Germaine De Stael Research Articles

Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work and Culture ed. by Linda V. Troost, and: Women Writing 1550–1750 ed. by Jo Wallwork, Paul Salzman (review)

MLR, 105.1, 2010 203 Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in theirLives,Work, and Culture, vol. v. Ed. by Linda V. Troost. New York: AMS. 2008. x+326 pp. $124.50. ISBN 978 0-404-64705-6. Eighteenth-Century Women is an annual essay collection with a few reviews, now up to its fifth volume. Although the subjects engage with different areas, the whole enterprise reminds one of the need?perhaps increasing in an age of gender studies?to think about women aswomen. Several essays deal with representations ofwomen bymen. Charles Haskell Hinnant looks at allegorical portraits ofRestora tion court beauties, particularly Sir Peter Lely's depictions of Barbara Villiers, in the light of political and sexual currents swirling round their sitters' reputations, to illuminate their complicated public postures. JuliaDabbs looks at stories about Italian women artists?Giovanna Fratellini, Maria Barbo (aminiaturist), and Ros alba Carriera?to show that 'therewas a price that thewoman artist paid forbeing gifted, at least according to her male biographers, and thatwas ugliness' (p. 37). Logan JamesConnors reads a couple of plays byMarivaux and Diderot topropose that the former has amore gynocentric dynamic, though his discussion of female agency on stage is so lightly contextualized?there isnothing about the process of production or reception?that more questions are raised than answered. The other essays are on stronger ground with a different sort of suggestiveness?discussions ofwomen's lives are used to frame discussion ofworks, and vice versa. One might wish for more explicit theorizing of relations between lives,works, and culture but thematerials do supplymuch practical food for thought.Marilyn Francus's careful study of Elizabeth Allen Burney, Frances Burney's stepmother, iswittily entitled 'Stepmommy Dearest', and makes a persuasive case for a woman who deserves a better press than she got from the Burney offspring. The essays do not overtly have much in common, apart from a general commit ment to eighteenth-century women, but the volume does set up some interesting resonances. An essay by Pam Lieske on Magdalen House narratives and their sig nificance for Frances Sheridan's life and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph keeps fallen women in view; though Lieske reads the novel rather debatably as rela tively closed to ambiguity, the ideological charge around prostitution is felt. It resurfaces in Laura Engel's essay on Mary Wells, around mad women. Wells's life was extraordinary?theatrical on stage and off, she puzzled and frustrated her contemporaries: was she mad? Or acting mad? When she retreated at one point to the north coast ofNorfolk, the locals took her forMarie Antoinette: how else to explain beauty, elegance, rich clothes, and broken English? Lieske comments: 'Wells's mockery ofmajesty reflects her own desire to be worshipped at the same time thather subversive performance demonstrates that theperception of royalty is artificial?anyone can play a queen' (p. 200). Queens, fallenwomen, mad women? women's agency is fragile in the eighteenth century, and both fallen women and mad women were likely to have their children taken away. Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Stael fly the flag for powerful intellectual women?the former's play VEntree du Dumouriez a Bruxelles, described as a la 204 Reviews Shakespeare' by one reviewer (and not approvingly!), is discussed byMegan Con way as a chauvinist epic, which failed on the stage in part because of the authors vigorous stand against the execution of Louis XVI. When Dumouriez defected to theAustrians later in 1793, an 'unfortunate choice of protagonists', as Conway puts it (p. 235) saw de Gouge herself condemned to the guillotine. The French Revo lution provides Madelyn Gurtwith with two further occasions to discuss women's agency: Chenier's play about Charles IX which associated Marie-Antoinette ne gatively with theMedici, and Francois Chabot versus Claire Lacombe in a fierce rhetorical clash.What Gutwith calls 'small but smoldering' (p. 237) moments par ticularize the expulsion ofwomen from public life in republic and monarchy That sets up nicely the final essay, by Barbara Ann Day-Hickman, on de StaeT's relations with du Pont de Nemours, a fellow liberal and friendwho proved unsympathetic about her exile and her troubles; tactlessly he wrote thathe wished he had her time to...

Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian woman as artist

Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian woman as artist

Ten years of exile

This unabridged English translation of Dix Annees d'Exile is the powerful memoir of Germaine de Stael's tumultuous years as the most prominent politically active woman in Napoleonic Europe. Translated by an award-winning scholar, it is a strong-minded and passionate woman's personal and political journal, published to mark the bicentennary of Napoleon's rise to power. During the French Revolution, Mme de Stael's salon became a brilliant centre of political and intellectual life. She aided Napoleon's introduction to French society, yet Stael and other liberals in the Constitutional Club she helped found came to oppose the increasingly powerful general. He, in turn, banished her from Paris in 1803. In exile, Stael continued to agitate against the new master of France. When Napoleon began his great Russian campaign, she fled across Austria and Poland to avoid the advancing armies. She arrived in Moscow only weeks ahead of Napoleon and then barely escaped to England. After Napoleon's defeat, Stael returned to Paris and again received ministers, generals and sovereigns in her revived salon. As the author of beloved novels and internationally respected work on literature, history and politics, Stael knew and corresponded with intellectuals and politicians, including Talleyrand, Schiller, and Goethe. Her memoir provides penetrating insights into the society and culture of Napoleonic Europe and vivid portraits of the leading figures of the age, including the emperor himself. Based upon the definitive 1996 French text edited by Simone Balaye and Mariella Bonifacio, this English edition includes a new introduction by Simone Balaye and Avriel Goldberger. Supplemented with a complete chronology and map of Stael's dramatic flight across Europe, Ten Years of Exile should appeal to those interested in biography, French history, women's studies, political and intellectual history, literature, and the Age of Napoleon.

‘That God Within:’ Writing Female Genius from Diderot to Staël

That God Within: Writing Female Genius from Diderot to Stael Cecilia Feilla A thin but significant line is traversed in the representation of female authorship between the depiction of Germaine de Stael at age twenty as the possessed pretresse la plus celebre d'ApoUon (Stael's Journals intimes qtd. in Vallois 4) and that of Emily Bronte in 1851 as an author who possesses the creative gift (C. Bronte One of the central figures to effect this change is, ironically, Her novel, Corinne, ou, I' Italic (1807) rescripts posses- sion (both ownership and the proper) in important ways which Stael herself. negotiate a new place for female genius in the novel. What I pursue in this paper is how genius is constructed along gender lines at moment it takes its modem introjected form as a natural gift in the late eighteenth century, and how the inspiration, proph- the ecy and possession which characterize genius take on a nega- tive valence when applied to women writers, often emblematized as sibylline, and read as signs of hysteria. Is the woman writer possessed by genius (a transcendent figure) or does she possess genius (an immanent gift)? A close reading of Corinne in light of Denis Diderot's essay, Sur les femmes (1772), will reveal how gender marks the discourse of writing and genius, especially as it pertains to issues of style and female authorship. Diderot wrote Sur les femmes as a reply to I'Abbe Antoine- Leonard Thomas's Essai sur le caractere, les moeurs et I'esprit des femmes (1772). A complex meditation on the nature of women and their potential for genius, Diderot's essay is also a reflection on writing and the exercise of style. From the first lines, Diderot establishes his authority on the subject of women by invoking his carnal knowledge of them. He explicitly links the lack of hetero- sexual activity in men with a lack of style in writing: Thomas, he claims, cannot write because he is celibate (251, 261-262), d' Alembert cannot because he is homosexual (262). Man distinguishes himself with style (Buffon's Le style est I'homme meme [30]), and the subject fashioning this style is woman:

History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic, and Baroque Life of Germaine de Stael

The tendency of biography is to present the portrait of a hero whose unified character has been purged of contradictory or confusing material. The virtues of such a presentation are legion, allowing us to identify with a great character, to find coherence in life, and to imagine so vividly that we become politically or intellectually inspired to new forms of action. In the case of Germaine de Stael the biographical unity imputed to her life centers on her enlightened constitutionalism and liberalism, both of which are bound up with the proclivities of her parents and manifested in her own political writing and activities.' Such a unity can have its disadvantages, however, by encouraging us to colonize a biographical space or to imagine someone in inappropriately clear ways that do a real disservice to complexity. For instance, the sexual promiscuity that unified Christopher Herold's Mistress to an Age did de Stael the latter kind of disservice.2 Taking account of these advantages and pitfalls, I would like to place alongside the liberal unity and the sexual unity yet a third biographical interpretation-that of de Stahl as a genius at doing history. It was one that she herself proposed and that inspired writers and feminists for almost the entire nineteenth century. Yet despite the strong figuration given genius in this exploration of de Stael's writing, I offer this interpretation not as

The early origins of the social sciences

Against these contentions she shows, for example, that women social thinkers have been active in every age since the sixteenth century. McDonald presents these women's work as evidence of the way in which the empirical social sciences have been employed by social reformers, including advocates for the equality of women, to challenge the state and those in authority. She argues as well that Weber's sociology has been misinterpreted, citing his extensive, but usually ignored, quantitative work. Despite the supposed opposition of interpretative and mainstream sociology, McDonald maintains that many of the founders of the discipline explored both. Covering the important eras in the development of the social sciences, she deals with the early Greeks, the seventeenth-century emergence of the scientific method (especially Bacon, Descartes, and Locke), the French Enlightenment, (especially Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and Germaine de Stael), and British moral philosophy (especially Hume, Smith, and Catharine Macauley). From the nineteenth century she includes figures such as Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Quetelet, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, J.S. Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Beatrice Webb.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Germaine de Stael: Crossing the Borders. Edited by MADELYN GUTWIRTH, AVRIEL GOLDBERGER, and KARYNA SZMURLO. New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, 1991. xii + 248 pp. Hb $45. JOHN ISBELL JOHN ISBELL TRINITY COLLEGECAMBRIDGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLVII, Issue 1, January 1993, Pages 85–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLVII.1.85 Published: 01 January 1993

The Literary Existence of Germaine de Stael

Against the wishes of her parents and the traditions of upper-class French society, Germaine de Stael (17661817) struggled to be accepted as a serious At a time when ladies wrote a little poetry and small stories, Stael insisted on writing about politics and philosophy.In an effort to abide by the rules of her society, she wrote in two stylesthat of a woman and that of a manbut as Charlotte Hogsett points out, Stael s efforts to write as a man could not disguise the woman behind the pen. Hogsett treats both the expository and fictional works in the Stael canon. The male canon reflects her respect for Rousseau and Chateaubriand; the female, her own courage and intelligence, for there was no one to emulate. Hogsett provides a vivid analysis of Stael s maturation as both woman and writer.