Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (review)

Faith Beasley's principal concern here is how the seventeenth-century French salon's contribution to French literature has been rewritten over the centuries in order, she argues, to eliminate (or at least minimize) the influence of women on France's literary canon. Given the importance ascribed to literature, and especially to the literature of the seventeenth century, in the creation of France's national identity, the stakes of her project are high. One of Beasley's key observations is that the eighteenth-century salon has clouded our collective understanding of the salons of the previous century. In the seventeenth-century salon, women enjoyed far greater autonomy and influence than their successors whose principal role was that of hostess. The eighteenth century thus saw both a new type of salon and the beginning of a revisionist account of the seventeenth-century salon that is still widely accepted in France today. Beasley takes to task a host of literary scholars who have chosen to exclude women from the literary sphere; implicitly, she is also critical of critics who treat female roles and women's writing separately from those of their male counterparts. Hers is a call for integration in order to gain a more complete understanding of seventeenth-century French literature. Beasley's insistence on the interaction between the traditional literary sphere and an alternative one offered by the worldly milieu of the salons is nicely supported by her account of the publication of Lafayette's novel, Zaïde, which appeared with Huet's important critical treatise, Traité sur l'origine des romans. That a scholarly piece by a learned male writer should have functioned as a preface to a worldly novel by a female author is striking evidence of overlap between the two trends. Having argued convincingly in favour of the importance of female literary activity in seventeenth-century France (epitomized at the time by Madeleine de Scudéry), Beasley then proceeds to chart the suppression of the same. Her narrative is solidly supported by primary sources and fitting examples, many of the most interesting taken from the nineteenth century. Beasley observes, for instance, how arch-misogynist Victor Cousin included in his magnum opus a substantial appendix of primary texts that tell a quite different story from his own trivializing account of female literary production, while Sainte-Beuve goes so far as to acknowledge the seventeenth-century's admiration for female writers, only to dismiss such an attitude as deluded. However, it is not only the work of female authors that has been distorted: Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes have been widely interpreted by French critics as denouncing all female intellectual activity, and many modern editions of the plays still include misleading information about the seventeenth-century salon. Beasley's book is about the development of the literary critic and of the literary canon. It is about the position of women in literary history and an intriguing fear of women that is still not fully understood today. Most of all, it is a sobering reminder of quite how inaccurate our collective memory can be.