Écrire de soi: Mme de Genlis et Isabelle de Charrière, l’autorité fémmine en fictions (1793–1804) par Marguerite de Coüasnon (review)

Coüasnon, Marguerite de. Écrire de soi: Mme de Genlis et Isabelle de Charrière, l’autorité féminine en fictions (1793–1804). Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7535-2204-6. Pp. 306. 17 a. The author contributes to the growing body of studies of literature produced during the French Revolution by presenting the work of two women writers: IsabelleAgn ès-Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serookskerken van Zuylen (Mme de Charrière, 1740–1805) and Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de Genlis (Mme de Genlis, 1746–1830). Both were aristocrats who spent the years of Revolutionary turmoil outside the borders of France, both wrote as educators seeking to modify social behavior, and both acknowledged the influence of Rousseau on their pedagogy, all the while refuting his limited views of women’s role in society. For these reasons, Coüasnon treats these two authors as consœurs. The underlying premise of her book is that in order to overcome societal prejudices that, at that time, kept women from assuming authorial prerogatives reserved exclusively for men, Genlis and Charrière skillfully employ the devices of fiction. Coüasnon’s introduction situates the goal of her study as understanding the roles to which Genlis and Charrière aspire as writers. To achieve this end, she uses description of the two women’s novels as well as examination of their conflicted relationship to Rousseau’s works. Individual chapters are devoted to evoking the inadequate education of many émigrés; outlining the more productive pedagogies proposed by Genlis and Charrière; defining the role of mentors in their émigré fiction; bringing to light discreet, carefully disguised authorial interventions in novels such as Genlis’s Les petits émigrés and Charrière’s Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés; contrasting the views of the two women to Rousseau’s view of woman as lover, wife, and mother; showing how, for Genlis and Charrière, writing could serve as a means of individual emancipation; and describing the strategies the two authors used to establish moral authority and negotiate social status for the persona of female author. Giving a wide berth to political ideology, feminist criticism, and esthetic analysis, Coüasnon uses detailed textual documentation to validate the strategies deployed by Genlis and Charrière in their efforts to reform the society that triply marginalized them, first as émigrées, then as women, then again as women writers. The most compelling arguments put forth in this book are those centered on Rousseau’s paradoxical role as both inspiration for the more engaged, personal, and moral pedagogical innovations that Genlis and Charrière propose and, at the same time, as inhibitor of the public dissemination, through writing, of feminine authority in matters of education and, indeed, of all literary endeavor. As a result, readers who find this volume most rewarding are likely to be found not among specialists of Genlis and Charrière (to whom many of Coüasnon’s observations may appear less than incisive) but rather scholars of Rousseau’s literary legacy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett 218 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 ...