Strategic Timing: Women's Questions, Domestic Servitude, and the Dating Game in Montesquieu

Abstract

Strategie Timing: Women's Questions, Domestic Servitude, and the Dating Game in Montesquieu Janet Gurkin Altman In 1954 Robert Shackleton cracked the code ofthe hybrid Persian-French calendar that Montesquieu used in the Lettres persanes, in which each letter was dated by the Christian calendar for day and year and by the Moslem calendar for months.1 Thanks to Shackleton's work, and to the many textual scholars who have shown us how much attention Montesquieu paid to the dating, attribution, and ordering of letters in the manuscripts and editions that he himself prepared,2 it has become possible to propose new readings of the Lettres persanes both as a philosophical novel and as a fictional chronicle of life in France and Persia from 171 1 to 1720. 1 Robert Shackleton, "The Moslem Chronology of the Lettres persanes" French Studies 8 (1954), 17-27; reprinted in Essays on Montesquieu and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), pp. 73-83. Jean Varloot paved the way for Shackleton's article by providing a detailed explanation in "Postface," Lettres persanes, Les Grands Maîtres (Paris: Bordas,1949), pp. 272-75. 2 There has been a century of discoveries on the part of textual scholars since Henri Barckhausen's pioneering work comparing extant manuscripts to editions. See, in particular, Henri Barckhausen, "Montesquieu, les Lettres persanes et les archives de la Brède," Revue du droit public (July 1898), 37ff; Edgar Mass, "Le développement textuel et les lectures contemporaines des Lettres persanes'' Cahiers de l'association internationale des études françaises (1983), 186-200; Edgar Mass, Literatur und Zensur in der frühen Aufklärung: Production, Distribution und Rezeption der "Lettres persanes" (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981); Darach Sanfey, "L'attribution de Ia lettre 144 des Lettres persanes',' Travaux de littérature 6 (1993), 173-92. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril, 2001 326 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION One of Montesquieu's most remarkable innovations as a novelist was to imagine a diverse cast of Persian letter-writers, including homebound wives and slaves as well as travellers, who raise potentially revolutionary questions about a global range of religious, political, and social institutions and about philosophical and moral principles. Because the Lettres persanes is organized as a novel andnot simply as acollection ofphilosophical and satirical letters, the Persian correspondents present institutions and ideas from varying locations and points of view, argue about them, and attempt to live by them in a fiction set during the second decade of the eighteenth century. For eighteenth-century readers, the most inflammatory issues were the religious ones. The novel was both censured and idolized for the way in which it relativized and undercut Roman Catholic authority in numerous letters devoted to theological issues and religious institutions in Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity.3 In other words, eighteenth-century readers agreed from the start on the novel's "impiety," and subsequent readers have agreed that the novel articulated ideas ofreligious tolerance and separation between ecclesiastical and state power that would be realized in France under subsequent republics.4 One ofthe vexedquestions, however, in studies ofthe Lettrespersanes is how to read the relationship between the high percentage ofletters devoted to assessment of political governments and the equally high percentage of letters devoted to the role of women in French and Persian society. Earlier readings tended to identify Roxane as the heroine of a certain republicanism, repressed by the despotic Usbek but offering nonetheless the triumphant final word ofthe novel. More recent readings have tended to conclude, on the contrary, that the novel had no feminist or republican edge, and that it could have contributed very little to the history of thinking that ledmen and women to establish arepublic in France in 1789 and to argue for equal rights for men and women in 1790 and 1791. Both Roxane's suicide and Usbek's failure to take political action enact instead a "flight from the sociopolitical system" and the "impotence of the critic, his inability 3 Jean-Baptiste Gaultier published an entire book, Les "Lettres persanes" convaincues d'impiété (Paris, 1751), in an attempt to get the novel banned because of its statements on religion. D'Alembert, on the...