Gender and Society in Eighteenth-Century France

Heidi Bostic
Michigan Technological University

Recent research across a variety of disciplines about the status of women in eighteenth-century France has drawn attention to ways in which gender influenced the period's cultural practices, from literary representations to legal ramifications. Eighteenth-century thinkers tended to support centuries-old commonplaces such as the notion that women lacked reason but were endowed with extreme sensibility, and the idea that women's place was in the private sphere of the home while men's role was to participate in the public sphere of politics, commerce and intellectual debate. These views, deeply rooted in a particular understanding of the relationship between the individual and society, bring us face to face with the tensions between eighteenth-century proclamations of universal liberty, equality and fraternity, on the one hand, and the Enlightenment's failed promise for women, on the other hand.

Course Description

Designed to create a context in which advanced undergraduates can engage with the issues outlined above, this fifteen-week seminar incorporates the study of French with analysis of gender in eighteenth-century literature and culture. A variable-content course with the general theme "The Individual and Society," this seminar was a logical choice for a focus on the eighteenth century because that era saw the formation of key modern concepts about the relation between self and society, ideas that continue to exercise a profound influence in our world today.

A principle goal of this seminar is for students to become familiar with the understandings of gender and society prevalent in eighteenth-century France and some of the consequences of these understandings. However, I also strive to facilitate student engagement with more general issues, including the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity; the Enlightenment concept of reason's power to overcome authority; and modern notions of democracy. Attention to the impact of gender on social structures and interactions guides the course's investigation of the individual and society. Studying eighteenth-century France in this course is not just an end in itself. Rather, students gain an informed understanding of why this period merits exploration and analysis, because we are all the inheritors of its legacy.

Major Course Units

The five major units of instruction all invite students to perform "reading in pairs," comparing male-authored and female-authored texts, a methodology borrowed from Nancy K. Miller. This reading strategy helps to highlight the ways in which gender matters in these works, providing a unifying thread that reinforces the seminar's thematic focus on women. Due to the varying amount of reading required in each unit, the class spends more time on some units than on others (see the course schedule below).

Unit 1: Enlightenment and Satire
This unit functions as an introduction to the eighteenth century, and includes some short lectures on eighteenth-century history and culture. If there are students in the seminar who have already taken related courses in areas such as history, civilization or political science, I encourage them to present to the class what they already know about the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. I believe it is important to cultivate active student participation in the course from the beginning, because early meetings become the model upon which subsequent class meetings are based. This unit's initiation to eighteenth-century France includes such topics as the belief in progress through reason and the slow crumbling of faith in the two major ancien régime institutions of authority: the Crown and the Church. I present satire as a typical Enlightenment mode of expression, and introduce some great satirists of the era. All of this serves as a preparation for the major reading assignment in the unit, Voltaire's Candide. I have found Renée Waldinger's edited Approaches to Teaching volume devoted to this book to be extremely useful.

Unit 2: Exploration and Exoticism
This unit exposes students to the interest in other cultures and places that characterized eighteenth-century French culture. Moving beyond the more obvious positive aspects of such interest, we discuss types of conflict and violence, both physical and symbolic, that arose in the wake of European contact with distant cultures. I draw upon texts like Julia Douthwaite's Exotic Women in talking to students about exoticism, colonialism, and the gender dynamics of these phenomena, including the coding of colonies and colonized peoples as feminine. During this unit, we read Graffigny's Letters from a Peruvian Woman and make some comparisons with Voltaire. In short lectures, I also present Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the text that critics most often compare with Graffigny's novel. This section of the course is enhanced by visual presentation and discussion of furnishings, household items and clothing that demonstrate the eighteenth-century taste for exotic artifacts.

Unit 3: The Encyclopédie and New Institutions of Sociability
This unit focuses on the emergence of a distinctly eighteenth-century public sphere and its outcomes. We discuss the various well-known salonnières and their salons, as well as other institutions of sociability including cafés and academies, focusing on the issue of women's roles in and exclusion from various institutions. I am indebted to Dena Goodman's groundbreaking work on women's significant intellectual achievements in eighteenth-century French salons, and to Joan Landes and Nancy Fraser for their work on women and the public sphere more generally. Short lectures during this unit address issues such as censorship, the periodical press, and anonymous publication, especially on the part of female authors. I present information about some of the longer key articles from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, including the "Discours préliminaire," "Encyclopédie," and "Raison," and students read several other Encyclopédie articles that highlight eighteenth-century French views on women, reason and the public sphere.

Unit 4: Reason and Sensibility
Building on this discussion of women and reason, we move into the longest unit of the course, which focuses on eighteenth-century definitions of reason and sensibility and the ways in which these ideas intersect with notions of gender. Because ideas about sensibility were closely related to physiological theories, it works well to include some information about the state of eighteenth-century medical science. I have used Anne Vila's Enlightenment and Pathology, as well as the 2002 Eighteenth-Century Studies forum on "Biology, Sexuality, and Morality in Eighteenth-Century France," for valuable information here. The readings for this unit include substantial selections from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (see the list of excerpts below, referring to both French and English editions) as well as Isabelle de Charrière's short novel, Letters from Mistriss Henley Published by her Friend. The availability of both Charrière's and Graffigny's novels in excellent, inexpensive recent MLA editions makes teaching them practical and enjoyable. For useful comparisons between Rousseau and Charrière, I have consulted Nadine Bérenguier's article "From Clarens to Hollow Park, Isabelle de Charrière's Quiet Revolution."

Unit 5: Gendered Declarations and French Revolutionary Culture
The final unit treats the issue of gender in the context of the French Revolution of 1789. In preparing short presentations about this period, I drew upon the resources in Jeremy Popkin's A Short History of the French Revolution as well as the 2001 special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on "French Revolutionary Culture." The four short Declarations that we read at this point are a good choice for the end of the semester as students' workloads increase, and provide especially good material for reading in pairs. We read the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen together with two women's texts that are rhetorically patterned on them: The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. This choice of texts calls for some clarification.

In the context of teaching French culture to American students, analyzing the U.S. Declaration in conjunction with the French Declaration activates students' background knowledge, helping them to relate the French document to a text with which they are more familiar. Furthermore, the inclusion of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments is useful for two principle reasons. First, it follows the Declaration of Independence article by article, just as Olympe de Gouges's piece echoes the male-authored French Declaration, enabling the class to perform an interesting rhetorical analysis and discuss the advantages of basing a text calling for women's rights on a well-known earlier document. Second, the 1848 Declaration's date of publication demonstrates the slow pace at which women managed to achieve some of the rights bestowed upon men during the eighteenth century. This fact illustrates the ongoing relevance of the Enlightenment legacy, including its emphasis on rights, precisely the point that I want my students to come away with. Eighteenth-century ideals and the documents produced to express them did not lose their pertinence with the end of the eighteenth century.

Pedagogical Approach, Assignments and Instructional Technology

As a seminar, this course is driven by discussion, and includes frequent informal student presentations. The "General Discussion Questions," reproduced below, help to guide the lines of questioning throughout the semester. I find it helpful to use what is familiar in order to introduce what is unfamiliar, as I explained above in the context of teaching the U.S. Declaration of Independence along with other French and U.S. Declarations. Furthermore, comparisons with current campus and community debates on sexism and representations of women help to enliven class discussion about gender roles in eighteenth-century France. The course assignments, described in some detail below, encourage independent, synthetic thought, and help students to organize and develop their ideas in order to make positive contributions to class discussion. Motivating students to prepare carefully prior to each class meeting helps to foster a student-centered classroom environment. The course assignments are as follows, with each assignment's portion of the total course grade indicated in parentheses:

Written Responses (20 %)
Similar to journal entries, the Written Responses offer students a context in which to express their thoughts about the texts we read. Expected to be around 250 words in length, each Written Response is comprised of two key parts: the first is a summary of information presented in the assigned text, and the second is a critical engagement with some important aspect of the text. I post a Written Response assignment on our course website one week prior to every class meeting, and students are responsible for turning in fifteen Responses over the course of the fifteen-week semester. This strategy allows students some flexibility to write Responses according to their own interests and schedules. The Written Responses about an assigned text are always due at the beginning of the class meeting during which that text will be discussed.

Painting Analysis (15 %)
Each student writes a Painting Analysis, which compares a painting with some other aspect of eighteenth-century French culture that we have studied. Students arrange the due date for this analysis on an individual basis, because they are encouraged to coordinate the date of their painting with the date of the text with which they compare it. For example, one very rich choice would be a comparison of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, which portrays men pledging to go to war while weeping women look on, with the gender dynamics in the two French Declarations from 1789 and 1791. Below, I include a list of suggested paintings for analysis. Two websites offering good archives of eighteenth-century French paintings are:
<http://www.culture.fr/files/imaginary_exhibition.html> accessed May 10, 2002
<http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTH18thcentury.html#18century> accessed May 10, 2002

Film Analysis (15 %)
For the Film Analysis, students draw upon the skills in analyzing visual media that they honed during the Painting Analysis, while also considering cinematic techniques and their effects. Teaching film presents the risk that students will interpret the filmic images as somehow offering the unadulterated "truth" about the eighteenth century. I encourage students to cast a critical eye toward the ways in which the film they choose constructs representations. I believe that this component of the course is especially useful in light of students' need to become more media literate. To aid their analysis, I ask students to consult Bywater and Sobchack, particularly the "Guidelines For Writing Humanist Film Criticism" on pp. 46-47. Suggested films for analysis are listed below.

Final Project (30 %)
The course culminates with a Seminar Project, allowing students to apply what they have learned about gender and society in eighteenth-century France to a substantial project of their own design. The list of "General Discussion Questions," reproduced below, offers some ideas for starting points. Many final projects grow out of a previous Written Response or a Painting or Film Analysis. The Seminar Project involves analysis of two different types of media (i.e., a written text and a painting; a written text and a film), and results in both a written paper and a visual presentation. The paper must be a minimum of eight pages in length, double-spaced, well-developed and carefully organized, with precise examples cited. Students may consult secondary sources if they wish, as long as these sources are properly documented in a Bibliography and in the text itself. Many of the students at my university have the skills to create wonderful multimedia presentations to share their research. To promote the study of both the eighteenth century and French, I would like to organize a display of Final Projects to share with a larger portion of the university community, as part of National French Week or during New Student Orientation, for example.

I have found that the best Final Project comes about when students submit their work in stages. In this seminar, students are required to turn in a topic during Week 9, an outline during Week 11, and a complete first draft of their paper during Week 13. At each of these stages, I provide feedback to help students improve their projects. The final version is due at the beginning of Week 15, when students also present their research to the rest of the class. I encourage students to turn in the final version early, so that I can give them comments of use in preparing one last revision. While this process of reading and re-reading requires a considerable investment of time, I have found that it yields an overall superior experience both for the student and for the audience listening to the final presentation.

Preparation and Participation (20 %)
As a seminar, this course depends upon contributions from all participants for its success. Thus, careful preparation and active participation in class, including short informal presentations, are an important aspect of the course grade. Participation includes regular contributions to the course's online discussion forum, described below.

Instructional Technology
This seminar makes extensive use of instructional technology, including a WebCT course website containing a discussion feature and links to a variety of online materials; language lab materials including CD-ROMs and film; and classroom computer and projector equipment that permits, for example, the collective viewing and discussion of artwork, manuscripts, and student-authored media work. Students must contribute weekly to an online discussion on WebCT, which includes responding to questions about online resources and images as well as extending our regular in-class discussions. The online discussion feature can also serve to begin a discussion that is subsequently expanded during class time. For example, prior to our first class meeting for Unit 5, each student compiles a list of similarities and differences between two of the Declarations, and posts this list on our website's discussion page. The discussion in class then draws upon the interaction already begun online, and includes additional online information to which I have directed them, about the texts' authors, their very different fates, and the wider historical context.

I have found that the major benefits of using WebCT include: the ability to post assignments and announcements, the easy accessibility of copies of the syllabus and other materials distributed in class, the ease with which I can direct students to useful websites, including those that have archived images of paintings and other cultural artifacts, and the availability of the online discussion so that conversations can continue outside of class time. The online discussion forum has been especially useful for ongoing collaborative reflection about similarities and differences between the eighteenth-century public sphere as manifested in salons, academies and cafés as well as through print culture, and the twenty-first-century public sphere that includes forays into cyberspace.

Meeting Challenges

All of the Modern Language seminars at my university are offered within a unique curricular context. Because this context is so unique, I have not emphasized it here. However, a brief description of it will help to suggest how this course can be adapted to fit other curricular contexts. Every spring, a section of each seminar is offered in French, in German and in Spanish. During most class meetings, the language groups meet separately, while on other days, all three language groups meet together to discuss one another's texts, which the non-target-language students read in English translation. Therefore, this course is designed around at least some French texts that are readily available in English translation. In an appendix below, I have included both French and English page numbers for the excerpts of the Confessions that all of the students in my seminar read. Selecting these passages was one of the more onerous aspects of preparing this course, and so I hope my selections can be of use to other teachers.

As I prepared and taught this course, three particular types of challenges arose: intellectual, curricular and interdisciplinary. The course presents an intellectual challenge because its ultimate aim is to provoke thought. It tries to get students interested in the eighteenth century while encouraging them to apply to their own life some of the most crucial ideas invoked in eighteenth-century thought, including freedom, equality, individualism, and the interaction between individual rights and desires, on the one hand, and social exigencies, on the other. The use of film and other media, as well as frequent comparisons to current debates on topics like gender rights and civic responsibility, helps to elicit student interest and enthusiasm, motivating them to navigate some of the intellectual challenges of the course.

Another important challenge is curricular. This class and other seminars like it serve as capstone courses for programs of study leading to Modern Language Certificates and Minors at my university. However, the institution does not offer Majors in Modern Languages or in cognate fields such as literature or English. The audience for this course, therefore, consists entirely of students whose primary area of study lies in other, and often quite different, fields. The course's attempt to link study of the eighteenth century to broader issues that still concern us today makes particular sense in the context of teaching non-Majors, who are less interested in gaining scholarly credentials than they are in relating what they learn in this class to their other educational and life experiences. That said, however, this course design could usefully be adapted to address other curricular contexts, whether as an advanced language and culture seminar for French Majors, as a Texts in Translation class, or as a course in Comparative Literature.

Finally, the seminar presents some challenges by virtue of its interdisciplinary design. This course requires students to engage with materials from a variety of fields, including not only literary and historical texts but also paintings and films. This cross-disciplinary scope is a serious yet invigorating challenge to anyone trained primarily in just one of the areas. I view this facet of the course as an opportunity for me to stretch my limits as a teacher. Well worth the extra effort required, this chance to expand my comfort zone yielded a richer course than a more traditional single-discipline class. The sustained focus on gender issues provides coherence, balancing the course's ambitious scope across genres and different types of media.

General Discussion Questions

1. What types of gendered identities does this text express?

2. In what ways does this text represent a break from the past, and in what ways does it seem
conservative?

3. According to this text, what are the proper spheres of activity for men and women?

4. How does this text negotiate the boundary between public and private spheres?

5. How are the interactions between people of the same and/or different genders portrayed in the
text?

6. What stance does this text take with regard to the centuries-old Querelle des femmes?

7. How does the gender of this text's creator seem to influence the text?

8. What does this text suggest with respect to the triple ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity?

9. How does this text portray individual rights and their interaction with social constraints?

10. What types of social critique are either explicit or implicit in this text?

Films (suggested)

Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears) 1988

Danton (Andrzej Wajda) 1982

La Nuit de Varennes (Ettore Scola) 1982

Ridicule (Patrice Leconte) 1996

Valmont (Milos Forman) 1989

Paintings (suggested)

Clément Belle, Minerva Hands Hercules the Decree Abolishing the Vices of the Former Government

François Boucher, Morning Coffee; Breakfast

Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Lock; The Swing

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paternal Curse; The Betrothal

Noël Hallé, The Magistrates of the City of Paris Receiving the News of Peace in 1763

Louis Lagrenée, Horatius after Striking his Sister

François Guillaume Ménageot, Allegory of the Birth of the Dauphin, the 22nd October 1781

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Marie-Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France; Self Portrait (1790)

Schedule

Weeks 1-2 Unit I: Enlightenment and Satire
Voltaire, Candide

Weeks 3-5 Unit II: Exploration and Exoticism
Françoise de Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman

Weeks 6-7 Unit III: The Encyclopédie and New Institutions of Sociability
Articles from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie: "Académie," "Caffé," "Femme," "Raisonnable", "Sensibilité, Sentiment," "Sociabilité," "Société"

Weeks 8-12 Unit IV: Reason and Sensibility
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions [see Reading Guide to Excerpts in French and English, below]
Isabelle de Charrière, Letters From Mistress Henley Published by her Friend

Weeks 13-14: Unit V: Gendered Declarations and French Revolutionary Culture
U.S. Declaration of Independence
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen

Week 15: Final Discussion and Final Project Presentations

Rousseau's Confessions: Reading Guide to Excerpts in French and English

Compiling the list of assigned reading selections from the Confessions was one of the most labor-intensive aspects of planning this course, and I hope it can be of use to other teachers. Several of the more motivated students in the course chose to read the whole book, but our discussions focused on the passages listed here.

French page numbers refer to the following edition: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, texte intégral, Gallimard Folio no 2776, 1973, ISBN 2-07-039393-3. English page numbers refer to the Oxford World's Classics edition, translated by Angela Scholar, 2000, ISBN 0-19-282275-6. Each reading assignment begins or ends with (and is inclusive of) the passage indicated between quotation marks. The beginning and ending points always coincide with the beginning or end of a paragraph. If no quoted passage is given, students should read the entire page indicated.

Bibliography

Bérenguier, Nadine. "From Clarens to Hollow Park, Isabelle de Charrière's Quiet Revolution." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991): 219-43.

Bywater, Tim and Thomas Sobchack. An Introduction to Film Criticism : Major Critical Approaches to Narrative Film. New York: Longman, 1989.

Charrière, Isabelle de. Lettres de Mistriss Henley publiées par son amie. New York: MLA, 1993. Trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché as Letters of Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend. New York: Modern Language Association, 1993.

Curtis, Judith. "Françoise d'Issembourg d'Happoncourt de Graffigny (1695-1758)." In French Women Writers. Ed. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne
Zimmerman, 208-17. Lincoln and London: Greenwood, 1994.

Declaration of Independence U.S., 1776 available at <http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/declaration.html> accessed May 10, 2002

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen France, 1789 available at <http://www.justice.gouv.fr/textfond/ddhc.htm> accessed May 10, 2002

Declaration of Sentiments U.S., 1848 available at <http://www.closeup.org/sentimnt.htm> accessed May 10, 2002

Douthwaite, Julia. Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.3, spec. issue on French Revolutionary Culture, 2001.

Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.2, forum: Biology, Sexuality, and Morality in Eighteenth-Century France, 2002.

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers. Paris: Briasson, Le Breton, 1751-80. Reprint: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1966.

Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." In Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the
'Postsocialist' Condition, 69-98. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Gouges, Olympe de. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen available at <http://perso.club-internet.fr/herve_ga/femme.htm> accessed May 10, 2002

Graffigny, Françoise de. Lettres d'une Péruvienne. New York: Modern Language Association, 1993. Trans. David Kornacker as Letters From a Peruvian Woman, New York: Modern Language Association, 1993.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Jarrassé, Dominique. 18th-Century French Painting. Trans. Murray Wyllie. Paris: Terrail, 1999.

Landes, Joan. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Miller, Nancy K. "Men's Reading, Women's Writing: Gender and the Rise of the Novel." In Displacements. Women, Traditions, Literatures in French. Ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller, 37-54. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Popkin, Jeremy. A Short History of the French Revolution. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. Gallimard Folio. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Vila, Anne. Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Voltaire, Candide. Livre de Poche. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Trans. John Butt, New York: Penguin, 1947.

Wakefield, David. French Eighteenth Century Painting. New York: Alpine, 1984.

Waldinger, Renée, ed. Approaches to Teaching Voltaire's Candide. New York: Modern Language Association, 1987.

Whatley, Janet. "Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805)." In French Women Writers, ed. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, 35-46. Lincoln and London: Greenwood, 1994.