(Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Germaine de Staël's Subversive Women (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 127 Lori Jo Marso. (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Germaine de Staël's Subversive Women. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xiv + 172pp. US$38.00. ISBN 0-8018-6032-6. Lori Jo Marso's ambitious and energetic study claims it will turn aside from established readings, mere surfaces, ofRousseau's and Staël's positions respecting women to disinter hitherto concealed political dimensions in the works of both which, she believes, hold promise for our own revisions ofconcepts of gender and citizenship. In Rousseau's case, she aims to probe beyond the multiple explorations of his misogyny in what she herself acknowledges to be an "unlikely" reading of his heroines' subversive gestures: these constitute, for her, an implicit critique by Rousseau of the style of "manliness" he posits in his works of theory, the style which, excluding female participation in public life, the French Revolution was to adopt. The vital element excluded from recognition by the polis in this view was female subjectivity, which was (is) held to be subversive of the masculine state. As to Staël's heroines in Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), Marso's analysis depicts them as more deeply overdetermined by women's political fortunes under revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes than has yet been theorized. Marso's schematic argument is carried forth with enormous élan and sweep, above all scrutinizing the way in which women's role in the state is bound up with the details, as these fictions set them forth, of their private comportment. Marso dwells upon the subversive transformative potential in this seeming paradox as she probes the implications of the lamentations over the losses of their heroines expressed in Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Delphine, and Corinne. Marso's argument aboutRousseau conveys a particular shock: her claim is that the emotion generated by Sophie's and Julie's counter-models of comportment, of regard for individual being, actually unmasks and unmans the model of the proto-male-democratic citizen proposed by proponents of liberal enlighteners. In uncovering Rousseau's fictional subversion of the supremacy of a male ethic of abstract principle, Marso attempts the Herculean task of recovering Rousseau for an Irigarayan feminism rooted in a politically and ethically expedient enactment of—indeed a glorification of—traditional femininity. Sophie and Julie expire, sacrificed for communities that cannot be sustained without the interpersonal mediations they perform, a position Marso sustains primarily through apt resort to current feminist theorists in political philosophy. Marso proceeds by sagaciously pointing out the moments of eruptions of female desire: Sophie unveiling her zest for Emile as mate; Julie admitting her unquenchable desire for Saint-Preux; Delphine pleading for her lover's life before a legalistic judge; Corinne at the acme of her celebrity as she catches sight of the man she will love. Marso establishes far richer grounds for the bond between Rousseau and Staël created by their shared interest in female desire: for Rousseau, a force that unmans seductively; for Staël, one full of liberatory promise. Marso's readings ably illustrate the disruptive, subversive quality of the heroine's place in the social order of each work. 128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 As a political scientist analysing French fictions before and after the French Revolution, Marso exploits few of the many literary studies by French scholars. Perhaps the greatest weakness of her method lies in its thinness with respect to its historical framework. Neither Rousseau's positions nor Staël's are related to any climate of opinion or taste, to any but the most minimal biographical data, or, in any particulars beyond the fate of women's citizenship in the Revolution, to legislation or to other fictions. Napoleon had political quarrels with Germaine de Staël unrelated to her heroines, for example, and Staël never sought to repudiate the Enlightenment, but rather to extend its light to women (to be sure, in the fashion Marso describes). But basically, Marso's concern is not with the past, but with the present: Rousseau and Staël are counters in her eloquent plea for refashioning a citizenship from which the feminine dimension of caritas would not...