Vingt études sur Prévost d'Exilés (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 109 women can be traced to their undertaking all the primary care of infants—a social fact, not a biological one. The question is not whether parents "loved" their children in earlier periods, but how parental concern was manifested. Eighteenth-century depictions of children are centrally concerned with managing children's moral training: the schoolgirls in Sarah Fielding's The Governess (1749) have to learn to share their apples. And who is to say whether the child-centred fixation of the late twentieth century is better or worse for children than the stricter discipline of earlier times? But it is inappropriate to judge attitudes towards children on die basis of strictness or laxity without taking into account the prevailing philosophy of the time and its historical rationale. Jane Austen, who was adored by her nieces and nephews for her affectionate playfulness and for her serious attention to their problems, often depicts children who are disruptive, difficult, and insufficiently disciplined. Austen satirizes the inability of selfindulgent parents to teach children to curb their appetites and anti-social behaviour. It is not that children are disliked: what is disliked is parents who abdicate their responsibility for the serious and difficult task of raising children well. Children reflect the moral intelligence and self-knowledge of their parents and as such are sign and symbol of responsibility to a larger social world. Fondness without discipline is not a good thing in Austen. It results in two-year-old Walter's climbing on the back of his aunt Anne in Persuasion, and in the misbehaviour of the children of Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, "who saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent encroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment." These scenes of bratty children were left out of the recent movies of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility because there was no way to make twentieth-century audiences understand indiscipline as a sign of failure of care. It is a convention in late twentiethcentury Anglo-America to represent children either as sentimental icons of innocence and unerring natural morality or as eerily haunted—preternaturally evil (the bad seed)— but not as moral agents capable of improvement. The film-makers apparently despaired of superimposing one conception on the other and so left those scenes out altogether. This sense of historical difference is what I miss in Nelson's book—how the logic about parents and children might have a different feel to it in the eighteenth century. However, my own concern with historicizing diese phenomena aside, Nelson has tackled an important subject and engaged a number of canonical texts with a new agenda in a lively manner. I found much of interest in the book—and so will others familiar with these eighteenth-century texts. Ruth Perry Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jean Sgard. Vingt études sur Prévost d'Exilés. Grenoble: ELLUG, 1995. 316pp. FFr125. ISBN 2-902709-92-7. Ce demier-né des livres de Jean Sgard, publié à l'occasion de son départ à la retraite , rassemble une longue série d'articles sur l'abbé Prévost parus dans des revues diverses depuis une vingtaine d'années—à peu près la moitié, d'ailleurs, dans les Cahiers 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 Prévost d'Exilés (1984-94) fondés par Sgard lui-même pour promouvoir les recherches sur Prévost. On y trouve, cependant, trois nouvelles études, rédigées pour le volume présent. Comment parler de vingt articles hétéroclites? Sgard nous facilite la tâche en bouleversant la chronologie de ses articles pour les regrouper en quatre grandes rubriques: La Vie [de Prévost], Le Siècle, L'Image de Manon, Le Temps. Dans la première partie, il motive , de manière convaincante, sa tentative d'imposer le nom de «Prévost d'Exilés», nom de plume choisi par Prévost lui-même, avant de nous offrir, dans l'article suivant, une collation de dix-neuf...