Montaigne's Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (review)

Book Reviews Richard L. Regosin. Montaigne's Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 254. The rarity with which critical theory and French Renaissance studies do business together, at least explicitly, is surprising since pre-Cartesian writers such as Montaigne in many ways echo critical theory's tenets and presuppositions. With the arrival of Regosin's judicious interweaving of critical theory and readings of the Essais, the role of the former has productively and interestingly made itself felt in Montaigne studies. Regosin takes as his starting point the notion that "the metaphor of the book as child has single-mindedly and openly expressed the fidelity of textual progeny, its capacity to represent its author and to assure the integrity of his name" (1). Accepting this traditional reading in part, Regosin adds a new dimension to the discussion by articulately reading against this topos of the dutiful child and demonstrating how paternal authority is problematized through the very textual metaphors that should buttress it. Each of his six chapters approaches the question of "textual engendering" from a different viewpoint, some more ostensibly linking textuality and progeny than others. In his opening chapter, the textual son himself becomes unable to carry on stable paternal authority, for the child takes the place of the father he is supposed to immortalize and reveals inadequacies and gaps in the paternal figure. Regosin also takes up the question of what happens when the textual son becomes a textual daughter from two different points of view. The figure of Marie de Gournay, read as Montaigne's historical-literary offspring, contrasts with his image of the dutiful daughter in "De la praesumption" (II, 17) and challenges paternal/ authorial intent by asserting an agential feminine self. On a more metaphoric level, the Pygmalion myth in Montaigne reveals an alternate literary paternity in which the text must be a daughter in order to be given life. Other chapters treat the problem of the monstrous child/text and the active reader to delineate further tensions within the traditional text/son topos. More interesting than Regosin's study of textual engendering per se, however, is the way in which his topic serves as a springboard for much-needed discussions of vaster issues surrounding the Essais—familiar contemporary critical issues such as the sex/gender system, reader-response theory, and binary oppositions. At times, the use of such theoretical issues is explicit, as in the chapter on the "obtrusive reader," where Iser and reader-response theory are placed next to the Essais to evaluate both Montaigne's view of the role of his reader as well as limitations of reader-response theory. At other moments, such theory simply informs the discussion, as in the chapter on "the woman in man," where modern gender theory seems to subtend the discussion. It is especially in this accessible combination of critical theory and scholarship that Regosin's work breaks new ground—with a mélange that Montaigne himself would have invited. Todd W. Reeser University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Lieve Spaas. Lettres de Catherine de Saint-Pierre A son frère Bernardin. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996. Pp. 222. Readable, sensitive, and knowledgeable, Lieve Spaas's consideration of Catherine de Saint-Pierre's letters to Bernardin makes fascinating reading. Its pages also bring a better 94 FALL 1997 ...