Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire de Duras's Ourika

Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire de Duras's Ourika Michelle Chilcoat THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 momentarily offered hope to women fighting for equal education, financial independence and, above all, a political voice. Legislation produced in the wake of the Revolution, however, made it illegal for women to enter the public education system, to vote, and to form political clubs. When the Convention Nationale revised the Revolutionary Constitution in 1793, a reporter for the Comité de Législation clarified what was meant by "citoyen français": L'idée générale que réveille le mot de citoyen est celle de membre de la cité, de la société civile, de la nation. Dans un sens rigoureux il signifie seulement ceux qui sont admis à exercer les droits politiques, à voter dans les assemblées du peuple, ceux qui peuvent élire et être élus aux emplois publiques; en un mot, les membres du souverain. Ainsi les enfants, les insensés, les mineurs, les femmes, les condamnés à peine afflictive ou infamante, jusqu'à leur réhabilitation, ne seraient pas des citoyens.1 Sharing the same status as children, criminals and the insane, woman's "place" in the new French society had to be more narrowly defined than ever. Accordingly, the Convention decreed that woman belongs "in the family," and that she needs no education beyond that of the domestic order: Le projet de la loi ne s'occupe pas de l'instruction des filles.... Ne sait-on pas... que c'est dans les familles que cet apprentissage domestique, comme celui des ouvrages qui conviennent aux filles s'établit naturellement? (Duhet, 200) Women who continued to voice what were deemed political concerns faced imprisonment, institutionalization and even execution. Women intellectuals of the ensuing Restoration period still found ways to articulate concerns regarding their social well-being, but as a consequence of Revolutionary legislation could only do so from within the confines of domesticity and the family, rather than out in the public/political sphere. The purpose of this essay is to examine how the institutionalization of the poor, the criminal, and the insane, the promotion of the bourgeois family as society's most highly esteemed institution , and legislation confining women to the domestic space all emerge as instances of the repressive power of the institution that characterizes France's Fall 1998 Chilcoat "âge classique" (which, according to Foucault, extends from the mid-seventeenth century to the turn of the eighteenth). In the last section of this essay, I propose a reading of Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823)2 as a tragic Restoration narrative of confinement in which the protagonist's inability to identify herself beyond the constraints of family relations ultimately kills her. In Histoire de la folie Michel Foucault describes the "grand refermement" that took place in mid-seventeenth-century France when the foundation of the "Hôpital général" was decreed.3 Foucault theorizes that an economic imperative motivated this Great Confinement. In Renaissance France, the poor and the lunatic, regarded as blessed by God, were left to wander about, depending on the good will of others to sustain their existence. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the numbers of wandering poor dramatically increased as a result of rampant unemployment in rapidly growing cities. No longer blessed in their poverty, the poor became responsible for their own misery, now said to derive from a moral inadequacy made manifest, above all, in an unwillingness to work (Foucault, 77). The jobless poor were therefore confined to the "Hôpital général" which, Foucault notes, was not yet conceived as a place of medical care, but rather as "une instance de l'ordre .. .monarchique et bourgeois " (61), rendered necessary not by "le souci de la guérison" but by "un impératif du travail" (75). Confinement had two goals, depending on whether the confined was labelled morally good or morally evil. For the morally good, confinement was an act of good will, a compensatory opportunity given to the interned to work and to contribute to society's (and consequently his or her own) economic well-being. For the morally evil, confinement and enforced labor served as a...