Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (review)

REVIEWS 515 p. 659); he is the witness (epigraph), unnamed because he is Rousseau's surrogate , lover and friend of the ideal. Petrarchism and vetero-testamental guilt are combined in Metastasio, who is a narrative poet not of the sixteenth century (p. 660) but, significantly, of Rousseau's own time. "Longinus" (p. 657) is a slip for Longus. To say that Edouard is not an Anglican (p. 7 14) is probably a misreading : "Luthérien" is just a Roman Catholic's way of designating him as an episcopalian (i.e., non-Calvinist) Protestant. The Introduction begins with an excellent contextualization ofthe novel (within its period and Rousseau's concerns). The polemic over titles, however, though bibliographically fascinating, takes too much of the remaining space. Kenrick, the English translator of 1761, is berated for changing Julie's name to Eloisa. But in an age which sees Marivaux's Marianne resurface as Indiana, and Voltaire's Jenni become Young James, this does not seem too grave. Overall the Kenrick translation, attacked severely in the abridged McDowell version of 1968 (pp. 2021 ), seems "belle" without being too "infidèle." The present volume, however, displaces all of these. If some of the comments above seem overly fussy, it is because Stewart and Vaché set themselves very high standards, which in almost all matters of substance they achieve. Robin Howells Birkbeck College, London Mary Seidman Trouille. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. ix + 411pp. US$21.95. ISBN 0-7914-3489-3. Few authors have shared with Jean-Jacques Rousseau the distinction of creating a corpus ofwork so ambiguous that partisans on all sides ofnumerous issues can cite him as their source of inspiration. Just as Rousseau's œuvre in the political sphere has been read as alternately republican, totalitarian, and aristocratic, his writings concerning women have been interpreted in radically contrary ways. He has been credited by some critics, both men and women, with offering French women of the latter half of the eighteenth century an ennobling new sense of their own value as wives and mothers, while for other readers of both sexes he was the spokesman for a particularly insidious pre-Revolutionary misogyny. Adding to the weight of these disparities of opinion is the unusually intense nature of reader response to Rousseau; he inspires antipathy and adoration in ways that other Enlightenment figures, by and large, do not. The issues have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as the realization has grown of how powerful a cultural influence Rousseau's vision exercised, well beyond the eighteenth century. In The Sexual Politics ofJean-Jacques Rousseau (1984), Joel Schwartz emphasized the positive values ofhis domestic ideology, permitting women to enjoy a new dignity in the family although restricting their liberty 516 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:4 in the world. Feminist scholarship has tended to take a less benign view. Madelyn Gutwirth's Twilight of the Goddesses (1992) analysed Rousseau's adroit rhetorical strategy ofpunctuating savage denigration of women with sudden expressions oftenderness and sentimentality: "the whip hand flies out ofcontrol and the gentle tamer reappears" (p. 127), and indeed elements of moral sado-masochism cannot be ignored in Rousseau's relations to his female readers. Other critics such as Gita May in Mme de Roland and the Age of Revolution (1970), Ruth Weinreb in Eagle in a Gauze Cage: Louise d'Épinay,femme de lettres (1993), and Erica Harth on Olympe de Gouges in Cartesian Women (1992) have studied the complex relations between various prominent women and Rousseau's writings as well as the author himself. Mary Seidman Trouille has brought together the accounts of seven women whose lives, in certain ways, were deeply influenced by Rousseau. In Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers ReadRousseau, she examines the impact, most particularly of Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and La Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, on the woman known as Henriette, Louise d'Épinay, Manon Roland , Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stéphanie de Genlis, and Olympe de Gouges, a most disparate group in terms of background, social class, and education , ranging from the daughter of the minister Jacques...