Revealing Difference: The Fiction of Isabelle de Charrière (review)

REVIEWS 543 Jenene J. Allison. Revealing Difference: The Fiction of Isabelle de Charrière. Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 171pp. US$33.50. ISBN 0-87413-566-4. In Revealing Difference, Jenene J. Allison uses Isabelle de Charrière's work to question some of the paradoxes facing contemporary feminist discourse. In her introduction, she contends that a new space for theorizing gender needs to be carved out, one "mat neither traps women and men in roles based on anatomy nor conflates them into one unsexed category of postmodem subjects" (p. 13). By exploring the ways in which the construction of femininity in the late eighteenth century faced some of the same paradoxes that it does now, Allison presents Charrière's work as a means of rethinking the question of gender difference. Situating Charrière as both a pre- and post-revolutionary writer, Allison maps the ways in which her fiction reflects and criticizes the shifting representations of the feminine during this period of upheaval. For example, Charrière creates conventional female figures, such as Germaine in Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d'émigrés, who are then countered by more radical representations within the same text, as in the figure of Pauline, who disguises herself as a man in order to escape the Revolution. In the novel Sainte Anne, the heroine Mademoiselle d'Estival is illiterate and thereby challenges conventions of class and education through her marriage to the aristocrat Sainte Anne. As stereotypes are overturned in the figure of the new heroine, a more problematic representation of femininity is articulated in that of the doomed heroine. Allison argues that in the social flux and transformation produced by the Revolution, masculine as well as feminine models of identity were being redefined. The struggle by the bourgeoisie for ascendancy over the aristocracy was often represented through a gendering of the class war, in which the feminine became linked more closely to a decadent and immoral aristocracy, as in the figure of Madame de Valine, a pun on "vilaine," the evil aristocrat in Charrière's Henriette et Richard. Such a figure, Allison argues, is "the negative image of woman that will be countered by soon-to-be enforced maternalism, and later by principles in the Napoleonic Code" (p. 49). Charrière's fiction ultimately exposes the ways in which the Revolution failed to create an emancipatory space for the feminine subject, dooming her instead to an ever more circumscribed private sphere. This private sphere, for Charrière, is frequently characterized by the representation of pregnancy. According to Allison, the circumscription of post-revolutionary women to the private sphere was "insidious," a reaction to the power of noblewomen in France, and therefore the issue of pregnancy has a political dimension in Charrière's work. It is also of particular concern to Allison's thesis, which seeks to restore the physicality and difference of the female body to feminist discourse. Three of Charrière's novels deal with pregnancy—Lettres de Mistriss Henley (1784), Lettres neuchâteloises (1784), and Trois femmes (1798)—and Allison explores how these narratives use pregnancy as a source of initially exclusive female knowledge, which always precedes the visual, objective fact of the pregnant body. She argues that the different representations of pregnancy in Charrière parallel an evolution in genre, from the monophonie voice of despair in Mistriss Henley to the polyphonic voices of Troisfemmes. In the latter work, pregnancy is also visually represented when the servant Josephine's corset bursts open, thereby boldly foregrounding the physicality of the female body. While Allison's reading of pregnancy in Charrière is both innovative and compelling, there are moments when her emphasis on a return to the physicality of the female body reproduces a reading of that body as other, that is, as different from the masculine norm which, for Allison, still represents the site of gender neutrality. Allison also reads the polyphonic text as more liberating, which at times fails to take into account the radical 544 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 critique of domesticity embedded in monophonie texts such as Lettres de Mistriss Henley. Overall, however, Revealing Difference provides a...