Fiction and the Female Reading Public in Eighteenth-Century France: The Journal des dames (1759-1778)

Fiction and the Female Reading Public in Eighteenth-Century France: The Journal des dames (1759-1778)Angus Martin The first French women's periodical, the Journal des dames, appeared , somewhat irregularly, between 1759 and 1778. In view of the often assumed predominance of female readers of fiction in the eighteenth century, the treatment of prose narrative in a series that was at least nominally intended for women would seem to offer an especially pertinent testimony of contemporary attitudes towards the genre. The aim of this article is to evaluate, more precisely than has been done previously, the extent to which such expectations may be justified and to determine whether there is in fact a feminine bias in the Journal's prose fiction. Twenty years ago Evelyne Sullerot, in a chapter of her book on early French women's periodicals, succinctly outlined what was then known of the history of the publication and the range of material that it covered. She gave almost no details about the stories published or ofthe reviews of novels, however, and suggested that such items represented a small proportion of the entire text. Her analysis was based on the incomplete set of the Journal in the Bibliothèque nationale.1 It has been necessary to 1 Evelyne Sullerot, Histoire de la presseféminine en France, des origines à 1848 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966). She draws attention in particular to an item published in March 1778, known as the Plaidoyer de Polly Baker (pp. 18-25) and used by Diderot in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. The BN copies are Z.54526-541, Rés. Z.3161-62, Z. Beuchot (1683). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 3, April 1991 242 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION wait for Nina Gelbart's definitive studies of the life of this periodical to obtain a wealth of documentation about it, as well as new contextual information about the press in eighteenth-century France.2 Gelbart resolves the problems posed by many inconsistencies in earlier sources, such as Hatin and even the Dictionnaire des journalistes,3 and in her book provides fully indexed details of publication history, as well as of the careers of the various editors (five men and three women, two with male associates ) and the vicissitudes of their editorship. The almost complete sets of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal4 were used, though thorough investigations in France failed to turn up copies of the missing run for the whole of 1776, which has equally eluded my own research. Her thesis, however , is essentially to demonstrate the anti-establishment spirit that for so long was exploited under the cover of an apparently anodyne title. As a result she touches only in passing on aspects of the fictional material in the series. . More recently still, Suzanna van Dijk, in a richly documented, wideranging study of women in eighteenth-century journalism, devoted an important chapter to the Journal des dames. She offers figures showing the changing balance between original texts and reviews of other publications under various editorships. At the same time she discusses the relevance for women, either as authors or readers, of the editorial material . Again, as with Gelbart, no detailed attention is given to fiction apart from a short treatment of the periodical's attitudes towards female novelists.5 2 Nina R. Gelbart, "The Journal des dames and the frondeur Press in the ancien régime," Transactions ofthe Sixth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1983), 244-46; "The Journal des dames and Its Female Editors: Politics, Censorship and Feminism in the Old Regime Press," in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987), 2474 ; and Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: "Le Journal des dames" (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987), cited hereafter as Gelbart. These studies have been invaluable in clarifying the background of the present article and readers are referred to them for detailed material impossible to include here. Thanks are due also to Jean Sgard, Patricia Clancy, Suzanna van Dijk, and Nancy MacCulloch for information and advice generously shared. 3 Eugène Hatin, Bibliographie historique...