Louise d'Epinay's Account of Female Epistemology and Sexual Politics

Louise d'Epinay's Account of Female Epistemology and Sexual PoliticsAuthor(s): Alice ParkerSource: The French Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Oct., 1981), pp. 43-51Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/390983 .

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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. LV, No. 1, October 1981 Printed in U.S.A.

Louise d'Epinay's Account of Female Epistemology and Sexual Politics

by Alice Parker

IN THE ALMOST TWO-THOUSAND PAGE FICTIONAL ACCOUNT of her life, Louise d'Epinay presents an exhaustive survey of an upper-class woman's existence in the mid- eighteenth century. The Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant provides primary data for a conceptual framework wherein women's actual experiences can be used to explicate the images, stereotypes, and myths produced by the culture. Our sense of the "grammaticality" of the fictional universe in the eighteenth century, of the gender-specific roles of subject, predicate, and object,' of the relationship of women to it as well as their place in it must be supplemented by a knowledge of the ways in which women were encouraged to view the world, and the range of choices open to them.2

The radical alteration of consciousness in the eighteenth century in favor of empirical reality and affective relationships encouraged male writers to take up the "woman question" as a "cause celebre" and permitted women to begin to find their own voices. Stereotypical images of women continued to be reinforced, however, by all available sources.3 Considered self-evident by men and women alike, the biological and historical foundation of the female condition justified traditional roles and options. D'Epinay's work informs us of the writer's existential situation, her phenomenological relationship to a staunchly patriarchal world, and the extent to which women remained subservient in what was purportedly a feminocentric society.4 Her fiction, correspondence, and pedagogical writings raise questions about female epistemology in the Enlightenment: did women literally know a different physical and mental space than men?

In many ways the "real" Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay seems more incredible than any of the narrative voices she creates. An independent and talented woman of privilege, she was in the center of the intellectual and social life of her time. She maintained relationships with Grimm, Diderot, Rousseau, the baron

1 See Nancy Miller, "The Exquisite Cadavers: Women in Eighteenth-Century Fiction," Diacritics, 5 (Winter, 1975), 37-38, for an exploration of this concept. 2 One of the few useful sources of this kind is Gita May's Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

3 See the excellent essay by Abby R. Kleinbaum, "Women in the Age of Light," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 217-35.

4 The monumental study of Pierre Fauchery, La Destinee feminine dans le roman europeen du dix- huitieme siecle: 1713-1807 (Paris: A. Colin, 1972), explores feminocentrism in the novel, but fails to separate male fantasy from female reality. (See pp. 559, 648-49.)

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d'Holbach, the abbe Galiani, Voltaire, and others. Her works show just how distant she was, psychically. Nor has posterity been more kind: bibliographical history has kept her work in literary limbo. Unscrupulous editors in the early nineteenth century altered her fiction, which was then misrepresented as authentic memoirs, while her twentieth-century editor continued to trivialize her work by labeling it "pseudo-memoirs."5 In choosing to reconstruct her life as fiction, Louise d'Epinay was able to distance herself from what she saw as the psycholog- ical and political victimization of women. If the principal character is oppressed by what she calls the "mis6rable esclavage de ma vie," the author, by virtue of the act of writing, is at least on her way to becoming a "creative non-victim."6

In the mid-eighteenth century both memoir novels and epistolary works pro- vided vehicles for reconstructing autobiographical materials. It was not an option for d'Epinay to be more freely inventive. There is no reason to suggest, as Georges Roth does, that her own life is less suitable for narrative manipulation than the experiences of an imaginary heroine.7 She had virtually limitless possibilities to "sound her own consciousness," as Philip Stewart put it in a discussion of the functions of the memoir form, and finally to create a "self," what Figaro would call "ce moi."8

The surface of the narrative appears simple-d'Epinay chooses a modified epistolary form that combines letters and journal entries. It is tempting to attend to only one voice, that of the heroine, Emilie de Montbrillant. This is what readers of "memoirs" or "pseudo-memoirs" would be encouraged to do. As in all fiction, however, the meaning emerges from a complex system of tonalities. The main narrative voice shifts from male to female, from Emilie's tutor to herself as she moves from childhood to adulthood. But even after she assumes the authority to

5Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay, Les Pseudo-Mem oires de Madame d'Epinay: Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, ed. Georges Roth, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Obviously, the first part of the title is pure invention of the editor and refers to a spurious bibliographical tradition initiated by nineteenth- century editors. All citations from the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant will be taken from this edition.

6 II, 338. Margaret Atwood, in her remarkable work on Canadian literature, Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), gives an excellent model for analyzing victim positions and strategies for moving out of them, pp. 36-40.

v The text of Georges Roth's summary to his critical preface is generally condescending and patronizing, demonstrating how critical tone and diction can close discussion rather than stimulate further exploration.

.. .concue d'abord comme un divertissement litt6raire, I' Histoire de Mme de Montbrillant etait un long roman a clef, a soubassement autobiographique, bien que librement compose. Remanie ab irato avec la connivence imperative de Grimm et (surtout, peut-etre) de Diderot, corrige, corse et interpole, le voici devenu bombe a retardement et dangereux engin de polemique. Produit d'une "machination prolongee" ces "memoires d'une famille" sont desormais "un pur roman-pamphlet" (I, xxi [citations from E. Faguet, Vie de Rousseau, p. 1881).

The polemical aspect of the work, a very insubstantial portion of the whole, has only attracted scholars for reasons unrelated to the novel itself, qua literature. For an ample discussion of the "conspiratorial" revision of the manuscript, see Evelyn Simha, "An Eagle in a Cage of Gauze: Mme d'Epinay's Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant" (Unpubl. diss. Yale 1968), pp. 143-151.

8 Philip Stewart, Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir Novel, 1700-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 121, 302.

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FEMALE EPISTEMOLOGY AND SEXUAL POLITICS

narrate her own story, Emilie's voice is always coupled with a male counterpart. As one would guess, the interaction never constitutes a true dialectic, since Emilie is typically at a disadvantage with regard to age, experience, power, health, and rationality.

It was d'Epinay's expressed purpose to prove the effects of an "education timide et incertaine" upon her heroine (I, 4). To this end the author had to invent two related concepts as the poles upon which to anchor the framework of her story: first, the significance of childhood in setting the stage for future adult personality; and second, the self-reflexive narrative. The latter would derive both from the mirroring effect of epistolary form, manipulated so that events could be viewed and reviewed, and from the story within the story, as the heroine too will be composing a novel.

Emilie's coming to consciousness occurs with the death of her father. Coinci- dentally, Emilie undergoes a traumatic initiation into the world of the larger family, as she and her mother must henceforth live with Emilie's aunt and uncle. At an age when boys would begin to prepare for public roles, or even begin to do the work of their adult lives, Emilie is advised that she may no longer "jouer un role" (her own): "Il faut se defaire de cette hauteur, et prendre comme grace tout ce qu'on fera pour toi. Ainsi plus de caprices, plus de fantaisie. De la douceur, de la bonte et de la pitie..." (I, 13). Her mother reinforces the notion that self- fulfillment is consonant with self-sacrifice; her great-aunt equates ideal behavior with aristocratic elevation. The combined message leaves Emilie with a behavioral model resembling self-extinction. As she comments: "Je ne pourrai jamais me conduire de maniere a ne pas me faire remarquer" (I, 259).

Emilie's verbal behavior naturally reflects what she has learned, but also the modalities of her experiences, the perceptual structures she has acquired, and finally the sexual politics of the language itself. Tone and diction reflect appro- priate female expression. As her tuteur, Lisieux, presents the primary narrative voice: "Le naturel, la sensibilite, la credulite et la douceur de son ame font le caractere de ses lettres" (I, 5). As Emilie listens to the voices around her, the only authentic note is the one that she must strain hardest to hear, that of her own voice. Desiring to lead a productive life according to the norms of her class and culture, Emilie is continually foiled. Not only is she handed someone else's script in an age of masks and artifice; the text has substantial lacunae that render it virtually meaningless as a vehicle for coping with the stresses that lie ahead. Certain kinds of perceptions may not be articulated; certain kinds of information may not be processed. Approval depends upon denying one's feelings,9 and even on rearranging the truth. In an attempt to penetrate the mystery of this behavior, Emilie asks her mother: "Est-ce comme cela que vous faites, maman, vous que tout le monde trouve si aimable?" (I, 45). The virtues that are reinforced are those

9 Emilie's reluctance to make her own decisions is a constant theme, mirroring the concerns of the author, who specified in the later Conversations d'Emilie, written for her granddaughter, that "la raison" meant "suivre les avis qu'on vous donne." Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay, Conversations d'Emilie (Paris: Pissot, 1776), p. 106.

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of the slave: "Vous n'avez que de la patience et de la reconnaissance a opposer a tout ce qu'on peut dire ou faire" (I, 31). And further, "Gardez-vous bien surtout de vous affliger de l'injustice des autres; ayez la bonne conscience de votre cote et vous serez la plus forte" (I, 33). Where this leads is articulated many years later by the mature Emilie: "Avoir une volonte a moi me paraissait un crime" (III, 209). The intellectual distance she eventually attains will permit her, in time, to reorient her behavior: "J'y ai bien regarde; j'ai commence a oser etre moi.. ." (III, 209). What she begins to dare to look at is the life she has led; the way that she becomes herself is by retelling her story.

If, as a recent critic has pointed out, it is still a problem for women in the twentieth century to "stop being haunted not only by 'convention and propriety' but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves,"10 it is difficult to imagine the limitations imposed by female socialization two centuries ago. In analyzing the trajectory of her life through three generations, from her mother to her children, Emilie constantly returns to the theme of education. Like Rousseau, she favored an education that would be privately controlled and domestically situated, not for the sake of reaffirming an aristocratic model, but in order to recognize and nurture the special needs of the individual child (II, 54). She is particularly concerned for the female child, whose domain would be "interior" rather than "exterior" (Conversations d'Emilie, pp. 99-100), and whose life would be physically dangerous, at least through child-bearing years. Girls had to be taught survival skills that could be exercised in isolation, remote from a permanent or dependable support group (pp. 143-45).

One of the author's chief concerns, in detailing the youth of her heroine, is the effect on the child of inadequate role models. Emilie's mother is pictured as so immersed in her own problems that she is incapable of guiding her daughter (I, 53). In addition, the Marquise de Beaufort, whom Emilie addresses as "maman" and who plays the role of grandmother, and her maternal aunt deliver strictures that inhibit personal growth as they undermine self-confidence in a familiar pattern of lateral conflict whereby persons of little power are encouraged to fight each other.

In spite of, or perhaps because of her timidity, Emilie's critical intelligence is turned inward. From the beginning she has shown the capacity for distancing that self-irony and later her writing will require. At thirteen, Emilie had written to Mlle de Beaufort, her cousin, that girls should not be educated by means of double messages, where their bodies are made to appear beautiful and gorgeously adorned while their minds remain pure and ethereal (I, 149-50). Sade was to explore fully the logical consequences of this particular paradox and to impale his heroines, Juliette and Justine, on each of the horns of the dilemma.

When Emilie marries her eldest cousin, she discovers that her exceptional "love match" binds her even more closely to her family and to male authority. However, at this point in her life she envisages no alternatives to a family-centered

'0 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 38.

46 FRENCH REVIEW




existence.'1 When she tries to salvage what is left of the wife and reinvest it in parenting, Emilie is again frustrated. After risking her life to give birth to a child (twelve out of twenty-five young women she has known have by then died in childbirth, or as a direct result [I, 450-51]), she discovers that she will have little to say about what happens thenceforth. Her mother, father-in-law, and husband all agree that she must not be permitted to nurse the child, a practice that is considered "bizarre" and "ridicule" (I, 190).

M. de Montbrillant comments pointedly: "Que voila bien une des folles idees qui passent quelquefois dans la tete de ma pauvre petite femme. Quelle diable de satisfaction peut-on trouver a nourir un enfant?" (I, 295). Even the wet nurse, chosen by her mother and father-in-law, lives too far away for her to visit the baby very often (I, 344). Later, there are further enforced separations from her children. When Pauline is about four, she writes: "J'installe ce soir Pauline dans la maison oii elle doit passer l'hiver; je suis desole de m'en separer" (II, 203). When they take her son away to boarding school, Emilie cannot eat or drink for two days (II, 57).

The possibility that Emilie can make things better for her children thus appears relatively remote from the beginning. "C'est un chagrin pour moi," she says of her daughter, "de voir l'ignorance ou nous sommes obliges de la laisser" (II, 512). Still later Emilie reflects on the consequences of her powerless position for the future of her children: "Ils feraient mon bonheur si j'6tais entierement maltresse de leur sort et du mien; mais comme je ne la suis pas, plus je suis satisfaite de ce qu'ils annoncent, plus ils m'occasionnent de reflexions facheuses pour l'avenir" (III, 133). As she tries to improve upon the model acquired from her mother, with whom she says she has never had more than four meaningful conversations in her life, and whom she was inclined merely to fear (I, 549), Emilie discovers that the problem is larger than a mere generational conflict.

Following the advice of her first directeur, "C'est une erreur de croire qu'a treize ans, ni dans aucun temps, on puisse se conduire par soi-meme" (I, 56), Emilie has fallen into a pattern of dependency that encourages her to entrust herself first to her mother, then to her guardian, then to her husband, and finally to two lovers. Lacking intellectual and cultural stimuli, she has little to oppose to the model of female identity that is predicated on the ability to attract men, or at best on the aptitute for fostering emotional ties.12

In 1756, at the age of thirty, Louise d'Epinay wrote: "Je suis tres ignorante. Toute mon 6ducation s'est bornee a cultiver des talents agreables et a me rendre

" Even upper-class women in the mid- and late-eighteenth century were encouraged to trade their pedestals for the nursery and the hearth. The two aspects of sex-role indoctrination that Emilie openly questions are the emphasis on physical beauty and adornment and on passive, compliant behavior. The only activities in which she engages that could expand her cultural frontiers are amateur theatrics (with her first lover) and, later under the tutelage of her second lover, her writing.

12 In his article on d'Epinay's novel, Paul Hoffmann also leads his readers to the unfortunate conclusion that the heroine should be satisfied with her lover's happiness. See "L' Historie de Madame de Montbrillant ou l'ecole de la femme," Revue des Sciences Humaines, 110 (1963), 161-72.

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habile dans l'art de faire des sophismes."13 In 1771 she used practically the same expressions in a letter to Galiani, adding "la femme la plus savante n'a et ne peut avoir meme que des connaissances tres superficielles."'4 This perceived ignorance, both as it affected her self-image and her ability to function intellectually, was compounded by her sense of living in someone else's world, according to others' priorities.

Restrictions on knowing affected eighteenth-century women's views of themselves and of the world. The author plots her characters' inner and outer landscapes and the temporal extension of her narrative in ways that are problematic for the modem reader. As Evelyn Simha observes: "Madame d'Epinay's characters are trapped not only in an airless salon or theater, but in themselves. Civilization has made inroads into their very souls, has layered veneers of refinement and artifice that they cannot strip off."15 In fact, only the female characters are thus entrapped, but not through excessive refinement and artifice. Rather, through rigid control and deprivation, Emilie could not even fulfill the domestic roles assigned to her.

One of the effects of Emilie's socialization is a pronounced agoraphobia. Her marriage assures that she will remain in the encircling domain where her life has turned since the age of ten, between her mother and her uncle (father-in-law). The real climax of the narrative results from Emilie's decision to leave home at the age of thirty in order to consult the celebrated Dr. Tronchin in Geneva. The voyage provokes a separation trauma so severe that Emilie thinks she is dying. In Geneva she is thrown into a vortex of sights, sounds, places, and motion that projects her out of the cocoon into which her socialization has spun her. A lengthy description emphasizes the symbolic significance of a series of events that hold the promise of rebirth, of the movement toward fuller consciousness (III, 246-67). She publishes some of her writing, and she learns to make new friends and to temper her snobbish perceptions of other people. Most of all, like the Swiss women, she adventures unaccompanied out into the streets of the city: this spatial liberation is particularly important.

The experience abroad serves several narrative functions. For Emilie it takes the form of a mythological passage, offering her new guides and the possibility of taking control of her life. Away from the imperatives of behavioral models and gossip, Emilie is "free" to redesign her relationship to a world of expanded horizons. The problem is that after thirty years the deformities have affected the structure of the mind and the imagination.

Emilie's preoccupation with her body and with illness takes on epic proportions in the narrative: the body is a recurring image, sickness a central metaphor around which the action crystallizes. It is a way of exteralizing stress and anxiety, the concomitants of her existential situation, and of projecting normative structures.

13 Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay, Mes Moments heureux (Geneve: De Mon Imprimerie, 1759), p. 5. 14 Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay, La Signora d'Epinay e l'abate Galiani. Lettere inedite (1769-1772),

ed. F. Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1929), p. 133. '5 Simha, p. 140. (See note 5.) This is the best source of biographical and critical information on

Louise d'Epinay and her work.

48 FRENCH REVIEW




A peculiar aspect of the social role that Emilie plays is her perception that she should appear to be unhappy. As a young wife she had expressed the fear that "on ne me fasse un crime dans le monde de n'etre pas assez malheureuse" (I, 447). Her near death on the way to Geneva, and the long description of her final illness that terminates the story, are pivotal moments that vindicate her existence and suggest an apotheosis. The flirtation with death is an analogue of her despair: "Oh! quand viendra la fin de tant de maux? Il me semble que je suis comme un banni, exile dans un monde 6tranger" (II, 338). It is disturbing to note that the self-identity of the author herself was defined in part by illness, so that she was happiest when she was sick.16

What the Histoire contributes to eighteenth-century French letters are acts of self-cognition that lead to an elementary confrontation with consciousness itself and the recognition of the protean self as a literary subject. If it falls short of the ideal accomplishment of autobiography as we now understand its potential, there are good reasons. In his Metaphors of Self, James Olney writes of the "theorizing subject that reaches out in consciousness to organize the objects of the world."'7 But the conjunction of time and space that permits one, as through a stereopticon, to focus on a particular self depends on a level of abstraction that women seem not to attain because of their remoteness from the Logos.l8 In her long narrative d'Epinay demonstrates how opaque a woman's existence may seem. "I1 y a des jours oiu je regarde comme une corvee d'avoir a recevoir les gens les plus aimables," writes Emilie in her journal. "Quelquefois meme mes amis m'importunent. Cela ne doit pas les blesser; je ne me traite pas mieux qu'eux. Je suis si detache de moi-meme" (II, 447).

I would suggest that it is the alien nature of the world, or rather of women's experience in the world, of their "being" that cannot accommodate itself to any known model, that would account for the sense of space that circles back upon itself, and for the unwieldy extension of the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant. If the plot seems to violate familiar patterns of spatial organization it is because the action is interior: persons and events in the outside world are used only as signposts on the journey toward self-definition. Our expectations of diachronic movement are frustrated because the requisite temporal and spatial coordinates are rooted in a world view that was unavailable to the author because she was a woman. Neither the monomyth of the hero's voyage, nor even the dramatic thrust and counterthrust of the epistolary form as it was conceived and executed by Laclos, would have been possible for Louise d'Epinay. The fatal unraveling of the plot in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant takes place synchronistically in

16 Louise d'Esclavelles d'Epinay, Gli Ultimi Anni della Signora d'Epinay: lettere inedite all'abate Galiani (1773-1783), ed. F. Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1933), p. 55.

17 James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 15.

18 Cf. Roy Pascal: "Autobiography imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story. This coherence implies that the writer takes a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the moment at which he reviews his life, and interprets his life from it." (Design and Truth in Autobiography [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], p. 9).

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a time-space field that has the disturbing ambiguity of the mythological and the schizophrenic.

Epistemology, in this case female epistemology, derives from a cultural consen- sus on what we may be permitted to know. It is obvious that for women as well as men the cultural and literary filiation in the eighteenth century was altogether patrilinear. Emilie is encouraged to view women writers as "pretentious" (I, 141). Her attempt to find her own voice by composing a narrative work is problematic, further, because of her sense of audience. A (male) reader to whom she offers her manuscript for comment observes, condescendingly: "[le] style [est] un peu trop familier; la forme n'en vaut rien" (III, 174). She does not see that "la d6fiance de soi" is directly related to the fact that the critics in her head as well as the readers to whom she is dedicating her creative energy are exclusively male.

One of the goals in exhuming this particular woman's text is to call attention to what Rich calls "the subversive function of the imagination" (Lies, p. 43), which determined, whether or not this was the conscious intention of the author, the choices of anti-heroine, anti-novel, self-reflexive form. As d'Epinay tries to write her way out of the abyss into which her life had plunged as she wrote the second half of her narrative, she dons the mask of bitter irony. "Est-il possible," Emilie had asked, "que les femmes n'aient d'autres secours ni d'autres consolations que les larmes? Pourquoi donc avoir mis l'autorite et la puissance entre les mains de ceux qui ont le moins besoin de secours?" (I, 367). When later Emilie accepts the advice of her lover not to show her work to anyone for fear, he alleges, of corrupting the "naturel" in it (III, 171), she only dimly realizes the extent to which this injunction represents the repressive intervention of the Logos. "Regardez-le comme un monument reserve pour vous seule," he counsels her (III, 171). The reader by this time knows better: one cannot establish identity and meaning in isolation. The audience-of-one becomes a paradigm for the conflict between the man (the mentor, the Logos) and the inner voices of the writer, her "bonnet" (II, 417). The "I" that looks within carries a terrible burden of cultural anxiety.

The inward journey that resulted in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant began with the rejection of a persona that was the product of an unnatural "education." In order to accomplish this, Louise d'Epinay had to deconstruct the text that she had been handed as a social person. Although she knew that her lack of self-confidence was going to play havoc with her creative energies,'9 d'Epinay found the courage to begin the painful process of reinventing herself as subject, sustained by her "bonnet," the private alter-ego to and for whom she wrote. Her service to posterity was to try to invent a language that would begin to name who and what she was. There were no models for what is essentially a woman's story. D'Epinay's originality lies in the accumulated details of perception, feeling, and articulation that begin to reveal the inner lives of her characters. She helps us to speculate about female ontology of two centuries ago.

19 Lettere inedite, p. 133. Even when she knows intellectually that she is right, as with regard to

pedogogy, she admits: "Mais comme j'a la sotte habitude de me defier toujours de mes idees, lorsqu'elles ne sont pas confirmees par les gens en qui j'ai confiance, et d'ailleurs j'ai un certain penchant a etre un peu pedante, je croyais me tromper" (p. 90).

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FEMALE EPISTEMOLOGY AND SEXUAL POLITICS 51

In bestowing unchanged on her heroine the handsome image that Voltaire had invented for her ("un aigle dans une cage de gaze"),20 d'Epinay illustrates several points about women's writing in the past. Fact can become fiction with only a subtle change in emphasis. Although the sad persona of Emilie de Montbrillant is not at all consonant with Voltaire's witty epithet, the author felt herself to be a good deal more pitiful than others judged her to be. The eagle image doubtless seemed extravagant to her, but the symbolic possibilities of the metaphor of the caged bird were endless. In their interior domains-convents, drawing rooms, private chambers-women wait for the images and words to be brought to them. Remote from the naming process whereby the world beyond hearth and home acquires tangible, three-dimensional substance, upper-class women observed the world that they had little role in creating from behind their masks and cages.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA

20 D'Epinay includes all of Voltaire's flattering remarks in the narrative, including the reference to Emilie as a "philosophe" (III, 341).



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Louise d'Epinay's Account of Female Epistemology and Sexual Politics