Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing (review)

This volume of 11 essays on the theme of utopia in eighteenth-century English and French fiction will be well received in American colleges and universities where comparative literature flourishes. However, the broadening perspective offered by the collection should appeal to a much wider readership. The originality of this volume lies above all in its focus on women writers and their visions of what for Jean Baudrillard is an exclusively male preoccupation, ‘woman being a living Utopia (having) no need to produce any such thing’ (Cool Memories II, quoted in the Introduction, p. 2). What then, these essays ask, is the place for women in eighteenth-century utopian writing? The answers proposed are of varying quality, but all have the merit of provoking further discussion on the subject. French scholars with an interest in feminist reappraisals of the literature of previous centuries will be especially drawn to three of the essays in this volume: Mary McAlpine’s lucid analysis of Montesquieu’s use of the salon as a utopian topos in his Lettres persanes, Caroline Weber’s illuminating reading of Isabelle de Charrière’s 1790 pamphlet, Défense et Plainte de Thérèse Levasseur, which was a timely response to the publication that year of the second half of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and Ana M. Acosta’s study of utopian space in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. Acosta draws convincing parallels between her chosen texts, arguing that both portray an ideal space, separated from the outside world, such spaces representing a striving for transparency characteristic of Enlightenment ideology that is related to the Cartesian split between a rational mind and an irrational body. In the case of Sade’s novel, the irrational body turns out to be female and, in particular, procreative. In pursuit of her theme, Acosta nods at previous work by a number of Sade scholars, including Jane Gallop, whose erroneous statement as to the ‘virtual absence of mother-son incest’ in Sade she unquestioningly repeats. There are instances of this type of incest in both Histoire de Juliette and La Nouvelle Justine. Moreover, Acosta wrongly situates Les 120 Journées in the seventeenth rather than the beginning of the eighteenth century, and she sloppily refers to Sade’s Voyage d’Italie as his Voyage à Italie (p. 115, n. 18). More serious than these irritating but relatively minor faults, however, is her ignorance of published work on the Sade text. In linking the Sadeian female body to the ‘traps or secret places’ of the narrative, an idea which she appears to present as original, she regrettably omits to acknowledge previous observations on the subject, made in places that are far from secret.