Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Tracy L. Rutler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Tracy L. Rutler Antoinette Sol Tracy L. Rutler. Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, coll. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2021. Pp. xxi + 291. Price $99.99. In Queering the Enlightenment, Tracy Rutler examines the "ailing state of the patriarchy" in novels and plays during the 1730s and 1740s by analyzing alternative systems of filiation and kinship played out in the narratives. These alternative systems reflect contemporary anxiety about the state of the monarchy and challenge the patriarchy. Combining psychoanalysis and structuralism with political theory, Rutler offers a different way to read canonical eighteenth-century texts by focusing on narrative substitutions for heteronormative familial relations. The interpretations of the texts are not necessarily new ones, but the journey to get to them is. By "reading queerly" new significations are teased out. Reading queerly means "seizing [the] disjunctions between the part (the subject) and the whole (the Order) by paying particular attention to the fruitful fracture between and within narration and language" (21). Rutler shows how Voltaire, Prévost, Crébillon fils, Marivaux, and Graffigny offer new paradigms of subjectivity and re-vision social organization by taking familiar heteronormative relations and rendering them unfamiliar. Importantly, Rutler shows how relevant the creation of alternative intimate communities in eighteenth-century texts is to our time. The introduction ably reviews the political and social situation in the wake of the death of Louis XIV and the theoretical framework that grounds Rutler's reading. Chapter one, "Towards [End Page 178] a Queer Politics of Kinship," finds value in a reconfigured familial space in Voltaire's Candide as a "thrown-together community of […] misfits "built upon a politics of collective action" (40), one that frustrates genre expectations and challenges the notion of family not organized around heterosexual reproduction. In the second chapter, "Oedipus interrupted: Prévost's Regime of the Brother," asks what difference the absence of women characters makes in the transfer of masculine power and in circuits of male desire. In chapter three, "Wandering Souls: The World of Cré-billon, fils" Rutler applies notions of "cruising" to the work of Crébillon fils and discusses how his characters refuse the "forward motion through time implied by heterosexual marriage and its goal of reproduction" (153) and where cruising "creates an astonishing egalitarian form of human and (nonhuman) relationality" (162). If the previous chapters explored formations of masculine subjectivity and circulation of desire, chapter four, "Origin Stories: Maternal Enlightenment in Marivaux," looks at the very different female subject formation through a compelling discussion of the maternal symbolic. Rutler reads Marivaux's La vie de Marianne and three of his plays as an exploration of various permutations and failures of the family romance. Reading for "political construction of female subjectivity" (184) reveals freely chosen and created female alternatives to the patriarchal traditional family. Chapter five, "Knotty Relations: Graffigny's Regime of the Sister," continues the discussion of female subjectivity and calls for a reevaluation of Graffigny's legacy. Rutler concludes her study by emphasizing that the texts studied "attempt to represent the emergence of alternative kinship structures […] characterized by forms of relation that exceed and undermine both patriarchy and heteronormativity" (272). This study is a fascinating and valuable contribution to the field. [End Page 179] Antoinette Sol University of Texas at Arlington Copyright © 2023 L'Esprit Créateur