“Langage inconnu”: Montesquieu, Graffigny and the Writing of Exile

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, the novel about a cultural outsider who exposes the vicissitudes of ancien regime society, notably the constraints it imposes on women, has gradually been incorporated into the literary canon. Following upon the editorial work of English Showalter, Gianni Nicoletti and others, several feminist critics engaged in the revision of the academic canon have initiated a critical reevaluation. This reappraisal has frequently involved the comparison of Graffigny's novel with texts by more illustrious male predecessors and contemporaries, most notably the Lettres persanes, but also Guilleragues' Lettres portugaises, Voltaire's L'Ingenu and Alzire and Condillac's Traite des Sensations. This critical practice raises several questions relating to the processes of canonization and revision. Are hitherto neglected women writers to be accommodated within an existing framework, given a place in the canon--A Woman's Place in the Enlightenment Sun,(1) as Janet Altman suggests in the title of one piece on Graffigny? Does the undoubtedly necessary process of canon revision inevitably depend upon the reception of texts as bearing determinate significations which can be compared and contrasted with those of other texts? I propose here to examine some of the ways in which the process of revision is played out in recent critical approaches to the Lettres d'une Peruvienne, and as a counterpart, to consider a further point of comparison between the Lettres and the work to which they are most often compared, the Lettres persanes. I shall focus on the emergence of a language which is described as unknown, new, foreign or strange, a langage inconnu or langage nouveau which in both texts is tied to the attempt to write about enlightenment, and suggest that this resistant, self-reflexive language constitutes an obstacle to the comparisons established in literary critical discourses. In a recent work, Julia V. Douthwaite considers the binary production of texts about exotic others by male and female writers of the ancien regimen. For example, she discusses Mme de Lafayette in relation to Prevost, and Montesquieu in the light of Graffigny.(2) She interprets the Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747) as a feminocentric revision or rewriting of the Lettres persanes (1721), both among the many novels of the period in which foreigners lay bare the arbitrary and unstable foundations of French institutions and cultural practices. Her use of the concept of revision clearly reflects a feminist and new-historicist approach, though the move to comparison itself builds upon a long critical tradition which has considered the Lettres d'une Peruvienne as a mere avatar of literary models inaugurated or exemplified by male-authored texts. Broadly speaking, Douthwaite locates the difference between the texts in each pairing in the sexual difference of their respective authors. She reverses the traditional view--that the male authors are more profoundly original or more philosophical than the women--while retaining the basis for this view, i.e. that writing is strongly determined by gender. Douthwaite's account of the feminist revision performed by the later text depends on a representation of the Lettres persanes as a masculine prototype, and on many points this characterization is accurate. The Persian travellers are all men, and the male voice predominates throughout the text. More problematic is the identification of these male characters with Levi-Strauss's ideal of the structural anthropologist, able to suspend the prejudices of his own culture in mid-air and to look beyond the foreignness of the world's societies to perceive their universal similarities and laws of order....This rhetorical strategy--which informs both structural anthropology and its intellectual ancestor, European travel writing--perpetuates the ontological advantage of the dominant European (male) observer over a passive, silent (feminized) Other. …