The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century by Heidi Bostic

Abstract

BOSTIC, HEIDI. The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2010. ISBN 978-0-87413-074-4. Pp. 270. $59.50. Heidi Bostic provides a refreshing examination of how current understandings of eighteenth-century reason have excluded women’s contributions to the phenomenon called the Enlightenment. Indeed, the “fiction” of her title refers to what she terms the “caricaturist tendency” of some current scholarship to reduce Enlightenment to a unified body of thought that champions reason as the way to knowledge, over feeling, when in fact the philosophers “espoused empiricism and embraced the passions” (46). Likewise, what she calls the “apologist tendency” of current scholarship offers a traditional understanding of the period that defines Enlightenment as an exclusively male intellectual endeavor. Thus our understanding of the Enlightenment, Bostic claims, enshrines fictionalized versions of Enlightenment thought which necessarily exclude women. In her introductory chapter “Women, Enlightenment and the Salic Law of Reason,” Bostic provides an extremely informative overview of eighteenthcentury views on women and reason. By historicizing the multiple meanings of “reason” for women and men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bostic suggests ways of conceptualizing reason that will allow contemporary scholars to see women’s intellectual contributions as adding to the project of Enlightenment . Moreover, Bostic looks at contemporary critiques of Enlightenment by feminist scholars who, while finding ways to recuperate Enlightenment ideals for feminism, nonetheless fail to seriously consider women writers as Enlightenment thinkers. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Bostic analyses the writings of three women authors, the first two of which were bestselling authors in their day—Françoise de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière—who engaged in public discourse about reason, most often through fiction, and who addressed reason’s implications for women. Bostic explores her topic in a wide variety of literary genres: in the plays La réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit and Phaza by Graffigny, in the journal L’abeille and the novels Histoire de M. le Marquis de Cressy and Lettres de Mylord Rivers by Riccoboni, and in the literary self-portrait, Portrait de Zélide, the comedy Élise ou l’université, and the essay Des auteurs des livres by Charrière. Each analysis revolves around a motif: Graffigny’s use of the mask to explore gender identity, Riccoboni’s incorporation of the teacup to promote reason as women’s remedy to their lack of self-determination, and Charrière’s focus on the book as the key to women’s literacy in the public sphere. Bostic’s examination of these “under-read” texts—ones not traditionally considered “philosophical”—is engaging. More importantly, she provides new ways of reading these women’s texts within the framework of philosophy and contemporary discussions on Enlightenment. The Fiction of Enlightenment convincingly demonstrates that eighteenth-century women’s writing, in its many genres, can and should inform our understanding of Enlightenment philosophy. Just like their male counterparts, these writers “explore [d] differences, challenge[d] assumptions, and re[thought] traditions” (218). Indeed, Bostic shows us how Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière, following Lawrence E. Klein’s definition of Enlightenment intellectuals, were “engaged conversers rather than detached observers” of their world (214). Heidi Bostic’s work makes an important contribution to the current debate on the legacy of the Enlightenment. It will certainly inspire contemporary scholars to re-evaluate Reviews 165 women’s texts as part of the dynamic public dialogue about reason that took place during the Enlightenment and its implications for women. This is a welcome contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship. California State University, San Bernardino Aurora Wolfgang BRIX, MICHEL. L’Attila du roman: Flaubert et les origines de la modernité littéraire. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-2021-6. Pp. 203. 19 a. D’après ce pamphlet, la littérature ne se serait jamais remise de l’ouragan “Gustave”. Se basant sur les textes présentés par Phillipot dans son Flaubert de 2006, Brix s’engage à nous démontrer que la “décadence” de la littérature fran- çaise est due à la “révolution” flaubertienne, “contre-nature” (11). Dans l’esprit du dix-neuvième...