Romancières sentimentales (1789–1825) (review)

Brigitte Louichon analyses the works of seven women novelists writing in the tumultuous and strange three decades after the 1789 Revolution, when key sections of the reading elite were visibly traumatized, some ideologies were trumpeted while others dared not speak their name, and when cultural opinion-formers were wondering what kind of literature could now be deemed appropriate. Louichon relocates in this setting the fiction of Cottin, Souza, Staël, Claire de Duras, Genlis, Gay, and Krüdener. These authors have by now been much pored over, and it is initially disappointing to find Louichon, in her Introduction, rehearsing very familiar material. Throughout the book, too, there is little engagement with other critics in the field and almost none with anglophone ones (Margaret Waller, for instance, is conspicuously absent). There are moments when it seems as if Louichon has never heard of women’s or cultural studies, for example when she states (albeit quasi-jocularly) that literary history is always written by ‘respectable’ figures and so ‘ne fait jamais qu’adopter une “position” particulière’ (p. 22), whereas hers will be different, being anchored in the historical-literary context of the period. But, this being said, the study turns out to be a rich one, and will be required reading for all those interested in the history of the French novel — as well as for Stendhalians and Flaubertians; for Louichon makes fascinating connections between Armance and these other works (not simply the obvious Olivier), and she also, on a number of occasions, sources with pinpoint detail Emma Bovary’s youthful reading and its provenance. Chapters on Rousseau and sensibilité; on ‘errance’; on the multiplicity of narrative voices in these works; on mises en abyme that show the characters being shaped by the selfsame type of fiction in which they themselves appear; on the sheer unhappiness of marriage and the role of chance: all these explode the stereotype of female authors penning vague and sugary works that constantly revert to the ‘intime’ or, worse, to the simplistically autobiographical. (Louichon substitutes the ‘intertextual’ for the ‘personal’.) Among the most compelling parts of the book are those claiming that the crucial question for the period was the place and meaning of eighteenth-century literature; suggesting that the history of the ‘roman sentimental’ is that of a disenchantment with the construction of passion as an ‘ideal’; and putting forward a possible explanation for the twin phenomena that have often puzzled modern commentators: why were these novels so very successful at the time and then forgotten (or derided) so quickly and thoroughly? Previous critics have put this down to the misogyny of nineteenth-century France. But Louichon convincingly argues that it is precisely because these novels were addressed to a readership that had lived through the Revolution — precisely because they portray fear and disorientation, and reveal a latent ideology that clings to an idea of ‘nobility’ while understanding why this has to undergo revision — that they seemed ‘right’ at the time but ‘wrong’ or false soon after.