Resistance and Retreat: A Laclosian Primer for Women

SUELLEN DIACONOFF Resistance and Retreat: A Laclosian Primer for Women In the past ten or fifteen years the assessment of Choderlos de Lados's treatment of women has undergone significant revision. For if during decades he was celebrated as the first feminist writer and continues to be so called by some critics, male especially/ in recent years an increasing number of others have asserted new judgments. Various critics now suggest that, far from being feminist, Lados's work in toto reveals a misogynist mentality (arising out of the imaginaire viril,2 a sort of ambivalence towards women best defined as 'reductive misogyny,),3 the kind of writing that poses as femino-centric but whose ideological subscript is really that of female vulnerability and the re-establishment and ratification of the male order.4 The lack of agreement among critics indicates not only changing currents in criticism and differing ideological stands, but also, and most important, the recognition that Lados delivers to women a mixed message of resistance and retreat. Author of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), arguably the century's finest novel and often considered the first genuinely feminist novel in French literature, Lados followed that succes de scandale with a foray into non-fiction when in 1783 he took up the competition essay question proposed by the Academie de Chalons-surMarne , 'Quels seraient les meilleurs moyens de perfectionner l'education des femmes?' The question is characteristic of the intellectual debate sponsored by various regional academies in France during the century of Enlightenment, and also illustrates the typical formulation ofthe 'woman question' in the eighteenth century - that is, almost strictly in terms of education.5 Indeed, by 1783 hundreds of essays had already been devoted to the issue, and the chances of the competition's eliciting much originality were fairly slight. Lados's approach was, however, striking because from the beginning he boldly asserted that it was not a different education that would improve conditions for women, but a different society. He caught his reader's attention by dedaring, in the first pages of an essay on improving women's education, that in fact it could not be improved. In the three essays he eventually produced on the topic, he would show why this was so and how women could accommodate themselves to this knowledge, but he would never return to argue the case for the radical overthrow of society, something he had seemed to UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1989 392 SUELLEN DIACONOFF promise to women in that tantalizing phrase on the third page: 'Apprenez qu'on ne sort de I'esdavage que par une grande revolution.' Disappointing as this must be for us today, it is, nonetheless, wholly .consistent with who Lados was and particularly who he was in March 1783, when he decided to try his hand at essay-writing. Indeed, in his biography of Lados, Georges Poisson offers a chronology of the essays' genesis that, if correct, is highly suggestive for the correlation between events in Lados's life and the evolution of his notions about women. Following the publication of his novel in early April 1782, Lados, a career military man stationed at La Rochelle, made the acquaintance of Marie-Solange Duperre, a young woman half his age with whose family he was billeted. Itwas the nextMarch (1783) that he began writing the first of the three essays to which posterity has given the collective title 'De l'Education des femmes,' the one which gives greatest import to the necessity of freedom. However, he wrote only three pages before conduding that the subject required greater amplitude, and it was not until later that summer, at age forty-one and for the first time in his life in love, that he would make a second attempt to deal with the subject. His approach was now to consider the development of women's sensual, social, and moral dimensions and to seek to protect rather than to free them. This development, which is expressed implicitly in the second essay, is understandable, Poisson suggests, because his young mistress was pregnant with his child, and the feelings he had towards her were naturally extended to all women...