Writing her rights: Fictions of sociability in the eighteenth-century French epistolary novel
Abstract
The five chapters of this dissertation discuss Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721; 1754; 1758), Riccoboni's Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby (1759), Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Gouges's Mémoire de Madame de Valmont (1784; 1788) and Charriere's Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d'émigrés (1793). They analyze the ways in which eighteenth-century literary heroines critique the gendering of traditional social practices and norms, and then generalize their personal situations to mount a case for women's rights at large. I argue that these texts can be read as fictions of sociability insofar as they stage contemporary social relations and articulate a theoretical discourse on the laws that govern human society. In particular these novels set up a confrontation between two historic conceptions of human relations. Initially elaborated and rehearsed in the seventeenth-century salons, the first was a moralist philosophy that focused on the behavioral aspects of an individual's social and intellectual existence. The second was more heavily inspired by the politico judicial discourse of natural law: it involved an analysis of the fundamental characteristics of human nature, as well as an understanding of the rules and dynamics by which societies can be established and maintained. It studied the individual's natural and civic rights, as well as his or her social duties. As it analyzes the ways in which these two different discourses were gendered and juxtapose in the Enlightenment epistolary novel, this dissertation traces changing representations of human sociability over the course of the eighteenth century. It also investigates the cultural significance of epistolarity, for, in this fictional corpus, letter writing is repeatedly imagined as a destabilizing intellectual, social, judicial and political act. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Romance
Recommended Citation
Giulia Pacini,
"Writing her rights: Fictions of sociability in the eighteenth-century French epistolary novel"
(January 1, 2002).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3043932.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3043932
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