Veiling Gender in French Literary History

THE COMPARATIST SONYA STEPHENS, ed. A History ofWomen 's Writing in France. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 2000. ix + 314 pp. + MADELEINE DOBIE, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. xiv + 234 pp. VEILING GENDER IN FRENCH LTTERARY HISTORY These two very different literary histories, one a general set ofessays, the other a focused thematic study, nonetheless both suggest a certain resistance to AngloAmerican feminism in French studies. Sonya Stephens's History of Women 's Writing in France, a volume in the Cambridge series ofnational histories, follows a straightforward chronological track and sets aside feminist challenges to periodization , movements, or the canonization ofmale authors. Instead it makes its mark by including all kinds ofwriting—devotional, epistolary, fairy tales, journalism, and even scientific tracts—that allow a broad sweep ofwomen to find a place. Yet the pigeonholes into which they are placed are familiar ones, and the absent men such as Rousseau and Richardson cast a long shadow overthe womenwho remain. The volume is hexagonal, excluding most women writing in French outside France. Isabelle de Charrière does appear in Martin Hall's chapter on eighteenth-century fiction as "arguably the greatest" woman writer of the century (113). Yet Hall's thematic description of"everyday provincial life" in her novels belies the importance ofher psychological portraits and ofher radical experiments with ironic fragmentation ofplot, which mark her as a cosmopolitan writer who breaks out ofher century. The accounts by the different contributors vary in their scope but they are all helpful in the mode ofa descriptive bibliography, and the final bibliography of texts and secondary sources will undoubtedly be useful to many readers who start their exploration ofwomen's writings here. By contrast, Madeleine Dobie's Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism is a sophisticated theoretical study ofcontradictory impulses in the gendered representation ofthe Other, whether colonial or Oriental, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The Orient, she argues, is feminized , while Western women are orientalized, as they are assimilated to the dangers ofdecadent desire on the "sopha," passive luxury in their private space, and despotism in the public sphere. In the central contradictory metaphor of the book, the veiled woman represents fidelity or truth, yet she also represents appearance and falsehood. Thus Roxane's veil in Montesquieu's Lettrespersanes protects her from the profane gaze ofthose other than her husband, yet it also enables her to disguise her infidelity to her husband. 7Ae Persian Letters also lay the groundwork for Dobie's theme of the alterity of Woman, of the Oriental, and of language. The instability oflanguage, or more specifically ofthe written, derives in part from texts being subject to interpretation, to reading, and often to speculative translation. When Usbek's letters remain unread, they lose their meaning and power. In an analogous destabilization ofmeaning, Roxane's suicide, which like all suicide has long been the subject ofdebate, here is read as a kind ofwriting, in which blood, poison, and ink spell out her death. In her chapters on the nineteenth century, Dobie's most striking contextual evidence concerns the support ofwriters on the left such as Gérard de Nerval for colonial intervention, and their failure to address the political consequences ofOriental expansion until the decades following the defeat by Germany in 1871. Already inthe eighteenth century she notes a repressive tendency (perhaps due to VcH. 27 (2003): 169 REVIEW ESSAYS censorship) to condemn Spanish colonies and slavery, but to remain silent on French analogues. Writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Crébillon fils offer a "metaleptic reversal between colonial history and Orientalist discourse" (17). The "displacement of the whole problem of slavery" from Western colonies to the Eastern world translates enslavement into political or domestic "servitude." Here may be the place to raise the question why, in a work devoted to gender, colonialism , and eroticism, Dobie focuses almost exclusively on male writers. Had she looked at George Sand's representation of colonialism and slavery in Indiana, the explicit parallelism between forms ofthe Other could have led her to very different arguments about nineteenth-century literary politics. Dobie writes boldly, laying out her claims in an emphatic first person, even where her...