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  • Seducing the Eighteenth-Century Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure
  • Thomas Wynn
Seducing the Eighteenth-Century Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure. By Paul J. Young. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008. vi + 168 pp. Hb £50.00.

Paul J. Young contends that the trope of seduction is employed in several eighteenth-century texts, including Bastide’s La Petite Maison and Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir, as a means by which to interrogate the links between reading, writing and pleasure. The body that is subject to disease, impotence and uncertainty is ultimately inferior to the written word, which stimulates and sustains dependable and long-lasting pleasures. Thus, fictions ostensibly about sex are in fact self-reflexive investigations of their own artifice. Following Jean-Marie Goulemot’s Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main (1991), the argument is now rather commonplace, and this monograph follows such an approach rather than challenge or problematize it. Despite this unexpectedly oldfashioned account of the eighteenth-century libertine novel, Young’s study nonetheless offers some intriguing readings of some of the genre’s key works. Based on a wide range of material — including theological works, prefaces and paintings — the first chapter suggests how the period feared and attempted to police the private reading experience. Young’s analysis is generally convincing, especially as regards the ‘inevitable drive toward emulation that is cast as the printed word’s most seductive feature’ (p. 20), although greater attention paid to the role that gender plays in the nature of that emulation would sharpen his argument. The second chapter proposes that the explicit fictions Thérèse philosophe and Le Portier des Chartreux betray a deep anxiety over the body, which is unseated as the seat of pleasure in favour of the written text, which produces a dematerialized ‘volupté’. Young implies that the first of these works is ‘an unusual libertine novel’ (p. 42), in that it advocates self-mastery, an argument that might baffle readers of Crébillon, Laclos and Sade, whose heroes and heroines surely epitomise a drive to self-control. The third and most successful chapter employs the notion of ekphrasis to treat the highly descriptive La Petite Maison as a critique of libertinage; the unreadable libertine self is made legible in the plethora of architectural and decorative objects by which the heroine is seduced. Despite seducing many of its contemporary readers, La Nouvelle Héloïse is argued to configure Rousseau himself as the privileged, if not sole, reader of his own text. The study’s final chapter analyses some moments in Sade’s usually encyclopaedic fiction when the narrator conceals tantalizing details from the reader, who is seduced into filling these blanks with his or her own stimulated fantasies; in short, the reader becomes the producer rather than merely the consumer of obscenity; this argument is valid though, again, not entirely new. For French specialists, it is frustrating that quotations from the original texts appear in English translation, although this editorial decision may make the monograph accessible to a wider readership. This book will be of interest to scholars — and above all students — of eighteenth-century fiction.

Thomas Wynn
University of Exeter
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