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  • Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment
  • John Phillips
Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment. By Suellen Diaconoff. Albany, SUNY Press, 2005. vii + 268 pp. Hb $75.00.

This thoughtful book addresses the political context of women's 'reading acts' in eighteenth-century France. Its central hypothesis is that, confronted with the difficulty of incorporating both their sex and their rationality into their discursive practices, many intellectual women of the time adopted a 'politics of virtue', underpinned by a belief in natural goodness and social commitment. The female writers represented here worked to promote feminine authorship and readership in a period of hostility to the very juxtaposition of women and novels, by promoting a view of novel-reading as an intellectually and morally improving activity. In seven closely argued and well-researched chapters, focusing on the works of Manon Roland, Félicité de Genlis, Isabelle de Charrière and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, the different versions of 'La Belle et la Bête' produced by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont, and the periodical print press for women, Diaconoff explores how women's reading was viewed and constructed in female-authored works. Of these discrete studies, two in particular make an especially valuable contribution to scholarship in this area. Charrière's project aims less at creating a bond of sentimental dependency between reader and writer (as Rousseau had done) or at ero-ticizing desire (as in the male-authored libertine novel) than neutralizing it through the intellect, while the rape scene in Madame Riccoboni's Les Lettres de Juliette Catesby is shown to de-eroticize the act of rape in contrast to the ironic and ultimately complicit manner in which rape is represented by Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses. By eschewing the inclusion of an implied male lecteur-voyeur at the 'fourth wall' of the boudoir, Ric-coboni's text is able to substitute the feminine viewpoint for the erotic reading of rape she and Diaconoff find in Laclos. Diaconoff provides a fascinating and instructive account of the correspondence between these two authors, following publication of Laclos's novel in 1782. These letters bring their different notions of the purposes of literature into stark relief. Laclos views reading as a game defined by codes and conventions, and complicated by multiple ironies, while Riccoboni rejects the ludic principle entirely on the grounds that the reader learns nothing from it, her objective being to 'reveal the effects of real acts [of rape] on real people' (p. 142). Laclos's defence to the charge of immorality was copied almost word for word by Sade in his preface to Justine (which is perhaps why Sade's Idée sur les romans strikingly omits to mention Laclos's novel): to paint vice in its most seductive colours is most effectively to expose its dangers. Diaconoff finds this argument 'not especially inspired' (p. 144). Her readers will wish to make up their own minds on this contentious issue, which is at the very heart of the debate concerning the value of all libertine literature. Whatever our conclusion, we are reminded, in this chapter and indeed, throughout the volume, that reading is always a gendered activity.

John Phillips
London Metropolitan University
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