Measuring Up: Infertility and "Plénitude" in Sophie Cottin's Claire d'Albe

Measuring Up: Infertility and "Plénitude" in Sophie Cottin's Claire d'Albe Michael J. Call Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own Sophie Cottin's story, little known to modern readers on either side of the Atlantic, may nevertheless be a perfect case study in gender role conflict and a woman's coming to writing in post-revolutionary France. Out of her struggle to reconcile Rousseauian notions of femininity and the realities of her own infertility arose a novel, Claire d'Albe (1799), condemned by at least one prominent female contemporary for its "immoralité révoltante."2 The novel inscribed both Cottin's anguish as a barren woman in a pronatalistic culture which valorized women according to their fertility and productivity, and the difficulty she faced in constructing a counter-identity for herself and women like her. Like other French women novelists of her time, Cottin was appreciated by a wide and diverse reading audience and enjoyed a popularity 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957), p. 68. 2 Madame de Genlis, "Madame Cotin [sic]," De l'influence desfemmes sur la littératurefrançaise comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs; ou précis de l'histoire des femmes françaises les plus célèbres (Paris: Maradan, 1811), p. 346. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 2, January 1995 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION which endured long after her death in 1807. Her works, for instance, were translated into English, Dutch, Romanian, Croatian, Italian, Spanish , and Portuguese.3 Fourteen editions of her complete works in French were published between 1817 and 1856 and translations of selected works were being published for her American reading audience as late as 1873 in New York.4 In spite of this evident popularity, Cottin's novels have received little critical attention in either Europe or America since the midnineteenth century. Early twentieth-century assessments of her works as "inferior" by critics such as André Le Breton served to dissuade serious scholarship on Cottin for many years.5 L.C. Sykes's Madame Cottin (1949) has been the only book-length scholarly study devoted exclusively to her life and works in the twentieth century.6 In the years since the appearance of Sykes's book, an occasional journal article has attempted to draw attention to Cottin without, it appears, reviving any sustained scholarly interest in her.7 Probably as a consequence of feminist criticism's emphasis on rewriting the canon, her name has begun to appear with greater frequency in recent literary histories, grouped with other women writers of her period, but the crucial connection between Cottin's infertility and her writing, and the significance of her struggle with her self3 L.C. Sykes, Madame Cottin (Basil, Blackwell, and Mott: Oxford, 1949), pp. 412-16. 4 Sykes, pp. 415-46. 5 André Le Breton, describing Cottin's novels as a whole, writes: "Elle a eu cet honneur et cette infortune que chacun de ses romans a été refait en tout ou en partie par quelque écrivain plus habile qu'elle et qui l'a fait oublier." Le Romanfrançais au dix-neuvième siècle. Première partie: avant Balzac (Paris: Société française d'imprimerie et de librairie, 1901 ; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), p. 93. 6 Sykes's work includes the most accurate biographical data currently available and extensive, though often edited, excerpts from her correspondence. This invaluable source has provided the factual information from which I have summarized Cottin's biography here, unless otherwise noted. Samia Spencer's summary of Cottin's life which appears in French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (New York: Greenwood, 1991, pp. 90-98) poses a problem in that Spencer neither quotes from Sykes's work nor includes his study in the bibliography accompanying the article and hence must be used with caution. 7 Scholarship on Cottin since the publication...