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  • Reason, Experience, and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
  • Giulia Pacini
Heidi Bostic . The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 2010). Pp 270. $59.50
Philip Stewart . L'Invention du sentiment: roman et économie affective au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2010). Pp viii + 250. £60 paper

The attributes and centrality of reason in Enlightenment culture are called into question yet again in two recent studies of eighteenth-century French literature. In The Fiction of Enlightenment, Heidi Bostic contends that Enlightenment reason was neither a masculine prerogative, nor a disembodied, universalizing concept, whereas in his L'Invention du sentiment, Philip Stewart offers an innovative analysis of the importance attributed to emotions as a privileged cognitive tool and a constitutive component of the self. When read together, these studies illustrate the gradual weakening of Cartesian thought over the long eighteenth century, and they emphasize the instrumental role that practical and emotive experience played in the Enlightenment quest for self-knowledge.

Bostic's The Fiction of Enlightenment argues that women's literature was central to Enlightenment culture, and that it inflected seventeenth-century rationalist definitions of reason and knowledge. Bostic contends, in fact, that [End Page 101] Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière contested the abstract nature of classical characterizations of reason. They recast the problem in practical and social terms, tackling issues such as: "What should one do to be reasonable?" (80). In different ways, these authors criticized the exclusivity of traditional, male definitions of reason, and pondered the question of how women might claim reason for themselves. Thus, rather than simply ask "What is Enlightenment?," Graffigny's, Riccoboni's, and Charrière's works also grappled with the issue of "What counts as Enlightenment?" According to Bostic, moreover, the fictional character of these women's writing may have actually strengthened their philosophical importance, for literature was understood in the eighteenth century to be "a means for reflection, self-knowledge, and analysis; . . . [it] permitted women to treat the topic of reason in rich, varied ways, emphasizing its impact on women's lives" (59, 61). The sentimental tone of their narratives allowed Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière to represent, to test, and to understand better the experiential, relational, and contextual aspects of the Enlightenment (65).

In particular, Bostic stresses the ways in which plays such as Graffigny's La Réunion du bons sens et de l'esprit and Phaza de-essentialized gender, and critiqued both French society and the education it offered women. Graffigny rejected metaphysical considerations to emphasize instead the social functioning of reason—the ways in which it was inflected by context—ultimately insisting on the importance of women's practical knowledge and common sense. Riccoboni similarly turned to reason in her search for a potential remedy to the injustices of a patriarchal society. Bostic's analysis of the Socratic intertext in Histoire du marquis de Cressy is particularly interesting, as is her discussion of Lettres de Mylord Rivers, which calls attention to the more optimistic moments in Riccoboni's corpus (all too often, in fact, the latter is described as a fierce denunciation of male privilege and violence). Another chapter on Charrière's Portrait de Zélide, Elise ou l'université and "Des Auteurs et des livres" then examines the importance of "literacy" for women in particular (153). Bostic rightly contends that for Charrière, "literacy" did not simply mean the ability to read and write; it also implied a practical skill in deciphering society's unspoken codes. Charrière thus extended the limits of the philosophical domain to include the "mundane details" of women's lives (192).

In each of these chapters, Bostic includes useful biographical information to support her claims regarding the philosophical status of her chosen texts. In fact, in addition to writing works with a thematic focus on reason, all three authors frequented intellectual circles and showed interest in rational discussion. Bostic's reader is nevertheless left to wonder how current events might have affected these women's experiences, most notably in the case of Charrière, who was writing during the Revolutionary period. Indeed, had [End Page 102] Bostic focused more carefully...

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