The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century (review)

The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century undertakes a systematic study of the concept of reason in the works of three female writers of the French eighteenth century: Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière. Heidi Bostic examines their contributions to the Enlightenment discourse by placing them “at the center of the exchange of ideas rather than at the periphery” (p. 21). She provides a renewed contextualization of the discourse on reason during the eighteenth century in order to “open up new understandings of Enlightenment” (p. 45). She sees Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière as adhering, like their male counterparts, to a broad conception of reason based on experience but as having been denied the status of women of reason.

The first chapter, “Women, Enlightenment, and the Salic Law of Reason,” comments on the consequences of the longstanding perception still widely held during the eighteenth century that women and reason were incompatible. Bostic starts with an overview of the limitations imposed on women by their education and legal status. The bulk of this chapter demonstrates that current theories of the Enlightenment, whether they caricature its legacy or champion its enduring relevance, ignore or minimize the contributions of women. She also deplores the limited success of contemporary feminist scholarship at promoting women writers as full-fledged “Enlightenment thinker[s]” (p. 51).

The three subsequent chapters, each organized around a metaphor— the mask, the cup and the role of reason as remedy, and the book and literacy—designed to give them a thematic unity, analyze a selection of works by each of the female Enlightenment thinkers that Bostic has identified. The first of these chapters, “Reason, Gender, and Masquerade in Françoise de Graffigny’s ‘La Réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit’ and Phaza,” discusses two little-known plays by the author of the bestselling novel Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747). In “La Réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit” (published before 1733; “The Reunion of good sense and wit”), Bostic argues that Graffigny both criticizes the traditional view that a feminine display of reason is coquettish and shows that reason, far from being a “monolith,” needs to be adapted to different social contexts. The play Phaza (1753/1770), a féerie that stages cross-dressing and masquerade, appears less directly concerned with the issue of reason, but its plot offers, Bostic argues, a metaphor on a female author’s obligation to wear a mask. In both plays, Bostic sees dramatizations of “women’s capacity for reason and [of] their ability to turn that reason toward a project of Enlightenment that includes the emancipation of women” (p. 103).

In the next chapter, “Reason as Remedy: Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s L’Abeille, Histoire du marquis de Cressy, and Lettres de Mylord Rivers,” Bostic turns to the essay L’Abeille (1761) in which she analyzes Riccoboni’s critique of dogmatic rationalist philosophy and her preference for “the book of the world” as a source of knowledge (p. 115). Her reading of Histoire du marquis de Cressy (1758) emphasizes its connections to the philosophical tradition with its most compelling argument concerning the novel’s betrayed female protagonist who, like Socrates, calmly ingests poison in order to end her life. In Lettres de Mylord Rivers (1777), Riccoboni ridicules “narrow-minded rationalist philosophers” and proposes instead “a practical reason deeply rooted in, and relevant to, one’s lived experience” (pp. 137, 139). What connects these three texts, in Bostic’s view, is the way in which they present reason as a “potent remedy for the social ills that women face” (p. 147).

Although scholars have abundantly commented on Isabelle de Charrière’s interest in philosophical issues, especially Kantian philosophy in her novel Trois Femmes (1795), the chapter “Reading Reason: Isabelle de Charière’s Portrait de Zélide, Elise ou l’université, and ‘Des...