Adoptive Daughter Research Articles

Hiszpańskie korzenie rodu Teodozjusza w poezji Klaudiana

Theodosius the Great was one of the great Romans of Iberian origin. The poetry of Claudian, the court poet of his son, Honorius, is full of praise for the Theodosian dynasty, hence one can find there also references to Spain as the cradle of the ruling house. The poet praised not only the emperors, but also referred to other members of the dynasty, in particular to Serena, Theodosius’ adoptive daughter and Stilicho’s wife. The commendation of the honorand’s country of origin was an important part of ancient panegyrics and Claudian mentioned Spain several times in this context. Such references are rather vague and general, frequently touching the aquatic environment an only once, in Laus Serenae, make up a longer passage belonging to the subgenre of laudes. The poet underlined also the relation (suggesting the fictive genealogy) between the Theodosian dynasty and the earlier emperors of Iberian origin, i.e. Trajan and Hadrian. By dint of the aforementioned passages Claudian tried to strengthen the position of Theodosians, to date known rather from their activities in the East, and to emphasize their connections with the Western Empire.

“Embronzed with the African Tint”: Racial Color-coding and Intergenerational Inheritance in Jamaica, St. Domingo and England in the Age of Abolition

ABSTRACT In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person’s identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808).

Paranoid Religiosity in Jeanette Winterson’s Novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

This paper represents an attempt to give a psycho-religious analysis of the character of Mrs. Winterson, who is the main protagonist of Jeanette Winterson’s debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011). Mrs. Winterson was the author’s adoptive mother, and was characterized by a pronouncedly idiosyncratic psychology. Here we will try to suggest that Mrs. Winterson had a personality disorder of the paranoid kind, based on the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Edition 5) psychiatric criteria for diagnosing this disorder. Every single criterion will be substantiated by instances and quotes from the two analyzed works. This personality pathology inevitably spilled over into the way she approached religion, practiced it, and imposed it on those around her, primarily on her adoptive daughter. Unlike with some other mental illnesses, it is very difficult to develop healthy religiosity in case one has a personality disorder, due to the proverbial lack of objective selfobservation and meaningful insight into one’s authentic personality. Nevertheless, Mrs. Winterson rigidly and intensely upheld the social and religious values of extremely dubious nature, and instilled them in her daughter. Such direct, strong, and essentially unwholesome parental influence was detrimental for the healthy development of Jeanette Winterson’s personality, which may be corroborated by both of her books, in which she described the same autobiographical story. The personality of Mrs. Winterson is dominant in both the novel and the memoir, an unmistakably idiosyncratic axis around which these two texts revolve, forcefully blurring the borders between the two genres.

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

(M)Othering Like Us

Black artist-activist Parker Bright’s three-day protest of white artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial ignited a debate concerning “historical witnessing” versus “cultural appropriation,” artistic freedom and freedom of speech, and institutional agency in affording socioeconomic value to white artists over artists of colour. While intended to evoke an empathetic response “across race,” Schutz’s painterly reproduction of the iconic photograph of 14-year-old murdered Black boy Emmett Till perpetuates and participates in white violence on Black life. Schutz’s own response—“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother”—suggested an empathetic connection with Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whereby abstract notions of heteronormatively defined white motherhood transcend the reality of everyday Black and Brown life. Schutz’s claim resonates with a statement made by Robin Kahn, a white artist whose installation-performance Dining at Refugee Camps (2012) at dOCUMENTA13 relocated a community of Sahrawi women exiled to the Tindouf Refugee Camps in Algeria since 1975 to Kassel, Germany, as “a symbol of peaceful refuge.” Kahn identifies as a “mom of color” (her adoptive daughter is African American), suggesting a universal/izing point of reference to the refugees that elides the disparity in privilege and precarity. Schutz and Kahn deploy white feminist—in particular, white motherhood—tropes to deemphasize damage done to Black and Brown people that the artists’ work reproduces. This article is about the cultural collateral white motherhood assumes in its own gendered, racialized, and economic privilege (as well as the assumption thereof within the space of academic publishing and in the article itself). It is also about the broader response in the artistic community, primarily from artists of colour, who literally and figuratively stand between the viewer and artwork.

"Komteß Mizzi": Eine Chronik aus dem Wien um 1900 ed. by Walter Schübler

Reviewed by: "Komteß Mizzi": Eine Chronik aus dem Wien um 1900 ed. by Walter Schübler Carl Niekerk Walter Schübler, ed., "Komteß Mizzi": Eine Chronik aus dem Wien um 1900. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020. 236 pp. This volume is a "must-read" for anyone teaching courses on the history of sexuality and literature in Vienna around 1900. Overseen by Walter Schübler, Komteß Mizzi is a carefully selected and edited collection of documents (trial records, interviews, letters, and newspaper articles) all related to the "Veith [End Page 121] trial" that took place in Vienna in 1908 and at the time drew considerable attention from both the general public and media. Karl Kraus published an essay on it in Die Fackel ("Prozess Veith"), a text that would later open his collection Die Chinesische Mauer (first published in 1910), and the trial also touches on issues discussed in texts by Schnitzler ("Fräulein Else" comes to mind; against expectation, his comedy Komtesse Mizzi, oder Der Familientag, although published in 1908, is not based on this material), Freud's Dora case, and the anonymously published Josefine Mutzenbacher. On April 28, 1908. Marcell Veith and his adoptive daughter Marie (eighteen years old, and publicly known as "Komteß Mizzi") were taken into custody by Vienna's Sittenamt, a branch of the police overseeing public mores. Marcell Veith, who had inherited the title of count—"Comes romanus," an aristocratic title given to his family by Pope Pius IX that officially is not recognized in Austria, although few seem to be bothered by his use of it—was accused of secretly prostituting his daughter. While Marcell was kept in prison, Marie was allowed to go home, where she wrote three letters, tolds her mother she wanted to make a phone call in a café, and committed suicide by jumping into the Donaukanal. Because of that act, her own voice is largely absent in the proceedings and from this volume (except for some letters, a diary, and a record of her being questioned by the police); only indirectly, through the testimony of others, do we learn more about her thoughts and motives. From the age of thirteen, Marie was taken by her father to cafés, restaurants, and other Vergnügungslokale to let herself be entertained in so-called chambres séparées and Champagnerpavillons by wealthy men and sometimes also students at one of Vienna's elite high schools, the Theresianum. The idea was, at least initially and with an eye on the outside world, that Marie would find a wealthy Maecenas willing to pay for her education as actress (for a while she visited a Theaterschule). Soon Marie was providing the main source of income for her mother and adoptive father. Around age fifteen, after getting to know Leopoldine Jellinek, a professional prostitute, Marie and Leopoldine ("Poldi") together started to entertain men at Jellinek's home or in hotels, and with a clear division of labor: Marie was to stay "geschlechtlich unversehrt" and would not let herself "auf natürliche Weise gebrauchen lassen" to engage instead in a series of "perverse" practices (45, 47), while her companion, Leopoldine, was available for vaginal intercourse. During the same period, Marie developed a relationship with a serious boyfriend, Victor Widakovich, who was however for financial reasons judged unsuitable by her father and [End Page 122] harshly dismissed, first by the father and then by Marie herself. Eventually Marie's virginity was auctioned off by her father (under circumstances that remain not entirely clear), she and Leopoldine split up, after which Marie now met men on her own, mostly in hotels and sometimes at home. In particular, the report on the autopsy of Marie's body is revealing: for several years, it states, Marie had been incapable to conceive due to a series of inflammations that were the result of a venereal infection (52). In court, Marie's father first maintained not to have been aware that sexual intercourse was taking place and, after that strategy failed, threatened to call as witnesses all of his daughter's 205 clients, a list that was eventually published and included the names of many famous men and their sons, among them "Stukart...

La filiation adoptive à l’épreuve du traumatisme

IntroductionIn recent years, in order to respect the principles of the 1993 Hague Convention, international adoption has focused on children with “special needs”. These children are difficult to adopt because of their personal situation or their state of health. International adoption leads adoptive parents to move to a foreign country with unknown language, customs, culture and administrative formalities, leading to a feeling of loss of control, placing them in a vulnerable position. Some international adoptions cause real suffering for both the adopted child and his/her parents, especially when trauma disrupts the filiation process. ObjectivesThe objective is to understand, from a clinical vignette, how filiation process is implemented in case of trauma. It means, to understand how parents can integrate the real child and recognize themselves in him or her and how the adopted child with traumatic injuries can build a bond of love and trust to others. Material and methodsClinical observation concerns a girl, abandoned at birth by her mother and who was victim on the second day of life, of an attempted murder with machetes. The child has been placed in an orphanage since that day. The aggression had serious after effects, not only physically but also psychologically. Thus, since the age 3 years, she has developed self-destructive behaviors with endangerments, including life-threatening situations. The first meeting between this child, aged 6, and her adoptive parents takes place at the orphanage. Not supported in this approach, parents are confronted with the relational difficulties of their adoptive daughter. Very isolated in a foreign country, they feel a deep uneasiness and they question the validity of the adoption process, causing shame and guilt and even suicidal ideation. Once in France, the girl adapts quickly to the culture of her new country. Psychotherapy undertaken to put into words the emotions and the behaviors allows an appeasement in the family relations and the disappearance of violent agitations. But the process of filiation, still hampered by the trauma of this violent first meeting, requires the pursuit of psychotherapy to allow parents to accept the loss of the object, here the imaginary child and the parental ideal. ResultsFrom this clinical observation, it appears that the first interactions between parents and adopted child play an important role in the construction of relationship. The parents welcome the child with a set of fantastical representations that reveal the place that has been given to him. Adaptation will be done by psychic movements, by comparing and relativizing the imagined child with the real child. It is a double movement of adaptation of both parents and child. In the mourning of the imaginary child, there is also the mourning of the perfect parent; it is in the articulation of these two losses that the depressive state of the baby blues arises. This baby blues can evolve into psychotrauma in case of confrontation with the violence of reality. Thirty percent of adopted children have, at the time of adoption, disorganized attachment patterns; but adoption would most often enable recovery through the mobilization of parents’ psychic abilities and their own attachment patterns. Hence, a necessary assistance for parents. ConclusionIn the current context of international adoption, it is important to provide prevention with specialized places and trained teams in order to recognize critical situations, help families and enable filiation process to take place.

Elizabeth Bohls, Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies; John Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times; Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti

E<scp>lizabeth</scp> B<scp>ohls</scp>, <i>Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies</i>; J<scp>ohn</scp> T<scp>helwall</scp>, <i>The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times</i>; M<scp>arcus</scp> R<scp>ainsford</scp>, <i>An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti</i>

The status of Serena and the Stilicho diptych

One of the best known (and best preserved) of late-antique ivories is what is generally known as the Stilicho diptych, kept in the tesoro of the cathedral at Monza. It represents a military man with a spear and shield on one panel, and, on the other, a high-ranking woman holding a flower above the head of a small boy, not more than 10 years old; he stands between them wearing a chlamys and holding the codicils of office in his left hand (fig. 1). Ever since the basic article by C. Jullian more than 130 years ago, it has been generally accepted that the only candidates who fit this description are the western magister utriusque militiae Stilicho (d. 408), his wife Serena, the niece and (according to Claudian) adoptive daughter of Theodosius I, and their son Eucherius, appointed to the office of tribunus et notarius in (probably) 395/6.

Marriage, Métissage , and Women's Citizenship: Revisiting Race and Gender in Claire de Duras's Ourika

Marriage, Métissage, and Women's Citizenship:Revisiting Race and Gender in Claire de Duras's Ourika Adeline Koh "Qui voudra jamais épouser une nègresse?"1 Many critics consider Claire de Duras's 1823 novel Ourika to be one of the most penetrating portrayals of racism of its time. In the brief novel, a young black Senegalese girl is saved at a young age from a life of slavery and raised by a white woman in an aristocratic French milieu as an adoptive daughter. Petted and praised by members of her benefactress's salon until she comes of age, she remains blissfully unaware of any form of racial prejudice. That is, until she realizes that she will never be able to marry a white Frenchman because she is black. She then descends into a depressive spiral from which she never completely recovers. Literary scholars often praise Ourika for its sensitive insight into the psychological plight of its young protagonist, frequently comparing her to the alienated narrator in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.2 At the same time, critics celebrate Duras for her insight into the black condition. Alison Finch has praised Duras as being "humanely free of racism" and declared that "no other French woman was as far-reaching or imaginative on the question of birth-disadvantages,"3 while Joan DeJean and Margaret Waller argue that when Ourika is compared with other works of its time, "its originality and its author's daring are evident."4 In what follows I will argue that Duras's Ourika is not as sympathetic towards the condition of black people as has been commonly interpreted. In particular, I will concentrate on revisiting the marriage device in Ourika, and show that the way Duras deploys the marriage trope reveals substantial [End Page 15] anxiety as it represents the potential for social equality between black and white women. Through a historical examination of political changes to marriage for French women after the Revolution, a survey of the historical status of métissage in the colonies and a close reading of two scenes in the novel, I seek to demonstrate that the way Duras eradicates all possibility of her black protagonist's marriage in France is indicative of a larger apprehension towards the black female subject. Current scholarship has neglected the political dimensions of marriage in the novel.5 Except for Chantal Bertrand-Jennings,6 who has argued that marriage in Ourika provides a way for the narrative to give voice to the silenced feminine subject, scholars such as Lucy Schwartz,7 Sylvia Romanowskie,8 and Alison Finch9 look at marriage under the umbrella of German Romanticism, arguing that marriage—or Ourika's inability to marry—is a simple plot element within narratives of this movement, or, as Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney suggest, that it functions as a critique of racism as marriage is intertwined with a critique of patriarchal interests.10 However, in the following analysis I shall contend that marriage and race combine to form a threatening possibility: that black women have the potential to become the civic peers of white women within the French social contract via marriage. In this manner, this paper contributes to a growing reassessment of Duras's racial sympathies. Christopher Miller has recently introduced ambivalence into Duras criticism by arguing that Duras's inherited colonial holdings in Martinique and their profits complicate current interpretations of Ourika, going so far as to ask: "As she was creating one of the most sympathetic representations of an African in French literature, did she still hold title to hundreds of slaves in Martinique?"11 My strategy in this essay is to build on Miller's exploratory study through this reading of Ourika. My intention is not to recast Duras as a pro-slavery figure. Neither is it to argue that Duras was unsympathetic towards the plight of African slaves in the French colonies. Rather, it is to show how a historically informed postcolonial reading practice can illuminate the ways in which even a canonical anticolonial text such as Ourika may still be fundamentally ambiguous in terms of civic equality between blacks and whites. Race, Sex, and Marriage...

Introduction: Cinema In and Out of the Maghreb

Abdellatif Kechiche’s award-winning 2007 film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), included in the Criterion collection three years after its release, attracted over a million spectators by the time it ended its box-office run in France, making it one of the few recent French films to attain both popular and artistic success. Such success is particularly unusual for a director who focuses his attention on Maghrebian immigrants in France. Yet Kechiche’s film connects with the realities of contemporary French life in a way that goes beyond the immigrant family in which it finds its center. Kechiche’s success is quite obviously due to his particular talents, as both scriptwriter and director, and his skill in bringing together the memories of his childhood with people able to give them life on the screen. In this film Kechiche employs his unique ability to identify and train non-professional actors: Habib Boufares, who plays the central character Slimane, was a longtime family friend who had worked with Kechiche’s father on construction jobs, like the character he plays. Also without previous training as an actress, Hafsia Herzi plays the role of an adoptive daughter to Slimane, which won her the French César award for Most Promising Actress. Two scenes dominate the film. In the lengthy Sunday dinner scene, the conversation focuses on the familiar French topics of food and love, although the food is Tunisian and the love often unites people of different immigrant backgrounds. And in the film’s culminating scene, the young Rym performs a slow and sensual belly dance while Slimane frantically attempts to recover the couscous for his new restaurant’s opening banquet. While seen by some critics as orientalist, Rym’s dance offers testimony to her love for her adoptive father and her attachment to the traditional music of her ancestral Arabic culture.

All In the Family: Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet ( The Secret of the Grain )

Abdellatif Kechiche’s award-winning 2007 film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), included in the Criterion collection three years after its release, attracted over a million spectators by the time it ended its box-office run in France, making it one of the few recent French films to attain both popular and artistic success. Such success is particularly unusual for a director who focuses his attention on Maghrebian immigrants in France. Yet Kechiche’s film connects with the realities of contemporary French life in a way that goes beyond the immigrant family in which it finds its center. Kechiche’s success is quite obviously due to his particular talents, as both scriptwriter and director, and his skill in bringing together the memories of his childhood with people able to give them life on the screen. In this film Kechiche employs his unique ability to identify and train non-professional actors: Habib Boufares, who plays the central character Slimane, was a longtime family friend who had worked with Kechiche’s father on construction jobs, like the character he plays. Also without previous training as an actress, Hafsia Herzi plays the role of an adoptive daughter to Slimane, which won her the French César award for Most Promising Actress. Two scenes dominate the film. In the lengthy Sunday dinner scene, the conversation focuses on the familiar French topics of food and love, although the food is Tunisian and the love often unites people of different immigrant backgrounds. And in the film’s culminating scene, the young Rym performs a slow and sensual belly dance while Slimane frantically attempts to recover the couscous for his new restaurant’s opening banquet. While seen by some critics as orientalist, Rym’s dance offers testimony to her love for her adoptive father and her attachment to the traditional music of her ancestral Arabic culture.

John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801)

I John Thelwall was a clear opponent of the slave trade and slavery as an institution. Although his political writings have received much scrutiny in recent years, his writings about slavery have received rather scant attention. The most serious current criticism of them is by Marcus Wood who finds that ‘Thelwall was most unusual among radicals in his uncompromising vision of poor white and poor black labour as equally exploited by the nascent forms of capitalism’. Challengingly, Wood argues that British radical hostility to the Evangelical Abolitionist political agenda and its own concern with the domestic poor led to its distancing the movement from abolitionism. Wood claims that, against this trend, Thelwall produces ‘one of the most trenchant pleas for the ideological unification of abolition and reform theory’ and is ‘one who stood out against the Negrophobe orthodoxies of English Radicalism.’ There is some truth in this assertion, although this seriously overestimates Thelwall’s isolation as a reformer from other radical abolitionists, such as William Roscoe, James Currie, and Edward Rushton, a group of Liverpool abolitionists with whom Thelwall was clearly engaged in serious and sustained discussion and committed radical abolitionists, such as Benjamin Flower. Oddly, however, Thelwall’s most powerful engagement with Caribbean slavery and one of his major works is seldom discussed or even noticed. This is the powerful and detailed fictional representation and critique of the Haitian slave revolution (in what was then French Saint Domingue) in his pseudonymously published novel, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times of 1801. This essay will discuss Thelwall’s engagement with anti-slavery and seek to re-establish the importance, as well as the limitations of this critique by surveying the scope and substance of Thelwall’s only novel.

Almost 9: A Personal Essay on Parenting, Aniridia, and Being a Doctor

The author, a family physician, writes about her adoptive daughter being diagnosed with the rare genetic disorder aniridia and later with a central auditory processing disorder. Both mother and daughter learn about these disorders and develop coping strategies.

Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle, 1820-1960, by Gillian Sutherland

Reviewed by: Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960 Valerie Sanders (bio) Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960, by Gillian Sutherland; pp. vii + 262. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, £40.00, $70.00. In 1886 Blanche Athena Clough, daughter of poet Arthur Hugh Clough and niece of the founding mother of Newnham College, Cambridge, recorded hating her fellow creatures so fiercely that she went about longing for "the sensation of a long knife going into my left side" (115). Besides this and her father's black depressions, the Cloughs encountered bankruptcy, abandoned their religious faith, enjoyed both spectacularly long and spectacularly short lives, and produced two women activists for higher education. The story of "Annie" and "Thena," as Gillian Sutherland fully demonstrates, merges with the evolution of women's professions and university access; their experiences, though highly idiosyncratic, reflect the wider developments of their society. Sutherland concludes: "A study of the Cloughs and their circle is an exploration of the slow emergence of middle-class women from the private domestic sphere to which the dominant ideology of the first half of the nineteenth century had confined them" (212). By the time the last Clough woman, Thena's adoptive daughter, Kitty Duff, grew up, the family assumed she would go to Newnham College and work for her living, whereas the first, Anne Jemima, spent half of her life wondering how to survive, both financially and psychologically, with no clear path ahead of her. In the end, she established a series of small domestic schools for girls, while Newnham began as a safe and chaperoned house for women wanting to attend open lectures in Cambridge. Once Arthur Hugh died in 1861, the story of the Cloughs is essentially that of the family's women and their widening circle of close friends and supporters. The 140 years spanned by the dates in the subtitle remarkably cover only two lives—the start of Annie's and the end of Thena's—but the changes they witnessed mark the end of Victorian attitudes towards higher education for women and the start of something recognisably like the modern age. The "Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind" of the book's title aptly summarize the changing priorities of the family. Histories of influential families like the Cloughs, the Stephens, or the Stracheys (all were intertwined) remind us of how the English establishment was run by networks of cousins and siblings who between them shifted ideological ground in ways that had a lasting impact, though they often had a hard battle to change public opinion. It was her brother's marriage into a family that included Florence Nightingale, Barbara Bodichon, the Bonham-Carters, and her own connections with the "Langham Place set" that helped steer Annie towards the founding of Newnham, and Thena to a continuation of her work amidst diehard opposition. Sutherland describes the anti-women riots that broke out at Cambridge in 1921, when Senate voted to exclude women from full membership of the University and the gates of Newnham were vandalised in celebration. Despite their temperamental differences, both the Clough aunt and niece persevered and presided over a steadily growing institution whose academic success proved that women deserved to be full members of Cambridge University. The Clough family had largely failed its women: the men had left them financially unprotected (Thena never even saw her father, who died in Italy three months after she was born), whereas the institution of Newnham became an alternative family made up of substitute sisters and mothers, including Philippa Fawcett, with whom Thena travelled to [End Page 369] India, Japan, and Canada on what must have been a truly liberating tour. Sutherland asks the question she supposes must be lurking in her reader's mind: should these intense friendships between women be seen as lesbian? Admitting that some did have what she calls "a powerful erotic charge" (201), she argues that such friendships operated on a model more finely nuanced and emotionally rich than their equivalent today, especially for women whose family connections had failed them in some way.That the...

Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie Le Jars de Gournay by Richard Hillman, Colette Quesnel

REVIEWS that the aids to readers be as complete as possible. The book is 1043 pages long, and I suspect that the Press would have been extremely reluctant to let it grow any further. It is a shame (although perhaps peculiarly appropriate!) if the exigencies of production have been allowed to affect the usefulness of this superb volume. But the negative is, in the grand scheme of this grand history, a small thing. David Wallace and his contributors are to be congratulated on a monumental achievement. SIÂN ECHARD / University of B ritish Columbia Preface to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne by his Adoptive Daughter, Marie Le Jars de Gournay. Translated, with Supple­ mentary Annotation, by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998. Voi. 193. 199. $18. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel provide for the first time the English translation of Marie de Gournay’s “Preface” to her initial edition of Montaigne’s Essais (edition of 1595). This “Preface” is crucial to the understanding of how Montaigne was received at the end of the Renaissance as well as to under­ standing the literary ideas of Gournay on her own work. Until recently, not very much credit was given to Gournay in her role of defending and promoting Montaigne’s legacy. Olivier Mil­ let in his book La Première réception des Essais de Montaigne (1580-1640) (1995) and the proceedings of several conferences held on Gournay (Marie de Gournay et l’édition de 1595 des Es­ sais de Montaigne [1996], and Montaigne et Marie de Gournay, Actes du colloque international de Duke [1995], [1997]) paid a legitimate tribute to this female writer known as one of the first feminists in French history. All these collections of essays, however, undoubtedly owe a debt to François Rigolot’s major study reproducing Gournay’s “Preface” in French and including abundant annotation. This work was published in 1989. In fact, Hillman and Quesnel reproduce Rigolot’s critical edition with their English translation on the opposite pages. The translators successfully provide a precise and elegant trans497 ESC 26, 2000 lation, which could not have been an easy task considering the specific rhetorical and often metaphorical qualities of Gournay’s prose. Although their critical annotation of the “Preface” is primarily based on Rigolot’s scholarship, it often gives signifi­ cant additional information to the reader. For example, taking into account the needs of their readers (mainly graduate stu­ dents and scholars familiar with, but not specialists in, French Renaissance literature), Hillman and Quesnel provide explana­ tions pertaining to the language, the time, and the personality of Gournay (cf. 25, 33). Sometimes, the translators add a much more detailed explanation of an allusion than in Rigolot’s edi­ tion (cf. 39: Timon of Athens/Socrates). Of course, scholarship and philological work on texts are never definitive. Another intertextual reference or literary source might be suggested to our colleagues here. When we read: “Un esprit sage se commet et remet à plusieurs, et se fie de peu de personnes” [A wise mind commits itself to, and consults with, a number and has confi­ dence in few] (66-67), we are inevitably reminded of a similar thought of Montaigne’s when he recommends that “il se faut prester à autrui et ne se donner qu’à soy-mesme” (Essais, III.10, “De ménager sa volonté”). The introduction (1-17) written by Hillman puts the “Pref­ ace” into its historical context and emphasizes its polemical and theoretical aspects. Readers will adequately understand the im­ portance of Gournay’s role in the reception of the Essais and in women’s attempts to reach literary respect and autonomy. The bibliography (105-09) provides the main critical elements produced on the subject. Two elements could be added: the proceedings of the conference at Duke quoted above (although the authors indicate the English version of these proceedings in the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 25, 1995), and Editer les Essais de Montaigne, Actes du colloque de Paris IV (1997). Despite a few typographical errors (read “Preface à ... ,” Table of Contents; “Élyane,” p. 2, n. 2; “wished her to do so,” not “her do to so,” p. 12...

How Incest Offenders Overcome Internal Inhibitions Through the Use of Cognitions and Cognitive Distortions

This study explored the victimization process of incestuous child sexual abuse, focusing specifically on the cognitions incest offenders use to overcome their initial inhibitions against offending and to maintain their offending behavior once begun. The research design was a qualitative, grounded theory approach, involving a series of three intensive, in-person interviews with eight Caucasian, male incest offenders currently in treatment for a sexual offense. All the offenders abused a biological, step-, or adoptive daughter. The cognitions identified are grouped into four separate categories: (1) cognitions related to sociocultural factors; (2) cognitions used to overcome the fear of disclosure; (3) cognitions used to diminish responsibility; and (4) cognitions related to permission seeking. Findings are discussed within the context of new theory on the role of cognitions in sexual offending.