“All times are present to her”: Femininity, Temporality, and Libertinage in Diderot’s “Sur les femmes”

JEMCS 3.2 (Fall/Winter2003) "All times are present to her": Femininity, Temporality, and Libertinage in Diderot's "Sur les femmes" Natania Meeker Denis Diderot begins his essay, "Sur les femmes* ("On Women"), with a declaration of affection for another man: "J'aime Thomas" ("I love Thomas"; [949]), he proclaims. Diderot goes on to skewer his acquaintance Antoine-L?onard Thomas for the arid prose, lack ofwit, and excessive impar tiality of his Essai sur le caract?re, les moeurs, et l'esprit des femmes dans les diff?rents si?cles?a treatise to which "Sur les femmes" styles itself as a response. Nonetheless, this ini tial faux-na?f declaration of tender masculine solidarity seems appropriate in a text whose unrelenting focus is sex ual difference as figured in and by women.1 "Sur les femmes" presents an unsystematic but extensive catalogue of the many modes of feminine alterity-?among them those of the hysteric, the prostitute, "la d?vote" ("devout woman"), the virgin, the mother, the savage, the prude, and the libertine. In his portrayal of the myst?re that is woman in all her vari ety, Diderot vacillates between a tone of airy sentimentality? "Quand on ?crit des femmes, il faut tremper sa plume dans l'arc-en-ciel et jeter sur sa ligne la poussi?re des ailes du papillon" ("When one writes about women, one must dip one's pen in the rainbow and sprinkle on one's writing the dust from butterfly wings" [957])?and one imbued with Meeker 69 moral sanctimony?"Quel sera le frein d'une femme d?shon or?e ? ses yeux et aux yeux de ses concitoyens?" ("What will hold back a woman who has been dishonored in her own eyes as well as in those of her fellow citizens?" [959]). Throughout, he is committed to a (familiar) vision of femi ninity as naturally marked by difference?a difference emblematized in the image of the uterus, "un organe sus ceptible de spasmes terribles, disposant d'elle" ("an organ, prone to terrible spasms, which controls her" [952]). Women, according to Diderot, can only be superficially acculturated, and suffer from the consequences of a necessarily incom plete integration into the sphere of the social.2 They evoke earlier stages of human development?the eras of the savage and the child. Yet, with their characteristic focus on matters of wit and style, women ultimately serve as pleasant inspi ration for a community of male authors. "Sur les femmes" begins and ends with references to intellectual exchange between men. The examination of women's ineluctable oth erness provides a crucial context for the cultivation of enlightened masculine sociability. Diderot's lively discussion of the "sexe faible" participates in the progressive naturalization of sexual difference that feminist critics have often seen as typifying philosophical, medical, and legal discussions of femininity in Enlightenment France.3 In "Sur les femmes," Diderot identifies women's physical subjugation to putatively natural processes (men struation, childbirth, aging, even the disease of hysteria) as a defining characteristic of the feminine organism. "C'est par le malaise que nature les a dispos?es ? devenir m?res; c'est par une maladie longue et dangereuse qu'elle leur ?te le pouvoir de l'?tre" ("It is through discomfort that nature makes it pos sible forwomen to become mothers; it is by means of a long and dangerous sickness that she takes from them the power to be mothers" [954]). However, Diderot is not just interested, in "Sur les femmes," in stabilizing a rhetoric of feminine infe riority through the establishment of "nature" as a kind of analytical bedrock; he is in addition intensely preoccupied with the problem of women's relationship to processes of social and historical change. His meditation on sexual differ ence is also a meditation on women's place in and experience of time?what Denise Riley has called the "differing temporal 70 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies ities of 'women'* (6). This time is characterized first and fore most by its repetitiveness?the cycle of eternal return which becomes, in "Sur les femmes,'' the sign of the natural. While men may acquire an abiding civility that legitimately...