Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature

Abstract

Mary McAlpin sets out to analyse a major obsession of the Enlightenment: the belief that society, although it could be improved through reforms, was equally threatened by a process of ‘hyper-civilization’ that led to its degradation. She argues that at the core of this cultural anxiety was the sexual development of young and innocent women, the ingénues, who also populated the literature of the period. The rise of vitalist theories in mid-century medical discourse, especially the how-to hygiene treatises published in significant numbers from the 1760s onwards, described the sexual differentiation set off by puberty as particularly dangerous for girls because of their ‘hypersensitivity to external influences’ (p. 7). Strict surveillance was the only way to turn them into the morally upright ‘new women’ that society needed. McAlpin establishes a connection between the dissemination of these medical theories on adolescent girls and the narrative choices that prevailed in contemporary literature. She argues that the deep-seated physiological concerns, which she discusses in the first two chapters of her book, pervaded not only medical discourse but also other cultural artefacts. The systematic ‘unpacking’ of medical concepts deeply embedded in non-medical texts enables McAlpin to uncover their role in the construction of literary femininity and to shed new light on canonical novels by Rousseau and Laclos. In Chapter 3 she draws on Rousseau's preoccupation with hygiene in Émile, ou De l'éducation, his major connection to vitalist theorists. She focuses her analysis on Julie d'Etange and provides interesting comments on Julie's physical development. McAlpin's reading of Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses in Chapter 4 benefits from her analysis of the physiological underpinnings in his essay ‘Des Femmes et de leur éducation’ (1783), which enables her to underscore the rich physico-moral context of the novel. In the absence of eighteenth-century female novelists who clearly expressed an interest in physiology, McAlpin devotes the last chapter to Marie-Jeanne Roland's Mémoires. She makes much of Roland's interest in medicine and of her willingness to evoke physiology in her autobiographical writing. As noteworthy as Roland's medical knowledge is, it does not offer McAlpin a clear interpretative advantage, and her disagreements with other Roland scholars do little to substantiate the greater relevance of her reading of Roland's text. While Roland undeniably has a role to play in this study, the book would also have benefited from a consideration of whether vitalism-inspired theories, which McAlpin presents as so pervasive in eighteenth-century culture, influenced novels written by women. Her discussion of a novel by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni and one by Isabelle de Charrière in Chapter 3 is too brief in this regard. Even more puzzling is Diderot's absence, since his essay ‘Sur les femmes’ and novel La Religieuse both conveyed a deep fascination for female physiology. Even though the premise of this study is compelling and McAlpin's interpretations of individual works are by and large sound, her reluctance to synthesize her arguments in each chapter and in the Conclusion ultimately mitigates the cohesiveness of the book.