Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (review)

Dena Goodman turns her feminist critical lens away from women authors towards the private world of female epistolarity in France. Considering women both as situated and as embodied subjects, she argues persuasively that letter writing occurred amidst expanding cultures of pedagogy, consumerism, and leisure and sociability, which shaped women's gendered subjectivities and self-expression. She casts a vast analytical net over metropolitan and provincial France as well as the French colonies, describing the development of modern women's letter writing from its seventeenth-century origins to its eighteenth-century heyday. Becoming a Woman is a mixed media experience referring to an impressive range of material: private letters nestle alongside art, literature, fashion, and material objects aimed at a female market, from bonheur du jour writing tables to heart-shaped inkwells. In Part I, Goodman's fascinating 'reading' of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's painting of a mother writing to her children reveals an innovative image of womanhood born at the intersection of the male-dominated portraiture tradition and eroticized images of 'epistolary women'. In Parts II and III, exhaustive research weaves a detailed tapestry of epistolarity in the period, coloured with memorable anecdotes and intriguing images of letter-writing paraphernalia. This paraphernalia participated in the gendering of women's letter writing as sentimental, spontaneous, and trivial, a practice thought to sacrifice technical accuracy to effusions of feeling, and reason to romantic love. Goodman demonstrates that gender discrimination pervades apparently trivial areas such as orthography and penmanship, concluding her chapters with incisive analyses of the role of material objects in promoting masculine fantasies of feminine delicacy and devotion. I remain unconvinced by her coupling of consumer choices with the compositional choices made by women writers: the latter might certainly indicate autonomous self-definition; the former, while enabling some exercise of judgement and taste, are equally implicated in a disenfranchising capitalist false consciousness. Goodman is at times drawn into turgid minutiae by her enthusiasm for material culture: we do not arrive at any extended treatment of women's private letters until the fourth and final section. When the analysis comes, though, it is compelling. Judiciously eschewing postmodern scepticism of human agency, Goodman uses case studies of Catherine de Saint-Pierre (sister of Bernardin), Manon Phlipon (later Roland), Geneviève-Randonde-Malboissière, and Sophie Silvestre to demonstrate women's self-reflexivity vis-à-vis epistolary culture. Feminist critics have long since identified the stereotype of the lovelorn letter-writing woman; Goodman shows that women were alert to the possibility of creative self-fashioning within an epistolary language preempted by men. The self-conscious 'literariness' of their writing justifies her use of contemporaneous fiction — Graffigny, Épinay, and Rousseau, amongst others — to support her conclusions. There was a conspicuous lack of attention given to the sensible language of female friendship and its role in women's developing attitudes to love, fidelity, and passion. Even so, in demonstrating that women used an epistolary culture defined by men to reflect on their personal development and gendered condition, Goodman mounts a convincing case for her work's importance in the ongoing project of modern feminist scholarship: to read women on their own terms, independent of masculine standards.