Vies et images maternelles dans la littérature française du dix-huitième siècle (review)

Abstract

100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 patriarchal culture. The "fantasy" of powerful female networks in Lady Susan and the equivocal presentation of female friendship as a positive alternative to marriage in The Watsons are denied, she argues, in Pride and Prejudice, where "Elizabeth Bennet's bold talking stands in for a community of female voices—and points us towards its absence" (p. 196). Kaplan's readings of the novels are often suggestive, and her insistence that Lady Susan and The Watsons are Austen's "most daring and experimental" works (p. 154) is persuasive. But it is in this section, and particularly in trying to account for this perceived shift in the fiction, that the more myopic aspects of Kaplan's methodology and range of reference become most apparent. When Austen's letters fail to provide her with an explanation for the shift to greater conventionality in Pride and Prejudice, Kaplan has to resort to the suggestion that it must be attributable to Austen's move from "private" to "public" writing. But "public" here remains largely undefined, a reification of the separate spheres which elsewhere Kaplan has tried to problematize. What her microhistorical method fails even to acknowledge is the possibility that the wider political debates of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period might inform not simply women's fiction, but also Austen's "two cultures." Claudia Johnson's recent book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1988), a subtle examination of Austen's novels in the context of 1790s fiction and the revolution debate, would be the obvious referent here. But Kaplan mentions Johnson only in passing, unfairly dismissing her as yet another example of American feminist criticism's wilful celebration of female experience. Kaplan presents herself as "making a case" for a literary criticism that is "both feminist and historically grounded" (p. 183). For feminist critics of Austen working within a British tradition—and, indeed, to many Americans, besides Johnson—this is hardly the daring claim she seems to assume it to be. In her eagerness to criticize American feminism 's naive championing of the "female voice" (a critique which in some cases, it must be said, is nevertheless justified), Kaplan ignores or misrepresents work on Austen which one might have expected her to recognize as either allied with, or at least relevant to, her own project. Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas is never mentioned; nor is the work of Janet Todd. Perhaps what is at stake here is the definition of "historical grounding." Kaplan's concern, as I have said, is with accessing the "specific social circumstances" of women's "differing experiences of subordination" (p. 14), and her account of how members of Austen's female community negotiated the constraints of gender is scrupulous and suggestive. But what the book lacks, in spite of its initial stress on contingency and historical change, is any sense of the complex discursive context which might reveal those negotiations as part of a wider social process. Vivien Jones University of Leeds Isabelle Brouard-Arends. Vies et images maternelles dans la littératurefrançaise du dix-huitième siècle. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 291. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991. ix + 465pp. ISBN 0-7294-0428-5. Isabelle Brouard-Arends has undertaken a very ambitious study, which includes medical and moral discourse, the novel, and theatre. Each genre is represented by a large number of works, including famous authors as well as lesser-known ones. She finds that eighteenth-century medical discourse, on the pretext of protecting the mother's health, deprives her of all responsibility. The widespread custom of sending REVIEWS 101 children out to nurse separated mother and child, and a legal system that held the bond of father and child to be more important than that of mother and child contributed to "une méfiance qui empoisonne durablement" the mother-child relationship (p. 106). In literary works written during the first part of the century, the mother is often absent or only briefly mentioned, and little interest is shown in the child. According to BrouardArends , there are relatively few mothers in French literature before about 1730, and those who appear...