Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography par Amy S. Wyngaard (review)

the same stages that humanity as a whole did in its history. The greatest threats to one’s personal integrity are time and other people. The most perfect fulfillment is to be found in a timeless state where one becomes sufficient unto oneself, when one transcends the obstacles represented by the encroachments of temporality and the corrupting influence of others. Such a happiness was known by Rousseau in his childhood, during the years he spent with Madame de Warens, and on the island of Saint-Pierre in the Lac de Bienne. Memory is the binding force that insures the unity of self through the different stages of life. Moreover, it is in the inner self, in one’s individual conscience that a person comes to know God. Another theme explored by Tripet is that of love in Rousseau’s writings. Tripet emphasizes the influence of the death of Rousseau’s mother at the time of his birth on his relationship with women. He was constantly in pursuit of a maternal figure, and his erotic drives often became confused with filial sentiments. He developed a neo-courtly ideal of unconsummated love as the most noble and satisfying form of this experience. The greatest fulfillment lies in the unfulfilled. In his autobiographical writings, Rousseau presents a number of examples, like his Platonic relationship with Sophie d’Houdetot. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, the enforced spiritual friendship between Julie and Saint-Preux attains a poetic elevation that a sexual liaison could never equal. In Rousseau’s own life, the search for the mother could attain cosmic dimensions, since he found the ultimate life-giver and protectress in nature.Tripet also shows how the pressure exerted on Rousseau by his father to take his mother’s place encouraged the son to develop the feminine side of his personality to an inordinate degree. This led him to find most attractive in the women he loved a reflection of himself.Two of Rousseau’s less well-known works are revealing in this regard. His play Narcisse projects onstage a lover of self who finds in his own being both the masculine and feminine dimensions of the love relationship. In Pygmalion, an artist falls in love with what he has put of himself into his own creation. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Wyngaard, Amy S. Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61149-420-4. Pp. 147. $65. The cover illustration of this little volume suffices to entice any reader’s curiosity. Most of it is dominated by a woman in eighteenth-century garb, whose bare breasts peek over her bodice and whose legs and tiny mule-shod feet are spread as she readies herself on the sofa for some sexual pleasure from the leering gentleman standing to her left. A glance at the title explains the choice of image and confirms the content. Wyngaard has chosen to deal directly with what Rétif de la Bretonne is most identified with: sex and pornography. This sets her apart from the conventional discussions of his socio-cultural portraits of late eighteenth-century France and of his prolific literary 240 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 241 production. In three chapters and a coda, she attempts to rehabilitate his reputation as an author of bad books“in both senses of the term”(1). She aims at demonstrating his contributions to modern knowledge of sexology as well as to the place of human sexuality in psychiatry. She shows how fiction influenced science and psychiatric medicine in the late nineteenth century and beyond and how scientific ideas, prompted through Enlightenment thought and perhaps pure genius, found their way into novels. In chapter 1, Wyngaard examines the difficulty in defining the term pornography, literally meaning writing about prostitutes. Censors were even confounded as to what was considered pornographic/obscene and what was not. Interestingly, one of Rétif’s earliest works, Le pornographe (1769) is not pornographic but constructively addresses the regulation of prostitution. She further details how he doggedly tested censorship boundaries with Le paysan perverti (1775) and eventually La paysanne pervertie (1784), its “semiauthorized soft porn” complement (7...