Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

Abstract

376 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:4 topoï ne réduisent pas la créativité du romancier, ils servent, au contraire, de tremplin à son invention. La démonstration est impeccable. Elisabeth Haghebaert porte son attention sur un apparent point de détail du roman: la parure dans La Vie de Marianne. Rien n'est secondaire chez Marivaux, surtout le paraître. Il s'agit d'une langue à part. Les personnages du roman sont peu décrits physiquement; la "métaphore couturière" leur tient lieu de portrait en mouvement. Dans une ultime contribution—"l'inceste évité"—René Démoris suggère que Molière agit sur Marivaux en tant que figure paternelle. L'inceste implicite de Tartuffe (Tartuffe/Elmire/Mariane) se retrouve dans La Vie de Marianne avec le trio Marianne/Valville/Climal. Le lien avec le statut pseudoparental déjà signalé dans Le Triomphe de l'amour est ici évident. Il serait bien audacieux de donner un jugement d'ensemble sur un recueil qui pratique des approches si diverses de l'œuvre de Marivaux. Laissons aux textes leur liberté d'être et peut-être, parfois, leur déraison. Ils témoignent du moins, dans ce concert francoqu ébécois, d'une égale volonté de comprendre l'un des écrivains les plus mystérieusement évidents du xviii* siècle. François Moureau Université de Paris-Sorbonne Madeleine Kahn. Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the EighteenthCentury Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. xi + 168pp. US$29.95 (cloth); US$9.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8014-2536-0. Remarkably often Madeleine Kahn reminds us of important similarities between Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Of Richardson, she writes that he had an "astonishing" talent "for projecting himself into the assumptions, desires, and concrete details" of his characters' lives and projecting his narrative voice into the "most unlikely fictional bodies" (p. 105). Such observations have been made, of course, about Defoe for years. Of Defoe, she writes that his use of the "transvestite narrator" is a "defining and protective structure [that] allows [Defoe] to be self-conscious about the very device he is using and to reflect the implications of his own relationship to this text in the relationships between his characters and, most of all, in the response he elicits from his readers" (p. 69). A number of recent books and articles have used Richardson's revisions and letters to demonstrate these preoccupations as he published Clarissa. Kahn's independence of mind opens her to such insights. She is surely right about Defoe. Critics of his novels too often ignore the fact that he had been a writer for at least thirty years before he published Robinson Crusoe. Because of the propagandists nature of that work, Defoe had to keep his readers in mind, considering at every moment how he might channel their thoughts and reactions; because of their responses (which were as "real" as those of Richardson's better-known readers), he became increasingly reflective about an author's relationship to readers. This understanding of Defoe allows Kahn to reopen and complicate conceptions of Moll as a character often described as created by an author who "does not so much portray his heroine's character as assume its reality in every action" (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 113). Watt concluded, "Defoe's identification with Moll Flanders was so complete that, despite a few feminine traits, he created a personality that was in essence his own" (p. 119). Tellingly, Kahn begins her book with an intriguing discussion of Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and some of the recent work on it and on da Vinci's Mona Lisa in which she gives us a compelling image of an artist creating a face that is his and not his, identical and yet always other. REVIEWS 377 To some extent, of course, the success of Kahn's book rests on her use of the term "transvestite narrative." Unlike the theatrical cross-dresser, the person like the jazz artist Billy Tipton, who lives life as the other sex, or the woman who wears men's clothing for fashion, comfort, or added safety, the transvestite only occasionally dresses as a woman, and it...