Les images de soi chez Rousseau: l’autobiographie comme politique by Morihiko Koshi

Abstract

in chronological order with Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). Jensen elucidates previously unanswered questions in this chapter. One of the main questions is how the Princesse breaks away from maternal possession and how she successfully creates her own identity after her mother’s death. In chapter 2, the author examines Madame de Sévigné’s desire to be an individual and to be recognized as a writer (140). Jensen shows how much Madame de Sévigné needed her daughter to validate and recognize her mother’s talent in her letters. However, on her side, Sévigné does not recognize her daughter’s desires, but imagines a “fantasy daughter” (176) that does not exist in real life. In chapter 3, Jensen analyzes Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, in which the author uses her daughter to represent herself as“ideally feminine” (201), a loving and tender mother.Vigée-Lebrun also invents a“fantasy daughter,”representing her as her“alterego ”, her “self-reflective object” (214). Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between George Sand’s two ‘mothers’ who raised her: her biological mother and her grandmother on her paternal side. Jensen starts her analysis by questioning why there is a discrepancy between the way Sand was viewed and what she wrote in Histoire de ma vie. Jensen concludes that Sand’s problematic relationship with her mothers is due to a lack of recognition as an independent subject (265). The last chapter analyses Break of Day, Colette’s fictional autobiography where Sido (the writer’s mother) is depicted very positively. However Jensen asks why Colette wrote about her mother after her death.She finds the answer in the preface when Colette states that her mother“imposed” herself on her (329)—most likely,as Jensen argues,because there were some unresolved issues or feelings between them.With a clear, well-supported, and thought-provoking study, Jensen has made a valuable contribution to the field of feminist literary criticism and has proved that there are no ‘easy possessions.’ California State University, San Marcos Véronique Anover Koshi, Morihiko. Les images de soi chez Rousseau: l’autobiographie comme politique. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0329-3. Pp. 331. 39 a. It is notably characteristic of almost all Rousseau’s work—as opposed, say, to standard philosophical discourse—that the narrator frequently refers to himself in the text. Koshi’s objective is not to get at the ‘real’ Jean-Jacques but to analyze the character or image of that first-person voice as exemplified in a certain number of works, in particular those he deems particularly polemical (but then virtually all of Rousseau’s writings are in one way or other contestatory or combative) and/or that take the form of discourses,letters,or autobiography.Koshi refers to this persona throughout as the author’s ethos, a term I find distracting even if it can be etymologically justified (22). Since he is concerned with how the “I” functions pragmatically (one might say ‘interactively’), he takes into account the ways in which the reader’s role as well is manipulated, and evidence of the manner in which the public sphere (both 222 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 223 virtual and factual) reacts. The analysis is made more complex by the fact that it focuses not on the self-image as abstracted from the argumentation, but rather on how it functions as part of the argumentation, in other words in the context of overall rhetorical strategy.The discours savant which Rousseau favors early on has,for example, very different rules from other genres that can be pressed into polemical service. A number of the formal letters are examined, particularly that addressed to Christophe de Beaumont and those to his fellow Genevans in response to Tronchin’s Lettres de la campagne. The texts that best lend themselves to this exercise are of course those that contain plenty of first- and second-person pronouns and verbs, yet the third person must not be overlooked (particularly in the form of on, but also le lecteur or even le public). Koshi spends relatively little time on dialogues, though Rousseau juge de JeanJacques is adduced for its theory of how...