosaic and the wonderful or the marvellous, that eighteenth-century
fiction “cultivates wonder at the real in a manner consistent with Hume’s
critique of induction” (4). As she puts it later in her introductory chapter,
her aim is to show how “both eighteenth-century fiction and the Humean
critique of induction have the effect of reframing the real as an object
of wonder” (14). To accomplish this, Kareem, methodical to a fault,
provides in the “chapter outline” that is a part of her introductory chapter
a list of the “defamiliarization techniques used to produce wonder ...
delayed decoding; suspenseful plot; estranging language; and switching
between different narrative points of view” (30). To be sure, although she
does not make this entirely clear, such features of narrative prose do not
necessarily lead to the production of wonder, which is a slippery and even
vague term. The title page of Robinson Crusoe, for example, promises
“strange” and “surprizing” events in his life. Often enough, especially in
intensely romantic fiction like Eliza Haywood’s (who is never mentioned)
or the socio-psychological courtship novels such as Samuel Richardson’s
or Frances Burney’s (both unmentioned) or in Defoe’s and Smollett’s
picaresque novels (never mentioned), wonder, in Kareem’s rather too
broadly-defined sense, is simply not an issue.
In the chapter that follows, “Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment,” still
introductory but also an important part of her buildup to her analyses of
fiction, Kareem surveys late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notions
of wonder as a psychological state, not always desirable and sometimes
seen as dangerous and pathological, from Bacon and Hobbes through
Addison, Hume, Beattie, Priestley, Johnson, Smith, and Kames. In this
survey, Kareem’s summaries of the works of these writers and many others
are exact and informative; her grasp of the various evocations of this
mental state is precise and helpful for understanding her guiding thesis.
Kareem goes on to invoke more modern theorists, such as Shklovsky,
Todorov, and Iser, as well as even more recent cognitive science and
neuroscience to make the case that wonder is associated “with heightened
attention and in particular the combination of novelty and familiarity in
maximizing wonder” (59).
As much as I admire Kareem’s presentation of a wide variety of
material, this chapter tends to go on too long, and her assertions about
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eighteenth-century fiction are almost completely lacking in particular
examples until the very end of the chapter, where the examples are too
brief to be meaningful. Of course, the next four chapters of the book
descend (just in time!) to particulars. Chapter 2, “Rethinking the Real
with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume,” is, for me, the most interesting
and original, as she argues that the Hume of the Treatise of Human Nature
is like the marooned Crusoe. Defoe and Hume, she contends, “both use
the narrative mode of Protestant spiritual autobiography and the figure of
the shipwreck in order to evoke the sense, central to Puritan theology, of
life’s contingency” (77). I find this comparison clever, even as it flirts with
glibness, which is an ever-present danger not always avoided in Kareem’s
book. To take the most egregious example, Hume does not choose the
Puritan spiritual autobiographical mode in his Treatise of Human Nature,
but rather stages a mock-comic confusion as the result of his rigorous
examination of the nature of our perceptions that destabilizes notions like
personal identity. Kareem’s characterization of Hume “as a superstitiousthinker-in-skeptic’s clothing” who “fittingly employs ‘the language of
Protestant spiritual autobiography’” (82) strikes me as absurd. Hume, I
think, would not have been amused.
Kareem is most convincing in this chapter when she focuses intensely
on the set of related scenes in the book where Crusoe finds English
barley growing on his tropical island and jumps to the conclusion that
he is the beneficiary of a particular Providence, only to discover to his
disappointment soon after that the grain is there because he had earlier
shook out a bag from the ship which unbeknownst to him contained
some chickens’ feed which produced the barley. But, as he thinks about it
again, he concludes that God works through what looks like the accidental
and the random, and Providence is redefined and reconciled with what
appears at first sight as contingent and random. Wonder in other words
is relocated in the quotidian and the ordinary. Kareem’s summarizing
comment on this scene reveals a lot about her critical perspective: for
Crusoe and for Hume “vigilant observation, uncontaminated by pre
conceived causal explanations, produces surprise, a surprise that attests
either to the role of Providence (for Crusoe) or of coincidence (for Hume)
in determining ordinary events” (103). Her approach at moments like
this is supple and flexible; she is ready and able to find the sustaining
paradoxes within Enlightenment secular modernity.
I do not propose to attempt to summarize the next three chapters of
Kareem’s book. The variety of keen critical observation and dialectical
spinning in them defies adequate summary. Instead, I will offer some
admiring comments on the rigour and coherence of her critical method
along with some reservations about that approach and what it (perhaps
necessarily, from her perspective) omits from the reading of a very few
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eighteenth-century novels. Chapter 3 is entitled “Suspending the Reader
in Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto,” and, on its own terms, it is a
tour de force. Both of these novels, as she notes, mark a turn towards a
pure fictionality. Following other critics like Catherine Gallagher, Kareem
finds that, by mid-century, readers have signed on to the convention that
literal truth is not an issue in narrative fiction, which presents a selfenclosed world with its own rules, bound only to be consistent on its
own terms. She thus invokes the “heterocosmic model” (developed by
continental eighteenth-century literary theorists) of a literary work as a
solution to the old problem of how to balance the otherwise contradictory
satisfactions of wonder and recognition. That model works surprisingly
well with these two very, very different narratives. Fielding’s “comic
epic in prose” and Walpole’s extravagant gothic romance, as Kareem
explains, “integrate the marvelous and the verisimilar in just the way
that the heterocosmic model prescribes, grounding far-fetched narrative
conceits in realist specificity” (114). Now, although I do not think that
any reader ever had even partial conviction in the absurd, totally unverisimilar events in Horace Walpole’s romance, this statement strikes me
as thought-provoking for Tom Jones. But Kareem’s purely narratological
approach seems to me to involve rather too much abstract theoretical
jargon. Fielding’s novel is radically impoverished by her approach, which
ignores the comic moralism and very particular kinds of social critique
that are, for me at least, essential aspects of its appeal, meaning, and force.
Chapter 4, “‘Marvelous Tales of Wonders Performed, or Rather, not
Performed’ in Baron Munchausen’s Narrative,” strikes me as an odd
choice, since the Baron’s wonders, as far as I am concerned, are simply
incredible, to say nothing of tedious. Kareem’s claims that these tales
“jolt” readers “out of habitual, prejudiced modes of perception similar
to the Romantic poets’ [she then quotes Coleridge] object of lifting ‘the
film of familiarity,’ and thereby ‘awakening the mind’s attention from the
lethargy of custom’” (166) seems to me a wildly exaggerated assertion
about a silly book like Raspe’s. She even likens the Baron’s tall tales and
their “critique of realism” to Hume’s critique of causation. But matters
do improve in the last chapter dealing with Jane Austen’s Northanger
Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “‘A Little Voyage of Discovery?’:
Fiction and the Pursuit of Knowledge,” which opens with a winning
admission that to find common ground between two such dissimilar
novels is to read both of them “‘against the grain,’ and I would not deny
it” (187). Her aim, she says nicely, is “to show how wonder can flourish
in radically different environments” (187).
Kareem’s close readings of these novels in this chapter are certainly
provocative if not for me entirely convincing. She offers the bold propo
sition that in Austen’s novel the good-natured realism Henry Tilney
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offers Catherine about English civilization or for that matter Victor
Frankenstein’s scientific triumph is exposed as a species of fantasy. Each of
them, she says, are “promoters of a false realism that conceals its artifice”
(188), a remark that I confess I do not understand, especially since in the
very next chapter in Northanger Abbey Catherine accepts and enlarges
Henry’s rationality. Kareem quickly explains that “a default skepticism
is as open to error ... as naïve credulity” (188). Stated thus baldly, the
proposition may be a truism, but neither Victor Frankenstein nor
Henry Tilney actually proposes that kind of scepticism. But this truism
leads Kareem to a dizzying dialectic whereby the sceptical approach
readers bring to Catherine’s gothic imaginings and Shelley’s incredible
tale depends upon “fantastical thought experiments” which prevent
scepticism from “defaulting to the habitual belief in life’s predictability”
(189). She argues what is really at stake in both these novels, in different
ways, is “perspectival defamiliarization” (189), an awareness, to put it in
slightly simpler language than she employs, of the radical contingency
and self-reflexivity of the first-person perspective that empiricism
encourages. Such a formulation, true enough for Frankenstein, in the case
of Austen’s novel, requires a very selective view of what actually happens
in most of the narrative. Kareem builds her reading of Austen’s novel on
what is in fact a fairly brief satiric sequence in which Catherine imagines
Northanger Abbey as it might appear in a gothic novel only to find that
it is an unremarkable if enormous country house, just as the manuscript
she finds in the massive chest in her room turns out to be a laundry list.
Otherwise, Catherine is a sensible if, for a time, misguided teenaged
romantic heroine such as Austen loves to imagine for her comic and
satiric purposes, to which Kareem pays no attention. So a summarizing
statement like Kareem’s about how the creature in Frankenstein and
Catherine misread the world is for me overstated and unduly portentous
in its characterization of Austen’s heroine: “Both the creature and
Catherine read fiction as true history and, as a result, fall into mistaken
assumptions about how the world works” (194). As Kareem writes, rather
melodramatically, once Catherine loses her illusions she is, in Austen’s
phrase, “completely awakened” and her “reentry into ‘common life’”
reinvents “wonder all over again” (188). Wonder does not really mean
all that much in Austen’s novel—a matter of the heroine coming to her
senses—and is not really “wonder.”
To be sure, Kareem is hardly alone among critics of Austen’s novel
(many of whom she cites) in espousing this very partial and, to my mind,
needlessly complicated view of things, and, as her footnotes make clear,
she is in good company. After I read this chapter, let me confess that I was
fairly puzzled, so I reread Northanger Abbey, and I think I see, more or
less, what she is getting at, but her response bears little resemblance to my
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(I suppose) traditionalist understanding of the novel, which is mainly
an amusing satirical look at life and romantic/marital relationships
among the upper bourgeoisie in the English Home Counties in Austen’s
time. Of course, Austen also offers a few brief and amusing asides on
the necessary artificiality of such fictions. Readers, Austen notes, and
Kareem quotes in the final chapter, “will see in the tell-tale compression
of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect
felicity” (Northanger Abbey, 233; quoted in Kareem, 220). Such an
aside licenses Kareem to find in this ironic, self-deprecating moment
that Austen is calling “attention to modern fiction’s demand that such
perfect felicity be achieved with verisimilitude” (220). And she goes
even further by asserting that the world of Austen’s novel “is as artificial
as Catherine’s gothic fantasies” (221). I think such a reading is perverse,
since all Austen is clearly saying is that readers will not share the anxiety
her characters are experiencing about the marriage of Catherine and
Henry Tilney, since they know by looking at the pages left in the book
that the happy ending is near. Austen expects her readers to be selfconscious about the genre she is working in, the comic courtship novel.
Kareem consistently prefers ponderous narratological and philosophical
profundity to the perfect comic simplicity of Austen’s irony. Brilliant
and often original and insightful, Kareem’s book would have been even
better if she acknowledged such simplicity.
John Richetti is A.M. Rosenthal Professor (Emeritus) at the University of
Pennsylvania. His Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2005) is now
in paperback.
Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places by Margaret Doody
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
xii+438pp. US$35; £24.50. ISBN 978-0-226-157832.
Review by Jeanne Britton, University of South Carolina
Jane Austen’s references to the real world have determined her positions
in popular culture, undergraduate curricula, and realist fiction. On one
hand, Austen’s allusions to historical events are slim enough for many
readers to find her accessible today. On the other hand, Austen’s confined
focus on the largely internal worlds of a few characters has vexed accounts
of her realist novels since Walter Scott’s early appraisal of her “‘correct and
striking representation’ of the world as it is” (385). The assumption that
shapes much of Margaret Doody’s Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons,
Places is not that Austen’s novels refer to real people or places, but instead
that Austen’s names for characters and locations work in varied and
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complex ways to expose historical conflict and contemporary tensions.
Austen’s subtle allusions create a “poetics of anachronism, of multiplicity”
(17) that emerges not in allegory or coded one-to-one equivalences, but
in webs of competing associations and layered temporalities.
This meticulous, expansive, and enjoyable book recreates the delight of
Austen’s wordplay in detailed etymologies, anecdotes, and historical and
literary references. Doody’s vast research will undoubtedly afford readers
of Austen new angles on the novels’ familiar characters and significant
places. There is great payoff in this book’s copious details. Doody identifies
“Fitzwilliam Darcy,” for example, as a striking instance of the kinds of
tension with which Austen invests characters’ names. The prefix of Mr
Darcy’s “unchristian ‘Christian name’” denotes an illegitimate son of a
Norman aristocrat (the prefix “fitz–” specifies illegitimacy); the historical
Thomas, Lord Darcy, beheaded in 1537 for his role in challenging the
Dissolution of the Monasteries, offers a surname that “redeems the crass
acquisitiveness and self-satisfaction” of the hero’s first name (82). Pride
and Prejudice’s resolution at Pemberley, which Doody explicates as “a
clearing of a man who grows barley,” signals not only Elizabeth Bennet’s
social rise but also a return to agricultural production. Irony lends tension
to the names of secondary characters. Mr Collins, the uptight clergyman,
shares the name of Anthony Collins, a controversial freethinker, and the
surname of the novel’s rootless suitor—Wickham—combines Old English
“wick” (settlement) and “ham” (habitation) to yield something akin to
“place-place” (115). Historical associations also restructure character
hierarchies. Doody explicates the knightly associations of “Martin” (Saint
Martin, who slashed his cloak in half to clothe a beggar), which lend
balance and equality to Emma, whose mere “Mr” Knightley, in Doody’s
reading, has more in common with the lowly Robert Martin than their
status and names would, at first glance, seem to suggest (162–64).
Doody’s discussion of Mansfield Park, the novel with more geograph
ical references than Austen’s other works, is especially illuminating for
the ways in which it positions the novel’s much-discussed allusions to
slavery within an extensive web of references that includes the names of
ships, stars, and constellations. Mobility is especially pronounced in this
novel, in which Doody finds, based in part on the “hidden Scottishness”
of the Crawfords and the Welsh origins of “Price,” that acclimating to an
unfamiliar culture is a persistent challenge for most of the novel’s characters
(132). Also remarkable is the reading of Persuasion, in which Austen’s
complex negotiations of multiple temporalities appear in particularly
resonant names and, as Doody puts it, “Place becomes Time” (374). The
surname of this novel’s hero, Wentworth, is the centre of Austen’s “Great
Name Matrix,” a group of surnames derived from historical figures that
spreads across all her novels and includes Fitzwilliam and D’Arcy. Austen
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is said to value Wentworth for the pun it contains: “Frederick went, but
he was worth something” (175). Indeed, Doody observes, “Time is very
odd—in a novel in which the hero’s name contains a verb in the past
tense” (188).
Value of a different sort is found in a character’s rejection of all surnames:
after a secret marriage to a Captain Dashwood, the birth and death of
two children, and the death of her husband, “Miss Jane,” a heroine in the
juvenilia, refuses to take a last name. An apparent “avatar of Jane Austen,”
this Jane asserts “an impossible freedom, an unknowable identity” (70).
In the view of Austen that emerges by the end of this study, though, that
kind of freedom seems largely unavailable to the characters in Austen’s
mature works. Reading Austen’s novels through their proper nouns per
haps unsurprisingly emphasizes the passivity of the individual: a person
chooses neither her name nor her birthplace. It is worth asking, in this light,
whether Austen’s delight in the historical layering that names afford might
be another instance of the coercive novelistic practice that critics, including
William Galperin, have attributed to her use of free indirect discourse,
which Doody appropriately observes is “not exactly ‘free’” (393).
Structurally, the book is divided into three parts—“England,” “Names,”
“Places”—and eleven chapters. The first five provide a wealth of historical
and cultural information that any reader of Austen would appreciate.
The four chapters that focus on the novels are divided between those
written at Steventon and Chawton; sections in these chapters examine
surnames and then first names in each novel (chapters 6 and 7) before
turning to real and imaginary places in each novel (chapters 10 and 11).
This organization, which scatters discussions of individual novels across
many sections and chapters, mutes some of the book’s more provocative
observations, observations that are at times almost overshadowed by the
abundance of Doody’s extensive research.
Austen’s historical and geographical references have been gaining
increased attention from scholars. Frequently in detailed conversation
with Janine Barchas, whose Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History,
Location, and Celebrity (2012) covers some of the same ground, Doody’s
book emphasizes the long historical reach rather than the contemporary
currency of Austen’s references. Another study relevant at many turns
in Doody’s argument is Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel
(1999). His mapping of Austen’s heroines’ dislocations, seaside plot com
plications, and rural, southern resolutions is a surprising absence in
Doody’s examination of characters’ geographical movements.
Concluding in conversation with D.A. Miller, Jane Austen’s Names
reveals a brand of realism in Austen that exposes more of the external
world—its “past passions, old causes”—than a “staid” realism would pri
oritize (386). Challenging Miller’s assessment of Austen’s impersonal
style, Doody argues that “Austen’s full style,” rather than achieving
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“a triumph of absences—an absence of person and specifics” instead
“creates a kind of masquerade in which the historical continuities of
a pageant are broken up in kaleidoscopic fury” (388, 386). Against
imprecise notions of Austen’s “timelessness” or even Miller’s nuanced
claims about her impersonality, it might be worth asking why the
potential allusions in Austen’s names—even those as seemingly un
remarkable as “Mr Collins” or “Robert Martin”—are drawing this kind
of attention, why the referentiality of proper nouns or matters of his
torical fact now seem, in some ways, to matter anew.
Jeanne Britton, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at the
University of South Carolina, specializes in the literature and culture of the
long Romantic period.
Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French
Women Writers, ed. Faith E. Beasley
New York: MLA, 2011.
ix+379pp. US$25.00. ISBN 978-1-60329-096-8.
Review by Catriona Seth, University of Oxford and Université de Lorraine
Coordinated by Faith Beasley, whose work on La Princesse de Clèves is
well known, Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women
Writers sounds like an exciting and hugely overdue volume. Thirty-three
scholars, all but one employed by American educational institutions,
have contributed to this set of essays. On the cover, an elegant portrait
by Pierre Mignard shows “L’illustre Madame de La Sablière” pointing
into the middle distance as she looks out at the spectator. Paradoxically,
this choice of image can be read as indicating at once what is successful
and what is disappointing about this collection. If your aim is to set out
the idea that “the works of French women writers are crucial to courses
on the early modern period and enliven many others” (publisher’s
description), surely it would be ideal to showcase the work of some of
these women writers, rather than give centre stage to someone who, as a
“salonnière,” was characterized by a form of self-effacement (as Beasley
writes) in which she promoted the writings of others and was not herself
an author. The essay in which she is mentioned is included in the first part,
which intends to “provide necessary background and help instructors
identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women’s
participation into account” (publisher’s description). This is a laudable
ambition, and much of the scholarship in the individual chapters is solid
and reliable (I particularly enjoyed Thomas M. Carr Jr’s piece on the nuns
whose voices can be heard in reality as in fiction), but was it necessary to
take up half the volume with such considerations—some of which have
ECF 28, no. 4 (Summer 2016)
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no dealings with questions of female authorship? Would not one or two
overarching background essays have been a better way to proceed, par
ticularly as the second and third parts are really concerned with doing
what it says on the tin or at least on the title page: teaching specific texts
and specific courses?
In these second and third sections, one might hope to have at once
references to well-known texts and more cutting-edge ideas of how to
deal with (or where to find) others that are less often called upon or are
not yet considered to be canonical. The authors who are dealt with in
part 2 show that—as the choice of cover portrait and the coordinator’s
own field of expertise might have led one to imagine—the seventeenth
century is dealt with more thoroughly (and much more convincingly)
than the century that follows. On the one hand, we have Scudéry,
Sévigné, Lafayette, d’Aulnoy, Villedieu, Deshoulières (Volker Schröder’s
reassessment is excellent). On the other, the selection is briefer and more
controversial: Du Noyer, Graffigny, Monbart, Gouges (to a large extent
an excerpt from a 2009 book by Lisa Beckstrand). Add to this that there
are two essays on Villedieu in this section (by Roxanne Decker Lalande
and Donna Kuizenga) and four involve teaching Lafayette (including
one, by Katharine Ann Jensen, which, curiously, is in section 1, although
it is called “Daughters as Maternal Masterpieces: Teaching MotherDaughter Relations in Lafayette and Vigée Lebrun,” and another by
Harriet Stone that pairs Lafayette with Graffigny). Clearly, eighteenthcentury women have been dealt a poor hand in this particular part of
the book, whereas their seventeenth-century counterparts are well served
by the contributors. This means that, while the earlier women are taken
out of the ghetto of gender studies and their participation in society is
reassessed, this is not true of the later ones—the exceptions being AnneMarguerite Du Noyer (in Henriette Goldwyn’s ground-breaking short
piece) and Marie-Josèphe de Monbart (whom Laure Marcellesi proposes,
in a stimulating essay, to study alongside Diderot and Rousseau for their
respective visions of Tahiti).
The third section, which deals with panoramic courses, is almost
exclusively on the seventeenth century. It is only in the very last chapter,
Katherine Montwieler’s “French Women Writers in a World Literature
Survey,” that Graffigny or Duras get a quick mention. Clearly, this would
have been a more coherent ensemble had it billed itself as concerning
seventeenth-century female authors and restricted its scope accordingly.
I certainly do not want to give the impression that the essays in the
volume are without merit. I question, however, the balance and the
overall structure. Let us take one example, drawn from the writings of
a renowned American scholar, Joan Hinde Stewart, who points out in
Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century
(1993), which is incidentally absent from the bibliography of the book
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under review, that Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s version of “Beauty
and the Beast,” included in her Magasin des enfants, is without doubt the
most celebrated work of fiction published by a woman in the eighteenth
century. Leprince de Beaumont churned out volumes of pedagogical
treatises and novels, which were widely translated and read throughout
Europe and beyond, well into the middle of the nineteenth century, yet
she does not even warrant a single mention in this book, as the index
shows. If I were turning to the present collection of essays for inspiration,
I would expect to find some mention of her as well as ideas on how to
teach Riccoboni, Charrière, Staël, or Genlis, for instance—the first two
authors are included in a contextual essay by Suzan van Dijk, the wellknown Dutch scholar, on male responses to female-authored texts (in part
1). I would not, however, consider it vital to be provided with articles in
which colleagues briefly showcase the conclusions of research they have
published elsewhere and which is connected with women who are not
writers, like Caroline Weber’s “Memoirs and the Myths of History: The
Case of Marie-Antoinette” (which is not, as it could have been, concerned
with the Queen of France’s letters) or Mary Trouille’s “Giving Voice to
Women’s Experience: Marital Discord and Wife Abuse in EighteenthCentury French Literature and Society,” which is mainly based on legal
documents penned by men who, at times, shaped female testimonies. Such
essays have their value and could have been included elsewhere, but for a
book to brand itself as a manual on teaching seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury women writers is to set up expectations that are unfortunately
not met here, whatever the quality of some of the contributors. I cannot
help but feel that the relationship between title and contents provides an
illustration of the French proverb: Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint.
Catriona Seth is a University Academic Fellow at All Souls College, University
of Oxford, and Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature; she is also a pro
fessor of eighteenth-century French literature at Université de Lorraine.
The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain,
1660–1789, ed. Catherine Ingrassia
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
xx+263pp. CAD$32.95. ISBN 978-1-107-013116-2.
Review by JoEllen DeLucia, Central Michigan University
Recovering women novelists in order to rewrite Ian Watt’s The Rise of
the Novel (1957) seemed the surest way to incorporate women into the
literary histories of the eighteenth century. This tactic rapidly changed
the makeup of the canon. By the late twentieth century, anthologies
and courses regularly featured the prose fiction of Aphra Behn, Eliza
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Haywood, and Frances Burney alongside the works of Daniel Defoe,
Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding; however, recent debates in
gender and literary studies about the function of both “women” and “the
novel” as analytics have troubled this approach. Although the intense
focus on the novel has fostered productive conversations about marriage,
domesticity, the patriarchal family, and sexuality, it has reinforced
simplistic understandings of the division between public and private
and, as detailed in Catherine Ingrassia’s new Cambridge Companion to
Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, limited our understanding of
women writers’ contributions to other developing media and genres,
from periodicals and ballads to travel writing and satire. Ingrassia and the
contributors to her excellent volume chart twenty-first-century directions
for the study of women’s writing, directions that both trouble the role
the novel has played in our literary histories and outline a new brand of
criticism that reaches beyond the private, domestic, and feminine spaces
the novel famously codified for it readers. Ingrassia’s volume will aid
scholars and students in, as Felicity Nussbaum suggests in her essay on
drama, mapping a “more fully integrated” eighteenth-century history of
print that includes women writers across genre and media (120). This
companion will also foster difficult conversations about how “women”
as a category might function once the private and domestic concerns
foregrounded in much novel criticism are no longer dominant.
By looking to women’s participation in the wider field of print culture,
the contributors to this volume provide frameworks for understanding
the interactions of genres, challenge long-standing ideas about masculine
and feminine literary forms, and provide new maps of literary influence
and exchange. Expanding our sense of women as consumers of print,
Mark Towsey draws on circulating library records and correspondence to
prove that women read widely, effectively challenging the long-standing
stereotype of the “morally delinquent female novel reader” (34). In an essay
on women as editors of, contributors to, and reviewers for periodicals,
Mary Waters highlights the interactions of literary texts and columns
on conduct and “domestic advice” with essays and news reports on
“public issues, including government and foreign affairs” (231). Turning
to poetry, David E. Shuttleton and Melinda Rabb recount how women’s
poetry has either been overlooked or dismissed as mere verse in critical
accounts because it does not fit comfortably within the Age of Satire
framework. In a provocative reading of Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris
(1690) and Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
(1753), Raab argues that while the tearful “excesses” of the sentimental
novel have been enthusiastically historicized as appropriate for the female
pen, the equally affect-filled but aggressive female-authored satires of the
Restoration and early eighteenth century have been difficult to recover
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because they fit awkwardly with entrenched conceptions of femininity.
Also focusing on poetry, Sarah Prescott adapts John Kerrigan’s model of
archipelagic criticism to illustrate the national tensions and competing
cultural and regional networks that shaped female literary influence
and exchange within the four nations of the British Isles. In addition to
challenging literary hierarchies built around reductive understandings of
the core and periphery, Prescott suggests that this framework “provides
a transferable model” for thinking about not only transnational but also
transatlantic feminism (67). Complementing Prescott’s archipelagic
approach, Harriet Guest demonstrates how Mary Robinson and Hester
Thrale Piozzi used their reflections on travel in Wales to meditate on the
nature of progress, civilization, and gender. In one of the most engaging
essays of the collection, Ruth Perry extends work done by scholars of
Celtic and oral culture within the British Isles to recover the contribution
of Anna Gordon Brown to Francis J. Child’s influential The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). Perry makes the significant point
that women, such as Brown, who preserved traditional ballads also
“honed” and “refined” their content in the process of performing and
recollecting them for collectors like Child (215). The collection also
includes noteworthy essays on the development and gendering of the
professional writer and popular culture by Betty A. Schellenberg and
Paula R. Backscheider.
The volume’s shift away from prose fiction raises important questions
about what it means to write women’s history (literary and otherwise)
in the twenty-first century. As several essays in the collection argue,
the new focus on a larger print culture has changed understandings of
canonical writers like Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn. Many of the
essays address Haywood’s work, which serves as an “example of the
rich possibilities next steps in the recovery project offer” (10). Kathryn
R. King’s reading of Haywood’s Love in Excess as a “hybrid narrative
that falls somewhere between narrative and drama, romance and erotic
lyricism” (86) and Rivka Swenson’s work on Haywood as both a translator
and historian provide important examples of how the “rise of the novel”
narrative has limited our understanding of her remarkable contributions
to print culture. Scholars and students interested in the latter part of the
eighteenth century would have appreciated a more sustained treatment
of writers such as the Bluestockings and Anna Seward, who have also
suffered because of the field’s emphasis on prose fiction. Despite this, the
multiple essays that engage with Haywood’s work effectively illustrate
Ingrassia’s contention in the introduction that “it is imperative to
shed preconceptions about ‘women writers’ in order to come closer to
understanding the complexity of the commercial and cultural world in
which they operated” (8). The attention paid to Haywood throughout the
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volume serves as an important illustration of the collection’s aim, which
is to dismantle the narratives and generalities that have limited studies of
women writers during this period. Ultimately, I found myself wondering
how this approach changes our understanding of the effectiveness and
integrity of “women” as a category for literary study. Once women are
decoupled from the domestic and private concerns that have shaped
women’s literary history, how should this category function? After
women writers are integrated into our studies of a fuller range of genre
and media, how do we make a case for the category’s necessity? Felicity
Nussbaum suggests one answer: “‘Woman’ remains a powerful and viable
category of analysis, not least because its meaning is never fixed but con
tinues to shift throughout history, and so it depends for its definition
on intersections with other social and economic categories” (120). The
full significance of literary scholars’ shift away from women as novelists
and towards women as playwrights, theatre managers, ballad collectors,
booksellers, travel writers, and historians remains to be fully articulated,
but Ingrassia’s collection offers the means to begin conceptualizing this
shift and its impact on the way scholars write and teach the history of
literature and print.
JoEllen DeLucia is an associate professor of English at Central Michigan
University. She is the author of A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women
Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 (2015).
Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution
par Stephanie M. Hilger
Newark: University of Delaware Press;
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
xii+184pp. US$70. ISBN 978-1-61149-529-4.
Critique littéraire par Monique Moser-Verrey, Université de Montréal
Spécialiste de l’écriture des femmes au lendemain de la Révolution,
Stéphanie Hilger nous donne ici une nouvelle étude cernant la contribu
tion d’écrivaines au dialogue interculturel qui révèle à cette époque
charnière un corps social en mutation. Tandis que dans Women Write
Back (2009) elle avait souligné le cosmopolitisme de femmes capables
de prendre le contre-pied de grands auteurs des Lumières tels Voltaire,
Rousseau, Johnson et Goethe, Gender and Genre (2015) approfondit
sa recherche sur le positionnement des écrivaines dans le spectre des
genres littéraires, déjà présente dans son premier livre, tout en ciblant le
nationalisme naissant parmi les auteures de langue allemande.
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Sa réflexion cadre s’inscrit dans la foulée de la recherche féministe
qui depuis une cinquantaine d’années remet en circulation des écrits de
femmes écartés de l’horizon littéraire et culturel par une appréhension
canonique trop exclusivement réservée aux hommes. Tout en rendant
hommage aux avancées des premières générations de chercheuses, Hilger
termine son parcours critique par un appel au dialogue nécessaire pour
rétablir définitivement les points de vue féminins dans l’histoire littéraire.
Mais son approche s’appuie aussi sur la recherche en histoire et sur
celle qui étudie les genres littéraires dans une perspective comparatiste.
Même si sa table des matières affiche les genres littéraires dans lesquels
s’inscrivent les ouvrages étudiés, chaque chapitre étaie solidement le
contexte historique motivant le propos des écrivaines choisies, soit
Therese Huber (1764–1829), Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (1774–1831),
Christine Westphalen (1758–1840), Regula Engel (1761–1853), Sophie
von La Roche (1730–1807) et Henriette Frölich (1768–1833).
Ces femmes, dont la vie est contemporaine des événements de 1789, de
la mort de Louis xvi en 1793, de la Terreur et des guerres révolutionnaires
puis napoléoniennes qui secouent le Saint empire germanique mais aussi
les cantons suisses, rusent avec les attentes du public lecteur pour prendre
position sur ces sujets d’actualité dans un contexte politique et social
tourmenté et violent. Hilger explique avec finesse leurs nombreuses
stratégies et montre aussi qu’elles publient les ouvrages étudiés en
Allemagne et en Suisse entre 1795 et 1820 généralement par nécessité, car
leurs pourvoyeurs sont décédés ou vaincus. À la suite des travaux de Lynn
Hunt sur Le Roman familial de la Révolution (1992), Hilger s’intéresse
également à l’image des héroïnes aux corps et aux esprits meurtris par les
circonstances et poursuit l’hypothèse voulant que ces images symbolisent
de nouveaux types de corps politique en devenir. Il va sans dire que
les corps fragilisés des héroïnes, travesties en soldats voire déplacées
vers les colonies parlent un tout autre langage que le corps magnifié de
Marianne, l’emblème bien connu de la République. Encore que cet angle
d’attaque stimule de nombreuses remarques pertinentes, il ne peut pas
être vraiment concluant, car les histoires sont trop variées et trop peu
nombreuses pour faire émerger un modèle interprétatif prégnant.
Qu’en est-il de ces histoires? Mis à part Die Familie Seldorf (1795–96)
de Huber et Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820) de Frölich
où la biographie des héroïnes relève de la fiction, tous les autres textes
développent de façon plus ou moins fictionnelle l’histoire véritable de
protagonistes mêlés à la Révolution ou l’émigration. La Charlotte Corday
(1804) de Westphalen en est l’exemple le plus frappant. Il s’agit d’une
tragédie historique publiée à Hambourg avant l’arrivée des troupes de
Napoléon pour célébrer la vision humaniste animant le geste meurtrier
de cette femme prête à mourir sur l’échafaud pour contrer la Terreur.
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Hilger souligne la double audace de Westphalen car en se mêlant
d’historiographie et en produisant une tragédie elle s’aventure dans un
domaine réservé aux maîtres du classicisme allemand qu’étaient Goethe
et Schiller. Elle se fait d’ailleurs rabrouer de façon mesquine, mais sous sa
plume Charlotte Corday n’en demeure pas moins beaucoup plus politisée
que sous celles de dramaturges et poètes contemporains tels Zschokke,
Senkenberg, Jean Paul et Klopstock (69).
L’hybridation des genres est, par contre, une stratégie propre à occulter
des prises de positions politiques. Hilger l’observe plus particulière
ment dans deux romans datant des années 1790. Erscheinungen am
See Oneida (1798) de La Roche combine une histoire d’aventure à la
Robinson Crusoé avec une quantité de références livresques étalant
de façon encyclopédique le savoir des Lumières. Ainsi, après avoir fui
la Révolution, Carl et Emilie Wattines refont leur vie sur une île du
Nouveau monde où les connaissances deviennent accessibles à tous.
Les lectrices du roman en bénéficient évidemment tout autant. Plus
jeune que La Roche et, de plus, favorable à la Révolution, Huber ne
travaille pas de la même manière à l’émancipation des femmes. Mais
en enchaînant des topoï du roman sentimental, du drame bourgeois
et enfin du roman gothique, elle conduit son héroïne, Sara Seldorf,
d’une naïveté première vers une prise en charge d’elle-même et une
politisation toujours plus engagée. Collée sur l’actualité de la Terreur et
de ses suites militaires, cette histoire se termine enfin dans le désarroi
sur des visions apocalyptiques dignes du roman gothique.
Un peu plus de recul dans le temps, facilite des figurations moins
littérales de la tourmente révolutionnaire. Lorsque la Motte Fouqué
publie son roman historique Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1816),
Napoléon est définitivement défait et le congrès de Vienne vient de
créer une Confédération germanique. Le soulèvement royaliste dans
la Vendée peut donc symboliser la guerre de libération livrée par les
princes allemands à Napoléon. Tout en s’appuyant sur les Mémoires de
Madame la Marquise de la Rochejaquelein (1811), la Motte Fouqué donne
à son héroïne royaliste un rôle politique visible lorsqu’elle se travestit en
soldat pour rejoindre son amant au combat. Son parcours difficile fait
écho aux peines vécues en Allemagne dans un passé récent. La lecture
fouillée de Hilger situe parfaitement ce roman par rapport à l’avènement
de l’historiographie et du roman historique en Allemagne.
Frölich prend encore plus de recul que la Motte Fouqué, puisque son
héroïne Virginia, née le 14 juillet 1789, quittera la France pour l’Amérique
où il s’agira de former une colonie incarnant les idéaux de la Révolution.
Ce parcours féminin se profile en opposition à la formation du jeune
homme bourgeois proposée dans le prototype du roman de formation, le
Wilhelm Meister de Goethe. Là encore, Hilger inscrit un roman de femme
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méconnu dans le contexte de l’histoire littéraire allemande et montre
comment la vérité prime ici sur l’invention. En effet, Frölich parodie dans
son sous-titre Mehr Wahrheit als Dichtung le titre donné dès 1811 par
Goethe à son autobiographie Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit.
Disons pour conclure que le dénominateur commun des ouvrages
réunis dans cette monographie n’est pas seulement leur lien thématique
avec la Révolution française, mais aussi leurs regard critique sur l’histoire
contemporaine comportant son lot de souffrance, d’injustice et de
mystification idéologique. L’exemple de Lebensbeschreibung (1821), un
récit autobiographique signé par Regula Engel, la veuve démunie d’un
mercenaire suisse ayant servi la monarchie, puis Robespierre et enfin
Napoléon, est éloquent à ce sujet. Si son histoire a connu un grand succès
de librairie sous le titre révisé d’Amazone suisse dès 1825, c’est que la vérité
intéresse toujours. Elle mérite d’être rétablie dans nos histoires littéraires,
comme le souhaite Stephanie Hilger, par l’inclusion d’écrivaines qui,
à moins d’être baronnes, n’osaient pas encore publier sous leur nom au
tournant du xixe siècle.
Monique Moser-Verrey est associée au Centre canadien d’études alle
mandes et européennes à l’Université de Montréal. Elle a publié Isabelle de
Charrière: salonnière virtuelle: Un itinéraire d’écriture au xviiie siècle (2013)
et codirigé Le Corps romanesque: Images et usages topiques sous l’Ancien
Régime (2015, 2e éd.).
Écrire le temps: Les Tableaux urbains
de Louis Sébastien Mercier par Geneviève Boucher
Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014.
272pp. CAN$34.95; €31. ISBN 978-2-7606-3444-2.
Critique littéraire par Hugo Sert, Université Paris VII-Diderot
Cet ouvrage, issu d’une thèse de Doctorat soutenue en 2010, propose
une lecture comparée originale, érudite et très richement référencée,
du Tableau de Paris (1781–88) et du Nouveau Paris (1798) de LouisSébastien Mercier, en inscrivant les deux œuvres panoramiques dans
ce que l’auteure théorise comme étant une véritable « révolution
temporelle » (9) du xviiie siècle. Cette révolution, dont les conséquences
en littérature sont à la fois un « goût pour la contemporanéité » (23) et
une sensibilité accrue aux métamorphoses de l’Histoire, doit informer la
lecture de la « physionomie morale » que dresse Mercier de la capitale
autant que les révolutions politique, scientifique et littéraire du siècle.
Dans ces années 1780–1790, la « révolution temporelle » confère au
présent une nouvelle valeur philosophique qui pousse l’écrivain, dans la
lignée de Lesage, Marivaux et Diderot, à observer et décrire les mœurs
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qui lui sont contemporaines, et non plus seulement à fantasmer, sous le
joug des règles et des codes des siècles précédents, les mœurs des temps
anciens. Or ce programme de captation du contemporain affiché dès
l’entrée du Tableau par le promeneur mercérien, et annonçant celui que
se fixe quelques années plus tard le « Spectateur-nocturne » dans les Nuits
de Paris de Rétif de la Bretonne, se trouve mis à mal en ces années qui
voient s’enchaîner les bouleversements politiques, sociaux, moraux et
artistiques. L’œuvre de Mercier se trouve confrontée à une problématique
qui conduit Geneviève Boucher à constituer, pour paraphraser le titre de
Michel Delon, une étude de l’idée de temps au tournant des Lumières, à
savoir: comment saisir et fixer le présent pendant une période historique
caractérisée de manière inédite par l’accélération du temps?
Boucher replace les textes dans les contextes de la fin de l’Ancien
Régime et de la période thermidorienne, et étudie les inflexions de la
sensibilité temporelle de l’écrivain entre le Tableau de Paris et le Nouveau
Paris. Elle met au jour les strates de l’imaginaire temporel complexe de
Mercier, qui lui servent à structurer son étude. Elle montre, à travers
trois grands axes qui dialectisent les rapports passé-avenir-présent, que
l’auteur de L’an 2440: Rêve s’il en fût jamais et et d’une Histoire de France en
six volumes, oscille entre nécessité d’un héritage et constat de la rupture
irrémédiable, refusant de choisir de manière trop schématique entre une
représentation cyclique et une représentation linéaire de la temporalité
historique. Mercier incarnerait la dualité de la conscience historique
moderne qui naît pendant ce tournant de siècle.
Dans une première partie intitulée « Faire revivre le passé », Boucher
donne à voir l’« épaisseur temporelle » (32) qui caractérise Paris avant la
Révolution, en comparant notamment le Tableau avec les Songes et visions
philosophiques: l’écrivain-promeneur marche alors dans une ville-signes,
et semble traverser les âges en même temps qu’il traverse les rues. La
Révolution vient métamorphoser ce rapport au passé, ce que démontre
l’étude détaillée d’un article publié par Mercier dans le Journal de Paris en
1797 (« L’arrangement du dépôt des Petits-Augustins, dit le musée des
Monuments français »). Les événements politiques historicisent un
présent qui dès lors prend toute la place dans la conscience collective,
et les témoignages architecturaux des époques passées, devenant des
ruines réelles ou des œuvres d’art muséifiées, participent paradoxalement
à disqualifier le passé en le dissociant de l’Histoire vivante en train de
se faire. Toutefois, l’auteure montre dans une deuxième partie intitulée
« Imaginer l’avenir », que la ruine du passé et le sentiment de tabula
rasa qui suit la Révolution ne va sans la nécessité d’une « régénération »
qui pose la question des sources et des références. Mercier, s’inscrivant
dans l’esthétique des ruines qui marque la deuxième moitié du xviiie
siècle, aperçoit dans le présent les marques de la ruine future: la
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dégénérescence est l’horizon de toute création. Or cela permet, pendant
la période révolutionnaire, d’envisager la ruine comme un point de départ
et non comme une fin. Dans l’imaginaire mercérien, toute destruction
est l’annonce d’une renaissance à venir. Ainsi le trop-plein de livres, la
prolifération des humains, l’élargissement continu d’une ville monstrueuse
et vampirisante, conduisent à une nécessaire épuration comme première
étape de la reconstruction. Ce lien décadence-régénération est présent dès
les premiers tableaux, et se resserre dans les chapitres du Nouveau Paris.
À partir de ces analyses, Boucher peut développer, dans une troisième
partie intitulée « Écrire le présent », des remarques stylistiques qui lui
permettent de poser les fondements d’une poétique du rapport au temps
dans les « tableaux urbains ». Elle montre que Mercier se dégage des lois
classiques de la mimesis et de l’ekphrasis. L’écriture dans le Tableau et plus
encore dans le Nouveau Paris doit coller au présent, et se fait mouvement
énergique cherchant sans cesse à rattraper les événements. Dans les
deux panoramas, le présent semble malgré tout échapper et cela conduit
l’écrivain à une pratique qui se rapproche de celle du fragment, à lier
également à sa pratique du journalisme pendant la Révolution. Mercier
doit sans cesse rajouter des morceaux d’œuvres qui sont autant d’instants
rapidement croqués, et l’accumulation des instants, comme cela se passe
avec un kaléidoscope, doit créer un tout se rapprochant le plus possible
de la trame du présent. L’enjeu finalement pour Mercier est d’écrire
une Histoire au présent, qui s’avère être une Histoire impossible: les
événements sont encore trop proches et, comme il l’affirme lui-même, il n’a
pas le recul suffisant. Comme beaucoup d’autres écrivains de la Terreur et
de l’Émigration, il fait dès lors avec les moyens littéraires à sa disposition,
se laissant aller parfois à une fascination qui oriente les descriptions
des scènes terribles de la Révolution vers une esthétique renouvelée du
sublime: l’on passerait chez Mercier, et plus largement pendant le tournant
des Lumières, d’un sublime de la Nature à un sublime de l’Histoire. Le
constat de l’impossibilité de l’écriture objective sur l’Histoire récente
donne lieu à une longue réflexion sur l’historiographie de la Révolution,
qui clôt l’étude de Boucher. La problématique de la relation au temps se
résout donc en une poétique, et la double impossibilité de la saisie du
présent et de l’analyse lucide des événements récents conduit Mercier à
transformer la Révolution, et par extension l’Histoire, en objet esthétique.
Ce qui fait l’originalité de l’étude de Boucher, c’est sa dimension
proprement sociocritique: dans une perspective d’histoire des idées
et des représentations, et en s’appuyant sur de nombreuses références
philosophiques et historiques, Boucher dresse le tableau des différentes
perceptions du temps à la fin du xviiie siècle, et plus particulièrement
pendant la période révolutionnaire. L’auteure pose les bases d’une étude
poétique renouvelée de Mercier appelée à être prolongée et précisée, et
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critiques de livres
construit les fondements solides sur lesquels peut dorénavant s’appuyer
toute lecture de ces œuvres qui, pendant le tournant des Lumières,
cherchent à « écrire le temps ».
Hugo Sert est doctorant contractuel à l’Université Paris VII-Diderot et
travaille sur les représentations de la marche dans la littérature française
des xviiie et xixe siècles.
Recueil des facéties parisiennes, by Voltaire, vol. 51A
in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, dir. Nicholas Cronk,
intro. Michel Delon
Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015.
xxx+592pp. £120;€169;$187. ISBN 978-0-7294-1071-7.
Review by Servanne Woodward, Western University
After decades of the dichotomy of politically disengaged structuralism
and compulsory Marxism, university researchers are now seeking ways to
be objective and scientific keepers of our culture at the same time as they
guide readers to make sense of their own present through an increased
familiarity with the authors we associate with the foundation of Western
democracies. This scholarly volume by numerous authors and editors,
complete with an extensive scholarly apparatus, including a preface
by Michel Delon, encourages us to seek relevance in the year 1760, an
instant in time concerning French intellectual history. We are encouraged
to retrace and contextualize Voltaire’s satirical caricature, with the idea
that it may help us interpret current practices: “Alors que les démocraties
peinent encore aujourd’hui à travers le monde à définir une neutralité de
l’espace public et ne se mettent pas d’accord sur le droit au blasphème et les
limites de la caricature individuelle, les variations polémiques de Voltaire
dans les années 1759 et 1760 sont autant de documents historiques à
interroger” (xxv). The publication Charlie Hebdo and its team remain
unnamed, but, for people who follow the news even distantly, it must
come to mind, although the modern journal does not use caricature in
the same way as Voltaire, which should become obvious as one reads this
volume. Delon is not alone in this effort to reflect on satirical caricature,
and out of two sponsored panels, the French section of the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Pittsburgh, 2016) proposed a
more blunt juxtaposition of the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo’s head
quarters and Voltaire’s thought as a launching pad for a rather complex
reflection—let us note that despite acknowledged interest, the call for
contributions to this panel did not meet with an immediate rush of
proposals from participants.
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It is rare to find a collection of introductions less partial to the works
of the author whose scientific edition they painstakingly produced
in an impressive collective effort. Each specialist restitutes dignity (if
warranted) to the injured parties and weighs Voltaire’s altruistic and
ideological motives against pettier ones, such as his self-interest and his
personal or authorial narcissisms. The latter are detected in his jealous
intermittent attacks over fifteen years against Le Franc de Pompignan’s
highly successful play at the time (Didon) as it met with great public
success and was officially included in the permanent repertoire of the
Comédie Française (David Williams, 208–12). Jessica Goodman exposes
Voltaire’s dubious positioning at the occasion of Palissot’s comedy (Les
Philosophes, 1760), ridiculing philosophers except for Montesquieu
and Voltaire, whom she praised in the published preface that she edits
(Goodman, 223–30). Goodman reports on Voltaire’s obvious sensitivity
to the compliment paid by Palissot (226) and Grimm’s comment that
Voltaire should not have sent friendly letters to Palissot nor acted as his
executioner in his critical “notes” (230). Diana Guiragossian-Carr also
mentions Grimm’s comment when questioning what motivated Voltaire
to publish all of these pamphlets in a bound volume (345).
While reading the letters exchanged between Palissot and Voltaire
(edited by Kelsey Rubin-Detlev), it is possible to interpret the friendly
overtures of Voltaire as a strategic move to lead the anti-philosophical
author to retract some of his attacks—his misattribution of quotes,
for instance—as too damaging for a project dear to Voltaire, namely
D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedia (Stewart, 118). Furthermore,
Pompignan’s academic speech attacking the philosophes, claiming that
they are impious and seditious towards the government, broke the
general convention of remaining silent on such topics in the gatherings of
the Academy: it was considered out of place if not indecent as a reception
piece to that institution (Stewart, 20n7). Stewart perceives that Voltaire
is rightly alarmed by the support for Pompignan and Palissot’s attacks
against philosophers (118), at a time when Morellet is arrested and sent
to the Bastille under the accusation of having written Voltaire’s “Si” and
“Pourquoi” (119–20). Stewart shows that Voltaire’s friends expect him to
react, and he is solicited by the likes of Diderot, who is hoping for his
protection (124). It appears that Voltaire’s personal attacks, such as his
harassment of Pompignan, were designed to discredit the individuals who
were fortuitous agents of dangerous powers, but those powers are harder
to identify. François Moureau further emphasizes that Pompignan’s
Mémoire addressed to the king could have had nefarious effects on the
“philosophers” (195), and Diana Guiragossian-Carr concurs (344).
Moureau stresses Voltaire’s disappointment with the Academy that did
not defend him against Pompignan’s personal denigration (193n3).
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In fact, Pompignan ends up partly redeemed in this volume, at least
when he attempts to protect the farmers of his region against further
taxes (Stewart, 160n4). Though he is clearly self-satisfied and clumsy, he
is still capable of producing a popular play and a dangerous “Mémoire,”
both produced in good faith but showing a narrowmindedness.
Pompignan’s lack of skill regarding public relations (Edouard Langille,
456) and his obliviousness regarding his full role in the philosophers’
debate are also revealed. Simon Davies and Lionello Sozzi contend
that Pompignan did not successfully negotiate the transition between
his local success in Montauban and the challenges of metropolitan
Paris (169). Voltaire becomes creative against him and invents a new
satirical genre by including critical notes to the text of an author whom
he wishes to depreciate: “Fragment d’une lettre sur ‘Didon’, tragédie”
(edited by Williams).
Despite his engagement on the side of “philosophers,” Voltaire’s
adhesion to each personal philosopher was nuanced and sometimes
mitigated. Clearly, Palissot’s portrayal of Rousseau on all fours must not
have offended him too much, since he borrows the image in “Le Russe
à Paris” (142), and his letter to Palissot (4 June 1760) admits that much
(300), while Brandli thinks that “Plaidoyer de Ramponeau” plainly
attacks the Swiss author (368). When the Republic of Geneva interferes
with his theatrical shows at Les Délices, Voltaire thinks Rousseau’s
influence in condemning theatre is at work, and his irritation turns
into hatred against the former ally (Brandli, 371). Likewise, in terms of
qualified support, Voltaire’s appreciation of Diderot’s Encyclopedia was
stronger than that of his bourgeois drama.
Voltaire’s satire is not always a focused “attack.” “Le Pauvre Diable”
is akin to Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau and dissuasive for writers who
are bound for misery and mercenary pamphlets if they persist in their
failed career (Gillian Pink, 61). Rubin-Detlev indicates that Palissot
reconciled with Voltaire and some of the philosophes upon Voltaire’s
return to Paris in 1778 (282).
When reviewing the reasons behind Voltaire’s own publishing of this
1760 collection of facetious pieces, Diana Guiragossian-Carr emphasizes
the pride he may have felt at the stylistic perfection attained in ephemeral
satire: “Il convient de noter ici qu’à partir de 1760 Voltaire fera un usage
de plus en plus fréquent et heureux de la facétie. Cette forme souple et
légère convenait à merveille à la lutte sans répit qu’il allait mener contre
l’infâme” (345–46). In other words, Voltaire enjoyed writing short pieces
as so many elegant verbal missiles; Brandli reminds us of his term “fusée
volante” from his homestead (Les Délices), protecting the world against
obscene infamy issued from Paris (353). Guiragossian-Carr finds that
“Réflexions pour les sots” is a miniature version of “Lettres anglaises,”
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where Voltaire lists the articles of his philosophical credo against fana
ticism and persecution, while for tolerance, freedom of thought, and
freedom of conscience (463).
The volume includes texts by other authors, such as La Condamine’s
“‘Les Quand’ adressés au Sieur Palissot,” which imitates Voltaire (edited
by Ruggero Sciuto) and “Les Qu’est-ce,” which includes passages by
Voltaire (or imitating Voltaire) that were attributed to some anonymous
author who defends Rousseau (Langille, 426). Langille also edited
“Avertissement au ‘Factum du Sieur Saint-Foix’”; he challenges the long
standing authorship attribution to Voltaire as well as the arguments for
this attribution (439–44). Among other details presented and evidence
found in certain vocabulary usages, the word “Sieur” does not conform
to Voltaire’s style, according to Langille. Texts by other authors, such as
Palissot, are included so that readers will be better able to understand the
dynamics of Voltaire’s voice.
In eighteenth-century France, scientific research lived or died
depending on governmental sponsorship or censorship. Graham
Gargett evokes a time when manuscripts were burned for reasons of
impiety, and he reminds us that the propriety of the impact of satire is
that it remains limited to the place where the readers were reasonably
acquainted with the events alluded to (489). Voltaire publicly disavowed
“Dialogues Chrétiens” because the second half concerning Geneva
earned the impassioned legal attention of the Republic to his writings,
while it left virtually no impression in France.
This volume of the collected works of Voltaire benefitted from the help
of many unnamed librarians (but for Alla Zlatopolskaya of the National
Library of Russia) and at least ten named researchers, including Haydn
Mason, who reread the pages. This vol. 51A of Les Œuvres complètes de
Voltaire covers a few months of intensive debate in 1760. This intensity
is impressively brought to life by the introductions and notes of the
various editors for each piece, and the 553 pages of texts, published in
order of their writing, will provide readers with a fresh understanding of
Voltaire—and perhaps shatter our complacency regarding the present he
helped shape for us.
Servanne Woodward teaches in the Department of French Studies,
Western University.

Click here for a pdf file of all the reviews in this issue.

Transcription

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