De Charriere Research Articles

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland. Change, Convergence and Divergence. Edited by Peter Borsay and Lindsay Proudfoot. Goethe and the English‐Speaking World. Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for his 250th Anniversary. Edited by Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics and Culture. An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727. By William E. Burns. Etudes sur les Journaux de Marivaux. Edited by Nicholas Cronk and François Moureau. Vif. Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. By John Earman. National Gallery Catalogues: The British School. By Judy Egerton. National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth‐Century French Paintings. By Humphrey Wine. Voicing Desire: Family and Sexuality in Diderot's Narrative. Edited by J. E. Fowler. Vif. Jane Austen and Religion. Salvation and Society in Georgian England. By Michael Giffin. Cross‐Currents in Religion and Culture. Lettres d'une Péruvienne. By Françoise de Graffigny. Edited by Jonathan Mallinson. Vif. Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe's ‘Italian Journey’ and its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen and Heine. By Gretchen L. Hachmeister. Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity. By Jonathan M. Hess. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth‐Century Society. Essays from the DeBartolo Conference. Edited by Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers. Peter the Great. A Biography. By Lindsey Hughes. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. By David Hume. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. The Clarendon Edition of The Works of David Hume. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress. By Colin Jones. Anne Vallayer‐Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie‐Antoinette. By Eik Kahng and Marianne Roland Michel, with contributions by Colin B. Bailey, Claire Barry, Laurent Hugues, and Melissa Hyde. Die Collegia der Insulaner, Vertraulichen und Wohlgesinnten in Zurich, 1679–1709. By Michael Kempe and Thomas Maissen. The Sermons of Charles Wesley. A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes. Edited by Kenneth G. C. Newport. Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture 1720–1892. By Robin Nicholson. Queenship in Britain 1660–1837. Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth‐Century Crisis of Empire. By Martyn J. Powell. Reading Goethe. A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work. By Martin Swales and Erika Swales. Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833. By Julia Swindells. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. By Helen Thomas. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 38. There are No Letters Like Yours. The Correspondence of Isabelle de Charriere and Constant d'Hermenches. Translated and edited by Janet Whatley and Malcolm Whatley. European Women Writers Series.

Weighing Women's Words

Mona Ozouf’s book opens with the startling assertion that “The woman’s portrait is a male genre. It rarely boasts a female signature. It is little concerned with women’s words.” Unlike portraits of men, it always begins with an exploration of the feminine “nature”— from which deviations must be explained. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity attempts to reformulate the historical woman’s portrait from a woman’s perspective. She pays attention to what individual women said and thought, and gives credence to their ideas. This is a perspective familiar to practitioners of Anglo-American women’s history; that it should have to be argued so forcefully by a French woman historian reveals much about the possibilities for and constraints on writing women’s history—at least among academic historians in France. Indeed, Ozouf is critical of women’s history as it has emerged in France since the mid-1970s for paying too much attention to (male) discourse about women and not enough to what women had to say about themselves, for focusing inordinate attention on victims and statistics and not enough on exceptional lives. These latter are also part of the story, she argues. So far, so good. The author points to numerous examples of French women writing against the prevailing or asserted norms, the “normative discourse on femininity” (xi), contesting claims by others that it is inevitably the masculine voice and prescriptions for femininity that drowns out the authentic voices of speaking women. Then she segues into a discussion of the relative timidity of contemporary French feminism, especially with reference to French academia. Finally, she addresses the theme of French singularity (raised by Michele Sarde and others), emphasizing the importance of the French Revolution in shaping this “singularity,” even as she objects vociferously to the still widely promulgated view that the exclusion of women was central to the foundation of democracy in France (48). She emphasizes instead “the inventive variety of individual paths” (xv) of a cluster of women engaged in inventing themselves, and united by their common concern for girls’ education. Their literary activity, Ozouf argues, was “a talisman against the mediocrity and monotony of female existence” (xxi) and on “the feminine art of managing time” (xxii). The ensuing portraits are rich, brisk, engaging. They are built by paying strict attention to what the women—beginning with Madame Deffand, Madame de Charriere, Madame Roland, and Madame de Stael, and proceeding through Madame de Remusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir—had to say, in their own words and to the contexts in which they spoke. Each portrait, introduced by a short biographical sketch, focused on a distinctive personal trait (e.g. Ž xity, valor, stubbornness, gluttony, asceticism, greed). Each responds to the judgments of earlier male portraitists, but builds something very distinctive out of the written evidence provided by each woman. What comes through is the complex, highly developed intelligence of each of these ten women, ranging from the childless Deffand, Charriere, Auclert, and the

Mirrors, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

This article explains how Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun take up where seventeenth-century writers Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sevigne left off in portraying an intense narcissistic relationship between mother and daughter in which the daughter’s heterosexual desire threatens the primary dyad by defining the daughter as separate from her mother. Moreover, pressing beyond these specific French women writers of an earlier age, the essay argues that the mother’s nostalgia for reflective unity with her daughter is not different in kind from the daughter’s nostalgia in the twentieth century. Feminists’ longing for the preoedipal mother is based on the same fantasy of past reflective unity as the early modem mothers’ longing for their heterosexually undetermined daughters. The essay concludes by urging the importance not only of producing alternative models and metaphors for coexistent maternal and filial subjectivities, but of demanding cultural recognition for alternative models to rival and, if possible, supersede early modem, Freudian, and post-Freudian elegiac and nostalgic models alike.

Revealing Difference: The Fiction of Isabelle de Charriere

This book is directed at elucidating both a new perspective on eighteenth-century fiction and the evidence Isabelle de Charriere's work offers on the construction of gender. The texts considered reconfigure the definition of woman in a variety of ways. Her description of the female body in its absolute difference articulates a commentary on sexual difference that pertains to current efforts to rethink gender.

Revealing difference: the fiction of Isabelle de Charriere

Revealing difference: the fiction of Isabelle de Charriere

A Preliminary Bibliography of Isabelle de Charriere (Belle de Zuylen)

Introduction Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Summary of contents The bibliography 1. Separate works 2. Collections 3. Works of other writers containing pieces by Isabelle de Charriere Appendices A. Works possibly by Isabelle de Charriere B. False attributions C. Pamphlet replies Bibliographical writings on Isabelle de Charriere Chronological index Alphabetical index