:A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France.(The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture.)

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the language of virtue in eighteenth-century France, and the central part that it played in political, cultural, and social life. Historians and literature specialists have begun to pay attention to women's particularly complex relationship with the rhetoric of virtue: it could empower women but also cause them to embrace suffering. Lesley H. Walker's study of mothers in Enlightenment literature and art is a timely contribution to this field. She has taken as her subject the role of eighteenth-century mothers in fashioning virtue, above all, the ways in which they instilled virtue in their daughters. Walker explores this intriguing theme through the fiction and literature of the period. She draws on psychoanalytical writings to inform her investigations into the power of maternal love and its relationship to virtue and self-sacrifice. A central theme of the book is the way in which mothers in Enlightenment literature offered powerful models of virtue; but it was a power that was often achieved through the self-sacrifice and/or death of the mother. Typically the daughter expressed her grief at the loss of her mother by deciding to emulate her and become, in her turn, a model of virtue. Walker looks at mother-daughter relationships in the works of a number of novelists and artists, including Madame de Lafayette, François Fénelon, Madame de Lambert, Madame de Genlis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Madame Roland, Madame de Staël, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marguerite Gérard, and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. In her analysis of artistic genres she charts the move away from rococo aristocratic styles to paintings that conveyed love and tenderness between mothers and their children—a genre at which women artists such as Vigée-Lebrun and Gérard were often more successful than their male counterparts such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who tended (perhaps unconsciously) to eroticize such paintings. Walker's readings are both sensitive and authoritative. She thus brings a fresh eye even to such well-worn topics as Rousseau's attitude to women in La Nouvelle Héloïse and enables us to see this work anew. She does not shy away from controversy and is particularly critical of Joan Landes and her interpretation of Rousseau's role in excluding women from the public sphere. Walker asserts that “the time has come to demystify Rousseau as the primary target of feminist critique and cause of women's disenfranchisement from the public sphere” (p. 71). Whereas other literary analysts have seen Julie's capitulation and agreement to marry Wolmar as a sign of the victory of paternal authority, Walker argues persuasively that it is the death of her mother, and Julie's desire to become a virtuous mother—literally by taking her mother's place—that leads to her willing self-sacrifice. Walker follows this up with a thoughtful account of how Madame Roland self-consciously echoed Julie's sacrifice in her own life when she dealt with her own mother's loss by embracing virtue. There were limits, however, to the degree to which inspirational mothers, with their love and dedication to the education of their daughters, could offer a liberating or empowering experience. Virtue could not play the same role for women as it did for men. Maternal virtue was fundamentally about the sacrifice of individual desires and ambitions. Moreover, eighteenth-century society remained very limited in the actual social opportunities granted to women. Walker concludes that “the daughter's enlightenment is not her liberation. She will remain enmeshed in a world of great social obligation and considerable constraints; her life will, however, be better than it might have been without such an education” (p. 27).