Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789–1815. By Christie Margrave

Abstract

The feminist recovery project in francophone women’s writing is decades behind its anglophone counterpart and this book makes an important contribution to the field. Christie Margrave’s analysis of women writers’ feminist engagement with the ­Romantic vogue for natural landscape not only offers a fresh perspective on Romantic ­luminary Germaine de Staël; it also sheds light on the novels of Félicité de Genlis, Sophie ­Cottin, Barbara von Krüdener, and Adélaïde de Souza. These writers remain astonishingly under-researched, despite their considerable renown during the First Republic and First Empire, and notwithstanding vital work by scholars such as Gillian Dow, Isabelle Brouard-Arends, and Mary Seidman Trouille. Margrave illuminates the mutual influence of all five Romantic-era women and their canonical male contemporaries, demonstrating that the women reconceived fashionable landscape imagery to confront and challenge the patriarchal norms, restrictions, and prejudices which shaped the female condition and informed their writing. The subtitle, ‘exposing nature’, refers to Margrave’s analysis of natural landscapes but also to the centrality of what she calls, adapting Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase, ‘a landscape of one’s own’ (p. 1 et ­passim), a fictional topography representing the contours of women’s lived experience. Although the monograph would have benefited from a stronger feminist theoretical framework, Margrave’s work is rich in fascinating detail about the ­landscaping vogue and language of flowers, and this thorough research underpins persuasive and pivotal close readings. Occasionally, these readings are limited by her tendency to interpret the novelists’ commentary solely in terms of gender and sexual politics. In the case of Souza’s Adèle de Sénange (1794), for instance, the emphasis on gradual reform could easily be read as a political metaphor, especially in light of the recent Revolutionary Terror. On the whole, however, Margrave’s literary-critical acumen is impressive. Chapter 3, ‘Landscapes of Rebellion: Natural Madhouses’, is particularly effective, placing forensic analysis of the works of Cottin and Krüdener in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes to mental illness to demonstrate how landscapes function to portray female madness as feminist protest. Another highlight is Chapter 5, ‘Writing the Landscape: The Ossianic North and the Debate over ­Women’s Writing and Education’, which analyses Scottish landscapes as well as implicit and ekphrastic allusions to James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems in Cottin’s Malvina (1800) and Staël’s Corinne (1807). Connecting the eponymous heroines with the Ossianic female bard, Malvina, Margrave demonstrates that, even as Cottin and Staël depict ­women writers suffering social exclusion and psychological torment, they also engage in ­meta-commentary on their cultural importance. In a particularly innovative reading of Corinne, she argues convincingly that the love affair between the heroine and the British Lord Oswald models the synthesis of social independence (Corinne) and political liberty (Oswald) that could free future generations to live on terms of political and gender equality. She goes on to demonstrate that Staël depicts Corinne taking up the legacy of Ossian’s Malvina, making her the doomed prophet of this ideal. This is an insightful, valuable, and timely study bound to inform and inspire future ­scholarship in French women’s writing of the Romantic era.