Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and James (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 307 The adult chuckles thinking of the procession of dazzling men to appear in Austen's writings, even appreciating the adroitness of McMaster's editorial amendments in writing out the blanks and dashes of the original text. Both child and adult laugh together at seeing McMaster's rendering of the fop as a striped lizard! The cover and layout of the book are very appealing. The small child, having duly corrected the spelling of "beautifuH" in the title, is encouraged to read the story alone. McMaster's perceptive anaylsis of The Beautifull Cassandra in the afterword is a rare instance of literary criticism aimed at a child audience and could be read by an older child. Yet while the afterword is being read by this adult to the younger child, the child can "read" the biography implicit in McMaster's drawing of Austen as a twelve-yearold girl and be reminded again that she too was a child when she wrote the tale. The drawing is evocative: Jane Austen is intently composing at her writing desk but with a half-smile that suggests her "secret laughter" at the world beyond. The Beautifull Cassandra is a perfect introduction to Jane Austen and to her Juvenilia for child and adult alike. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh McGiIl University Susan Winnett. Terrible Sociability: The Text ofManners in Laclos, Goethe, and James. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. ? + 245pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8047-2140-8. In his The Novel of Worldliness (1969), Peter Brooks looked at a number of French eighteenth-century novels in order to show how they exploited "the drama inherent in man's social existence, the encounters of personal styles within the framework and code provided by society" (p. 9). In Terrible Sociability, his student Susan Winnett looks again at novels of manners, but sees them primarily as texts that exploit the codes of society for purposes of narrative. Both books are reworked dissertations; both wear their learning lightly, with sparse footnotes and no bibliography; both talk about the social in terms of literature, with little attention to the actual social conditions of the time; both return more than once to Barthes's essay on La Bruyère and some remarks of Baudelaire's about Laclos. They are both thoroughly mondaine and engagingly written approaches to the problem of mondanité. But the differences between them suggest some of the changes that have occurred in our thinking about literature in the last quarter century (perhaps we could even call it progress); the reverberations of feminist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic criticism (including Brooks's later Readingfor the Plot) echo throughout Winnett's book. (I was struck, for example, rereading Brooks's book, by how often phrases like "man's social existence" or "man's way of being" recur, phrases that are now nearly unwritable.) Winnett's book shows, in other words, without ever parading it, a thorough grounding in the theories of narrative and of literature as a social institution that have marked recent critical work. Her range is also wider, perhaps reflecting the trend towards comparative studies: while Brooks then confined himself to French novels from Crébillon and Marivaux to Stendhal (with a few asides on English literature from Richardson to James), Winnett moves from Scudéry's Carte de Tendre (1654) to a long chapter on The Golden Bowl, and seems at home in German as well as French and English literature. Though there is relatively little overlap in the texts they treat, both devote a chapter to Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, 308 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 a novel that is probably of particular interest to readers oíEighteenth-Century Fiction and that shows the differences in their approach. Brooks spends most of his time establishing "a total and objective view" (p. 175). He presents Merteuil and Valmont as manipulating the codes of the social structure they both criticize and depend on, Tourvel as existing in a realm beyond it. Winnett, on the other hand, begins with Laclos's plan for numbering the streets to create a knowable, legible Paris—and concludes with the collapse of "the old social topography." She insists that the novel exposes the contradictory grammar...