The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut by Naomi Segal (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s Naomi Segal. T h e U n i n t e n d e d R e a d e r : F e m in ism a n d M a n o n L e s c a u t . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xxv + 324. Naomi Segal’s study on Prévost takes as its point of departure an issue that has attracted considerable critical attention in recent years: the narrative strategies that lead to M anon’s effacement and those textual manipulations that render her, in Des Grieux’s vocabulary, “ enigmatic.” The history of readings of Manon Lescaut is a history of uncovering ambiguities, for the more one interrogates the narrator’s hyperboles and self­ justifications, the more one becomes aware of how he preempts his beloved’s voice and the more questions remain. In her introduction, Segal gives a succinct account of critics’ read­ ings from the 1730’s to the early 1980’s and suggests that some questions need further exploration: “ how is Des Grieux using utterance to express and contain desire? how is such expression also designed to repress and deny desire? how does his text exemplify a male dis­ course that represses and oppresses the female?” (xxv). In order to answer these questions Segal proposes a three-part analysis. Her first sec­ tion, “ Prose pour Des Grieux,” is an extended close reading of M anon that lays the foun­ dations for the four thematic studies (on Money, The Woman, Doubles, and Fatality) com­ prising Part II, “ Themes.” Part III, “ Theory,” begins with an overview of feminist psychoanalytic theory, then proposes applications to Manon. Woman is, of course, the “ unintended reader” of Segal’s title. As Lionel Gossman observed some years ago, Manon is a “ profoundly masculine” work. Segal likens its narra­ tive structure (Des Grieux telling the Homme de Qualité about the absent Manon) to Freud’s analysis of smut: a man’s expression of desire, refused by a woman, deflected into a joke at her expense told for the enjoyment of another man. The feminist or unintended reading unmasks the patriarchal conspiracy and shows the extent to which “ the norm of male discourse is founded in uncertainty and anxiety” (251). In Des Grieux’s account of his passion for Manon and eventual loss of her, Segal traces his apprenticeship in the duplicity of signs and his own accession to duplicity. She sees in Des Grieux a will to power that aims at “ fixing” and eventually destroying Manon, whose autonomy is invariably seen as threat­ ening or “ enigmatic.” M anon’s threat is both Oedipal—Des Grieux is the son resentful of his mother’s separate existence—and political: Des Grieux colludes with other men, mem­ bers of his own social class, and with his intended (male) reader in order to keep the balance of power in his favor. The Unintended Reader will not only be of interest to scholars interested in Prévost’s novel, but also to those concerned with issues of feminist literary criticism and the feminist critique of psychoanalysis. The study’s elaborate structure is not, however, without its drawbacks. The four thematic studies, coming as they do after a broad close reading, create an echo effect that on occasion enhances the interpretation, but all too often leads to repeti­ tion and awkward references forwards and backwards in the analysis. Fortunately for the reader interested in following Segal’s commentary on, say, the Italian Prince incident, an index helps connect the different phases of her argument. In any event, Segal’s is an absorbing, richly-textured study, well worth reading. J u l i e C . H a y e s University o f Richmond L a R é c e p t io n d u r o m a n f r a n ç a is d u xvue s iè c l e e n F r a n c e d e 1660 A 1979. Œ uvres et Critiques 12.1 (1987). Pp. 218. As its title suggests, this volume of Œ uvres et Critiques brings together nineteen articles on the reception of the seventeenth-century...