In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Romantic Psychology and Kantian Ethics in the Novels of Isabelle de Charrière Madeleine Dobie Recent studies have addressed the relationship that ties themes and character development to narrative form in the novels of Isabelle de Charrière. Notably, her use of the letter form has been tied to textual closure; it is often suggested that texts by eighteenth-century women writers tend to subvert the conventional endings of death or marriage that close off the narrative, prescribing a restrictive set of alternatives for women readers. Although textual closure is a complex notion that can be analysed on different levels, it is clear that many of Charrière's novels do problematize narrative resolution, either through appending sequels or commentaries, or by alluding to uncertainties in a protagonist's future. I would like to address narrative practice, particularly the suspension of closure, from a somewhat different perspective, considering how it is shaped by the evolution of Charrière's vision of psychology and by her use of characters as heuristic devices for the presentation of social and ethical problems. Reflecting an epistemological shift which occurred over the final quarter of the eighteenth century, Charrière depicts characters alienated from both their social milieu and their emotional intuitions, and portrays ethical decisions as moments of conflict between different mental faculties. Broadly speaking, this shift can be characterized EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 3, April 1998 304 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION as a movement away from the optimistic holism of empiricism towards idealism—a movement which reinstated the relationship between mind and body as an epistemological problem. I shall investigate, in particular , the reverberations of this shift for Charrière's depiction of sexual difference. Charrière and Critical Praxis Feminist critics have contested the traditional assimilation of Charrière' s writing to romantic strains in Rousseau, Kant, and Constant. My intention is not to restore this approach, which is blind to gender and often predicated on the preference accorded to Caliste over her other works. Rather, I would like to reopen the question of how the burgeoning of romanticism may have coloured the ways in which gender is represented—or constructed—in her novels. Since narrative form is widely cited as a marker of gender difference, I will focus on how it is shaped by the presentation of a theme which can be defined loosely as romantic. The innovation most widely associated with the romantic personal novel is the privileging of individual psychology over social relationships . Although there can be no doubt that social forces are implicated in the genesis of this literary form,1 within the novels themselves these forces are sublimated in favour of the representation of personal ethical and emotional dilemmas. Several critics have argued that this shift from the social to the personal corresponds to a shift from feminine to masculine : the alienated hero of the romantic novel is generally male. Given that many romantic novels represent women as victims of masculine soul-searching and vacillation, it is easy to comprehend the reluctance of feminist critics to see Charrière as a closet romantic. Since almost all her works explore the dilemmas of women's destinies, such a characterization would inevitably suggest a misreading of Charrière's texts for the purpose of consolidating the canon, for, as Nancy K. Miller and Joan DeJean among others have shown, canon-building has often entailed the suppression of what is original in women's writing.2 When we retrace the genesis of this debate, it becomes apparent that French and American critics have approached the issue of Charrière's romanticism and the question of gender specificity differently. In 1960, 1 Emigration and loss of property accompanying the upheavals of the Revolution are often cited as sources of the romantic sense of alienated dispossession. 2 See Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). PSYCHOLOGY AND KANTIAN ETHICS IN CHARRIÈRE 305 Robert Mauzi catalogued the "Maladies de l'âme au xvmème siècle," providing an inventory of the "malheur," "mélancolie," and "imagination morbide" afflicting eighteenth-century characters.3 While Mauzi deftly draws out latent preromantic...

pdf

Share