- Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography by Amy S. Wyngaard
Author of an estimated 57,000 pages in 187 volumes, the prolific Rétif de la Bretonne is a considerable figure in late eighteenth-century French literature. His reputation has, however, been ambivalent at best. A nineteenth-century critic felt obliged to defend him against the charge of being “foul, lost, horrible, tainted, impossible to read, like a leprous novelist whose name sullies the memory” (3). One of the virtues of Amy Wyngaard’s welcome study is its careful tracing of the critical evaluation [End Page 320] of Rétif. She judiciously observes that while some defenders of his work downplayed the author’s exemplarity (his novels have, for instance, been mined for information about eighteenth-century popular culture, as if these texts were unambiguously representative), the marginality and daring that mark his fiction have also served to exclude him from the canon.
Wyngaard’s ambition is to examine Rétif’s contributions to modern concepts of obscenity, pornography, and sexuality. This efficient volume is accordingly structured in three main parts, the first of which considers how the various versions of Le Paysanperverti (1775–82) and La Paysanne pervertie (1785) helped to define obscenity by circumscribing the moral and legal limits of representation. Wyngaard provides a closer reading of the texts and their illustrations (several are reproduced), arguing that the pornographic is identified through forced absence rather than graphic presence, and that through the installments of his novels, Rétif’s readers widened their conception of the licit. Wyngaard sees Rétif’s combination of the sentimental and the licentious as crucial to this process, and, while her close textual analysis certainly illuminates Rétif’s own practices, her wider claims of his importance would be more compelling with greater contextualization, as this fusion of sentiment and debauchery does not seem especially innovative or unique to that figure in eighteenth-century French writing (or indeed art). She might also take more care here (and elsewhere in the volume) to indicate how her analysis marks a distinct contribution to existing research in the area.
Chapter 2 compares what is perhaps Rétif’s best-known work, the treatise on prostitution Le Pornographe (1769), with his one sexually explicit novel, L’Anti-Justine (1798), which Wyngaard interestingly views as developing the fusion of sex and sentimentality laid out in the earlier work. She provides a brief but useful history of the publication and reception of the first text, which she correctly reads as a unified work instead of following other scholars in splitting the epistolary narrative from the reform tract. By innovatively placing Le Pornographe within a tradition of sentimental literature, she argues that the treatise proposes the same moralistic messages as the fictional narrative about the importance of interpersonal relationships and the sanctity of the family. There is a slight tendency here to read Rétif at face value, and to see as unproblematic his apparent valorization of female desire, within both the brothel and the family. This tendency becomes more pronounced in her analysis of L’Anti-Justine, which ostensibly privileges women’s sexual desire. The portrayal of the novel’s heroine as finding satisfaction in an incestuous relationship with her father might to some readers suggest less that Rétif took into account women’s perspectives and more that he constructed a dependent female fantasy figure whose desire derived from—and was controlled [End Page 321] by—a dominant man. Wyngaard certainly recognizes this possibility when she notes that a woman’s sexual empowerment in this novel is only “relative” (65)—was the pun intended?—but further analysis of Rétif’s construction of the female sexual agent would be welcome. Again, some contextualization could bring into sharper focus the specificity of Rétif’s vision. There is also a mistranslation of the verb “gamahucher,” which arguably distorts the power dynamic of that particular sex act.
The third...