The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse

The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse Claire Grogan Anna Laetitia Barbauld writes in her introduction to The British Novelists (1 810) of "the passionate, the eloquent, the seductive Rousseau ... whose thoughts ... breathe and words ... burn."1 In this statement Barbauld responds to two well-established concerns of eighteenth-century English critics and educationalists: first, the danger novels posed for the female reader, and second, the specific dangers of Rousseau because of the limited reading capabilities of women. While educators, critics, and writers disagreed as to why women were poor readers, they concurred that they were eager readers of and dangerously susceptible to the novel. Susceptible because the novel encouraged an escape into an illusory world that foregrounded the female character, her thoughts and predicaments, and generally exaggerated her importance in society.2 For these reasons educators attempted to dissuade women from reading novels, which 1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The British Novelists: With an Essay, and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, 50 vols (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1810), 1:19. 2 For a survey ofreadings about female capabilities and duties, see James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 2 vols (1766); Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary, 2 vols (1778); Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designedfor Young Ladies (1777) and Strictures on the Modern System ofFemale Education: With a View ofthe Principles and Conduct PrevalentAmong Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (1797); and Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 4, July 1999 460 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION would distract them from more appropriate activities. Vicesimus Knox complained that "Plays, operas, masquerades, and all other fashionable pleasures have not half so much danger to young people as the reading of these books" and "if the present age is more corrupt than the preceding the great multiplication of Novels has probably contributed to its degeneracy ." John Bennett described novels as "profligate and improper books" which "provide that fatal poison to virtue," while James Fordyce called novels "an infernal brood of futility and lewdness ... utterly unfit" for the female reader "as they paint ... loose and luscious ... scenes of pleasure and passion altogether improper for [females] to behold, even in the mind's eye."3 No one novel appears to epitomize the genre's dangerously seductive character so well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitons d'une Petite Ville au Pied des Alpes (1761)4 with its articulation offemale sexuality and desire through Julie 's willing participation in a sexual relationship with her tutor, St Preux. The intimate portrayal ofJulie's living arrangements and affairs ofthe heart was widely thought inappropriate for the susceptible female reader. Robert Darnton suggests that La Nouvelle Héloïse was an overwhelmingly influential text both for its stylistic features and for its sexual content, since it "transformed the relation between writer and reader, between reader and text."5 Rousseau's description of himself as editor/author in the two prefaces encouraged readers to blur the activities of "Reading, living and loving" to the extent that they imaginatively entered a world Rousseau depicted because it both corresponded to and articulated their own lived of the Female Sex (1797). For a discussion of the seductive qualities of novels, see Devendrá P. Varma, The Evergreen Tree ofDiabolical Knowledge (Washington: Consortium Press, 1972); Jean Hagstrum, Sex andSensibility: Ideal andEroticLovefromMilton toMozart(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Leslie Rabine, Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and G.J. BarkerBenfield , The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 3 Knox, 2:72, 1:68; John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady, on a Variety of Useful and Interesting Subjects: Calculated to Improve the Heart, to Form the Manners, andEnlighten the Understanding, 2 vols (1789), 1:144; Fordyce, 1:149. 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Biblioth èque de...