Rococo Fiction in France, 1600–1715: Seditious Frivolity by Allison Stedman (review)

A fascinating study that opens up and complicates our understanding of the literary field of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France, Rococo Fiction traces the literary rococo as it evolves from its origins in the work of Montaigne to the works of fairy-tale writers at the turn of the century. This evolution involves, in part, the move away from forms of literature and sociability grounded in the spatially mediated social field (that is, salons and academies) to a textually mediated social field that was initially an extension of and later substituted itself for physical spaces such as the salon. Characterized by generic heterogeneity, social and ideological diversity, and valuing foremost individual creative expression, Stedman makes the case that rococo fiction paves the way for the literary practices of the Enlightenment. Opening with a text by Jean Donneau de Visé from Les Diversités galantes (1664), which blends enema with romance, Stedman’s introduction exemplifies the mixing of high and low and the challenges to the classical-baroque aesthetic characteristic of the rococo. Stedman’s study foregrounds the importance to the constitution of the Republic of Letters of hybrid, heterogeneous texts and compilations such as Les Diversités galantes, which are often overlooked in contemporary scholarship despite their commercial success in the period.

Chapter 1 begins by looking at “innovation” as a form of dissent within the context of absolutism under Henry iv and Louis xiii in the works of rococo’s precursors. In particular, Stedman examines the ways in which poetic license and moral licentiousness become inseparable in the eyes of innovation’s critics. In the wake of the Religious Wars, François de Malherbe attempts to do for poetry what the monarchy sought to do for the state: establish a well-ordered and controlled (poetic) regime. Violating the Malherbian aesthetic practices “had become analogous to moral debauchery” (22). Stedman expands on this idea in her examination of François Garasse’s critique of Théophile de Viau’s poetry. Garasse deplored Théophile’s mixing of popular and elite language and literary forms. Théophile’s insertion of the elite ode into the round, or drinking song, blended high and low literary forms, making an elite genre accessible to lower classes associated with the round. Stedman moves to a different example of proto-rococo’s relation to the popular in her analysis of the Querelle du Cid. Corneille’s defence of his play reflects a somewhat republican notion of art: for Corneille, the public and not a small group of supposed authorities should determine the value of a work of art. This move democratizes the process by which a literary work is recognized and legitimized in ways that anticipate the democratizing moves made by later rococo writers.

In chapter 2, Stedman turns to Montaigne for the origins of rococo fiction. Montaigne represents, above all, literary innovation in his need to create new literary forms—the fragmented essays—to accommodate new ideas and subjects. His tradition of literary innovation and free thought was carried on in Marie de Gournay’s salon, frequented by Théophile as well as other authors of aesthetically subversive texts, including Charles Sorel. In particular, Stedman looks at “the new, generically heterogeneous compilations into which many early seventeenth-century novellas were inserted [which] eschewed the humanistic symmetry provided by the Renaissance frame narrative” (64). While texts with frame narratives in the tradition of Giovanni Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre create unity out of diverse stories, the rococo compilation emphasizes diversity and openness with the text no longer grounded in a relatively stable social space and group or narrative frame. Ritual meeting is replaced by chance, one-time encounters that further destabilize the text. Characterized as the first example of a rococo text, Sorel’s La Maison des jeux (1642) consists of games, a short story, a speech, a dispute, news, and an extraordinary tale whose characters come...