Becoming a Woman: self-fashioning and emotion in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

Abstract

This article explores the self-fashioning of a bourgeois woman in nineteenth-century France by analysing Geneviève Laurent-Pichat's letters to her father. Geneviève's illegitimacy compounded the emotional difficulties of her path to womanhood, but it also illuminates the processes by which bourgeois girls learned emotional self-management and shaped a self that fitted their assigned social position. Geneviève's letters also enable a reassessment of the role of letter-writing in women's self-fashioning. Engaging in family correspondence was central to the upbringing of middle-class girls, but its protocols reinforced the norms of conventional femininity. Family correspondence thus directed opportunities to explore and constitute the self into acceptable channels, creating a paradoxical feminine self whose fulfilment lay in self-denial.