Marie-Hélène Chabut
Abstract:
This essay focuses on the representation of the young man – lover or
potential husband – in four women’s novels written at the end of the
eighteenth century: Isabelle de Charrière’s Henriette et Richard and
Lettres trouvées dans des porte-feuilles d’émigrés, Marie-Jeanne
Riccoboni’s Histoire de Christine de Suabe, and Sophie Cottin’s
Claire d’Albe. It argues that these novels, in large part through the
kind of young male characters they invent, question and resist not
only the classical canon of the rational masculine, but also the new
developing romantic canon of « feminized » masculinity and the
masculine body that was developing during that period, and that
ended up relegating women to literary, social and political nonexistence.
To different degrees then, they succeed in avoiding the
new masculine ideal that was rapidly becoming fashionable and
would culminate in the romantic period.
SvD, January 2009
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