Women's Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women's Theater (1650–1750) by Theresa Varney Kennedy (review)

Theresa Varney Kennedy's study provides an overview of some twenty-one plays by sixteen women writers over this hundred-year period, some of whom — Villedieu, Graffigny, Riccoboni — are better known to critics, while others — such as Dorothée de Cory — have received less attention. Kennedy argues that female playwrights question traditional views on women using their fictional heroines. Each play is discussed with the same formula: a brief overview, a discussion of its performance history and its sources, followed by a short analysis of the play. As such, this study offers a useful English-language survey of these works, not all of which have been reprinted in critical editions, and it complements Perry Gethner's recent translation of plays by Françoise Pascal, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, Antoinette Deshoulières, and Catherine Durand, Challenges to Traditional Authority: Plays by French Women Authors, 1650–1700 (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2011). The plays are analysed and organized into chapters according to the 'types' their heroines represent: the 'irrational'; the 'dutiful'; the 'bold and brazen'; and the 'deliberative'. The first two types bear the influence of male-authored theatre — a discussion of which is limited to Racine and Corneille and a somewhat generalized representation of the heroines in their works — although there are, Kennedy argues, subtle nuances in the women's version: namely the 'autonomy' of the female-authored irrational heroines (p. 18); and a demonstration of competent 'leadership' (p. 57) in the case of the 'dutiful' heroines. The 'bold and brazen' heroine, often featuring in plays written in locations (outside Paris; the salon) or genres (the théâtres de société) where 'female writers could break free from the male-centred rules', was 'a new type of heroine' (p. 99). This 'bold and brazen type', the author argues, paves the way for the 'deliberative' type, the 'modern protagonist more capable of earning our esteem' (p. 141) whose 'brand of rationality combines reason with passion' (p. 140), and who emerges towards the end of the seventeenth century. This analysis situates the 'deliberative heroine' as an example of women's responses to the contemporary debates about Cartesian reason and, later, sensibilité. More detail regarding the specific and changing socio-literary contexts — of theatre and of the conditions of women's writing — of this hundred-year period would have helped historicize more precisely these different heroines, as would more information about the playwrights themselves, whose biographies are somewhat sidelined by being placed in the footnotes. Nevertheless, this book constitutes a valuable English-language resource for a wide range of lesser-known plays and authors.