Mme du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 85 act] by the powerful research potential of the psychoanalytic method" (Lichtenberg, 62); with the role of "objective" reader intersecting the biographical act and providing a mirror for the biographer to "be sure about the validity of [his] transference intuitions "—which validity can never be secured "until he has succeeded in conveying his insights to his readers by reproducing comparable emotional responses in them" (Moraitis, 347; my emphases). Introspection essentially preaches that the biographer should temporarily "surrender " to his subject, that is, "give his subject the opportunity to persuade him of the validity of [the subject's] perceptions," but then should "assess" and "integrate" the latter into a "coherent schemata," a task of integration best accomplished "under conditions optimally conducive to a reflective examination of the introspective data available ," or in short, by using the Moraitis method (Moraitis, 336). And insofar as they record how their writers submitted their biographical acts to this method's "controls and structure that protect the self-observer from deceptive and self-serving assumptions " (322), Introspection's essayistic accounts of this method at work cumulatively purport "to study subjectivity objectively" (326). The question a critical reader has to decide is whether the repetitive narrative pattern of these essays and their consistent thematic "testimonials" to the Moraitis method don't indicate a subtext with its own self-serving, non-objective or ideologically narcissistic assumptions. After all, taken together or separately, these essays demonstrate the unruly forces of autobiography on the borders of biography. On the one hand, each essay unconsciously mimics the "coherent schemata" of religious autobiographical confessions: former biographical naivete towards the subject (sin); gained self-awareness of this uncritical relation through the Moraitis collaborative method (conversion); a more objective revision of the relation to one's biographical subject (redemption of past as fortunate fall). On the other, in doing so, don't these essays leave room for interrogating their own relatively uncritical belief in narrative patterns constantly resulting in coherent knowledge about the other? Why that outcome? The Moraitis method can thus lead us to question itself: first as a method arrested by (identifying with?) a central hypothesis that exerts pressure on unwieldy narrative evidence for confirming desired results; second as a method endorsing the suspicious ideology of integration, whether of ultimately autonomous selves or disciplines. With one more turn of the self-critical screw, this method might indeed disclose an objective subjectivity at the heart of the biographical act. It might disclose subjectivity itself, albeit the postmodernist trace of an alive and kicking Sartrean other that resists if never altogether manages to escape subjection to the integrating schemata of critic or biographer, as the fate even of any purported objective study of subjectivity—or of monitored autobiographies of the biographical process of writing. But although a reasonably and clearly argued proposal for an intellectually sensible alliance between psychoanalytic procedures and biographical projects, Introspection, self-critically speaking , ends up going "neither out far nor in deep" (Robert Frost). Louis A. Renza Dartmouth College Esther Ehrman, Mme du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment . Berg Publishers Ltd./St. Martin's dist., 1986. 98 pp. $6.95. 86 biography Vol. 11,No. 1, A member of a powerful and wealthy family of the nobility of the robe, Mme du Châtelet was not content to enjoy the considerable prerogatives and privileges of an eighteenth -century marquise. Well-educated by any standards, thanks to a thoughtful and enlightened father, she vigorously pursued her intellectual interests and became an accomplished scientist, essayist and translator, as well as an indefatigable letter-writer. Numerous constraints hampered the efforts of a woman scientist who wished to rise above the rank of amateur, even one in Madame du Châtelet's privileged position, in a field so completely dominated by men. Yet Madame du Châtelet managed to gain widespread recognition in her own lifetime. Among her works are translations with commentaries of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and Newton's Principia Mathematica, a booklength study on physics (the Institutions de physique), a treatise on the nature of fire and heat (the Dissertation sur la nature et propagation du feu), papers on Newtonian physics and other scientific...