Rousseau's Dance of Veils: The Confessions and the Imagined Woman Reader

Abstract

Foucauldian accounts of the novel often emphasize how fiction induces readers to accept as natural ideological fictions whose effect is to constrain their ideas and actions. Nancy Armstrong argues, for example, that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the novel helped to create the middle-class fiction of separable public and private spheres of life.1 The novel constituted itself as a domain of feminine authority over matters of the heart and the household and helped create a new concept of identity, according to which individuals could define themselves in terms of their inner qualities rather than social status. Although this new sense of identity at first enfranchised people by helping to create concepts of individual rights and offering a rationale for modern social institutions, Armstrong asserts, it eventually became repressive.2 Social conflict was displaced onto sexual difference and thereby contained. Novels contributed to this trend by implying that love and marriage could and should resolve class tensions, thereby not only obfuscating social inequity but also enforcing a sexual contract.3 On women, especially, novels came to have an oppressive effect: the household became women's domain, but that domain was sequestered from the larger political world, which was the province of men.4