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O 1 } Dialectical Desires The Eighteenth-Century Coquette and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Fictional Character He was to be a plaything for her whims; he was to surmount one obstacle after another while making no advance, like an insect which, teased by a child, hops from one finger to the next in the belief that he is getting away while its malicious tormentor keeps it stationary. —Honoré de Balzac, “La Duchesse de Langeais” (1834) balzac and the perils of the coquette-aristocrat Despite her ubiquity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British literary narrative, the figure of the coquette has eluded a sustained critical consideration in discussions of the novel. Although both men and women may play at flirtatious games, it is largely the coquette who in the novel of realism becomes the living symbol of a dangerous form of eros, as well as an enduring exemplum of a French aristocratic class so given over to glittering effects that it has lost its purpose. As we shall see, by importing the eighteenth-century coquette to nineteenthcentury fiction, Victorian novelists come to highlight problems of female sociability as well as seemingly “unnarratable,” dissident desires. Additionally , the artful, “aimless” carnality of Congreve’s Millamant (the prototypical eighteenth-century coquette explored in this chapter) offers a paradox in literary narrative. For as integral to realist fiction as the coquette ’s strategies become, coquetry always threatens to stall a plot that strives to move toward a resolution in marriage. At the same time, coquettish desire signifies an unmentionable female eroticism precisely because it would seem to defy narration. The grande cocotte who Balzac makes the subject of his novella “La Duchesse de Langeais” (1834) has her origins in French salon culture in which female conversational prowess found a place. Recent historians of eighteenth-century French literary culture such as Erica Harth, Joan DeJean , and Mary Vidal have examined the place of salon-based conversation in French high society of the ancien régime—a central aspect of culture in France before the Revolution—and have explored its paramount role in the development of the modern French novel. Harth, for example, argues that the eighteenth-century “art of conversation” was a uniquely accommodating sphere for female interests, one that functioned in keen opposition to the period’s all-male academies.1 Through her social inroads into salon life and her transformation of this once exclusively male preserve into an arena of feminine power, the salon’s grande dame exemplifies the potential for greater female agency. That power is acquired not through the privileges of birth but through conversational talent. The site of female cultural achievement, the salon also signaled an independent aesthetic system in its own right, one that relied on literary nuance, intellectual badinage , and playfully orchestrated scenes of social performance. With the rise of a more constraining post-Napoleonic social ethos, however, the high mandarins of official French culture increasingly regarded “la parole ,” or salon-based “speech,” not as an unassailable realm of achievement for women but as a site of feminine uselessness—and peril.2 Throughout the eighteenth century, French and British writers continually linked female coquetry to a once-exalted aristocratic ethos that had disintegrated into wicked, erotic gamesmanship. Thus, in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), the amoral aristocrats the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil take professional pride in toying with a young woman and forcing her to acknowledge their power over her. In explaining why he delays lovemaking with the ingenue Cécile Volanges, the vicomte tells his sometime-lover and fellow gamester the marquise, “My plan . . . is to make her perfectly aware of the value and extent of each one of the sacrifices she makes me; not to proceed so fast with her that remorse is unable to catch up.” The point of his cruel enterprise, notes the marquise, “is to show her virtue breathing its last in long-protracted agonies; to keep that sombre spectacle ceaselessly before her eyes; and not to grant her the happiness of taking me in her arms until I have obliged her to drop all pretence of being unwilling to do so. After all, I am not worth much if I am not worth the trouble of asking for.”3 Aware of the passing authority of his class and the devaluation of his 52 The Flirt’s Tragedy [3.145.115.195] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 17...

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