The Fiction of Enlightenment. Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century (review)

This book by Heidi Bostic constitutes a capital contribution to the ongoing rehabilitation of eighteenth-century French women writers. Through her particularly felicitous title, The Fiction of Enlightenment. Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century, Bostic posits the two premises of her study. First, the conventional definition of Enlightenment is, in fact, a fiction because it routinely excludes the contributions made by French "women of reason," intellectual women. Second, the works of fiction by these women writers actually offer additional insight into the Enlightenment and enhance our understanding of it. Analyzing mostly lesser-known texts and letters by the three leading women authors writing in French during the eighteenth century, Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière, Bostic argues persuasively that these authors claim reason for women and demonstrate in their works that women make crucial contributions to Enlightenment. Their writing thus illustrates how Enlightenment in its traditional definition is a fiction in need of revision. And although recent scholarship has recuperated these women's voices to some extent by publishing modern editions of their texts and analyzing them, Bostic issues a call for greater focus on these authors' "emergent feminist epistemologies" (215) specifically, so that their importance for contemporary feminist theory may be properly documented and assessed.

Bostic makes her argument in four chapters—preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion—of which brief sections were previously published. The first chapter, entitled "Women, Enlightenment, and the Salic Law of Reason," addresses such issues as how women and reason were viewed in the eighteenth century, the nature of Enlightenment, and its relationship with literature. The remaining three chapters each cover a woman writer, organized in chronological order by their date of birth, beginning with Graffigny and proceeding to Riccoboni and then to Charrière. Their texts jointly span most of the eighteenth century.

Although initially skeptical of Bostic's approach of using a single motif to interpret each author's diverse texts, this reviewer, in fact, found her discussion pertinent and enlightening. For Graffigny, Bostic studies the motif of gender as a mask—the performance of gender—used in order to claim reason for women in her two plays La Réunion du bon sens et de l'esprit (unpublished) and Phaza, both of which have rarely formed the object of modern scholarship. Bostic analyzes the motif of the cup, symbolizing reason as a remedy, in Riccoboni's essay L'Abeille and novels Histoire du marquis de Cressy and Lettres de Mylord Rivers, of which the latter two in particular may be more familiar to readers and scholars. Lastly, for Charrière she examines the relationship between female literacy and reason through the motif of the book as it appears in her literary self-portrait Portrait de Zélide, her comedy Élise ou l'université and her essay "Des Auteurs et des livres," all relatively unknown. As apparent from this list, Bostic selected her texts from a broad range of genres practiced by eighteenth-century women writers, which lends additional weight to her argument and her plea to consider these authors an integral part of Enlightenment.

Five black-and-white images aptly illustrate the text; a listing of these illustrations would have been a convenient reference tool. An extensive fifteen-page bibliography and an elaborate index conclude the publication.

Offering fresh perspectives on relatively unknown texts and delineating new avenues for future intellectual inquiry, this richly annotated, cogently argued book engages with other scholarship not just on eighteenth-century French literature but also on history, cultural studies, gender studies, feminist theory and philosophy. It will be of great interest to readers in all these disciplines.