Crossing the Channel:
Socio-Cultural Exchanges in English and French
Women's Writings - 1830-1900
Barbara Pauk
Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western
Australia
Disciplines of English and Cultural Studies and European Languages and Studies
2008
Abstract
The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in
travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women
Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France
and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on
the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are
never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for
instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also
by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two
countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England’s
superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype
of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given
that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as
notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas
which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis
have been used as a basis for this investigation.
I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ ‘discourses of
difference’ (to use Sara Mills’ term), or alignment and ‘othering’ in regard to nation, class,
and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge
contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very
different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and
their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The
English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia
Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the
seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie
Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from
other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and
endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of
i
Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by ‘othering’ with
regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an
authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse
ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them.
This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called ‘woman
question’ through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of
gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.
ii
Contents
List of Plates
page iv
Special Note
v
Acknowledgments
vi
Introduction
1
1.
French Women and England: Shifting Perceptions, 1830-1900
23
2.
Frances Trollope, Lady Blessington and French Salon Culture
71
3.
Contesting National and Gender Boundaries: Flora Tristan’s London
Journal
129
4.
Woman and Evolution: George Eliot’s ‘Woman in France’
176
5.
Rewriting History: Julia Kavanagh and Marie Dronsart
205
Conclusion
248
Bibliography
251
iii
Plates
Plate 1 François Gérard, Corinne at Cape Miseno, 1819 Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Lyons.
Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Kren and Daniel Marx.
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/gerard/5corinne.html
(accessed 29/11/05)
page 101
Plate 2 Auguste Hervieu, Lecture à l’abbaye-aux-bois.
Frances Trollope. Paris and the Parisians. Gloucester: Alan
Sutton, 1985, p.408.
102
Plate 3 W. Greatbatch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Letters and Works of Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu. Ed. Lord Wharncliffe. London: Richard
Bentley, 1837, vol.1, frontispiece.
128
iv
Special Note
The Bibliography follows the standard Old MLA style for English titles but
for French titles follows the style set down by Nineteenth-Century French
Studies - Author Guidelines.
v
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people for their assistance during the
researching and writing of this study, in particular my supervisors Associate Professor
Judith Johnston and Senior Lecturer Srilata Ravi. Their generous support and
encouragement has never wavered during the production of this work. In interesting and
inspiring discussions, they showed enthusiasm for the project and shared with me their
perceptive insights in the field. They have brought to my attention works which I might
otherwise not have looked at and read patiently through my drafts, providing sound and
useful advice and giving me the benefit of their editorial skills. I appreciate also their
assistance with regard to my socialisation into the world of academic research, conference
presentation, publication and teaching.
Further, I extend my appreciation to my colleagues and friends for their encouragement. I
thank in particular Richard, Catherine, Sandra, Nin and Cathryne for reading some of my
drafts and giving me useful feedback. Finally, I want to recognise the financial and moral
support, care and love of my husband Luis, my children and parents.
vi
Introduction
Calais. – Dès que vous avez mis le pied sur le paquebot, vous êtes en Angleterre: on ne parle plus
autour de vous que cet idiome barbare dans lequel il va falloir escrimer désormais. ... Nous voici au
large: le bateau roule beaucoup; il tangue plus encore; le vent fraîchit, la houle est forte, les embruns
retombent en pluie sur le pont, que vient même balayer de temps à autre une grosse lame qui a sauté
par-dessus les tambours. Les courages faiblissent, les teints verdissent, les conversations languissent,
les coeurs s’affadissent.
Marie-Anne de Bovet1
Normandy is allowed to be one of the most cultivated parts of France; a fact which no one can feel
any inclination to dispute, who, leaving the clean and lively port of Southampton, takes his passage
in summer weather to Havre, and lands at that bustling town, amidst the screaming of innumerable
parrots, and the noise and clamour of French commissionaires.
Louisa Costello2
As the two epigraphs suggest, texts on another country, for instance travel books, are often
concerned as much with the conditions at home as with those encountered on journeys
abroad; as much coloured by preconceptions and misconceptions as by the actual facts of
the journey itself.3 Both these authors, Bovet and Costello, are betraying stereotypes and
prejudices from the outset of their journeys. Bovet, by associating the English language
with the term ‘barbarous’ and communication with fighting, suggests that English
conversation is unpolished and not worthy of a civilised nation. Costello, juxtaposing the
noisy French men with screaming parrots, portrays French people as lacking poise, selfcontrol and seriousness. Both travellers not only express their preconceptions, but also their
sense of displacement in an unfamiliar, foreign and potentially threatening place. Crossing
1
‘Calais. – As soon as you have set your foot on the liner, you are in England: around you one speaks only
this barbarous idiom in which you will have to fight from now on. ...Now we are off the coast: the ship is
rolling heavily; it is pitching even more; the wind becomes cool, the swell is strong, the sea spray falls as rain
on the deck, swiped from time to time by a big wave that has leaped over the ship’s drum. Courage is failing,
complexions become greenish, conversation is languishing, hearts become faint.’ Marie-Anne de Bovet,
'Croquis anglais,' Revue Universelle Illustrée 4 (mai 1889), pp.153 and 155. This and all subsequent
translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
2
Louisa Stuart Costello, A Summer Amongst the Bocages and the Vines (London: Richard Bentley, 1840),
p.1.
3
The fact that travelogues are never innocent has been claimed and demonstrated by many scholars such as
Susan Bassnett. Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford & Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1993), p.114.
1
the Channel may seem a short trip nowadays, particularly since the construction of the
tunnel which allows a crossing by railway, but during the nineteenth century it often
involved terror during storms and wild seas as well as seasickness.4 This study builds on
this idea that description is never ‘an innocent act of merely producing information’, an
idea which is common to different fields such as discourse theory and comparative
literature.5
Preconceptions depend, among other factors, on the destination. English travellers to
France tend to associate the country and its population with fashion, cuisine, amorous
encounters and unruly behaviour. Significantly, the English language attaches the suffix
‘French’ to words relating to food (French fries, French mustard, French toast, French
dressing), to fashion (French cuffs, French braid), and to sexuality (French kiss, French
letters) and to behaviour which transgresses social rules (take French leave, excuse my
French). Stereotypically, French people are superficial bon vivants, indulging in the
pleasures of life.6 The nineteenth-century English writer Margaret Oliphant states: ‘The
ideal Frenchman is still a light-hearted, frisky, dancing, singing, supremely polite
individual to the popular mind of England’.7 Oliphant’s ‘still’ indicates her personal
awareness of the way in which stereotype pervades nationalist prejudice.
During the nineteenth century, English perceptions of France were markedly informed by
the events of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic wars as well as the
competition between the two nations as colonial powers. French influence was linked to
social instability and a deterioration of values as for instance in an article in the AntiJacobin, a journal whose aim was to oppose radical ideas encouraged by the French
Revolution:
4
For more details about Channel crossings by Grand Tourists see: Jeremy Black, France and the Grand Tour
(Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.7-12.
5
Sara Mills, Discourse (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), p.115. Bassnett, p.114.
6
Philippe Delaroche, the reviewer of Peter Mayle’s Un Bon Cru, which has also been adapted for the cinema,
summarizes the way French people are portrayed in this work : ‘Le peuple français a la religion des sens et du
verbe; de la table au lit, il pratique et plaide la cuisine, le vin, le sexe’, [French people value sensual pleasures
and words; whether they are at the table or in bed, they celebrate and argue in favour of food, wine and sex].
Philippe Delaroche, ‘Le French Costard is taillé,’Lire 336 (juin 2005): 10.
7
Margaret Oliphant, 'French Periodical Literature,' Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Nov 1865), p.603.
Stereotypes are very constant over time. The Roman writer Tacitus described the Gallic people as superficial,
gregarious, frivolous, generous, witty and gallant in his work Germania. Horst Thomé, ‘Vorbemerkung,’ in
Nation als Stereotyp. Fremdwahrnehmung und Identitaet in deutscher und franzoesischer Literatur, ed. Ruth
Florack (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 2000), p.2.
2
Our fair country women, regardless of their superiority over the females of most
other nations, sink themselves into a servile race of wretched imitators; adopt with
criminal facility the regicidal fashions of Republican France; and so imperceptibly
and undesignedly, promote the nefarious schemes of those who seek to make them
the instruments of the Devil in destroying the influence of virtue, and in establishing
the empire of vice.8
Such views, reflecting fear of revolutionary ideas, were most pronounced in conservative
circles. But, as John Stuart Mill claims in 1824 in the radical Westminster Review, the
liberal journal Edinburgh Review also promoted many national prejudices against France:
‘Every opportunity is taken of showing how much the character and habits of that nation
differ from excellence; meaning, of course, by excellence, the English habits and
character.’9 While France is associated with superficiality, instability and immorality,
England is linked to superiority, seriousness, stability and virtue.
The French, of course, do not share these ideas. ‘La perfide Albion’, [perfidious Albion], a
common term for England, which seems to have been coined in the eighteenth century,
gives an idea of the stereotypes linked to England: hypocrisy, materialism, egoism and
concentration on appearances.10 Nineteenth-century French travellers often describe
English people as proud and haughty, believing themselves and everything English to be
superior, sometimes even as xenophobe, and overly concerned with their own comfort and
material gains from industry, commerce and colonial expansion. George Renard writes in
the Nouvelle Revue in 1885 :
Nous lui devons [à l'Angleterre] mille ingénieux perfectionnements dans l'art de
s'enrichir, même malhonnêtement. Les voleurs anglais, ces virtuoses du vol, n’ontils pas introduit de force dans notre langue le mot de pick-pocket, et ensuite, comme
le gibier traîne après lui les chasseurs, celui de détectives?
Pour revenir aux négociants anglais, ils n’ont pas seulement servi de modèles aux
nôtres; ils on été aussi leurs rivaux.11
8
'Admonitions to Women,' Anti-Jacobin 2 (1802), 149.
John Stuart Mill, 'Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review,' Westminster Review 1 (Jan. 1824), pp.521-22.
Mill develops this point in great detail over several pages. 521-5.
10
According to the OED it might have been first used by Marquis de Ximenès (1726-1817). ‘Albion,’ Oxford
English Dictionary online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50005220?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=Albion&first=1&ma
x_to_show=10 (accessed 10/03/2008)
11
Georges Renard, 'L'influence de l'Angleterre sur la France depuis 1830,' La Nouvelle Revue 36 (sept.-oct.
1885), p.39.
9
3
[We owe them [the English] a thousand ingenious perfections in the art of becoming
rich, even dishonestly. The English thieves, these virtuosos of stealing, have they
not introduced the word ‘pick-pocket’ into our language and then, like the game
which draws hunters, the word ‘detective’?
To come back to the English merchants, they served not only as models to ours,
they were also their rivals.]
As in this quotation, accusations of egoism and dishonesty are often combined with
admiration for English economic and imperial success. Occasionally French people mock
the English for their supposed need to travel and their lack of taste both concerning art
works and clothing. While they see themselves as masters in conversation and good
manners, they consider their English neighbours to have uncouth manners - as Bovet
implies in the epigraph - and to be monosyllabic and boring.12 However, these stereotypes
vary not only according to the destination, or to the writers’ political opinions as the
difference between Mill’s position and that of the Anti-Jacobin article suggests. They vary
depending on the writer’s gender, class, religion, nationality, and regional and other
alliances.
This investigation focuses on English and French women’s perceptions and experiences of
each other’s countries, France and England. The writings of English women about France,
and those of French women about England have received little critical attention, despite the
fact that in Victorian England travel-writing was undoubtedly a very popular genre.13 Many
studies on nineteenth-century women’s travel writing investigate questions related to the
tension between middle class ideologies on femininity and women’s activity in the public
realm, as travellers and writers. Scholars such as Shirley Foster and Maria Frawley outline
in different ways how travelling opens possibilities for women.14 My investigation could be
seen in this tradition, although it is not based on the genre of travel narratives but on
documents containing cross-cultural references and is more interested in the reciprocity of
12
While in France, stereotypes change according to the region described, capital or countryside, north or
south, in England, the different regions invite a considerable variety of observations. For more detail on this
variety see passages later in this introduction and chapter 1.
13
L. Tissot, 'How did the British Conquer Switzerland?' Journal of Transport History 16.1 (March 1995), 23.
14
While Shirley Foster argues in Across New Worlds that travelling allowed women to escape from the
constraints imposed on them by family and society, Maria Frawley claims in A Wider Range that it provided
them with the authority to write in areas outside of women’s sphere.
4
social and cultural exchanges.15 It is based on studies such as Sara Mills’ Discourses of
Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism and Reina Lewis’
Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, in particular on the idea that
‘discourses of difference’, or, in other words, ‘othering’ in regard to nationality, gender,
class, religious beliefs and political opinions, provide writers, in this case women, with
various narrative positions. For instance, women, while being considered as inferior to men
within Western society, can construct themselves as superior to colonial subjects.16
Although developed for a colonial context, these ideas are valuable for exchanges within
Europe, given that the perception of another European nation is as much informed by
practices and belief systems as that of a colony and likewise linked to notions of superiority
and inferiority, as appears clearly in the epigraphs and the above quotations from the AntiJacobin, the Westminster Review and the Nouvelle Revue. This study aims to argue that
English and French women use discourses of difference strategically to construct
themselves in their texts as well as to publish their opinions about women’s nature and
roles in society. The investigation of the texts themselves is therefore complemented with
the analysis of their production and reception, as far as the sources allow it, in order to
make visible women’s narrative and political strategies.
As alliances to class, and beliefs and values influence perceptions and preconceptions about
another country to a large extent, I will focus on texts by women from different
backgrounds, and producing different genres, for instance Lady Blessington’s The Idler in
France (1841) and Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians (1835). While Blessington
belonged to the upper classes through her marriage and spent some years in France,
Trollope was a middle-class woman trying to make ends meet. Notorious for her book on
America, Trollope travelled to Paris to get medical treatment for her husband and financed
her journey with a commission from her editor for a book on Paris. Both women did not
write typical travel books. Blessington focuses on the description of the society she moves
in, as well as the Revolution of 1830, and Trollope betrays her sociological interests by
15
This investigation could therefore be seen as drawing on the argument which Mary Louise Pratt makes in
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, namely that the colonizing nation and the colony shape
and influence each other, that cultural exchange is always reciprocal. However, I agree with Katherine Turner
that Pratt’s work presupposes a too homogenous image of Europe for her theory to be useful within a
European context. Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800: Authorship, gender and
national identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p.6.
16
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism. Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996),
p.4.
5
describing a variety of institutions such as prisons and hospitals. The French writer Flora
Tristan, who published Promenades dans Londres, [Walking in London] in 1840 (London
Journal in its English translation), was also a middle-class woman. Yet, unlike Trollope
and Blessington, she was a feminist and socialist; her work could be characterised as a
sociological study rather than a travel narrative and it probably influenced Friedrich Engels’
The Condition of the Working Class in England. Further, the investigation will include
journalistic work by George Eliot, in particular ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’ an
article which was published in the radical Westminster Review in 1854. Finally, I will
investigate historical works by the English novelist Julia Kavanagh, mainly her French
Women of Letters and English Women of Letters, published in 1862, and by the French
translator Marie Dronsart, whose Portraits d’outre-Manche, [Portraits from Across the
Channel] appeared in 1886.
This choice of texts does not correspond with my original intention to consider works by
English and French women to the same extent, because it includes only two French women,
Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart. In spite of intense research and useful tools such as
Bénédicte Monicat’s compilation of French travelogues by women and the homepage of the
CRIDAF, ‘Centre de recherches interculturelles sur les domaines anglophones et
francophones’, [Centre for Intercultural Research in English-Speaking and FrenchSpeaking Regions], which leads to different biographies, for instance, a list of French texts
on London by Richard Tholoniat, my list of primary texts remains unbalanced, although I
could locate numerous texts on London published by French men during the nineteenth
century.17 Further, my list showed that there are fluctuations in the number and character of
texts over time. France and its women have been the focus of interest for English women
throughout the century although the number of travelogues decreases in the last two
decades of the century in favour of other genres, such as historical works.18 Narratives on
England published by French women are scarce from the 1820s to the 1870s while they are
17
Bénédicte Monicat, 'Pour une bibliographie des récits de voyages au féminin (XIXe siècle),' Romantisme
77 (1992), 95-100. For more information on texts on England by nineteenth-century French men see my first
chapter. Richard Tholoniat, ‘Bibliography établie par M. Richard Tholoniat (Université du Maine),’ CRIDAF
(Centre de recherches interculturelles sur les domaines anglophones et francophones) www.univparis13.fr/CRIDAF/Travels/Tholoniat.PDF (accessed 18/07/07).
18
There are still texts on France destined for tourists. For instance, the Argosy, a journal targeting a middleclass readership, published an article on ‘Fair Normandy’ in 1890. Charles W. Wood, ‘Fair Normandy,’ The
Argosy 50 (July to December 1890), 140-158.
6
numerous in the last decades of the century. French women’s fluctuating interest in
England and its inhabitants will be discussed in my first chapter.
In English scholarship, woman’s travel writing has been a focus of interest for some time
already, resulting in works by Shirley Foster, Jane Robinson, Sara Mills, Mary Louise
Pratt, Maria Frawley, Elizabeth Bohls, Brian Dolan and so on. Works on nineteenth-century
travel writing tend not to focus specifically on journeys to France but rather to other
destinations, for instance Italy, like John Pemble’s The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians
and Edwardians in the South or one section of Foster’s Across New Worlds: Nineteenthcentury Women Travellers and their Writings. Studies which do at least partly focus on
France normally cover an earlier period, before 1830, and investigate texts based on the
‘Grand Tour’, which was almost always undertaken by men. Its most important
destinations were Italy and France, mostly Paris. Jeremy Black’s France and the Grand
Tour offers a plethora of information on Grand Tourist experiences in France.
In French scholarship, travel narratives by nineteenth-century women have become a
popular field of investigation only in very recent years.19 Bénédicte Monicat pointed out in
1994 in ‘Autobiography and Women’s Travel Writings in Nineteenth-century France:
journeys through self-representation’ that a large number of them have never been
investigated.20 Two years earlier, she had compiled a list of more than one hundred
travelogues by nineteenth-century French or Francophone women and later, she published a
study on travel writing by women: Itinéraires de l'écriture au féminin: voyageuses au dixneuvième siècle.21
French scholars have investigated nineteenth-century journeys between England and France
in the context of studies on travel guides or on the ‘Grand Tour’. Paul Gerbod, historian and
founder of the CRIDAF, ‘Centre for Intercultural Research in English-speaking and
French-speaking Regions’, focused specifically on travels between the two countries in his
19
Therefore, Bénédicte Monicat underlines the importance of comparative studies between nineteenth-century
English and French travel literature. Bénédicte Monicat, Itinéraires de l'écriture au féminin: voyageuses au
dix-neuvième siècle (Amsterdam; Atlanta (GA): Rodopi, 1996), p.7.
20
Bénédicte Monicat, 'Autobiography and Woman's Travel Writings in Nineteenth-Century France: Journeys
through Self-Representation,' Gender Place and Culture 1 (1) (1994), 61.
21
In it, Monicat discusses questions which are not related to this study. For instance, she argues that men and
women’s travel writing is distinctly different.
7
publications Voyages au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles. La France vue par les
Britanniques du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, [Journeys to the Country of Frog Eaters: France
Seen by the British from the Eighteenth Century to the Present] (1991), and Les Voyageurs
français à la découverte des îles Britanniques du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, [French
Travellers to the British Isles from the Eighteenth Century to the Present] (1995). Gerbod’s
works offer interesting background information for this study, but unfortunately, he often
omits to provide references. Some years later, in 1999, Jacques Gury published an
anthology of French travellers to England from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Le
Voyage outre-Manche: anthologie de voyageurs français de Voltaire à Mac Orlan, du
XVIIIe au XXe siècle, [Travelling Across the Channel: Anthology of French Travellers
from Voltaire to Mac Orlan, from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries]. The studies
by Gerbod and Gury include very few texts by women. Gerbod, for instance, mentions only
five nineteenth-century French women visiting England, the countess de Boigne, the
painter Madame Vigée-Lebrun and Madame d'Avot, who all three visited Britain in the first
two decades of the nineteenth century, Flora Tristan, as well as Marie-Anne de Bovet
whose travelogues appeared in the 1880s and 1890s. Although he mentions more English
women describing France, women’s texts are clearly not an important focus of his
investigation. In Gury’s anthology, women are neglected to an even larger extent, since it
contains passages by only two women: Madame Roland, who published her work in the last
decade of the eighteenth century and Flora Tristan.22
During the decades before the 1830s the three main domains of this study, the discussion
about women and their roles in society, cross-Channel travel and exchanges, and
perceptions of the two nations, are significantly marked by economical, sociological and
political events and developments, for instance, industrialisation, the increasing importance
of the middle classes and the French Revolution. Works about feminism in the two
countries by scholars such as Jane Rendall, Barbara Caine, Claire Goldberg Moses, James
F. McMillan and Susan Foley suggest that the French Revolution had a major influence on
discussions on women.23 In France, upper-class women lost their privileges founded on
22
A third woman, Marie-Anne Bovet is mentioned in Gury’s bibliography.
See Rendall’s second chapter ‘Feminism and Republicanism: ‘Republican Motherhood’ in Jane Rendall,
The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780-1860 (London:
Macmillan, 1985), pp.33-72; Caine’s first chapter ‘Feminism and the Rights of Woman,’ Barbara Caine,
English Feminism, 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.11-52. McMillan and Foley
23
8
wealth and class alliance. Emerging republicanism was linked to ideals of masculinity and
domesticity, and women were increasingly perceived as the seat of morality and patriotism.
Women’s foremost task was deemed to be the education of good citizens. The nation was
no longer represented by the king but by Marianne, a woman, often pictured as a mother
nurturing children.24 The concept, that virtuous women lead a retired and domestic life,
which was propagated by Rousseau, penetrated middle-class ideology in both France and
England.25 Women were seen as representing the nation but were deprived of civil rights.
The years of the Revolution also saw the emergence of feminism. Women participated
actively in the Revolution and, as a result, a ‘collective female consciousness was
developing’, as Claire Goldberg Moses states.26 Ideas on equality inspired women to claim
civil rights, publishing pamphlets and opening women’s clubs. The best-known among
them are Etta Palm d'Aëlders, Théroigne de Méricourt and Olympe de Gouges, the author
of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’. The voices claiming civil rights for women
found also some resonance in England. Sympathisers travelled to France to experience the
revolutionary events first-hand, for instance Helen Maria Williams and Mary
Wollstonecraft.27 Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued in the Vindication of the Rights of
Woman for a better education and civil rights for women, can be seen as the foremother of
English feminism. Although later feminists often did not explicitly allude to her because
she was notorious for her ‘immoral’ life, particularly after the publication of her biography
by her husband William Godwin, her ideas underlie many later expressions of feminist
opinions.28
indicate the importance of the French Revolution by indicating 1789 as the beginning of the period they
investigate: James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789-1914 (London & New York: Routledge, 2000);
Susan K. Foley, Women in France since 1789 (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
24
See Ruth Roach Pierson, ‘Nations: Gendered, Racialized, Crossed with Empire,’ in Ida Blom, Karen
Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long
Nineteenth Century ( Oxford & New York: Berg, 2000), p.44.
25
Turner, p.19.
26
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1984), p.11.
27
For more information about the influence of feminist ideas during the French Revolution on later French
and English women see: Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave published a
new edition of works by the English Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte West and Anne Plumptre on
revolutionary France titled Women’s Travel Writing in Revolutionary France, (2007).
28
For more detail see: Clarissa Campbell-Orr, ‘Introduction: Cross-Channel Perspectives,’ in Wollstonecraft’s
Daughters: Womanhood in England and France 1780-1920, ed. Clarissa Campbell-Orr (Manchester
University Press, 1996), in particular the first chapter ‘Mary Wollstonecraft a Problematic Legacy’ by Pam
Hirsch, pp.43-60.
9
In both countries radical ideas were not long-lasting. In 1793 female clubs were shut down
and politically active women were condemned. Feminism re-emerged only decades later, in
the 1830s among groups of utopian socialists, at the same time as the bourgeoisie were
consolidating their influence and imposing their ideologies.29 In the same years, the
question of the woman writer, the ‘femme auteur’, came into public debate.30 While the
field of the French novel had been dominated by women and their sentimental novels from
the Revolution to 1830, after, with the advent of the realist novel, an increasing number of
male authors wrote novels. In the battle between the sentimental and the realist novel,
writers used the rhetoric of gender, widening the discussion to women’s nature and place in
society.31
In England the Revolution was at first seen as liberation from the tyranny of absolute
monarchy and compared to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A considerable number of
English sympathised with France and the radical ideas of the Revolution. The importance
of this group is reflected in the success of Tom Paine’s work The Rights of Man, published
in 1791 and 1792: it had sold over 200,000 by 1793.32 But after some initial sympathy,
English public opinion turned decidedly against the French Revolution and, as Powell
states, ‘Anti-French sentiments became more pervasive’. Radical ideas were seen as linked
to the French Revolution, and their supporters condemned as antipatriotic.33 In this
conservative climate, the prospect of a Queen, prior to Victoria’s accession to the throne in
1837, resulted in discussions about public roles for women. My investigation will start with
the 1830s, a period when middle class ideologies were firmly in place and discussions on
the role and place of women was ongoing in both countries, England and France.
29
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century , p.41.
Christine Planté discusses this term and its problems, for instance, that it subsumes all women under one
heading, or that it elides the notion of creativity and inventiveness. An ‘auteur’ is a writer of any type of book
unlike the ‘écrivain’ who writes fiction. Christine Planté, La Petite Soeur de Balzac. Essai sur la femme
auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp.16, 26-27.
31
Margaret Cohen, ‘Women and Fiction in the Nineteenth Century’, Timothy Unwin, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to the French Novel from 1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.
58.
32
David Powell, Nationhood and Identity: The British State since 1800 (London; New York: I. B. Tauris,
2002), p.20.
33
Powell, p.19. This view resulted in actions such as the ‘Priestley Riots’ in 1791, an attack on the house of
the radical Joseph Priestley For more detail see ‘Wars and revolution’ in Powell, pp.18-30. But, as Powell
argues, the conflict in the last years of the eighteenth century was not between radicalism and nationalism
because radical ideas took different forms in Scotland and Wales.
30
10
During the same years, exchanges between England and France became increasingly
intense. Travel between France and England was difficult during the years of the
Revolution. In 1793 Pitt the Younger declared War on France and took the opportunity to
seize French colonies. This war continued with the Napoleonic era until the Restoration in
1815 and made travel practically impossible. From the 1820s to the middle of the century,
European travel changed significantly as scholars such as Mona Wilson, Marjorie Morgan,
Lynne Withey and James Buzard outline in detail. Steam-powered ships, which were
crossing the English Channel in 1821, and railways, made travelling faster, more
comfortable and cheaper.34 Portable railway timetables, first compiled by George Bradshaw
in 1839, and improved facilities to change currency, further assisted the travellers. In the
1820s and 1830s guide books appeared, providing practical information for travellers who
did not intend to spend years and months on their tour. Mariana Starke is probably the first
‘professional guidebook writer’.35 Her guides were followed by those of the English
publisher John Murray and by the Germans Karl and Fritz Baedeker. While the travel book
had contained both the minute practical details of the trip and reflections on the destination
and its artworks, natural phenomena, and population, the two elements were now in two
separate genres, the travel guide and the travel book. Travel changed further through the
organisation of guided tours by Thomas Cook, first within England, in the late 1840s, and
to Europe in the 1850s, for instance to the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1855.36 A year later,
he offered ‘a grand circular tour on the Continent’.37 The development was finally leading
to what we call tourism.38
The dramatic transformation in the means and circumstances of travelling led to a
‘democratization of travel’, as Marjorie Morgan puts it in National Identities and Travel in
34
James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840),’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing ,
eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.47.
35
Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750-1915 (London: Aurum
Press, 1997), p.69. For more details on travel guides see Withey, pp.68-74.
36
Mona Wilson, 'Holidays and Travel,' in Early Victorian England 1830-1865, ed. G. M. Young (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934), p.310-1.
37
Wilson, p.311.
38
For reflections on the terms ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’ see: Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840),’
pp.49-50 and Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp.37-50.
11
Victorian Britain.39 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leisure travel was largely
restricted to wealthy persons, mostly male aristocrats.40 Young English heirs went to
Europe on the ‘Grand Tour’ to accomplish their education, refine their manners and social
skills in Paris and visit the sites of the Roman Empire, which was seen as the cradle of
European culture.41 Lynne Withey argues that the ‘Grand Tour’ was mainly a British
phenomenon because there was a large and very wealthy upper class. The number of
French ‘Grand Tourists’ was significantly smaller.42 But some French nobles and
philosophes, among them Montesquieu and Voltaire, travelled to England which they saw
as a place of tolerance and freedom.43 With the previously mentioned changes, travelling
became increasingly accessible to the middle classes as well as to women and children, and
finally to the working classes. The possibility of having a guided tour encouraged many
people to take short trips or annual holidays.44 According to Paul Gerbod, the number of
passengers between French and English ports increased from 12,000 in 1815 to 30,000 in
1830, reached 40,000 in 1840 and almost 85,000 in 1852.45
As a consequence of the flourishing traffic across the English Channel, an increasing
number of French and English women from different social backgrounds had the
opportunity to encounter the neighbouring country and culture. Research by Chloe Chard,
Brian Dolan and Katherine Turner demonstrates that female ‘Grand Tourists’ were not
numerous.46 Like their male counterparts they were wealthy and mostly aristocrats. But
39
Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
& New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.13.
40
As my focus is on testimonies of cultural exchange, I do not mention here the merchants and other lowerclass people travelling to make a living, who did not produce travelogues, diaries or letters about their
journeys.
41
Buzard, p.39. Jean Marie Goulemot states that the Grand Tour took generally two to three years and at least
two of them were normally spent in France and Italy. Jean Marie Goulemot, 'Le Grand Tour comme
apprentissage,' Magazine Littéraire 432 (juin 2004), 34.
42
Withey mentions that in 1770 there were also government restrictions on leaving France. Withey, p.7.
43
Jacques Gury, Le Voyage outre-Manche: Anthologie de voyageurs français de Voltaire à Mac Orlan du
XVIIIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), pp. 2-4.
44
Wilson, p.311.
45
Paul Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français à la découverte des îles britanniques du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours
(Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995), p.29.
46
Turner names only two travel accounts before 1770, and twenty between 1770 and 1800 – including all
destinations. Turner, p.127 What she calls ‘voyage narratives’ is included in this number. For a list and
biographical indication on female ‘Grand Tourists’ see Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour: British
Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe. (New York: Harper
Collins, 2001), pp.289-296. Jeremy Black outlines that women either travelled with their families or to elope
or live with their lovers. Black, pp.130, 137.
12
already before 1830, the date which is generally indicated as the end of the ‘Grand Tour’,
middle class women with less means began to cross the Channel in increasing numbers.47
Middle- and lower-class women encountered more difficulties with regard to travel than
upper-class women who enjoyed privileges owing to their wealth and class. Lower-class
women will not be discussed in this study because even if they travelled, they normally did
not leave accounts about their journeys because they were often illiterate. The
consciousness of the middle classes was shaped by the concept of the separation of the
female domestic sphere and the male public sphere, a separation reiterated in periodical
literature and conduct books from the second half of the eighteenth century. According to
these gendered ideologies, travelling and writing for publication was not considered
suitable for women. So, even if they could afford to travel, they could not travel
unaccompanied. Anxieties about the trespassing of gender boundaries through their
activities, travelling and writing, appear in their travel books while aristocratic women were
less concerned with ideologies on femininity. When aristocratic women such as Lady Mary
Montagu or the French Countess de Boigne, whose work appeared in print only
posthumously, did not publish their work, it was because they found publication ‘somehow
vulgar’.48
Perceptions of the English and French nations as well as their subjects, the third focus of
this study, underwent some changes from the eighteenth century to the 1830s. Recent
scholars investigating national identity, tend to consider nation as a cultural construct that is
constantly reshaped and reinvented.49 Around the French Revolution, discussions on
nationhood and national identity contributed to a growing sense of national identity on both
sides of the English Channel. During the First Republic, the French could see themselves
no longer as subjects of the French king. Their identity was rather defined as subjects of the
French nation. In England, the formation of the English state, with the Act of Union, and
47
Chard indicates the years around 1830 as the end of the ‘Grand Tour’ and Buzard the years just after the
accession of Queen Victoria on the throne. Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel
Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
1999), p.11. Buzard, p.38.
48
Turner, p.144.
49
Marjorie Morgan speaks of the ‘protean nature of national identity and tradition’, p.156.
13
the inauguration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, represents a
result or a cause for the formation of a clearer sense of ‘Englishness’.50
The increased sense of national identity was also due to the increasing economic and
political importance of the middle classes which developed in England in the second half of
the eighteenth century, and in France slightly later, particularly after the French
Revolution.51 National alliance became more important than solidarity with a particular
class. During the eighteenth century upper classes were characterised by what could be
called cosmopolitanism, solidarity between European aristocrats, which was favoured by
the ‘Grand Tour’. James Buzard states that one of the aims of the ‘Grand Tour’ was ‘the
cultivation of a certain trans-European class consciousness’ through prolonged journeys
and intense contact with European upper classes.52 This sense of a cross-national alliance
decreased with the declining influence of the upper classes and the end of the Grand Tour,
in the 1830s. Thus, in the decades before 1830 the English and the French developed a
stronger sense of national identity and began to see each other more distinctly as ‘other’, a
development which was reinforced by the wars between 1793 and 1815.53
English perceptions of France and French views of England and their change throughout
the nineteenth century have received little scrutiny in scholarship on both sides of the
Channel. In England such perceptions are mainly discussed in the context of the appearance
50
While scholars such as Gerald Newman and Linda Colley argue for the former, David Powell opts for the
latter. Powell, p.14 and 18. Powell uses the terms ‘Great Britain’ and ‘British’. As Eric Evans states in
‘Englishness and Britishness: National Identities, c.1790-c.1870,’ the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ were used
interchangeably and Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston in Gender and the Victorian
Periodical, state that the latter predominated. I will use terms such as ‘England’ and ‘English’. Eric Evans,
'Englishness and Britishness. National Identities, 1790-1870,' in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British
History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.232; Hilary
Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p.125, footnote 3.
51
In both countries the middle classes were consolidating their influence in the 1830s. While in France this
happened under Louis Philippe, in England the widening of the census in the Reform Act in 1832 was part of
this process. It was the first time women were specifically excluded from legal rights. Kate Millett, Sexual
Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), p.66.
52
Buzard, p.41.
53
This does not mean that the French were not perceived as ‘other’ before. Lower classes always tended to
have more distinct prejudices against their counterparts. Gerald Newman cites the Gentleman’s Magazine
(1766) to assert that the reaction to France was strongly linked to the class affiliation of the traveller.
Newman, p.37. Jeremy Black quotes Thomas Greene who, during his visit to Paris in 1764, relates how he
and the painter George Romney were entertained by a mountebank and his monkey. ‘We could not but admire
the sagacity and drollery of the animal and at the same time could not forebear concluding that it had much
more the appearance of the human species than many strutting Frenchmen that we had seen.’ Preston,
Lancashire CRO. DD Gr F/3 fols. 16-17, in Black, p.21.
14
of a sense of national identity by scholars such as Gerald Newman, Linda Colley and David
Powell. In addition, some earlier works such as Christophe Campos’ The View of France
from Arnold to Bloomsbury, published in 1965, discusses France’s representation in
English literature and more recently Joanna Richardson’s ‘The English Connection: French
Writers and England 1800-1900’.54 French scholarship similarly offers some older studies
focusing on literary portrayals of the other country, for instance, Pierre Reboul published
Le Mythe anglais dans la littérature française sous la Restauration, [The English Myth in
French Literature] in 1962.55 A recent collection of essays published in 2006, Sylvie Aprile
and Fabrice Bensimon’s La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe siècle, échanges,
représentations, comparaisons [France and England in the Nineteenth Century, Exchanges,
Representations, Comparisons], contains numerous essays which explain the relationship
between France and England and their perception of each other at specific periods during
nineteenth-century history. Aprile and Bensimon’s work is important for this study because
it contains several essays on the competition and conflicts between England and France as
colonial powers and the influence of these incidents on their perceptions of each other. It
also contains an essay which has some similarities to my work insofar as it explores
Balzac’s use of stereotypes about England in his attempt to simultaneously condemn the
English political system and to see it as a model for France’s political future. Yet, Aprile
and Bensimon focus neither on works by women nor on representations of women.
Given that perceptions and descriptions of France and England depend very much on the
writers’ sense of their own identities, notions of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Frenchness’ will be
discussed shortly. Scholars such as Gerald Newman and Linda Colley argue that the
English constructed themselves against the French. According to them, in the eighteenth
century, England, Wales and Scotland were fused together through the different wars and
animosities against France rather than through a common culture.56 Colley writes:
54
Campos focuses on male writers such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold and George
Meredith. Joanna Richardson, 'The English Connection: French Writers and England 1800-1900,' in Essays by
Divers Hands: Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, ed. Richard
Faber (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp.14-40.
55
In the domain of studies on French-English relationships, the nineteenth century has often been neglected in
favour of the eighteenth, as Sylvie Aprile and Fabrice Bensimon state in ‘Introduction’ to Sylvie Aprile and
Fabrice Bensimon, La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe siècle: échanges, représentations, comparaisons (Paris:
Créaphis, 2006), p.6.
56
Powell, p.18.
15
Imagining the French as their vile opposites, as Hyde to their Jekyll, became a way
for Britons – particularly the poorer and less privileged – to contrive for themselves
a converse and flattering identity. The French wallowed in superstition: therefore,
the British, by contrast, must enjoy true religion. The French were oppressed by a
bloated army and by absolute monarchy: consequently, the British were manifestly
free. The French tramped through life in wooden shoes, whereas the British … were
shod in supple leather and, therefore, clearly more prosperous.57
Colley outlines that differences to France, particularly in religion, but also in political
systems and economic conditions, created a sense of unity among the culturally different
parts of England. Morgan, investigating travel narratives, likewise insists on the English
view of a contrast with France.58 She mentions freedom, which the English associated with
their nation at least from the sixteenth century onwards, as a constant and important
element in discourses on English nationality. Freedom was invested with different
meanings over time. Being first linked to Protestantism, it began to include also political
and economic elements, notably Parliament and constitutional monarchy during the
eighteenth century. Regarding these elements, it was often contrasted with the absolute
monarchy and the considerable influence of the Catholic Church in France. Some
nineteenth-century travellers conflate liberty in religious matters and Protestantism with
enlightenment and characterize the French as superstitious while others show some
sympathy for Catholicism. Later, freedom was associated with prosperity and order.
‘Englishness’ seems indeed to be contrasted against the French in the English perspective
and, the fact that in nineteenth-century English travel texts, writers often used the word
English for English-speaking people, designating the English as well as the Welsh and
Scots, points to a certain sense of a community.59
However, English perceptions of their identity are more complex, as the critical reception
of Colley’s work demonstrates: scholars such as Marjorie Morgan, Katherine Turner and
David Powell challenge the idea of the construction of English identity against the French
‘other’ for several reasons.60 They argue that England was not a homogenous entity and
57
Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
1992), p.368.
58
Marjorie Morgan, p.156-7.
59
Marjorie Morgan, p.184.
60
Morgan asserts that there was not one single English identity but a variety of them and Turner contends that
many English travel works resisted the myth of the evil ‘other’. David Powell similarly sees Colley’s
argument as part of a more complex reality. He points out that Colley excludes one part of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Catholic Ireland, and presents a picture of England that is too
16
that the contrast with France is only one element in constructions of ‘Englishness’ among
others such as their common industrial and commercial success and their role as colonizers.
England was industrialized earlier than France and had already, in the first half of the
century, extensive colonies.
French nationals, contrasting themselves with the economically successful English,
construct themselves as culturally superior and base concepts of their identity on their
history. Faith E. Beasley in Salons, History, and the Creation of 17th-Century France:
Mastering Memory explains compellingly that French national memory and identity is
largely marked by history and particularly by the seventeenth century, the period of the
reign of Louis XIV which is called ‘le grand siècle’, [the great century].61 Beasley describes
this century as:
The era that witnessed the birth of the French Academy, the reign of Louis XIV,
one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, the expansion of France’s political
domination to such far reaches as southern India, and the influence of cultural
luminaries such as Racine, Corneille, Descartes, Boileau, and Molière, to name only
a few, is also the period that saw the definition of what French culture was, and the
exemplary nature of this culture and the society it produced.62
Beasley mentions two important aspects here, the fact that the seventeenth century was
presented as symbolizing the superiority of French culture, including its language, and
secondly, the position of France as an imperial power in that period. In later centuries, and,
as Beasley demonstrates, up to the present time, this period has been privileged in French
historiography and considered to represent what is specifically French: witty and spiritual
conversations, gallantry and refined manners, and conviviality, all of which is practised in
one of the key features of this period, the salons.
Analogously to the diversity within concepts of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Frenchness’ there are
also marked differences in the descriptions of the other country according to the region
within the nation. In the view of French travellers, England (including Wales) generally
coherent and culturally homogenous, neglecting for instance the varieties within Protestantism. Marjorie
Morgan, pp.5-6; Turner, pp.6-7; Powell, pp.1-2, 10.
61
Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp.6-8.
62
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.5.
17
appears distinctly different from Scotland, and also from Ireland for that matter.63 The latter
two tend to be described with much more sympathy. For instance, in Blanche de Rivière’s
Quinze jours dans la Grande-Bretagne, (1862), Scots are by far preferred to English people
and Edinburgh to London. Towards the end of the century, Hermione Quinet an influential
Republican and widow of the politician and historian Edgar Quinet, betrays a similar view:
A Londres, on est écrasé par la puissance britannique, par sa prépondérance sur les
races du globe. Ici on respire le génie poétique de l'Ecosse et sa traditionnelle
sympathie pour la France.64
[In London one is crushed by British power, by its supremacy over the races of the
globe. Here one breathes the poetical genius of Scotland and its traditional
sympathy for France.]
London is associated with wealth and with the consciousness of its own superiority and
Scotland with traditional friendship. Scotland had become fashionable after Scott’s
publication of Waverley and was a must for intellectuals and travellers in search of the
picturesque in the 1820s. Ireland received more sympathies than England from French
travellers owing to their common religion as well as for political reasons. This feeling of
sympathy is often concomitant with blaming England for the cruelty of its policy in
Ireland.65 English travellers in France analogously perceive differences between the
different parts of France, although to a lesser extent. Paris and the countryside, as well as
northern and southern France, are described in different ways and their population seen
differently.
As this study investigates representations of women, it will be concerned with stereotypes
on French and English women. Although they take different connotations they often remain
basically the same, sometimes over a long period of time. The West Magazine states on its
cover page on the 26 of June 2006: ‘They’re sexy, beautiful and bold. Meet the French
actresses who keep getting better with age.’ In the article, the French actresses’ ongoing
success in leading roles, even as they advance in age, is explained by the fact that ‘they
have never been squeamish about sex’. They are contrasted against their ‘prudish American
63
For travellers to Scotland see: Margaret I. Bain, Les Voyageurs français en Ecosse 1770-1830 et leurs
curiosités intellectuelles (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931).
64
Hermione Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg (Paris: C. Lévy, 1898), p.38.
65
See my chapter three on Flora Tristan’s London Journal.
18
counterparts’. This description of French women in contemporary Australia contains the
same stereotypical characteristics attributed to them during the nineteenth century. For
instance, in Ellen Wood’s novel Within the Maze, first published in 1872, the narrator
states:
Several women – ingrained coquettes from their birth, as French women are often
born to be – threw glances of admiration at the handsome man [an Englishman], in
spite of the fact that their husbands – for that one day – were at their side;66
This perception of French women as coquettes, fascinating but neither virtuous nor faithful,
may originate in the days of the ‘Grand Tour’ when many young English aristocrats were
having liaisons abroad as part of this rite of transition to becoming a gentleman.67
The idea that French women were not virtuous was intricately linked to their reputation as
active and influential participants in social and cultural life which they enjoyed throughout
the nineteenth century. Instrumental in the creation of this idea was the concept that the
‘great century’, the seventeenth century, represented ‘Frenchness’. During this period, a
considerable number of women, most of whom have fallen into oblivion since, were seen as
having an active part in cultural life, providing an alternative to academic circles in their
salons. They were considered influential not only in forming modern French language, but
also as writers creating new genres, and as widely esteemed literary critics establishing new
criteria. Already during the seventeenth century this role for women was considered as
specifically French. This special role became one of the traits of French nationality, in the
perception of the French themselves as well as in British view. Seventeenth-century
salonnières were often seen as representing all French women and consequently all of them
were deemed to have important roles in society.68
66
Ellen Wood, Within the Maze (London: Macmillan, 1900), p.72
Buzard, p.41. Black argues that many ‘Grand Tourists’ had sexual relations abroad. Black, pp.122-34.
While Buzard suggests that sexual adventure abroad was accepted as part of the ‘Grand Tour’, Black argues
that public opinion was unfavourable towards it.
68
According to French dictionaries, the word ‘salonnière’ does not exist in French with this meaning of ‘salon
hostess’. ‘Salonnier’ is the adjective of ‘salon’ and a ‘salonnier’ or a ‘salonnière’ is a male or female
journalist reporting about the Salon, the annual art exhibition held in Paris. Le Petit Robert. Dictionnaire
alphabétique & analogique de la langue française, (Paris: Dictionnaire le Robert, 1977). In 1880, Maupassant
used the word for somebody who attends salons. Le Grand Robert de la langue française, (Paris: Le Robert,
1985). Even recent dictionaries do not mention the word as meaning a woman who conducts a salon.
Dictionnaire culturel en langue française sous la direction de Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert,
2005). Also none of the titles in the Bibliothèque Nationale contains this word ‘salonnière’. However, the
67
19
A combination of ideas about nation, class and gender led to the British idea of the morally
doubtful French woman and the French stereotype of the virtuous and domestic British
woman. In the second half of the eighteenth century, English middle-class men, who saw
themselves as embodying ‘Englishness’, presented themselves in contrast to unpatriotic,
cosmopolitan and Francophile aristocrats. Ideas on class were combined with anti-luxury
discourses, which were influential from 1850 on.69 The aristocratic traveller was often
described as frivolous and loving luxury and particularly upper-class women were
connected with fears that they would be corrupted by a taste for luxury, particularly French
fashion.70 While aristocracy, especially French aristocracy, was associated with profligacy
and immorality, middle-class English men and women were said to be morally superior.
These ideas were most prominently expressed by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
who markedly influenced French and English ideologies on femininity. When advocating
separate spheres for the two sexes, Rousseau condemned the life style of French
salonnières, who supposedly spent their life in public, and praised his native Geneva and
England, where he thought that the model of separate spheres was realized.71 Already in
Rousseau’s texts the notion that he is describing only aristocratic women gets lost. The
success of Rousseau’s work in France and England contributed to the popularity of the
concept that woman’s place was in the house. English women’s virtuous retired life became
intimately linked with the idea of English nationality while French women were deemed
influential in society but not virtuous.
In the French view, English women are portrayed in a variety of ways. Important is their
reputation as domestic and virtuous women and keen travellers able to create a home
anywhere. But these key ideas are interpreted differently and undergo modifications during
the century. Domesticity can bear positive or negative connotations. For instance, Gerbod,
based on numerous travel narratives, mostly by men, remarks on English middle-class
women in the first half of the century: ‘les épouses, douces, effacées apparaissent trop
soumises à leurs maris’, [the gentle wives who keep in the background seem to be too
expression figures in some online documents. See for instance: Gemma Álvarez Ordoñez, ‘Chateaubriand et
les salons,’ in Ecrire, traduire et représenter la fête, eds. E. Real et al. (Universitat de València, 2001),
pp.175-185. http://www.uv.es/~dpujante/PDF/CAP1/B/G_Alvarez.pdf (accessed 13/08/2007)
69
Turner, p.141.
70
Turner, pp.2 and 143.
71
This will be discussed in more detail in chapter two.
20
submissive to their husbands].72 Some French travellers distinguish between young English
girls, who supposedly had more freedom than their French counterparts, and married
women, who were subjected by their husbands. Similarly, the English woman’s reputation
of virtue is sometimes valued and at other times dismissed as pretence. For instance the
author of Les Dessous de la pudibonderie anglaise, [Underside of English Prudishness]
claims in 1898 that divorce has become common in England although ‘les dames anglaises
… prétendent être plus chastes et plus reservées que les dames du continent’, [English
women … pretend to be more chaste and more reserved than the women on the
continent].73 The representation of English women seems to vary more according to the
context than that of French women.
These preconceptions and perceptions of their French and English sisters both marked
French and English women’s discussions of the ‘woman question’ and influenced their
motivation to write about the other country, as will be discussed in the first chapter which
investigates the reasons for the small and fluctuating number of texts on England by French
women. This overview on French women’s writing on England will be followed by case
studies. The works of Frances Trollope and Lady Blessington, two English women who
proposed some changes to the situation of women, carefully avoiding being labelled as
radical, will be analysed in the second chapter. In contrast to them, the French feminist and
socialist Flora Tristan sought provocation. The third chapter will demonstrate how Tristan
used her position as a traveller and stereotypes on England and its women to convey her
feminist arguments and to stir public opinion. George Eliot was often considered to be a
conservative writer. Yet, in her review of several French works published in the radical
Westminster Review, she clearly developed feminist arguments, as will be outlined in the
fourth chapter. Finally, in the fifth and last chapter, I will investigate works by the English
novelist Julia Kavanagh and the French translator and biographer Marie Dronsart which
were published in periods of emerging feminism in their respective countries, in the 1850s
and 1860s, and in the 1880s and 1890s. They drew on the history and literature of each
72
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français, p.48.
Les Dessous de la pudibonderie anglaise, quoted in Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français, p.117. There is no
precise indication but he probably means Les Dessous de la pudibonderie anglaise, expliqués dans : les
divorces anglais, ou procès en adultère jugés par le banc du roi et la cour ecclésiastique d'Angleterre (Paris:
C. Carrington, 1898).
73
21
other’s countries as well as on stereotypes in order to rewrite women’s history. While they
emphasise women’s influence and merits, they carefully try to represent them according to
nineteenth-century ideals of femininity.
22
Chapter 1
French Women and England:
Shifting Perceptions, 1830-1900
C’est que Londres est une ville spéciale. Son charme ne se dévoile que peu à peu. La première impression
pour un Français est celle d’une angoisse poignante, d’un ennui mortel. Ces grandes maisons armées de
fenêtres à guillotine sans rideaux; ces monuments laids endeuillés de poussière, noirs de crasse tenace; … la
boue noire des rues ; le ciel toujours un peu bas ; ... tout cela causait ... un malaise indéfinissable à un cerveau
Sarah Bernhardt1
parisien.
L'Angleterre est le pays de la femme par excellence. Nulle part ailleurs, celle-ci n'est respectée au même
degré, dans la famille comme dans la vie publique. Toutes les vocations, tous les domaines sont ouverts à son
activité ou pour le choix d'une carrière. Qu'une femme soit jeune ou âgée, elle peut, étant seule, voyager, aller
au spectacle, prendre part à la vie publique sans être jamais molestée ou entendre des propos déplacés si elle
Ida Blanchard2
se comporte convenablement.
The number of texts on England published by nineteenth-century French women is much
smaller than that written by French men.3 During the same period, English women wrote
abundantly on France. Moreover, French women’s writing on England fluctuated
considerably over the century. To my knowledge, no text by a French woman appeared in
the first decade of the century, probably as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars which
raged between 1793 and 1815, making travelling difficult and positing England as an
1
Sarah Bernhardt, Ma Double Vie: mémoires (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de l'éd. de Paris: E. Fasquelle,
1907), vol.1, p.446. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2008708 (accessed 15/3/08) [London is in fact a
special city. Its charm is revealed only little by little. The first impression for a French person is that of a
poignant anxiety, of a deadly boredom. These large houses, armed with double sash windows without
curtains; these ugly monuments plunged into mourning by dust, black from lingering grime; … the black mud
in the streets; the sky which is always a little low; all that provoked … an undefinable uneasiness to a Parisian
brain.]
2
Ida Blanchard, Les Grandes Maisons. Une Institutrice neuchâteloise chez les nobles de Bavière et du
Royaume-Uni, 1879-1918 (Lausanne: Editions d'en bas, 2005), p.130. [England is a woman’s country par
excellence. Nowhere else is she respected so much both within the family and in public life. All vocations, all
domains are open for her participation or for the choice of a career. Whether young or old, a woman can
travel or go to the theatre on her own, take part in public life without ever being molested or hearing uncalledfor remarks, if she behaves properly.]
3
French men wrote on England throughout the century. The number of works is slightly smaller in the first
half of the century. To get an impression of the numbers see the Bibliography of travellers writing on London
by Richard Tholoniat.
23
enemy.4 In the 1810s a small number of works were published, for instance two
travelogues, one by Amélie-Julie-Candeille, a celebrated composer, musician, actress and
writer, and another by M. d’Avot, a writer and translator as well as Considérations sur les
Principaux Evénements de la Révolution Française by Germaine de Staël which contains
extensive passages on England.5 From the 1820s to the 1880s travel books on England
written by French women are scarce: I could locate only four travelogues: Flora Tristan’s
Promenades dans Londres (1840), Antonia de Oviedo’s Souvenirs de Londres tableaux
historiques (1861), Blanche de Rivière’s Quinze jours dans la Grande-Bretagne (1862), a
booklet of thirty-nine pages, and Pauline de la Ferronnays Craven’s Réminiscences,
souvenirs d’Angleterre et d’Italie (1879). In addition, some women integrated remarks
about England in their letters or journals, for instance, Pauline Viardot, a well-known opera
singer, or Adèle Hugo, the wife of the poet. Furthermore articles referring to England and
written by women featured in a number of newspapers, mainly in the feminist press. After
this relative silence of half a century, writing on England became increasingly popular
among French women in the 1880s and 1890s.
The publication of a series of travelogues on England in the last decades of the century is
remarkable because it is contrary to a general development. In the second part of the
century, travel within Western Europe seemed to have become more commonplace. Booklength travel narratives on France published by English women were practically absent
after the 1870s, probably due to a tendency to travel further afield. Elizabeth Rigby, for
instance, states in 1845:
France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, no longer count in a fine lady’s journal.
Trieste is their starting-post, not Dover; and Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Cairo,
4
James Buzard, p.38.
David C.F. Wright, ‘Amélie Julie Candeille,’ MusicWeb International (UK) (1994).
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2004/Feb04/candeille.htm (accessed 3/08/2004). In Considérations,
obviously not a travel narrative, Staël’s main focus is not on England. However, some chapters in the first and
second volume and more than half of the third volume describe institutions and the political, economic and
social situation in England, a country which has a prominent place in Staël’s oeuvre. André Monchoux,
‘Compte rendu critique de L’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Mme de Staël par Robert Escarpit,’ Revue de
Littérature Comparée 29 (1955), 117-8. The importance of England in Considérations has been explained by
the fact that Staël intended to write a book on England in analogy to De l’Allemagne and that Considérations
which was published posthumously might have been a draft for it.
5
24
the cities they desire to see ‘and then die,’ or return home and publish, as the case
may be.6
Blanche de Rivière, in Quinze jours dans la Grande-Bretagne, [A fortnight in GreatBritain], published in 1862, has similar thoughts when she feels that in this time
characterised by easy travelling, one could no longer describe at length European countries
like England.7 The numerous guide books which were available by then reinforced the
impression that travel books on European countries were becoming redundant. In this
context, the increase in the number of travelogues on England by French women late in the
nineteenth century demands an explanation.
In this chapter, I aim at exploring both the scarcity of texts on England by French women
from the 1820s to the 1870s as well as the increase in their number in the last decades of
the century. It is widely accepted in studies on travel literature that the knowledge and
preconceptions about the world and a specific destination markedly inform the way the
traveller sees and describes it. I will take this idea a step further, postulating that a
traveller’s decision to take up the pen or not is markedly informed by this prior knowledge
as well as their situation within their own society and as travellers. Consequently, I will
argue that in the first two thirds of the century, French women’s gendered position within
society, for instance their education and civil status, was not conducive to travelling or
writing and that the different aspects of England and its inhabitants which incited curiosity
at the time either did not interest them or lay in a domain which was not deemed to be
suitable for their writing, such as industry and commerce. Many women seem to have
shared Sarah Bernhardt’s opinion as expressed in the epigraph to this chapter, that London
was not an attractive city which, through its size, dirt and lack of sun, caused anxiety,
sadness and boredom. Furthermore, unlike their English counterparts, French women
generally did not see their sisters on the other side of the Channel as ideals for femininity
and extra-domestic activities and influence, and hence were not particularly interested in
them. At the same time, I will argue that the increase in the number of texts on England by
French women in the last decades of the century is due to changes in French women’s
situation – particularly emerging feminism and improvement of girls’ education - and to
changed perceptions of England and its inhabitants, particularly its women. Many French
6
7
Elizabeth Rigby, later Lady Eastlake, 'Lady Travellers,' Quarterly Review 76 (1845), 119-20.
Blanche de Rivière, Quinze jours dans la Grande-Bretagne (Saint-Etienne: Impr. de A.Cottet, 1862), p.2.
25
women share the admiration for England and English women which Ida Blanchard
discloses in the second epigraph. French women used the supposedly independent, publicly
active, and travelling English women to argue for a betterment of the condition of women
and to contest republican ideas which tended to relegate them to the domestic realm.
For the English nineteenth-century traveller and writer Elizabeth Rigby, the scarcity of
texts on England by French women is due to their lack of education:
The Frenchwoman … would make a shrewd observer and a brilliant describer – but
alas! There is one little impediment which stands in her way – a trifle, we feel
almost provoked to have to mention, which stops her pen – she cannot spell! 8
Not surprisingly, her French contemporary Philarète Chasles contradicts her in his article
‘Les Femmes Touristes de la Grande-Bretagne’.9 But according to Claire Goldberg Moses,
the majority of French women did not have access to schooling during most of the
century.10 It was only during the Third Republic that their education was significantly
improved. This was one of the factors leading to a marked increase in the number of
published and acknowledged French women writers in the last decade of the century.11 The
increase of texts on England by French women may reflect this improvement in women’s
education and the subsequent intensification of literary activity. Yet, given that French
women published travelogues on various regions throughout the century, it does not
entirely explain the tiny number of texts on England.
French women may also have ventured afar less frequently because public opinion may
have tended to be less tolerant than in England regarding women travelling on their own, as
an article in the Saturday Review of 1858 suggests in regard to unmarried women:
8
Rigby, p.104.
Chasles renders the above quoted passage of Rigby’s text in French, mentioning ‘she cannot spell’ in
English and translating it by ‘elle ne sait ni lire ni écrire’, [she can neither read nor write]. Philarète Chasles,
'Les Femmes touristes de la Grande-Bretagne,' Revue des Deux Mondes (1846), 302. Chasles regularly wrote
articles on French literature, often published in the Revue des Deux Mondes.
10
According to Moses, in 1867, 41% of the women who got married were not able to sign their name. Moses,
French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.177. Those girls who attended a school, normally daughters of
the aristocracy or upper middle class, went to schools and boarding schools provided by the Church. Diana
Holmes, French Women's Writing 1848-1994 (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), pp.11-12.
11
Holmes, p.18.
9
26
How often have we fought the battle of our country’s ways against the Frenchmen,
who can see nothing in the confidence we place in the purity and principle of our
maiden countrywomen but stupid or shameful indifference to their virtue!12
The idea that English girls had more freedom than French girls in various respects features
in writings by both French and English women.13 In the English view, it was related to their
women’s moral superiority and in French writing this freedom of the girls is often
contrasted with their situation after marriage.
Another issue related to women’s education is their knowledge of foreign languages.
Upper- and middle class English women normally had a certain proficiency in French. The
insertion of French terms in their letters and journals as well as in books about France was
common. By contrast, only few French women seem to have spoken English. While upperclass women such as Marie d’Avot understood English - she reports that she read English
literature in the original language – others such as Amélie-Julie Simons-Candeille, the
daughter of a singer spoke only rudimentary English and Flora Tristan, also from a middle
class background, found it difficult to understand the speakers in the Houses of
Parliament.14 Even toward the end of the century, few women spoke English. The writer
Julia Allart Daudet, the wife of Alphonse Daudet, confesses that she was embarrassed by
her almost complete ignorance of the language when she was surrounded by English
women speaking French.15 Towards the end of the century Hermione Quinet states
admiringly: ‘tous les Anglais distingués que je connais parlent le français dans la
12
'English Girls,' Saturday Review 5 (1858), 239.
Avot, for instance states: ‘Vous ne sauriez vous former une idée du tableau qu'offre un salon en Angleterre,
et la liberté dont y jouissent les demoiselles: elles sont ce que les femmes mariées sont en France; et les
femmes mariées ont ici une apparence réservée, qui donne à la société un air glacial.’ [You can’t possibly
imagine the picture an English drawing room offers and the freedom young girls enjoy in it: they are what
married women are in France; and here married women have a reserved countenance which gives a cold
atmosphere to society.] M. d' Avot, Lettres sur l'Angleterre, ou mon séjour à Londres en 1817 et 1818, par
Mme M. D. (Paris: Germain Mathiot, 1819), pp.215-6. Charlotte Brontë in Villette similarly describes how
girls in Belgium were constantly supervised and given no freedom at all while Frances Trollope claims: ‘To a
novice in French society, there is certainly no circumstance so remarkable as the different position which the
unmarried hold in the drawing-rooms of England and les salons of France.’ She claims that while in England
young girls dance, in France married women dance and young girls remain unnoticed in a corner. Frances
Trollope, Paris and the Parisians (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), p.210.
14
Avot, p.240, Mme Amélie-Julie Simons-Candeille, Souvenirs de Brighton, de Londres et de Paris, et
quelques fragments de littérature légère. (Paris: Delaunay, 1818), p.6. Flora Tristan, Promenades dans
Londres. 1842 L'aristocratie & les prolétaires anglais (Paris: Indigo & Côté-femmes éditions, 2001), p.54.
15
Julia Allard Daudet, Mme Alphonse. (1844-1940), Notes sur Londres, mai 1895 (Paris: E.Fasquelle, 1897),
p.72. For a biographical note see: Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de langue française de Marie de France
à Marie Ndiaye, eds. Christiane P. Makward and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, avec la collaboration de MaryHelen Becker, Erica Eisinger et al. (Paris: Karthala, 1996), p.178.
13
27
perfection, et quelques-uns sans le moindre accent’, [all distinguished English people I
know speak French perfectly well and some of them without the slightest accent].16 It
seems probable that the knowledge of the language and consequently a certain familiarity
with the culture, made English women feel more confident and competent to write on the
neighbouring country while French women’s ignorance of the English language contributed
to their silence. However, language competency cannot be a major reason for French
women’s silence on England, as French men do not seem to have been more
knowledgeable in the English language. Joanna Richardson states that of the French authors
who had close links to England ‘Vigny was one of the rare who knew the language’.17 Yet
French men wrote on England in spite of their lack of language skills.
The question remains why French and English attitudes to learning the language of the
country on the other side of the Channel were so different. It seems to be related to
understandings of the French language which, in France, is seen as a crucial part of
‘Frenchness’. Beasley records that seventeenth-century writers endeavoured to purify the
language at the same time as asserting its supremacy. She quotes one of the writers who
claims: ‘On parle déjà français dans toutes les cours d’Europe’, [French is already spoken
at all the courts of Europe] and expresses the opinion that it deserved to be the language of
all the peoples in the world.18 French was indeed the European diplomatic language up to
the nineteenth century. The seventeenth century also saw the foundation of the French
Academy whose aim was to preserve and develop French language and literature. This
understanding of the superiority and importance of the French language marked nineteenthcentury discourses and informs attitudes towards language learning. While French people
tended not to learn other languages, for English women, speaking French was testimony to
their culture and accomplishments. Unlike men, they generally did not learn Latin and
Greek, but French and perhaps Italian or German and, in their books, they proudly
exhibited their knowledge.19 Showing some proficiency in French obviously conferred
some prestige. Lady Morgan’s statement, that many Parisians were able to read and
16
Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, p.11.
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ p.25. Some of the French writers had English relations, such as
Lamartine and de Vigny who had English wives, and Sainte-Beuve who was the grandson of an English
woman pp.22-23.
18
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.68. (Translation by Beasley).
19
For more about eighteenth-century enthusiasm for everything French and its connection to class, see Gerald
Newman. He asserts that the following proverb was still in use in the nineteenth century: ‘Jack would be a
gentleman – if he could speak French’. Newman, p.15, see also pp.14-18.
17
28
understand English but did not speak it, illustrates that speaking English did not enhance
one’s prestige.20
French women’s silence on England may also be due to prevailing ideas on femininity
which did not encourage them to publish their works. Therefore, some works were only
published posthumously, such as the memoirs of the Countess de Boigne, which,
commenced in 1835, were not published until 1921-23. It is possible that others were never
published. Some women chose to publish under a pseudonym or anonymously. For
instance, the feminist Louise Michel states in her Mémoires that an article sent to a
newspaper signed Louis Michel was much more likely to be published than one signed with
her real name.21 However, in the period 1830-1880, I could locate only five anonymous
French works on England which cannot be attributed to male writers and may have been
written by women.22
French women’s relatively small literary production during most of the century can also
partly be explained through their legal situation which had not significantly changed since
the beginning of the century. The Code Civil, which served as a framework for the legal
situation throughout the nineteenth century, strongly reflects bourgeois ideology on
women. Legally, women had the same status as minors.23 This was, of course, another
factor which was not favourable to activities such as travelling and writing. However, this
fact distinguishes French women from men, but not from their English sisters who had the
status of minors as well and the same legal rights as children and idiots.24
Rigby claims in 1845 that French women do not travel at all, while she praises English
women for being excellent travellers and travel writers:
20
Lady Morgan, France (London: Henry Colburn, 1817), pp.195-7.
Louise Michel, Mémoires (Paris: F. Maspero, 1979), p.78.
22
Huit jours à Londres, signé L.N. Boulogne 1838; Cinq jours en Angleterre en 1840 (Paris: Guiraudet et
Jouaust, 1841); Souvenirs d'Angleterre en 1844 (Paris: Typographie Lacrampe, 1845). A fourth work is rather
a travel guide than a travel book: Huit jours à Londres pour 150 F, Faure, 1862. A fifth work figures in
Tholoniat’s bibliography but is not available at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: Voyage de Paris à
Londres, (septembre 1851) Musée P. Arbaud; another anonymous work seems to have been written by a man
given that, when he mentions the lavatories for ladies and gentlemen, he describes the latter. Voyage à
Londres. 1876. Notes et souvenirs (Lille: Camille Robbe, 1876), p.15.
23
Holmes, p.6.
24
Millett, p.67.
21
29
Whether as traveller, or writer of travels, the foreign lady can in no way be
measured against her. The only just point of comparison is why the one does travel,
and the other does not.25
Rigby's French contemporary Philarète Chasles similarly says of his country’s women:
‘elles voyagent peu ou ne voyagent pas’, [they travel little or not at all].26 It was a common
stereotype of the time that English people were enthusiastic travellers. Blanche de Rivière
for instance states, referring to the English: ‘on voyage’, [one travels]. (10)27 This idea is
also borne out by statistical material. Paul Gerbod asserts that between 1815 and 1830 only
10-12 % of the passengers crossing the Channel to Calais and Boulogne were French,
compared to 68-72% of English travellers.28 Thus, French women did indeed not travel
much in the first thirty years of the century. However, as has been mentioned in the
introduction, the number of French travellers increased significantly in the 1830s and even
doubled between 1840 and 1852. While Thomas Cook offered guided tours to France in the
1850s, travel agencies in France such as the ‘Agence Lubin’, ‘Voyages économiques’ or
‘Voyages pratiques’ only offered guided tours as late as the 1880s and 1890s.29 These
agencies made travelling easier, and may well have attracted a number of female clients.
Maria Stern’s observation in 1895 that the wish to travel was more frequent among French
people in those years is confirmed by Gerbod’s statistical material as well.30 He asserts that
the number of passages between France and England increased four times from 1855 to
1905 while at the same time the percentage of English travellers decreased from around 6065% to 55%.31 So, the relatively small number of French travellers and their increase in the
second half of the century may be another factor accounting for the development in the
number of texts by French women on England later in the century.
25
Rigby, p.102.
Rigby, p.102. Chasles, p.304.
27
M. d’Avot states ‘Les Anglais ont la maladie de changer de place. La femme d'un artisan tant soit peu aisé,
qui n'a pu obtenir encore de son mari de faire le voyage de France, se croirait morte, si elle n'allait passer six
semaines de la belle saison à Margate ou à Ramsgate.’[For the English the need to move is like an illness. The
wife of a reasonably well-to-do artisan who could not yet get from her husband a trip to France would
consider herself dead if she did not spend six weeks of the summer months in Margate or Ramsgate.] Avot,
p.141.
28
Paul Gerbod, Voyages au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles: La France vue par les Britanniques du XVIIIe
siècle à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), p.90.
29
Gerbod, Voyages au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles, p.108, Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français, pp.74-5.
30
Maria Star, Quinze jours à Londres (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1898 (1895)), p.32.
31
For instance in 1855 90,000 passengers travelled from Calais to England compared to 325,000 in 1905.
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français, p.72.
26
30
Furthermore, the circumstances of many journeys of French women to England were not
conducive to travel writing. Caren Kaplan distinguishes between commercial and leisure
travel, and migration. While the former participate in what she calls ‘mythologized
narrativizations’, ‘immigrants, refugees, exiles, nomads, and homeless also move in and out
of these discourses as metaphors, tropes and symbols but rarely as historically recognized
producers of critical discourses themselves.’ 32 While a large number of English travellers
came to France for the purpose of leisure, French people often had other reasons for their
journeys. For many of them, England was the country in which they were seeking asylum.
Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand fled there in 1793, during the Terror.33 Simons-Candeille
fled to London when Napoleon returned in 1814 and remained there until 1816. 34 Baron
d’Haussez, whose negative comments on the English Parliament Tristan quotes, fled to
England with Charles X in 1830, Victor Hugo in 1852 at the beginning of the Second
Empire, and Emile Zola in 1898 after his involvement in the Dreyfus affair.35 While French
people sought asylum in England throughout the nineteenth century, the number of
refugees seems to have been particularly high after the Revolution, as Simons-Candeille
describes the English in 1818 as ‘un peuple essentiellement égoiste, moqueur, rassasié de
l'émigration [sic] française’, [a nation essentially egotistical, mocking, tired of French
emigration].36 Gerbod asserts that after 1790, 60,000 to 80,000 refugees came to England
within a few years. Thus, a large number of French people came in contact with England
and its inhabitants through their need for political asylum.
In addition to those who went into exile, many French people went to England for
professional reasons. Chateaubriand, for instance, became Louis XVIII’s Ambassador in
England in 1822.37 Joanna Richardson notes in her article ‘The English Connection: French
Writers and England 1800-1900’ that most of the great French authors went to England at
some stage in their lives, for instance to deliver lectures. One example is Hippolyte Taine,
who after two visits to England to study its people, was invited to give some lectures at
32
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1996), p.2.
33
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ p.15.
34
Wright. For a list of her works see: Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de langue française, p.105.
35
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ pp.28, 37.
36
Simons-Candeille, p.30.
37
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ pp.15. Lamartine was offered the post in 1840 but did not accept it
whereas Alfred de Vigny unsuccessfully applied for it in 1848. p.26.
31
Oxford in 1871.38 Towards the end of the century, a visit to Oxford ‘had now become a
literary tradition’, as Richardson states. Mallarmé and Alphonse Daudet were two of the
visitors. Verlaine spent a few years as a teacher in England in the 1870s.39 Sarah Bernhardt
is probably the most famous French actor who worked in London but not the only one.
Blanche d’Antigny and Alice Ozy also spent at least one season in London, according to
Richardson.40 French people of other professions also seem to have migrated: workers,
tradesmen, French teachers and house personnel. Tristan gives the number of French people
living in London in 1839 as 15,000 while Gerbod indicates 7212 persons in 1851 and
16,000 in 1861.41 In short, French travellers to England were often exiles or immigrants.
While most of the migrants did not relate their experiences, those who did, described their
host country only marginally, probably because they had many other concerns. For
instance, the Countess de Boigne describes her life in England where she moved almost
exclusively within the exile community and offers very few comments on England or its
inhabitants. When describing a second journey undertaken in 1816, she adopts much more
the perspective of a tourist.42 Adèle Hugo, wife of Victor Hugo, focuses on family matters,
friends and the situation in France and gives very little information about Jersey and
Guernsey in her letters written from 1852 to her death in 1868. When she travels to London
to provide some diversion for her daughter, however, she describes in detail the ball and the
thé dansant they attended as well as the shop where they bought a dress for Adèle.43 Her
daughter’s journal reflects the same preoccupations, mentioning England mainly when they
fear that exiles will be expelled. Similarly, in Souvenirs et correspondences, published in
1896 under the name Madame Octave Feuillet, the writer reports her daily worries, for
instance that she sold her jewels to get some money, and does not mention the customs of
the inhabitants in Jersey which she describes as neither French nor English.44 The socialist
38
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ p.32.
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ P.34.
40
Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Phoenix,
2000 (1967)), pp.17, 91, 94.
41
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.30., Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français, pp.33 and 72.
42
Éléonore-Adèle d'Osmond Boigne, Récits d'une tante: mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d'Osmond,
publiés intégralement d'après le manuscrit original (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de l'éd. de Paris: E.
Paul, 1921-23), vol.1 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2014366 (accessed 16/10/07).
vol.2 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k201437k (accessed 16/10/07). The difference between vol.1 and
vol.2 might partly be due to the fact that she was very young during her exile.
43
Simon Gustave, La Vie d'une femme (Paris: P. Ollendorf, 1914), pp.299-430.
44
Octave Mme Feuillet, Souvenirs et correspondances (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1896), pp.113 and 124.
39
32
writer Louise Michel, who had actively participated in the Commune and was exported to
New Caledonia, only speaks of the exiles in London, where she stops over on her way
home after an amnesty.45 Not only exiles but also women who were in England for
professional reasons often did not provide a portrayal of their host society in their letters,
journals or memoirs. For instance, the celebrated actress Rachel relates her immense
successes on stage and how the young queen received her and yet she does not comment on
the country except that she calls it ‘cette riche Angleterre’, [this rich England].46 Sarah
Bernhardt, when relating that she was in London for twenty-one seasons, dedicates merely
two pages to London. After the negative first impression quoted in the epigraph, she relates
that she started liking some aspects of the city and particularly its inhabitants who were a
more constant and affectionate audience than the Parisians.47 The fact that French exiles or
migrants often did not describe their host country might also be related to their language
skills which, as mentioned earlier, were often poor, and hence their lack of interaction with
the English.
Topics related to England discussed by nineteenth-century French men either lay outside
the boundaries of what were deemed suitable subjects for French women or did not capture
their interest. England was reputed for its industrial and commercial success. Jacques Gury
rightly states that England was in most domains twenty years in advance relative to France
and therefore was often the object of comparative studies.48 Many French people admired
the English industrial revolution and commercial success, studied it and reported their
results.49 This interest is also reflected in the impressive number of visitors the various
international exhibitions attracted. They were held in London every decade, and were
aimed at presenting England’s progress in all domains. The novelist and journalist
Frederick Hardman, states in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of 1854 about the first
45
Michel, Mémoires p.249.
Georges Heylli, Rachel d'après sa correspondance (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1882), pp.164;156165. Rachel was a very celebrated actress in England and gets a mention in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as well
as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. She figures also prominently in Lady Davies’ work. Lady Luay
Clementina Davies, Recollections of Society in France and England, 1872 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872),
vol.2, chapter 17.
47
Bernhardt, pp.446-7.
48
Gury, p.8.
49
Example : Pierre Marie Sébastien Catineau-Laroche, La France et l'Angleterre comparées sous le rapport
des industries agricole, manufacturière et commerciale et conséquences que l'on doit tirer de cette
comparaison (1844). According to Margaret I. Bain, in the years after 1815, the French government sent
people to England to get exact information about the marine and the economic organization of England. Bain,
p.124.
46
33
Exhibition in London: ‘the attractions of the year 1851, have brought the French to our
shores by tens of thousands.’50 Davis indicates that 27,000 French people paid a visit to
England during the six months of the Exhibition while the number of all foreign visitors in
the three previous years is estimated at 21,500.51 The importance of these international
exhibitions is illustrated by the fact that they also gave rise to a large number of
publications, particularly the exhibitions of 1855 and 1862.52
Through the earlier industrial development, England also had to deal far sooner with the
problems relating to the process of industrialisation. French writers thus studied not only
England’s industry and commerce, but also its administration, its prison system, pauperism,
urbanism and so on. Consequently, there was an abundance of French studies describing
sociological, political and economic aspects or institutions of England throughout the
century. 53
The texts depicting England’s industrial and commercial success or the ensuing social
problems were almost exclusively written by men. Women were deemed to be neither
knowledgeable nor competent to write on topics requiring a precise analysis such as
industry and commerce and their consequences for society. The reception of Tristan’s
work, which discusses in detail social and economic problems resulting from
industrialisation and thriving commerce, reflects this gendered criticism of texts as will be
discussed in my third chapter. As a consequence of thematic constraints imposed on them,
50
Frederick Hardman, 'The English at Home by a Frenchman abroad,' Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 75
(Jan. 1854), 37.
51
John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud, England: Sutton, 1999), p.177. One can assume that the
following exhibitions, for instance in 1855 and 1867 in Paris and in 1862 in London, again attracted numerous
visitors. An impressive 75,000 visitors used the services of Thomas Cook to visit the Exhibition of 1878.
‘Voyages en France, chronologie,’ Gallica, http://gallica.bnf.fr/Voyages en France (accessed 23/07/2007).
52
The following list of works on the Exhibition of 1851 is not exhaustive. The number of works on the
following Exhibitions seems to be smaller, but still considerable. Jules Boyer, Voyage à Londres avant
l’ouverture de l’Exposition de 1851; Michel Chavalier, L’Exposition universelle de Londres (1851);
Hippolyte Dussard, ‘Exosition universelle des produits de l’industrie à Londres’, Journal des Economistes,
121 (21 mai 1851), 12; Jules de Premary, Promenades sentimentales dans Londres et le Palais de crystal
(1851); Alexis de Valon ‘Le Tour du monde à l’exposition de Londres,’ La Revue des Deux Mondes, 11(15
juillet 1851), pp.193-228; J. W. Del Campo, Le Palais de Cristal à Sydenham près de Londres (1861);
Exposition internationale (1851, Londres); Almanach commercial et illustré de l'Exposition de Londres
(1852).
53
Examples : Eugène Buret, De la Misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France : de la nature
de la misère, de son existence, de ses effets, de ses causes, et de l'insuffisance des remèdes qu'on lui a opposés
jusqu'ici, avec les moyens propres à en affranchir les sociétés (1840); L'Angleterre comparée a la France :
sous les rapports constitutionnels, légaux, judiciaires, religieux, commerciaux, industriels, fiscaux,
scientifiques, matériels, etc / par un ancien avocat, a la Cour de Cassation et au Conseil d'État (1851).
34
most women did not venture to write on these topics. They merely integrated them as one
in a whole range of topics in their travelogues. For instance, one of Avot’s chapters is
entitled ‘coup d’oeil sur le commerce’, [a glance at commerce] and Blanche de Rivière
writes a chapter on the exhibition of 1862. Yet, these represent only superficial glimpses,
not a thorough analysis, and conform to what were thought to be the intellectual capacities
of women.
England was an attractive destination to romantic writers and painters who went to London
for its intellectual life; Stendhal, Mérimée, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Lamartine, to
name just a few.54 Expression of this sympathetic interest in England is the Revue
Britannique, which was founded in 1825, a journal which offered translations of articles in
English magazines and reviews.55 It also informed some of the works, for instance
Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe which were written in London.56 Women writers
who are considered to invest in romanticism, such as George Sand or Marceline DesbordesValmore, did not develop this passion for England, or at least not to the same extent.57
Neither Sand nor Desbordes-Valmore travelled to England nor wrote about it. Moreover,
while the poet Wordsworth in his home at Grasmere was a popular tourist destination, none
of the few French women writing on England mentions it, unlike American women
travellers such as Margaret Fuller and Catherine Sedgwick who made the pilgrimage to
Grasmere.
In the same context of romanticism, in worldly Parisian circles a taste for English fashion
developed. French dandies imitated their English forerunners.58 Gerbod states that ‘Dès la
Restauration, le goût anglais s’impose dans l’élégance masculine et féminine ... redingotes,
spencers, châles, tissus écossais sont à la mode’, [Since the Restoration, English taste is
dominating male and female fashion … long double-breasted overcoats, spencers, shawls,
54
Gury, p.9. Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ pp.17-28.
Pierre Reboul, Le Mythe anglais dans la littérature française sous la Restauration (Lille: Bibliothèque
Universitaire de Lille, 1962), p.187.
56
Chateaubriand describes his time in England in volume 4, book 9 of his Mémoires d’outre-tombe.
Chateaubriand, François-René, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ed. Edmond Biré (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1925),
vol.4, pp.233-312.
57
Anne K. Mellor argues that romantic literature written by women is concerned with different issues than
that by male poets which are generally included in the canon. There might be a similar difference in French
romanticism which cannot be explored here. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York &
London: Routledge, 1993), pp.1-15.
58
Chateaubriand mockingly describes the outfits and behaviour of English dandies. Chateaubriand, 4 : 246.
55
35
Scottish fabrics are fashionable].59 However, it seems that this fascination with English
fashion was considerably more pronounced among men. Avot who moved in aristocratic
circles is far from commending English women’s outfits for imitation. In her narrative,
English women falsely believe that they are dressed ‘à la française’.60 The duchesse FitzJames reports anglomania under Louis XVIII and Charles X but she outlines influences in
regard to sport and social institutions, not fashion.61 Only towards the end of the century,
does the idea that French women adopt what they see as English fashion, appear in
women’s texts. The novelist and journalist Marie-Anne de Bovet, for instance, ridicules
French people endeavouring to dress ‘à l’anglaise’.62 Romanticism seems to have kindled
enthusiasm about England and its fashion mainly in men.
Other aspects of England, such as its capital city which was much bigger than Paris, did not
interest French women enough to take up the pen. While English women such as Frances
Trollope and Lady Blessington were fascinated with Paris, its monuments and its
inhabitants with their gregariousness, good manners, and gallantry, French women’s view
of London and its inhabitants seems to be marked by their defensive and apprehensive
attitude. According to French visitors, the prevalent characteristics of London are
immensity, monotony, uniformity, regularity and boredom.63 Blanche de Rivière’s
description of Paris and London in the first pages of A Fortnight in Great-Britain
summarizes the perceptions the two nations have of each others’ capital cities:
L'aspect général ... [de Londres] est triste, les maisons d'une teinte grise et
semblables. Comparé à Paris comme régularité Londres aura toujours l'avantage;
mais comme animation, gaîté, entrain Paris restera la maîtresse du monde; Londres:
c'est la beauté parfaite de formes sans expression, sans feu, sans caprices, que l'on
admire mais devant laquelle on passe; Paris, c'est la Cléopâtre moderne, fraîche,
coquette, gracieuse dans ses défauts même et dont le charme attache et captive.64
59
Paul Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français à la découverte des îles britanniques du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours
(Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995), , p.24.
60
Avot, p.38, see also pp.6-8.
61
Duchesse Fitz-James, 'L'Anglomanie française,' La Nouvelle Revue 108 (1897), 594-7.
62
Bovet, ‘Croquis anglais,’ 153 and 155.
63
For instance Avot writes: ‘Douvres n'a rien de remarquable, si ce n'est cet esprit d'ordre, cette uniformité,
cette teinte d'ennui répandus également sur la première jusqu’ à la dernière ville d'Angleterre’, [Dover has
nothing remarkable except this sense of order, this uniformity, this tint of boredom which characterises
equally all the English cities]. Avot, p.3. See also: Boigne, 2: 134-5.
64
Rivière, p.4.
36
[The general aspect [of London] is sad; the greyish houses resemble each other.
With respect to its uniformity, when compared to Paris, London will always have an
advantage; but when it comes to vibrance, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, Paris will
remain the mistress of the world; London: that is perfect beauty of form without
expression, without fire, without whims, which one admires but in front of whom
one passes; Paris is the modern Cleopatra, fresh, coquette, graceful despite her
faults and whose charm attaches and captivates.]
London’s main fault is said to be its perfection, a characteristic which is often
complemented by remarks about the cleanliness of houses.65 Although London provokes
admiration it does not retain the visitor’s interest. This conforms to Gerbod’s statement that
French visitors often showed little enthusiasm about London’s monuments.66 Paris, in
contrast, is described as a fascinating city. Rivière compares the town to a courtesan by
using the expression the ‘mistress’ of the world, a term which has two meanings. The
characteristics she attributes to the city, ‘fire’ and ‘whims’, as well as the comparison to
Cleopatra, the coquette, evokes the English stereotype of the morally doubtful French
woman. As Holmes points out, Paris had the reputation of a sex city in Europe, particularly
during the Second Empire, when Rivière was writing this work.67 While Paris was
perceived as an interesting place by men and women, Rivière and other French women did
not describe London as a fascinating place but rather as an immense jungle where it is not
easy to circulate.
Life in London is pictured as similarly monotonous, as boring as its architecture. French
women assert that the English live indoors with very few distractions. Therefore Blanche de
Rivière for instance asks:
A la régularité de la ville ajoutez la régularité des habitudes anglaises, l'observation
exagérée du dimanche, l'absence de flânerie et dites-moi ce que doivent devenir les
malheureux qui sont nés riches?68
65
Avot, p.2.
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.36
67
Holmes, p.9. She indicates that Paris had more prostitutes than other European cities: ‘in the 1850s London
counted about 24,000 prostitutes whereas Paris, with a population half the size, had 34,000’, basing her
information on Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), vol.1, p.306.
68
Rivière, p.12.
66
37
[To the monotony of the city add the regularity of English habits, the exaggerated
observance of Sunday customs, the absence of flânerie and tell me what the
unfortunate who are born rich should do?]
Rivière describes how dull and sad London is on Sundays and at night – except in the
quarters where there is debauchery - a common complaint in French travel writing on
England.69 She claims that women make tea and men stay at home or go to the club. To this
very stereotypical description she adds what is commonly associated with England, the
very French notion of ‘spleen’: ‘On s’ennuie, aussi on voyage sous peine d'être pris du
spleen, et ... souvent on voyage et on a le spleen;’, [One is bored, therefore one travels or
otherwise one is affected by the spleen, and often one has the spleen while travelling;].70
Complaints of this kind emerge particularly clearly from Pauline Viardot’s letters to George
Sand.71
Mingling with English people does not promise much entertainment either. Avot hints at
the difficulty of getting into contact with them: ‘il faut beaucoup de temps de pénétrer dans
les seins des familles. Les familles restent isolées’, [it needs a lot of time to enter family
circles. The families stay isolated].72 English people are reputed to be distant, silent and
formal.73 When invited to parties, French visitors often complain about the big, crowded
and noisy events which preclude conversation and discussion.74 Interestingly, this
complaint is also uttered by English women such as Frances Trollope who deplores that the
English do not have the custom of little informal meetings like the French.75 French women
often show little sympathy for England and its people. For instance the singer Pauline
Viardot who repeatedly spent seasons in London observes in 1839: ‘C’est drôle, il m’est
impossible d’avoir pour mes amis anglais autant d’affection que pour ceux de tout autre
69
Rivière, pp.11, 20.
Rivière, p.11. The term ‘spleen’ has its origin in the theory of the different humours. In French, ‘spleen’
means melancholy, boredom and world-weariness without a distinct cause. Baudelaire famously uses it in the
title of a collection of poetry ‘Spleen et Idéal’ which is part of his most famous work, Fleurs du mal, [Flowers
of Evil] and of several poems included in the collection.
71
She writes in 1841: ‘nous noierons dans la mer l’immanquable spleen que vous donnent cinq mois de séjour
en Angleterre’, [we will drown in the sea the spleen which you get inevitably in the course of five months
spent in England]. Thérèse Marix-Spire, ed., Lettres inédites de Georges Sand et de Pauline Viardot (18391849) (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1959), p.115.
72
Avot, p.95.
73
The Countess de Boigne, for instance, describes its inhabitants as reserved and silent, in spite of her
admiration for England’s prosperity. Boigne, p.134.
74
See for instance Avot, p.38.
75
Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, p.373-4.
70
38
pays.’ [It is strange that I can’t have as much affection for my English friends as for those
of any other country.] 76 English people were repeatedly described as arrogant, xenophobic
and convinced of their own superiority. The stereotype of English haughtiness was already
mentioned during the Restoration. Avot, for instance, states: ‘Le peuple anglais n'imagine
rien au-dessus de lui’, [The English can think of nothing above themselves]. This was a
constant element in writings on England throughout the century.77 These descriptions of
England and its population help explain how unattractive it was to French women both to
travel to England and to relate their experiences.
This rather negative impression of English people may have been enforced by a virulent
anglophobia which marked the first half of the century.78 There are several political reasons
for this strong aversion against the neighbour on the other side of the Channel. The most
important were the wars between 1793 and 1815 which had left haunting memories. They
were refreshed by narratives of prisoners of war or exiles. For instance, Field Marshal
Pillet, in L'Angleterre vue à Londres et dans ses provinces, pendant un séjour de dix
années, dont six comme prisonnier de guerre, [England seen in London and in its provinces
during a stay of ten years, among them six as a war prisoner] published in 1815, describes
in detail the atrocious way prisoners were treated in England. Pillet’s relation is so negative
that it became notorious and prompted several publications which contested his account.79
Baron d’Haussez, an exile who contributed to the negative impression of England in Great
Britain in 1833, provided such a bleak portrayal as to provoke English reactions. In the
New Monthly Magazine it was reviewed under the title ‘French Libels on the English’.80
According to Gerbod, popular songs and plays are other testimonies to the fact that the
Revolution and Napoleonic wars resulted in considerable anglophobia.81
76
Marix-Spire, p.286.
D’Avot, pp.57-8.
78
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.23-24.
79
The works against Pillet’s accounts by J. Marsan, and by Jean Sarrazin are held in the Bibliothèque
Nationale.
80
'French Libels on the English,' New Monthly Magazine 39.3 (1833), 401-410. The anonymous writer of the
article refers to different travel accounts about England citing one - by the American Richard Rush (Envoy
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from 1817-1825) - as a positive account but questioning the very
negative portrayal of England by Baron d'Haussez.
81
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.24.
77
39
Despite a first ‘Entente Cordiale’ under the July monarchy, the negative perception of the
English remained and was exacerbated by conflicts in the colonies, the Oriental crisis in
1839-1840, tensions in relation to the abolition of the slave trade and the Pritchard affair in
1844. The Oriental crisis, caused by an armed conflict between Sultan Mahmoud and one
of his vassals, the Pacha of Egypt, revealed France’s and England’s clashing imperial and
commercial interests in the Middle East.82 The crisis ended with a defeat of the Pacha
whom France had supported. It was widely discussed in the newspapers on both sides of
the Channel and contributed to French animosities toward England.83 Some years later,
events in Tahiti brought England and France to the brink of a new war, as Philippe
Darriulat outlines in detail. 84 An English missionary, Georges Pritchard, had supported a
revolt against the French on the island of Tahiti, which was under French protection.
Pritchard was subsequently imprisoned and expelled. After protests by England, France
paid him compensation which was seen by the French opposition as a symbol of the
government’s submission to English interests.85 This opinion was already widespread as a
result of the discussions and treaties concerning the abolition of the slave trade. Servane
Marzin demonstrates how French politics under foreign minister Guizot, who tried to create
stronger ties with England particularly by treaties on measures to combat the slave trade,
finally led to a certain distance between French government politics and to a strongly
nationalist and anglophobe public opinion.86 The foreign minister was dubbed Lord Guizot
as a result of his politics. The three events, the Oriental crisis, the discussion about the
suppression of the slave trade and the Pritchard affair contributed to the formation of
widespread French perceptions of the English as ‘sec et arrogant, hypocrite et egoïste,
dévoré par son ambition, ignorant des souffrances d’autrui’, [cold and arrogant, hypocritical
82
For more detail about the Oriental question see chapter 3.
The anonymous author of an article on ‘France and England: the Syrian Question’ in the Foreign Quarterly
Review states: ‘The solution of the Eastern question, in a sense opposed to the wishes and anticipations of the
French nation, has produced a strong feeling of hatred to England in the minds of the great bulk of the French
nation.’ 'France and England: the Syrian Question,' The Foreign Quarterly Review 26 (1841), 452.
84
For the Pritchard affair see: Philippe Darriulat, ‘L’Affaire Pritchard, un paroxysme de l’anglophobie
française?’ in Sylvie Aprile and Fabrice Bensimon, eds., pp.219-235.
85
Darriulat, p.223.
86
Servane Marzin, ‘La France, l’Angleterre et la répression de la traite des Noirs sous le ministère Guizot
(1840-1848)’, in Sylvie Aprile and Fabrice Bensimon, eds., pp.237-254. The conflict between the two nations
concerning slavery also appears in literature, for instance in Frédéric Soulié’s Le Bananier (1843) and its
review by W.M. Thackeray. W.M. Thackeray, 'French Romancers on England,' Foreign Quarterly Review 32
(1843), 226-246.
83
40
and egotistical, consumed with ambition, ignorant of other’s suffering], as Darriulat
argues.87
Nineteenth-century French and English writers are in accord in the opinion that English
tourists in France also contributed to a negative public opinion about the English. The
successful novel writer, translator and literary critic Théodore Bentzon (pseudonym for
Marie-Thérèse de Solms Blanc, 1840-1907) states: ‘les allures de certains touristes sur le
continent ont donné lieu à un préjugé tenace’, [the behaviour of certain tourists on the
continent have given rise to deep seated prejudices].88 This may well be the case, since
several travellers claim like Rivière: ‘Pour juger un peuple il faut le voir chez lui’, [to
assess a nation you have to see its people in their own country].89 On the English side of the
Channel an anonymous writer describes English misbehaviour on the continent in
considerable detail in the Foreign Quarterly Review of 1843.90 In the article ‘The English
on the Continent’, the author mainly targets English inflexibility and haughtiness. In a
recent study on ‘The Victorians and Europe’ Bernhard Potter asserts that the English had a
reputation for xenophobia in Europe which was particularly pronounced between 1840 and
70.91
English residents on the continent likewise called forth French aversion. The anonymous
author of ‘The English on the Continent’ attributes this resentment to the large number of
English visitors, claiming that certain little towns and villages ‘swarm with English’, for
instance Boulogne and Tours, hosting 6,000 and 2,000 respectively.92 Many English settlers
spent their lives in France to escape jail or to live decently on modest means. Compared to
England, living costs were inexpensive on the continent and cheap education for children
was available. The author of ‘The English on the Continent’ contends that numerous
migrants were not satisfied with their situation and did not conceal their discontent from
87
Darriulat, p.234.
Thérèse Bentzon, 'A travers Londres. Notes et impressions,' Revue Politique et Littéraire 19 (10 nov. 1883),
589.
89
Rivière, p.23.
90
'The English on the Continent,' The Foreign Quarterly Review 32 (1843), 90-106. This is a review of Mrs
Bray’s The Mountains of Switzerland and Anthony Trollope’s A Summer in Western France, both published
in 1841. The reviewer, who seems to be English, explains why he/she exposed English weaknesses: ‘We
would rather do it ourselves than leave it to be done by others, and because we are not unwilling to show the
world that our integrity and courage are superior to our vanity.’ ‘The English on the Continent’, 106.
91
Bernhard Porter, 'The Victorians and Europe,' History Today 42 (January 1992), 16.
92
'The English on the Continent,' 102.
88
41
their French neighbours.93 These circumstances soured the relationship between English
and French living in France and negatively influenced French perceptions of the English.
As the title of Philippe Darriulat’s article ‘L’Affaire Pritchard, un paroxysme de
l’anglophobie française ?’, [The Pritchard Affair: A Climax in French Anglophobia?]
suggests, French anglophobia culminated in the middle of the 1840s. In the second half of
the century, the relationship between France and England was less marked by conflicts.
Instead, the two nations were fighting alongside each other in the Crimean war and their
friendship was strengthened through the reciprocal visits of Queen Victoria and the
Emperor. Further, the exhibitions on both sides of the Channel during the second half of the
century were not only expressions of the commercial competition between the two nations
but also a ‘stepping-stone to further Anglo-French cooperation’ as Davis asserts for the
Exhibition of 1851.94 They markedly contributed to an intensification of contacts on all
levels. This does not mean that the relationship between the two countries was free of
conflicts in the second half of the century. England’s neutrality in the Franco-Prussian war
and some clashes of interest in the colonies, over the Suez Canal, in Indo-China, (1885), in
Madagascar (1895), on the Niger (1896-8) and finally the Fashoda crisis in 1898 troubled
their relationship and, at least in 1898, led them to the brink of war.95 But these conflicts
were short-lived and did not prevent another ‘Entente Cordiale’ in 1904.
The few texts by women reflect the increasingly negative perceptions of England in the first
half of the century. The three works published in 1818 and 1819, whose authors lived in
England for a certain time, admire some of its aspects and try to give a balanced picture.
Staël echoes the idea of eighteenth-century philosophers that England was the country of
freedom whose political and social organization is admirable.96 Simons-Candeille’s
narrator, an old French musician who is married to an English woman, relates his
encounters and discussions with other characters, French and English and therefore, both
nationalities have their voice. Although the most sympathetic and authoritative characters
93
'The English on the Continent,' 103.
Davis, p.201.
95
Jean Guiffan, ‘L'Anglophobie dans les premiers manuels d'histoire de l'enseignement primaire sous la
Troisième République,’ in Aprile, and Bensimon, eds., pp. 255-67; Aurélien Fayet, ‘Jingoïsme et
francophobie en Angleterre pendant la crise de Fachoda, ‘ in Aprile, and Bensimon, eds., pp. 287-300.
96
She claims that England is ‘le plus beau modèle de l'ordre social ’, [the best model of social order].
Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux evénements de la Révolution Française (Paris:
Delaunay: Bossange et Masson, 1818), vol. 3, p.282.
94
42
are French and the text written as a warning for young artists who, out of some
dissatisfaction, might go to England, her portrayal is not overly negative. Avot, finally, is
not very positive in her description of English people but praises English agriculture and
cleanliness in houses as models to emulate. Later works show more clearly the antagonistic
attitude to England, for instance those by Flora Tristan (1840) and Blanche de Rivière
(1862).97 Flora Tristan’s work was notorious and, as Gury claims, was used by later writers,
thereby reinforcing the climate of anglophobia in France.98 This climate of distrust
obviously did not encourage French women to travel to England or to write about it.
A topic which should have potentially incited French women to write, the condition of
women on the other side of the Channel, did not motivate them, at least not until the last
decades of the century. In this, they differ from their English counterparts, who were
fascinated by French women’s reputation and admired their supposedly privileged position
in society and considerable role in public life. English women idealised French women in
their texts and constructed themselves according to this ideal as will be addressed in more
detail in my second and fourth chapters. The social and cultural role of English women only
became interesting to French women in the last decades of the century.
English women are stereotypically marked by their domesticity which is often mentioned as
a positive trait. For instance, for Germaine de Staël, who may have provided the most
positive European portrait of England in the first two thirds of the century, English
domesticity is clearly an ideal. She states in De la Littérature: ‘Si les Français pouvoient
donner à leurs femmes toutes les vertus des Anglaises, leurs moeurs retirées, leur goût pour
la solitude, ils feraoient très-bien de préférer de telles qualités à tous les dons d'un esprit
éclatant’, [If the French could give to their wives all the virtues of English women, their
reserved manners, their taste for solitude, they would do well to prefer these qualities to all
97
A third travelogue, Souvenirs de Londres. Tableaux historiques, published in 1861, by Antonia Oviedo
(1822-98), who had a Spanish father and a mother from Lausanne, and mainly lived in Spain and Italy,
depicts England in a more positive light. For information on Oviedo see ‘Antonia Maria de Oviedo e
Shonthal,’ Vita dei Santi, Beati e testimony. [summary of Manuel Gomez Stampa, Dammi Da Bere],
http://users.libero.it/luigi.scrosoppi/santi/antonia.htm (accessed 2/07/07) and ‘I Centenario de la muerte de
Antonia Maria de la Misericordia,’ http://www.planalfa.es/confer/boletin/web/centenario.htm (accessed
2/07/07).
98
Gury, p.11.
43
the gifts of a brilliant mind].99 Staël, who was three times in England, in 1813-14 for a
whole year, echoes Rousseau when she points out that English women do not appear
prominently in public life. Other French women share her positive assessment of English
domesticity and emphasize the good marriages in England. In Simons-Candeille’s work, for
instance, one of her characters mentions in a conversation that all the English women she
knows have a very good understanding with their husbands and her English counterpart
asserts: ‘Nos maris ...nous aiment, et se cachent soigneusement pour nous manquer de foi’,
[our husbands love us and cheat on us discreetly].100 Although she takes a mocking
distance, she replicates stereotypes about English and French marital life: cheating is
described as ‘traiter à la française’, [treating the French way].101 English women are
generally seen as having positive characteristics, namely domesticity and faithfulness to
their husbands.
Although this stereotype of domesticity often has positive connotations, it also leads to the
idea that English women are subordinate to their husbands. Chapter three will outline that
this is very much the case in Tristan’s London Journal. Even Staël states that ‘les femmes
se sentent subordonnées’, [women feel subordinated] to explain her observation that
English women do not participate in the general conversation.
102
The novel writer and
countess Henrietta Puliga de Quigini, at the end of the century likewise claims that ‘dans la
vraie tradition anglaise le principe de la subordination au mâle était absolue’, [in the true
English tradition the principle of subordination to the male was absolute].103 This
perception of English women as subjected to their husbands is widespread and, according
to Gerbod, found also in men’s texts.104 Avot even goes so far as to report an incident
where a woman was sold, probably inspired by Auguste Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret.105
99
Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Genève,
Paris: Droy, M.J. Minard, 1959), vol.2, p.336.
100
Simons-Candeille, pp.80-1.
101
Simons-Candeille, p.82.
102
Staël, Considérations , 3 : 272.
103
Henrietta comtesse Puliga de Quigini, Notes sur Londres (Paris: C. Lévy, 1895), p.49. This writer, who
was born in 1850, is also known as a novel writer under the pseudonym Brada. She wrote in French and
English.
104
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.48. Other example: The countess de Boigne states that English women
are ‘sans protection contre la tyrannie d'un mari s'il veut l'exercer’, [without any protection from the tyranny
of a husband if he wants to exert it]. Boigne, p.154.
105
The narration of an incidence of a woman being sold is reported in Auguste Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret’s
Six mois à Londres. See extract in Gury, pp.793-795. In one of her letters in Lettres sur l’Angleterre, Avot
44
Although she describes it as a single incident she generalises it: ‘Ne venez pas en
Angleterre, ma chère amie: on y vend les femmes; c'est une vérité incontestable’, [Don’t
come to England, my dear friend: women are sold here; this is a confirmed fact.]
106
Until
the last decades of the century, the idea that English women were ruled by men was
prevalent.
This prejudice was not overthrown by the knowledge that a considerable number of English
women were writers. Staël mentions Edgeworth, d'Arblay (Burney), More, Inchbald, Opie,
Baillie, asserting that there are many important women writers who are adored by the
French public and avidly read by the English.107 For her, the ideal of domesticity should not
prevent women from intellectual activity and she accuses French men of forgiving their
wives all the mistakes except superiority.108 Simons-Candeille also notes the large number
of English women writers.109 But in spite of these voices, the prejudice against English
women as domestic and subjected prevails, as in Tristan’s text where women writers are
characterised as exceptions among English women generally.
Despite their domesticity, English women are not represented as ideal, charming and
feminine or beautiful women. Descriptions rather mention their lack of taste, grace and
skills of communication. Avot, for instance, although she observes a positive development
towards more elegance in dress, states that the gracefulness of children is soon replaced by
stiffness, adding: ‘les femmes grimacent, et défigurent tous leurs mouvements en les
rendant masculins’, [women distort their faces and disfigure all their movements by making
them masculine].110 Simons-Candeille’s alter ego Mme Delrive characterizes English girls
as ‘gauches, timides et taciturnes’, [awkward, shy and taciturn], not a very flattering
portrayal either, although, in this context, it is preferred to the French ‘babillardes’,
[chatterboxes].111 While, according to Gerbod, men’s texts contain laudations of their
thanks her correspondent for sending her Quinze jours à Londres, which is probably the work which
Defauconpret, a former lawyer published in 1816 and again in 1817. Avot, p.94.
106
Avot, p.118.
107
Staël, Considérations , 3 : 288. Staël spells “Moore” and “Bayley”. She asserts that while French women
were famous for their conversation, English women were known for their writing. She depicts English women
in a very positive light.
108
Staël, De la littérature , 2 : 332.
109
Simons-Candeille, p.49.
110
Avot, p.9.
111
Simons-Candeille, p.59.
45
beauty, French women do not describe their English counterparts as beautiful, charming or
feminine.112
What is more remarkable than these different stereotypes and descriptions is the fact that
English women seem to share the negative opinions about themselves, at least to a certain
extent. While Ellen Wood states that ‘natural taste’ is not common in England, Blessington
suggests that French women have ‘a confidence in their own attractions [which] precludes
the air of mauvaise honte and gaucherie so continually observable in the women of other
countries.’113 It is telling that in all the discussed texts the notion of English women
imitating French women appears. In most cases it is combined with the assertion that such
an effort is hopeless.114 Not surprisingly, therefore, English women are not perceived as
fascinating by their French counterparts, either for their remarkable situation in society or
for their femininity and charm.
English women, on the contrary, find French women fascinating in spite, or indeed
because, of their questionable moral reputation. They either assert that French women’s bad
reputation is not founded on reality, as for instance Frances Trollope, or see it as an
additional interesting element. George Eliot, while condemning ‘gallantry and intrigue’,
adds: ‘but they certainly serve better to arouse the dormant faculties of woman than
embroidery and domestic drudgery’.115 Eliot’s choice of words to describe household tasks
suggests boredom and monotony while the life French women supposedly lead is inspiring
and conducive to literary production. While English women align themselves with their
French counterparts in their writing, as I will argue in my subsequent discussion,
stereotypes of English women failed to attract their French counterparts until the last
decades of the nineteenth century.116
This perception of English women is one of the reasons why there appear to be only four
travelogues by women writers published between 1820 and 1880. Three of them address
112
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.49.
Ellen Wood, 'French and English Female Dress,' Bentley's Miscellany 46 (1859), p.505. Margaret
Gardiner, Comtesse de Blessington, The Idler in France (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de l'éd. de Paris: A.
and W. Galignani, 1841), p.221. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1031009 (accessed 15/3/07).
114
Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, p.270, Avot, p.38.
115
George Eliot, ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,’ repr. in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p.56.
116
See my second chapter about Frances Trollope and Lady Blessington.
113
46
the stereotype of British domesticity.117 Flora Tristan uses domesticity to present English
women as having no power or role in society, neither outside nor inside their homes, and
consequently dismissed as victims of the English social and economic system. Blanche de
Rivière, whose work is very much informed by the antagonism between France and
England, may be the only French woman since Staël, who describes English domesticity
and virtue as worthy of imitation. In her booklet A Fortnight in Great-Britain, she contrasts
gender roles in England with those in France:
En Angleterre les hommes sont généralement très respectueux envers les
femmes, sans doute parce que les femmes dites honnêtes le sont réellement,
et que celles dont l'état est de ne pas l'être ne sauraient, comme en France,
être confondues, par leurs manières et leur mise, avec les élégantes de la
société; cette espèce particulière que nous nommons Lorette n'existe guère à
Londres où un jeune homme bien élevé n'oserait pas afficher un scandale.118
[In England men are generally very respectful towards women, no doubt
because the so-called respectable women are really so and those who are not
cannot be confounded with them as in France, by manner and attire with
elegant ladies of society; that particular type which we call Lorette
[courtesan] does not exist in London where a young, well educated man
would not dare to cause a public scandal.]
Here, Rivière alludes to the fact that during the Second Empire, the golden age of
courtesans, there was no clear line between ‘mondaines’ and ‘demi-mondaines’ as Joanna
Richardson designates them.119 Moving in the same circles, the courtesans with their wealth
and chic were often setting new fashions. Napoleon III, as well as his entourage and many
more, had their mistresses. Rivière closely links this situation to the stereotypes about
English women, who are virtuous and lead a domestic life. The above quotation is framed
by the assertions that young English women go out less frequently than French girls, that
English households are more unified than in France and that English manners are better and
more refined.120 The morally more satisfying situation in England is therefore presented as
a result of women’s domestic life which leads to stable marriages. Finally, Pauline de la
117
The fourth of these women writers, Antonia de Oviedo, the child of a Spanish father and a mother from
Lausanne was known for her sympathy and activism for fallen women, and does not mention ordinary
middle-class English women at all. ‘Antonia Maria de Oviedo e Shonthal,’ Vita dei Santi, Beati e testimony.
http://users.libero.it/luigi.scrosoppi/santi/antonia.htm (accessed 2/07/07).
118
Rivière, p.12.
119
Richardson, The Courtesans , p.145.
120
Rivière, p.12.
47
Ferronnays Craven, who was married to an Englishman and spent some years in England,
indirectly draws on this stereotype when she idealises the English home as representing
happiness and thereby contradicts the cliché of England as the country of melancholy and
boredom.121 Although a small number of women praised English female domesticity, it
seems not to have been attractive to a large number of French women.
It has been mentioned earlier that French women wrote travelogues throughout the century,
a fact which raises the question as to what countries they chose to visit and describe. A
glance at Bénédicte Monicat’s bibliography of French women’s travel writing reveals that
oriental regions were most popular, North Africa, particularly Algeria and Egypt, and the
Middle East, followed by Italy and Spain. From 1820 to 1870 around twenty travelogues on
what was considered to be the Orient were published by French women. The countess La
Ferté-Meun travelled to the Orient as early as 1816-19 and in 1834 ten Saint-Simonian
women headed to Egypt to ‘improve the lot of their Egyptian sisters’, as Barbara Hodgson
asserts.122
This interest in the Orient echoes a general renewal of interest in the region in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.123 Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798 was
instrumental in this renewal. This political event had enormous cultural implications
because Napoleon engaged an army of scientists to appropriate Egyptian culture, as Edward
Said argues.124 The many-volumed work, Description de l’Egypte, which contained studies
on a variety of topics, was a key document for Orientalism, as was Auguste Renan’s work
on Oriental languages, published in 1848. Said names a whole series of works inspired by
the Orient, written by French authors such as Chateaubriand and Flaubert, as well as
English publications such as Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern
Egyptians (1836) and Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah
and Meccah (1855).125 The interest in the Orient may have been rekindled by the French
invasion of Algeria in 1830. Evidence for revived interest is particularly noticeable in
121
For biographical information on Craven see Bénédicte Monicat, ‘Craven de la Ferronnays, 1808-1891,’ in
Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de langue française, pp.168-71; Dictionnaire de biographie française, eds.
J. Balteau M. Prévost et al. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1933-), vol.9, p.1175.
122
Barbara Hodgson, Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Allure of the Orient (Berkeley, CA:
Greystone Books, 2005), p.27.
123
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), p.42.
124
Said, p.42.
125
Said, p.88.
48
paintings such as the ‘Women of Algiers’ by Delacroix. The Orient’s attraction for the
French reflects a national imperial interest in the region.126
Oriental women and harems figure among the main features of the Orient which fascinate
Western women, an interest which is betrayed by some of the texts’ titles, for instance Les
Mystères du sérail et des harems by Olympe Audouart, (1866), Les Femmes arabes en
Algérie by Hubertine Auclert, (1900) and Une Femme chez les Sahariennes by Mme Jean
Pommerol, (1900). Barbara Hodgson asserts that the harem was attractive for women
because it was a place were men could not go and moreover reporting on harem activity
gave women an opportunity to explore a topic in which their sex was privileged.127
Investigating texts by French and English women, Hodgson asserts that before 1840,
women tended to believe that the harem and the veil provided freedom, while later
travellers thought harem women to be enslaved.128 The feminist Olympe Audouart in her
three works on the Orient published in the 1860s, used her observations of Oriental life to
write on issues such as divorce and sexuality.129 She saw harems and veils as protecting
women and providing freedom, but at the same time criticises them. Other writers, such as
Cristina di Belgiojoso, condemned harems completely because they held them to be
immoral.130 Valérie de Gasparin tried to convert Egyptian and Syrian women to
Christianity and to motivate them to work by distributing sewing supplies.131 The
pervasiveness of Orientalism and the discursive positions it allows women will be
demonstrated in my discussion of Flora Tristan’s London Journal. Traces of French
women’s fascination with their Oriental counterparts can be found much later, at the turn of
the century, when the feminist Juliette Adam compared the condition of the Egyptian
women she met in 1904 with that of French women and concludes that Muslim law
accorded them more freedom, particularly in regard to their possessions.132
For French women, travelling to the Orient was probably made easier by the fact that
Egypt, and after 1830 also Algeria, were under French control. French officials may have
126
Reina Lewis’s Gendering Orientalism is particularly informative with regard to artworks and French
fascination with the Middle East.
127
Hodgson, p.99.
128
Hodgson, p.129.
129
Hodgson, p.114.
130
Hodgson, p.115.
131
Hodgson, p.124. Gasparin was a Swiss puritan who travelled to Egypt and Syria with her husband in 1848.
132
Juliette Adam, L'Angleterre en Egypte (Paris: Impr. du Centre, 1922), pp.285-8.
49
assisted their compatriots with any arising problems, such as communication with locals.
English and German travellers such as Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, Marianne North and
Ida Pfeiffer would seek out consuls or trade attaches to get some assistance with finding
accommodation or guides. Indeed, Pfeiffer notes in Tahiti the help of the Governor, M.
Bruat, who lent her horses and a subaltern officer to assist her in undertaking an excursion
to Fantaua.133
Although English women were similarly fascinated with the Orient, this interest did not
prevent them from travelling to France and writing about their experiences there. Their
behaviour does not mirror that of French women. Reasons for this fact are complex but
three factors can be mentioned here. Firstly, English women travelled more and could
therefore cover a wider range of destinations. Secondly, the tradition of travelling to France
and Italy was deeply ingrained in English culture since the days of the ‘Grand Tour’ in
which Italy and France figured as the two main destinations. Finally, describing the Orient
allowed Western women to fantasize about harems and veils which could be read as
providing some freedom of movement or a protected space. French women, however, were
often taken by the English as examples of culturally active women who, in spite of moving
in the public sphere, were very feminine. Writing about France offers, therefore, the
opportunity to discuss different topics, namely women’s role as intellectuals and writers
which was crucial for English women writers.
So far, I have shown that the small number of French women’s travel texts on England
during most of the nineteenth century can be explained by women’s gendered position
within society, the circumstances of their travels, and the preconceptions and perceptions of
England, which, either did not appeal to them, or concerned topics which were not deemed
suitable for women to study and describe. Women were more fascinated by the Middle East
which provided material for the creation of feminist utopias or examples of women’s
suppression and where French administration made their journeys easier. The following
section will focus on the changes and developments of the last three decades of the
nineteenth century.
133
Ida Pfeiffer, A Lady’s Voyage Round the World (1851; transl. Jane Sinnett) (London: Century, 1988), p.31.
50
It has already been outlined that French women’s situation in regard to their education
started changing in the 1870s. At the same time French feminism was slowly emerging and
becoming more influential. Before 1881, Feminism in France had what Moses very
succinctly describes as ‘a start-and-stop history’.134 After periods of feminist activities, the
leading women were silenced, forced into exile or imprisoned because they were perceived
as dangerous to public order. This had happened after the Revolution in 1793, in 1834, and
in 1850 when the repression was particularly devastating because it destroyed, as Moses
states, ‘the most advanced and energetic feminist movement in the Western world’.135
Towards the end of the Second Empire, in the late 1860s, a series of more liberal laws,
covering press and public meetings, allowed a new generation of feminists to emerge after
almost twenty years of inactivity.136 However, with the fall of the Commune and the
beginning of the Third Republic, in 1871, French politics was once more characterized by
repression. Feminists who had participated in the Commune went into exile or were
imprisoned. The situation improved again when the Republic was more firmly established
and finally, in 1881 laws were passed to guarantee the freedom of assembly and the press
allowing the feminist movement to become increasingly forceful until World War I.
Unlike their English counterparts, French middle-class women had no opportunity to gather
and exchange ideas and experiences because, as Moses argues, charity work was under
church and state control in France and therefore organised by men.137 In addition, there was
no political movement such as the Anti-Corn-Law league. The anti-slavery movement was
small and elitist, and obviously not supported by an evangelical network.138 French women,
therefore, had no opportunity to develop organisational skills or to practice public speaking.
Unlike their English sisters, they did not have meetings which could be used to challenge
patriarchal society.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in France, ideas on women’s nature and role
were increasingly influenced by republican ideals. In the 1850s, and more so in the 1860s,
republican ideology was propagated and, after 1870, put into practice. Republicanism, at
134
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.198.
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.229.
136
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.151-161. About the ‘start-and-stop history’ of
French feminism see also Holmes, p.20-21.
137
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.38.
138
Rendall, p.247.
135
51
the same time as advocating equality among citizens, emphasized the difference between
the sexes and the inferiority of women. Women, on the ground of their inferiority and
supposed difference from the male norm, were excluded from citizenship. The most
prominent republican theorist of the time was Jules Michelet, who stressed woman’s
weakness and invalidity:139
Elle [la femme] est généralement souffrante au moins une semaine sur quatre. La
semaine qui précède celle de crise est déjà troublée. Et dans les huit ou dix jours qui
suivent cette semaine douloureuse, se prolonge une langueur, une faiblesse, qu’on
ne savait pas définir. Mais on le sait maintenant. C’est la cicatrisation d’une
blessure intérieure, qui, au fond, fait tout ce drame.140
[She [the woman] is normally ill at least once every four weeks. The week
preceding the crisis is already troubled. And in the eight to ten days which follow
this painful week, a certain languor, a weakness which could not be defined. But it
is known now. It is the healing of an internal injury, which, in fact, causes the whole
drama.]
Michelet uses pseudo-medical arguments and what he presents as medical discoveries to
argue that women are weak and sickly. He concludes that they are not able to work outside
the house and must be protected by their husbands. A strong advocate of the middle-class
family, he vehemently opposes social utopists’ ideas.141 The contrast between the
republican ideal of individual equality and the exclusion of women from politics was
heightened by the fact that, in practice, many women were very actively involved in the
propagation of republican ideas or as political advisers to their republican husbands.142
Patriarchal ideas were endorsed not only by republicans but also by socialists, whose wellknown theorist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. While Michelet idealises women’s love and
work for the family, Proudhon considered them as inferior in regard to strength, intellect
and morality and describes them in terms of lack:
La femme est un diminutive d’homme, à qui il manque un organe pour devenir
autre chose qu’un éphèbe. ...
La femme n’a pas de raison d’être: c’est un instrument de reproduction ...
139
For more detail on Michelet’s thinking see Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, pp.158-61.
Jules Michelet, 'L'Amour,' in Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), vol.18,
p.64.
141
Michelet, ‘L’Amour,’ 18: 43.
142
Foley, pp.131-134 and pp.140-4.
140
52
La femme ... reste ... inférieure devant l’homme, une sorte de moyen terme entre lui
et le reste du règne animal.143
[A woman is a diminutive of man who lacks the one organ which would enable her
to become more than a youth [before entering full citizenship] …
A women has no reason for existing: she is an instrument for reproduction …
A women remains inferior to man, a kind of middle ground between him and the
rest of the animal kingdom.]
Like Michelet, Proudhon is a strong advocate of the family and condemns Saint-Simonian
and Fourierist ideas. It is not surprising that he provoked refutations by feminists such as
Juliette Lamber, later Adam and Jenny d’Héricourt.144 Thus, left-wing theorists did not
sympathise with feminist ideas any more, as they had in the 1830s and 1840s and
consequently antifeminism was widespread.145
In addition to feminism and Republicanism, nationalism was increasingly influencing ideas
regarding women’s role in France. After the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871,
France developed what Elinor A. Accampo calls ‘a deepened sense of national
degeneration’.146 In this context, the discussion about the decline in the rate of population
growth, which had been led since the 1850s, became more acute.147 While in other
countries the population was growing between 1750 and 1880, France had a decline in the
fertility rate.148 By the mid nineteenth century, two children per couple were the rule. Only
after 1880, when the rate declined in other countries, did France’s population begin to
increase. There was concern about the increasing number of women, who, as a consequence
of industrialization, participated in the work force. Their work was linked to the practice of
wet-nursing and the resulting increase in infant deaths which contributed to the declining
rate of population growth.149 As bearing and rearing children was seen as an urgent task in
143
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ‘De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise,’ in Œuvres complètes de P.-J.
Proudhon, eds C. Bouglé and H.Moysset (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1935), vol.8.4, pp.182-3.
144
For more detail see Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, pp.162-172.
145
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.151.
146
Elinor A. Accampo, ‘Gender, Social Policy, and the Formation of the Third Republic: An Introduction’ in
Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870-1914 , eds. Ellinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs,
and Mary Lynn Stewart (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p.8.
147
Karen Offen offers more detail about the connection between Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism.
Karen Offen, 'Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,' The American Historical
Review 89.3 (1984), 652.
148
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, pp.21-2.
149
Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1799-1950: A Political History (Stanford, California: Standford
University Press, 2000), p.653.
53
the service of the nation, the republican idea that women should rightfully be mothers
gained more weight.
During the different periods of activism, French feminists were in contact with their
English counterparts and expressed their thoughts about their activities. The journal
Tribune des femmes, which was founded by Saint-Simonian women, contains evidence of
the contacts between French Saint-Simonians and English Owenites. In 1833, Jenny
Durant, a French woman, who was temporarily in England, comments on Miss Hamilton’s
public lectures and writes about her contacts with the Owenite Anna Wheeler, famous as
co-author of Appeal of one Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the
other Half, Men, to retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery.150
In the years 1848 to 1851, French women and men again looked across the Channel to
observe the women’s situation as well as the Owenite and Chartist movements. For
instance, the first feminist daily newspaper La Voix des Femmes which was edited by
Eugénie Niboyet, contains a review of the English press in every issue. In 1869 and the
1870s, French women wrote again about the situation of their English counterparts, for
example in the feminist weekly which Léon Richer founded in 1869, Le Droit des Femmes
later, L’Avenir des Femmes. However, only after 1878, did French feminists come into
closer contact with their British counterparts. After the foundation of the French
‘Association for the Abolition of Regulated Prostitution’, they established links with
Josephine Butler’s campaign against the ‘Contagious Diseases Act’.151 In France,
prostitution was legal and regulated, a situation which French women endeavoured to
amend. Butler, who was one of the honorary secretaries of the British, continental and
general federation, supported them. In regard to this issue as well as to others, French
women were working with their English counterparts.
Parallel to this development of closer contact, perceptions of English women and their
activities changed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, French feminists do not
consider their English counterparts to be persuasive models with regard to women’s rights.
150
Wheeler’s co-author was William Thompson. Thompson and Wheeler align the condition of women to that
of slaves, just as Mary Wollstonecraft did.
151
Holmes, pp.23-4. In 1877, L’Avenir des Femmes advises its readers that according to Josephine Butler,
many English newspapers translated and published articles in their journal. L.R. (probably Léon Richer), ‘A
la presse anglaise,’ L’Avenir des Femmes 147 (4 fév. 1877), 31.
54
For instance, in the 1830s, French women consider the French utopist movement to be
more advanced, describing English women as ‘arriérées’, [less advanced], as Jenny Durant
puts it in the Tribune des Femmes.152 She asserts that she would like to stimulate the
English ‘qui s’endorment dans la métaphysique et le sentiment, sans mettre en action
aucune de leurs belles théories’, [who fall asleep in their metaphysics and their feelings
without putting into practice any one of their nice theories].153 At this stage, French
feminism, which was supported to a certain extent by social Utopists, seems to influence
English feminism. In L’Almanach des femmes pour 1852 published by the feminist Jeanne
Deroin, English women are still portrayed as being in a deplorable situation since they did
not inherit, except if they had no brothers:
Quand on ne leur donne rien, il leur est impossible de gagner honnêtement de quoi
vivre. Non-seulement elles sont exclues de toutes fonctions publiques, ... mais les
travaux mêmes qui leur restent accessibles, la couture, la broderie, le tissage, la
domesticité, etc., sont des ressources que la concurrence, le bas taux des salaires, le
chômage et le défaut d’organisation rendent partout insuffisantes. Qu’elles se
gardent surtout d’être vertueuses, quand elles n’ont pas les moyens de l’être!154
[When they aren’t given anything, it is impossible for them to earn their living
honestly. Not only are they excluded from all public functions, … but the tasks
which remain accessible to them, such as sewing, stitching, weaving, housework
etc., are means of support that have been rendered insufficient everywhere by
competition, low salary rates, unemployment and the lack of organization. Above
all, women should be careful not to be virtuous if they cannot afford it!]
The legal background Deroin alludes to is the equal inheritance of all legitimate children in
France.155 Therefore, French women felt privileged in comparison to their English
counterparts. Moreover, the French dowry system did not give the husband any rights over
his wife’s capital.156 Furthermore, a larger number of women were in the work force. Susan
K. Foley indicates that at mid century the percentage of married women in the work force
was 40% in France versus 25% in England, a fact which might also have accounted for
French women’s impression that their situation was preferable.157 Production on a small
152
Jenny Durant, ‘Extrait de la correspondence,’ La Tribune des Femmes, (1833), 65. Jenny Durant seems not
to have understood some of the details, as she puts ‘Mme Thompson’, for William Thompson and ‘miss
Wrigle’ for Miss Wright.
153
Durant, 63.
154
Jeanne Deroin, ‘Feuilletons de L. Desnoyers et réponse,’ in L’Almanach des femmes pour 1852, ed. Jeanne
Deroin (Paris, 1851), p.122.
155
Foley, p.21.
156
Rendall, p.229.
157
Foley, p.74.
55
scale was more common in France because it had less industrialisation than England and,
given the lower rate of population growth, women were not driven out of the work force by
a large number of available workers.
Deroin’s Almanach for 1852, hints at the fact that some changes were under way by
reporting the introduction of Bloomers into England.158 In the Almanach of the following
year, the tone of the articles - which were all printed in French and English - changes more
dramatically, a shift which is perhaps partly due to the fact that it was published in London
where Deroin was a refugee. For instance, it contains a reprint of an English newspaper
article on a public lecture by Mrs Dexter on Shakespeare in which she outlined the merits
of women in literature. The anonymous commentator states that the article ‘fait honneur au
caractère anglais’, [honours the English character] and adds:
La presse anglaise fait place à l’intelligence sans distinction de sexe: elle ouvre à la
Femme le chemin de la tribune politique, en lui donnant un libre accès à la tribune
littéraire.159
[the English press gives room for intelligence without distinction of sex: it opens to
the woman the way to the political tribune by giving her free access to the literary
tribune]
The comment clearly reflects the idea that the situation of English women is about to
change (the author uses the present tense), a notion which persisted also in the following
and last number of the Almanach. The above quotation represents a reaction to the situation
in France, where, as Jane Rendall states, legislature had just been changed in 1852 to
prohibit women ‘from political commentary and newspaper directorship’. This interdiction
was to be in force until 1881.160 French women may have envied their English
counterparts’ freedom to contribute to the press. This early manifestation of a shift in
perceptions of English women was not followed up because feminist activity in France was
again precluded for some twenty years.
158
Eve, ‘Réforme des Costumes’, in L’Almanach des femmes pour 1852, ed. Jeanne Deroin (Paris, 1851), p.
62-70. Bloomers, a kind of Turkish trousers, allowed women to wear much shorter, more comfortable dresses,
and to have more freedom of movement. They were introduced by the American Amelia Bloomer. Marjorie
Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p.314.
159
‘Madame Dexter’, in Almanch des femmes. 2e année. Women's Almanach for 1853, in the English and
French Languages, ed. Jeanne Deroin, (London; Jersey: James Waston; Universal printing establishment,
1852), p.133.
160
Rendall, p.296.
56
Only around 1870, did the idea, that the situation of English women was changing,
reappear. Clarisse Coignet, a writer of historical works as well as brochures for civic and
moral education, and a journalist, for instance, describes what she calls ‘cette intervention
si nouvelle des femmes dans la vie publique en Angleterre’, [this intervention of women in
public life which is so novel in England], alluding to the activities which aimed at passing
the bill for the suffrage for tax paying (single) women.161 Coignet observes a difference
from the previous state of affairs: ‘La législation anglaise a toujours courbé l'épouse sous le
joug de l'époux de la façon la plus tyrannique’, [the English law has always placed the wife
under the yoke of the husband in the most tyrannical way].162 Similarly, Puliga de Quigini
claims that English women’s lives were not marked by subordination anymore.163
Meanwile, the feminist Hubertine Auclert asserts that English women were well ahead of
French women with regard to their emancipation.164 Towards the end of the century, French
women were looking towards England, where feminism was more powerful at that stage.
English feminism had gained momentum from the 1850s and gradually provoked changes
in women’s condition. Since the exchanges between the two countries were very intense,
French women were aware of the English reforms.
Newspaper articles and books on England published by French women after 1870 portray
English women and their position within society in a way which is markedly different from
that of the first half of the century. Often they admire English women’s situation regarding
civil rights and political life, education and professional activities, sports and leisure
activities as well as their relationship with their husbands. I argue that through their
description of English women, they address republican ideas and their own situation during
the Third Republic. French women’s writings are often motivated by their desire to present
alternative gender roles and form a part of feminism which emerges around 1870 and gains
momentum in the 1880s and 1890s.
161
For a biographical note on Coignet see Dictionnaire de biographie française, 9: 147. Her full name was
Clarisse Coignet, her maiden name, Gauthier.
162
C. Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (9 mai 1874), p.1069.
163
Puliga de Quigini, pp.49-52.
164
Hubertine Auclert, ‘Le Sommerville-Club,’ La Citoyenne (19 au 25 mars 1882), in ‘La Citoyenne’: articles
de 1881-1891, ed. Edith Taïeb (Paris: Syros, 1982), p.123.
57
English women are mentioned with regard to civil rights and their participation in political
life by French women of different persuasions, radical feminists, liberal feminists and more
conservative writers.165 Radical feminists use the example of English women to demand the
right to vote for French women. For instance, Julie Daubié, who founded the Association
pour le Suffrage des Femmes, [Association for Women’s Franchise] in 1871, refers to
English women in L’Avenir des Femmes in 1872.166 In her article, she stresses how many
English men consider their women to positively influence civil and political life.167 Another
feminist, Juliette Adam, the founder and editor of La Nouvelle Revue, integrated an article
‘La Question du vote des femmes en Angleterre in 1883’, written by the English
Viscountess Haberton in her journal.168 Haberton asserts that the question of the franchise
for women is not ridiculed in England any more as it is in France, and women’s reputation
in regard to their political work has improved.
Liberal feminists presented English women as examples of participation in political life.
For instance, Coignet published a series of articles on the discussion about suffrage for tax
paying women in England in the Revue politique et littéraire, in 1874 and 1875. She
describes the English tradition of giving wealthy single women political rights, stating that
women were members of the Saxons’ national counsel and delineating women’s rights in
the course of English history. With regard to the present, she explains how English women
have the right to vote in community elections and on school boards. In addition to
highlighting the positive effects of women’s participation in political life, Coignet,
165
The journal Le Droit des Femmes, later L’Avenir des Femmes, for instance, published regularly articles
about the discussion on the vote for women. An example is a letter ‘To the English Ladies’ written by Léon
Richer in English (containing grammatical and spelling errors) which advises English women of the attention
given by French papers to the first successes towards the introduction of the vote for women. Le Droit des
Femmes 55 (15 mai 1870), 1. Further examples are: Maria Chenu, ‘Le Droit de suffrage des femmes en
Angleterre’, Le Droit des Femmes 57 (29 mai 1870), 2, Georges Bath, ‘Le Vote des femmes en Angleterre’,
L’Avenir des Femmes 70 (1 oct. 1871), 2, K.B. Murray, ‘Novelles d’Angleterre,’ L’Avenir des Femmes 81(17
déc. 1871), 2, and Georges Bath, ‘Le Vote des femmes en Angleterre’, L’Avenir des Femmes 88 (2 juin
1872) , 2.
166
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.213. For a biographical note on Daubié see Balteau
and Prévost et al., 10: 247. Daubié was interested in education and the condition of women and published the
following works: Du progrès dans l'instruction primaire: justice et liberté, 1862; La femme pauvre au XIXe
siècle, 1866; L'émancipation de la femme, 1871.
167
Julie Daubié, ‘Le Vote des femmes en Angleterre,’ L’Avenir des Femmes, 87 (5 mai 1872), 3. Maria
Chenu, another writer of an article on the vote of women, is clearly in favour of it in regard to England but
does not mention France. Maria Chenu, ‘Le Droit de suffrage des femmes en Angleterre,’ 2.
168
Lady Haberton, ‘La Question du vote des femmes en Angleterre,’ La Nouvelle Revue, (juillet-août 1883),
693-717. Lady Haberton was an English dress reformer who published Reasons for Reform in Dress (1885),
was the inventor of the divided skirt and president of the Rational Dress Society. Leigh Summers, Bound to
please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001), p.77.
58
describing a political meeting, emphasizes the calmness and professionalism of the women
orators.169 She claims: ‘on ne trouve parmi elles ni déclamations, ni violences, ni fausse
sentimentalité’, [one can find neither ranting nor violence nor false sentimentality among
them], thereby refuting the idea that women are driven by feeling and incapable of rational
thinking. This supposition was widespread among republicans, socialists and formed the
basis for women’s exclusion from political life.170 In other words, Coignet, who was one of
the protestant republicans playing an active role in the emancipation of women, alludes to
the stereotype of the reticent and distanced English to support her argument. To the same
end, she shows the women orators’ rigorous analysis of the topic by reproducing their
speeches. Thus, Coignet’s text is a response to republican discourses on women. Unlike
Daubié, Coignet does not use the English discussion to advocate the vote for women,
although she is favourable to it in principle and clearly expresses her belief in freedom and
equality.171 Yet, she deems the introduction of the vote for women not practicable in a
country with universal suffrage, such as France. Instead, she finds changes in civil
legislation and education more urgent and demands more equality in marriage and the
opening of careers for women. Education and administration seem to her ideal domains of
work for women.172
Julia Allard Daudet takes a more conservative approach to politically active women.
Daudet, an author in her own right, accompanied her husband, the writer Alphonse Daudet,
to Oxford and London.173 She praises the English practice of wives, daughters and sisters of
candidates visiting the electors and serving as a link between representatives and
represented. Women’s role, in her view, rests in their supporting their husbands, fathers and
brothers.
169
C. Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (18. sept. 1875), 274-79.
170
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (18.sept. 1875), 279.
171
When Coignet reports certain discussions one gets the impression that she is thinking of the French
context, particularly in the passages which concern the church’s influence on women. In France there were
fears that, if given the vote, women would vote conservative and drastically change the political landscape.
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et Littéraire
(18.sept. 1875), 274-77.
172
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue politique et littéraire
(9. mai 1874), 1071-2.
173
Richardson, ‘The English Connection,’ pp.36-7.
59
At the same time, French women portray their English counterparts as examples of well
educated women. In France, education for girls and boys had been discussed since the
middle of the century.174 In 1850, the Falloux Law required that all communities of a
certain size have a primary school for girls.175 But the implementation of this law was slow.
It was only during the Third Republic, in 1880 that free and compulsory primary schooling
for boys and girls was provided by the state, a move which was motivated by the desire to
reduce the church’s traditionally important role in education. One year earlier, the first state
secondary school for girls was introduced.176 These facts explain why education was an
urgent theme for many French women.
The perception that English women have a superior education dominates French women’s
numerous remarks on English education. The assessment of English education is positive
mainly from 1870 onwards, the period when the English school system was reformed and
school boards introduced. In an earlier article published in 1869 in Le Droit des Femmes by
Julie Daubié, who was granted the first licence-ès-lettres in 1871, the English school
system with regard to the education of women does not fare particularly well compared to
those in Europe and America.177 However, only two years later, articles published in
L’Avenir des Femmes, by two men, draw a very positive picture of the English educational
system, one referring to the reform of the English educational system and the other
announcing the introduction of science classes for women.178 Daudet, in 1895, supports the
idea that English women benefit from a good education, asserting that they are superior
concerning general knowledge and because they do not restrict their minds to household
concerns.179
174
There had been calls for education for girls before, for instance during the Revolution when active women
agreed on the necessity for it. But, as Rendall states, no measures were taken to realise education for girls.
Moses records that in 1867 41% of women were unable to sign their names at their marriage. Rendall, p.53.
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.177.
175
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, 174-175.
176
Holmes, p.11-12.
177
Julie Daubié, ‘Coup-d’oeil sur l’enseignement primaire, secondaire et professionnel des femmes dans les
deux-mondes’, Le Droit des Femmes (18 déc. 1869), 2. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,
p.175.
178
Georges Bath, ‘L’Enseignement public en Angleterre. La Part faite aux femmes,’ L’Avenir des Femmes (8
oct. 1871), 2. The article consists mainly of extracts of a booklet by M. Lebon, published in Bruxelles on the
progress of public education in England. K.B. Murray, ‘Nouvelles d’Angleterrre’, L’Avenir des Femmes (10
déc. 1871), 3. Thérèse Bentzon, in her series of articles in the Revue Politique et Littéraire also comments on
English women’s education by stating that there were more girls than boys at the art school. Bentzon, 'A
travers Londres. Notes et impressions,' 591.
179
Daudet, p.114.
60
French women praise various aspects of English women’s education, giving also differing
reasons for its success. A. Bardol focuses on the English school system, with its school
boards and particularly the working conditions and salaries of teachers as well as the
resulting commitment and motivation. For her, the English women who enter in
competition with boys for a university education in Cambridge or Oxford, are testimony to
the fact that even though women may generally not be suited for serious studies, there are
many brilliant exceptions.180 Thus, although she adopts the widespread belief that women
were not as capable as men in regard to intellectual achievements, she is full of praise for a
system which offers them the possibility of acquiring a good education. Hermione Quinet,
the influential republican, similarly praises English, and even more Scottish, women’s
education and their ability to support themselves if necessary, but without even mentioning
the public school system.181 According to Quinet, in La France idéale, [The Ideal France]
(1896), the improved education of English women is due to Protestantism, or rather to the
fact that every pastor educates his daughters well.182 As they pass on their knowledge and
wisdom, the general educational level becomes higher. Quinet believes that the same will
happen in France in the future, as girls already get a good education which allows them to
enter professional life. At the same time Quinet reiterates the republican idea that a good
education will make women good educators of citizens.
Coignet, another Protestant and republican, who published several works on education, the
first in 1856, focuses more on English women’s attitudes to education, work and their role
in society in her articles in the Revue Politique et Littéraire.183 She explains their positive
attitude towards education by the fact that there were more women than men and
consequently a considerable number of unmarried women. She contends that instead of
waiting for a husband, English women
travaillent à acquérir une instruction solide et s’adonnent à des occupations
sérieuses. Elles s’intéressent aux questions générales et à toutes les affaires du pays;
180
A. (Melle) Bardol, L'Enseignement primaire en Angleterre (Lyon: Pitrat aîné, 1882), p.23. Bardol states
that England had been inspired to introduce school boards and improve its education system by legislation in
regard to education introduced in France in 1870. Interestingly, she believes that the outcome had been more
fruitful in England. Bardol, p.8.
181
Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, p.9.
182
Hermione Quinet, La France idéale (Paris: C.Lévy, 1896), p.75.
183
It is interesting that Coignet and Quinet, who were both Protestant, praised female education in England.
61
elles entrent dans des associations, elles voyagent, elles écrivent; enfin, elles
s’habituent à penser, à agir, à être quelque chose par elles-mêmes. 184
[work to get a solid education and devote themselves to serious occupations. They
are interested in general questions and in all the matters of the country. They form
associations, they travel, they write; in short they get used to thinking, to acting, to
becoming something in their own right.]
Coignet emphasizes English women’s activity by aligning them to a series of verbs of
action, such as ‘work’, ‘travel’, ‘write’ and contrasts them with the passivity of French girls
awaiting marriage. She also underlines their seriousness and responsibility by contrasting it
with what French girls supposedly do: going to balls. In this way, Coignet provides a
portrayal of responsible and independent citizens which is in conflict with republican ideas
of clearly separate roles. She appears to see a broader use of education than republican
reformers, namely the possibility of leading an independent life.185
Other French women similarly admired English women for having a whole range of
activities, professional and other beside their tasks as wives and mothers. Bentzon, who
published several novels and travel narratives on Russia and North America exploring the
condition of women, contends that English women are ‘singulièrement entreprenantes’,
[remarkably enterprising] and ‘se poussent partout avec succès’, [successfully push
themselves in all domains].186 Enterprise is a characteristic which is generally considered to
be typical for English people, particularly men, not women, a fact which Bentzon
acknowledges by adding ‘remarkably’. She very deliberately gives this attribute to women.
Although her phrase ‘all domains’ is vague, and the context does not provide more
precision, it can be conjectured that she means different opportunities to make a living, as
well as other activities. Coignet similarly shows some admiration for English women’s
active life when she explicitly names the professions of the different orators in the political
meetings she describes.187 Puliga de Quigini emphasises that the contemporary English
woman by no means spends her life ‘dans le mystère du home’, [in the mystery of the
184
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (9 mai 1874), 1066.
185
Foley, p.146.
186
Bentzon, 'A travers Londres. Notes et impressions,' 591. For a biographical notice on Bentzon see
Bénédicte Monicat, 'Blanc, Thérèse (1840-1907),' in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, ed. Eva
Martin Sartori (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.58.
187
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (18 sept. 1875), 274.
62
‘home’].188 She is impressed by the English woman’s wide field of activity, which in her
view is much more extensive than that of French women, and names as an example their
participation on boards for parishes.189 Puliga de Quigini thinks that English women are
privileged because their earnings are at their own disposal. The Married Women’s Property
Act allowing this had been passed in 1870. French women also stress the large number of
English women writers and describe them not as notable exceptions, as Tristan does.
Instead writing is seen as a hallmark of the standard English woman.190 Bentzon states: ‘Le
talent chez les femmes ... est trop fréquent pour qu'on s'en émerveille’, [the talent of women
... is too common to cause surprise].191 English women are obviously no longer seen as
subjugated domestic wives, but as well-educated and independent women.
These activities are presented as furthering women’s skills in different domains. The
feminist Hubertine Auclert, for instance, when she reports the foundation of the first club
for women, encourages French women to imitate their English sisters. She explains that
French women are silent presences in salons and appear to be foolish and silly while
English women have a voice because they organise themselves and hold meetings.192 This
assertion is based on the fact that English women have been politically active since the antislavery movement and have acquired the necessary skills.
Moreover, French women assert that their English counterparts are free to participate in
sport activities, drive their own carriages and, to a certain extent, travel on their own. Sport
for Victorian women was, as Kathleen McCrone argues, related to the campaign for higher
education for girls in the 1860s and the foundation of women’s colleges.193 It was
188
Puliga de Quigini, p.127.
‘Le champ d’activité de l'Anglaise est, dans toutes les classes, beaucoup plus étendu que celui de la
Française. Dans les rangs élevés, elle ne se confine pas au rôle décoratif et est tout à fait la compagne et l'aide
de son mari.’ Puliga de Quigini, p.174.
190
English women writers also figure in texts published in the 1810s by Staël, Avot and Simons-Candeille.
Staël, Considérations, 3 : 288. Avot hesitates to comment on a literature in a foreign language. But she does
mention some male writers and Maria Edgeworth as well as the book on Paris by the Irish writer Lady
Morgan, albeit in a critical way. pp.239-44. Simons-Candeille, on the contrary, mentions in her disclaimer
that her work would not be comparable to that of Morgan. p.6. One of her English characters claims that for
English women it was not exceptional to write books, even in other languages. But another replies that this
was not different in France. p.49.
191
Thérèse Bentzon, 'En Angleterre. Notes et impressions,' Revue Politique et Littéraire 16 (20 oct. 1883),
501. Daudet similarly admires English writers. Daudet, pp.72-4.
192
Auclert, p.123.
193
Kathleen E. McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870-1914 (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp.21-2.
189
63
introduced as a complement to the development of intellectual capacities. The founders of
the colleges aimed at showing that, against claims to the contrary, women did not suffer
any damage as a consequence of higher learning and therefore contributed to their
wellbeing with physical activity. French women, such as the author Maria Star, Bentzon
and Bovet admiringly describe English women who are active in sports such as lawn tennis,
driving competitions with one-horse carriages, and horse riding.194 Surprisingly, they do
not mention cycling, a sport which was very important in the 1890s and allowed women far
more freedom than in the past. For middle-class French women, who were familiar with the
ideas on sexual difference and women’s secluded life proclaimed by republicans and
socialists such as Michelet and Proudhon, women’s sport may have seemed liberating. For
instance, Bovet asserts that sport is a much better occupation for young girls than ‘faire
d'inutiles broderies et de lire de méchants romans’, [making useless embroideries or reading
bad novels].195 This is a clear rejection of sedentary occupation such as needlework, which
was deemed suitable for girls and women. Bovet, obviously aware of the fact that her
opinion had many opponents, argues that women could be good mothers despite their
sporting activities.
French women are also impressed by English women’s freedom of movement. Star (a
pseudonym for Ernesta Hierschel, later Stern) asserts that women and girls drive their own
carriages without drawing anybody’s attention to them.196 Rivière claims much earlier, in
1862, that young English girls drive their own carriages.197 As mentioned previously, a
woman travelling alone was more acceptable in England than in France. Puliga de Quigini
describes the example of three young English girls who could travel and explore the
country without damaging their reputation.198 While she characterises English girls as free
creatures she uses the metaphor of slavery for French girls.199 Satisfaction and health are
194
Star, p.81-82. Bentzon, 'En Angleterre. Notes et impressions,' p.476.
Marie-Anne de Bovet, L'Ecosse, souvenirs et impressions de voyages (Paris: Hachette, 1898), p.78. For a
biographical note on Bovet see Dictionnaire de biographie française, 7: 87. Bovet was a novelist and
translator as well as a journalist contributing to a range of newspapers, sometimes under the pseudonym of
‘Mab’.
196
Star, p.31. Interestingly, she claims that a pretty horse gets more attention than a beautiful young girl.
197
But Rivière, writing in 1862, adds that in spite of this possibility, English girls can rarely be seen in the
street. Rivière, p.12.
198
Puliga de Quigini, p.178.
199
Since the late eighteenth century, English feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft readily understood the
connection between slavery and their own lack of rights. Women, for instance, could be subjected to physical
abuse and only had the right to separate from brutal husbands if they could prove their lives were in danger.
195
64
contrasted with monotony and sadness. French women seem to envy their English sisters’
freedom.
For Quinet, Star and Bentzon, woman’s independence and activities outside the home are
closely linked to the notion that she should be the companion of her husband, an idea which
had particularly been emphasised by republicans. Quinet asserts that Scottish women are
really their husbands’ companions and share both tasks and honour.200 In her view the
profession of the husband determines the activities of the woman. For instance, as a wife of
a teacher, she will be concerned with schools. She clearly separates men’s and women’s
roles, politics and industry for the former and moral power for the latter.201 Her ideas reflect
Republicanism. Star similarly insists on companionship outlining that English men like
sport and respect women, but they never love them as exclusively as French men do:
En rendant la femme indépendante de l’homme, l’Anglais en fait une camarade. Il
se marie plus par goût de ce qu’il nomme « companionship » que par vertige de
tendresse.202
[By making the wives free of men, the Englishman makes her a friend. He gets
married for what he calls companionship rather than for breathtaking tenderness.]
Star echoes Rousseau’s ideas that constant veneration of women makes men effeminate.203
Being not absorbed by love, English men are enterprising, and explore the world. This
characteristic is heightened through their education which does not focus exclusively on
academic achievements, as in France, but on sport and outdoor activities. The choice of
vocabulary Star uses and the connection to the colonial enterprise recalls the republican
ideal of marriage as a partnership with a shared mission.204 Star is moving in upper-class
circles where women do not have to be the companion of a simple school teacher and
where women’s freedom is related rather to leisure than professional activities. When she
Participating in the anti-slavery movement gave English women the opportunity to experience speaking in
public and taking an active part in a political movement for the first time.
200
Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, p.139.
201
Quinet, De Paris à Edimbourg, pp.139-40.
202
Star, p.11.
203
Star argues that in France, woman is often man’s only aim of existence and as a conequence, ‘leur énergie
s’énerve’, [their energy is enervated]. Star, p.11.
204
Foley, p.136. Jules Ferry wanted to create ‘Republican companions for Republican men’ through new
legislation about schooling. Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p.520, quoted in Foley,
p.146.
65
describes gender relations as a key to success in the colonies, she refers not to contributions
by women but to men’s masculinity and enterprise. Bentzon similarly sees companionship
as benefiting colonialism when she declares: ‘La Française est mère avant tout; l'Anglaise
est épouse d'abord’, [the Frenchwoman is first and foremost a mother, the Englishwoman is
primarily a wife].205 She approves of the English custom of keeping the children in the
nursery and presents the women as companions in the colonial enterprise. In the 1880s, at
the time Bentzon was writing, France was establishing herself as a colonial power while
England’s colonies had long been consolidated, hence French women’s preoccupation with
the topic, and admiration for England. Bentzon’s statement can be seen as an opposing
response to republican discourses which describe woman’s foremost and natural mission to
be a mother and educate her children.
Some women link their admiration for English women and their situation within society to
preferences for specific political systems. Puliga de Quigini associates it with her nostalgia
for the ancien régime and the privileges upper-class women had in that period. She
compares the English society of the 1890s to eighteenth-century France which she believes
was more tolerant: ‘on s'est affranchi … d'une foule de préjugés religieux et sociaux; les
questions les plus brûlantes sont ouvertement discutées’, [one became freed … of many
religious and social prejudices; the most contentious questions are openly discussed].206
There is an obvious parallel to nineteenth-century English women who admire French
salonnières. Puliga de Quigini explains the increased tolerance in England with the fact that
it is emancipating itself from Protestantism, a ‘forme du suffrage universel qui mène à
l'escavage intellectuel et moral exercé par la masse ignorante et fanatique’, [a form of
universal suffrage which leads to intellectual and moral slavery imposed by the ignorant
and fanatic masses].207 Protestantism and the general vote are equally condemned by
Puliga de Quigini, who seems to regret ancien régime aristocracy. The emancipation of
ideas coincides with the supremacy of women’s influence.208 Although Puliga de Quigini
approves of this development, her attitude towards female emancipation is ambivalent.
205
Bentzon, 'En Angleterre. Notes et impressions,' 500.
Puliga de Quigini, p.45. Puliga notes further about English women : ’Tout d’un trait, elles sont parvenues
à ce point unique, absolu de liberté, qui consiste à s’affranchir de l’opinion d’autrui’ [In one breath, they have
reached this unique and absolute freedom which consists in not yielding to other’s opinions]. p.106.
207
Puliga de Quigini, p.200.
208
Puliga de Quigini, p.48.
206
66
Star seems to be royalist and conservative and at the same time advocating women’s
independence. She went to London to be at the sixtieth anniversary of Victoria’s coronation
and to take a photograph of her. Throughout the book she expresses her admiration for the
political and social order in England and the respect for traditions and institutions held by
its inhabitants. Star admires the freedom English women enjoy under the protection of the
law.209 She believes that as young girls it protects them from encountering coarseness and
rudeness and as married women against the abuses of marital power. Monarchy and
tradition are presented as warrants for order and women’s freedom of movement, an
implicit criticism of the French republic. Star’s convictions in regard to women might be
explained by her biography. She was of aristocratic origin and married a financier. Being
wealthy, she kept a salon and moved in intellectual and artistic circles.
210
At the time she
wrote Quinze jours à Londres, her third work out of more than twenty, she was a widow.
Thus, some independence would have been normal for her.
Some of the women also saw negative aspects to the perceived changes in English women’s
gendered position in society. Daudet, for instance, considers English women’s extradomestic activities to have negative consequences. She compares the negligence of their
duties as mothers to that of aristocratic French women in the eighteenth century, before
Rousseau.211 But after describing the handing over of the children into the care of a nurse,
and later to a school, as negative (she only speaks of Eton, an English boys’ school), she
concedes that this education might be suitable for men who most probably would spend
their lives far from home in the colonies. Similarly, Puliga de Quigini emphasises
repeatedly that she does not think such a development to be positive for society. But her
work is a typical example of a text marked by the clash of discourses. Her assurances,
which conform to contemporary ideologies on femininity, contrast with her manifestations
of enthusiasm about the developments she perceives in England.
209
Star, p.147.
Information about Star is scarce. But there is one webpage on the property where she had built two houses
in 1825, a villa in the style of a ‘pavillon de chasse’ and a ‘folie’, inspired by a Spanish castle. Le Bois des
Falaises, http://perso.orange.fr/proaction/CHV/Pages/Extension32.htm (accessed: 27/07/2007). On another
webpage Stern’s name figures in letters written by members of the Ephrussi family, a clan of rich intellectuals
and artists, to Charles Deudon. Correspondance de Charles Deudon 1862-1907. Le Clan Ephrussi,
http://deudon.charles.free.fr/ephrussi.htm (accessed:27/07/2007).
211
Daudet, p.114.
210
67
Once English women are perceived as models for reform, they are generally portrayed in a
positive light, both in regard to their physical appearance and their clothing. Coignet and
Daudet insist on their femininity and neatness in attire, Coignet describing her orators at the
political meeting as carefully but simply dressed and wearing hats. Daudet, who is invited
to the women writers’ club in London, assures the reader that ‘tous les auteurs restent
femmes et très femmes’, [all the writers remain feminine and very much so].212 Coignet and
Daudet obviously write, without mentioning them, against prejudices about politically
active women and women writers which were common in both countries. In Punch for
instance, lampoons and cartoons show intellectual women as dowdy, frumpy, and
unappealing personally. Even in texts by French women, where English women’s physical
aspect is not part of an argument, they are often described as elegant or beautiful, although
Bentzon, Puliga de Quigini and Daudet still think that they lack refinement in their
toilette.213 Unlike in the earlier decades of the century, none of the mentioned writers
describes English women as masculine in a negative sense. In the same endeavour to
provide a positive portrayal of English women, French women, unlike their male
colleagues, do not assert that English women’s virtue is only a mask for their true nature
and debauchery.214 French women do not discuss English women’s virtue at all.
To conclude, towards the end of the century, French women were fascinated by their
English counterparts and instead of presenting them in terms of domesticity and
submission, used their condition as a basis for their arguments for the desirability for
change in the conditions of women in France. While in texts by English women, their
counterparts’ independence and participation in public life is linked to France’s dominant
cultural role, Bentzon, and particularly Star, link it to England’s colonial and economic
success, hence to the stereotypical strengths of the two nations.
212
Coignet, 'Le Mouvement des femmes en Angleterre. Le Suffrage politique,' La Revue Politique et
Littéraire (18 sept. 1875), 274. Daudet, p.73.
213
Bentzon asserts : ‘L’Angleterre est le pays par excellence de la beauté féminine’, [England is the country
par excellence of female beauty], Bentzon, 'A travers Londres. Notes et impressions,' 594. Exceptions to the
positive image can be found in the texts by Bovet and Dondel du Faouëdic. Thérèse Bentzon, 'Londres en
automne,' Revue politique et littéraire 21 (24 nov. 1883), 658; Puliga de Quigini, p.113; Daudet, p.51.
According to Gerbod, French men give very different portrayals of English women, from the beauty to the
ugly creature with the jaw of a carnivore and long teeth and feet. Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.104/5.
Star, who moved among the English upper classes, claims that women and men were more elegant than in
France. Star, pp.22-23.
214
Gerbod, Les Voyageurs français , p.117.
68
Shifts in perceptions of English women related to emerging feminism are important factors
leading to an increase in French women’s writing on England. However, not all French
women writing on England are feminists or particularly interested in the role of women in
society and using their texts to present English women as ideals for education and
independence. Voyages loin de ma chambre by the marchioness Noémie Dondel du
Faouëdic contrasts most with the previously discussed texts when, in her relation of a
journey to the Channel Isles and to London in 1885, she describes English women as
servants of their husbands, who lose their freedom upon their marriage.215 Other women
focus on specific interests. For instance, Pauline de la Ferronnays Craven, who was born in
England and spent most of the first thirty years of her life in Denmark, Russia, Rome and
England, and was married to an Englishman, does not make any comments on English
women in general.216 The individual women she describes in Réminiscences, souvenirs
d'Angleterre et d'Italie, published in 1879, are praised for their piety. In her first work,
Récit d’une soeur, she shows how woman’s life is glorified through the catholic faith. The
title of another of her works related to England, Deux incidents de la question catholique en
Angleterre, reveals a similar focus. Craven describes English women as exemplary even in
regard to religious matters, a characteristic Daudet attributes to them as well.217 Finally,
Rosalie Berruyer, a cook whose Mémoires d'une bonapartiste ou le souvenir de mes
voyages en Angleterre were published posthumously in 1894, describes very little of
England. The aim of her different journeys to England in the 1870s is to visit the imperial
family in Chislehurst and the purpose of her narrative is to continue what she calls ‘le culte
bonapartiste’, [the cult of Bonaparte].218 To illustrate her devotion to this cult, the writer
focuses on the difficulties of the journeys and the description of encounters with the
Bonaparte family.
All in all, French women, towards the end of the century, seem to immerse themselves
more in English culture than those in the previous decades. Some of them start using
English terms in their writing, for instance Puliga de Quigini and Star. Bentzon even
215
Noémie Dondel du Faouëdic, Marquise, Voyages loin de ma chambre (Redon: A. Bouteloup, 1898), pp.
222 and 277.
216
Monicat, ‘Craven de la Ferronnays, 1808-1891,’ p.168.
217
Daudet asserts that English women are superior, among others through their religious aspiration. Daudet,
p.114.
218
Rosalie Berruyer, Mémoires d'une bonapartiste ou le souvenir de mes voyages en Angleterre (Grenoble:
Imprimerie Centrale, 1894), p.55.
69
reflects on the possibilities of expressing certain English characteristics in French, for
instance ‘cheerful’ and ‘jolly’, which can only partly be expressed by the French word
‘gai’.219 Bentzon and Feuillet also turn out to be familiar with English literature.220 As this
chapter has shown, French women’s immersion in English culture arises from changes in
their gendered position within their own society and shifts in their perceptions of English
women. While this happens towards the end of the century in the case of French women,
English women are keenly interested in French culture and show sympathy for their French
sisters much earlier and throughout the century. The following chapter will investigate
English women’s enthusiasm for France in Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians and
Lady Blessington’s Idler in France.
219
Bentzon, 'En Angleterre. Notes et impressions,' 496. Bovet similarly reflects on English and French words,
‘wagon’ and ‘carriage’ in this case. Bovet, ‘Croquis anglais,’ 158.
220
In the streets of London she imagines passing some of Dickens’ characters and asserts that David
Copperfield is her companion or guide. English reality is thus not read through the grid of a French travel
guide but rather through English literature and a fictional travel guide. Bentzon, 'Londres en automne,' 659.
Mme Octave de Feuillet is reminded of one of Dickens’ characters by her servant in Jersey. Feuillet, p.148.
This can be seen in the context of a generally increased interest in foreign, particularly English, literature.
John Philip Couch asserts that by the early 1890s, almost all the major magazines (except those linked to
naturalism) had increased the number of contributions by English and Russian authors. John Philip Couch,
George Eliot in France: A French Appraisal of George Eliot's Writings, 1858-1960 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1967), p.110.
70
Chapter 2
Frances Trollope, Lady Blessington and French
Salon Culture
It is impossible to be admitted into French society without immediately perceiving that the women play a very
distinguished part in it. So, assuredly, do the women of England in their own; yet I cannot but think that,
setting aside all cases of individual exception, the women of France have more power and more important
influence than the women of England. … France has been called ‘the paradise of women;’ and if
consideration and deference be sufficient to constitute a paradise, I think it may be called so justly.
Frances Trollope1
In the 1830s and 1840s, a considerable number of women writers published travel
narratives about France. This chapter focuses on Frances Trollope’s Paris and the
Parisians and Lady Blessington’s The Idler in France, published respectively in 1835 and
1841. They seem to be the first of a number of English authors who discuss the public role
of women by positing French salon hostesses as a model.2 The theme of women playing a
role in public life came into focus in the years preceding Victoria’s ascension to the throne
in 1837. For instance, Anna Jameson published Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns
in 1831 which, as she mentions in a letter, could be dedicated to the princess Victoria.3
English texts like those of Trollope and Blessington, which link French salon hostesses to
the so-called ‘woman question’, have their heyday in the 1850s and 1860s when
discussions about the nature and role of women gained increased interest.
1
Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), p.327. All subsequent references
are to this edition and page numbers will appear in the body of the text.
2
In French, the word ‘salon’ has basically three different meanings. It can describe an apartment or a room
for the reception of guests. It can also have the more specific meaning of a ‘reception-room of a Parisian lady
of fashion; hence, a reunion of notabilities at the house of such a lady; also, a similar gathering in other
capitals’. Finally, the term ‘salon’ also refers to ‘the annual exhibition at Paris of painting, sculpture, etc. by
living artists.’ In this text, the word has the second meaning of a reception room of a Parisian lady who
receives notabilities, writers and artists. OED The word will be discussed in more detail later on in this
chapter. Oxford English Dictionary online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl (accessed 10/03/2008).
3
Judith Johnston, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997),
p.55.
71
The objective of this chapter is to analyse how Trollope and Blessington represent French
women and construct themselves in their texts. French women were often described as
fascinating, which, whilst seemingly positive, also suggests an element of moral prurience;
French women accordingly were often condemned for their loose morals, as has been
outlined in the introduction to this study. I will argue that Trollope and Blessington do not
explicitly allude to earlier representations of French women by English travellers but draw
on the existing stereotypes and ideas held by their English readers in order to construct a
new and positive image of powerful and influential French salonnières with whom they
align themselves. Trollope has been deeply influenced by her idol, Mme de Staël, while
Blessington identifies herself mainly with Mme de Sévigné and Mme de Maintenon.4
Conflating salonnières and French women in general, Trollope and Blessington constantly
compare this positive portrayal of French women to English women as in the epigraph and
critically comment on gender roles in England. Trollope’s and Blessington’s depiction of
French women is not only new because it is positive, but because they combine feminist
ideas with conservative politics. They advocate political stability and not, like earlier
advocates of feminist ideas, radical politics. I will demonstrate that Trollope and
Blessington’s portrayals of salonnières differ in that Blessington’s description corresponds
more to nineteenth-century ideas of womanhood and therefore has more in common with
the majority of French representations of salons.
To situate my argument in a wider context, I will shortly outline how French salonnières
were seen in France during the nineteenth century. Faith E. Beasley states that ‘the
nineteenth century in particular becomes almost obsessed with seventeenth-century France
– its women, as well as the institution that best embodies their cultural activity, the salon’.5
This interest can be explained on one hand by the increasing importance of nationalist
ideologies in the wake of the French Revolution and on the other hand by the consolidation
of bourgeois concepts about gender.6 According to Beasley the representation of
4
Besides Sévigné and Maintenon, Blessington mentions the Marquise de Rambouillet Ninon de l’Enclos and
briefly Mesdames de Longueville and de Lafayette. Her choice might have been influenced by Sainte-Beuve
who includes mainly Madame de Maintenon, Ninon de Lenclos and Madame de Sévigné in his critical works.
See Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.222.
5
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.236.
6
Moreover, the role of women writers was widely discussed with the rise of the realist novel. This genre,
contrary to its predecessor, the sentimental novel, was dominated by male writers. As Margaret Cohen argues,
72
seventeenth-century women was in the service of ideologies of nationality and gender.
Basically, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the role of salonnières was
remodelled in order to correspond to bourgeois ideologies of femininity and their influence
on the literary canon of the seventeenth century was written out. Salons were presented as
places where good manners and gallantry are formed rather than as havens of literary
activity. One exception is Stéphanie de Genlis’ De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature
française, comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs; ou Précis de l'Histoire des
femmes françaises les plus célèbres, published in 1811. As the title indicates, Genlis
wanted to reclaim the salonnières’ important role for seventeenth-century literary life.
Trollope and Blessington might have known some of the works on French salons published
in the first half of the nineteenth century, for instance Genlis’s work or the Historiettes by
Tallemand des Réaux, written 1637-1659 and edited and published for the first time in
1833; P.L. Roederer’s Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire de la société polie en France
published in 1835, one year before Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians; Sophie Gay’s
Salons célèbres (1837); or Histoire des salons de Paris in six volumes by the Duchess
d’Abrantès (1837-38).7
It might be asked why Trollope and Blessington were fascinated with French salons and did
not choose English salons to portray their ideal. Salons or literary circles existed also in
England. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century Lady Cork, Mary and Agnes
Berry, whom Blessington met in Paris, and Lady Holland were well known for their salons.
At the same period, Mary Clarke and Mme Belloc, both Irish women like Blessington, had
their salons in Paris.8 Earlier, in the eighteenth century, there were various circles of
bluestockings. One reason for the choice of the French model is that both Trollope and
Blessington wanted women to be integrated and accepted in intellectual life or literary
tradition and therefore, preferred the image of French salons, where the two sexes mingled,
over circles in England.9 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English salons were
these realist writers did not discuss the merits of individual women writers but extended their discussions to
‘la femme auteur’. Cohen, p.61.
7
The information about the Historiettes is taken from: Léon Cerf, ed., Historiettes de Tallemant des Réaux
(Paris: Payot, 1929), p.14-16.
8
Jeanne Moskal, ‘Gender, Nationality, and Textual Authority in Lady Morgan's Travel Books,’ in Romantic
Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds. Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1995), p.185.
9
As Beasley points out, the salons of the seventeenth century were gender mixed and women played a
considerable role whereas later salons were normally male dominated both by number and influence. Trollope
73
clearly male dominated, often consisting of a female hostess and male guests, as in
Blessington’s case.10 In the eighteenth century, the circles of bluestockings were mainly
female whereas the predominantly male literary circles met in coffee houses which were
not deemed suitable places for women. Another reason for the choice of the French salon
might be that French nationality was still linked with the freedom and influence of its
women in the minds of English readers. Beasley, for example, argues that ‘in the
seventeenth century, ‘Frenchness’ was associated in part with the particular freedom
accorded to women in the social and cultural arenas’ and that this aspect of ‘Frenchness’
had been re-memorized later.
11
For some nineteenth-century English women, such as
Trollope and Blessington, this image of free and influential Frenchwomen was obviously
still valid. The choice of French over English salons has less to do with what they both
actually were and more with the perception of their role and significance.
Although Trollope and Blessington travelled and spent their lives in very different
circumstances, both published their books out of financial necessity. Frances [Fanny]
Trollope (1780-1863), whose life was similar to that of many middle-class women before
the publication of her first book, was the daughter of a clergyman and lost her mother at a
young age. In 1809, she married Thomas Anthony Trollope with whom she had seven
children, one of whom was the well-known Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.12 Her
husband Thomas Anthony Trollope was a barrister, but unfortunate business affairs and his
ill health made the financial situation of the family increasingly difficult. In 1827 Frances
Trollope went to America, hoping to establish her second son there and to rescue the family
finances. Trollope’s hopes were deceived and when she came back in 1832, the financial
situation of the family had worsened. Consequently, she hastened to publish her first work,
reports that in Madame Récamier’s salon there were two ladies and half a dozen gentlemen. Beasley, Salons,
History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.176; Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, p.176.
10
Susanne Schmid, ‘Lady Blessington und die Salons der englischen Romantik,’ in Subversive Romantik, eds
Volker Knapp, Helmuth Kiesel, Klaus Lubbers und Patricia Plummer (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2004),
p.155.
11
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.14.
12
Teresa Ransom, Fanny Trollope (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p.16. The background detailed here
is indebted to Ransom’s 1995 publication. Other reference works consulted include: Frances Eleanor
Trollope, Frances Trollope, her Life and Literary Work, from George III to Victoria by her Daughter-in-Law
Frances Eleanor Trollope (London: R. Bentley and son, 1895); Helen Heineman, Mrs. Trollope: The
Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979); Helen
Heineman, Restless Angels: The Friendship of Six Victorian Women (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,
1983); Helen Heineman, Three Victorians in the New World: Interpretations of the New World in the Works
of Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); and Pamela
Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope. The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (London: Viking, 1997).
74
an account of her almost four years in America, entitled Domestic Manners of the
Americans. Trollope, now aged fifty-two, expressed her financial concerns in a letter to a
friend:
I remember the time dearest, when if I had made such an attempt my only thought
would have been ‘what will be said of it?’ but now Alas! my only anxiety is, what
will be paid for it?13
The book caused much controversy and attracted fierce criticism in America because
Trollope’s view of America was bleak and marked by her strong opposition to
Republicanism. But, as one critic in the London Times states,
the more they (the Americans) complained of her strictures, the louder they talked
of ingratitude, misrepresentation, prejudice, short-sightedness, vulgarity, and all the
rest of it, the more our folks laughed…The quarrel was fun, and the louder it raged
the more funny it was.14
As a consequence, Trollope’s work received considerable publicity and was read, discussed
and reviewed in England as well as on the continent.15 It immediately established her
popularity and sold well. Her later works were popular as well and many of them were
translated into other languages. Paris and the Parisians appeared in the same year in
English, French and German. It seems therefore not to be exaggerated when Eleanor
Trollope, her daughter-in-law, contends that: ‘She was one of the most successful writers of
her day.’16 Her name was so famous that a French author tried to capitalise on it by
publishing his work under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trolopp.17 Her success and
perseverance enabled Trollope to provide the family income. She published travel books
and novels, often two works of three volumes a year, forty-one in total.18
13
Ransom, p.74, note 9. Ransom refers to the Garnett-Pertz Collection, Letters, by permission of the
Houghton Library, Harvard University. bMS Eng 1304.2 (30) FT to Julia Pertz, Harrow 25 November 1831.
14
'Paris and the Parisians,' The Times (30 Jan. 1836), 5.
15
Susan Kissel asserts that ‘American reviewers were naturally furious with Mrs. Trollope. Interest in these
reviews was so intense in England that a separate bound volume containing several of them was published.’
Susan S. Kissel, In Common Cause: The "Conservative" Frances Trollope and the "Radical" Frances Wright
(Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), p.17.
16
Frances Eleanor Trollope, p.3.
17
Sir Francis Trolopp (Féval Paul (1816-87)), Les mystères de Londres (Paris, Comptoir des imprimeurs unis,
1844) It was published by F. Gaillardet in New York in the same year and in Paris by Roulé in 1847.
18
Alan Sutton, ‘Introduction’ to Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, (Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1985),
p.xii.
75
Lady Blessington (1789-1849), on the other hand, was born as Margaret Power into an Irish
family. Her father was a small landowner, a squireen. Critics describe the situation of the
family as ‘difficult’, both in regard to finances and due to the irascible temperament and
brutality of the father.19 In 1804 Margaret was married to Captain Farmer with whom she
stayed only a few months because he was also brutal, and subsequently returned to her
family.20 In 1807, she went to live with Captain Jenkins. Later, she met Lord Blessington,
whom she married after the death of her husband in 1818. The financial situation of Lady
Blessington became increasingly difficult after the death of her husband in 1829 because
what he left her in his will did not provide for the luxurious life style she had adopted.21
Therefore, she published an increasing number of novels and travel narratives after 1832
and started working as an editor of the Annuals The Book of Beauty and The Keepsake.22
Her biggest success was probably her Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of
Blessington, published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1832 and 1833 and by Bentley in
1834.23 But as Jane Robinson avers, her travel writings were very popular as well and ‘did
much to popularize the Grand Tour amongst ‘women of quality’’.24 She had published her
first travel book, Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821, already in
1822. After the success of her travel book The Idler in Italy, published in 1839 and with an
added volume in 1840, she decided to publish the journal she had written during her years
in France in 1828-30 under the title The Idler in France.25 Like her previous Idler, it was
published simultaneously in London and Paris, in 1841. The numerous repetitions in the
text suggest that the work was not carefully crafted and that she was driven more by
necessity than by ambitions as a writer. Given that all personal allusions are elided, she
19
Prudence Hannay, 'Lady Blessington: A Literary Club for Editors,' in Genius in the Drawing-Room: The
Literary Salon in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Peter Quennell (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1980), p.24. The biographical indications on Blessington owe much to the following works:
Michael Sadleir, Blessington – D’Orsay: A Masquerade (London: Constable, 1933); Edith Clay, ed., Lady
Blessington At Naples (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979); Susanne Schmid; and Ernest J. Lovell,
‘Introduction,’ Lady Blessington’s ‘Conversations of Lord Byron’ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1969), pp.3-114.
20
Schmid, p.159.
21
Sadleir, p.131.
22
Sadleir, p.217-18.
23
Lovell, p.3.
24
Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990), p.83. Flora Tristan, for instance, was familiar with her works.
25
Blessington also published some tales alluding to France in the New Monthly Magazine in 1840, for
instance ‘Annette; or, The Galérien: A Tale,’ New Monthly Magazine 58 (February 1840), 257-260 and ‘The
Gamesters: A French Story,’ New Monthly Magazine 59 (May 1840), 28-43.
76
certainly modified her journal before publication, according to Sadleir.26 The Idler in
France was well received, but her later works left only ‘a transient mark’, as Sadleir puts it,
and Blessington’s activity as a writer and editor did not prevent her from becoming
insolvent in 1849.27 She fled to Paris and died soon afterwards.
Although both women were motivated to publish their travelogues by financial problems,
the circumstances of their journeys to Paris were completely different. While Trollope paid
for her trip with the commission for her book from the editor Richard Bentley and travelled
with a sick husband and son for whom she hoped to find help from a famous doctor,
Blessington moved in upper-class circles and led a more comfortable and leisurely life until
the death of her husband in 1829.28 This difference in financial situation and social
affiliation is clearly reflected in the two narratives. Yet, the two women have in common a
fascination with Paris, a city they both knew intimately. Trollope visited it several times,
for instance on her first trip abroad, in 1823, with her husband. The Trollopes were
introduced to different salons and met General Lafayette, Madame de Ségur, the Fenimore
Coopers, Madame Récamier, Prosper Mérimée, Stendhal, the Macreadys and Mary
Clarke.29 Trollope enthusiastically wrote in her journal: ‘I know not where to find so
intellectual, so amiable a set of beings as those I have been living amongst here.’30 In 1826
she visited Paris again and met Frances Wright who convinced her to accompany her to
America. Trollope relates the experiences on this journey in her first and most notorious
work Domestic Manners of the Americans. In 1835 she went to Paris to investigate material
for Paris and the Parisians. Later, she repeatedly visited Paris and enjoyed her celebrity as
a well known author.31 Trollope and Blessington were fluent in French and thoroughly
enjoyed social and intellectual life. For instance Blessington states in The Idler in France:
26
Sadleir, p.60.
Sadleir, p.278. But she was not unknown, for instance Flora Tristan mentions her in Promenades dans
Londres, chapter 2.
28
Owing to the success of her two earlier travel books about America and Belgium, the publisher Bentley
commissioned a book about Paris.
29
Ransom, p.30-1.
30
Heineman, Restless Angels, p.16. Heineman refers to ‘Trollope’s Journal of a Visit to La Grange’,
University of Illinois (UIU).
31
Paris features in several of her works. Trollope wrote two novels at least partly set in Paris, Hargrave, A
Man of Fashion (1843) and Fashionable Life; or, Paris and London, published in 1856. Another novel, The
Old World and the New (1849), contains letters from a character in Paris. In 1843 and 1844, Trollope
published several articles on France in the New Monthly Magazine, for instance ‘A visit to Rousseau’s
favourite residence, Les Charmettes’, New Monthly Magazine 70 (Jan. 1844), 64-76.
27
77
The tone of society in Paris is very agreeable. Literature, the fine arts, and the
general occurrences of the day, furnish the topics for conversation, from which illnatured remarks are exploded.32
In her view, conversation in Parisian salons is interesting and inspiring and Paris is an
enjoyable place for women, particularly for older women: ‘In France, a woman may forget
that she is neither young nor handsome; for the absence of these claims for attention does
not expose her to be neglected by the male sex.’ (44) She supports her idea of what Mary
Louise Pratt calls a ‘feminotopia’ by relating numerous interesting encounters and
discussions.33 In short, in Paris and the Parisians as well as in the Idler in France, Parisian
social and intellectual life is glorified.
In their descriptions of Paris, Trollope and Blessington, unlike most travel writers, do not
refer to earlier works written about the region or the people they describe. For instance the
English author Helen Maria Williams in her Letters written in France repeatedly quotes the
novelist Laurence Sterne who had described France some twenty years earlier.34 Williams
uses Sterne’s authority to back her argument that everyone with some affection and
philanthropy supports the French Revolution.35 Trollope and Blessington, on the contrary,
write their travelogues as if no English traveller had ever explored French culture before
them. Trollope refers to French authors, and quotes some of them copiously but she does
not refer to any English writers. Blessington only cites one of Sterne’s works in a passage
which is not directly related to France and quotes other writers when describing antiquities
in the south of France. Neither Trollope nor Blessington mention that Rousseau condemned
salons in moral terms, although they both knew his writings: Trollope comments on
Rousseau’s attempt to describe French women in La Nouvelle Héloise and Blessington
mentions her pilgrimage to Rousseau’s hermitage (326; 68). This omission allows them to
32
Margaret Gardiner comtesse de Blessington, The Idler in France (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de
l'éd. de Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1841), p.57. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1031009 (accessed
15/3/07). Subsequent references to this text are to this edition and page numbers will appear in the body of the
text.
33
The term ‘feminotopia’ has been coined by Mary Louise Pratt, p.166-7.
34
Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England; Containing
Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, eds., Neil Freistat and Susan S. Lanser, (Mississauga,
Canada: Broadview, 2001), pp.74, 95 and 101.
35
She contends that those who did not rejoice when they saw the fall of the Bastille may be ‘very respectable
persons’ but doubts that they have ‘feelings of general philanthropy’. Juxtaposing her statement with Sterne’s
sentence: ‘a man is incapable of loving one woman as he ought, who has not a sort of an affection for the
whole sex’ she uses this intertextual reference to support her argument. Williams, p.74.
78
use the stereotypes of gallantry, wit and quickness of mind in order to draw a new and ideal
image of French women and their position in society, which contradicts previous views.36
To demonstrate the novelty of Trollope’s and Blessington’s depictions and at the same time
their use of stereotypes, it is useful to analyse widely held ideas about French women. The
image of French women and ideologies of femininity in general had been largely
influenced by Rousseau in the second half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth
centuries. Mary Seidman Trouille asserts that ‘particularly during the first ten years after
the French Revolution ‘Rousseauism’ became the dominant ideology of the new bourgeois
ruling class.’37 Moreover, Rousseau had an important impact on thought in England and on
the continent. Given the importance of Rousseau’s ideas on women, and on French women
in particular, his strictures are explored in some detail.
Rousseau mentions French salon hostesses in his Letter to D’Alembert. He argues that a
virtuous woman leads a domestic life and does not appear in public. Consequently, he
deplores that in France, salonnières, who play a public role, are highly esteemed:
Chez nous … la femme la plus estimée est celle qui fait le plus de bruit; de qui l’on
parle le plus; qu’on voit le plus dans le monde; chés [sic] qui l’on dîne le plus
souvent; qui donne le plus impérieusement le ton; qui juge, tranche, décide,
prononce, assigne aux talens [sic], au mérite, aux vertus, leurs degrés et leurs places,
et dont les humbles savans [sic] mendient le plus bassement la faveur.38
[With us... the most esteemed woman is the one who has the greatest renown, about
whom the most is said, who is the most often seen in society, at whose home one
dines the most, who … most imperiously sets the tone, who judges, resolves,
36
Trollope’s use of stereotypes was the most criticized element by her reviewers. Even the reviewer for the
Literary Gazette, who presents her work in a favourable light, states that Paris and the Parisians contains
‘much commonplace in the way of opinion’. 'Paris and the Parisians in 1835. By Frances Trollope,' The
London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc. (1836), 4. Another reviewer calls
her a ‘wholesale dealer in old-fashioned prejudices’. 'The Monarchy of the Middle Classes. By H.L. Bulwer /
Paris and the Parisians, in 1835. By Frances Trollope,' Monthly Review 2 (1836), 236.
37
Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany:
University of New York Press, 1997), p.67. For Rousseau’s critique of salonnières and its influence on
historiography see also: Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), chapter 2 ‘ Philosophes and Salonnières: A
Critique of Enlightenment Historiography,’ pp.53-89.
38
Jean- Jacques Rousseau, ‘J.J. Rousseau Citoyen de Genève, à M. D’Alembert,’ in Œuvres complètes, eds.
Bernard Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond, (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), vol.5, p.45.
79
decides, pronounces, assigns talents, merit, and virtues their degrees and places, and
whose favour is most ignominiously begged for by humble, learned men.39]
Whereas Rousseau represents the salon hostesses as powerful and influential he uses the
expression ‘humble’ for the men. This term is normally used in combination with
‘serviteurs’, servants not ‘savans’, or learned men. Thus, Rousseau suggests that men in
salons are the servants of women. At the same time, the salonnières are presented as
aggressive and threatening particularly through the rhythm of the second sentence with its
repetition of verbs. The threat is emphasized by the choice of the words ‘juger’ and
‘trancher’. Whereas the figurative meaning of ‘trancher’ is ‘to resolve’, its real meaning is
‘to cut’. In another passage, Rousseau asserts that salon life is emasculating: ‘Chaque
femme de Paris rassemble dans son appartement un serrail d’hommes plus femmes
qu’elle.’, [Every woman in Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish
than she.]
40
Men are not only compared to women, but to oriental women whose position
was thought to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In brief, women assuming a public
role were believed to feminize men. Following Rousseau, this is an unnatural state because
women should naturally lead a retired virtuous life.
In Rousseau’s view, the degradation of the ‘natural’ gender roles is a consequence of
traditional aristocratic ideals. He explains the fact that men accept their position as servants
of salonnières by the influence of ‘les livres de chevalerie’, [books of chivalry] which were
‘les écoles de galanterie du temps’, [the schools of gallantry of the time].41 This idea was
taken up during the Revolution. Aristocracy was considered to be feminised whereas
Republicanism was intricately linked to ideologies of masculinity. Women in public were
seen as a threat to the Republic which was perceived as needing virtuous women who
would educate good citizens.42 This way of thinking is reflected in the French ‘Declaration
39
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, Translated, with
notes and an introduction by Allan Bloom, (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1960), p.49. All subsequent
quotations of Rousseau are translated by Allan Bloom. Page numbers referring to this edition will appear in
brackets.
40
Rousseau, 5 : 93, (p.101).
41
Rousseau, 5 : 82, (p.89).
42
Trouille asserts that under Robespierre’s reign, women in public roles were ‘labelled ‘unnatural’ and
counterrevolutionary’ and finally imprisoned and often condemned to death, like Olympe de Gouges and
Mme Roland. Trouille, p.69.
80
of the Rights of Man’ adopted in 1789, where women are explicitly excluded from
government.43
Rousseau’s work contains the elements which led to the perception that the two different
gender models correspond to the social order in France and Britain. On one hand, he
extends the image of salon hostesses to women of all classes when he claims that ‘every
woman in Paris gathers a harem of men’. On the other hand, his work suggests that English
women correspond to the ideal of virtuous women. He praises the institution of London
clubs and ‘cercles’ in Geneva which ensure that men and women move in separate
spheres.44 These elements reappear in the English view that, in contrast to English women,
French women are not virtuous, and lead a public instead of a retired life.
Trollope follows Rousseau’s argument to a certain extent. Like him, she insists on the
crucial role of French women in society and cultural life, claiming for instance: ‘The
women of France have more power and more important influence than the women of
England’ (327). In addition, like Rousseau, Trollope extends her image of salon hostesses
to French women in general. Her chapter about French women focuses mainly on salon
hostesses and when she mentions women of other classes, she underlines their similarities
to salonnières. To buttress her argument, she insists on continuity and uses stereotypes. For
instance, she claims that, whereas Frenchmen have considerably changed, salon hostesses
have remained the same since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
A petite maîtresse is a petite maîtresse still ; and female wit – female French wit –
continues to be the same dazzling, playful and powerful thing that it ever was (330).
The stereotypical characteristic of French people is not only linked to salon hostesses, but
to all women. The fact that she makes the stereotype recognizable, by adding ‘French wit’,
emphasizes this generalization.
43
Olympe de Gouges reacts to the Déclaration des droits de l’homme by issuing her Déclaration des droits
de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen) in 1791.
Trouille, pp.273-4. Similarly Mary Wollstonecraft responded with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
44
Rousseau, 5 : 90. (p.98).
81
Blessington, like Rousseau and Trollope, emphasizes the salonnière’s influence and extends
her description to all French women and to her own period:
Frenchwomen still think, and with reason, that they govern the tone of the circles in
which they move, and look with jealousy on any infringement of the respectful
attention they consider to be their due (246).
Blessington, unlike Trollope, moves only in the salons of the French aristocracy. The word
‘still’ implies that these contemporary salons are closely linked to the history of salons. In
another passage she insists more clearly on this continuity. After praising the agreeable tone
in French salons she states:
A ceremoniousness of manner, reminding one of la Vieille Cour, and probably
rendered à la mode by the restoration of the Bourbons, prevails; as well as a strict
observance of deferential respect from the men towards the women, while these last
seem to assume that superiority accorded to them in manner, if not entertained in
fact, by the sterner sex (57).
Blessington argues that after a break from the Revolution to the restoration of the
monarchy, the old salon tradition was reinstated and with it the ‘superiority’ accorded the
women. Her women have agency and influence the topics discussed in salons.45 To explain
the importance of French women and the respect they receive, Blessington draws on the
stereotype of French gallantry or ‘good breeding’ (125). She repeatedly insists on the
importance of good manners, and clearly states what she means: ‘By a disagreeable manner
… I refer to a superciliousness or coldness, that marks a sense of superiority; or to a habit
of contradiction, that renders society what it should never be – an arena of debate.’ (153) In
Blessington’s view, men should not have a sense of superiority but rather accord women
superiority. Thus, although she bases her argument on gallantry, like Rousseau, she does
not adopt his negative judgment on influential women.
Trollope and Blessington follow Rousseau’s argument to a certain extent, but, unlike him,
do not portray women in French salons in a negative way. On the contrary, they both
celebrate salon culture and their participants, although not in the same way and to the same
extent. Trollope acknowledges salonnières for their conversation, their writing and their
45
See for instance: ‘I strongly suspect that women here would be very little disposed to submit to the
nonchalance I have referred to in England’ (246).
82
role as literary critics. For instance, she mentions admiringly different salon hostesses:
Mme de Sévigné (1626-1696) who is known for her letters, Madame de la Fayette (16341693) author of La Princesse de Clèves, who is considered to have founded the genre of the
novel, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry (1607-1701) the writer of poems and novels who
opened a literary salon in 1652:46
I really do not believe that if Mme de Sévigné herself were permitted to revisit the
scene of her earthly brightness and to find herself in the midst of a Paris soirée
tomorrow, that she would find any difficulty in joining the conversation of those
she would find there, in the same tone and style that she enjoyed so keenly in days
of yore with Madame de la Fayette, Mademoiselle Scuderie, or any sister sparkler
of that glorious via lactea – provided indeed that she did not talk politics, …(330).
Trollope not only admires their conversation but also their literary activity, adding that
women were still writing ‘romances’, ‘verses’ and ‘memoirs’. Further, she emphasises the
salonnière’s roles as ‘keen critics’ who ‘doomed the poets of the day to oblivion or
immortality according to their will’ (330). Her heroines are by no means on the margins of
the literary scene, but, in fact, judge works by male and female writers. Moreover, they
cannot be dismissed as exceptions because the image of the ‘via lactea’, the stars in the
Milky Way, indicates that there is a multitude of stars, or talented and admirable women,
who are often overlooked. The mention of the Milky Way recalls the Pléiade, a group of
sixteenth century poets, named after the star formation Pléiade, whose best known member
was Pierre de Ronsard.47 As these poets reached new popularity at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Trollope may have known some of their works.48 The parallel is
interesting because it emphasises the importance of salon hostesses for French literature
and language.49
46
For biographical information see: Faith E. Beasley, ‘Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de
Lafayette, (1634-1693),’ Katharine Ann Jensen, ‘Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701),’ and Michèle L. Farrell,
‘Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696),’ in French Women Writers. A BioBibliographical Source Book, eds. Eva Martin Sartori, and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, (New York;
Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press), 1991, pp.272-84, pp.430-9, pp.453-62.
47
The alignment with the Pléiade also integrates the salon hostesses in a long tradition of Western culture. In
Greek mythology the name Pléiade refers to the seven daughters of Atlas who changed into the stars of the
sign Taurus after death and therefore means immortality. In the third century before Christ it was used for a
group of poets of Alexandria.
48
The Bibliothèque nationale holds two editions from 1828 and 1830, one of poems by Ronsard and the other
of poems by different members of the Pléiade.
49
The parallel between the Pléiade and the salonnières emphasizes their contributions to French literature and
language. The poets of the Pléiade played a crucial role for the formation of a French literature. Although they
considered the ancient Greek and Roman texts to be extremely important for their literary production, they
83
When Trollope emphasizes the important role of French women in society as well as in
regard to literature she explicitly includes lower-class women:
As we all know but too well, ‘les dames de la Halle’, or, as they are more familiarly
styled, ‘les poissardes,’ have made themselves important personages in the history
of Paris (331). 50
Trollope adds that the ‘poissardes’, or marketwomen have their delegations at all important
historical occasions and play an important role in cultural life, even having their own
literature. To support this claim she gives examples of bon-mots and songs collected under
the name of ‘Chansons Grivoises’ (332). Trollope’s portrayal of the ‘poissardes’ as having
their own culture contradicts Edmund Burke in his famous work on the French Revolution,
where he claims women are part of the irrational and vulgar mob which stormed the Castle
in Versailles.51 Trollope alludes to this well-known and often reiterated portrayal of French
lower-class women by emphasising that she does not consider them important owing to
their role in the Revolution which she describes as ‘hideous’ (331).52 At the same time she
echoes Genlis who states:
During the century of Louis XIV … there was a multitude of women writers in all
genres and in all classes; and not only did people of letters not rail against these
advocated the use of French and not Latin for literary production and opted against translations of Greek,
Latin and Italian works, which were an extremely important factor in literary production of the period.
Moreover, they considered the French language to be poor and in need of embellishments. One of the poets,
Joachim Du Bellay, proclaims these ideas in Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). André
Tournon, Michel Bideaux, Hélène Moreau et al. eds., Histoire de la littérature française du XVIe siècle (Paris:
Nathan, 1991), pp.176-178. So, the poets of the Pléiade contributed to changes in the French language and to
the formation of modern French and played a crucial role in literature.
50
The word ‘poissardes’ means ‘femme de la halle’, [woman of the market hall] or ‘femme du bas peuple au
langage grossier’, [lower-class woman using coarse language]. ‘Les dames de la Halle’ would be [the ladies
of the market hall]. Le Petit Robert. Dictionnaire alphabétique & analogique de la langue française (Paris:
Dictionnaire le Robert, 1977). Trollope refers here to a group of persons not clearly defined but which figure
in many records on the Revolution. Jules Michelet, for instance, uses it. Jules Michelet, 'Les Femmes de la
Révolution,' in Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p.401
51
Dolan, pp.203-207. Dickens portrays French lower-class women in a similar way in his Tale of Two Cities.
52
Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser confirm in a footnote to Helen Maria Williams’ Letters Written in France
‘The Poissardes, fishwives and market women, would on ceremonial occasions offer their greeting and pledge
their loyalty to the King and Queen at Versailles.’ They also mention the involvement of the poissardes in the
Revolution i.e. their march to Versailles on the 5 October 1789. Williams, p.99.
84
women writers, they took pleasure in valorizing them and giving them all the honor
and esteem of gallantry.53
Trollope and Genlis draw an idealised image of the society they describe where women of
all classes contribute to cultural production and are valorised for it.
Blessington’s representation of French salons and their hostesses is more ambivalent. But
she clearly celebrates them. Relating how she bought objects owned by Madame de
Sévigné, Madame de Maintenon, the Marquise de Rambouillet, Ninon de l’Enclos and
Madame du Deffand, she dwells at length on these objects and their relation to their former
owners. In other words, she treats these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women like
saints or idols. Like Trollope, she uses the metaphor of stars, describing Madame de
Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Longueville (1619-1679) as ‘the fair and
elegant dames of that galaxy of wit and beauty’ (133). However, in Blessington’s text, the
image of the stars is not linked to literary endeavours but to wit and beauty. For
Blessington, the salons are places for conversation where manners and morals are refined.
In this she follows nineteenth-century French representations of salons. Yet, she
acknowledges the salonnières’ roles in regard to the French language, stating about the
salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet that it was celebrated ‘not only for the efforts made
by its coterie towards refining the manners and morals of her day, but the language also’
(132). This addition of the aspect of language seems to indicate that she was aware of
contemporary French representations of salons and wanted to confer more importance on
salonnières.
In spite of this celebration, Blessington represents salonnières as less important than
Trollope and echoes contemporary French representations of salons to a certain extent. For
instance she does not mention the women’s roles as literary critics and therefore plays
down their influence on literature. Also, she alludes to Molière’s comedies Les Femmes
savantes and Les Précieuses ridicules and takes them as accurate representations of reality,
hence believing that salon culture degenerated ‘into a coterie, remarkable … for its fantastic
and false notions of refinement, exhibited in a manner that deserved the ridicule it called
53
Quoted in Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.200, Mme de
Genlis, De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature française, comme protectrices des lettres et comme
auteurs: ou, Précis de l'histoire des femmes françaises les plus célèbres (Paris: Maradon, 1811), p.xxxiv.
85
down!’ (262).54 In addition, she ridicules Scudéry’s novels describing them as ‘tiresome’
(161). In this, she follows again a general tendency in nineteenth-century French
representations of salons and their hostesses. As Beasley outlines, the salon Rambouillet
was stylized as elegant and aristocratic and having all the French characteristics while
Scudéry’s samedis were ridiculed and associated with the bourgeoisie although the salons
were frequented by the same people and equally praised for their literary activities by their
contemporaries.55 The major difference between the two women, Scudéry’s renown as a
writer within and outside France, accounted for their different reception during the
nineteenth century: Scudéry did not correspond to ideals of femininity.
Trollope, on the contrary, asserts that French women have not ‘degenerated from their
admired great-grandmothers’ (330). She does not mention Molière’s portrayal of salons,
instead, in her text, the salonnières are the ones discussing Molière’s comedies. This leads
to another difference between Blessington’s and Trollope’s text. Blessington’s salonnières
are more often in a rather passive position of listening and responding to men.56 This
portrayal corresponds much more to that given in French historical works of the nineteenth
century. This is not to say that Blessington reduces women to ornaments of the salon, as for
instance Victor Cousin would in his work on Madame de Sablé, published in 1854. She
states that in French salons, women get attention for their mental capacities and not only
owing to their youth and beauty: ‘France is the paradise for old women, particularly if they
are spirituelle [witty]; but England is the purgatory’ (44). In short, French women are
respected not only because men are polite but because they are good and witty
conversationalists. This has a positive effect on old women, as Blessington remarks, ‘they
possess all the gaiety of youth, without any of its thoughtlessness’ (44). She carefully
avoids the stereotype used for French people of superficial gaiety by asserting that they are
not thoughtless. In Blessington’s text, French salons are represented as ‘feminotopias’ but
salonnières are given less importance in regard to cultural production than in Trollope’s
text.
54
According to Beasley, this was an often adopted point of view. Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation
of Seventeenth-Century France, p.2.
55
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, pp.228 and 233.
56
For instance: ‘I see pass before me the fair end elegant dames of that galaxy of wit and beauty, Mesdames
de Longueville, Lafayette, and de Sévigné, fluttering their fans as they listened and replied to the gallant
compliments of Voiture, Ménage, Chapelain, Desmarets, or De Réaux, or to the spirituelle causerie of
Chamfort.’ (262).
86
Both women, Trollope and Blessington, contradict the widespread negative judgment about
French women by giving the stereotypes a positive connotation. For instance, in Trollope’s
text, French wit is not linked to superficiality, the most common stereotype for French
people. Instead, she chooses the words ‘dazzling’ and ‘playful’ which suggest interesting
and novel ideas: French wit ‘continues to be the same dazzling, playful and powerful thing’
(330). Moreover, the expression ‘powerful’ confers a certain importance to their wit and
contradicts deprecating gender stereotypes which attribute little importance to female
conversation. Blessington similarly celebrates conversation in French salons:
I observe that few English shine in conversation with the French. There is a
lightness and brilliancy, a sort of touch and go, if I may say so, in the latter, seldom,
if ever, to be acquired by strangers. Never dwelling long on any subject, and rarely
entering profoundly into it, they sparkle on the surface with great dexterity, bringing
wit, gaiety, and tact, into play (96).
Like Trollope, she draws on the stereotypes of ‘Frenchness’, wit, gaiety and superficiality,
and imbues them with positive connotations. She repeatedly insists on wit and sparkle
when describing French conversation, stressing that in France, wit does not degenerate into
offensive satire as happens in England. Thus, through the representation of French salons,
Trollope and Blessington valorise what, in England and France, was often depreciatingly
called light female conversation.
Blessington uses the same strategy when praising the writing of Madame de Sévigné and
even of French women in general. She states:
All Frenchwomen write well. They possess the art of giving interest even to trifles,
and have a natural eloquence de plume, as well as de langue, that renders the task an
easy one (195).
Here, she gives the stereotypical characteristics of women’s writing (the natural flow and
lightness) a positive connotation. Then, she goes on to praise French novels, a genre which
was dominated by female writers in the first three decades of the century; an uncommon
step, since they were often dismissed as immoral. Blessington was well aware of that since
she states: ‘It is the custom in England to decry French novels’ (195). Blessington clearly
87
emphasises the importance of literary production by French women although she does not
link it as closely to the salon tradition as Trollope.
Trollope and Blessington buttress their positive image of French women by attributing
them also qualities as wives and mothers, roles that were considered primordial in
bourgeois ideology. Like Rousseau, Trollope draws on the stereotype of gallant French
men; unlike Rousseau, however, she does not aim to show their decadence. She does not
use the word ‘gallant’, probably because of its negative connotations, but refers to
Frenchmen’s politeness. Trollope argues that French men are more polite than English men,
and therefore show ‘consideration’ and ‘domestic respect’ to women (327). She concludes
that the respect French women enjoy from their fathers, husbands, and sons, speaks for
their ‘genuine virtue’ (328). The expression ‘domestic respect’ implies that they are good
daughters, wives and mothers (my emphasis). Thus, Trollope contradicts Rousseau’s
separation of the terms ‘influential’ and ‘virtuous’ regarding women. Her French women
are both influential and virtuous.57
Trollope’s inclusion of virtue in her ideal image seems to be a concession to prevalent
ideologies of femininity of her period, or in other words, a strategy to advocate activities
for women that are not linked to their domestic roles. She does not really propagate the
bourgeois ideal of virtuous women. On the contrary, she praises mostly women who lived
as aristocrats in the ancien regime, where ideas about marriage were different, or else
women like Mme de Staël and George Sand who do not correspond to this ideal either.
Trollope was well aware of the scandal around Sand. She alludes to her cross-dressing, in
Paris and the Parisians, but does not dwell on her private life although she dedicates a
whole chapter to her.58 Interestingly, she explicitly excludes this aspect: ‘The private
57
To demonstrate the virtue of lower-class women, she conveys an anecdote of the ‘dames de la Halle’
chasing and flogging a countess and her friend who were not decently dressed (332). She adds that the market
women have authority and influence among the men of their class. Thereby she comes very close to
Rousseau’s view of women as preservers of virtue in the family and nation. But contrary to Rousseau, public
life and virtue do not exclude each other in Trollope’s view. The market women promote moral behavior in
the public space. Like her salon hostesses, Trollope’s market women are influential and virtuous in addition to
actively contributing to French culture. This inclusion of lower-class women is uncharacteristic for Trollope
who endorses an elitist stance and expresses her anti-republican convictions throughout her work. Moreover it
is inconsistent in itself. She uses the stereotype of aristocratic women lacking virtue to prove the virtue of
market women. Thus, she contradicts her own statement that salonnières are virtuous.
58
Trollope mentions that women were not allowed to be spectators of the monster process but that there was a
boy called ‘George S-----d’ (132).
88
history of an author ought never to mix itself with a judgment of his works.’ (433) Trollope
seems to be more interested in Sand’s talent and in the improvement of the condition of
woman. All these aspects point to the fact that the integration of virtue in her ideal was a
strategic move.
Blessington does not mention virtue at all. But her French women, like Trollope’s, are good
mothers and wives despite their important public role.59 She dispels commonly held
prejudices about French women in a different way. Agreeing with Rousseau about the
aristocratic way of life, she asserts that vice and egotism were widespread before the
Revolution, but contends that the one good effect of the Revolution was a change of French
attitudes:
The relations between husband and wife, and parents and children, have assumed
another character, by which the bonds of affection and mutual dependances [sic] are
drawn more closely together; and home, sweet home, the focus of domestic love,
said to have been once an unknown blessing, at least among the haute noblesse, is
now endeared by the discharge of reciprocal duties and warm sympathies (171).
(emphasis in original)
She explains this change as a salutary effect of exile and poverty on the French aristocracy.
By attributing French aristocrats an affectionate home, Blessington dispels the stereotype
that French women were not good wives and mothers. She praises the bourgeois ideal of a
marriage of affection and contrasts it with the practices of the noblesse before the
Revolution (173). Blessington, once again extends her positive assessment to all French
people.60 Her argument that public and domestic life are not exclusive is supported by her
portrayal of the Duchess de Guiche:
In the meridian of youth and beauty, and filling so brilliant a position in France, it is
touching to witness how wholly engrossed this amiable young woman’s thoughts
are by her domestic duties (126).
This sort of description of the de Guiche appears continuously and prompts Michael Sadleir
to state: ‘Throughout the twenty-seven months of Paris Journal, the virtues and graces of
59
This difference might be due to the different status they held in English society, Trollope in the bourgeoisie
whereas Blessington moved in aristocratic circles.
60
Blessington asserts that: ‘It is truly delightful to witness the warm affection that subsists between relatives
in France, and the dutiful and respectful attention paid by children to their parents.’ (63).
89
D'Orsay's sister Ida and of his brother-in-law the Duke de Guiche, are set forth in
wearisome superlative.’61 By presenting activities in French salons and domestic duties as
compatible, Blessington contradicts Rousseau as well as bourgeois ideology. In addition,
she often does not distinguish between the Duke and the Duchess in regard to their role in
the family and outside.62 So, in addition to presenting French women as both leading an
active life and corresponding to contemporary views of the ideal wife and mother,
Blessington does not always support the idea of different gender roles.
Accordingly, in her portrayal of the famous salonnières Blessington does not primarily
stress their intellectual capabilities and achievements but gives equal emphasis to their roles
as women, wives and mothers. For instance she chose to give an important place to
Madame de Sévigné who, since the publication of her letters in the eighteenth century was
not only seen as ‘the letter writer par excellence’, but also gradually became a symbol for
the bourgeois ideals ‘motherly love, order, and respectability’.63 Blessington aligns herself
with Sévigné by purchasing a crystal flacon previously owned by her. This flacon stands
not only for Sévigné’s spirit and her gift for writing but also for her image as a tender and
selfless mother. Blessington describes how Sévigné holds the flacon under the nostrils of
her daughter. Similarly, the other personal objects Blessington buys are specifically objects
used by women, not related to their intellectual activities such as a pen or a book would be.
Blessington’s text reflects this ideal of women as excelling in both spheres, the public and
the domestic.
Trollope and Blessington are not the only English women who depict French women in a
positive light. For instance Lady Morgan, in her work France, published in 1817, shared
their positive assessment of French women. In 1817, it was an audacity to praise aspects of
French people and life because for years, the English press had been presenting French
61
Sadleir, p.123. The Duchesse de Guiche was the sister of her close friend, Count d’Orsay. He was married
to the daughter of Lord Blessington.
62
For instance Blessington asserts that few people who know the the Duc and Duchess in public can imagine
them ‘emulating each other in their devotion to their children, and giving only the most judicious proof of
their attachment to them’ (86).
63
Catherine Montfort, ‘Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de (1626-1696),’ in French Women
Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, eds. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, (New
York; Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1991), p.510.
90
people and Napoleon as fiends.64 Like Trollope and Blessington, Morgan insists on the
crucial role of women in the ancien régime. She argues like Blessington that the Revolution
had a positive influence on married life. However, she attributes this positive change to a
diminution of women’s importance in society and declares that their influence before the
Revolution was ‘undue’.65 Consequently, Morgan’s view is closer to Rousseau’s while
Blessington and Trollope refuse to see a difference between the important role of women
before and after the Revolution. Helen Maria Williams, in Letters Written in France,
published in 1790 offers another example of a positive portrayal of French women. She
praises French women for their involvement in the Revolution and the countess de Genlis
for her Republicanism. Williams and Morgan sympathise both with Revolution and
Republicanism.66
Trollope’s and Blessington’s work, on the contrary, is decidedly anti-revolutionary.67
Trollope’s contention is expressed in her description of republicans:
A hat, whose crown if raised for a few inches more would be conical, is highest in
importance, as in place; (…) Then come the long and matted locks, that hang in
heavy ominous dirtiness beneath it. The throat is bare, at least from linen; but a
plentiful and very disgusting profusion of hair supplies its place. The waistcoat like
the hat, bears an immortal name – ‘GILET À LA ROBESPIERRE’ being its awful
designation; and the extent of its wide-spreading lapels is held to be a criterion of
the expansive principles of the wearer. Au reste, a general air of grim and savage
blackguardism is all that is necessary to make up the outward man of a republican
of Paris in 1835 (134-5).
Trollope depicts the republicans as dangerous, but at the same time, she ridicules them and
expresses her contempt by describing them only in terms of dress or ‘masquerading attire’
64
According to Mary Campbell, the book was fiercely attacked, for instance in the Quarterly Review. Mary
Campbell, Lady Morgan. The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988), p.154.
65
Lady Morgan, pp.160-162.
66
Mary Campbell asserts that Morgan met Helen Maria Williams in Paris when she was there in 1816 and
that they were talking about Madame de Staël, a republican as well, who was in Italy at that time. Campbell
does not indicate the sources of her information. Campbell, p.141. Campbell also states that Morgan met
another republican, Madame de Genlis. p.144. She quotes from letters between Genlis and Morgan without
giving precise references.
67
A reviewer of her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, claims that her journey to America
changed her political convictions: ‘She made the usual transit in the course of her travels, having gone out
Whig, and come back Tory, ready with the Anti-jacobin, in the Robbespierrian days in Paris, to cry out, ‘D---liberty! I hate its very name.’ 'Trollope and Paulding in America,' Fraser's Magazine 5 (1832), 336. NevilleSington quotes a letter by Frances Trollope in which she wrote in 1831 that she was once ‘a bit of a radical’
but that the tour to America had changed her convictions. Neville-Sington, p.167.
91
and does not mention their convictions, speeches or actions. In addition, she asserts that
they can be seen ‘strutting’, ‘sauntering’ or ‘hovering’ in and around Paris using verbs
which express idleness and purposelessness and not political contentions and actions (134).
In the lines following the above quotation, she compares the republicans to the witches in
Macbeth and thereby feminises them. Similar descriptions recur throughout Paris and the
Parisians. For instance, mentioning the small riots regularly happening at the Porte Saint
Martin which cause fear and, at one point, make Trollope think of returning home, Trollope
states that the rioters are ‘as harmless as a set of croaking bullfrogs on the banks of the
Wabash’ (203).68 This image of the ‘frog parliament’ which suggests a lot of noise without
consequence illustrates Trollope’s contempt for Republicanism and revolution. The
‘othering’ in this passage is emphasized by her statement: ‘One of the happiest
circumstances in the situation of poor struggling England at present is, that her boys are not
republican. On the contrary, the rising spirit among us is decidedly conservative.’ (169)
Blessington expresses her ‘horror of revolutions’ most clearly when describing her visit to
the Château d’Orsay and to the Hôtel d’Orsay, both largely destroyed during the Revolution
(84-85; 146-147). She describes the former splendour of the buildings as well as their
richness in works of art and deplores that ‘a revolution - that most fearful of all calamities,
pestilence only excepted, that can befall a country’ has destroyed them (147). In spite of her
argument about a lack of morality during the ancient regime, she clearly sympathises with
the old aristocracy whose members lost their fortunes and houses during the Revolution.
When describing the events during the revolution of 1830, she takes the same point of
view, although she does show some respect for the discipline and gallantry of the people on
the barricades. In line with her sympathies, Blessington clearly rejects the idea of a
Republic but considers that the chances of its introduction are slim:
The cry for a republic, though strongly echoed, will, I think, be unavailing; and the
reasonable part of the community cannot desire that it should be otherwise,
inasmuch as the tyranny of the many must ever be more insupportable than that of
68
Interestingly, Trollope positions these frogs to the banks of the Wabash, the river which rises in western
Ohio. For her, Republicanism in America and in France is closely linked. This passage backs Claire
Cotugno’s opinion that Trollope’s pronounced aversion against Republicanism was a result of her unhappy
experiences in America. Claire Cotugno, '"Stay Away from Paris!" Frances Trollope Rewrites America,'
Victorian Periodicals Review 38 (2005), 243.
92
one, admitting that even a despotic monarchy could in our day exercise a tyranny,
which I am not disposed to admit (277).
Although she expresses her political opinions, she repeatedly disclaims any interest in
politics, adopting a careful discursive gendered position. The events of the revolution of
1830 do not seem to concern her and she believes herself to be safe, except when walking
to her friend over the barricades. She is convinced that only the monarch ‘has fallen into
disrepute’ and not the aristocracy, voicing fear only for the closest followers of the king
(296).
Trollope is more outspoken in political matters and describes herself as a conservative. She
expresses not only her sympathy with the royalists but also her nostalgia for the time before
the Revolution.69 Her description of a royalist reveals her respectful attitude:
There was a quiet, half-proud, half-melancholy air of keeping himself apart; an
aristocratical cast of features; a pale care-worn complexion; and a style of dress
which no vulgar man ever wore, but which no rich one would be likely to wear
today. …there was something pervading his whole person too essentially loyal to be
misunderstood, yet too delicate in its tone to be coarsely painted (68).
The passage stresses the positive and uncommon characteristics of the royalist who is
‘keeping himself apart’. The description also reflects nostalgia for a glorious past which
pervades the text, particularly the first letter. Trollope reminisces about the lilies she
describes as ‘the symbol of chivalric bravery’ and the white banners which were ‘floating
gaily over her palaces’ when she last visited France and which she finds now ‘torn down
and trampled in the dust.’ (4) Her text mirrors her regret that the ancien régime and the
monarchy of the Restoration have disappeared. In the course of her text her opinion is
increasingly favourable to the establishment, a fact that has been criticised by several
reviewers: ‘Mrs. Trollope … has fallen in love with Louis Philippe, of whose government
she has become a zealous supporter’ the Athenaeum reviewer complains.70 This is a clear
69
At the period Trollope was known as a Tory and conservative. Kissel asserts that the Brownings thought
her too conservative and hesitated whether to socialize with her. Kissel, p.93 Cotugno describes the different
political influences on Trollope: she ‘came from a politically conservative family but married a liberal and
travelled in liberal social circles until her arrival in America in 1827. In Domestic Manners, she adopts a
strong anti-republican stance. Cotugno, 242.
70
'The Monarchy of the Middle Classes. By H.L. Bulwer / Paris and the Parisians in 1835. By Frances
Trollope,' Athenaeum 428 (9 Jan 1836), 25.
93
exaggeration. Trollope merely acquires the conviction that the bourgeoisie and King Louis
Philippe represent political stability and prosperity. She stresses that fear of Republicanism
is ‘the point on which we agree wholly and heartily’ (252). In the postscript Trollope
asserts that ‘we firmly trust, [France] … will establish her government on a basis firm
enough to strengthen the cause of social order and happiness throughout all Europe.’ Thus,
Trollope’s political contentions in Paris and the Parisians are mainly informed by a desire
for political stability.71
Although this position might suggest that she was a conservative who wanted to preserve
the status quo, this is not the case. On the contrary, Trollope shared the hopes of
Wollstonecraft and Williams that French influence would improve the situation of English
women. She explicitly criticises English society and presents French women and their
position in society as an ideal to emulate. In her opinion, English women are inhibited by
manners and prevalent opinions in their country. They don’t freely express their opinions
and show their talents for fear of being mocked as ‘blue’ and therefore often appear to be
ignorant and dull in spite of their knowledge (328).72 Further, Trollope blames the English
for thinking that discussing politics is not suitable for women (329). Finally, she would like
to see social gatherings not divided according to gender. Her ideal woman is well educated
and able to discuss any subject, even politics.73 Her role is not restricted to that of wife and
mother or to the family home. Trollope claims that ‘nowhere are the higher efforts of the
female mind more honoured than in France’ and approves of this practice (331). She gives
as examples of admired women, Mme de Staël who is mainly known for her novels and
works about Germany, and Mary Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and scientific
writer.74 Trollope implies that in France, women working in domains not deemed feminine
are also admired and clearly advocates changes to the condition of woman in England.
71
Cotugno claims that Trollope presents America and Paris as ‘lessons against political reform in Britain’.
This can be illustrated by Trollope’s comment about the Reform Bill of 1832 in Paris and the Parisians. She
states that Britain is more advanced and adds ‘and it may be, that as we have gone farthest of all modern
nations … so may we be first to fall from our delicate elevation into that receptacle of things past and gone
which has engulfed old Greece and Rome. Is it thus that the Reform Bill, and all the other horrible Bills in its
train, are to be interpreted?’ Cotugno argues that this conservative position increases sales and that Paris was
the best sold and most criticised of her works. This might be an exaggeration but, as mentioned earlier, the
work was immediately translated. Cotugno, 150, 242 and 245.
72
Heineman asserts that the author herself had been called a bluestocking. Heineman, Restless Angels, p.11.
73
Trollope herself was fluent in Latin, French and Italian (6).
74
Joanne Shattock, Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), pp.400/1.
94
Paris and the Parisians is not the only work in which Trollope promotes social changes. As
Susan Kissel argues, many of her novels are works of social protest. Trollope reveals the
injustices and problems of traditional marriage and promotes changes in the condition of
women by portraying strong and independent women and alternative ways of living
together, for instance female sisterhood. Moreover, it was Trollope who published the first
antislavery novel in 1836: The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: or
Scenes on the Mississippi. In the following year, she explored hypocrisy in the evangelical
clergy in her portrayal of the protagonist of The Vicar of Wrexhill. She also protested
against child labour in The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy
published in 1839 and attacked the bastardy clauses of the Poor Law in her novel Jessie
Philips: a Tale of the New Poor Law.75
Blessington, like Trollope, criticises English customs but does not address social issues.
Her criticism is clearly restricted to the behaviour and attitudes of men in English drawing
rooms and other locations of social meetings such as parks and does not directly target the
roles of women. She criticises the dominance of men in English drawing rooms who
impose the topics they prefer, such as races, hunting and shooting.76
In England many a woman is doomed to listen to interminable tales of slaughtered
grouse, partridges, and pheasants; of hair breadth ‘scapes by flood and field,’ and
venturous leaps, the description of which leave one in doubt whether the narrator or
his horse be the greater animal of the two, and render the poor listener more
fatigued by the recital than either was by the longest chase (124).
Blessington expresses her contempt for these men and their lack of ‘breeding’ in this
passage by comparing them to animals. She ridicules them by mockingly calling their
preoccupation with hunting ‘intellectual occupations’ (125). Furthermore, she criticises
English men for valuing women only for their youth and beauty, and not for their
intellectual capacities, like the French men she knew.
75
Kissel, p.16.
Unlike Trollope, she did not find fault with the separation of gender in English drawing rooms. This
difference could be related to the fact that Blessington had almost only male guests in London because
respectable women would not be seen in her company.
76
95
In England, the elderly and the ugly ‘could a tale unfold’ of the naïveté with which
men evince their sense of the importance of youth and beauty, and their oblivion of
the presence of those who have neither (44).
She contrasts this with France, ‘the paradise for old women’ where men still pay attention
to them especially if they are witty and entertaining. Like Trollope, Blessington points out
the English custom not to talk about politics in front of women. But unlike the former she
does not mind this fact in itself – she asserts several times that she is not interested in
politics – but the way the topic is avoided:
[In France] There is none of the affectation of avoiding subjects supposed to be
uninteresting to women visible in the men here. They do not utter with a smile –
half pity half condescension, - ‘we must not talk politics before the ladies;’ they
merely avoid entering into discussion, or exhibiting party spirit (125).
Blessington assumes that women are less interested in politics and that it is therefore only
polite not to discuss it in front of them. Her criticism focuses on the ‘pity’ and
‘condescension’, signs of an assumption of women’s inferiority. In the same train of
thought, she praises Frenchmen who ‘shew their deference for female society by speaking
on literature, on which they politely seem to take for granted that women are well
informed.’ (125) Blessington takes offence at the fact that women are not considered to
have the intellectual capacity, as well as being informed enough, to understand topics like
politics and literature. She does not question the different roles of men and women but
severely attacks assumptions about women’s inferiority.
For Blessington, it seems to be normal that women participate in intellectual life. During
her marriage with Blessington she always had leisure, financial means and the social
position to travel, read, write and meet writers and politicians. In The Idler in France, her
intellectual pursuits are reflected in relations of discussions or critical reflections on her
reading. She shows clear impatience towards uncritical or uninformed women or people in
general. At one stage she exclaims: ‘How many Mrs. --‘s there are in the world, with minds
ductile as wax, ready to receive any impression one wishes to give them!’(195) In another
passage she explains how she hates ‘general society’ because of ‘commonplace remarks’
and ‘stupid conversation’ and prefers a good book or a discussion with friends at the risk of
being called a ‘bas bleu’, [a bluestocking] (81). Blessington also targets the ignorance of
96
ladies of fashion in the acid descriptions of London society in her first work, The Magic
Lantern: or Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis.77 Thus, although she presents intellectual
and social activities as ideal for women, unlike Trollope, she does not state that English
women are in any way prevented from indulging in them.78
Unlike their predecessors Trollope and Blessington do not link their hopes for the
improvement of the condition of women to the events of the French Revolution, as has been
mentioned previously. Blessington does not even explicitly express her wish for changes in
England although she clearly criticises the attitude of English men. Her criticism concerns
attitudes as opposed to actions and is therefore less provocative from the outset than
Trollope’s. Trollope opts for gradual changes and downplays the importance of the
alterations she proposes by different means. Firstly, she presents different ideologies of
femininity as a consequence of national manners, as though the few examples of customs
she names express the whole system of contemporary gender ideologies. Secondly, she
balances carefully criticism of English manners with praise for them. For instance, with
regard to marriage, Trollope advocates English manners which seem to offer more choice
for women. Thirdly, she stresses the idea of slow and gradual change:
Great and important improvements in our national manners have already arisen
from the intercourse which long peace has permitted. Our dinner-tables are no
longer disgraced by inebriety; nor are our men and women, when they form a party
expressly for the purpose of enjoying each other’s society, separated by the law of
the land during half the period for which the social meeting has been convened
(24).79
The fear of sudden and radical changes is also softened by her assertion that some have
already occurred. Finally, she gives the changes a positive connotation emphasising that the
abolition of separate spheres works against vice and is an improvement. All in all, Trollope
minimizes the impact her feminist ideas might have and avoids scandalizing her readers.
77
Schmid, p.160.
Her remark about the ‘bas bleu’ hints at widespread ideas that women should not have intellectual pursuits
but Blessington does not take it very seriously.
79
It is notable that she inverses here Rousseau’s idea that separate spheres ideology leads to virtue, presenting
male vice as a consequence of such ideology.
78
97
Trollope’s and Blessington’s combination of advocating changes in the condition of woman
at the same time as political stability is a new concept. With it, they reject what Clarissa
Campbell-Orr calls ‘the legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft’ namely the ‘linkage of feminism
with moral and political radicalism in popular perception of the ‘woman question’.’80 As
the fear of Revolution was widespread until 1848 and resulted in conservatism and
suspicion of any change, their approach may have made their feminist ideas more popular
with their English readers.81
Trollope’s strategy seems to have been successful. Although Paris and the Parisians was
reviewed in all the major periodicals and often fiercely criticized, as will be outlined, no
reviewer attacked her feminist ideas, rather, most simply ignored them. Only Christian
Isobel Johnstone for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine mentions gender politics. She agrees with
Trollope that French men are more complaisant explaining that the abolition of the right of
primogeniture in France resulted in a bigger choice of husbands, implying that men had to
be more agreeable to find a wife.82 Thereby she presents the better situation as a
consequence of legal differences between the two nations and not as an example to
emulate. It might be argued, as Kissel convincingly does, that the radical Frances Wright
and Frances Trollope had an impact and contributed to social changes in different domains.
She states: ‘The swift and angry character assassinations heaped upon them bear witness to
the fear they had aroused as their audiences grew, their ideas became known, and their
views gained gradual acceptance.’83 In her view, the fact that the two authors were labelled
as radical and conservative, although they promoted very similar ideas, is testimony to a
certain desire to dismiss their ideas.84 The critical reception of her works points to the fact
that Trollope’s ideas on sexual politics had some impact on her numerous readers.
Blessington’s Idler in France received less publicity on the whole. Important newspapers
of the day such as the Times, the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh Review or the New
80
Campbell-Orr, p.1.
Campbell-Orr, p.3.
82
Christian Isobel Johnstone, 'Mrs Trollope's Paris and the Parisians,' Tait's Edinburgh Magazine 3 (1836),
188.
83
Kissel, p.145.
84
Kissel also asserts, less convincingly, that Trollope certainly did influence the image of women in the work
of her son Anthony. Kissel, p.133.
81
98
Monthly Magazine did not review it.85 However, her criticism of English attitudes towards
women was prominent in a review of The Idler in France in the Athenaeum. After quoting
a short passage on Avignon, the anonymous reviewer inserts two extracts about the
difference in behaviour between French and English men which clearly demonstrate the
shortcomings of the latter. But the reviewer comments: ‘After all, our ‘impartial Justicer’
inclines, we think, to delineate in favour of the best English society’ and adds some lines in
which Blessington praises ‘the society of clever and refined English men’.86 On one hand
the reviewer questions Blessington’s impartiality and on the other, quotes a passage which
seems to contradict the earlier statements without indicating that it describes Englishmen as
guests in her Parisian house and not in English society. At the same time the reviewer
portrays French men in a negative way, supporting this view-point by a citation concerning
Blessington’s annoying experience with shopkeepers. Despite this attempt at discrediting
Blessington’s criticism of attitudes towards women, her claim was spread to the readership
of the Athenaeum.
Trollope and Blessington use their ideal image of French women and salon culture not only
to criticize English society but also to suggest changes in it. As I will show, they both
constructed themselves as one of the salonnières they describe in Paris and the Parisians
and The Idler in France, albeit in very different ways. Trollope presents herself as part of
French salon culture by repeatedly describing her visits to Madame Récamier’s salon and
expressing her enthusiasm for Madame de Staël. The following example describes a recital
of verses by Casimir Delavigne in Récamier’s salon:
The whole scene was, indeed, striking and beautiful. A circle of elegant women
surrounded the performer: the gentlemen were stationed in groups behind them;
while the inspired figure of Gérard’s Corinne, strongly brought forward from the
rest of the picture by a very skilful arrangement of lamps concealed from the eye of
the spectator, really looked like the Genius of Poetry standing apart in her own
proper atmosphere of golden light to listen to the honours rendered to one of her
favourite sons (500).
85
This is surprising given that, if we belief Hannay’s statement, she was personally acquainted with the
editors of many newspapers, for instance The Literary Gazette, Fraser’s Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine,
Quarterly and Edinburgh Review who all visited her drawing-room. Hannay, ‘Lady Blessington,’ p.30.
86
'The Idler in France,' Athenaeum 712 (19 June, 1841), 469.
99
In this passage, Trollope describes a prominent feature in Madame Récamier’s salon, a
painting by François Gérard representing Corinne, the heroine of Mme de Staël’s
eponymous novel (see plate 1). Corinne is described in terms of religious imagery, as being
‘in an atmosphere of golden light’ which emphasises Trollope’s admiration for this fictional
character and its creator. The text conflates Corinne with Mme de Staël, a usual proceeding
at the time.87 Staël posed for paintings of Corinne, including the painting by Gérard in
Madame Récamier’s salon.88 The context suggests that Trollope is one of the ‘elegant
women’ and therefore part of the beautiful picture. I would like to argue that she is part of
the same audience or picture as Corinne/Mme de Staël. Corinne is ‘strongly brought
forward from the rest of the picture’ into the midst of the audience and, like the latter, is
said to listen to the poetry. She seems to be part of the same group as Trollope herself. Thus
present and past as well as fictional and historical characters are conflated in order to align
Trollope with Mme de Staël, and to present her as part of salon culture.
The importance of this image is illustrated by the fact that the artist Auguste Hervieu, who
accompanied Frances Trollope to America, Paris and on other journeys, illustrated it (408)
(see plate 2). Half of his etching is taken up by Gérard’s painting and in the lower half,
ladies and gentlemen are represented. Some of the figures in Gérard’s painting mirror those
in the salon by their posture and expression, in particular one of the ladies in the salon is the
pendant to the figure of Corinne. These parallels capture exactly the conflation of time and
place in Trollope’s text.
Throughout Paris and the Parisians Trollope stresses her participation in Parisian salon
culture by reporting parts of discussions she had. For instance after she was introduced to
Chateaubriand:
87
Ellen Moers states that Staël was conflated with Corinne at the time: ‘(For her contemporaries, the single
name denoted them both, for after the publication in 1807 Mme de Staël was everywhere known as Corinne.)’
This close association between her and her fictional character is confirmed in Paris and the Parisians.
Trollope reports that she asked Madame Récamier if Staël had portrayed herself in the character of Corinne
and got the reply: ‘Assuredly … The soul of Madame de Staël is fully developed in her portrait of that of
Corinne.’ (176) Madame Récamier then draws the attention to the resemblances between the portrait by
Gérard and Staël. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976), p.176.
88
Linda M. Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2003), p.8.
100
Plate 1 : François Gérard,
Corinne at Cape Miseno, 1819
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons
Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Kren and Daniel Marx.
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/gerard/5corinne.html
(accessed 29/11/05)
101
Plate 2: Auguste Hervieu,
Lecture à l’Abbaye-aux-Bois
Frances Trollope. Paris and the Parisians. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985, p.408.
102
The conversation was resumed, and most agreeably – every one bore a part in it.
Lamartine, Casimir Delavigne, Dumas, Victor Hugo, and some others, passed under
a light but clever and acute review (177).
She makes clear that she is not merely a listener to the discussion, stressing that ‘every one
bore a part in it’ (177). She also mentions a question she asked Chateaubriand and at one
stage lengthily contradicts an idea of Chateaubriand as she might have done in the salon
(178). In brief, she presents herself as an active participant in the intellectual dynamics of
the salon.
In the passages describing Trollope’s visit to Madame Récamier’s salon, there seems to be
a split between the narrator, and the traveller Trollope. The narrator is located outside the
scene she describes and in which the traveller or character Trollope obviously participates.
Similarly in the above quotation, Trollope creates a certain distance between the narrator
and the traveller by using the passive construction ‘the conversation was resumed’ and by
putting the authors as subject of the second sentence. This split, which will be observed in
other examples, can be explained by the fact that in the previously quoted passages
Trollope and her companions are foregrounded and admired. In the first passage she is part
of the beautiful picture and in the second passage the narrator expresses admiration using
the terms ‘clever and acute review’ which suggest a circle of competent judges of literary
works. Trollope clearly would like to present herself as one of the admired members of the
salon. However, putting forward her own person meant challenging the ideologies of
femininity in her period. As Sara Mills asserts in Discourses of Difference, certain narrative
positions, for instance the bold adventuring hero, are not open to women.89 Likewise the
role of the erudite woman demonstrating her knowledge and capacities in public does not
conform to gendered expectations regarding a female author or the behaviour of a modest
woman. Trollope, the traveller, is bold and participant, while Trollope, the narrator, offers a
more modest, passive rôle.
Like Trollope, Lady Blessington aligns herself with different salonnières. She does this by
relating how she contemplates the objects formerly owned by Madame de Sévigné, the
Marquise de Rambouillet, Ninon de l’Enclos and Madame du Deffand. The souvenirs stand
89
Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London;
New York: Routledge, 1991), p.22.
103
for the different women, as Blessington asserts in another passage where she bought an
amber vase which once belonged to the empress Josephine: ‘each [object] seems to identify
itself with the former owner’ (208).90 She emphasizes the close connection between the
objects (as well as the women and their history) and herself by expressions such as ‘the
flacon now mine’, ‘the very pincushion now before me’ and ‘the … tabatière now on my
table’ (253/258). This connection becomes even tighter as she not only contemplates their
objects and is proud of their possession but uses them, or at least imagines how she is going
to use them:
I can indulge in a pinch of snuff from the tabatière of the Marquise de Rambouillet,
hold my court-plaster in the boîte à mouche of Ninon de l’Enclos, and cut ribands
with the scissors of Madame du Deffand (253).91
She even makes the same use of the objects as their former owners - except for the ‘boîte à
mouche’, which was used to keep artificial beauty spots - hence placing herself in their
shadow.92
The souvenir functions as a means to conflate present and past, as well as history and
private life. Susan Stewart asserts in On longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
the Souvenir, the Collection, that ‘temporally, the souvenir moves history into private
time’.93 In Blessington’s text, this becomes clear when she writes: ‘the contemplation of the
little memorials … awakens recollections in my mind fraught with interest’. (253) The
word ‘recollection’ which according to the OED means ‘the act of recalling to the memory;
the mental operation by which objects or ideas are revived in the mind’, brings not only
together present and past but at the same time identifies Blessington with the historical
90
It is probable that the passage with the salonnières was written before the publication in 1841, not in 182830, and was inspired by one or several of the works on seventeenth and eighteenth-century women which
appeared in France in the thirties (see beginning of chapter). In the passage on page 208-209, some of the
objects are the same as she attributes later to the salonnières, a ‘chased gold etui enriched with oriental agates
and brilliants’ and a ‘vase / flacon of rock crystal’ (Madame de Sévigné) and a ‘heart-shaped pincushion’
(Madame de Maintenon). (128-129 and 208-9) In the earlier passage she attributes them to ‘some beauty’ or
‘some grande dame’.
91
A court-plaster is according to the OED a ‘sticking-plaster made of silk (black, flesh-coloured, or white)
coated with isinglass, used for covering superficial cuts and wounds’.
92
In addition, the souvenirs contribute to Blessington’s sense of identity in a similar way as the acquired art
objects and antiquaries did the ‘Grand Tourist’. Buzard asserts that the object acquired abroad, ‘displayed at
home, would testify to the quality of his taste and surround him with objective confirmations of his selfworth.’ Buzard, p.40.
93
Susan Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p.139.
104
figures, the original owners of her souvenirs. Blessington appropriates their souvenirs in
both senses of the word. She imagines that she knows what they could recollect although
she was not a witness of the scenes she evokes. Thus, there is at the same time conflation of
present with past and of Blessington with the salonnières, the same effect that Trollope
achieves through her description of the salon of Récamier with the painting of Corinne
modelled by Madame de Staël herself.
Blessington constructs herself also as a salonnière by reporting her intellectual activities in
The Idler in France. She comments on the plays she sees and the books she reads. Her
critical voice is very authoritative as for instance when she states:
It is the custom in England to decry French novels because the English
unreasonably expect that the literature of other countries should be judged by the
same criterion by which they examine their own, without making sufficient
allowance for the different habits and manners of the nations. (195)
She dismisses English criticism and presents herself as a person with a wider horizon and
knowledge, hence attributing more competence to herself. Her intellectual qualities are
emphasised in the text. Unlike Trollope, she inserts only few dialogues in the text, and for
this reason her intellectual endeavours are less closely linked to salon culture.
However, Blessington, like Trollope, presents herself as a salonnière in her different
literary works. The Idler in France is in large parts a sort of diary of her receptions and
visits, hence reflecting Parisian salon life. Another of her works, Conversations of Lord
Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834), reflects the salon setting to an even larger
extent. As Susan Schmid convincingly argues, this work is an imaginary salon in which
conversation takes place.94 The visitors, their physical appearance and their conversation
are described in a narrative which, in its seemingly unstructured way, reproduces the
ambiance of a salon where different topics follow each other and are interrupted by new
arrivals. But most interestingly, Blessington invites the reader to participate in the salon and
therefore clearly constructs herself as a salonnière. Schmid argues that Blessington tried to
attract visitors to her newly opened salon in London and that she deliberately chose the
topic of conversations with Byron to enhance the popularity of her own salon.
94
Schmid, p.160-161.
105
Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, might have inspired Trollope for her conflation
of time and persons, since it appeared in 1832/33 in the New Monthly Magazine, a journal
to which Trollope herself contributed. Blessington’s imaginary salon contains people who
were present in the salon in Genoa where she met Byron as well as others, for instance
Mme de Staël, who had died in 1817, several years before Blessington met Byron.
Blessington knew both Staël and Byron, and they were acquainted with each other, but the
three of them were never present in the same salon. Nonetheless, as Schmid rightly argues,
Staël is so vividly portrayed that she becomes a presence in the imaginary salon.95
Blessington records not only Byron’s reminiscences of Staël but also their conversations.
Trollope and Blessington seem to have been fascinated with the idea of a Republic of
letters, which includes men and women of different nationalities and ages.
Trollope’s and Blessington’s constructions of themselves as part of the salon culture has its
parallels in their lives. Trollope, after having organized entertaining evenings with amateur
theatricals early in her life, set up her own salon in her later years in Florence. As Pamela
Neville-Sington asserts, ‘The Villino Trollope’, the house which she shared with her son
Thomas and his wife Theodosia, became a meeting point for English society in Florence.96
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived in Florence as well, mentions Trollope’s gatherings
with dismay:
From what I hear, she … has recommenced her ‘public mornings’ which we shrink
away from. She ‘receives’ every Saturday morning in the most heterogeneous way
possible. It must be amusing to anybody not overwhelmed by it.97
Contrary to Barrett Browning, Trollope seemed to enjoy this role as a hostess. While
Trollope published her book on Paris before her time as a salon hostess in Florence, Lady
Blessington was already a salonnière when she wrote The Idler in France. Schmid explains
that Blessington had several salons, from 1818-1822 in her house on St. James’s Square;
95
Schmid, p.161. Madame de Staël features repeatedly in the text, but the following passages gives an idea of
how she is represented: Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, Lady Blessington’s ‘Conversations of Lord
Byron’, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp.22-27.
96
Neville-Sington, p.339.
97
Letter to Mary Russell Mitford by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written in Florence on the 19 Oct. 1854. In:
Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Sullivan, eds. Women of Letters: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Browning &
Mary Russell Mitford (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p.271.
106
between 1822 and 1830 on the continent, in Genoa where she met Byron, and in Naples;
and finally in London from 1831-1849.98
Whereas Blessington is indeed mentioned as a salonnière in critical studies - for instance in
a work edited by Peter Quennell which mentions the salon she opened in London in 1831 Frances Trollope is mainly remembered for her novels, and not for her salon.99 Why her
gatherings were not considered to be ‘salons’ and why Blessington’s Italian meetings were
not recorded in Quennell’s work is an interesting question. It leads to the issue as to what a
salon actually is. According to Schmid the word ‘salon’ was used only rarely in
contemporary sources in Germany and England and was seen as a typically French
phenomenon. This is confirmed by the fact that in the above citation, Browning speaks of
‘public mornings’ and leads to misleading assertions such as that by Linda M. Lewis
‘English women were isolated and powerless; they had no equivalent of the salon’.100 Caryl
L. Lloyd defines the word ‘salon’ in The Feminist Encyclopedia on French Literature:
Salons exhibited a great variety with respect to their formal aspects and contents of
their discourses. In the most general definition they were mixed-sex gatherings
hosted by women at regular intervals and in private settings.101
The variety of discourses led some scholars to use more specific expressions such as
‘literary salon’ or ‘political salon’.102 As a matter of fact, it is often difficult to establish
what the main topics of the salons were. But given Trollope’s and Blessington’s interest in
literature, it can be assumed that this was one of the main topics in their gatherings.
Referring to Blessington’s salon Prudence Hannay states that it ‘was accepted almost as a
literary club for editors, journalists and publishers’ and she names editors who were her
98
Schmid, p.160. Sadleir describes the difficulties Blessington encountered when she established her salon in
1831, for instance the rivalry of other salonnières such as Lady Holland, Lady Charleville and, to a much
lesser extent, Lady Cork. Sadleir, pp.146-149.
99
Hannay, ‘Lady Blessington, pp.23-33.
100
Schmid, p.155. Linda M. Lewis, p.9.
101
Caryl L. Lloyd, 'Salon,' in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, ed. Eva Martin Sartori
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.496.
102
Quennell, for instance, uses the expression ‘literary salon’ in the title of the work he edited: Genius in the
drawing-room: The Literary Salon in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, while K. D. Raynolds focuses
on political salons in ‘Politics without Feminism: The Victorian Political Hostess’, pp.94-108. However, the
terms are not always clearly distinguished. In Quennell’s work on literary salons, Prudence Hannay writes in
the chapter on Lady Holland that she was a political hostess. Her quotation of George Ticknor (without
reference) about his visit at Holland House suggests indeed that the conversation included political as well as
literary themes. Prudence Hannay, ‘Lady Holland: An Elite English Circle,’ in Quennell, p.44.
107
guests.103 The topics discussed in their drawing rooms were certainly not the reason for the
exclusion of Trollope’s and Blessington’s Italian salons from critical studies.
The main reason is probably the setting of their gatherings. The word ‘salon’ is often linked
to a specific place. Schmid contends that this often led to neglecting ‘salons’ like the circle
around Shelley.104 As the Shelleys were moving around Italy, their circle would probably
not be considered as a salon even though they regularly met the same group of English
friends. This understanding of the word ‘salon’ might explain why Prudence Hannay only
focuses on Blessington’s London salon, opened in 1831, and why Trollope’s salon in
Florence is not mentioned at all. Contending that Trollope and Blessington had their salons
in Italy means adopting a wide sense of the word ’salon’.
If we adopt Lloyd’s definition of a ‘salon’ as ‘mixed-sex gatherings’, Blessington’s salon
would not correspond to it. According to Schmid, her guests were predominantly male.105
Blessington’s drawing room was not deemed a suitable place for respectable women
because of her reputation. She had lived with Jenkins and then in a house established by
Lord Blessington while still married to Gardiner. Later, she was suspected to be the lover of
the Count d’Orsay who had lived with her and her husband since 1822. This rumour
became particularly strong after the death of her husband and the breakdown of Orsay’s
marriage with Blessington’s daughter in 1831.106 Therefore Blessington was ostracised by
many of her contemporaries. Schmid outlines that many other English hostesses such as
Lady Holland were outsiders as well and not admitted to ‘good’ society.107 In Schmid’s
opinion this was an incentive for them to open their salons. Concluding this parenthesis on
the meaning of the word ‘salon’, it can certainly be asserted that although their ‘salons’
might not have corresponded to some ideas on ‘salons’, Trollope and Blessington liked to
see themselves as salonnières in their fiction as well as in real life and might have been
considered as such by many of their contemporaries.
103
Hannay, ‘Lady Blessington,’ p.30. In Blessington’s obituary in the Times however, the political dimension
of her salon in Paris is emphasised: the anonymous writer states that she had moved into a new house in the
Rue-de-Cercle, ‘where her delightful réunions were eagerly looked for as an oasis in this republican desert’.
‘Sudden Death of Lady Blessington in Paris,’ The Times (6 June, 1849), 5.
104
Schmid, p.157.
105
Schmid, p.156.
106
Sadleir, p.291.
107
Schmid, p.156.
108
Trollope and Blessington’s reasons for positioning themselves within the tradition of salon
culture vary greatly as a consequence of their different class backgrounds and social roles.
Trollope constructs herself as part of a literary tradition, aligning herself with well known
contemporary writers such as Chateaubriand. Given that the salonnières she mentions were
mostly writers, she integrates herself into a female literary tradition. In her work she insists
on this tradition which, in her view, reaches from the salon hostesses of the seventeenth
century to Mme du Deffand, the friend of Voltaire whose salon was popular from the 1750s
to 1780, and finally to Mme de Staël (329).108 Trollope particularly aligns herself with
Mme de Staël, who is conflated with Sappho in the text: ‘were it not for the modern
costume of those around her, the figure (Corinne) must be mistaken for that of Sappho’
(176).109 She may have been conscious of the fact that Sappho is one of two women
Rousseau excluded from his negative judgment about women as creators.110 Thus, Trollope
presents herself as part of a tradition of women who were famous and recognized for their
literary work.111 These illustrious foremothers also, and perhaps more importantly, provide
legitimation for her own literary work, an activity which was not without problems for
women of her time.
The difficulty of finding her own identity as a female author might be one of the reasons for
Trollope’s particular admiration for Staël. Trollope started her literary career only three
108
Caryl L. Lloyd, ‘Du Deffand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise de (1697-1780),’ in French Women
Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book eds. Eva Martin Sartori, and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, (New
York; Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press), 1991, pp.134-142.
109
Joan DeJean asserts that Staël wrote a ‘romance’ on Sappho at the beginning of her career and a tragedy,
Sappho, at the end of it. The title of Gérard’s painting ‘Corinne au cap Misène’ alludes to the story of Sappho.
Joan DeJean also states in ‘Staël’s Corinne: The Novel’s Other Dilemma’ that Mme de Staël’s mother was
known as Sappho during her student years in Lausanne, had also had a salon and rewrote some of the texts of
‘préciosité’. Joan DeJean, ‘Portrait of the Artist as Sapho,’ in Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, eds.
Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger and Karyna Szmurlo (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rudgers
University Press, 1991), p.122. See also Joan DeJean, 'Staël’s Corinne: The Novel’s Other Dilemma,' in The
Novel's Seductions. Staël's Corinne in Critical Inquiry, ed. Karyna Szmurlo (London: Associated University
Presses, 1999), p.119.
110
‘Elles ne savent ni décrire ni sentir l’amour même. La seule Sapho, que je sache, et une autre, méritérent
(sic.) d’être exceptées.’, vol.V, p.94/95. [They do not know how to describe nor to feel even love. Only
Sappho, as far as I know, and one other woman, deserve to be excepted.] (p.103).
111
She may have been seen in this tradition by Leigh Hunt who refers to Sappho in his famous poem ‘BlueStocking Revels’ which was first published in 1835: ‘Sappho was there, As brown as a berry, and little of
size’. Given that she was described as ‘a short plump figure, with a ruddy, round Saxon face of bright
complexion‘ by Timothy Flint and that Leigh does not mention Trollope elsewhere, he might well have called
her Sappho. Timothy Flint is quoted in Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of
a Clever Woman (London: Viking, 1997), p.130. Leigh Hunt, 'Blue-Stocking Revels or, The Feast of the
Violets,' in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H.S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923),
p.187. Hunt’s poem lists English and French women writers and intellectuals including Marguerite
Blessington, Fanny Wright, Fanny Butler, Julia Pardoe, Sydney Morgan and Germaine de Staël.
109
years before the publication of Paris and the Parisians and was still at the beginning of it.
Staël, in spite of her social position, had to struggle to define herself as a writer. She was
strongly influenced by Rousseau whose work she discussed at the age of eighteen in her
first published work, Lettres sur J.J. Rousseau.112 Her father took a similar stance to that of
Rousseau in regard to intellectual women. Whereas in the Letters, Staël endorses many of
Rousseau’s ideas, some years later, in Corinne, her approach was different. This is even
more the case in the second preface to the Letters she wrote in 1814, aged 48. Trouille
asserts that in the new preface, ‘she indirectly challenged his (Rousseau’s) traditionalist
views on women and, as in Corinne, proudly affirmed her identity as a woman artist.’113 It
seems likely that Trollope, who had always enjoyed intellectual activity, but who had led an
ordinary domestic life until the age of 52 could easily identify herself with Staël.114
Staël’s success in spite of her bourgeois background made her an ideal figure of
identification, not only for Trollope.115 Many nineteenth-century English women were
fascinated with Mme de Staël and her heroine Corinne. Ellen Moers asserts that Fanny
Burney, Hannah More, Mary Berry and Maria Edgeworth admired Mme de Staël.116
Corinne, the figure of the female artist influenced also George Sand’s Consuelo. Corinne
and Consuelo inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning for her poem Aurora Leigh as well as
George Eliot, as will be seen later.117 Moers also claims with some justification that ‘the
myth of Corinne’, as she calls it, lasted during the whole century.
Blessington uses the model of salonnières to express her wish to have a gift for
conversation. Her acquisition of an étui of gold and a flacon of rock crystal, believed to
have been in the possession of Madame de Sévigné represents a longing. According to
112
Mme de Staël had written small comedies and tragedies in verses which were published only in 1790.
Germaine de Staël, Lettres sur J.J. Rousseau. Avec une préface de Marcel Françon (Genève: Slatkine
Reprints, 1979), pp.viii and ix.
113
Trouille, p.194.
114
Staël might also have been a model for Trollope because she kept a distance from outspoken feminists like
Olympe de Gouges, Etta Palm d’Aëlders and Théroigne de Méricourt, although this distance could have been
caused by class difference. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.11.
115
Moers states about Staël: ‘Mme de Staël was the first woman of middle-class origins to impress herself,
through her own genius, on all the major public events of her time - events political, literary, in every sense
revolutionary.’ Moers, p.176.
116
Moers, pp.176-177.
117
Eliot, ‘Woman in France,’ p.55. Browning’s poem was admired, for instance by the French writer
Hermione Quinet, who identified herself completely with Browning and her character Aurora Leigh. Quinet,
La France idéale, p.164.
110
Susan Stewart, a souvenir is ‘not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object
arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia’.118 In regard to Madame de
Sévigné’s flacon, Blessington explicitly formulates what she longs for:
Would that with the possession of these articles, often used by her, I could also
inherit the matchless grace with which her pen could invest every subject it
touched! But alas! … and so I must be content with inhaling esprit de rose from the
flacon of Madame de Sévigné, without aspiring to any portion of the esprit for
which she was so distinguished. (252)
Blessington aspires to the esprit of Madame de Sévigné as well as to Sévigné’s talent in
writing.119 She would like to be ‘spirituelle’ in conversation as well as in her letters and
other texts.
Unlike Trollope who puts herself on a par with male writers like Chateaubriand,
Blessington assigns herself a role which is more acceptable for a nineteenth-century
woman. But she does imagine rubbing shoulders with Racine and Molière stating that
‘perhaps this pincushion has lain on her table when Madame de Maintenon listened to the
animating conversation of Racine, or heard him read aloud’ or, alluding to ‘the diamondmounted tabatière now on my table’, ‘Molière … may have been permitted the high
distinction of taking a pinch of snuff from it, while planning his Précieuses Ridicules’ (130132). Unlike Trollope, Blessington is in the role of the impressed listener and, when
aligning herself with Madame de Rambouillet, in that of the person who is going to be
ridiculed.120 At the same time, she identifies herself most clearly with Madame de Sévigné.
This choice is significant because Sévigné wrote letters, a genre deemed appropriate for
women in the nineteenth century, and did not publish them. Most of the women she
118
Stewart, p.135.
She is not the only English woman to express such wishes linked to objects. Gesa Stedman quotes a poem
by a writer who was later identified as Mrs. Spencer:
‘On Madame de Sévigné’s Inkstand in the Toilet of the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill, Impromptu
Dear Sévigné! Hadst thou this inkstand retain’d,
And left me thy Pen, Oh! How much I had gain’d!
Like Sylphs wit and sense had then dwelt in the quill,
Nor were left as Heir-looms to Strawberry Hill.’
The poem was published in her collection of poems Commemorative Feelings in 1812. Gesa Stedman,
‘Channel Crossings: Zum Verhältnis französischer und englischer Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert,’ in Gender
Studies in den romanischen Literaturen: Revisionen, Subversionen, eds. Renate Kroll und Margarete
Zimmermann (Frankfurt am Main: dipa-Verlag, 1999), p.261. Unlike Blessington, Spencer uses the ‘pen’
which was usually a symbol of male creativity.
120
In the Conversations of Lord Byron, she attributes herself a more active role.
119
111
mentions, Madame de Maintenon, Ninon de l’Enclos, and Madame de Longueville,
practiced acceptable genres of writing and were not remembered for their writing during
the nineteenth century.121 This is the same strategy Sainte Beuve adopted according to
Beasley. In his critical works Sainte-Beuve presents women who corresponded to
contemporary ideas about femininity, or, if they did not, rewrote their memory.122 When
Blessington does mention women who were famous for their literary work such as Madame
de Lafayette, the celebrated novel writer, she portrays her in a salon, listening to the men.
In Scudéry’s case she remarks on her novels or discussions in a depreciating manner, as
already outlined (133). Writing and intellectual activity is not at the centre of her interest in
her portrayal of these women. It is also significant, that the salonnière she most identifies
with is Madame de Sévigné who during the eighteenth century and later was remembered
or recreated as ‘serious, pious, edifying’ and as a model mother, thus corresponding exactly
to the ideal of femininity.123 This presentation of salonnières corresponds to her own
behaviour. She probably did not intend to print her journal when she wrote it in Paris in
1828-30 since she published it only in 1841 when she was in need of money. The works
she had published in 1822 were one travel narrative and The Magic Lantern: or Sketches of
Scenes in the Metropolis and Sketches and Fragments, both in 1822. As the word
‘sketches’ in the titles reveals, she is careful to assign herself an amateur status and to
conform to expectations of femininity of her time.124
Yet, as has been demonstrated earlier, Blessington did not want to be considered as inferior
owing to her gender. She constructed herself as she saw her French counterparts, as
intelligent and knowledgeable participants in salons. Further, she also wished to be
accepted as a writer. As has been shown, she endeavours to valorise female writing which
121
Madame de Maintenon, for example, wrote treatises about education and did not publish them.
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.222-223.
123
Montfort, ‘Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de (1626-1696),’ p.510.
124
Richard C. Sha explains how sketching was recommended to women and was seen as an amateur activity
as opposed to more carefully crafted works. He then argues that Lady Morgan and Helen Maria Williams
called their works sketches, insisting thereby on their amateur status and at the same time to undermine the
boundaries between male and female writing. Richard C. Sha, ‘Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing:
The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,’ in Romantic Women
Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds. Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, (Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1995), p.194.
122
112
was often described in deprecating terms and praises French novels, a genre mainly
practised by women at the time.125
Whereas Trollope’s alignment with salon hostesses provides her with legitimation for her
literary activity and characterizes her as an important writer, she seems keen to ascribe to
herself also social prestige and importance. Therefore she stresses the importance of Mme
Récamier’s salon calling on the authority of a French author, M. de Lavergne, and quoting
lengthily his writings about the reading of Chateaubriand’s work:
Je vivrais des milliers d’années que je n’oublierais jamais rien de ce que j’ai vu là.
... il m’a été ouvert ce salon de l’Europe et du siècle, où l’air est en quelque sorte
chargé de gloire et de génie ... Là respire encore l’âme enthousiaste de Madame de
Staël (405).
[If I lived millions of years I would never forget what I saw there. This salon of
Europe and of the century where the atmosphere is still somehow laden with glory
and genius has been opened to me… there still breathes the enthusiastic mind of
Mme de Staël.]
The term ‘the salon of Europe’ evokes international importance whereas ‘the salon of the
century’ suggests a crucial role for several generations. The visit of Récamier’s salon is
presented as a life changing event. On the following page, Trollope endorses Lavergne’s
enthusiastic statement and, adding, in case the reader has not yet understood: ‘I think that
by this time you must be fully aware … that this intellectual fête to which we were invited
at the Abbaye-aux-Bois was a grace and a favour of which we have very good reason to be
proud.’ (406) Trollope presents the salon as eminently important in order to gain social
prestige for herself.
In her endeavor to present her important social position, Trollope also emphasizes how
exquisite and exclusive the audience in the salon of Mme Récamier was. Once again she
quotes Lavergne’s description of the reading of Chateaubriand’s memoirs:
125
Her positive evaluation of French novels might also be seen as an answer to criticism of one of her own
works The Victims of Society. The unknown reviewer for the Times reproaches her for adopting ‘the worst
spirit of the worst writers of the new French school of novelists’. 'The Victims of Society by the Countess of
Blessington,' The Times (24 April, 1837), 3. The article must have met with protest as it was followed by a
leading article five days later in which the newspaper’s position is defended. 'Leading Articles: Lady
Blessington's Novel,' The Times (29 April, 1837), 6.
113
L’assemblée était bien peu nombreuse, et il n’est pas d’homme si haut placé par le
rang ou par le génie qui n’eût été fier de s’y trouver. A côté d’un Montmorency,
d’un Larochefoucauld, et d’un Noailles, représentans de la vielle noblesse française,
s’asseyaient leurs égaux par la noblesse du talent, cet autre hasard de la naissance;
(405-6)
[The assembly was not large and there is no man highly placed by rank or genius
who would not have been proud to be present there. Beside a Montmorency, a
Larochefoucauld and a Noailles, representatives of the old French aristocracy, were
seated their equals by nobility of talent, those fortunate to be born with it.]
This passage demonstrates that only few were admitted to the salon of Madame Récamier
and that those present were not common people, being either of the old Aristocracy or
having talent, hence the exclusiveness and exquisiteness of the audience.
Trollope takes this very elitist stance throughout Paris and the Parisians and even suggests
that her origins destine her for a superior position in society. She draws on old prejudices
between the two nations to claim that Parisian salons should be more restrictive in regard to
the moral status of their visitors and should not admit people, men or women, who had
drawn attention to themselves as a consequence of their behaviour (350).126 According to
her, the situation in England is different because the clergy is mingling in society and
thereby prevents the spread of ‘notorious vice’ (350). The clergy has a crucial role in
society:
The clergy of England, their matronly wives and highly-educated daughters, form a
distinct caste, to which there is nothing that answers in the whole range of
continental Europe. In this caste, however, are mingled a portion of every other, yet
it has a dignity and aristocracy of its own: and in this aristocracy are blended the
high blood of the noble, the learning which has in many instances sufficed to raise
to a level with it the obscure and needy, and the piety which has given station above
either to those whose unspotted lives have marked them out as pre-eminent in the
holy profession they have chosen. (351)
It might astonish readers that Trollope attributes aristocracy to the clergy and their families.
Yet many of her readers would have known that she was one of the ‘highly educated
126
Trollope uses here the word ‘salon’ in a more general sense for social gatherings not, as in the previous
quotations, for literary salons. However she does not make a distinction between the two. Her idea that
nobody should draw attention through their behaviour is parallel to Rousseau’s affirmation that ‘la femme la
plus honnête étoit celle dont on parlait le moins’ or in English, [the best woman was the one about whom the
least was said]. But Trollope extends the moral judgment to both sexes and thereby eliminates the implied call
for separate spheres. Rousseau, 5: 44/45; (p.48).
114
daughters’ her father being a clergyman. This passage stresses that Trollope was not an
outsider who had the luck to be admitted into the illustrious circle of Récamier’s salon.
Trollope implicitly asserts that she has the right to be invited because she is part of the
aristocracy by ‘blood’, ‘learning’ and virtue. In short, Trollope constructs herself not only
as a ‘true’ member of the French salon tradition, but also, and more importantly, as part of
the elite of English society.
Blessington did not need the alignment with salonnières to present herself as an important
member of upper-class society. She achieves this by naming her guests, important figures
in English and French political and cultural life. As Sadleir rightly observes, ‘she is
skilfully prodigal with titled acquaintances and glimpses of the life luxurious’.127 As she
was only the daughter of a small landowner, she may have liked to display all the illustrious
names and her luxury but she did not need rhetorical means, like Trollope, to prove her
noblesse. Yet, Blessington might reveal her craving for social acceptance by dedicating
several pages to Madame de Maintenon and mentioning twice Ninon de l’Enclos. As stated
earlier, Blessington was not deemed respectable and hence ostracized by London society.
The fact that she mocked fashionable ladies in her two earliest works indicates that she
resented this exclusion. Given that Maintenon and Ninon figured in earlier works on
seventeenth-century women, it seems probable that Blessington had some notion of their
biography. She might have perceived parallels with her own fate. Both women made their
way in society from financially modest origins without support from their families. They
both would have been ostracized in nineteenth-century society. If we believe Gabrielle
Verdier, the life style of Ninon, which defied all convention, was a problem even in her
time.128 Blessington might have wished to live in a society like that of the seventeenth
century with slightly different ideas on marriage and moral behaviour. Harriet Devine Jump
points out that, when editing the annuals, Blessington was keenly aware of her delicate
situation as the supposed mistress of Orsay and quotes one of her letters to Charles
Matthews:
127
Sadleir, p.61.
See: Gabrielle Verdier, ‘Lenclos, Anne (Ninon) de (1623 ?-1705)’ and Marcelle Maistre Welch
‘Maintenon, Françoise D’Aubigné, marquise de (1635-1719)’ in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French
Literature, ed. Eva Martin Sartori, (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1999), pp.314 and 333-334.
128
115
I have been so long a mark for the arrows of slander and attack, that I must be more
particular than any one else; and your pretty verses, which in any of the Annuals
could not fail to be admired, would in any book edited by me draw down attacks …
What a misery it is, my dear Charles, to live in an age when one must make such
sacrifices to cant and false delicacy, and against one’s own judgment and taste.129
More freedom of movement and expression, as well as better acceptance in society clearly
seemed desirable to Blessington. She may have wished to live in another age.
For Trollope, the construction of herself as one of the salonnières has another consequence.
Through it, she describes herself as having all the characteristics of the independent women
she admires. As has been outlined, she portrays herself as an active participant in Parisian
cultural life and a competent participant in discussions, especially about literature. But
these discussions significantly, are not restricted to topics generally deemed appropriate for
women. On the contrary, they prominently include politics. Further, throughout Paris and
the Parisians she seems to have an active public life, going from one social gathering to the
next and often speaking of ‘her party’, the group of people whose company she enjoys. She
also gives the image of an independent woman not primarily defined by her family. Her
husband, who accompanied her to Paris, is conspicuously absent from the text and her
daughters are rarely mentioned. All in all, she presents herself as one of the Parisian women
she describes.
However, she carefully avoids drawing a too bold picture of herself by introducing the
already mentioned split between the image she gives of herself and the voice of the narrator
which conforms to common expectations of women. Trollope claims at the outset of the
book that she is only an observer and often does not understand what she sees (4). This
disclaimer supports the idea that women are intellectually inferior. In regard to politics she
repeatedly claims that she would like to avoid this topic because it is not suitable for
women (102 and 153). Thus, Trollope obviously endeavours to accommodate a large public
and therefore softens the bold image of herself through the voice of the narrator. She is
successful in this endeavour. No reviewer criticizes her presentation of herself as an
129
Harriet Devine Jump, ‘”The False Prudery of Public Taste”: Scandalous Women and the Annuals, 18201850,’ in Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts. Divergent Femininities, eds. Emma Liggins and
Daniel Duffy, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p.8. She quotes a letter published by R.R. Madden in Literary Life
and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington (London: Newby, 1855) vol.3, p.353.
116
independent participant of French cultural life.130 However, her elitist attitude and the
importance she gives to herself, mainly in the scene of the reading of Chateaubriand’s
work, did provoke reactions. For instance, Johnstone, the reviewer for Tait’s Edinburgh
Magazine states in regard to the reading of the work of Chateaubriand ‘how grateful she is,
and how eloquent! The tact and delicacy shewn in the selections made, for one so
furieusement loyal and chivalric as Madame Trollope, quite enchant her.’131 Johnstone
mocks, with the sprinkling of Frenchisms, Trollope’s emphasis on the exclusiveness of the
company as well as her presumptions that she is part of a social elite. In another passage
she mocks Trollope’s elitism even more fiercely when she mentions ‘her own Parisian
friends, who may probably monopolize all virtue, as they do all loyalty, and all literary
taste, and all influence in society.’132 The reviewer of the Times even doubts her presence at
the readings in Mme Récamier’s salon. He states: ‘The copious translations which Mrs.
Trollope gives from the printed account of this work (Chateaubriand’s memoirs) … throws
a doubt upon the fact of her having been there at the time she describes.’133 He accuses
Trollope of inventing her prestigious role in French society. She responded by publishing a
correction of the above passage a few days later in the Times, asserting the truthfulness of
her account and giving the exact date of the visit.134 The reviewer, like Trollope herself,
must have considered this scene as important for her representation of herself as a
participant in French salon culture, as a recognised writer and a woman with social prestige.
Blessington, like Trollope, constructs herself as an independent salonnière who is
constantly surrounded by interesting persons. She presents herself as independent, not
defined through her husband who is mentioned merely as Lord B, like any visitor.
130
Only one reviewer introduces his comments on Trollope’s work by presenting his traditional ideas about
gender roles. The reviewer for Fraser’s Magazine complains about a spinster and widow who ‘would seem to
consider herself unsexed, and thereby qualified to enter upon a new and peculiar career.’ He contends that the
most offensive activities of such a woman is ‘book-making and travel-mongering’ and adds that he considers
Frances Trollope to be the ‘worst specimen’ of the ‘class of old women-errant’. This criticism alludes to
women travellers in general and not to the way Trollope presents herself. 'Paris and the Parisians in 1835,'
Fraser's Magazine 13 (Feb. 1836), 209. The author of the review cannot be identified with certainty. The
Wellesley Index mentions Thackeray as possible author but indicates that there was no consensus about the
authorship. Walter E. Houghton, ed., The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press ; London : Routledge & K. Paul, 1966-1989), vol.2, p.350.
131
Johnstone takes for granted that her readers understand ‘furieusement’, which means ‘tremendously’.
Johnstone, 183.
132
Johnstone, 181.
133
'Paris and the Parisians,' The Times (30 Jan. 1836), 5. The reviewer obviously takes the already mentioned
extracts from texts about the reading for extracts of the Mémoirs d’outre-tombe themselves.
134
Frances Trollope, 'To the Editor of the Times,' (2 Feb. 1836), 3.
117
Although she mentions several times her ‘party’, she never indicates of whom it consists.135
Blessington also constructs herself as a knowledgeable and intelligent presenter of many
topics. But as she rarely chooses the form of a dialogue, the text does not suggest that there
are listeners to her comments. Her activity and voice in the salons is less emphasized than
in Trollope’s text. Moreover, unlike Trollope, who constantly reverts to politics and other
topics deemed unsuitable for women, Blessington generally adheres to acceptable themes
except when relating the revolution of 1830. These differences may be partly due to the fact
that as an upper-class lady, Blessington already had a certain independence and voice. To
summarize briefly the consequences of their identification with salonnières, Trollope
constructs herself within a literary tradition and legitimizes her literary activity, attributes
herself social prestige and a certain ‘noblesse’, and presents herself as an independent and
active woman who is not restricted to domestic life while Blessington, whose upper-class
background gives her a privileged position, constructs herself as a knowledgeable and
competent writer and participant in discussions who is not considered as inferior as a
consequence of her gender. She may also have expressed her desire to be a more generally
accepted member of society.
Blessington and Trollope, by giving a positive image of French women and by identifying
with them, endorse what might be called cosmopolitanism. 136 Their sense of identity is not
primarily shaped through their nationality but through their status as women participating
in cultural life and as part of a tradition, or community, of like-minded women. Their
perception of themselves must be seen in the context of the ideal of cosmopolitanism which
was popular among the upper classes in the eighteenth century as has been outlined in the
introduction to this study. Gerald Newman describes this as ‘unifying tendencies among
Europe’s upper classes’ which were strengthened by an increase in international
communication, and customs such as the ‘Grand Tour’ or the ‘voyage de gentilhomme’.137
What unified and provided identity was therefore class affiliation – only upper-class men
could afford to undertake a grand tour - as well as a shared culture, good manners and
language skills, the qualities that were acquired or perfected on the tour. Blessington and
135
See for instance: ‘a party of six, and six servants’. Blessington, The Idler in France, p.20.
For a definition of the meaning of the word and the history of the ideal of cosmopolitanism see the
‘Cosmopolitanism’ by Caryl L. Lloyd in The Feminist Enzyclopedia of French Literature, p.127 and
Newman, pp.1-18.
137
Newman, p.12.
136
118
Trollope construct themselves as part of this cosmopolitan circle which feels more
solidarity with peers of the other nation than with other classes. Blessington’s work on
France is based on a kind of ‘Grand Tour’ with her husband. In her text, ‘good breeding’
which refers to class but is used by her for good manners, is by far more important than
nationality. Lower-class people are almost absent from her narrative and in most cases
negatively connoted. Trollope presents herself as cosmopolitan by insisting on an
intellectual community. She claims that ‘Genius is of no nation’ and aligns herself with
French salonnières (429). Both women present themselves as part of an international
community and historical tradition of cultured women.
This cosmopolitan tendency was unusual at a time when, according to scholars, there was a
clear sense of ‘Englishness’ which had contributed to the creation of a united nation.138
Blessington’s and Trollope’s cosmopolitan approach in texts written in 1829 (published in
1841) and 1836 demands explanation. An important factor is certainly the wish of both
authors to draw on the ideal of an international group of cultured men to create a similar
ideal for women. But there are other explanations.
In the case of Blessington, her attitude becomes understandable with some facts of her
biography. Born in Ireland, she may have had a more critical stance towards England, than
English women. She never went back to Ireland after her youth and spent more than ten
years in Europe, probably the happiest time of her life.139 There, she might have felt more
accepted than in England where she was ostracized by respectable women. Consequently,
she was very sympathetic towards European people. Many of her friends were French, such
as the Count d’Orsay. This biographical background might have induced her to take a
cosmopolitan stance.
At the same time her cosmopolitanism is undercut by nationalism. Blessington makes a
series of clearly nationalist statements which betray her belief in English superiority. She
writes for instance: ‘There is a repose in the society of clever and refined Englishmen to be
met with in no other’ and enumerates all their qualities (242). In other passages she implies
the superiority of the English by stating that the French quickness of mind impedes
138
139
Newman, p.227; Powell, p.30.
Clay, pp.153-7.
119
progress because it makes them jump to false conclusions (104). Her negative comments
are always very general or allude to lower classes which she often associates with
revolution. For instance, at a theatre representation she is worried about the impact of the
play:
It is not wise to exhibit to a people, and above all to so inflammable a people as the
French, what they can effect; and I confess I felt uneasy when I witnessed the deep
interest and satisfaction evinced by many in the parterre during the
representation.(87)
This stereotype of the excitable French is combined with contempt for the lower classes.
Members of the lower classes, she believes, are not able to form an opinion and to act
responsibly because they are ‘totally incapacitated by ignorance’ (272). For this reason her
servants are incapable of recognising the causes for the uproar during the revolution of
1830 and their excitement annoys Blessington. Her cosmopolitanism is combined with a
nationalism that is largely linked to anti-revolutionary attitudes and class consciousness.
Intriguingly, her mixture of cosmopolitanism and nationalism lead to a contradictory
portrayal of the lower classes. While she gives a negative image of lower-class people, she
insists that the positive characteristics she mentions are those of all French people.
A good taste in dress seems innate to French women of every class, and a
confidence in their own attractions precludes the air of mauvaise honte and
gaucherie so continually observable in the women of other countries (221).
While all French women have good taste, all men, according to Blessington, are polite. She
several times reports incidents which demonstrate the politeness of the men on the
barricades in the street during the revolution of 1830 and concludes: ‘let me render justice
to the politeness I have invariably experienced from all classes of men, and on all
occasions, in France- a politeness so general that I should be ungrateful if I did not record
it’ (284). While she portrays French people in general, including members of the lower
classes in a very positive way, the latter are often marked as inferior.
Trollope’s cosmopolitan tendency seems to have been influenced by Madame de Staël,
who, as has been outlined previously, was an important role model for her. Joanne Wilkes,
120
in Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, describes Staël’s attitude as ‘for the period an unusual
mixture of nationalism and cosmopolitanism’.140 She explains:
Staël, despite her Swiss and German ancestry, her admiration for German and
Italian culture, and her fervour for the political system of Britain, never ceased to
consider herself as a Frenchwoman, and suffered much anguish at being forced to
spend many years away from France.141
Staël’s works, for instance her novel Corinne which had influenced Trollope, reflect less
her nationalism than her admiration for different European countries. The novel is set in
Italy which is idealized as a country with an old culture and an active cultural life, while
England is presented as providing a home and stability.142 Although Staël clearly
sympathises with the creative and talented Corinne who has an Italian mother, the English
characters are presented likewise in a sympathetic way. The only protagonist who receives
less sympathy from the reader is French.
At the same time, Staël’s novel Corinne and Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians are marked
by a fascination with national characteristics which is expressed by the inclusion of
numerous discussions. Normally, the interlocutors in these debates are of different
nationalities. For instance in Corinne, the participants in a discussion are Italian, English
and French. They compare Italian literature to that of other nations in much detail, covering
two chapters. In Paris and the Parisians, the participants in the discussion are normally
English (often Trollope herself) and French. The topic is invariably a comparison of
politics, literature or manners (particularly customs concerning women) in the two
countries.
Staël and Trollope take for granted that the individual and all aspects of life such as
politics, social systems and literature are primarily marked by nationality. Moers considers
this view to be an important contribution of Staël to the history of thought:
140
Joanne Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for opposition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p.16.
Wilkes, p.15.
142
Moers argues that ‘Corinne … worships Oswald because he personifies the English ideal of home.’ Moers,
p.208.
141
121
Her principal contribution was the extension of the central point of Montesqieu’s
Esprit des lois, that political systems grow out of and are inseparable from social
custom and national tradition, to fields other than politics, most of all to literature.
She adds that Mme de Staël is occasionally named as the first scholar of comparative
literature, mainly in reference to her work De l’Allemagne.143 Staël’s work illustrates the
link between national character, and politics and literature. For instance, Corinne declares
in a discussion, that the lack of independence in Italy has a negative impact on its literature:
‘on y a perdu tout intérêt pour la vérité, et souvent même la possibilité de la dire’, [every
interest in truth has been lost and often even the possibility of telling the truth].144 Also, the
different governments in the Italian states cause the wide variety of manners and
customs.145 Finally, nationality is presented as instrumental in the formation of an
individual. In Corinne, the characters Corinne and Lucile, in spite of being half-sisters are
completely different owing to their Italian and English mothers. Their different ways of
living are portrayed in terms of national characteristics at the same time as they represent
the two role models Rousseau contrasts in his Letter to D’Alembert. Lucile, the English
woman, leads a domestic and retired life and is virtuous and innocent whereas Corinne
enjoys public life and success.146
As Wilkes convincingly argues, Staël contended that nationality was limiting and that, for
an individual, it would be ideal to be endowed with the characteristics of several of them.147
Therefore, although it was good for members of a nation to keep their own characteristics,
it was beneficial to be familiar with other cultures and their intellectual production.148 Staël
follows the eighteenth-century ideal of cosmopolitanism in Corinne by positing
international experience as necessary for the formation of the individual. The Italian
tradition of improvisation allows Staël’s heroine, Corinne, to express herself, to develop her
talents and to be part of cultural life. Corinne clearly corresponds to the salonnières and
Trollope herself. It is the celebration of a tradition of another country, improvisation and
143
Moers, pp.206-207.
Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie (Paris: Nelson, 19--), vol.1, p.217.
145
Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie , 1 : 197.
146
According to Rousseau, gender roles in England resembled those of Staël’s city of origin, Geneva.
147
Wilkes, p.14.
148
Wilkes, p.96.
144
122
salon culture, which most aligns Corinne and Paris and the Parisians.149 Italian culture,
like French culture in Trollope’s view, allows women to develop their talents and to break
out of the domestic realm. In both works the inserted discussions have the function of
celebrating women’s participation in cultural life.150 Staël and Trollope present another
culture to emphasize the pleasure cultural life provides for women. All in all, Trollope saw
in Mme de Staël not only a model for herself as a writer and salon hostess. She was also
inspired by Corinne when she wrote Paris and the Parisians, presenting different role
models for women as a feature of different nations.
In spite of all the similarities between the two works there is one crucial difference.151
While in Corinne nationalist tendencies are practically absent, Trollope’s work is not only
marked by nationalism but is clearly chauvinist. Already through her first work about
America she had acquired the reputation of a chauvinist. In 1833, the author of the article
‘French Libels on the English’ in The New Monthly Magazine alludes to this reputation
when he claims that ‘every nation has its Mrs Trollope’.152 In Paris and the Parisians, the
deprecating stereotypes about France are indeed prominent. France and its inhabitants are
generally described negatively, often in terms of dirt. For instance the streets of Paris are
149
Staël introduces the language of improvisation into French. Joan DeJean, ‘The Novel’s Other Dilemma,’
p.121/122.
150
For instance Staël emphasizes Corinne’s talent for discussion in one of the conversations: A French
character presents Italian cultural production in a deprecating way and the Italians want to refute his
argument : ‘mais comme ils croyaient leur cause mieux défendue par Corinne que par tout autre, ils
suppliaient Corinne de répondre’, [but as they thought that their cause was better defended by Corinne than by
anybody else, they entreated her to answer]. Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie , 1: 223. Her talent is not only asserted
but also demonstrated to the reader by the insertion of her argument. Moreover, her improvisations are often
reported in full length. In Paris and the Parisians, Trollope inserts serious discussions that cannot be
compared to the dialogues on every day matters in earlier works such as Domestic Manners of the Americans
and celebrate public and cultural activities for women. Both Trollope’s and Staël’s works were criticised by
contemporaries for the inserted discussions. See Joan DeJean, ‘The Novel’s Other Dilemma,’ p.121.
151
Staël’s and Trollope’s works show other parallels. There are a number of formal parallels between the
novel and the travel book. For instance, both do not correspond to the characteristics of one genre but can be
considerd as a mixture of fiction and travel book. Helen Heineman states: ‘Fictional techniques became
inextricably part of her third book of travel, Paris and the Parisians in 1835.’ Heineman, The Triumphant
Feminine, p.131. Heineman explains the fictional elements in Paris and the Parisians with the fact that
Trollope, while putting her travel books in their final form, was already working on a novel, set in the same
region. This assertion seems unconvincing for two reasons. As Trollope proceeded in the same way for the
first two travel books, why does only the third contain fictional elements? Moreover, after Paris and the
Parisians, Trollope wrote The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: or Scenes on the
Mississippi and a novel which has nothing to do with Paris. So, while I agree that Trollope might have been
induced to mix the two genres because she practiced both, I would like to argue that the introduction of this
technique in Paris and the Parisians has more to do with her admiration for Mme de Staël and her work
Corinne.
152
‘French Libels on the English,’ 403. The author explains: ‘some are willfully blind, resolved to pervert and
misrepresent all they see and hear, imagining that they exalt their own country by deprecating ours.’
123
said to be dirty and to smell badly (74-5). Trollope sees the two nations as competing for
instance in the comparison of the Zoological gardens of Paris and London: ‘I confess that I
envy them their beautiful giraffe; but what else have they which we cannot equal?’ (412)
Distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them’ she is ‘othering’ the French. She then summarizes
her position by quoting Byron: ‘O England! With all thy faults, I can’t help loving thee
still.’(412) This chauvinistic attitude is so prevalent in many parts of Paris and the
Parisians that most reviewers criticized it, claiming for instance that her strength is ‘to
exaggerate the contrasts and disparities presented by the two nations, to the disadvantage of
the French character, and to the placing of English morals on stilts.’153 Another reviewer
states in a very concise way: ‘Mrs Trollope covers them [the French] in mud’.154
Trollope’s combination of cosmopolitan tendencies and her chauvinism leads to contrasts
and contradictions within her work. Her chauvinism appears in relation to lower classes, to
parvenus and, as has been outlined earlier, to republicans (280). To describe these groups,
she uses tropes of dirt. For instance, she complains that the entrance to the Louvre is free
and that there were some ‘very particularly greasy citizens and citizenesses’ (20). In
contrast, people in distinguished salons, royalists and women are portrayed in positive
terms. Thus, unlike Blessington’s text, the contrast between the different descriptions is
stronger and the line follows not only class differences but also political and gender
differences.
Trollope creates further contradictions in her text by linking politics and literary production
adopting thereby Staël’s idea that nationality marks all domains of life. Trollope despises
most of the contemporary French literary production, particularly Victor Hugo: ‘The
circumstance decidedly the most worthy of remark in the literature of France at the present
time, is the effect which the last revolution appears to have produced.’ (40) She claims that
since the revolution of 1830, no work likely to become part of the canon was published. In
her opinion, the political context in contemporary France, in particular the disturbances
brought about by the Revolution, does not advance literary production. She divides the
French nation into two groups, referred to by the words ‘rococo’ and ‘décousu’ which,
153
154
‘The Monarchy of the Middle Classes,’ The Athenaeum, 45.
‘The Monarchy of the Middle Classes,’ Monthly Review, 237.
124
according to her, are fashionable in Paris.155 While the adjective ‘rococo’ was used in the
1830s as a synonym for ‘old fashioned’ and ‘slightly ridiculous’, it takes a positive
meaning in Trollope’s text: The term ‘rococo’ ‘appears to me to be applied … to everything
which bears the stamps of the taste, or principles, or feeling of the time past’ (11-2).
Trollope applies the word to herself and to loyalists. ‘Décousu’ is the name given to ‘the
whole of the ultra-romantic school of authors, … all shades of republicans, … most of the
schoolboys, and all the poissardes of Paris.’ (12) As this enumeration shows, romantic
authors are seen in the same way as republicans. Trollope suggests in a very simplistic
manner that the authors’ talents and their political convictions are closely linked. These
‘minor French storytellers of the day’ as she calls them ‘swarm au sixième in every quarter
of Paris’ and ‘they all hold themselves ready for rebellion at the first convenient
opportunity – be it against Louis, Charles, Henri, or Philippe, it is all one’ (492-3). French
contemporary authors are seen as supporting political upheaval and consequently despised.
Her opinion about French literature mirrors her nostalgia for the ancien régime and the
period of the Restoration. The authors she admires are Chateaubriand and Lamartine.
This contempt for contemporary writers stands in contrast to her praise for French women,
and her description of them as having remained unchanged since before the Revolution.
Trollope makes the contradiction less conspicuous by mentioning only one French female
writer of her time, George Sand. In her description, Sand is not compared to the salon
mistresses of the ancien régime. On the contrary, she ‘has been tossed about in the
whirlpool of unsettled principles, deformed taste and exaggerated feeling, (…) and she has
been stained and bruised therein.’ (428) This quotation gives an idea of Trollope’s view of
romantic literature and the negative portrayals she provides of contemporary authors. Yet
she softens the contradiction between this image and her ideal French women by describing
Sand as an exception. Due to her talent, she argues, Sand would be a great author ‘would
she make one bold effort to free herself from this slough’. (429) Nonetheless, her
description of the contribution of women to contemporary literature remains contradictory.
155
Le Petit Robert. Dictionnaire alphabétique & analogique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaire le
Robert, 1977). ‘Décousu’ means litterally ‘unstitched’ and in the figurative sense ‘disconnected’, ‘disjointed’
and ‘desultory’. Collins Robert French Dictionary (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2003).
125
The fact that the two approaches to nationality lead to contradictions has been noticed by
some critics. Johnstone, the reviewer for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, points out the
contrast between Trollope’s praise of the French and her belief in English superiority. After
quoting a passage praising salons and French manners, she states: ‘Mrs Trollope is now
fearful that, as an Englishwoman, she has ventured too far’ and she adds another quotation
where Trollope insists on the English moral superiority:
Could I think that by thus approving what is agreeable [good French society], I
could lessen by a single hair’s breadth the interval which we believe exists between
us in this respect, (morality,) I would turn my approval to reproof, and my
superficial praise to deep-dyed reprobation.156
Here, Trollope reiterates the stereotype of English moral superiority at the same time as she
praises French salon culture. The reviewer sees this contrast as due to Trollope’s exception
of her Parisian friends from criticism. None of the reviewers hints at the possibility that this
contrast between cosmopolitanism and nationalism could have resulted from the influence
of other works such as Staël’s Corinne.
In conclusion, Trollope and Blessington do not explicitly refer to earlier works on France
and at the same time use stereotypes to construct French women in a new and positive way
as models for both intellectual and domestic life. In doing this, they might be inspired by a
wave of French writings on salonnières published in the thirties. Blessington’s
representation is to a large extent in line with the portrayals of seventeenth-century women
in the second half of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth. Yet, she does
acknowledge their contribution to the French language, and stresses their talent not only as
conversationalists, but also as writers. Trollope’s portrayal of salon hostesses goes against
the general tendency by emphasising the salonnières’ role as important contributors to
French culture, their merits as writers and literary critics, not only as teachers of good
manners. Trollope and Blessington use the image of French women to criticize English
gender politics, but in a very careful way. Unlike earlier radical feminists, they combine
their feminist ideas with a decidedly conservative and anti-Revolutionary stance. Trollope
and Blessington construct themselves as part of salon culture which includes persons of
156
Johnstone, 181.
126
different nationalities and of different ages, a kind of community of cultured people,
drawing on the eighteenth-century ideal of cosmopolitanism.
In contrast to this cosmopolitanism and their positive portrayal of French women, the
French feminist and socialist Flora Tristan describes English people as ‘others’ and offers a
very bleak view of England in her London Journal.
157
She praises only few English
women, among them Trollope and Blessington. Tristan also differed from Trollope and
Blessington, in her deliberate pursuit of provocation and publicity. She always managed to
get read and to be talked about.
157
As Tristan’s work was published in 1840, she could not know Blessington’s Idler in France. She may have
known her critical portrayals of English society or the Idler in Italy, published in 1839.
127
Table 3: W. Greatbatch, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu. Ed. Lord Wharncliffe. London: Richard Bentley, 1837, vol.1,
frontispiece
128
Chapter 3
Contesting National and Gender Boundaries:
Flora Tristan’s London Journal
Le mari anglais est le type du seigneur et maître des temps féodaux; il se croit ... le droit d’exiger de
sa femme l’obéissance de l’esclave, la soumission et le respect. Il la cloître dans sa maison, non pas
parce qu’il est amoureux et jaloux comme le Turc, mais parce qu’il la considère comme sa chose,
comme un meuble ... .
Flora Tristan1
Flora Tristan (1803-1844) was a celebrated and well known French feminist and socialist
whose works appealed to a wide audience. Promenades dans Londres, [London Journal]
(1840), for instance, sold well and went through four editions between 1840 and 1842.
Shortly after the publication of her first major work Pérégrinations d’une paria,
[Peregrinations of a Pariah] in 1837, her name was confused with that of George Sand, an
incident which suggests that she was already a well known author.2 Even after her death in
1844, Tristan was an important figure in the French workers’ movement. In 1848, 6-7000
workers commemorated her achievements at the inauguration of a monument established in
her honour in Bordeaux.3 Some critics contend that Engels was influenced by Tristan in his
1
Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres. 1842 L'aristocratie & les prolétaires anglais (Paris: Indigo &
Côté-femmes éditions, 2001), p.203. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent references are to this edition and
page numbers will appear in the body of the text.
[An English husband is the lord and master of feudal times. He sincerely believes that he has the right to
demand from his wife the passive obedience, the submission and respect of a slave. He shuts her up in his
house, not because he is in love with her or jealous like a Turk, but because he considers her to be his object,
like a piece of furniture ….] Flora Tristan, Flora Tristan's London Journal. A Survey of London Life in the
1830s. A Translation of Promenades dans Londres by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (London: George
Prior, 1980), p.195. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent quotations from the English edition of
Promenades are by Palmer and Pincetl and references to this English edition will appear in the body of the
text or in brackets after the reference to the French edition.
2
The Periodical Le Journal des Débats informs its readers that, in spite of rumours, it was not George Sand
but Flora Tristan who had been shot by her husband. Sainte-Beuve sarcastically comments that Tristan had
gained more celebrity through this shooting incident than in many years of literary life. However, he is
probably exaggerating. Lettre 832 à M. Et Mme Juste Olivier (15 septembre 1838), Jean Bonnerot, ed.,
Correspondance générale de Sainte-Beuve, (Paris: Stock, 1942), pp.440-2.
3
Susan Grogan, Flora Tristan: Life Stories (London & New York: Routledge, 1998), pp.6-7. Some workers
acknowledged her in their memoirs, for example Joseph Benoît, Sébastien Commissaire and Joseph Reynier.
See also introduction and headnotes to Stéphane Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve :
Correspondance établie par Stéphane Michaud (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003), p.299.
129
work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1844.4 Socialists at the
end of the century, such as Jean Jaurès and Karl Marx, acknowledged her struggle for
socialism.5 Her ideas about women were taken up later by feminists in France and Peru.6
As Claire Goldberg Moses writes in French Feminism in the Nineteenth century, Tristan
was ‘perhaps the most celebrated of all nineteenth-century French feminists’.7 She owed
this success very much to the fact that she was ‘an extremely audacious, rhetorically gifted,
and formidable social critic’ to cite Kathleen Hart.8
This chapter will investigate Tristan’s rhetorical strategies, particularly how she uses
discourses on nationality and ideas of foreignness and exclusion, as for instance in the
epigraph, to publicise her radical feminist ideas. Its main claim is that in the London
Journal, Tristan uses ‘othering’ as a means to manipulate power relationships in regard to
nation, race, gender and class and at the same time constructs herself as an outsider and
victim of exclusion. Playing with different positions and perspectives, Tristan challenges
Western patriarchal society.
In spite of the fact that Flora Tristan’s life has been investigated by a considerable number
of scholars many facts are still contested and uncertain, particularly with regard to the
period before the publication of her first and probably best known work, Peregrinations of
a Pariah, which relates her journey to Peru.9 Her life remains a contentious topic because
4
Many critics, for instance Sandra Dijkstra, Dominique Desanti and Evelyne Bloch-Dano agree that Engels
was influenced by Tristan’s work for his Conditions of the Working Class in England published four years
later. Cross and Gray point out the similarities between Tristan and Engels and Marx. Desanti explains the
fact that Engels did not quote her by the current opinion that a work written by a woman was not a serious
reference. But she asserts that in their work The Holy Family, Engels and Marx did mention her favourably
and therefore had known her ideas. Sandra Dijkstra, Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand
(London: Pluto Press, 1992), p.128; Dominique Desanti, ‘Flora Tristan: Rebel Daughter of the Revolution,’ in
Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, eds. Sara E. Melzer, and Leslie W. Rabine (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p.283; Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Flora Tristan: La femme-messie (Paris:
Grasset, 2001), p.13. Máire Cross and Tim Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan (Oxford; Providence: Berg,
1992), p.64.
5
Grogan, Flora Tristan, p.7.
6
Grogan, Flora Tristan, p.8.
7
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.107.
8
Kathleen Hart, 'Reviews,' Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33.3-4 (2005), 452.
9
The following work contains a discussion of the literature on Flora Tristan up to 1992. Cross and Gray,
pp.1-5. Most of the critical work about Tristan focuses on her biography, for instance the first studies in the
1920s and 30s. One of them, Jules-L. Puech, La Vie et l'œuvre de Flora Tristan 1803-1844 (Paris: Librairie
Marcel Rivière, 1925), contains a very detailed investigation and sources that were not available in print until
recently. When Flora Tristan gained more critical attention in the 1970s with the new wave of feminism, the
biographical approach was still prevalent. In Dominique Desanti, Flora Tristan: la femme révoltée (Paris:
130
Tristan was extremely self-conscious concerning the presentation of herself and her life.
While some studies focus on Tristan’s writing to reconstruct her life, Susan Grogan in
Flora Tristan: Life Stories points out many contradictions between the biographical
indications in her work and in other sources. Even though her approach is biographical, she
abandons the chronological structure in favour of a presentation of the multiple dimensions
of Tristan’s life: ‘Slave and pariah’, ‘Traveller’, ‘Social scientist’ and so on. In all these
aspects of Tristan’s biography, Grogan sees her feminism as a ‘meta-narrative’.
Tristan’s construction of herself seems indeed to be in the service of her political
propaganda. She casts herself in the role of a foreigner, an outsider and a victim. For
instance, in a letter written to her portraitist in 1839 she writes:
Songez, mon frère, que ce portrait sera celui de la Paria – de la femme née
Andalouse et condamnée par la Société à passer sa jeunesse dans les larmes et sans
amour!10
[Think, my brother that this portrait will be that of the Pariah – of a woman born
Andalousian and condemned by society to spend her youth in tears and without
love!]
Tristan consciously presents herself as a ‘pariah’ a term she associates not only with being
a stranger, emphasizing her foreign origins, but also with being condemned and stigmatized
by society.
11
Flora Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristan Moscoso was born in 1803 to a
Hachette littératures, 1980), a work that was first published in 1972 and translated into English by Elizabeth
Zelvin (New York : Crown, 1976) and in the chapter ‘Flora Tristan: Rebel Daughter of the Revolution,’ the
novelist, journalist and scholar in History, Desanti, places Tristan in the tradition of the French revolution
describing her as ‘the emblematic figure of the second revolutionary wave’, an expression which mirrors the
idealizing tendency in Desanti’s work. Another scholar, Dijkstra, Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of
George Sand focuses more on the contradictions in Tristan’s life and work. Her study points out the different
narrative positions in Tristan’s writings and explains them through psychological interpretations of her life.
10
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.114. Lettre 53 à Charles-Joseph Traviès (Londres, 16 juillet
1839). Tristan was very preoccupied with the representation of herself and wrote several letters to her
portraitist. In October of the same year, when she was back from London, she was annoyed that the portrait
was not already done and worried that every delay would cause her to look more tired owing to her big
workload: ‘Vous savez que je tiens beaucoup à la forme et ma mine d’aujourd’hui, et celle que j’aurai dans un
mois sera encore moins avantageuse pour ledit portrait.’, [You know that I care very much about appearance
and my look today and the one I’ll have in a month will be even less to my best advantage for the portrait.]
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.125. Lettre 62 à Charles-Joseph Traviès (Paris, 3 octobre
1839).
11
The word ‘pariah’, which derives from Sanskrit, designates a person on the lowest social level, an
untouchable in Indian culture. Porfirio Mamani Macedo, Flora Tristan, la paria et la femme étrangère dans
son œuvre (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003), p.11. The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française states that in
the nineteenth century, the word was used for a person who was despised and banned by society. ‘Au XIXe s.
131
French mother and an aristocratic Peruvian father. As her father died when she was very
young, she grew up with her mother in France. While older critical works, based on her
own statements, claim that her youth was overshadowed by poverty, Susan Grogan
convincingly argues that Flora and her mother were not destitute but lived modestly.12 They
could, for instance, afford dancing and drawing lessons for Flora but their financial
situation did not allow her to get a formal education. Although she lost her father at a young
age and was from a modest background, there is no evidence for a ‘youth in tears and
without love’. Tristan may have alluded to her illegitimate status. Her parents’ marriage
was never officially recognized because her father had failed to get the permission to marry
from the Spanish king, which was needed in his position as a colonel. However, Flora does
not seem to have been conscious of this fact as a child.
The link between her portrayal of herself as a pariah and feminism becomes clear when in
one of her later works, Union ouvrière, [Workers’Union], Tristan describes women in
general as pariahs:
Jusqu’à présent, la femme n’a compté pour rien dans les sociétés humaines. – Qu’en
est-il résulté? – Que le prêtre, le législateur, le philosophe, l’ont traitée en vraie
paria. La femme (c’est la moitié de l’humanité) a été mise hors de l’Eglise, hors la
loi, hors la société. – Pour elle, point de fonctions dans l’Eglise, point de
représentation devant la loi, point de fonctions dans l’Etat.13 (italics in original)
[Up to now, a woman has counted for nothing in human society. What has been the
result of this? That the priest, the lawmaker, and the philosopher have treated her as
a true pariah: Women (one half of humanity) have been cast out of the Church, out
of the law, out of society. For them, there are no functions in the Church, no
representation before the law, no functions in the State.]14
Tristan may have borrowed the image of the pariah from Germaine de Staël who used it for
‘distinguished women’.15 Tristan saw the improvement of the condition of women as her
il s’applique à une personne méprisée, mise au ban de la collectivité.’ This sense was widely known owing to
the tragedy by C. Delavigne: Le paria (1824) Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris:
Dictionnaires le Robert, 1993).
12
See for instance: Cross and Gray, p.7. Grogan, Flora Tristan, pp.17-18.
13
Flora Tristan, Union ouvrière contenant un chant : la Marseillaise de l’atelier mise en musique par A. Thys
(Paris : Reproduction numérique BNF de l’éd. de Paris: chez tous les libraires, 1844), pp.44-45,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k81522j (accessed 6/05/07).
14
Flora Tristan, The Workers Union. Translated with an introduction by Beverly Livingston (Urbana,
Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p.76.
15
Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, 2:342.
132
main task as she explains to a journalist in 1840: ‘l’émancipation de la femme est l’objet
principal de mes études et la cause à laquelle je me suis vouée’, [the emancipation of
women is the principal objective of my studies and the task I have set for myself]. 16
Notions of foreignness are a crucial and strategic part of this feminist mission, as will be
addressed in detail.
Tristan’s later life offered ample material for her construction of herself as an outsider. Her
husband was the painter and lithographer André-François Chazal, who was also her
employer, when she started working as a colourist for his lithographic shop at the age of
fifteen.17 She married him aged seventeen, but, as the marriage was disastrous, left him
after only four years, with their two children and pregnant with the third. The next thirteen
years were marked by Tristan’s conflict with her husband who tried, sometimes
successfully, to get custody of their children. Under the law of the time, the Code
Napoleon, a woman had neither the right to leave her husband nor to have custody of their
children. As Tristan risked imprisonment, she repeatedly moved and spent some years
outside France. In 1833/34, for instance, she travelled to Peru to claim the inheritance of
her father. Although she was well received, her uncle did not recognize her as a legal heir
but, as the illegitimate child of his brother, he offered her a rent for life.18 In
Peregrinations, she emphasises that her home-country Peru and her uncle and his family,
treated her as an outsider - a pariah. In 1838, Tristan’s husband tried to kill her, but she
survived and died six years later at the age of 41.
Similar to the construction of herself, Tristan’s writings are in the service of political
engagement. Her early works mainly mirror her preoccupation with the condition of
women. For instance, in her first brochure: Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes
étrangères, [On the Need to Provide Hospitality for Women Travellers] she proposes to
found a Society for Women Travellers with the aim of helping foreign women.19 Her travel
16
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.130. Lettre 69 à un journaliste non identifié (Paris, 6 mai
1840).
17
I have given Chazal’s version that she worked in the atelier. However, Tristan claimed that she worked at
home and went to the workshop to have lessons occasionally. Grogan explains this discrepancy by stating that
Tristan aimed at bourgeois status although her financial situation did not allow it. Grogan, Flora Tristan, p.20.
18
Her uncle withdrew the rent after the publication of her book about the journey to Peru.
19
Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes étrangères, par Madame Flora Tristan, (Paris, chez
Delaunay, Palais Royal, 1835). I use the version Flora Tristan, Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes
étrangères, ed. Denys Cuche, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), and for translations On the need to provide
133
book on Peru, Peregrinations of a Pariah, as well as her novel, Méphis, present women’s
roles in society. Tristan proposed a better education for women and attacked the marriage
laws. For example in 1838, she wrote a petition for the restoration of divorce. As Tristan
considered the betterment of woman’s situation as a key to any social progress, her
feminism was closely interwoven with her socialism. In her view, women were particularly
destined to change social conditions. This was the goal she set herself in her London
Journal, a study of the social, economic and political situation of this major city. The years
after its publication in 1840 were dedicated to Tristan’s socialist activism. She published
The Workers’ Union in 1843 and started to mobilize French workers, first attending
meetings in Paris and then travelling around France. Her ultimate goal was to establish an
international workers’ union.
As a feminist and socialist Tristan did not align herself with any movements or groups,
although she had contact with the feminist group who published the Gazette des Femmes
and was influenced by social reformers like Charles Fourier, Victor Considérant and Robert
Owen.20 Máire Cross and Tim Gray, scholars who analysed her feminism and her
socialism, argue that Tristan owes at least as much to the ideology of liberalism as that of
socialism.21 They conclude that her convictions are more similar to late eighteenth century
and later feminism than to those of social utopists. This chapter, although focusing on
Tristan’s rhetorical strategies, her play with notions of foreignness and exclusion, will
outline similarities to utopists as well as her alignment with the early English feminist,
Mary Wollstonecraft.
Tristan’s preoccupation with foreignness has been analysed in a recent study, Flora
Tristan: La paria et la femme étrangère dans son œuvre, published by Porfirio Mamani
Macedo. He explains her view of herself as a pariah by events in her life, analyses her
description of foreign women, and finally comments on Flora Tristan’s first brochure, On
the Need to Provide Hospitality for Women Travellers, about the reception of foreign
women in Paris. Mamani Macedo emphasizes Tristan’s international solidarity and
universality in her engagement with social improvement, claiming that ‘chez elle le
hospitality for women travellers in Felicia Gordon and Máire Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940: A
Passion for Liberty (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publ., 1996), pp.27-44.
20
Gordon and Cross, p.21.
21
Cross and Gray, p.vi.
134
nationalisme s’effacera totalement pour laisser place à l’idée que le monde doit être la
commune patrie de tous les hommes’, [in her thinking nationalism will disappear
completely to be replaced by the idea that the world should be the home country shared by
all human beings].22 Stephane Michaud similarly argues that she showed solidarity and did
not adopt the position of a condescending philanthropist or a neutral investigator in
England.23 Tristan proclaims indeed a certain international solidarity. For instance in a
letter written in 1832, she addresses English socialists and expresses her wish to collaborate
more closely.24 However, she also clearly deploys ideologies of nationality and class.
Basing my investigation on the London Journal, I will argue that her endorsement of these
ideologies is crucial to her work. I will show that the use of discourses on national
difference allows Tristan to achieve her main goal, which is to criticize Western society and
publicise her feminist convictions.
The fact that Tristan analyses English and not French society enables her to publish her
book in France, in spite of the tense political climate under the July Monarchy. The work
was published in 1840, at a time when feminist and socialist activism was difficult. While
the legislation ruling press censorship was liberal at the beginning of the reign of Louis
Philippe in 1830, by 1835 rigorous laws to control the press were introduced.25 Since the
publications by Saint-Simonian women in the early 1830s, feminist voices were scarce. The
editors of the Gazette des Femmes, who propagated a moderate feminism, were imprisoned
in 1838.26 Tristan herself would be tracked by police in the last years of her life and her
workers’ meetings would be surveyed by spies of the French authorities. In spite of these
difficulties, Tristan managed to propagate her ideas.
Writing about England does not prevent Tristan from criticising French society. The
London Journal is, like all of Tristan’s works a means of propaganda and does not have the
characteristics of the travel genre. The usual sightseeing of the casual tourist is ignored in
favour of descriptions of prisons, asylums for the mentally ill, factory workers, prostitution
22
Mamani Macedo, p.36.
Stephane Michaud, ‘La Déviance sociale à Londres vue par une enquêtrice socialiste française: Flora
Tristan et les Promenades dans Londres (1840),’ Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 61 (21 Apr. 2005), 1489.
24
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, pp.131/132. Letter 70 à MM. les socialistes de la GrandeBretagne (Paris, 11 mai 1840).
25
Albert Pierre, La Presse française (Paris: La Documentation française, 1979), p.138.
26
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.107.
23
135
and infant schools. The London Journal could be seen as a sociological study and, as I will
outline later, has also been acknowledged as such.27 Chapters about movements like the
Chartists and social reformers, such as Robert Owen, indicate Tristan’s interest in social
changes.
Tristan does not conceal the tense political climate in France and the repressive measures of
its government. She states that since 1830 there has been an increase in the number of
refugees after every uprising.28 In the same matter of fact way she hints at surveillance by
the French government:
Many of them [Frenchmen in England] are suspected of being in the pay of the
French government (it is said that the police have republican refugees in London
closely watched).29
The espionage by the French government is clearly stated, although cautiously, in reported
speech. In another passage, Tristan conveys a long story about Louis Philippe’s plan to
assassinate Louis Napoleon in London.30 She reports the words of the Marquis de
Montauban, and does not comment on what he supposedly said. In addition, Tristan
presents it as a funny story which has no particular significance. However, the fact that the
27
This tendency is reinforced in the fourth edition where a chapter on ‘English Drama’ is omitted and two
sketches on ‘Oisiveté de la vieillesse Travail imposé à l'enfance’ and ‘Le ‘puff’ anglais’ are added. (the
chapter on ‘Robert Owen’ is omitted as well.) Some travellers to the United States in the 1830s likewise
undertook this kind of social political itinerary, for instance Harriet Martineau in Society in America (1837) or
Charles Dickens in American Notes for Circulation (1842). As Tristan mentions Martineau in Promenades
dans Londres, she was certainly aware of her work.
28
London Journal, p.19. Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres was published in 1840 by H-L. Delloye in Paris
and by Jeffs in London. Jules-l. Puech and Susan Grogan report that in the same year, a second identical
edition was published. Puech, p.115 ; Grogan, Flora Tristan , p.219. The third edition, which was marked as
second edition, was published in 1842 with the title: La Ville Monstre. It was identical to the previous editions
and published by the same publishers. In the same year, the fourth edition with the title: Promenades dans
Londres ou l’aristocratie et les prolétaires anglais, was published. Michaud asserts that this popular version,
which contained a dedication to the workers (Dédicace aux classes ouvrières), was published by RaymondBocquet et Prévot. (1.500 copies) Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.103. The text I am using is
a reprint of this fourth edition. It has the same title followed by the date 1842 and contains the dedication for
the workers. This edition omits issues which are reported in the first two and introduces other aspects. The
chapter on foreigners in London is much shorter in this fourth edition. I have supplemented these omissions
through the English translation by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl which is based on one of the two
identical editions of Promenades dans Londres published in 1840. See p.iv.
29
Tristan elided the remarks about the political system in her fourth edition, shortening the chapter about
strangers in England significantly. If this was a consequence of political pressure it does not appear in her
letters. But they are included in the the English translation by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl which is
based on one of the two identical editions of Promenades dans Londres published in 1840. Tristan, London
Journal, p.17.
30
Tristan, London Journal, pp.31-36.
136
account takes up several pages gives it some importance. Thus, Tristan mentions the
repressive practices of the French establishment albeit in a cautious way.
Moreover, despite her focus on English society, Tristan includes France in her analysis. In
her preface she states that her book is intended as a lesson to the Continent:
J’ai signalé les vices du système anglais, afin que sur le continent on s’applique à
les éviter (15-6).
[I have pointed out the evils of the English system so that the continent might strive
to avoid them (XX).]
In some chapters, Tristan clearly asserts that the described problems, although occurring in
a more acute form in England, also arise in France or Europe. For instance, her chapter
about prostitution is preceded by two epigraphs, one referring to the English situation, the
other taken from a work about prostitution in France.31 Moreover she declares that ‘la
prostitution existe partout’, [prostitution exists everywhere] and is ‘un résultat forcé de
l’organisation des sociétés européennes’, [an inevitable result of the organization of
Western society] (81,84), (81-82,85).
The epigraph taken from a work by Parent-Duchatelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de
Paris insists on the need for investigation and discussion of the problem in France.32
Tristan states that there are no statistics about prostitution in France and deplores that
chauvinism ignores the problems. She clearly pleads for more social analysis. Prostitution
was indeed a topic that was much discussed in the England of the 1830s and 1840s but
barely in France. As described in the London Journal, prostitution epitomizes the
oppression of women in general as well as the economic plight of workers, allowing Tristan
to openly criticise French society indirectly.
Tristan even goes so far as to criticize the political and legal system in France, which
disadvantages women, by integrating a chapter about ‘Les étrangers à Londres’,
[Foreigners in London], which deals almost exclusively with French people and France.
31
In the fourth edition, Tristan integrated a third epigraph by abbé Constant. Tristan, Promenades dans
Londres, p.69.
32
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.69-70. (71-2)
137
She explains in detail why she considers the battle of Waterloo as the most important event
since the Revolution and Napoleon’s defeat as the work of providence in the service of
liberty.33 She insists that Napoleon’s reign was tyrannical, particularly his laws and
institutions many of which still remained in force. She outlines in detail the disadvantages
of the Code Napoleon (which was still the basis of France’s legal system) giving as a first
example the laws about marriage: ‘he (Napoleon) transformed marriage into servitude’.34
At the same time she is conspicuously silent about the legal situation after 1830. This
silence and her remarks about espionage make her description appear as an indirect
criticism of the French political establishment and its legal situation, particularly with
regard to women. In short, Tristan’s targeting of English society in the London Journal
allowed her to escape censorship and did not prevent her from criticizing the legal and
social situation of French women. However, Tristan elided the remarks about the political
system in her fourth edition, shortening the chapter about strangers in England
significantly. The omission of these passages in the chapter about strangers might have
been a consequence of political pressure. However, there is no trace of such pressure in her
letters.
The investigation of a foreign society also offered Tristan social positions that were not
readily available to women.35 For respectable women, it was not deemed appropriate to
walk in the street to observe, let alone to visit places such as prisons, asylums for the
mentally ill and brothels. Deborah Epstein Nord argues in Walking the Victorian Streets:
Women, Representation and the City that Tristan’s foreignness allowed her to observe and
criticize English society as well as to ‘trespass with impunity into areas of the city an
English woman would instinctively avoid’.36 Being a stranger partly removes social
constraints of class and gender. Tristan took full advantage of her foreignness in her
33
Tristan, London Journal, p.27. In the fourth edition on which my French text is based the description of the
significance of Waterloo is outlined in a separate chapter, ‘Waterloo et Napoléon’. In it Tristan argues that
Napoléon did not only suspend the natural development towards liberty for some time, but praises him for
having tried to combat the English commercial supremacy.
34
Tristan, London Journal, p.22. These remarks on the code Napoléon are omitted in the fourth edition on
which my French text is based and are therefore supplemented through the English translation of the first
edition.
35
Lloyd Kramer argues that Flora Tristan and Victor Jacquemont recognised that ‘cultural differences opened
a space for the exercise of intellectual authority (personal identity)’. Lloyd Kramer, 'Victor Jacquemont and
Flora Tristan: Travel, Identity and the French Generation of 1820,' History of European Ideas 14 (1992 Nov),
p.794.
36
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p.121.
138
investigation. She also provocatively chose the title Promenades dans Londres for her book
which means ‘Walking through London’ and suggests a ‘promeneur’, a male subject.
Indeed, unlike other women travellers, Tristan exclusively focuses on the public, and
presumably male, space.
Tristan was acutely aware of the advantages of foreignness and hints in her chapter about
foreigners at the possibilities attendant on being unknown and taking another identity. She
describes French men and women who adopt all kinds of titles mentioning for instance a
French woman who passes herself off as ‘the niece of the Count de la Rochefoucault’ (17).
As will become clear in this chapter, Tristan herself plays on the possibilities of taking
different identities and forming various allegiances during her stay in London.
The licence that foreignness gives has its complement in the narrative possibilities for the
travel writer, especially when reporting journeys in non-European countries. Tristan’s
description of London is based on the widely held view that the degree of civilization of a
country is visible in its treatment of women. This view, which Tristan expresses in her first
work on foreign women, was shared for instance by the Austrian traveller Ida Pfeiffer who
states in her Journey to Madagaskar:
Diese nur deswegen [von der Geographischen Gesellschaft] auszuschliessen, weil
sie Frauen sind, würde ich höchstens im Orient begreiflich finden, aber nicht in dem
auf seine Zivilisation so stolzen England.37
To exclude them [from the Geographical Society] only because they are women
would be understandable in the Orient but not in England, a country which is so
proud of its civilization.
I will argue that, similarly to Pfeiffer, Tristan associates England’s oppression of women
with the uncivilised East. Throughout the London Journal, the English population is
repeatedly marked as ‘other’ and inferior. At the same time, Tristan casts herself in the role
of a disinterested and invisible observer and knowledgeable narrator who describes another
nation. In one of the scenes where this becomes particularly apparent Tristan aligns herself
37
Flora Tristan, Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes étrangères, p.67. ‘On the need to provide
hospitality for women travellers,’ in Gordon and Cross, p.37. Ida Pfeiffer, Reise nach Madagaskar (Wien,
1861) quoted in Kurt Lütgen, Wagnis und Weite: Die Erlebnisse von vier bedeutenden Frauen (Würzburg:
Arena, 1969), p. 164.
139
with Western travellers to the East. She relates how she disguised herself as a Turkish man
to enter the Houses of Parliament because women were not admitted, and – as will be
demonstrated – describes the Houses of Parliament like a Turkish bath or harem. For
contemporary readers the dress she describes would have aligned her with English
travellers to the Orient such as Lady Montagu and Lady Hester Stanhope. In her Embassy
Letters Montagu describes at length the Turkish dress she wore. Moreover, she had several
paintings and engravings made of herself in Turkish attire, for instance the one in the 1837
edition of her Letters.38 The notorious Hester Stanhope, who died in June 1839, just at the
time when Tristan was in London to research for her book, is reported to have worn the
attire of a Turkish man during most of the time she spent in the East, from 1811 to the end
of her life.39 Tristan may well have read Alphonse de Lamartine’s Souvenirs which contains
a chapter about Stanhope. It was published in 1835, and translated and published in English
in 1837.40 Members of Parliament may also have been reminded of the intrepid Ladies
Montagu and Stanhope by Tristan’s dress and description.
As Reina Lewis explains in Gendering Orientalism, the position of the Western traveller
places women as superior in ‘the West/East divide of colonialism’.41 Tristan adopts this
position of the traveller to the East to gain authority as a narrator. For the same reason, she
emphasizes the difference between herself and the ‘other’, the English population she
describes. Her identity as a woman, which positions her as inferior in patriarchal Western
societies, appears very seldom and is normally linked to her political agenda. The
positioning as a Western traveller provides Tristan with authority to overturn the gender
divide in European society, so that the Members of the British Parliament are registered as
both other and inferior.
38
Lord Wharncliff, ed., The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: Richard
Bentley,1837), frontispiece.
39
Hodgson, pp.81-85.
40
As other travellers visited her, for instance Alexander William Kinglake in 1835 and Prince Herman
Pueckler-Muskau, she was certainly talked about in London. Kinglake integrated a chapter about Hester
Stanhope in Eöthen which was first published in 1844, the same year as Pueckler-Muskau’s narrative which
was published in English in 1845. Another account of her travels was written by the physician Dr Charles
Meryon who accompanied her. Charles Meryon, Travels of lady Hester Stanhope; forming the Completion of
her Memoirs. Narrated by her Physician (London: H. Colburn, 1846).
41
Reina Lewis, pp. 4-5.
140
Tristan was familiar with oriental imagery. In her Lettres à un architecte anglais, [Letters
to an English architect], she describes favourably the architecture of mosques.42 She
probably knew the descriptions of baths in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish
Embassy Letters to which she refers in the London Journal.43 Montagu’s Turkish Embassy
Letters was very popular and continually re-edited during Tristan’s life time. Her Embassy
Letters, and particularly her description of Turkish women, seem to be a key document
about the Orient, in the first half of the nineteenth century at least. Stanhope claims in a
letter in 1811 that Turkey had been ‘ill described by every one except Lady W. Montagu’
and refers to her description of Turkish dresses and women.44 The notes of artist Ingres
show that he was inspired by Montagu’s work for his famous bathing scenes.45 Tristan was
probably also aware of the fact that Rousseau and Mme de Staël both applied the image of
a Sultan and his seraglio to gender difference. In Staël’s novel Corinne, the English
protagonist Oswald writes about gender relations in Italy: ‘Ici on dirait presque que les
femmes sont le sultan, et les hommes le sérail.’ [Here one would almost say that women are
the sultan and men the serail.]46 This image might have inspired Tristan.
In Tristan’s visit to the Houses of Parliament, the Members of the British Parliament are
constructed as the ‘ethnic other’. They are dull and purposelessly lounging around, a
stereotype orientalist impression often made of the women of a harem.47
Les honorables s’étendent sur les bancs, en hommes fatigués et ennuyés; plusieurs
sont couchés entièrement et dorment. ... C’est du bon ton parlementaire de se
présenter à la séance tout crotté, le parapluie sous le bras, en costume de matin,
d’arriver à cheval. ... En général, les orateurs parlent très longuement; ils sont
42
Flora Tristan, 'Lettres à un architecte anglais,' Revue de Paris 37-38 (1837), p.136.
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.205. ‘A number of women writers have brought fame to England. …
since the example of Lady Montagu, who wrote about her travels in such a pure and elegant style, a great
many others have taken up the pen and demonstrated considerable ability.’ (198) Montagu left for Turkey in
1716, where her husband was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary. Her letters were published much later,
one year after her death, in 1763. Anita Desai ‘Introduction,’ to Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters, eds., Anita Desai and Jack Malcolm (London: William Pickering,
1993), pp. xv and xxv.
44
Ian Bruce, ed., The Nun of Lebanon. The Love Affair of Lady Hester Standhope and Michaael Bruce. Their
Newly Discovered Letters. (London: Collins, 1951), pp.86, 88 and 117.
45
Pierre Curthion, Pierre Cailler, eds., Ingres raconté par lui-même et par ses amis: Pensées et écrits du
peintre (Vésenay-Genève: Pierre Cailler, 1947), pp.237-241.
46
Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie (Paris: Nelson, 19--), p.193.
47
For example, Harriet Martineau describes harem women in this way as ‘dull, soulless, brutish, or peevish’.
She states that they are unable to understand that women might have something active to do. Eastern Life,
Present and Past (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), vol. 2, p.155.
43
141
habitués à ce qu’on ne leur prête aucune attention et paraissent eux-mêmes ne pas
prendre un vif intérêt à ce qu’ils disent (53-54).
[The honourable Members of Parliament loll on the benches, like so many tired and
bored men; several are completely stretched out and actually asleep. … It is good
parliamentary form to come to the session bespattered with mud, an umbrella under
one’s arm, in morning dress: or to come on horse back. … In general, orators are
very long-winded, they are accustomed to not being listened to at all, and appear to
be not particularly interested themselves in what they are saying.] (57)
The centrality of this image is shown by the fact that Tristan uses a similar image as
epigraph to the chapter. It is taken from the work La Grande Bretagne by another French
travel writer, Baron d’Haussez:
Les députés se présentent dans le costume le plus négligé en redingote, en bottes, le
chapeau sur la tête, un parapluie sous le bras. Ils prêtent peu d’attention à la plupart
des discours (50).
[Members of Parliament appear in the most careless attire: frockcoat, boots, their
hats on their heads, an umbrella under their arms. They pay scant attention to most
of the speeches.] (53)
Tristan buttresses her argument by repeating D’Haussez’s imagery - the umbrella, the
neglected clothing, and the boredom - and taking it further. Her description questions the
Members of Parliament’s class, their gender and their nationality. Negligent clothing and
more importantly dirt were commonly seen as characteristics of the lower classes.
Moreover her description evokes oriental women through the focus on their clothes and
bodies but also through their posture and behaviour. She insists on their passivity and does
not report their speeches, claiming that she didn’t understand them. Their actions and
movements are elided by the use of words such as ‘monotonous voice’ and ‘wax figure’. In
deploying such a focus, she feminises the men and characterises them as non-English.
Tristan also questions their Englishness by insisting on the English habit to follow dress
code in any situation:
Cette société anglaise, qui attache une si haute importance à la toilette qu’elle ne
s’exempte pas même à la campagne d’en faire trois par jour, ces Anglais guindés ...
affichent à la chambre un mépris complet pour tous les égards que les usages de la
société imposent (53).
142
[The English, who are always zealous martyrs of the rules of etiquette, who attach
so much importance to dress that even in the country they do not fail to change three
times a day, … affect in the Chamber nothing but contempt for the courtesy which
good manners require.] (57)
She then juxtaposes this care for dress with the portrayal of the negligent Members of
Parliament. The fact that their identity as middle and upper-class English men is thoroughly
questioned is emphasized by the expression ‘les honorables’ which does not determine the
subject and ironically questions their honour.
Tristan’s orientalizing description of the Members of Parliament, who symbolize
assumptions of male and English superiority, questions both their maleness and their
Englishness. In the nineteenth century, Englishness is closely linked to the empire and the
‘civilizing mission’ which is based on the idea that England is an advanced, civilized
society which must be spread. 48 Refined manners and rationalism were commonly seen as
signs of civilization and Englishness.49
Tristan not only aligns the Members of Parliament with ‘ethnic others’, she also accuses
them of lacking manners and therefore undermining their much vaunted ‘Englishness’
which includes courtesy to women. When Tristan enters the Parliament disguised as a
Turkish man, soon the entire House is aware of the fact that she is a woman. In a move
which seems to some critics illogical, she expects to be treated as a lady, despite her
disguise, and expresses her disappointment at the bad treatment she gets: 50
Eh bien! sans nul égard pour ma qualité de femme et d’étrangère, et pour mon
déguisement, tous ces gentlemen me lorgnaient, parlaient de moi entre eux et tout
haut, venaient passer devant moi, me regardaient effrontément sous le nez, puis
s’arrêtaient derrière nous dans le petit escalier, et, s’exprimant à haute voix afin que
nous puissions les entendre, ils disaient en français: « Pourquoi cette femme s’estelle introduite dans la Chambre ? – Quel intérêt peut-elle avoir à assister à cette
séance? – Ce doit être une Française. – Elles sont habituées à ne rien respecter. –
Mais, en vérité, c’est indécent! – L’huissier devrait la faire sortir. » Puis ils allaient
parler aux huissiers, et ceux-ci me regardaient ; d’autres couraient le dire à des
membres de la Chambre, qui se dérangeaient de leur place pour venir me regarder.
J’étais sur des épines! Quel manque de convenances et d’hospitalité! (53)
48
Fraser, Green and Johnston, p.126.
Marjorie Morgan, p.131.
50
Bloch-Dano, p.233. Tristan ‘se plaint sans aucune logique’, [is complaining without any logic].
49
143
[And yet, without any regard for my being a woman, a foreigner and in disguise, all
these ‘gentlemen’ ogled me, discussed me in audible tones, made a point of passing
close to me, staring me brazenly in the face; then they would stop behind us in the
little staircase and speaking in a loud voice so that we could hear them would say in
French: ‘What is that woman doing in the Chamber? What motive could she
possibly have for attending the sessions? She must be French. French women have
no respect for anything. Really, it’s indecent! The usher should eject her.’ Then they
would go and speak to the ushers who would return and look at me. Others went
running to tell Members of the House who then left their seats to come and have a
look at me. I was on pins and needles! How ill-mannered and inhospitable!] (56)
Tristan emphasizes the impolite behaviour by giving several reasons for consideration and
respect, the fact that she is a woman, a stranger and in disguise. She stresses the impolite
curiosity and undistinguished behaviour by using a whole series of verbs of intense activity,
‘lorgner’, [to ogle], ‘parler haut’, [to discuss in audible tones], ‘venir passer’, [to pass],
‘regarder éffrontément’, [to stare brazenly], ‘s’exprimer à haute voix’, [to speak in a loud
voice] and even ‘courir’ [to run] which contrast with the apathy and disinterest she
describes later. In the whole passage, Tristan foregrounds the lack of manners of the
Members of Parliament.51
This focus is emphasized by intertextuality. Tristan constructs the scene in parallel to a
passage in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters. As the Letters were
very popular, for many contemporary readers, the scene in the Parliament might have
recalled Montagu’s visit to a Turkish bath. Montagu is surrounded by naked Turkish
women:
I was in my travelling habit, which is a riding dress, and certainly appeared very
extraordinary to them. Yet there was not one of them that shewed the least surprise
or impertinent curiosity, but received me with all the obliging civility possible. I
know no European court where the ladies would have behaved themselves in so
polite a manner to such a stranger. I believe, upon the whole, there were two
hundred women, and yet none of those disdainful smiles, and satirical whispers, that
51
Another source which might have inspired Tristan to this scene is Helen Maria Williams who relates in
Letters Written from France how she and her sister were admitted without tickets to the National Assembly
and given the best seats: ‘We had no personal acquaintance with this gentleman, or any claim to his
politeness, except that of being foreigners and women; but these are, of all claims, the most powerful to the
urbanity of French manners.’ She goes on comparing this situation to her bad experiences when visiting the
British Houses of Parliament. Williams, p.81.
144
never fail in our assemblies when anybody appears that is not dressed exactly in the
fashion.52
Whereas Montagu stresses the politeness of the women, Tristan lengthily dwells on the
Members’ ‘surprise’ and ‘impertinent curiosity’. She narrates how the Members of
Parliament do not restrain themselves to ‘disdainful smiles’ and ‘satirical whispers’ but
speak loudly about the stranger, in the language they assume she understands and express
their outrage as clearly as they possibly can. Their mocking attitude contrasts with the
politeness and civility the Turkish women show towards the foreigner. Montagu describes
them as having more refined manners, than European upper classes.53 Tristan’s
construction of this scene in parallel to Montagu’s text emphasizes her point that the
Members of Parliament have no manners and therefore lack a characteristic which is
deemed to be typical of English civilization.
At the same time, the textual parallel puts the scene in the parliament in a different
perspective and gives it another meaning. While in both scenes, an intruder of another
nationality and in a singular dress appears in a numerous assembly, there is one important
difference. Montagu, visiting a Turkish bath is not transgressing gender boundaries.
Tristan, however, transgresses both gender and ethnic boundaries by entering the
Parliament which is forbidden to women, and by disguising herself as a Turkish man. She
hides this fact both through the parallel to Montagu’s text and through her expression of
disgust and outrage at the impolite behaviour of the members of Parliament. As her
transgressions, which would explain the behaviour of the Members of Parliament for an
English audience, are elided from the text, Tristan normalizes her own behaviour and
presents herself as a victim of the rude and inhospitable behaviour of the Members of
Parliament.
Tristan’s earlier work On the Need to Provide Hospitality for Women Travellers suggests
the same reading of the scene. In it, Tristan links the good treatment of women to
52
Desai and Malcolm, p.58.
A similar description of Eastern, in this case Egyptian women, can be found, decades later, in L’Angleterre
en Egypte, [England in Egypte]. Adam describes how, in 1904, she met Egyptian women with a noble, proud
attitude and charm and elegance. Moreover, they are said to be good, intelligent and educated
conversationalists. Egyptian women, Adam reports, recognised the need for girls’ school better than the
English occupant. Adam, pp.280-3.
53
145
civilization and progress and announces the London Journal as a work which would show
how foreign women are received in England.54 Readers of her earlier work would therefore
be led to understand the scene in the Parliament as an example of inhospitality and
conclude that England is not the advanced country it pretends to be.
The elision of Tristan’s transgressions is an interesting strategy which appears repeatedly in
her work. An example can be found in L’Emancipation de la femme ou le testament de la
paria, [The Emancipation of Woman or the Testament of the Pariah], a posthumous work
based on her notes:
J’ai été femme, j’ai été mère, et la société m’a broyé le coeur – j’ai été assassinée,
parce que j’ai protesté contre l’infamie, et la société m’a flétrie en condamnant à
regret mon assassin – maintenant je ne suis plus une femme, je ne suis plus une
mère, je suis la paria.55
[I was a woman, I was a wife, and society has broken my heart – I have been
murdered because I protested against infamy and society has dishonoured me by
condemning my murderer reluctantly – now I am no woman anymore, I am no
mother anymore, I am the pariah.]
These lines allude to the following biographical background: Tristan and her husband both
claimed custody of their daughter Aline. After he had abducted her several times, Aline and
Tristan accused him of incest. He published a Mémoire to justify himself.56 Soon after,
Tristan revealed personal details in her Peregrinations or, as she puts it in the above
quotation ‘protested against infamy’. One month after the publication of the
Peregrinations, her husband shot her. 57 At his trial, his defence lawyer tried to justify the
murder attempt by accusing Tristan. In the above quotation, she plays on the contradiction
between herself as a victim of the murderer and the perception of her as a culprit, which
might have been shared by many contemporaries because leaving one’s husband was
illegal. Tristan stresses that society (the tribunal) did not wholeheartedly take her side and
consider her as a victim but, rather, accused her. This incident is a crucial element to her
construction of herself as a pariah. She presents herself as excluded from society and
54
Gordon and Cross, p.34.
Flora Tristan, L'Emancipation de la femme, ou, le testament de la Paria. Ouvrage posthume de Flora
Tristan, complété d'après ses notes et publié par A. Constant (Paris: Bureau de la direction de la vérité, 1846),
pp.12-13.
56
Grogan, Flora Tristan, p.32.
57
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.55-56.
55
146
deprived of the social roles of woman and wife. By casting herself in the role of the victim
of society, a role which implies passivity, she disguises all her activities that do not
conform to the social rules and laws of the period.
Tristan consciously constructs herself as a pariah and hides transgressions. Evidence for
this is the fact that she repeatedly does so, using effectually rhetorical strategies such as
repetition, exaggeration and suggestive vocabulary. For instance the use of the word
‘flétrir’ for dishonour is a word which is often used for ‘withering’ in relation to flowers. It
suggests the idea that society acts against the natural order in the above mentioned passage.
Another example is the following passage, which plays on the same contrast between
victim and culprit:
Songez, mon frère, que ce portrait sera celui de la Paria – de la femme née
Andalouse et condamnée par la Société à passer sa jeunesse dans les larmes et sans
amour! Enfin de cette pauvre femme assassinée et traînée devant les juges, non pas
comme victime mais comme coupable. Cette femme dont le coeur, le cerveau, les
lèvres sont encore bouillantes [sic] de jeunesse et dont les cheveux sont blancs! 58
[Think, my brother that this portrait will be that of the Pariah – of the woman born
Andalousian and condemned by society to spend her youth in tears and without
love! Finally, it will be the portrait of this poor woman who was murdered and
dragged before judges not as a victim but as a culprit. This woman whose heart,
whose brain and whose lips are still burning with youth and whose hair is grey!]
She uses the phrases ‘murdered woman’ and ‘dragged before the judges’ for the attempted
murder and the trial of her husband, exaggerating grossly the actual events. The
romanticizing image of her youth in tears, correlates even less to facts in her biography as
has been discussed previously. In addition, Tristan gives her status as a pariah a positive
connotation by using exotic imagery in her description of the ‘Andalousian’ ‘whose lips are
still burning with youth’. Tristan’s casting herself in the role of the pariah is thus a
deliberate strategy to distract attention from her transgressions.
In the preface to Peregrinations, Tristan establishes the procedure of disclosing the acts of
the oppressed as a programme. She appeals to those who have suffered injustice to make it
public and adds:
58
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.114. Lettre 53 à Charles-Joseph Traviès (Londres, 16 juillet
1839).
147
Si les lois ne sont pas égales pour tous, si des préjugés religieux ou autres
reconnaissent une classe de PARIAS, oh! alors, le même dévouement qui nous
porte à signaler l’oppresseur au mépris doit nous faire jeter un voile sur la conduite
de l’opprimé qui cherche a échapper au joug.59
[But if … laws are not equal for all, if religious or other prejudices recognise a class
of PARIAHS, oh! then, the same devotion that leads to denounce the oppressor with
loathing must make us cast a veil over the conduct of the oppressed who is seeking
to escape the yoke.]60
Tristan describes here a programme for resistance by denouncing the powerful and by
passing in silence over the conduct of the oppressed. She uses the metaphor ‘to cast a veil’
which is, as Reina Lewis and Sara Mills assert, fraught with meaning, particularly in the
context of Orientalism.61 In the Peregrinations Tristan shows that she is very conscious of
the power a veil can confer. She describes the women of Lima who wear a saya which
covers them completely and conceals their rank and identity, even to their husbands. This
disguise allows them to go out on their own and to do whatever pleases them. 62 Tristan
romanticises these dresses which literally cast a veil over women’s conduct and provide
freedom of action and power.
Exotic dresses have been described as symbols of freedom before, for instance in
Montagu’s Embassy letters, or in works by Lady Elizabeth Craven and Julia Pardoe,
published two years before Tristan’s London Journal.63 Montagu describes how Turkish
women of all ranks wear the same dress that covers them completely.
‘tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her,
and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual
masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger
of discovery.64
59
Flora Tristan, Pérégrinations d’une paria 1833-34 (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de l'éd. de Paris:
A. Bertrand, 1838), vol.1, p.23. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark/ 12148/bpt6k81733r (accessed 15/12/07).
60
In Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.207.
61
Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, ‘Introduction,’ Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Reina Lewis and
Sara Mills, (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp.14-15.
62
Tristan, Pérégrinations, 2: 366-381.
63
Hodgson, p.113.
64
Desai and Malcolm, p.71.
148
Mary Louise Pratt argues that Tristan might have been inspired by Montagu for her
description of the Liméniennes.65 The fact that Tristan compares their dresses to oriental
costumes supports Pratt’s argument.66
Tristan is very conscious of the fact that the veil may be seen as an instrument which not
only empowers women but also disempowers men. According to the ideas Foucault
illustrates with the example of the Bentham panopticon, power frequently relies upon its
capacities of surveillance, which presupposes the ability to observe others.67 As Meyda
Yeğenoğlu points out in ‘Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse
of Orientalism’, the veil is an obstacle to visual control as it is ‘invested with the potency to
hide or reveal the 'truth' about the Orient which the West ultimately seeks.’68 Through the
veil, the power relation between men and women and between Western traveller and
indigenous woman are reversed. Tristan illustrates this point by describing the veil as an
obstacle to the scopophilic pleasure of Western men in the Orient. She insists particularly
on the Limaniennes’ grace and beauty and claims that Western men commit ‘folies’ and
‘extravagances’ to get a glimpse of them, thereby emphasizing their relative powerlessness,
as Lima’s women remain anonymous and uncontrollable.69 As Tristan’s first preoccupation
is to ‘cast a veil over the conduct’ of women she seemingly combines feminism and
socialism with a critique of imperialism, implying in her ‘class of PARIAHS’ not only
women and workers but people considered as ethnic others like the Irish. Her call for
casting a veil over the conduct of pariahs means resistance to patriarchy and the imperial
project. However, as will become clear later, she does not criticise imperialism as such.
What reverses the power relation even more radically is the fact that the veiled woman is
able to see while staying invisible herself. Tristan widens this aspect by emphasizing that
women in Lima can act without being visible and therefore they have power at the same
time as they stay invisible. In large parts of the text, Tristan as a narrator takes this position,
the role of the invisible observer. Her identity as a woman appears very seldom and is
65
Pratt, p.167.
‘Il est respecté et fait partie des moeurs du pays, comme, en Orient le voile de la musulmane.’ Tristan,
Pérégrinations, 2: 376. ‘It is respected as part of the culture of the country just as the Muslim woman’s veil is
in the Orient.’ Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah, Transl. Jean Hawkes, London: Virago, 1986, p.273.
67
Michel Foucault, ‘Docile Bodies,’ in Discipline and Punish (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979),
pp.135-69.
68
Lewis and Mills, p.14.
69
Tristan, Pérégrinations, 2 : 372.
66
149
normally linked to her political agenda, as for instance in the parliament. But
characteristically, this scene is cut short by the narrator: ‘Mais je laisse là des souvernirs
pénibles pour parler de la chambre’, [But enough of painful memories, let us describe the
Chamber] and she resumes the role of the distant and invisible observer (53), (56).
The phrase ‘to cast a veil over the conduct of the oppressed’ has another implication which
is ethically problematic. The actions Tristan would like to conceal are considered illegal in
her society, for instance leaving a husband or entering the Houses of Parliament as a
woman. It is significant that Tristan criticises the Code Napoleon for making ‘nondisclosure of a crime a crime itself’, a law which complicates the situation of outlaws like
herself.70 In her writing Tristan carefully chooses images and rhetorical strategies in order
to reveal and conceal what suits her purpose. The use of the metaphor ‘cast a veil’ conceals
the fact that this strategy is ethically problematic.
Tristan considers this strategy as part of her mission. Influenced by Saint-Simonians and
Fourierists, she saw herself as a messiah or prophet and asserts this idea repeatedly in her
letters, for instance in a letter to her friend Chodzko written in 1839:
Que les disciples du Christ, de Saint-Simon, de Fourier, de Flora Tristan (quand elle
en aura – ce qui sera avant 10 ans), que les disciples posent, c’est un fait que je ne
nie pas et qui est même providentiel.71
[That the followers of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Flora Tristan (when she will have
disciples – and this will be well before 10 years) establish themselves, is a fact, I
cannot deny and which is even providential.]
Tristan provocatively aligns herself with Christ, political leaders such as the revolutionaries
of 1789, as well as the social reformers Saint-Simon and Fourier and announces that she is
a prophet chosen by God to induce social and economic changes. In the London Journal,
she clearly refers to her mission in the preface when she claims that to work against the
flaws of society
70
Tristan, London Journal, p.21. This part of the chapter ‘Foreigners in London’ does not exist in the fourth
edition.
71
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.124. Lettre 61 à Olympe Chodyko (Paris, septembre 1839).
150
il faut … remonter aux causes, ne reculer ni devant la fatigue ni devant les sacrifices
de tout genre, et donner à ses investigations la plus grande publicité, avec cette
intrépidité qui est le caractère de l’apostolat. (15)
one must … trace them back to their causes and, without hesitation in the face of
weariness or of any sort of sacrifice, assure the greatest possible publicity for one’s
investigations with all the intrepidness which characterises the true apostle. (xix)
Writing the London Journal is part of her mission as a messiah who aims to improve
society. Tristan regards giving publicity to her ideas as her main task which overrules any
other considerations. This includes consciously establishing a reputation, ‘poser’, as she
remarks in the above quotation about the disciples of Christ. In the same letter she argues
that because people are stupid, the spreading of ideas needs ‘charlatans’ and ‘bavards’, both
expressions which stress more the publicity aspect than exact relation of facts. In another
letter to her friend Olympe Chodzko, Tristan explicitly discusses what should be publicly
said and what should be concealed.72 This careful choice of what should get published
allows her to posit another ethic or social order as the ‘truth’. She naturalizes alternative
rules and accuses society of acting against them.
Rabine similarly argues with regard to Peregrinations that Tristan’s writing is not based on
‘truth’, patriarchal law, but on positions and that she refuses to play the roles assigned to
her by society (daughter and wife) and stages her own theatre in which she is not only an
actor but a playwright and director. ‘By staging these scenes Tristan establishes a fiction
that can compete with the patriarchal fictions called society.’73 Conventions of society are
revealed to be fictions and patriarchal rules shown to be contingent, or, as Rabine puts it,
Tristan ‘makes visible the void behind the apparent substantiality of patriarchal images’.74
This is what she does in the description of the Houses of Parliament when she plays down
72
Tristan explains: ‘Maintenant je suis très convaincue que Ganneau n’est pas le Mapah. C’est tout
simplement un homme de haute et puissante intelligence, ayant au suprême degré la force de poser. Mais
n’importe – il faut faire croire au public que c’est bien l’homme réunissant les deux termes – Ganneau ne
vivra pas pour toujours et, après sa mort, on pourra dire qu’il était réellement le Mapah.’ Michaud, Flora
Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.121. Lettre 58 à Charles-Joseph Traviès, Paris, 14 septembre 1839. [Now I am
convinced that Ganneau is not the Mapah. He is merely a man who is highly intelligent and able to establish a
reputation for himself. But this is not important – we have to convince the public that he really is the man who
combines the two qualities – Ganneau will not live for ever and after his death we will say that he was really
the Mapah.] The Mapah saw himself as a God representing the male and female principle. His name is
deduced from the latin words ‘mater’ and ‘pater’.
73
Leslie Wahl Rabine, ‘Feminist Texts and Feminine Subjects,’ in Moses and Rabine, p.131.
74
Rabine, p.133.
151
the fact that she is trespassing in order to question patriarchy and the British Empire. This is
also what she promises in her preface to the London Journal:
Je n’ai pas été séduite par les brillantes et riches décorations de la scène anglaise;
j’ai pénétré dans les coulisses, j’ai vu le fard des acteurs, le cuivre de leur gallons, et
entendu leur propre langage. (15)
I have not been beguiled by the opulent and splendid scenery of the English stage; I
have made my way into the wings, I have seen the paint on the actor’s faces, the
glitter that is not gold, and I have heard them speak their own words. (xix)
Writing the London Journal is therefore clearly part of her mission as a messiah.
Tristan achieves this deconstruction of patriarchal society by taking the narrative position
of the Western traveller to an uncivilised country. What Rabine does not mention in her
analysis is the fact that the relationship between Tristan and her Peruvian uncle is not only
determined by patriarchy but also by the binary European/non European. Her uncle at the
same time as being the head of the family is the non-European ‘other’. In spite of the fact
that he is of aristocratic blood and belongs to the dominating white caste in Peru, Tristan
describes him and her family as ‘other’. While in Peregrinations, this complex relationship
is given, Tristan constructs it deliberately in the London Journal, by portraying herself as a
traveller to a non-European country and its inhabitants as ‘others’.
Tristan’s choice of the disguise as a Turkish man is also part of this mission to undermine
patriarchal society. In the text, Tristan does not offer a convincing explanation for her
choice. To enter the Houses of Parliament in cross-gender disguise would have served her
purpose. Tristan claims that she initially approached a Member of Parliament and the
French, German and Spanish Ambassadors who all refused to lend her men’s clothes and
help her gain access to the Parliament. While the Member of Parliament was subjected to
prejudice and hypocritically pretends to be shocked by her proposition and the European
Ambassadors fear to compromise themselves, the Turkish obliges her and is very
considerate. Tristan implies that he is the one who most acts like an enlightened and
civilized man, reversing once more the binary between supposedly civilized and barbaric
nations.
152
At first, the choice of an oriental disguise is difficult to explain in spite of some practical
advantages. Turkish dress normally consisted of trousers and long robes which were loose
and would hide the form of the body. Therefore, it was more suitable as a disguise than the
costume of a European man. Moreover, Tristan might have felt less awkward in a dress
which she or other women had worn to fancy dress balls. 75 The eighteenth-century tradition
of public masquerade was still alive in France and increasingly linked to exoticism.76
However, the choice of the Orientalist disguise seems incongruous as it does not serve as
camouflage and attracts the attention of passers-by and of the whole House of Commons.
Nor can it be seen as an orientalising self-fashioning. The disguise is not described and only
mentioned as ‘un riche costume de turc’, [a sumptuous Turkish costume].77 Nord argues
that the dress provided Tristan with a sense of invisibility and invulnerability. She claims
that for some of the nineteenth century women who used disguise, it was not necessary that
the disguise was convincing. For example, George Sand in men’s clothes was perceived
neither as a woman nor as a man but as ‘other’ and therefore had more freedom.78 In the
case of Tristan, Nord argues similarly: ‘The camouflage is thus meant not to conceal her
identity but to furnish her with a sense of invulnerability by inhibiting the responses of
others.’79 I agree with Nord that Tristan’s disguise was not meant to disguise her identity as
a woman. However, the intention of the disguise was not to inhibit responses, but on the
contrary, to provoke them and to make a public statement. Tristan chose a Turkish dress
because it was not a clear marker of gender. Whereas in Turkey trousers were worn by men
and women, in England, as Marjorie Garber asserts, they were intermittently fashionable
for women.80 Therefore, it allowed her both to enter the Houses of Parliament and to be
present as a woman. Tristan clearly wanted to be recognized as a woman and to provoke
reactions by the Members of Parliament. She would have known that the intrusion of a
woman would not be ignored. Her insistence on the fact that she was the only focus of
interest of the whole Parliament betrays her pleasure at her triumph. Tristan’s presence as a
75
Desanti, Flora Tristan: la femme révoltée , p.161. He gives no reference but asserts that Tristan went to a
ball in a saya, the traditional dress of Lima. Susan Grogan asserts that Tristan had made a saya in Lima which
was amongst her possessions when she died. Grogan, Flora Tristan, p.178, note 47.
76
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnevalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and
Fiction (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986), p.335.
77
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.52, (55).
78
Nord, p.118-9.
79
Nord, p.121.
80
Garber, pp.311-3.
153
woman within ‘le sanctuaire de la puissance male’, [the sanctuary of male power] was a
provocation, the gesture of an activist.81
The various connotations of Turkish dress heightened this provocation. It aligned her with
the two travellers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Hester Stanhope members of the
upper class. Montagu’s husband was a Member of Parliament and Hester Stanhope was the
niece of Prime Minister, William Pitt, with whom she spent several years before his
death.82 In brief, the two women were highly regarded members of English society and by
no means powerless. The scene in the Parliament becomes even more significant when
considered in the light of the life and convictions of the two women. Because of their high
class status, neither Montagu nor Stanhope were compelled to conform to the ideologies of
feminine behaviour in the period. Mary eloped with Montagu to escape an arranged
marriage and Hester Stanhope took a young lover during her travels. Montagu was a
feminist. A publication with the title Woman not Inferior to Man: or, A Short and Modest
Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity
and Esteem with the Men / Sophia, a Person of Quality has been attributed to her. Stanhope
made no secret of her conviction that the Western world was not well organized and needed
a messiah and thorough changes.83 Middle-class women would have been mocked and
pilloried for identical behaviour, and would not have had their writing reviewed in the
major journals of the day. Tristan, by taking a Turkish disguise aligns herself with women
who, like her, rejected important conventions of Western society.
Tristan might have been inspired by the legends surrounding Hester Stanhope which
represent her as a very powerful woman among the inhabitants of the Orient. Alexander
Kinglake calls her ‘the Queen of the desert’ and the different sources agree on the fact that
she was extremely well received in the different cities she visited and was respected by the
Arabs.84 Lamartine for instance reports:
81
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.51. (54).
Hodgson, pp.81-5.
83
Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient 18321833 ou notes d’un voyageur,’ in Œuvres complètes de Lamartine, (Paris: The author, 1860-1863), vol.6,
pp.223-7.
84
Although his work Eöthen was only published in 1844, he saw Stanhope in 1835 and probably contributed
to talk in London about her. Alexander William Kinglake, Eöthen (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1936 (1908)),
p.63.
82
154
Ce fut dans cette dernière station [Palmyre] que les nombreuses tribus d’Arabes
errants ...réunis autour de sa tente au nombre de quarante ou cinquante mille, et
charmés de sa beauté, de sa grâce et de sa magnificence, la proclamèrent reine de
Palmyre.85
[It was in this last place (Palmyra), that the numerous wandering Arab tribes …,
forty to fifty thousand in number, were gathered around her tent and, charmed by
her beauty, her grace and her magnificence, proclaimed her queen of Palmyra.]
Interestingly, this veneration was shared by Lamartine. He mentions her ‘traits nobles doux
et majestueux’, [gentle, noble and majestic traits] and describes her as a heroic woman with
a strong will, almost supernatural strength and perseverance.86 Lamartine even suggests that
she had some visionary powers as she was reading him like a book and vaguely implies that
she had a role at the side of the messiah she was expecting. Kinglake takes a more
distanced stance stating that ‘the true story of the English woman ruling over Arabs always
sounded to me like a fable’.87 Nonetheless, this image of the queen of Arabs and repeated
affirmations that she inspired admiration might have given Tristan the awareness of the
possibilities for Western women in the East and inspired her to use Turkish dress for her
triumphant public statement in the Parliament.
Tristan’s presence in the Houses of Parliament in a Turkish dress was provocative also
owing to the political associations it evoked. In 1839 (24 June), just at the time when
Tristan was in London to research for her book, the Pacha Mehemet Ali of Egypt was
victorious in the battle of Nezib against Sultan Mahmoud. This victory meant that Syria fell
into the hands of the Sultan’s vassal, the Pacha. There was concern that he would march
towards the Turkish capital but he was probably prevented from doing so by fear of
intervention from Russia, which was bound to support Turkey through the treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi. France proposed to have the question settled between the five great powers in
Europe and on 29 July 1839 a note stating this was sent to the Sultan.88 Different states sent
troops into the region and diplomatic activity was at its height. But the five states could not
come to an agreement. From September to December 1839, when Tristan was writing her
London Journal, the Orient question was a constant theme in the newspapers. The crisis
85
Lamartine, 6 : 215.
Lamartine, 6 : 217 / 222.
87
Kinglake, p.63.
88
‘France and England: the Syrian Question,’ 437.
86
155
brought to the fore the conflict of interests between England and France in the Orient. The
author of the ‘Chronique de la quinzaine’ in the Revue des Deux Mondes describes the
English interests in his contribution of the 14 September 1839:
De son côté, l’Angleterre, sous le prétexte de sauver et de venger la légitimité
ottomane, ne voudra-t-elle pas ... briser la puissance égyptienne, qui lui fait obstacle
en Syrie, en Arabie, effacer enfin cette nouvelle individualité orientale, qui ne se
prête pas d’une manière assez souple à toutes ses ambitions de négoce et de
commerce?’89
[And England for her part, would she not want, under the guise of saving and
revenging the Ottoman legitimacy, to destroy the Egyptian power which opposes
her in Syria, in Arabia, and to break this new oriental individual who does not fall in
easily with her ambitions of trade and commerce?]
The author of an article in the Foreign Quarterly confirms the importance of the Turkish
Empire for English trade and commerce.90 On the English side, it was feared that in alliance
with the Pacha who controlled Egypt and Syria, and with Algeria in its possession, France
could easily extend its influence on the African coast threatening not only the English
possessions in the East but also becoming a too-powerful state in Europe.91 In the course of
the negotiations about the oriental question, the relation between England and France was
strained. In this way, Tristan’s Turkish dress represents the conflict of interest between the
two imperial nations and challenges England’s imperial and commercial aspirations. Her
appearance in the parliament echoes the words of a letter she wrote in London:
Ce qu’il y a de plus comique, c’est que ce peuple de forgerons a la prétention d’être
le premier peuple du monde! Ceci n’est pas de l’orgueil, c’est de la stupidité’.92
[What is most comic is the fact that this nation of blacksmiths aspires to be the first
nation of the world! This is not pride but stupidity.]
Tristan’s presence in Turkish clothes in the Parliament is part of the questioning of
England’s role as an imperial and commercial power which pervades the London Journal.
89
V. de Mars, 'Chronique de la quinzaine. - Histoire politique,' Revue des Deux Mondes 19 (1839), 875.
‘France and England: the Syrian Question,’ 452-4. According to the Wellesley Index, the author of this
second part of the article may have been Edward Clarkson. Houghton, 2: 162.
91
‘France and England: the Syrian Question,’ 442. On the 15th July 1840 a treaty between Turkey, England,
Russia, Austria and Prussia determined that the Pacha had to evacuate Syria and allied troops conquered it.
92
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.112. Lettre 51 à Olympe Chodzko (Londres, 15 Juillet
1839).
90
156
The exclusion of women from the Houses of Parliament is a theme that has been raised in
earlier texts. Montagu reports in her letters an anecdote of an incident when women forced
admission into the House of Lords. It was usual that peeresses could attend the sessions but
the House had the privilege to ask the visitors, called ‘strangers’, to withdraw. Montagu
relates how a group of ladies tried to get access by thumping, rapping and kicking against
the door ‘with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarce heard’.93 As
this was unsuccessful, they stayed silent until the door was opened on the presumption that
they had left. Montagu states: ‘They stayed there …and during the debate gave applause,
and showed marks of dislike, not only by smiles and winks (which have always been
allowed in these cases), but by noisy laughs and apparent contempts’.94 In the scene, the
group of women relinquish the roles of passive observers and participate in the activity of
the House as Tristan does in her Turkish dress. Montagu, who obviously enjoys her story,
ends it with the words: ‘you must own this action to be very well worthy of record, and I
think not to be paralleled in any history, ancient or modern’, she visibly did not think that
these ladies would have a successor.95 As this letter was first published in the edition of
1837, it is possible that Tristan was inspired by it.
The incident of Tristan’s appearance is recorded nowhere, neither in the Times, nor in
George Henry Jennings’ Anecdotal History of Parliament which was first published in
1880 and contains Montagu’s story.96 The Journal of the Parliamentary session and the
Hansard give no indication either. So, either Tristan’s appearance as agent provocateur did
not change the usual procedures of parliamentary sessions or Tristan only created the scene
and her role in the text.97 At any rate, she might have been inspired to her action or story by
93
Robert Halsband, ed., The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), vol.2,
p.136. Letter to Lady Pomfret [March 1739].
94
Halsband, 2: 137.
95
Halsband, 2: 137.
96
George Henry Jennings, An Anecdotal History of the British Parliament, from the Earliest Periods to the
Present Time: with Notices of Eminent Parliamentary Men, and Examples of their Oratory (London: Horace
Cox, 1883), pp.419-20.
97
Nord, p.120, footnote 13. Nord claims that Tristan went to the Parliament on her second trip in 1831 but
gives no evidence for her claim. She merely states that in 1835, women were admitted to the Houses of
Parliament. The question was discussed indeed in the House of Commons in August 1835 but the Hansard
indicates 83 Ayes and 86 Noes in the divide. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: Third Series (New York:
Kraus Reprint Co., 1971), vol. 30, p.49. Tristan had visited London in 1826, in her function as a Ladies’
companion or maid. But she cannot have visited the Parliament then because the Irish Member O’Connell she
mentions in her description was not in the Parliament in 1826. Michaud asserts that Tristan was in London in
157
Montagu’s text or by the fact that the House of Commons rejected the admission of ladies
in 1835. According to an article in the Guardian Unlimited, not only women, but strangers
generally were only admitted to the Parliament during sessions in 1845 and women in
1916.98 In order to make her political statement Tristan seems to ignore the fact that when
she visited the Parliament men and women were excluded from it. She obviously attributes
some importance to the provocative image of herself, as a woman, in the Houses of
Parliament. This is evident in the fact that she published this chapter separately in the
journal Le Nouveau Monde.99
Tristan uses the narrative position of the distant investigator and traveller in the whole
London Journal and, as I will show, presents not only the Members of Parliament but also
English women like ethnic others. However, she also sympathizes and identifies with a
small number of English women writers, playing on the different narrative positions
available in travelogues. Sara Mills, who calls this identification with the ‘other’ ‘counterhegemonic voices within colonial discourse’, contends that they constitute a critique of
dominant discourses.100 Tristan uses this voice in her own way. The women she chooses to
portray in a sympathetic way are writers of travel books or novels presenting the manners
in other European countries or America. Apart from Lady Montagu she mentions for
instance Lady Morgan whose vivid depiction of Ireland she praises or Mrs Gore, who was a
very profuse and popular writer, and portrayed manners in Poland.101 She also mentions
‘Mrs Shilly’, probably Mary Shelley who published journals of a tour through France,
Switzerland, Germany and Holland. Moreover, she praises Harriet Martineau and Frances
Trollope who both investigated American Republicanism in the 1830s, although from
December 1835 a time when the Parliament was not debating. Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve,
p.54. Therefore, Tristan might have visited the Houses of Parliament in 1831 when she was in London under
unknown circumstances or, more probably, in 1839.
98
Ros Taylor, ‘Cook Welcomes ‘Strangers’ to Parliament,’ Guardian Unlimited, 22 April 2002.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/openup/story/0,,688698,00.html (accessed 15/06/06). The Hansard’s
Parliamentary Debates of 1845 contain a discussion on the admission of strangers to the house. However, the
resolution confirms the prohibition. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 77: 138. This fact suggests that the
Parliament was opened to strangers later. According to the Anecdotal History of Parliament, upper-class
women were admitted except from 1778-1834. Jennings, pp.420-21. In addition, Members of the other House,
Diplomats and distinguished strangers were regularly admitted to the sessions. In Tristan’s text, the Turkish
ambassador has an admission card.
99
Jules-L. Puech asserts that she published in the Fourierist Journal Le Nouveau Monde. ‘Une visit aux
chambers de Parlement’, Le Nouveau Monde, 21 May 1840. Puech, p.114.
100
Mills, Discourses of Difference, pp.22/23.
101
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.205. (198). Robinson, pp.187-8. Morgan’s study about France in
1817 was fiercely attacked by the Quarterly and she was accused of Jacobinism.
158
different political points of view.102 Tristan might have seen these women as role models
for her work as a social investigator. She emphasises this aspect, asserting that they work
on serious topics such as political economy. Thereby she clearly characterises these English
writers as not conforming to ideals of femininity in contemporary English society. Tristan’s
sympathy and identification has therefore two consequences. On the one hand, as all these
women were well established and famous, her alignment with them reinforces her own
prestige and authority. On the other hand their non-conformity characterises them - and
Tristan - as outsiders. Like wearing Turkish dress in the Parliament, Tristan’s alignment
with some English women provides her with the status of a pariah.
Tristan’s strategy becomes even more evident when she identifies herself most clearly with
women writers who were infamous for challenging conventions of respectability in their
lives, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Lady Bulwer Lytton or Lady Blessington.
Wollstonecraft was not married to her first partner with whom she had a child and Lady
Bulwer was separated from her husband who had incarcerated her in a lunatic asylum for
some weeks. Tristan describes them as victims of the indissolubility of marriage. In her
view, their disreputable reputations are slander which they have to endure: ‘le supplice de
la calomnie’, [the torture of slander] (206).103 Tristan claims that Bulwer’s husband, the
eminent novelist and politician, spread slander about her because he envied her talent and
success. To buttress her argument she reports the rumour that Lady Bulwer had also written
the works published by her husband. Tristan explicitly links Bulwer’s fate to her own:
(198) 104
Oh! Lady Bulwer, I sincerely hope your husband’s hatred will remain for ever
powerless, so that, more fortunate than I, you will escape the assassin’s bullet.105
Syntactically, Tristan enters into a dialogue with Lady Bulwer. Her phrasing associates
slander with assassination and evokes notions of violence and victimisation. As in
102
Martineau, Society in America (1837). As Maria H. Frawley asserts, most women whose travel accounts
were social investigations wrote about America. Frawley, p.39.
103
My translation. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl, the translators of the London Journal do not translate
the word ‘supplice’. Tristan, London Journal, p.200.
104
Lady Bulwer had indeed similar problems to Tristan. In 1837, she lost her children to her husband. Marie
Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Lytton, Rosine Anne Doyle Bulwer (1802-1882),’ in The Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography: in Association with the British Academy: from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, eds. H.C.G.
Matthew and Brian Harrison, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 34. pp.993-5.
105
Tristan, London Journal, p.199. In the fourth edition the part about Bulwer’s husband is not included.
159
previously discussed passages, Tristan elides the women’s trespassing of social rules and
accuses contemporary patriarchal society and its ideologies of femininity.
Tristan aligns herself with Wollstonecraft not only in regard to her status as an outcast but
also as an advocate of the liberation of women. She stresses that there was no other
defendant of this cause in England.
Cependant, une voix de femme se fit entendre en Angleterre il y a un demi-siècle,
voix qui prit dans cette vérité dont Dieu a mis l’empreinte en notre âme une
puissance irrésistible et une éclatante énergie; voix qui n’a pas craint d’attaquer un à
un tous les préjugés et d’en démontrer le mensonge et l’iniquité. (206)
And yet, half a century ago, a woman’s voice spoke out in England. A voice which
derived an irresistible power, a splendid energy from the truth implanted in our
souls by God, a voice which was not afraid to attack every prejudice, one by one,
and to show how iniquitous and false they are. (199-200)
The word ‘notre’ or ‘our’ in the phrase ‘en notre âme’, [in our souls] underlines what
Wollstonecraft and Tristan (and perhaps other women) have in common, their mission to
liberate women. The religious imagery demonstrates the Saint-Simonian influence on
Tristan. She uses rhetorical strategies which have been discussed earlier by choosing the
words ‘préjugés’, [prejudice] and ‘mensonge’, [lie] for the English laws and social
conditions which disadvantage women. Tristan’s identification with Wollstonecraft goes so
far as to integrate long quotations of her work Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with
Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) into the London Journal.106 After the
publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of Vindication of the Rights of
Woman no writer in England mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft in a positive way although
she was well known. Only in 1855 George Eliot broke tradition with the publication of her
article Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. While most women endeavoured not to
be compared to Wollstonecraft, Tristan seeks the parallel that a reviewer of her
Peregrinations had already made. He puts Tristan in the tradition of Helen Maria Williams
and Mary Wollstonecraft and calls them ‘these miserable quacks of womanhood’.107 Tristan
106
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, pp.207-9, (200-3).
'Peregrinations, Mainly in Peru, of a Pariah by Madame Flora Tristan,' The Foreign Quarterly Review 21
(1838), 152. The Wellesley Index suggests that the author might be B. E. Pote. Houghton, 2: 157.
107
160
emphasizes Wollstonecraft’s disreputable reputation and the notoriety of Vindication of the
Rights of Woman:
La réputation de ce livre inspire un tel effroi que, si vous en parlez même aux
femmes dites du progrès, elles vous répondront avec un movement d’horreur: ‘Oh!
c’est un très mauvais livre!’ Ah! La calomnie l’emporte souvent sur la renommée la
mieux méritée! (206)
The book has such a dreadful reputation that if you mention it even to so called
‘progressive’ women, their horrified reply will be ‘Oh that is a very wicked book!’
Alas slander often triumphs over the best deserved renown (200).
She uses strong words like ‘effroi’ and ‘horreur’, in English ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, to
underline the reactions to the book and making her dismissal of it as slander more striking.
Tristan’s quotation of long passages from Vindication of the Rights of Woman, this ‘wicked
book’, characterises her once again as ‘agent provocateur’.108
Tristan uses the strategy of identifying with women who do not obey the rules of their
society also in regard to a working-class woman in prison. However, while she identifies
completely with women of her own class, she creates a clear distance from working-class
women. Drawing on phrenology, she describes most prisoners as showing in their
physiognomy their wickedness. Then she dwells lengthily on one woman’s beauty and
concludes that this woman cannot be a criminal.109
Je l’avais deviné! … C’était une mère qui avait senti les entrailles de ses
malheureux enfants déchirées par les horribles angoisses de la faim ... Elle avait
volé! … Mais quelle était la plus coupable, d’elle ou de cette société qui, sans nulle
justice et sans nulle humanité, laisse le pauvre exposé à une mort affreuse et le
pousse ainsi à la folie, au crime? (100)
She was a mother who had felt the awful hunger gnawing at her children’s bellies
… she had stolen. … But which was the guiltier, she or a society which, without
any justice or any humanity exposes the poor to a horrible death, and thus drives
them to madness and crime? (102)
108
In her chapter ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Flora Tristan: One Pariah Redeems Another’, Máire Fedelma
Cross even maintains that Flora Tristan ‘was in a modest way responsible for rescuing the reputation of
Britain’s pioneer champion of female emancipation.’ Cross outlines the similarities between ‘the hyena in
petticoats’ and ‘O’Connell in petticoats’ as the two women were dubbed’. Máire Fedelma Cross, ‘Mary
Wollstonecraft and Flora Tristan: One Pariah Redeems Another,’ in Campbell-Orr, p.121.
109
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.100. (101)
161
The woman is said to be destitute because her drunken husband, a seaman, had abandoned
her without money. Tristan idealises her as a mother.110 At the same time, the woman is
described like an object as passive and voiceless whereas Tristan takes the role of the
investigator who contemplates her and reads her like a book. At first, her physiognomy
indicates that she is not a criminal, then her ‘proud bearing’ tells her that this woman is
proud of having fulfilled her duty as a mother, and finally, she insists that she can see in
her eyes what she wanted to say to her:
Oh! Tu es mère, toi! Tu as compris mes angoisses? Comme moi tu aurais volé; la
faim de tes enfants t’en eût aussi donné le courage! Tu sens ce qu’il m’a fallu de
force pour tout braver. Merci merci ! femme, tu m’as comprise ! (102)
Oh, you too are a mother! You understand my anguish! You would have stolen as I
did; your children’s hunger would have given you too the courage to do it! Thank
you! Thank you, sister, you understand me! (103)
Tristan, taking at the same time the desperate view of the prisoner and that of a seer,
explicitly transfers guilt from the prisoner to society which prevents this woman from being
a good mother. Drawing on prevalent ideologies of femininity, she turns the crime into the
heroic action of a selfless mother and blames the current social and economic order in
England.
The few English women just discussed are exceptions in Tristan’s text. She sets them
clearly apart from the majority of English women:
Quel révoltant contraste en Angleterre que l’extrême servitude des femmes et la
supériorité intellectuelle des femmes auteurs! (199)
What a revolting contrast there is in England between women’s abject servitude and
the intellectual superiority of women writers. (191)
She argues that these writers must be superior as they can achieve much in spite of their
oppression. Tristan does not sympathise or identify herself with other women. She takes the
perspective of the distant observer and traveller meeting ‘others’. On the one hand, she
explicitly compares English women to inmates of a Turkish harem, as for instance in the
110
In the context it becomes clear that Tristan does not completely identify herself with the role of the mother.
Rabine rightly argues that Tristan did not construct herself as a mother for workers. Rabine, p.138.
162
epigraph where she compares gender roles in England to those in the Middle Ages or to
those in Turkey, both times and spaces which stand for the uncivilized. On the other hand,
Tristan employs the usual rhetorical devices to portray ‘the cultural Other’ which are, as
David Spurr asserts in The Rhetoric of Empire, debasement and descriptions of people in
terms of absence and nothingness.111 According to Marjorie Morgan, colonial discourse
used in England, was often not Orientalism but Anti-Catholicism.112 What is remarkable in
Tristan’s text is not her use of colonial discourse but rather the extent to which she employs
it and debases English women. Other women writers describing England such as Mary
D’Avot in Lettres sur l'Angleterre, ou mon séjour à Londres en 1817 et 1818, par Mme M.
D. (1819) or Blanche de Rivière in Quinze jours dans la Grande-Bretagne (1862) give a
more sympathetic picture of English women and, although discussing differences of
customs, do not describe them like ethnic ‘others’.
Tristan presents English women as commodities and objects and refers to them in terms of
absence and lack. Significantly, one of the longest chapters in the London Journal is about
prostitution where women clearly figure as commodities and objects for the pleasure of
wealthy men. Tristan claims that she attended one of the ‘finishes’, a kind of brothel where
drinks and the company of prostitutes were on offer. She displaces sexuality onto food and
drink, relating how one of the pleasures was to make the prostitutes drink and throw up
until they lie lifeless on the floor. Her description of the prostitutes contains graphic detail:
Un divertissement fort apprécié aussi dans ces fashionables réunions, c’est de jeter
sur les filles qui gisent mortes ivres sur le plancher un verre de n’importe quoi. J’ai
vu des robes de satin qui n’avaient plus aucune couleur ; c’était un mélange confus
de souillures, le vin, l’eau de vie, la bière, le thé, le café, la crème, etc., y dessinaient
mille formes fantastiques – écriture diaprée de l’orgie. (77)
Another much appreciated entertainment in these fashionable gatherings is to throw
a glass of anything at all on the drunken women lying senseless on the floor. I have
seen satin dresses whose colour could no longer be ascertained; they were merely a
confusion of filth. Countless fantastic shapes were traced in wine, brandy, beer, tea,
coffee, cream and so forth – debauchery’s mottled record. (77-8)
111
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial
Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp.76, 93.
112
Marjorie Morgan, pp.6-7.
163
Here, prostitutes are not living creatures, but objects without life. The French expression
‘mortes ivres’, consisting of the words dead and drunk, expresses this much more clearly
than the word ‘senseless’ which Palmer and Pincetl use in their translation. Instead of
describing their bodies, Tristan focuses on their dresses which are compared to a written
testimony about the orgy and stand for abjection. In contrast to the clothing of Lima’s
women, the attire of European women repeatedly stands for abjection as for instance in the
passage about the upper-class women at Ascot:
C’était vraiment pitié de voir toutes ces dames, qui, le matin, étaient si fraîchement,
si élégamment parées, revenir couvertes de poussière, sales et entièrement
méconnaissables. (157)
It was truly a pity to see all those ladies, who that morning were so neatly, so
elegantly turned out, coming home covered with dust, dirty and completely
unrecognizable. (158)
In the chapter on ‘English women’ which focuses exclusively on middle and upper-class
women, young girls are described in a similar way, as objects and commodities. The
epigraph taken from Fourier’s Théorie des quatre mouvements plainly expresses this idea :
La jeune fille n’est-elle pas une marchandise exposée en vente à qui en veut
négocier l’acquisition et la propriété exclusive? (198)
Is not the young girl a piece of merchandise offered for sale to anyone wishing to
settle on a price, thereby acquiring exclusive rights to the property? (190)
Married women however, are even less than consumable goods in Tristan’s text. She
presents marriage as a financial transaction arguing that for men, there is only one reason to
marry:
Du côté des hommes, c’est uniquement le désir de s’emparer de la dot, de s’en
servir pour payer des dettes, faire des spéculations, ou, si cette dot est une fortune,
d’en manger les revenus dans les clubs, les finishes [brothels], ou avec leurs
maîtresses. Dans ce marché c’est la femme qui est dupe; les préjugés la conduisent à
l’autel, la cupidité l’y attend pour la dépouiller. (205)
As for men, it is simply the desire to get hold of a dowry, to use it to pay their debts,
speculate or, if the dowry is very large, to squander the income in clubs, finishes or
with their mistress. Women are the dupes in this bargain. Prejudice drives them to
the altar where greed is waiting to despoil them. (197)
164
Tristan goes on to accuse the double standard, asserting that men can lead lives in freedom
and often debauchery after marriage. Women, in this passage, are the undesired and
burdensome companions men have to accept to get the desired dowry. Tristan uses the
imagery of consumption in the term ‘manger les revenus’ which is literally ‘to eat the
income’ or when referring to mistresses or prostitutes. The company of wives is the price to
be paid for these consumptions.
Married women are literally nothing, not only in regard to their roles as wives but also in
that of housewives and mothers. Tristan claims:
Rien ne manifeste autant le matérialisme de cette société anglaise que l’état de
nullité où les hommes réduisent leurs compagnes! (204) (my emphasis).
Nothing is more revealing of the materialism of English society than the fact that
men reduce their wives to such nonentities. (197). (my emphasis)
Tristan bases this assertion on the stereotype of the English woman spending her life at
home.113 At the same time, Tristan deconstructs woman’s role in the house maintaining that
she has no responsibility or function whatsoever. She asserts that in England, the husband
has the keys and the money, commands the servants, and decides on the fate of the children
whereas a nurse cares for the children. The only function of upper- and middle-class
women in Tristan’s portrayal is to produce legitimate offspring: ‘Hélas! Elle est réduite à
l’état de machine à fabriquer des enfants’. (205) [She is nothing more than a baby-making
machine.] (198) This comparison to machines completes the objectification of English
wives.
In the case of middle-class women, the distance between the narrator and the women she
describes, which is created through the rhetorical strategy of debasement, is increased
through reiterated references to national difference. Tristan asserts that the condition of
middle-class women is due to English customs and institutions. For instance, the inactivity
of women is considered as typically English. These affirmations stand in contrast to her
113
Ida Pfeiffer, for instance, sees English women in a very similar way: ‘The life of the women of the middle
rank seemed to me particularly monotonous. They are mostly alone all day.’ Pfeiffer, A Lady’s Second
Journey Round the World, p.16.
165
choice of an epigraph by Fourier which explicitly states that the situation of middle-class
women does not differ substantially between England and France.114 Tristan seems to be
torn between the need to distance herself from English middle-class women and her wish to
extend her social criticism to France.
Working class women are conspicuously absent from the text, a remarkable fact in a book
written by a female socialist. Only descriptions of prisons and streets feature some lowerclass women. They are not presented as workers but judged against middle-class ideologies
of femininity and found deficient. On the occasion of a visit to a factory, Tristan expresses
her astonishment that no women appear after the men’s shift:
Mon Dieu pensai-je, ces ouvriers sont-ils donc sans mère, sans soeur, n’ont-ils ni
femme ni fille attendant, à la porte, leur sortie de l’ardente fournaise, afin de les
laver à l’eau tiède, de les envelopper dans des chemises de flanelle, de leur faire
prendre un breuvage nourrissant, fortifiant, puis de leur dire quelques paroles
d’amitié, qui encouragent et aident l’homme à supporter les plus cruelles misères?
(67)
Heavens! I thought, do these workers have no mother, no sister, wife nor daughter
waiting at the door to wash them with warm water, to wrap flannel shirts around
them, to give them a nourishing and fortifying beverage to drink, and a few
affectionate, loving words which comfort, encourage and help men to bear the
cruellest misfortunes. (69)
Tristan does not take into account that these women might be workers themselves and
accuses them of not accomplishing their duty as mothers, wives and daughters. She
describes them in terms of absence. In brief, prostitutes and English women of all classes
are objectified and debased and therefore marked as ‘other’. The extreme objectification
which is the basis of Tristan’s criticism of the condition of women in England is only
possible through the narrative positions of the foreign traveller. They are not available to
women describing their own country.
The possibility that her outsider position offers, becomes particularly apparent in the
chapter about prostitutes. A woman moving in spaces where prostitution takes place, is
easily taken herself for a ‘fille publique’, a prostitute. Tristan’s activity as a flâneuse in the
114
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, pp.198-9, (190-1).
166
urban environment and her report threatens her respectability and femininity. Nord,
building her argument on Griselda Pollock’s analysis which suggests ‘a triangle of male
artist, bourgeois female, and commodified female’ outlines how Tristan negotiates her
position between the three.115 She argues that Tristan, in spite of her role as a flâneur in the
urban space, aims to preserve her femininity. I believe that Tristan does not negotiate her
position within English society to accord with gender ideology but takes an outsider
position from the outset. Evidence of this is her provocative distancing from respectable
women. ‘Les femmes honnêtes ont pour ces malheureuses un mépris dur, sec et cruel’. (80)
[Respectable women are harsh and contemptuous of the unfortunate creatures] (81). Her
categorical formulation clearly excludes herself from the group of respectable women.
Tristan describes the whole scene in the brothel as if she was a Western traveller describing
ethnic others. She is the invisible observer who watches not only the undoing of women but
sets her gaze also on men:
Les illustres rejetons de la noblesse anglaise, les très honorables du Parlement
quittent leur habit, dénouent la cravate, ôtent le gilet et les bretelles. Ils établissent
leur boudoir particulier dans un cabaret public. Pourquoi se gêneraient-ils? Ne
payent-ils pas très cher le droit d’imposer leur mépris ? Et quant à celui qu’ils
inspirent, ils s’en moquent. (76)
The illustrious scions of English nobility, the honourable Members of Parliament
take off their coats, waistcoats and braces. They make themselves at home in a
public tavern as if they were in their private boudoir. There is no reason for them
not to feel quite at home; after all they pay a high price for the right to show their
contempt. As for the contempt they inspire, they could not care less. (77) 116
In this scene, the public and noble men become feminized and public in both meanings of
the word. They offer themselves to the gaze of any observer in a public place and are
objectified. Tristan describes how as the orgy draws to an end, the waiters dress them with
the clothes they can find and carry them to their cabs. Tristan uses words like ‘paquet’
which usually refer to objects.117 As in the scene of the Houses of Parliament, important
members of English society, ‘the illustrious scions of English nobility’ are feminised,
115
Nord, p.118.
The word ‘gêner’ has also the sense of feeling awkward, uncomfortable. So, ‘Why should they feel
awkward?’ would be a more literal translation.
117
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.78, ‘baggage’ (78).
116
167
objectified and offered to the gaze of a distant, superior observer. The construction of the
East-West divide in the text confers this superior position on the woman Flora Tristan.
Tristan uses her narrative position of the Western traveller to criticize society for its
treatment of women, or in other words, to cast herself in the role of the impartial outsider
and to contest dominant ideologies on gender in contemporary Western society. Tristan
rejects the dominant moral judgment about prostitutes and presents them as victims of
society who are deprived of moral agency. She describes prostitution as a result of the
social, legal and economic status of women, of the fact that married women could have no
property and could not earn a living because they were paid much less than men. Tristan
also blames the institution of marriage with its double standards of morality which leaves
seduced girls no other option than prostitution. Likewise middle-class women are seen as
innocent victims.118 To emphasise this, Tristan uses the metaphor of the stranger:
La femme en Angleterre, n’est point toujours, comme en France, la maîtresse du
logis; elle y est même presque entièrement étrangère. (203)
In England, a woman is not, as in France, mistress of the house; indeed she is
almost always a stranger there. (195)
At the same time, she declares that English middle- and upper-class men are responsible for
this situation because they are immoral and materialistic. In the above quotation for
instance, Tristan invokes a certain lack of morality when she describes the men undressing
without shame. She suggests that according to English values, one can dispense with
morality if sufficiently wealthy. Tristan intricately links the economic situation and the
condition of women. She presents prostitution as the epitome of the oppression of women.
Thus, by way of her narrative position and the debasing portrayal of English women she
fiercely criticises European society.
The interpretation that Tristan takes the position of a traveller to an uncivilized country in
order to criticise European women complements Sandra Dijkstra’s view. She observes
118
It is probably due to her sympathy towards male workers that working-class women are the only class of
women not consistently represented as innocent and in no way responsible for their situation. This tendency to
a harsh judgment pervades Tristan’s work. But she softens it by accusing the lack of education of women for
their moral deficiencies, an opinion already advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft.
168
Tristan’s stance of superiority in the ‘finish’ (brothel): ‘Here her feminine clothes offer a
protective device, distancing her from the men; yet, as an observer, she is (supposedly!)
permitted to seem disinterested and somehow superior.’ Dijkstra points out Tristan’s
position of a disinterested observer, albeit without explaining it. In addition she emphasizes
particularly her debasement of women, the recurring images of ‘woman un-done’, a
preoccupation which seems to her excessive.119 She explains Tristan’s insistence on
women’s debasement and her ‘avoidance of all rapprochement to them’, [avoiding being
aligned with them] with her repression of sexuality but also – and this is more interesting
for this study – to Tristan’s messianism.120 Dijkstra points out that in the London Journal,
Tristan identifies herself not with the socialist and feminist Anna Wheeler who
accompanied her, but with an inmate of Bethlehem. This is all the more surprising because
Tristan seems to have read the tract Wheeler published with Thompson in 1825: Appeal of
One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men to
Retain Them in Political, and thence Civil and Domestic Slavery as she uses the same
expression for women, ‘la moitié de l’humanité’, in her Union Ouvrière.121 The inmate who
gets all her sympathy believes himself to be the messiah and has, according to Tristan,
ideas which resemble those of Jesus, Saint-Simon and Fourier.122 Tristan clearly adopts an
authoritative authorial position and distances herself from the European women she
debases.
Tristan does not mainly define herself in relation to other women and adopts a male
identification. Rabine, in her excellent chapter ‘Flora Tristan: The Name of the Father and
the Body of the Mother’ observes the same male identification in the Peregrinations:
‘Tristan often engages in an exaggerated imitation of male romantic egotism, which casts
her autobiographical self in grandiose roles’.123 Throughout the London Journal she takes
the role of a coloniser, an independent investigator and knowledgeable authority in the text,
119
Dijkstra, pp.159-60.
Dijkstra, p.158-61. (Quotation p.159)
121
Tristan, Union ouvrière contenant un chant, pp.44-5.
122
Tristan sees no signs of insanity in him asserting that he talks like Jesus, Saint-Simon or Fourier. But
suddenly, he insults Wheeler : ‘That woman is English; she embodies matter, corruption, sin: out, ungodly
woman!’ and pushes her in the dirt.’ (164) Tristan identifies herself with him and does not mention Wheeler
in the rest of the chapter. Dijkstra, pp.161-2. It is remarkable that Tristan, in another passage, sympathises
very much with Wheeler’s daughter Rosina Bulwer Lytton who was also incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for
some time. The case of Rosina Bulwer Lytton was famous in the Victorian age, and much talked about. This
might have been the reason for Tristan’s choice to identify with her.
123
Rabine, p.125.
120
169
barely mentioning her companions and only naming them in the case of the well-known
phrenologist Mr. Holm and Anna Wheeler, a feminist and socialist.124 Unlike other women,
for instance Frances Trollope, Tristan does not advocate sisterhood and does not proclaim
solidarity among women although she does so in the case of workers. She always portrays
herself like a romantic writer as a lonely, suffering figure. Tristan also takes a ‘scientific’
stance. She constructs herself as a social investigator studying social, economic and
political structures of the modern society of London in order to show the negative impact of
commercialisation and to demonstrate the necessity for social and economic changes.125
Her text is characterised by the use of statistical material, numerous footnotes and
quotations of other scientists.126 Moreover, Tristan constructs herself as an intrepid hero
who is in control: ‘Cependant ma contenance imposait: je maîtrisai mon agitation et mon
apparence était calme’. (52) [My demeanour inspired respect, I overcame my agitation and
was to all appearances calm.] (56) The use of the simple past in ‘maîtrisai’ stresses the fact
that she is acting to save the situation. She also imitates strongly sexualized language often
used in narratives of exploration. ‘La défense d’assister aux séances des honorables
provoqua en moi l’envie d’y pénétrer’. (51) [The prohibition against attending the sessions
of the honourable Members of Parliament made me all the more desirous to do so.] (54)
The expression ‘L’envie d’y pénétrer’, ‘the desire to penetrate’ with its strong sexual
connotation feminises the Houses of Parliament and provides Tristan with the role of the
masculine explorer. Thus, what Moses and Rabine state in relation to the Peregrinations,
that Tristan is using a ‘mimeticist narrative voice’ is also the case in the London Journal.127
Ironically, while Tristan deconstructs the civilising mission of English men by presenting
their patriarchal social system as uncivilised, she casts herself in the role of a messiah who
has the mission of creating a better and advanced civilisation and identifies herself with
Montagu and other travel writers who participated in the imperial mission. Tristan uses
124
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres, p.173. (160)
Grogan states that in the first half of the nineteenth century, several important studies on the ‘condition of
workers’ were published. Tristan is not the only one studying the English example because in England,
industrialization was more advanced. Engels, who is said to have been influenced by Tristan’s work, also
described England. Grogan, Flora Tristan , p.82-3.
126
The work cannot be considered as a typical example of the travel literature genre. In this, it is clearly
different from a first, much shorter version of Promenades dans Londres, published in 1837 in the Revue de
Paris under the title ‘Letters to an English Architect’. In this earlier work, Tristan does include social
considerations.
127
Rabine, p.126.
125
170
‘counter hegemonic discourses’, the identification with the ‘other’ only to endorse the
powerful position of the coloniser. Thus, she endorses the ideologies she deconstructs and
reverses power relations.
Tristan was not only successful in deconstructing gender relations in European and French
society, her London Journal also appealed to a wide readership. The book seems to have
sold well, as it went through four editions between 1840 and 1842.128 However, the
obviously large readership of the book stands in contrast to its critical reception. Periodicals
like the Revue de Paris or Le Figaro which had reviewed the Peregrinations, did not
mention it. It seems that Tristan was right when she claims in 1841 in a letter to a minister,
in which she applies for a pension, that her work had been ‘étouffé par la presse
parisienne’, [choked by the Parisian press].129 The reception of the London Journal in
London was marked by the same contrast between readership and reviewers.130 As Tristan
was very keen to have a large distribution for her book, she had arranged its publication by
the English editor Jeff, during her stay in London.131 In the period, it was not uncommon to
publish French books in England. The English press seems to have mostly ignored
Tristan’s work and it was not translated into English during the nineteenth century. Desanti
claims ‘Promenades dans Londres aroused indignation in certain English social spheres’
but does not offer any evidence while Michaud asserts that there were no reviews in the
English press.132 Tristan herself asserts in the already mentioned letter to a French Minister
that in England, the work had sold well.133 While the readership seems to have liked
128
As Cross and Gray assert, this success might have been partly due to the Anglophobic tendency in large
parts of the work. During the oriental crisis, until 1841, the relation between the two countries was
particularly tense.
129
Tristan, Union ouvrière contenant un chant, p.288.
130
Pamela Pilbeam asserts that Fourierist journals in both countries excerpted the London Journal but offers
no details. Pamela Pilbeam, ‘Fourierists in France and Britain,’ in Aprile and Bensimon, p.135.
131
Tristan refers to a letter of introduction to him in her letter to Olympe Chodzko. Michaud, Flora Tristan.
La Paria et son rêve, p.109 (Londres, 24 mai 1839).
132
Dominique Desanti, ‘Flora Tristan: Rebel Daughter of the Revolution,’ p.282. Michaud, ‘La Déviance
sociale à Londres vue par une enquêtrice socialiste française,’ 159.
133
‘Mon ouvrage, bien qu’étouffé par la presse parisienne, a eu beaucoup de retentissement au dehors; et,
chose digne de remarque, c’est qu’un nombre considérable d’exemplaires a été vendu en Angleterre, quoique
ce livre soit une critique sévère des moeurs et du gouvernement anglais.’ [My work, although choked by the
Parisian Press, had a wide repercussion elsewhere; and it is remarkable that a considerable number of copies
were sold in England, in spite of the book being a severe criticism of English manners and the English
government.] Flora Tristan, Union ouvrière; suivie de letters de Flora Tristan (Paris: Reproduction
numérique BNF de l'éd. de Daniel Armogathe et Jacques Grandjonc, Paris: Des Femmes, 1986, Fac-sim. de
l'éd. de Lyon, 1844), p.288. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k221097 (accessed 10/07/07).
171
Tristan’s provocative style, the press responded mainly with silence. Only the Fourierist
press on both sides of the Channel drew the readers’ attention to the London Journal.
This silence might have been partly due to her reputation as a revolutionary. During the
investigations for the work she states in a letter to her friend:
figurez-vous que je passe ici pour une révolutionnaire, une Jaccobine, une
sanguinaire – enfin pour une espèce de monstre femelle qui ose réclamer l’égalité
de droits pour l’homme comme pour la femme. Je dois cette agréable réputation à la
presse tory qui est aussi lâche, aussi vénale et aussi méprisable que celle de Paris.134
[Imagine that I am taken here for a revolutionary, for a bloodthirsty Jacobin – in fact
for a kind of female monster who dares to call for equality of rights for man and
woman. I owe this pleasant reputation to the Tory press which is as cowardly, as
venal and as despicable as that of Paris.]
Tristan was obviously known as a feminist, and therefore considered as revolutionary by
the English public whose opinion was still very anti-revolutionary in 1840. Her previous
work, the Peregrinations, had been reviewed in the Foreign Quarterly Review, a widely
read journal. Its author clearly reveals Tristan’s rhetorical strategies in her fight for
women’s rights. He starts explaining how marriage has a long and universal history which
Tristan wants to overthrow because she would like to become a miss again. He mentions in
the same mocking tone Tristan’s affirmation that the evil done to pariahs should be
published whereas their actions (for instance women’s love affairs) should be concealed
and imagines what would happen ‘if every married woman were to write two volumes
octavo of what occurred to her in years 1833-1834 alone’.135 The reviewer aligns Tristan
with radicals such as Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. ‘These miserable
quacks of womanhood have long since, thank Heaven! died away in England; and amongst
our fair neighbours across the Channel the race does not seem to meet with encouragement
at present’.136 Tristan’s reputation as a French radical explains that when she criticizes
English society, she is ignored.
134
Michaud, Flora Tristan. La Paria et son rêve, p.117. (Londres, 1er août 1839).
'Peregrinations, Mainly in Peru, of a Pariah by Madame Flora Tristan,' p.151.
136
'Peregrinations, Mainly in Peru, of a Pariah by Madame Flora Tristan,' p.152.
135
172
In France, the London Journal was well received by some socialist periodicals. Probably
the most enthusiastic reviewer of the London Journal, a worker named Vinçard, claims in
La Ruche Populaire that ‘Cet ouvrage grand et digne doit rapporter et rapportera à son
auteur sympathie, gloire et amour’, [This great and dignified work must and will bring its
author sympathy, glory and love].137 Another reviewer, AL.R, of the Revue du Progrès
Politique, Social et Littéraire, a periodical edited by Louis Blanc, asserts that the work is
not what one would expect from a woman but a seriously investigated book. At the same
time he claims that, although the book is not scientific and systematic, it has importance for
economical science.
138
He makes, like most reviewers, a clearly gendered judgment.
Similarly the reviewer of the Nouveau Monde, a Fourierist periodical, who also reviews the
book favourably, contends that writing about most topics in the book, for instance
prostitution, was not a task for respectable women.139
Tristan’s work was also read and discussed by feminists, although their judgment was
likewise gendered, but harsher. Hortense Allart de Méritens, an active member of the group
around the Gazette des Femmes, which advocated rights for women, describes the London
Journal in a letter to Sainte-Beuve: ‘Comme cela manque de goût et de délicatesse, vous ne
sauriez le lire.’ [As it is lacking in good taste and refinement you would not like to read
it.]140 Charles Frédéric Herbinot de Mauchamps, the main writer and de facto editor of the
Gazette des Femmes, who reviewed the Peregrinations, condemns Tristan’s activism and
social critique, reproaching her that she had not used the rent payed by her uncle to divorce
and marry the man she liked, in short to normalise her situation. Almost like the reviewer of
the Foreign Quarterly, he mocks her for having posed as a miss and for taking up a public
role describing her as: ‘une femme qui se croit appelée à briller dans le grand monde, et que
le grand monde toujours repousse comme une PARIA’ [a woman who sees herself destined
to sparkle in the big world and who is always turned away by the big world like a
137
Vinçard, 'Promenades dans Londres par Madame Flora Tristan,' La Ruche Populaire (août 1840), 8,
quoted in Grogan, Flora Tristan , p.76.
138
AL. R., 'Promenades dans Londres, par Mme Flora Tristan.,' Revue du Progrès Politique, Social et
Littéraire 2, 2e série (1840), p.187. L'ouvrage ‘ a cependant un caractère assez sérieux et révèle ou confirme
des faits assez importants pour qu'on puisse le considérer, en ce qui touche l'Angleterre, comme un utile
auxiliaire de la science économique.’ The work has [nevertheless a fairly serious character and reveals or
confirms facts that are important enough to consider the work a useful tool for economic science about
England.]
139
Czynski, 'Madame Flora Tristan: Ses Promenades dans Londres,' Le Nouveau Monde 37 (1840), quoted in
Grogan, Flora Tristan , p.76.
140
Puech, p.116. He refers to: Léon Séché, éd., Lettres d’Allart de Méritens à Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1908).
173
pariah].141 Herbinot would like to see Tristan keeping her problems in the private realm.
The reviewer of the Journal des Débats also mentions that Tristan questions marriage and
demands that private matters be made public but discusses these questions far more
seriously and in a less dismissive way.142
Tristan’s concern with representation of herself and publicity for her cause bore its fruits
also after her death. The Emancipation of Woman or the Testament of the Pariah was
published posthumously in 1845, based on her notes.143 In the same year a biography by
one of her followers appeared.144 Tristan was also commemorated by feminists at the end of
the 1840s. For instance in 1848, La voix des Femmes reprints a short biography of Tristan
by the Fourierist Eugène Stourm which had appeared in the Union four years previously.
Stourm acknowledges her work in the service of feminism and socialism and emphasises
her suffering, especially during the first years of her life, hence reiterating her own
construction of herself. He also discreetly omits compromising details of her life providing
only the information relating to her mission.145
In conclusion, Tristan managed to find a wide audience for her radical ideas about the
condition of women in Western society in spite of the rigorous censorship under the July
Monarchy. She successfully criticises Western society and its ideologies through a
conscious and clever metaphoric use of discourses on nationality. At the same time she
endorses the role of a messiah who has the mission of creating a better and advanced
civilization. In other words, she takes advantage of ideologies of gender and nationality
while subverting them. This play with different positions allows her to create her own
version of reality with different ethical rules which do not correspond to that of patriarchal
society. This strategy has obviously contributed to making her a very well known socialist
and feminist.
141
Charles Frédéric de Mauchamps Herbinot, 'Pérégrinations d'une Paria (1833-1834), par Mme Flora
Tristan,' Gazette des Femmes. Journal de Législation et de Jurisprudence 3 (1838), 10.
142
G., 'Mémoires et pérégrinations d'une paria par Mme Flora Tristan,' Journal des Débats (13 février 1839),
1-3.
143
Tristan, L’Emancipation de la femme, It was published posthumously in 1845 by Abbé Constant who
completed her notes.
144
Eléonore Blanc, Biographie de Flora Tristan (Lyon: l’auteur, 1845).
145
‘Nous n’aborderons la vie privée de Mme Flora Tristan que dans ses rapports nécessaires avec sa vie
apostolique.’ [We will broach her private life only insofar as it is necessary in relation to her apostolic life.]
'Flora Tristan,' La Voix des Femmes 24 (15 avril 1848), 3.
174
In contrast to Blessington and Trollope, who draw on upper-class cosmopolitanism and the
idea of a community of letters, Tristan builds her argument on nationalist and anti-English
feelings which were particularly strong around the 1840s. In England, nationalism and a
sense of English superiority was supported by science, in particular evolutionary theories,
which became increasingly known in the late 1850s and 1860s - Darwin published On the
Origin of Species in 1859. George Eliot uses these theories in her article ‘Woman in
France: Madame de Sablé’, hence drawing on nationalism like Tristan. At the same time,
she professes the same admiration for French salonnières as Blessington and Trollope.
175
Chapter 4
Woman and Evolution:
George Eliot’s ‘Woman in France’
In France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making
crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women
were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history.
George Eliot1
George Eliot, or rather Marian (Mary Ann) Evans – she had not yet begun publishing
fiction under her pseudonym – contributed to the discussion on the role of women,
particularly their role in intellectual and cultural life, in various articles at the beginning of
her career. She started her work as an editor of the radical Westminster Review for John
Chapman in 1851.2 In 1854, she quit this work and eloped to Germany with George Henry
Lewes. Shortly after, Chapman suggested she write an article on Victor Cousin’s Madame
de Sablé: Nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle, [Madame
de Sablé: New Studies on Famous Women and the Society of the Seventeenth Century]
which had just been published.3 This article, ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’ was to
be one of several essays about women or women writers by Eliot. In the following year, an
article on ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ was published in the Leader and after
another year Eliot published ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ in the Westminster Review.
Eliot’s essays are reflections on the ‘woman question’ and the role of female writers. As an
unacknowledged editor without wages herself, and ambitious with regard to her own
professional future as a writer, she was acutely aware of the situation of women writers.4
1
George Eliot, ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,’ repr. in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p.54. Subsequent references to this text are to this edition and
will appear in the body of the text.
2
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), pp.xiii-xv.
3
Harris and Johnston, pp.19-24.
4
Rosemary Ashton, discussing the relationship between Chapman and Eliot, states that she wished her role as
an editor to be kept secret as she ‘enjoyed anonymity, partly from natural diffidence and fear of failure, and
partly because female editorship was unheard of at this time.’ Rosemary Ashton, 142 Strand. A Radical
Address in Victorian London (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), p.95. As Thomas Pinney points out, by the
time she had the idea for the article on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ in 1856, she was already meditating
176
Eliot’s position regarding the ‘woman question’ has been interpreted in very different ways.
In the 1970s she was seen as endorsing patriarchal ideology, but in more recent studies the
feminist aspects of her work have been more thoroughly analysed.5 This variety of opinions
is reflected in the various readings of ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’, published in
the Westminster Review in October 1854, which was much less subjected to critical scrutiny
than other articles by Eliot such as ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ or ‘Margaret Fuller
and Mary Wollstonecraft’.6 Shirley Foster compares Eliot to the notorious anti-feminist
Sarah Ellis: ‘Eliot’s panegyric to Mme de Sablé … could have come from the lips of the
esteemed Mrs Ellis’.7 While Foster mentions the main body of the essay, most critics
provide an interpretation of the introduction or the last paragraph where Eliot professes her
feminist credo.8 Others, such as Frederick R. Karl find the text ‘a strange piece, full of
contradictory impulses’ and do not draw definitive conclusions.9 In this chapter I will argue
that in ‘Woman in France’ Eliot makes a clearly feminist statement, expressed in a very
subtle and innovative way. My argument will demonstrate that the variety of readings is
about her first fictional work. Pinney also stresses the fact that the role of female writers had preoccupied
Eliot already in the early years of her career as an editor. He bases his assertion on an article published in the
Westminster Review in January 1852. Its author complained that few women writers ‘exhibit the subtle
penetration into feeling and character, and the truthful delineation of manners which can alone compensate for
the want of philosophic breadth in their views of men and things, and for their imperfect knowledge of life
outside the drawing-room’. Westminster Review LVII (Jan. 1852), 283.Thomas Pinney, ed., Essays of George
Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) pp.300-1. According to the Wellesley Index, this article was
attributed to George Eliot ‘on basis of style by Gordon Haight’. Houghton, 3: 617.
5
A late example of an antifeminist reading of Eliot’s essays is chapter 6 in Shirley Foster, Victorian Women’s
Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual (1985; London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 2001), pp.185-222.
Even in a more recent study, its author Gesa Stedman reads ‘Woman in France’ as an argument for separate
spheres and wonders ‘Dass ausgerechnet George Eliot Autorinnen nicht mehr als die Rolle der Muse
zugesteht, ist....beinahe komisch.’ [It is almost funny that just George Eliot is the one who does not concede
more than the role of a muse to women writers.] Stedman, p.272.
6
See: Alexis Easley, 'Authorship, Gender and Identity,' Women’s Writing 3:2 (1996), 145-160, and Judith
Johnston and Hilary Fraser, ‘The Professionalization of Women’s Writing: Extending the Canon,’ Women
and Literature in Britain 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattock, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2201),
pp.231-250.
7
Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.190.
8
See: ‘The ‘Woman’s Question’’ in Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp.1-29, and
Sherri Catherine Smith, 'George Eliot, Straight Drag and the Masculine Investment of Feminism,' Women’s
Writing 3:2 (1996), 97-111. A reading of George Eliot’s essays within discourses on gender in the
Westminster Review has been provided by Laurel Brake, ‘The Westminster and Gender at Mid-Century,’
Victorian Periodicals Review 3.33 (2000): 247-72 and 34.1 (2001): 97-99.
9
Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot. Voice of a Century: A Biography (New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1995), p.183. Karl believes that Eliot shows disregard for English writers, such as Fanny Burney, Jane
Austen, and the Brontës by highly valuing French women such as Madame de Staël and Madame de Sévigné.
One of the possible explanations he gives for this is that she found ‘a less harsh morality’ in French literature.
My argument will show that this is not the reason for Eliot’s preferences but she and many other English
women might have been fascinated by the social position of French women in spite of the fact that they did
not correspond to nineteenth-century expectations of femininity.
177
due to the fact that the references to French women and French writers have often been
overlooked. ‘Woman in France’ is a review of three French works, Victor Cousin’s
Madame de Sablé (1854), Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits de Femmes, [Portraits of Women]
(1844) and Jules Michelet’s Les Femmes de la Révolution, [The Women of the Revolution]
(1854). By taking into account the references to these French works, my reading will reveal
that ‘Woman in France’ is crucial for the understanding of Eliot’s opinions, because it
explains not only in what ways Eliot was a feminist, but also why she was often not
considered as such.10
Two of the works Eliot reviews, Victor Cousin’s and Sainte-Beuve’s, portray French
salonnières, and the third, Jules Michelet’s, relates the role of French women during the
Revolution. Evocations of France and French salons, which have been investigated in my
second chapter in texts by Frances Trollope and Lady Blessington, are recurrent in texts by
English women published in the 1850s and 1860s. Examples are Elizabeth Gaskell’s essay
on Madame de Sablé, published in 1854, the works of Madame Mohl (Mary Clarke) on
Madame Récamier (1862) as well as Julia Kavanagh’s Women in France during the
Eighteenth Century and French Women of Letters, published in 1850 and 1862
respectively.11 French salon culture was taken as a model by English women from the
thirties to the end of the century, but particularly in the 1850s and 1860s.
French salonnières, such as Mme de Staël and her heroine Corinne, with whom she is often
conflated, became important models for nineteenth-century women writers. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning constructs the female artist in her major work Aurora Leigh with striking
similarities to Corinne. Another admirer of Mme de Staël, and, as the epigraph reveals of
10
Notable exceptions are Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth and Nancy L. Paxton. The former mentions that Eliot
reviewed three French texts and portrayed salonnières. However she does not mention the evolutionist
argument. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, 'Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,' in Oxford Reader's Companion to
George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.442. Nancy L. Paxton
states that Eliot ‘turned to evolutionary science’ to dissociate the ‘maternal’ sensations from the actual
experience of motherhood. She argues that ‘Before she began to write fiction, Eliot tried to convert
‘femininity’ from a liability into an advantage’ and that she located the particular authority of women writers
in their ‘maternal’ sensations and emotions. Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism,
Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991),
pp.23-4.
11
An earlier example is Julia Pardoe’s Louis the Fourteenth and the Court of France in the Seventeenth
Century (1847). Towards the end of the century, in 1885, Kathleen O'Meara published a work on Madame
Mohl (English woman Mary Clarke) and her salon: Mme Mohl. Her salon and friends: A study of social life in
Paris (1885).
178
French women in general, George Eliot states that her ‘name still rises first to the lips when
we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power’ (55). Linda Lewis argues that
not only Staël’s protagonist Corinne, but also Sand’s Consuelo in the eponymous novel,
were models for mid-century women because they lacked a network and a guiding myth as
England had produced no great novelist since Jane Austen.12 In her opinion, Corinne and
Consuelo fill this gap by providing a romantic female hero comparable to the male
protagonists Byron’s Childe Harold and Goethe’s Werther. Although Lewis’s statement
could be contested by pointing out that there were popular women novelists like Frances
Trollope, her claim that the women of the 1850s were looking out for role models is a
justifiable one.13
The fact that the model of ‘salonnières’ became important in the 1850s can be explained by
the situation of British women. As Alexis Easley asserts in her article ‘Authorship, Gender
and Identity: George Eliot in the 1850s’, it was in the 1850s that ‘defining and delimiting
the role of the ‘female author’ became a major critical preoccupation’.14 She outlines how
women’s writing was assigned a lower status and was expected to focus only on issues
which corresponded to gendered experiences of life. According to her, the female author
was ‘simultaneously lionized and redomesticated’ in the periodical press of the time.15 A
similar development took place in all domains, professionalisation and exclusion of women
being parallel. The 1850s saw also the beginnings of a feminist movement which aimed at
reversing the continual exclusion of married women from paid work by legislative action
and to explore further avenues for professional work for middle-class women. French salon
culture proved a useful basis in arguments for women’s intellectual progress.
The interest in French salon culture can also be seen in the context of a general interest in
things French in the early 1850s. For instance the Westminster Review contained a column
on French literature written by G.H. Lewes in every issue from January 1852 to October
1853. Similarly, the Saturday Review promised to give more attention to foreign literature
12
Linda M. Lewis, p.10.
The topic of women writers looking for role models, or the Sapho/ Corinne myth is also taken up by Gesa
Stedman. She argues that English women writers transform French women of letters into bourgeoises who did
not have literary ambitions and rather helped and inspired their friends. Stedman, pp.256-76.
14
Easley, 145.
15
Easley, 147.
13
179
when it was founded in 1855. From 1856 until 1868 it featured monthly articles on French
literature.16 Frederick Hardman, a contributor to different journals, published nine articles
on topics related to France in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1851and 1854
compared to three in the late 1840s.17 Joanna Richardson’s assertion that there was ‘a
remarkable understanding’ between the two nations during the Second Empire which was
confirmed and buttressed by reciprocal state visits by Queen Victoria and Napoleon II and
the alliance in the Crimean War, might provide some elements of an explanation for this
interest.18 Richardson mentions also the exhibitions which, in official discourse, were seen
as building bridges between the two nations. The increase of travel and the possibility to
undertake guided tours to Europe made France accessible and a focus of interest for a large
public.
Many English women writing on French salonnières were, like George Eliot, influenced by
French works.19 Gaskell refers to the same work by Cousin in her article ‘Company
Manners’. Another example is Julia Kavanagh who mentions Roederer’s Mémoire pour
servir à l’histoire de la société polie, (1835), in French Women of Letters.20 In France,
salonnières were a popular topic from the 1830s to the 1860s and again towards the end of
the century.21 For instance Cousin wrote various works on women and seventeenth-century
16
Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in
Victorian England (New York: AMS Press, 1966 (1941)), p.261.
17
Houghton, 5: 335-337.
18
Joanna Richardson, La Vie Parisienne 1852-1870 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), p.107.
19
In a letter to Chapman, Eliot mentions that she has ordered Sainte-Beuve’s Douze Portraits de Femmes.
The Bibliothèque Nationale has no book with this title but she probably means the edition of 1852 of
Portraits de Femmes which indicates twelve women by name in its table of contents. In the article for the
Westminster Review, Eliot indicates the title as Portraits de Femmes. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot
Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-1978), vol. 8, pp.115-6.
20
Julia Kavanagh, French Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862),
p.17.
21
Examples for the 1830s and early 1840s have been given in chapter 1. Later works are Sainte-Beuve’s
Portraits de Femmes (1844), Napoléon- Andoche Junot d’Abrantès’ Le Salon de Mme Récamier (1844) and
Antonin Rondelet’s Madame Récamier, ouvrage ... suivi d’une étude sur Madame de Staël (1851). In 1856
and again in 1861, Charles Livet published a revised edition of Le Dictionnaire des précieuses, first published
by [Antoine Badeau], sieur de Somaize in 1661. Mohl’s work, Madame Récamier: with a Sketch of the
History of Society in France, was an answer and a contestation of a work by Amélie Cyvoct Lenormant,
Souvenirs et correspondance tirés des papiers de Mme Récamier (1859). She wrote later Madame Récamier,
et les amis de sa jeunesse et sa correspondance intime (1872). Another work about Récamier was written by
Auguste-Aimé Boullée: Récamier (Jeanne-Françoise-Juliette-Adélaïde Bernard, Mme) (1863). The theme of
the salon was still popular in the 1880s and 1890s as the three following examples show: Gabriel-PaulOthenin d’Haussonville, Le salon de Mme Necker (1882), Lucien Perey and Gaston Maugras, Une femme du
monde au XVIIIIe siècle: dernières années de Mme d'Épinay, son salon et ses amis, d'après des lettres et des
documents inédits (4e éd, 1883), A. Tornezy, Un bureau d’esprit au XVIIIe siècle. Le salon de Mme Geoffrin
(1895).
180
society which were hugely popular such as a work on Madame de Longueville (1853) and
another on Mme de Chevreuse and Mme de Haute-Fort. These two books went into five
editions within eleven and thirteen years respectively. Some of his publications, like that on
Madame de Sablé, were first published in the Revue des deux Mondes, a periodical which
had wide circulation amongst intelligentsia and upper classes in England.22 The
publications in the 1830s and 1840s can be seen in the context of the preoccupation with
the ‘femme auteur’. Margaret Cohen asserts in her chapter on ‘Women in Fiction in the
Nineteenth Century’ that women were important contributors to cultural life from the
Revolution to 1830, particularly as writers of sentimental novels.23 During the July
Monarchy, when the number of female writers declined and the realist novel came into
existence, male realist writers did not discuss the works of single writers but instead
focused on the so-called ‘femme auteur’.24 They questioned the role of women writers in
general to promote their own writing. As at the same time the bourgeoisie was ‘in the
process of consolidating its hegemony’, women writers who conformed so little to
bourgeois ideology were bound to provoke controversy.25 The discussion turned not only
around women writers but around public activities of women more generally. This is also
reflected in the fact that at the same time various studies about women’s role in the
Revolution appeared, such as that by Michelet.26
Faith E. Beasley argues that Cousin and his contemporaries remodelled seventeenthcentury women to provide an image which corresponded to nineteenth-century ideals of
femininity.27 This is indeed the case for both Cousin and Sainte-Beuve. Cousin, in his work
on Jacqueline Pascal – the first of his series on French women - in a chapter entitled
‘Introduction aux femmes illustres du XVII siècle’, [Introduction to the Women of the
Seventeenth Century], distinguishes between the ‘femme d’esprit’ and the ‘femme auteur’
22
Margaret Oliphant writes in an article which appeared anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:
‘The ‘Revue des Deux Mondes,’ the most well-known and important of French literary periodicals, must be
so familiar to many of our readers, that it may seem to them almost unnecessary to do more than mention its
name.’ Oliphant, 604.
23
Cohen, p.61.
24
Christine Planté discusses this term and its problems, for instance that it subsumes all women under one
heading, or that it elides the notion of creativity and inventiveness. An ‘auteur’ is a writer of any type of book
unlike the ‘écrivain’ who writes fiction. Planté, pp.16, 26-7.
25
Cohen, p.61.
26
Some examples about women’s public role during the revolution are: E. Lairtullier, Les Femmes célèbres
de 1789 à 1795 et leur influence dans la Révolution (1840) and Michelet’s Les Femmes de la Révolution,
published in 1854 and translated and published in English in 1855.
27
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.211.
181
claiming that ‘nous honorons infiniment l’une et nous avons peu de goût pour l’autre’ [we
infinitely honour the former and we have little taste for the latter].28 In the following text he
clearly defines women as domestic beings and, in a footnote, praises Rousseau’s depiction
of what he calls the true role of women.29 In his description of Sablé, he emphasizes her
qualities as a charming and kind hostess and mentions her literary works in a deprecating
manner. Sainte-Beuve shared Cousin’s preference for women who moved within the
boundaries imposed on them. He was more interested in eighteenth-century salonnières
who were famous for their social involvement rather than for their intellectual roles and he
valorised marginal genres such as personal memoirs and letters, which were deemed
suitable for women but situated them outside mainstream literature. 30 He did not include a
portrait of Madame de Sablé in his work. She is only mentioned in de la Rochefoucauld’s
portrait which is, curiously, one of the Portraits of Women. Sainte-Beuve diminishes
Sablé’s part in the composition of de la Rochefoucauld’s Maximes calling it ‘ce rôle d’amie
moraliste et un peu littéraire’, [this role of a moralist and slightly literary friend]. As if to
contest recent scholarship about collective writing in the salons and seventeenth-century
concepts of authorship, he repeats ‘elle fut conseillère, pas autre chose’, [she was an
adviser, nothing else] and mentions Sablé’s own Maximes in an extremely deprecating
manner.31 Both writers provide an image of French salonnières which corresponds to
nineteenth- century ideals of femininity.
Michelet’s representation of women follows the same lines. He plays down the role of
salons in general. In his chapter ‘Influence des femmes au XVIIIe siècle. – Maternité’, he
describes the role of the salons as secondary for the influence of women and instead claims
that their crucial role in the Revolution is the result of ‘l’amour enthousiaste, la rêverie
28
Victor Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal: premières études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle
(Paris : Reproduction numérique BNF de la 4e édition de Paris: Didier, 1861), p.27.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k201455h (accessed 10/04/07). Translation in Beasley, Salons, History
and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.213. Cousin’s distinction between ‘femme d’esprit’ and
‘femme auteur’ clearly appears as a construct in the light of recent scholarship about collective writing and
given that the concept of authorship was very different in the seventeenth century. See Erica Harth, ‘The
Salon Woman Goes Public. Or Does She?’ in Going Public: Women Publishing in Early Modern France, eds.
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp.184187.
29
Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, p.28.
30
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.221-223.
31
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes (Paris: Reproduction numérique BNF de l'éd. de
Paris: Garnier frères, 1886), p.309. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k201416h (accessed 17/05/07). For the
theory on collective writing in salons see Harth, p.184.
182
solitaire des grandes idées, et la volonté d’être mères, dans toute l’extension et la gravité de
ce mot’, [enthusiastic love, solitary musing on great ideas, and the determination to be
mothers, in the whole meaning and seriousness of the word.].32 Positing motherhood as the
essential mission of women, he goes on to say that neither salons nor women writers would
have changed the world, hence clearly echoing Rousseau’s view of women. It is not
surprising that in the second half of the 1850s and later, French feminists such as Juliette
Lamber (later Adam) and Jenny d’Héricourt protested against his and Proudhon’s ideas.33
This chapter will investigate how and why Eliot reviewed the three French authors.
With ‘Woman in France’, Eliot does not enter new territory. She was very familiar with,
and fascinated by German and French thought and literature. Not only did she translate
works by D.F.Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach from German into English, she knew French
literature better than many of her English contemporaries.34 It was the first literature she
was able to read in the original language. Eliot was also interested in French politics,
following the events around the revolution of 1848 with sympathy. She associated France
and French people with intellectual activity and social reform, stating, for instance, about
the French working class: ‘In France, the mind of the people is highly electrified – they are
full of ideas on social subjects – they really desire social reform’.35 This sympathetic
attitude towards France and her interest in, and knowledge of, French literature, permeates
her representation of salon culture in ‘Woman in France’.
In ‘Woman in France’, Eliot draws on the so-called ‘development theory’ by adopting the
idea that the environment influences the development of a species. She describes French
and English people like two species of the animal world, with different physiologies.3
Humans are seen as animals of a higher organization and are repeatedly compared to other
animals, for instance to insects (55 and 60). The stimulating environment of the French
salons, where women and men discussed a wide range of topics, lead to a ‘more abundant
manifestation of womanly intellect’ and furthered French women’s development (55).
Proof of French women’s superiority is their contribution to culture since the seventeenth
32
Michelet, ‘Les Femmes de la Révolution,’ in Œuvres complètes, 16: 363.
Moses, pp.161-2. Moses asserts that Proudhon and Michelet used different styles to express very similar
ideas. As Michelet followed the Romantic tradition his writings attracted less protest.
34
Harris and Johnston, p.xiii and John Rignall, ‘French literature,’ in Rignall, p.127.
35
Rignall, ‘France,’ p.124.
33
183
century. As Eliot states in the passage quoted in the epigraph, she considers French women
to have made a substantial contribution to French language and literature which cannot be
compared with what has been done elsewhere. Although Eliot compares French women to
their English counterparts of the same period, she implies in the above quotation that
contemporary English women do not make major contributions to national culture and
consequently are still not advanced in their development. In Eliot’s vision of a future
English society, men and women are equally valued contributors to culture and society. But
before this ideal can become reality, the conditions which lead to this early development in
France have to be given in England in order to enable the evolution of English women.
Eliot’s assertion about the superiority of French women is bold and provocative. To
integrate it into English ideology of the period which posits the English, particularly its
men, as the culmination of the evolution of man, Eliot resorts to scientific theories,
claiming that higher organized species are less frequently perfect than more primitive ones:
Throughout the animal world, the higher the organization the more frequent is the
departure from the normal form; we do not often see imperfectly-developed or illmade insects, but we rarely see a perfectly-developed, well-made man. And thus the
physique of a woman may suffice as the substratum for a superior Gallic mind, but
is too thin a soil for a superior Teutonic one (55).
Basing her argument on the common belief that women had a weaker constitution, she
asserts that in the inferior Gallic race women’s organisms were nevertheless strong enough
to allow intellectual and creative work. Hence Eliot manages to both challenge gender
ideology and also to reassert the ideology which endorses English superiority.
Eliot’s use of evolutionary theory is new and remarkable for several reasons. Although she
was certainly influenced by Fourier and the Saint-Simonians, who combined social
evolution with religious thought, Eliot was among the first to base her vision of society on
theories of biological evolution.36 Moreover, ‘Woman in France’ was published five years
before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, when this scientific
field was not yet widely known. Her ideas seem to have been influenced by early
36
Susan Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803-44
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p.159.
184
evolutionary theory such as that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who postulated that
characteristics which were acquired as a consequence of changing living conditions would
be inherited by the next generation.37 Eliot had read his work and was generally familiar
with the different writings on the subject, for instance the popularizing work by Robert
Chambers, Vestiges of Natural History of Creation.38 She may have discussed development
theory with Herbert Spencer, her close friend, who also applied evolutionary theory to
society and with her partner George Henry Lewes, who, according to Diana Postlethwaite,
was writing on ‘Development Theory’ when they met.39 In short, Eliot’s ‘Woman in
France’ takes an innovative approach to the ‘woman question’.
Eliot’s argument differs from that of other writers using development theory. As Lorna
Duffin argues in ‘Prisoners of Progress’, evolutionary theory was used in the late nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries to confirm prevalent ideologies and the place of women in
society.40 Spencer, for instance, although he agreed with Eliot on several feminist goals in
the early 1850s, rejected feminist causes towards the end of the 1850s.41 As Nancy L.
Paxton demonstrates, Eliot was well aware of the misogynist undertones of Spencer’s
theory which he elaborated in The Principles of Biology, published ten years later.42 Eliot,
in contrast, uses evolutionary ideas to argue against the exclusion of women from certain
domains and challenges dominant ideologies of femininity. As in France, the main
condition leading to an early evolution of women was salon culture which allowed women
to become familiar with any topic. Eliot demands for England:
Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that
which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source
of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary
complement to the truth and beauty of life (81).
37
Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p.157.
38
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p.157.
39
Diana Postlethwaite, 'George Eliot and Science,' in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George
Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.107.
40
Lorna Duffin, ‘Prisoners of Progress,’ in The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical
World, eds. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp57-91.
41
Paxton, p.6.
42
Paxton, p.19.
185
While in ‘Woman in France’ she focuses on intellectual activities, her essay ‘Margaret
Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, published one year later, postulates that any professional
activity should be open to women.43 Thus, Eliot, already in 1854, uses concepts derived
from evolutionary theory to promote her feminist ideas.
Before following further the thread of Eliot’s argument, some reflections about Eliot’s
characterization of French people as an inferior ‘race’ are necessary. It seems to contradict
the earlier mentioned interest and sympathy as well as some critics’ description of Eliot as
an educated, open-minded woman. For instance, John Rignall claims that ‘For George
Eliot, Europe was no monolithic 'other' but a naturally accepted part of her heritage as an
educated Englishwoman, and one whose diversity she appreciated.’44 He also states that the
usual Victorian stereotypes about morally questionable French people do not feature in her
fictional work – except Madame Laure in Middlemarch, whose passionate character and
murder of her husband can be explained by the fact that she is an actress, not only by her
race.45 So, why does Eliot strongly insist on the distinction between the English and ‘Gallic
race’ and hence foreground her nationalism in ‘Woman in France’? (55)
One explanation is certainly that Eliot wanted to counterbalance her statement about the
more advanced French women which was extremely bold given that Victorian England saw
itself as ‘the pinnacle of evolution’.46 Her nationalist stance would therefore mainly be an
assertion of English superiority. Yet in Eliot’s other writings, France and its inhabitants
have often negative connotations particularly when compared to Germany. At the same
time Germany is much more important in her journalistic work.47 Her critical stance in
43
Eliot quotes Fuller who states that women should be able to be even sea-captains if they wished. George
Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,’ repr. In Pinney, p.203.
44
John Rignall, ‘Introduction,’ to George Eliot and Europe, ed. John Rignall (Aldershot Hants: Scolar Press,
1997), p.xi. John Philip Couch expresses similar ideas: ‘Among all the major Victorian novelists George Eliot
in her works is the least apt to exploit her Anglo-Saxon reader’s traditional distrust of everything French or
continental.’ Couch, p.188.
45
Rignall, ‘France,’ p.126. John Philip Couch points to her connection to the theatre, p.188.
46
Duffin, p.57.
47
While references to France are not frequent, Eliot wrote numerous articles referring to Germany. Alone in
the years 1855 and 1856 she published: ‘German Mythology and Legend’, Leader 7(1855):917-8, ‘Three
Months in Weimar’ Fraser's Magazine 51(1855):699-706, ‘A Word for the Germans’, Pall Mall Gazette
1(1865):201, ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, Fraser’s Magazine, 52(1855):48-62, ‘The Future of German
Philosophy’, Leader, 6(1855):723-724, ‘History of German Protestantism’, Leader, 7(1856):140, ‘German
Wit: Heinrich Heine, Westminster Review, 65(1956):1-33, The Natural History of German Life, Westminster
Review, 66(1856):51-79, ‘Sightseeing in Germany and Tyrol’, Saturday Review, 2(1856):424-425, as well as
186
regard to France was most pronounced at the time of the Franco-Prussian war when,
according to Christophe Campos, British sympathy generally lay with Germany.48 Eliot
wrote for instance, in a letter to Barbara Bodichon in 1870, that the war was ‘the conflict of
two differing forms of civilization’:
But whatever charm we may see in the southern Latin races, this ought not to blind
us to the great contributions which the German energies have made in all sorts of
ways to the common treasure of mankind.49
It is remarkable that Eliot chooses the word ‘race’ for different nationalities within Europe.
She posits the ‘Teutonic’ race, the English and German as superior to the ‘southern Latin
races’. Her comment on the war between a superior and an inferior civilization reminds one
very much of evolutionary ideas and suggests the victory of the superior race. Europe is
indeed not a ‘monolithic ‘other’’ for Eliot, she has clear preferences. When she expresses
her pity for the suffering of French people in the same letter Eliot adds:
but I think these sufferings are better for the moral welfare of the people than
victory would have been. … in a great proportion of the French people there has
been nourished a wicked glorification of selfish pride, which like all other conceit is
a sort of stupidity, excluding any true conception of what lies outside their own vain
wishes.50
Her statement implies that French people need to be morally improved and thereby
replicates the usual stereotype of lack of morality. So, while John Rignall may be right with
his assertion that Eliot does not use this stereotype in her fictional work, it clearly appears
in her letters.51 Her relationship to France and its inhabitants is obviously ambivalent.
three articles on Heine and one on Goethe. During the same period, she published ‘Pictures of Life in French
Novels’, Saturday Review, 2 (1856):69-70. See ‘Explanatory Index’ in Harris and Johnston, pp.405-406.
48
Campos, pp.49-50.
49
Haight, 5:113. Couch contends that Eliot’s sympathy with the revolutionary France in 1848 turned into a
more critical attitude during the second Empire and softened again during the Commune. Couch, p.187.
Rignall states that Eliot and Lewes sympathised with Germany at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war.
Rignall, ‘France,’ p.125.
50
Haight, 5:113.
51
There are also some traces of it in her fictional work. For instance in Felix Holt, the Radical, Esther, the
daughter of the French woman Annette Ledru is said to have ‘contracted notions … of too worldly a kind to
be safe in any rank’ as well as vanity at a French school. Annette Ledru is portrayed as thoughtless and
egotistical but changes during the illness of the minister who took her in when she was poor and homeless.
Thus, George Eliot alludes to the usual stereotypes of moral deficiency but her French women, Annette and
Esther, are redeemable. George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980), pp.67, 80. Portrayal of Esther, pp.70-80. Another character, Mrs Meyrick in Daniel Deronda ‘a
187
The ambivalence stems from the fact that Eliot’s fascination with France is linked to its
culture, history, and ideas on social change, rather than to its people. She seems to have had
a different relationship to German and French people. While she repeatedly stayed for
longer periods in Germany in 1854, 1858 and 1868-70 and had opportunities to meet
people, her trips to France, although frequent – Couch counts fourteen visits in her lifetime
- were normally journeys through France to another destination.52 Only in 1865 she and
George Henry Lewes spent ten days in Paris and, later in the year, a month in Brittany and
Normandy.53 But a letter to Barbara Bodichon clearly demonstrates that they visited Paris
as tourists: she states that they spent their time with theatre-going and sight-seeing.54 The
thesis that she was little interested in French people is supported by Couch’s statement that
although she enjoyed French literature, she never tried to get introduced to French writers
(except Montégut). ‘Otherwise, but for an exceptional visit … to Madame Mohl’s in 1866,
George Eliot made no effort on her own to meet anyone in Paris who might have been in a
position to help advance her reputation in France.’55 Eliot did not try to mingle with
Parisian society and seems to have been more sympathetic to Germans than to French
people. She also experienced the two countries in a very different way. While she eloped to
Germany at the beginning of her relationship with Lewes, and was particularly happy there,
she travelled through France just after her father’s death, in bad health and spirit.56 Her
ambivalent attitude to France and its population is mirrored in the conspicuous scarcity of
French characters and landscapes in her novels which was unusual for the period.57 For
lively little woman, half French, half Scotch’ is portrayed in positive terms as an excellent mother who is very
charitable: ‘Her happy mixture of Scottish caution with her Scottish fervour and Gallic liveliness had enabled
her to keep the secret from the girls as well as from Hans’. However, the characteristic which enables her to
keep the secret seems to be more her Scottish origin. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p.180 and p.527.
52
Couch, pp.185-6. John Rignall gives examples of their social activities in Weimar and Berlin in 1854, in
Munich in 1858 and in Berlin in 1868. John Rignall, ‘Germany,’ in Rignall, pp.134-9.
53
Rignall, ‘France,’ p.126.
54
Haight, 8:333. She adds: ‘I have lost my dislike for Paris’ and explains it by architectural changes, for
instance the restorations by Violet-le-Duc. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston note that on her holiday in
Normandy and Brittany, she extensively quoted from Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France, published
in its ninth edition in 1864. Harris and Johnston, p.381.
55
Couch, p.186.
56
Germany was repeatedly a ‘place for study and escape’. Rignall, ‘Germany,’ pp.135-7.
57
Gemany is more present in her work, not only in the many articles on German topics (see footnote 46), but
also in her fiction. Some poems are set in Germany, for instance ‘Agatha’ as Rignall asserts in ‘Germany,’
p.137. Likewise the plot of Daniel Deronda starts in a German Spa. Moreover several German characters are
presented favourably, the painter Naumann in Middlemarch as well as the musician Klesmer in Daniel
Deronda. It is notable that both are accomplished and admired artists. Klesmer’s superiority is very much
linked to his being German. ‘Was there ever so unexpected an assertion of superiority? at least before the late
188
instance, in Gaskell’s fictional work French characters abound and are often portrayed in a
very positive way such as the hero of The French Master. At the same time, however,
French culture and literature figures prominently in Eliot’s works. John Philip Couch
counted twelve quotations from French authors in the chapter epigraphs of Felix Holt,
Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.58 Also, when Eliot shows more sympathy to French
people in 1871, she acknowledges them for their contribution to intellectual life: ‘I love the
French and am grateful to them for what they have contributed to the mind of Europe’.59
Thus, while Eliot was interested in French literature, philosophy and social thought, she
tended to consider its people in a condescending way.
It is important to note that Eliot’s view of French people varies according to gender.
Although she reiterates the stereotype of French women having love affairs, she portrays
female writers and salonnières in a positive light. She uses the image of a forest to describe
all the admirable French women:
These great names, which mark different epochs, soar like tall pines amidst a forest
of less conspicuous, but not less fascinating, female writers; and beneath these again
are spread, like a thicket of hawthorns, eglantines, and honey suckles, the women
who are known rather by what they stimulated men to write, than by what they
wrote themselves. (55)
This comparison of the women to a whole forest with all its parts implies a generalisation
of the positive view to all women. Eliot’s ‘great names’ include not only women of the
past, but also nineteenth-century writers such as Madame de Staël and contemporaries like
George Sand whom she praises.60 The image of the forest suggests, to a larger extent than
Trollope’s trope of the Milky Way, the relationship and interdependence of the women.
The bigger trees provide shade for the smaller plants and together they form a whole
ecosystem, to put it in biological terms. Eliot’s image suggests a tradition and community
Teutonic conquests?’ The editor, David Carroll asserts that this is a reference to ‘Bismark’s defeat of Austria
in the fictional time of the novel, and to his defeat of the French (1871).’ George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p.42;
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp.184-6 and 208-13.
58
Couch, p.185.
59
Haight, 5:142.
60
Eliot calls George Sand ‘the unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques’ eloquence and deep sense of
external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic depth of passion’ (55).
189
of French women who contribute to cultural life. In brief, Eliot, similarly to Frances
Trollope, describes members of the French nation according to their gender.61
Coming back to Eliot’s argument about the evolution of woman, it can be used to explain
her ambivalent attitude regarding the feminist agenda of her period. She did not actively
participate in the feminist movement like her friends Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon) and
Bessie Rayner Parkes, and declined to support women’s suffrage, writing to Sara Hennell
in 1867: ‘I proceed to scold you a little for undertaking to canvass on the Women’s
Suffrage. Why should you burthen yourself in that way for an extremely doubtful good?’62
This reticence can be explained by the fact that for her, the improvement of the condition of
woman must be the result of an evolution, as she argues in ‘Woman in France’. She
considered that English women had to evolve before they were able to be equally valued
members of society. Consequently, Eliot disagreed with feminists such as the social
utopists as well as contemporaries like John Stuart Mill, who assumed equality of the sexes
or even the superiority of women.63 The focus should be on reaching equality through the
creation of an environment which influences the development of a species, in this case
English women, in a positive way. Therefore Eliot supported mainly the initiatives of the
period which aimed at the improvement of women’s education, for instance the foundation
of Girton College, the first University College for women in England.64 In this way,
‘Woman in France’ makes Eliot’s selective feminism more plausible.
Her reluctance to support feminist initiatives was reinforced by her ambivalent social
position. Due to her relationship with George Henry Lewes, she was not admitted to genteel
society until her growing fame as an author opened society’s doors. Therefore, she
probably feared that the association of her name with feminist projects would hinder rather
than help. For instance, although she strongly supported Girton College, her name is not
linked to its foundation.65
61
In Eliot’s texts class plays a far smaller role in her assessment of the French.
Haight, 4:39.
63
For more detail see: Iris Wessel Mueller, John Stuart Mill and French Thought (1956; Urbana, Illinois:
1968), Chapters 3 and 4 ‘The Saint-Simonians’ and ‘The Influence of Auguste Comte’, pp.48-133.
64
Tim Dolin, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.147.
65
Pam Hirsch, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon,’ in Rignall, p.32.
62
190
Eliot’s vision of a future English society is, in some ways, as radical as the philosophies of
Charles Fourier, the Saint-Simonians and Flora Tristan, although she neither questions
marriage nor advocates sexual liberation.66 Basing their ideas on the common belief of the
period that the two sexes are distinctly different from each other, they advocated equality in
difference. While gender difference was commonly used to exclude women from certain
activities, for the Saint-Simonians, this difference made women’s involvement and
influence in all domains of life necessary and valuable. Further, they considered the
improvement of the condition of women as a key to a betterment of society as a whole.67
Eliot similarly had the vision of a world where women’s specifically feminine
characteristics were valued as much as those of men and she contended that this would be
for the benefit of society more generally. However, Eliot’s rejection of separate spheres and
roles for women goes further than that of the social utopists. According to her, women do
not have special virtues and a particular aptitude for love and pacifism, nor are they morally
superior. Consequently, she does not attribute a particular role to women, for instance she
does not see women as moral guides as did Flora Tristan. For Eliot women’s specific
experiences, sensations and emotions serve as an argument for women’s participation in the
same activities as men, even in the traditionally male domain of intellectual work. Her
position has less similarity to a romanticizing idealization of women than that of the SaintSimonian feminists.
Eliot believed that ‘in art and literature … woman has something specific to contribute’
(53). Therefore, their participation would lead to a valuable complementary cultural
production as it did in France, where women produced literature that was different from
that of men. This stage is not attained yet in England where books written by women are
66
The importance of Saint-Simon for Eliot has often been underestimated according to Valery A. Dodd.
Valerie A. Dodd, George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p.114. In her journals,
Eliot reports as late as July 1869 that she had a discussion about Saint-Simonism with some friends and
considered writing about utopists. Harris and Johnston, p.136. On 24 July 1869, Eliot notes in her journal: ‘I
read about Fourier and Owen, and thought of writing something about Utopists.’ Harris and Johnston, p.137.
67
Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference, p.194. John Stuart Mill made similar claims that the
situation of women should be improved in the interest of the whole of society in his Essays on Equality, Law
and Education, for instance the one on marriage written in the early 1830s, and in The Subjection of Women,
published in 1869. Like Eliot, Mill was familiar with the ideas of Saint-Simon and Comte. But in contrast to
Eliot, Mill considered women and men to be equals and advocated more immediate changes, for instance to
abolish the indissolubility of marriage. Later, another advocate of similar ideas was George Meredith who, as
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth points out, ‘focused on the self-destructive misogyny of English culture’ in his
fictional work and essays. Ermarth, ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,’ pp.442-3.
191
generally ‘an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style’ (53). Through women’s
implication in cultural production, heavy and ostentatious erudition or ‘pedantry and
technicality’ would disappear in favour of a clear and understandable presentation of ideas
(55/58). It is also the length and not user-friendly presentation that she criticises in Cousin’s
work, ‘more than three hundred pages of rather scattered narrative and … an appendix of
correspondence in small type’ (62). Eliot criticises displays of erudition which aim at
acquiring social status and excluding others in her later article, ‘Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists’:
A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less
obtrusive for her knowledge; …In conversation she is the least formidable of
women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you
can’t understand her.68
Eliot uses the same parameters to criticise women and men. At the same time, she gives a
positive connotation to light female writing. One of Sablé’s letters is described as ‘light and
pretty, and made out of almost nothing, like soap bubbles’ and quoted in French, without
translation (72-3). Eliot presents light writing as an additional quality like Lady Blessington
and not as a sign of a lack of intellectual capacities as it was commonly seen in the period.
Eliot presents women’s influence in cultural production as a crucial element to prevent
regression to a more primitive stage. She deplores the fact that erudition is increasingly
restricted to print culture which gains territory at the expense of conversation. Newspaper
journalism and men’s tendency to bury their heads in newspapers fills her with fears:
In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within
the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of electric
telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects,
communicating by ingenious antennae of our own invention (60).
The simile from nature ‘sort of insects’ is further evidence that she is using evolutionary
theory. Regression is presented as a consequence of the domination of men in the cultural
realm, while feminine influence is necessary for further cultural development.
68
George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,’ in Pinney, p.317.
192
In the context of the increasing professionalisation and the concomitant exclusion of
women from many domains and particularly from parts of intellectual and cultural life,
Eliot calls not only for a feminisation of intellectual and cultural life, but also for a
professionalisation of female literature. She later shows, with the example of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, that a work should not be ‘too exclusively feminine’, nor
restricted to what are deemed feminine experiences of life and limited in scope by a lack of
knowledge and culture.69 This concern is crucial for Eliot and appears in other essays, for
instance in her later article ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, which appeals to women to
work seriously and not just to dabble. What is essential is that women should aspire to be
accepted as serious, professional contributors to cultural life and not be satisfied with a
secondary role. Then, true professionalisation does not have to mean exclusion but, on the
contrary, can gain from the contribution of women.
Another difference to utopian socialists is the fact that Eliot does not insist on a set of
female and male characteristics and focuses more on opening possibilities for woman than
on a specific mission. In ‘Woman in France’ she refuses a precise description of future
characteristics of English women, referring merely to ‘that which is peculiar in her mental
modification’ (80). At the same time, the female characteristics she mentions, for instance
when describing Sablé, are merely attributes of one stage in the evolution of women which
will be overcome. Thereby Eliot challenges the idea of essential female traits. In the same
line of thought, she states one year later about Margaret Fuller: ‘Some of the best things she
says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature and absolute demarcations
of woman’s mission.’70 To a certain extent Eliot challenges the usual categories which
often had a prescriptive effect. Likewise, women’s mission, in Eliot’s view was not
exclusively motherhood although she argues that women’s authority as writers and
contributors to intellectual and cultural life is based on their ‘maternal’ sensations. But, as
Paxton states, in the context of evolution, this alludes to potential motherhood rather than to
the actual experience.71 So, Eliot does not reduce women to their role as mothers or to any
69
George Eliot, ‘Belles Lettres: Review of Elizabeth Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Gerald Massey’s
Craigcrook Castle , ‘ The Westminster Review 67 (1857), 306.
70
Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,’ p.203.
71
Paxton, p.24.
193
other role.72 Her feminist vision is more radical than that of the utopian feminists insofar as
it rejects ideologies of separate spheres and challenges ideas of essential female
characteristics and the mission of women.
Eliot’s vision of women’s and men’s complementarity, harmonious and fruitful
collaboration, in particular in cultural production, has been taken up much later by Virginia
Woolf.73 Gesa Stedman points out the parallel between Eliot’s ‘Woman in France’ and
Woolf’s essay titled ‘Madame de Sévigné’, which was published in The Death of the Moth
and other Essays in 1942. Speaking of Sévigné’s environment in seventeenth-century
France, Woolf portrays a kind of cultural garden of Eden:74
Here is the garden that Europe has been digging for many centuries; … here it is at
last fertilized, bearing flowers. And the flowers are not those rare and solitary
blossoms – great men, with their poems, and their conquests. The flowers in this
garden are a whole society of full grown men and women from whom want and
struggle have been removed; growing together in harmony, each contributing
something that the other lacks.75
Woolf uses natural imagery which is conspicuously similar to Eliot’s earlier quoted passage
which compares female writers to a whole forest. Similar to Trollope and Eliot, Woolf
states that people of all classes participate in cultural creativity even ‘the simple girl – la
petite personne’.76 Finally, like Eliot, Woolf asserts that the utopia she describes is not
replicated in contemporary reality.
So far it has been demonstrated that Eliot’s framing argument is clearly feminist as it calls
for an integration of women into the world of cultural production. But the main thrust of
her essay, which is a review of Victor Cousin’s just published, Madame de Sablé:
Nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle and – at least
72
She agrees with Fuller that women should be able to do anything even being a sea-captain. But she
concedes that very few women would choose this option and is convinced, as she outlines in a letter, that
‘through all transitions the goal towards which we [men and women] are proceeding is a more clearly
discerned distinction of function (allowing always for exceptional cases of individual organization)’. Haight,
4: 364-365.
73
Trollope’s representation of French salons can be seen as a predecessor of this image of men and women
contributing to cultural production.
74
Stedman, p.274.
75
Virginia Woolf, ‘Madame de Sévigné,’ in The Death of the Moth and other Essays, (London: Hogarth
Press, 1942), pp.40-1.
76
Woolf, p.41.
194
nominally – of Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits de femmes and Jules Michelet’s Les Femmes de la
Révolution has not been investigated. I will argue that the reference to the three French
works helps Eliot to contradict common stereotypes about intellectually active women and
supports her claim about the crucial role of French women and their appreciation in society.
It seems surprising and not consistent with Eliot’s framing text when she follows closely
Cousin’s description of Madame de Sablé and abstains from critical remarks regarding the
three French writers who, as has been mentioned, described women in a very traditional
way. Elizabeth Gaskell for instance casts a much more critical eye on the slightly modified
version of Cousin’s work, published from January to June 1854 in the Revue des deux
Mondes. She ridicules his description of Sablé:
Apart from this crowning accomplishment [to keep a salon], the good French lady
seems to have been commonplace enough. She was well-born, well-bred, and the
company she kept must have made her tolerably intelligent. She was married to a
dull husband, and doubtless had her small flirtations after she early became a
widow; … She was given to liking dainty things to eat, in spite of her Jansenism.
She had a female friend that she quarrelled with, off and on, during her life. (my
emphases).77
By giving an extremely short summary of Sablé’s life and by exaggerating the dullness and
triviality of the information, Gaskell questions the accuracy of Cousin’s description. At the
same time she mocks its author, saying that he portrayed Madame de Sablé only because
she was a friend of Madame de Longueville, whose lover he was, according to Parisian
wits.78 What is remarkable in this context is that Gaskell questions Cousin’s description of
Sablé as a very ordinary woman.
I am arguing that Eliot was drawing on this image of an ordinary woman because she was
well aware that female writers were seen as unfeminine, ‘bas bleus or dreamy moralizers,
ignorant of the world and of human nature’ as she points out herself and that the ‘femme
auteur … was Rousseau’s horror in Madame d’Epinay’ (58/61). Therefore she follows
closely Cousin’s description of Madame de Sablé and, conforming to the usage of the time
in review journalism, integrates many extracts from Cousin’s work. He describes Madame
77
Elizabeth Gaskell, 'Company Manners,' in The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. W.A. Ward (Hildesheim &
New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), vol.3, p.492.
78
Gaskell, ‘Company Manners,’ 3: 323-31.
195
de Sablé as a very charming, kind and intelligent woman who was an excellent hostess and
cook. ‘La marquise de Sablé est le modèle de la femme aimable et distinguée de la
première moitié du XVIIe siècle’, [The Marquise de Sablé is a model of the amiable and
distinguished woman of the first half of the seventeenth century].79 Her merits as an
intellectual woman and writer are played down. Instead Cousin emphasizes her support for
male writers and asserts that she had no personal literary ambitions. Sainte-Beuve and
Michelet described women in a similar way, praising them and their influence and
relegating them to the role of supporting men. By reproducing Cousin’s portrayal of
Madame de Sablé as an ordinary and charming woman and referring to Sainte-Beuve and
Michelet, Eliot demonstrates that seventeenth-century salonnières were ‘normal’ women in
spite of their participation in cultural life and, in addition, provides an image which appeals
to many English men. Thus, Eliot, presents Sablé as a feminine woman and refutes
widespread ideas that this characteristic is incompatible with intellectual work.
By drawing on Cousin’s text, Eliot also contradicts stereotypes about women in public
roles such as writers and French salonnières who were often accused of being immoral.
Cousin represents Sablé as a virtuous and increasingly religious woman. He dismisses other
accounts of Sablé’s life, for instance that of Tallemant des Réaux which includes her
various liaisons and the fact that she had a daughter with Armantières, as ‘un ramassis de
commérages de bas étage où un peu de vérité se mêle aux plus cyniques mensonges’, [a
jumble of gossip of the lowest order in which few elements of truth are mixed with the
most cynical lies].80 So, Eliot can refer to ‘the untrustworthy assertion of Tallement des
Réaux’ to assert that Sablé had no lovers and was a very virtuous woman (63).81 Using
Cousin’s text in specific ways, Eliot presents a salonnière and writer who is at the same
time a virtuous and feminine person.
The reference to the three French works also buttresses Eliot’s claim that French women
had a crucial role in society. It must have been fascinating for Eliot to see eminent
79
Victor Cousin, Madame de Sablé: Nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Didier, 1865), p.1.
80
Cousin, Madame de Sablé, p.23. Cerf, p.274-275. The Historiettes were written 1657-1659 but published in
1835 for the first time and therefore the representation of Sablé was not adapted to nineteenth-century views
about gender roles.
81
Eliot misspells ‘Tallemant’. She refers to Montmorency’s admiration for Sablé, but her description suggests
a platonic relationship.
196
historians and literary critics dedicate entire works to women. She may have been in accord
with Madame Mohl, who states explicitly in Madame Récamier: with a Sketch of the
History of Society in France:
That a man of M. Cousin's calibre and reputation should have published
successively seven volumes, and been occupied ten years in researches into the lives
of the ladies of a particular epoch, is a fact as significant as was the creation in the
eleventh century of a vocabulary appropriated to their [women’s] service.82
Of course Madame de Sablé was only the third of the seven works and Eliot could not
know that he was to write four more. Also, we don’t know if the idea of Cousin as a
nineteenth-century troubadour would have appealed to her. Yet, she seems to have agreed
with Mohl that women were considered important in France. The three writers she reviews
assert this importance of women, Cousin in seventeenth-century cultural life, Sainte-Beuve
in cultural life from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and Michelet during the
Revolution.
Eliot’s choice of extracts exaggerates the importance of Sablé in Cousin’s text. All the
passages she reproduces directly relate to Sablé, except one focusing on activities in the
salon of Mademoiselle d’Orleans (59). Yet, Cousin offers a portrait of the period where
Sablé sometimes figures only as an eyewitness. For instance, after some pages on the work
and salon of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, which was held on Saturdays, he states: ‘On pense
bien que Mme de Sablé, dont le goût était si délicat, sentait autant que personne ce qui
manquait aux Samedis’, [One can imagine that Mme de Sablé whose taste was so delicate,
noticed more than anybody else what was missing on the Saturdays] (67). Then he adds
some words on the relation between the two women before passing on to the salon of
Mademoiselle d’Orléans. Eliot’s focus on Madame de Sablé is also one of the salient
differences between her review and that of Horatio Mansfield who reviewed Cousin’s work
on Madame de Longueville for the Saturday Review.83 Mansfield’s review clearly shows
that Cousin offered a portrait of the period not merely of the woman. Eliot’s choice of
82
(Madame M) Mohl, Madame Récamier: with a Sketch of the History of Society in France (London:
Chapman & Hall, 1862), pp.179-80.
83
Horatio Mansfield, 'Madame de Longueville,' The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art
1 (16 Feb. 1856), 302-304.
197
extracts confirms her endeavour to emphasise the importance of Madame de Sablé for
Cousin and his contemporaries.
Further, Eliot uses the three French writers to support her idea that, in France, the evolution
of woman resulted in a valuation of their specific characteristics. The three French writers
were very much part of French culture which, according to Diana Holmes showed a certain
reverence for women and their specific characteristics.84 Beasley similarly points out, in
regard to Cousin and Sainte-Beuve that they use ‘a process founded upon idealisation and
praise’.85 In Cousin’s work, seventeenth-century women are lauded indeed, for instance in
his portrayal of Jacqueline Pascal: ‘Les femmes ne nous paraissent pas moins admirables
que les hommes’, [women seem to us not less admirable than men].86 In regard to Madame
de Sablé, Cousin claims: ‘Cette dame ayant soutenu ses sentiments avec beaucoup d’esprit
et une grande beauté, leur avait donné de l’autorité dans son temps’, [As this lady had
supported her views with much wit and great beauty, she had given them authority in her
time].87 The celebration of women is particularly evident in republican discourse;
Michelet’s Les femmes de la Révolution is a model of it. Sentences like the following must
have appealed to Eliot ‘On éloigne les femmes de la vie publique; on oublie trop que
vraiment elles y ont droit plus que personne’, [Women are excluded from public life; one
forgets easily that they have more right to it than anybody else].88 Cousin, Sainte-Beuve
and Michelet use a laudatory tone which was unusual to English ears. For instance Horatio
Mansfield writes in his review of Cousin’s work on Madame de Longueville in the
Saturday Review: ‘Of all the ladies whose biography he [Cousin] has attempted, he speaks
with an enthusiastic affection which is almost surprising in an accomplished professor and
84
Holmes, p.x.
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.211.
86
Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, p.26.
87
Cousin, Madame de Sablé, p.14. The translation is taken from Eliot’s quotation of the passage in ‘Woman
in France’ p.63. This statement seems to value women, their opinions, authority and influence although it
actually means that Sablé knew her place. The views Madame de Sablé promotes so successfully are that ‘Les
femmes qui étoient l’ornement du monde et étoient faites pour être servies et adorées, ne devoient souffrir que
leurs respects [des hommes]’, [women, who were the ornament of the world, and made to be served and
adored, ought not to admit anything from them [men] but their respectful attentions].
88
Michelet, ‘Les Femmes de la Révolution,’ in Œuvres complètes, 16: 382-3. Of course, Michelet did not
promote women’s rights. He argues that women should not be excluded from public life because their sons
are part of it. He explains that although women lead a sedentary and lonely life, in their minds they are in
Algeria to suffer with their sons who are soldiers. So, Michelet reduces women to their roles as mothers and
relegates them to the private sphere.
85
198
venerable Platonist’.89 Eliot was not less fascinated with this French way of describing
women. ‘French writers on women’ was the topic she originally intended for the article,
which would be ‘piquant and fresh’ as she promised Chapman.90 Eliot uses the three
authors’ laudatory discourses to support her argument that women in France were both
considered important, and their specifically feminine qualities valued.91
The combined voices of Cousin, Sainte-Beuve and Michelet had much weight as they were
renowned intellectuals of the time. Victor Cousin was professor of philosophy and a
member of the Academy, as well as minister and peer of France before he left public life in
1849.92 Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a well known literary critic and historian who
wrote a weekly ‘feuilleton’ from 1849 to his death, first for the Constitutionnel and later for
the Moniteur and the Temps.93 Jules Michelet had a chair of history and morality at the
Collège de France from 1838 to 1852.94 He was noted for his voluminous Histoire de
France (1833-1867). Claire Goldberg Moses calls him ‘the most influential republican
theorist of the 1850s and 1860s’.95 The three writers were well known, not only in France,
but also in England.96 At least two of Cousin’s works were translated into English and
89
Mansfield, ‘Madame de Longueville,’ 302-4.
Haight, 8: 115-6.
91
It is probable, although not demonstrated so far, that Sarah Lewis used and not only translated LouisAimé’s De l'éducation des mères de famille, ou la civilisation du genre humain par les femmes, (1834) in a
similar way to back her own ideas of the crucial role of women for society in her very popular work Woman’s
Mission. As Bonnie Zimmerman asserts Martin, a disciple of Rousseau, aimed to elevate women’s role. She
quotes his sentence from his Education of Mothers ‘I come to reveal to you your rights, your power, your
sovereignty’ to support her assertion. Eliot tells her former teacher in 1840 to recommend Woman’s Mission
to all her married friends and calls it ‘the most philosophical and masterly [book] on the subject I ever read or
glanced over’. Eliot was also familiar with Martin’s Education of Mothers as she mentions in a letter that she
was electrified by one of his observations. Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘‘The Mother’s History’ in George Eliot’s
Life, Literature and Political Ideology,’ in The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, eds.
Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), pp.90-91. Haight, 1:66, 1:70. See
also Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society
and Literature in Britain and America 1837-1883 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
vol.1, pp.3-5.
92
Hector Talvart and Joseph Place, Bibliographie des auteurs modernes de langue française (Paris: Editions
de la Chronique des letters françaises, 1928-76), vol.3, pp.317-29.
93
Arlette Michel, Colette Becker, Mariane Bury, Patrick Berthier and Dominique Millet, Littérature française
du XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), p.242.
94
Michel, Becker, Bury et al. p.192.
95
Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p.152.
96
Cousin's writings were well known in England where they had often appeared both in the original French
and in translation from the early 1830s. His publications were consistently reviewed in the quarterly and the
weekly periodicals. Michelet’s History of France and Sainte-Beuve’s works were reviewed in English
periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review or the British Quarterly Review. The Times, for instance, published
reviews of Michelet’s works in 7 issues between 1845-1848.
90
199
published in 1854 and 1859 respectively.97 Eliot, by alluding to the works of the three
French historians, demonstrates that in France, women’s cultural and historical roles were
considered noteworthy and received much praise.
Eliot was fully aware of the disempowering effect of romantic idolization, a fact which
supports my argument that she used the three French writers only for rhetorical reasons and
did not share their opinions. In 1855, in her article on Fuller and Wollstonecraft she states:
Men say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of precious things,
provided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be treated,
one and all, with justice and sober reverence.98
In the same paragraph, she compares the middle-class woman in her drawing room to a
‘doll-Madonna in her shrine’. She clearly rejects idolization and the confinement of women
to their homes and demands equal treatment. In ‘Woman in France’ she uses French
idolization of women to make such claims.
Another aspect which confirms my argument that she did not agree with the French writers,
is the fact that while Eliot echoes Cousin’s opinions, she provides a distinctly different
interpretation of an extract from Sainte-Beuve’s work. The particular passage is a quotation
from the writings of the Abbot of St. Pierre in which he outlines that Mme de Longueville
was very gifted in understanding characters but extremely untalented in abstract reasoning
and science. Sainte-Beuve contrasts Longueville with Sablé who loved and understood
dissertations, a fact which prompted Pascal to ask her opinion about ‘la logique de Port
Royal’.99 Sainte-Beuve not only dedicates a portrait to Longueville and mentions Sablé
only occasionally, he also praises Longueville much more than Sablé. Yet, Eliot quotes
only the text by the abbot of St. Pierre and presents a different view:
97
The Youth of Madame de Longueville, or New Revelations of Court and Convent in the Seventeenth
Century. From the French of Victor Cousin. By F. W. Ricord. [An abridgment of ‘La Jeunesse de Madame de
Longueville.’] (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854) and Secret History of the French Court under
Richelieu and Mazarin; or, Life and times of Madame de Chevreuse ... Translated by Mary L. Booth (New
York: Delisser & Procter, 1859). In the 1830s Cousin’s study of Education in Prussia was translated by Sarah
Austin and published in 1836.
98
Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,’ p.205.
99
Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, p.353-4.
200
Surely, the most ardent admirer of feminine shallowness must have felt some
irritation when he found himself arrested by this wall of stupidity, and have turned
with relief to the larger intelligence of Madame de Sablé, who was not less graceful,
delicate, and feminine, because she could follow a train of reasoning, or interest
herself in a question of science (80).
Eliot portrays Sablé as an intelligent woman who nonetheless has all the desired feminine
qualities and harshly judges the supposed shortcomings of Madame de Longueville. This
interpretation demonstrates that Eliot reads the extracts of the abbot of St. Pierre’s writings
in a completely different way and does not adopt Sainte-Beuve’s opinion about women.
Eliot obviously used her review of Cousin’s Madame de Sablé as an opportunity to
promote her own perception of gender roles. She creates a contrast between the body of the
text, her review, and the framing feminist argument or, in other words, she both uses and
contradicts the French texts she reviews. It is possible that she was inspired to this step by
Cousin’s text which is contradictory in itself. While Cousin plays down Sablé’s literary role
in the main body of the work, the ‘Appendix’, which is about one third of the book,
provides a very different picture. It contains documents written by Sablé and her
contemporaries which provide a portrait of Sablé ‘as a respected critic and important author
in her own right’ as Beasley puts it.100 Sablé’s important role as a writer and literary critic
clearly emerges from the different documents in spite of Cousin’s comments which betray
his more prosaic ideas on women, for instance when he expresses his astonishment at the
fact that the French theologian and philosopher Antoine Arnauld sent Sablé not only his
texts on general topics, but also the second part of La Logique, ou l’art de penser which he
describes as ‘aride et épineuse’, [dry and thorny].101 The work is indeed a highly theoretical
treatise on logic, language and method, hence Cousin’s amazement at the choice of Sablé as
a critic. In fact, Cousin, insisting on the feminine qualities of Madame de Sablé and adding
the documents which prove her to be an excellent writer and literary critic, provides ideal
material for Eliot’s argument on the advanced state of seventeenth-century French women.
Eliot ensures that both aspects of Sablé are known by drawing the reader’s attention to the
‘Appendix’. When introducing Cousin’s work, she first mentions the documents to which
he had recourse as well as the collections of manuscripts he consulted and adds: ‘From
100
101
Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, p.218.
Cousin, Madame de Sablé, p.350.
201
these stores M. Cousin has selected many documents previously unedited’.102 Finally she
assures readers that she found the work interesting enough to read it from cover to cover
thereby inviting them to do the same.
George Eliot’s use of salon culture in her argument was certainly unique. She both imitates
and challenges nineteenth-century French representations of salons. Her emphasis on their
literary role can be compared to works by Madame de Genlis in France, or Frances
Trollope. Other French and British writers of the 1850s and 1860s took a decidedly
different approach. Elizabeth Gaskell for instance is inspired by Cousin’s work to focus on
Sablé’s role as a hostess in her article ‘Company Manners’, which was published in Charles
Dickens’ Household Words. She tries to ascribe value to this specifically female activity by
elevating it to the status of an art which she calls Sabléing. But she emphasizes the
domestic aspect of receiving company, for instance, by asserting that Sablé prepared some
of the food with her own hands: ‘I can fancy her stewing sweetbreads in a silver saucepan,
or dressing salad with her delicate, plump, white hands’.103 Other contributors to Household
Words go even further in their representation of French women. Eliza Lynn, later Linton,
the author of ‘French Domesticity’ and famous for her antifeminist stance, states that the
French woman ‘is not only an agreeable woman of society, but also a careful housekeeper,
an affectionate mother, and a submissive wife’ and describes her life and domestic
arrangements in detail.104 The French woman, who is presented as very economic and
industrious, doing many tasks herself, is contrasted with the idle English woman. In 1852
several articles or rather hymns on French women working hard and doing, if necessary,
even humble work, appeared in Household Words.105 Olga Stuchebrukhov argues
convincingly: ‘Dickens and his Household Words contributors use France and its state and
102
Cousin, Madame de Sablé, p.61-62.
Gaskell, ‘Company Manners,’ 3: 498. Probably Gaskell read the version of Cousin’s book published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes which did not contain the appendices illustrating Sablé’s important literary role.
(janv.-mars 1854), 5-36, 433-472, 865-896 and (avril-juin 1854), 5-37.
104
Eliza Lynn, 'French Domesticity,' Household Words: A Weekly Journal IX (24 juin 1854), 434. The
attribution of this article as well as of those mentioned in footnote 118 is taken from Anne Lohrli, Household
Words : A Weekly Journal 1850-1859 / Conducted by Charles Dickens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1973), pp.94, 100, 125.
105
Examples: Louisa Stuart Costello ‘My little French Friend,’ Household Words 5 (8 May 1852), 169-171,
Edmund Saul Dixon, ‘The Rights of French Women,’ Household Words 5 (22 May 1852), 218-221, Edmund
Saul Dixon, ‘More Work for the Ladies,’ Household Words 6 (18 September 1852), 18-22.
103
202
cultural practices to promote their own middle-class idea of a nation’.106 The representation
of French women in Household Words cannot be discussed here in detail. However, it
illustrates that Cousin and his French contemporaries successfully modified the image of
French women. This image was used in the discussion of the ‘woman question’ in England.
‘Woman in France’ is an important contribution to this discussion because it offers an
alternative picture.
Eliot’s presentation of French salonnières both as active contributors to culture and as
women who corresponded to contemporary ideologies of femininity explains the variety of
modern critical responses which has been mentioned at the outset of this chapter. While
Foster bases her claim that Eliot is an antifeminist on the description of Madame de Sablé,
others focus rather on her feminist vision, or, like Karl, find the text contradictory. My
investigation seeks to demonstrate that Eliot’s description of Madame de Sablé is used to
support her argument that intellectual women can nonetheless be feminine and attractive.
Another element in ‘Woman in France’ divided critical opinion: her masculine
identification in the text. As journal articles were often published anonymously at the time,
Eliot made use of the possibility to adopt a male voice, writing for instance: ‘We
…presuppose an exclusive desire in the ‘ladies’ to discuss their own matters, ‘that we may
crackle the Times’ at our ease.’ (60) While this voice has been interpreted as an adoption of
dominant ideas by some critics, Sherri Catherine Smith argues that Eliot creates herself a
masculine persona in order ‘to be implicated in those myriad histories which underwrite the
political significance of masculinity.’107 She contends that this masculine identification was
a way of participating in intellectual and cultural life on the same terms as men. I am
suggesting that this masculine persona, like the portrayal of Madame de Sablé, is a
rhetorical means to convey her opinion more effectively.108 Her representation of the
French as inferior contributes to her authority, in a similar way as Tristan’s debasement of
English people confers a superior status to her.
106
Olga Stuchebrukhov, 'The "Nation-less" State of Great Britain and the Nation-State of France in
Household Words,' Victorian Periodicals Review 38 (Winter 2005), 392.
107
See for instance Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.189. Sherri Catherine Smith, 103.
108
This means has been adopted by many women journalists at the time, e.g. Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn
Linton etc.
203
In conclusion, in ‘Woman in France’ George Eliot uses evolutionary theory to present a farranging vision on gender relations at a time when modern feminism was just emerging and
before evolutionist theory was widely known. Eliot manages to express her idiosyncratic
feminist credo drawing on discourses which were generally used to buttress traditional
images of women: the scientific discourse of evolutionary theory and French idolization of
women. She challenges contemporary negative assumptions about feminine characteristics
and capacities by presenting a utopia of men and women as equally valued contributors to
cultural and literary life, a vision which reaches beyond the political agenda of her
contemporaries. ‘Woman in France’ both reveals Eliot to be an early feminist and helps
explain her reticence towards feminist activism of the period.
While Eliot clearly distinguishes between the admirable literary achievements of French
women and literary history elsewhere, as is evidenced in the epigraph, the Irish novelist
Julia Kavanagh contends that both French and English women made significant
contributions to literary history, particularly with regard to the genre of the novel.
Kavanagh and the French translator and biographer Marie Dronsart express feminist ideas
in very careful ways which recall Eliot’s rhetorical strategies. They waver between gender
and national alliances in an attempt to demonstrate women’s important role in history.
204
Chapter 5
Rewriting History:
Julia Kavanagh and Marie Dronsart
Scholars agree that biography was the most important genre in Victorian women’s
historical writing. Rohan Maitzen even contends in regard to biographical accounts on
famous women that, given their number and popularity, they should be studied as ‘a
distinct genre of Victorian women’s writing’.1 This chapter will focus on the Irish writer
Julia Kavanagh and the French translator and biographer Marie Dronsart who both
contributed to historiography with several biographical works. Kavanagh, who was mainly
known as a novelist in her time, published four historical works: Woman in France during
the Eighteenth Century (1850), which was very popular and went into several reprints
during the fifties, Women of Christianity (1852), French Women of Letters: Biographical
Sketches, (1862), and English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, (1863).2 Dronsart
contributed to historiography through her own writing as well as through translation. She
wrote Portraits d’outre-Manche, [Portraits from across the Channel] (1886), Les Grandes
Voyageuses, [The Great Women Travellers] (1894), as well as two biographies published in
1887 and 1893, one of Prince von Bismarck, the Prussian foreign minister, later Imperial
Chancellor, who is remembered for having unified Germany, and the other on William
Ewart Gladstone, a liberal politician and writer who served as prime minister several times
during the reign of Queen Victoria. Furthermore, Dronsart contributed to the dissemination
of historical knowledge by translating and publishing Queen Victoria’s memoirs in 1884.
I will argue that in their collective biographies, Kavanagh and Dronsart both try to assert
the important role of women in history and to challenge certain ideologies on femininity
while trying not to offend conservative sensibilities. They negotiate the various discourses
1
Rohan Amanda Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women,’
Victorian Studies 38 (1995), 371. 371.
2
Michael Forsyth, Julia Kavanagh in her Times: Novelist and Biographer 1824-1877 (Diss., Open
University, 1999), pp.40 and 200. Woman in France and Women of Christianity are not biographical works in
the strict sense of the word as they are records of periods which include a certain number of biographies.
205
on feminism and femininity through different strategies, most importantly by enmeshing
discourses on women with discourses on nations, the French and the English, and by
drawing on specific sources from each other’s cultures. Their texts are typical examples of
what Sarah Mills describes as the clashes of different discourses, discourses of feminism as
well as of femininity and, of course, of nation and class, and therefore often do not convey
a clear message, as Janet Todd outlines in regard to Kavanagh’s portrayal of Aphra Behn
and her work.3 Nonetheless, their opinion about women’s important role in society and
culture emerges clearly from their texts.
Although the two biographers offer a whole range of biographies in order to revise history,
this chapter will mainly focus on Kavanagh’s portrayal of Madeleine de Scudéry and
Dronsart’s representation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It will outline the reciprocity
and parallels in their strategies at the same time as it will reveal the differences in
Kavanagh’s and Dronsart’s opinions. While for both women, Kavanagh and Dronsart,
revealing the role of women in history is a crucial concern, Kavanagh’s portrayals are more
provocative and challenge ideologies of femininity more thoroughly.
Historiography was long considered a masculine area in regard to both the writers and the
described agents in history. Yet women contributed to this field and their number was
increasing in the first half of the nineteenth century at the same time as historiography
became more strongly a professional and therefore masculine domain.4 J. M. Kemble’s
remark in Fraser’s Magazine, in 1855, that he ‘must plead guilty to a great dislike for the
growing tendency among women to become writers of history’, clearly points to a
considerable number of female contributors to historiography and a gendered anxiety that
women were trespassing on a male domain.5 However, as Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine
and Ann Curthoys point out in the introduction to their Companion to Women’s Historical
Writing, women’s works did often not correspond to what was commonly seen as history
3
Janet Todd, The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (Columbia, SC: Camden, 1998), pp.49-51.
Mary Spongberg, Writing Women's History since the Renaissance (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p.109. Examples of women historians in the second half of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
Hays and Anna Jameson, Germaine de Staël and Marie d’Agoult, Countess de Flavigny.
5
[Kemble, J.M.] ‘Review of Queens of the House of Hanover, by Dr. Doran,’ Fraser’s Magazine 52 (Aug.
1855), 136. Quoted in Maitzen, ‘”This Feminine Preserve”,’ 372.
4
206
writing, either due to their form or subject matter.6 Women tended to present an alternative
to the supposedly objective public and political history of great men, publishing genres
such as historical fiction, travelogues or biographies.7 While women’s tendency to focus
more on the local, the private and women’s lives challenged masculinist assumptions that
history is the story of great men and their political achievements, it also positioned their
works in or beyond the margins of historical writing and contributed to the impression that
history was a masculine domain.
The marginal position of women’s historical writing within historiography is mirrored in
the absence of attention it received in scholarship until recently. In England and France,
scholars focused on women’s history rather than on women as writers of history. In 1984,
Bonnie G. Smith uses the metaphor ‘uncharted land’ for women’s historiography in her
article ‘The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France,
and the United States, 1750-1940’.8 A decade later, in 1995, Rohan Maitzen still asserts
that there is only one major twentieth-century study about women’s biographies written by
nineteenth-century female historians.9 Maitzen published a study encompassing questions
of gender and genre in Victorian historical writing some years later.10 In the same year,
Smith published her work on gender and history. Subsequently scholars such as Mary
Spongberg and Barbara Caine investigated women historiographers.
Given the relative neglect of women’s historical writing in scholarship, it is not surprising
that there has been little research done on Kavanagh and Dronsart. Scholars who write
more extensively on Kavanagh focus mainly on her fictional work.11 For instance Michael
6
Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys, Companion to Women's Historical Writing
(Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.xv.
7
For more detail see Amanda L Capern, ‘Historical production,’ in Spongberg, Caine and Curthoys, pp.15860. Women also wrote conventional political history. Examples are: Catherine Macaulay, Mercy Otis Warren
and Marie de Lézardière. Bonnie G. Smith, 'The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great
Britain, France, and the United States, 1750-1940,' The American Historical Review 89.3 (1984), 709.
8
Smith, 'The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United
States, 1750-1940,' 709.
9
Maitzen, ‘”This Feminine Preserve”,’ 371. She refers to Carl Ballstadt ‘The Literary History of the
Strickland Family,’ Diss., University of London, 1965.
10
Rohan Amanda Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland Publishing,
1998).
11
For instance Eileen Fauset, 'The Politics of Writing: Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877),' Irish Journal of Feminist
Studies 2 (1996), 58-68. Forsyth’s chapters focusing on her non-fictional work are the third, ‘the Female
Tradition’ (pp.40-64) and the fourth, ‘Two Literary Environments: French and English Women Novelists’
(pp.65-92). This latter is a comment on French Women of Letters and English Women of Letters. Shirley
207
Forsyth, in his thesis on Kavanagh, considers her non-fictional work in two out of eleven
chapters. Kavanagh’s French counterpart, Marie Dronsart, has, to my knowledge, received
almost no critical attention.12 This might be due to the fact that her main activity,
translation, had very little prestige.
Biographies written by women are clearly set in the context of a growing concern with the
nature and role of women in the first half of the nineteenth century. Maitzen claims that in
England their number was particularly high in the early and mid-Victorian period, a time
when Victorian gender ideology increasingly informed social life.13 As Mary Spongberg
outlines in her chapter on ‘Female Biography’, biographical writing was used by women in
very different ways. Conservative women, in their portrayals of saints, queens or ordinary
women, celebrated women’s domesticity, purity, spirituality and morality producing works
resembling conduct manuals. Others, particularly after mid-century when feminism was
increasingly important, challenged masculinist assumptions about women’s role in
society.14 Kavanagh’s biographical works were published in 1850 and 1862 respectively, at
a time when, on one hand, dominant discourses assigned women a secondary role in
society, history and literary history and, on the other hand, feminist movements burgeoned
in England. The same can be said about Dronsart’s works which were published in the
1880s and 1890s when French feminism was becoming increasingly important.
Kavanagh and Dronsart were both interested in women’s role in society but were far from
endorsing a radical position. According to Michael Forsyth there is no evidence that
Kavanagh had participated in any way in mid-Victorian feminist movements in England.15
He describes her as ‘a largely orthodox Victorian moralist’ who chose to propagate her
views and values.16 This description suggests that Kavanagh had conservative views, an
opinion that seems to be confirmed by Pauline Nestor who contends that Kavanagh argued
Foster, also focusing on Kavanagh’s novelistic work, presents her as an example of a conservative woman
who questions her own conventionalism. Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction, pp.16-19, 27. The Companion to
Women’s Historical Writing edited by Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys situates Kavanagh
within women’s historical writing but, as a general work, does not analyse in detail her historical work.
12
John Philipp Couch mentions her as a George Eliot enthusiast. Couch, p.106.
13
Maitzen, ‘”This Feminine Preserve”,’ 371.
14
Mary Spongberg, ‘Female Biography,’ in Spongberg, Caine and Curthoys, p.182.
15
Forsyth, pp.23 and 40.
16
Forsyth, p.2.
208
for ‘separate standards for male and female writers’.17 Spongberg, in her biographical
notice, on the contrary insists on the feminist and challenging aspects of her writing.18
Thompson Cooper expresses a similar view in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography when he states that, in her collective biographies, Kavanagh argued against a
sentimental idealisation of women and the silence on many of their achievements in
historical discourse.19 These scholars depended largely on Kavanagh’s works to determine
her opinions because biographical information is scarce. However, it is important to note
that Kavanagh’s works represented her means of sustenance because by 1850, when her
father had left them, Julia supported herself and her invalid mother through her writing.
Consequently, her works were primarily written to be sold, and not to profess opinions.
What can be said is that Kavanagh’s writings and opinions are certainly marked by her
complex background and that she was probably an outsider wherever she lived. She was
Irish, born in 1824 to Morgan Peter Kavanagh, an descendant from an aristocratic family
and his wife Bridget, née Fitzpatrick, but spent most of her life in England and France.20
The fact that she was a Roman Catholic did not make it easier for her in England at a time
when there was much suspicion towards this creed.
Marie Dronsart’s opinions in regard to the ‘woman question’ are at least as difficult to
determine. Information about her and her opinions is almost completely absent although
she was not only the author of biographical works but of numerous translations into French
which were published from the 1880s onwards and republished during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.21 But, as already mentioned, translation was not a prestigious activity at
the time. Dronsart’s interest in women and their roles is evident in the fact that she
translated the memoirs of Queen Victoria, published biographical works featuring many
women as well as a long article on the feminist movement in France, which appeared in
17
Pauline Nestor, Female Friendship and Communities. Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell
(Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1985), p.87.
18
Mary Spongberg, ‘Julia Kavanagh 1824-1877,’ in Spongberg, Caine and Curthoys, p.300.
19
Thompson Cooper and Megan A. Stephan (rev.), ‘Kavanagh Julia (1824-1877), in Oxford Dictionary of
National Geography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15191, (accessed 23/06/08).
20
Forsyth, p.8. Forsyth outlines that there is little information on Kavanagh, a fact which he attributes to the
blindness of her mother who survived her. pp.4-8.
21
She is not mentioned in biographical dictionaries such as the Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de la
langue française de Marie de France à Marie Ndiaye, eds. Christiane P. Makward, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage,
Mary-Helen Becker and Erica Eisinger (Paris : Karthala, 1996), but the catalogue of the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris contains many of her works and the information that she died in 1901.
209
1896 in Le Correspondant.22 In it she argues that the French feminist movement had only
really started in the 1890s because feminist demands were too revolutionary and contends
that the English feminist movement was better conducted because it did not attack sacred
elements such as religion and the family.23 She seems not to have been an active feminist
either but certainly had some sympathies for the feminist movement.
Kavanagh and Dronsart portray women of each other’s culture to support their claim that
women played a crucial role in society. Both women were very familiar with the English
and the French language and culture. Kavanagh’s family moved to London and later to
Paris during Julia’s childhood.24 This move might have been motivated by financial
difficulties. There is no record that her father, a writer of poems and one novel, was
wealthy. Later, in 1844, according to Joanne Shattock, when Julia was twenty, the family
moved back to London. Kavanagh returned to France with her mother, probably around
1867, and died in Nice in 1877.25 Towards the end of her life she was so immersed in
French culture that she was talking French with her mother, but she seems never to have
written for publication in French.26 Dronsart was obviously very interested in English
history and culture, having translated from English into French works by Robert Louis
Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, John Strange Winter (pseud. Henrietta Eliza Vaughan
Palmer), John Oliver Hobbes (pseud. Mrs Pearl Craigie), Mrs Arthur Stannard, Stanley
John Weyman, Richard Henry Savage, Anthony Hope Hawkins, John Jacob Astor, William
Dean Howells as well as the memoirs of Queen Victoria and written biographical works, on
Gladstone, for instance. I could not find any record which established the reasons for her
thorough knowledge of English cultural and political life. What can be stated is that, unlike
Kavanagh, she strongly identifies with one nation, the French one, repeatedly using the
word ‘nous’, [we] to designate the French.27
22
Marie Dronsart, 'Le Mouvement féministe,' Le Correspondant 184 (1896), 860-893.
Interestingly she gives as a second reason the fact that women had always had a dominant role in France.
Dronsart, ‘Le movement féministe,’ 861.
24
For biographical information on Kavanagh, I am indebted to Joanne Shattock, Oxford Guide to British
Women Writers pp.240-1, to Mary Spongberg’s entry on Kavanagh in Spongberg, Caine and Curthoys, p.300,
as well as to Forsyth’s dissertation on Kavanagh.
25
Forsyth presumes that in 1867 she was back in France given that she was portraying the small emigrant
communities in her novels. p.32.
26
Forsyth, pp.17 and 22.
27
Marie Dronsart, Portraits d'outre-Manche (Pais: Calmann Lévy, 1886), p.203.
23
210
Julia Kavanagh and Marie Dronsart clearly aim at an acknowledgment of women’s agency
and significant role in history within historiography and try to valorise the contribution of
women, particularly in the domain of political, cultural and literary history.28 Kavanagh
expresses this concern most explicitly in her earlier works, Woman in France during the
Eighteenth Century and Women of Christianity. For instance in the latter, she states:
Men have filled … [history’s] pages with their own deeds: their perilous daring in
wars - their subtle skill in peace - their designs vast and magnificent - the power of
their ideas - the triumphs of their genius - the revolutions in their faith and
government - all they have either done or undergone, has been faithfully recorded.
(2) But in all this what have we?29
Kavanagh questions and criticizes the fact that women have been written out of history.30 In
the same vein of ideas she points out in Woman in France, that without the power and
influence of eighteenth-century French women which, as she deplores, ‘the historians of the
period have never fully or willingly acknowledged’, many pages of history would never
have been written at all.31 She supports this statement by portraying eighteenth-century
French women and outlining their influence on history. In her works on French and English
women of letters, Kavanagh states that her objective had been ‘to show how far, for the last
two centuries and more, women have contributed to the formation of the modern novel in
the two great literatures of modern times - the French and the English.’32 In the four works,
she clearly expresses her aim to reinstate women as agents in history. Given the number of
works on this theme and the fact that she must have started working on Woman in France
very early in her career this seems to have been a main preoccupation of hers.
Marie Dronsart, although declaring it less explicitly, strives towards the same aim as
Kavanagh. This appears clearly in her choice of the seven historical figures she presents in
Portraits: five of whom are women: the Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Mary Wortley
28
Kavanagh’s belief in women’s political, social and cultural influence has been pointed out by different
scholars, for instance Forsyth, p.42.
29
Julia Kavanagh, Women of Christianity, Exemplary for Acts of Piety and Charity (London: Smith, Elder,
and Co., 1852), pp.1-2.
30
According to a study on Anna Jameson by Judith Johnston, Jameson expressed similar concerns in her
Characteristics of Women (1832). Jameson was deploring both women’s absence from historiography and the
dismissive negative portrayal of women featuring in it. Johnston, Anna Jameson, p.51.
31
Julia Kavanagh, Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850),
pp.13-14.
32
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters, 1: vi.
211
Montagu, Miss Berry, George Eliot and the Princess Alice of England, daughter of Queen
Victoria. With regard to Montagu she also explicitly asks: « Pourquoi oublions-nous cet
excellent écrivain dont le style vif, gracieux, facile, bien que ferme, concis et brillant, reste
un des modèles de la littérature anglaise? » [Why do we forget this excellent writer whose
lively, gracious, simple and nonetheless vigorous, concise and brilliant style remains one of
the models of English literature?].33 She obviously wants to remedy this gap in collective
memory. Dronsart’s aim of reintegrating women into historiography is also visible in the
introduction to The Great Women Travellers:
Elles ont contribué à porter partout la civilisation européenne et à éclairer l'Europe
sur les contrées inconnues. ... A mesure que le rôle de la femme s’étendait, que
l’opinion lui accordait plus de liberté, d'estime, d’importance et de respect, elle était
associé, dans une mesure de plus en plus large, aux entreprises de l’homme et à
l’œuvre civilisatrice.’34
[They have contributed to bringing European civilisation everywhere and to
enlighten Europe on unknown regions. … As the role of woman was expanding and
general opinion according her more freedom, esteem, importance and respect, she
was increasingly associated with the enterprises of men and the civilizing
enterprise.]
Dronsart supports this statement by giving examples of woman’s crucial role, naming for
instance a woman who saved a whole expedition. She emphasizes the growing importance
of women for the colonial mission as well as their increasing participation in men’s
enterprises and presents them as a sign of progress. In the late 1880s, some years before
Dronsart wrote her Great Women Travellers, the French were establishing themselves as
colonialists in countries such as Algeria and Indochina while the English had long since
consolidated their Empire. This context may account for Dronsart’s as well as other
women’s admiration for their English counterparts’ participation in the imperial mission in
the last decades of the century.35
Kavanagh and Dronsart use stereotypical images of French or English people to confer
more plausibility to their provocative statements about women’s role in history. Kavanagh,
in her first work, bases her main claim on the image of French women having an active part
33
Dronsart, Portraits, p.128.
Marie Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses (Paris: Hachette, 1909), p.1-2.
35
For instance Thérèse Bentzon and Maria Star. See my first chapter.
34
212
in society, as important figures in salons as well as during the Revolution.36 There are two
provocative elements to her claim: Firstly she argues that woman’s influence and power is
not located within the family and secondly, that her influence is not based on her virtues.
Kavanagh declares explicitly that the activities of eighteenth-century French women were
not restricted to the domestic sphere: ‘They ruled society, as women of the world; the
empire of letters, as patronesses of the fine arts; the state, as favourites and advisors of
kings.’37 Using strong terms such as ‘power’ and ‘to rule’, Kavanagh emphasizes the
extensiveness and completeness of women’s power in all domains of eighteenth-century
France.38 Thus, although her thesis could be seen as ‘inherently conservative’ because
French women’s power, as Kavanagh describes it, is indirect, it is not exercised within the
home.39 This locating of women’s influence in the public and political realm distinguishes
Kavanagh’s works from biographical writings by conservative women such as Hannah
More and indeed from most of women’s biographical writing during the first half of the
century.40 Moreover, unlike women such as the Strickland sisters, Anna Jameson or
Dronsart, Kavanagh, although focusing on the upper classes, attributes influence and power
to women of all classes.41 Yet, what is more provocative is her assertion that ‘This power
was not always pure or good: it was often corrupt in its source, evil and fatal in its results;
but it was power.’42 Accordingly, in her text, women’s influence seems to be in inverse
proportion to their virtue. While most biographical works after that of Mary Hays,
published in 1803, focused on good women who were exemplary for bourgeois
womanhood, Kavanagh shows some admiration for women whose virtue is more than
doubtful but who nonetheless had more influence than any other women, as she strongly
36
She might have been inspired to her project by the historical novel by Julia Pardoe, Louis the Fourteenth
and the Court of France in the Seventeenth Century, first published in 1847 in which the activities and
influences of women are deemed important.
37
Kavanagh, Woman in France , p.13.
38
In her second work, Women of Christianity, she states that she does not intend ‘to include those women
whose virtues went not beyond the circle of home, and whose piety was limited to worship’ in her work.
Kavanagh, Women of Christianity , p.iv.
39
Forsyth rightly states it was ‘at once audacious and inherently conservative’. p.44.
40
Mary Spongberg outlines that during the first half of the century most women presented women’s influence
in accordance with the contemporary ideology of femininity. Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.124.
Judith Johnston argues that Agnes Stickland and Anna Jameson represent Queen Elizabeth I in terms of
bourgeois ideology. Johnston, Anna Jameson, pp.58-71.
41
Spongberg asserts that since the 1830s women’s biographies had shifted from religious to regal lives.
Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.124.
42
Kavanagh, Woman in France , p.13.
213
insists.43 Her moderate critique of women, who were deemed completely contemptible, was
provocative.
Kavanagh’s claim about French women’s power and influence provoked Edward Cheney,
the critic of the eminent Tory journal Quarterly Review to devote a substantial review of
more than thirty pages to Woman in France, an unusually strong reaction to a first nonfiction work of an author who had published only two novels.44 Moreover, his review
focuses much more on Kavanagh’s work than on the Duke de Noailles’ Histoire de
Madame de Maintenon et des principaux événements du règne de Louis XIV with which it
is contrasted. Cheney uses the review to express his disagreement with Kavanagh’s main
claim, the considerable influence of women in French eighteenth-century society. He not
only repeatedly claims that Kavanagh overestimates women’s influence but also castigates
her fascination with eighteenth-century society and her failure to condemn French women,
whose reputation was such that Cheney describes the work’s title as alarming.45 H. F.
Chorley, the reviewer of Woman in France, in the more liberal Athenaeum, who gives a
generally positive appraisal, does not mention Kavanagh’s main thesis about women’s
influence but criticizes her serious way of treating the subject, claiming that she should
‘write about it wittily’.46 He seems to be prepared to engage only with the entertaining
aspects of the work and comments that there would be material for a third novel, citing
people such as George Sand and Daniel Stern ‘who conceive themselves priestesses of
opinions wider and wilder than the most reckless philosophe cherished by a Du Châtelet or
an Epinay ever dreamed of!’.47 Instead of engaging with Kavanagh’s thesis, he mocks some
notable French women writers stating that they thought themselves important.
43
Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.118. Kavanagh states that their power was so complete ‘ as to be
unparalleled in the history of their sex.’ Kavanagh, Woman in France , p.13.
44
The fact that this review was remarkably extensive for a writer who had only published two novels and for
a newspaper which did not review other works by her, is also pointed out by Forsyth pp.22, 42.
45
‘We cannot applaud her logical consistency when she vaunts the charms of a society which she herself
describes so justly, and, admitting of the truth of the indictment generally, extenuates and denies each charge
in detail.’ Edward Cheney, 'M. de Noailles' Life of Madame de Maintenon and Miss Kavanagh's Woman in
France,' Quarterly Review 88 (March 1851), 366.
46
‘The purity of mind and taste which we have observed and admired in former essays by Miss Kavanagh,
are in some measure obstacles to her picturing the women of France in all their cameleon brilliancy.’ H. F.
Chorley, 'Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century by Julia Kavanagh,' Athenaeum 1166 (1850), 226.
47
Chorley, 'Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century by Julia Kavanagh,' , p.227. Daniel Stern is the
pseudonym of the French writer Marie d’Agoult, comtesse de Flavigny.
214
In French Women of Letters Kavanagh builds on the stereotype that French salonnières had
considerable influence on seventeenth and eighteenth-century cultural life. Referring to
specific sources, as will be outlined later, Kavanagh presents women as active participants
in literary life. For instance, she describes seventeenth-century women as crucial figures for
the formation of the modern French language and in literary creation, and, with regard to
Mademoiselle Gournay, she insists on the fact that she participated in the work of the
Academy. She is convinced that women played a considerable part in the development of
literature and in particular that ‘women have acquired undisputed eminence’ in the domain
of the novel.48 Contemporary critics agree that women played an important role in the
beginnings of the French and the English novel in the seventeenth century.49 In the 1860s,
however, when Kavanagh published her works on women of letters, French women played
a less important role as novel writers. While the French novel was dominated by women in
the first three decades of the century, with the rise of the realist novel, the number of female
novelists decreased considerably, a development which was reversed only in the 1880s.50 In
England, in contrast, the number of women novel writers was significant. The English
journal Temple Bar estimated in 1862 that two thirds of all English novels were written by
women.51 So, English women have indeed acquired undisputed eminence in the domain of
the novel.
In an age when women’s literature was often seen as a discrete body which could not
compete with men’s work, Kavanagh, in spite of including only female novel writers in her
study, keeps in view literary history and the genre of the novel in general.52 She always
emphasizes women’s influence on literary developments or on men’s writing, pointing out,
for instance, that the first prose story by a woman preceded d’Urfé’s Astrée, a work often
cited as the first great novel, or claiming that Mme de la Fayette founded a new school of
48
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters, 1: v.
Joan DeJean writes ‘without exception, the strains of prose fiction that today’s readers would identify with
the novel were the creation of women writers.’ Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of
the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p.5. Backscheider asserts in her preface
that the early period of novel writing was dominated by women. Paula R. Backscheider, ed. Revising Women:
Eighteenth-Century ‘Women's Fiction’ and Social Engagement (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), p.xi.
50
Cohen, pp. 54-72.
51
R[obert] W. B[uchanan], ‘Society’s Looking Glass,’ Temple Bar, 6 (1862), 136, quoted in Monica Correa
Fryckstedt, Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum Reviews: A Mirror of Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Fiction
(Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International 1986), p.11.
52
Kavanagh does the same in Woman in France which is not only a series of women’s biographies but a
history of France based on them.
49
215
fiction.53 Kavanagh follows here the example of biographers of regal women such as the
Strickland sisters, Anna Jameson and Hannah Lawrance, who presented their queens as
models for learning and influence on culture.54 Her emphasis on women’s contribution to
the development of the modern novel was provocative at the time and is mocked by the
anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review who slightly ironically and patronizingly
states, regarding Madame de Tencin, ‘She too, was, according to our authoress, the founder
of a school.’55 While Kavanagh’s focus on women’s achievements provokes a response
from this reviewer, H.F. Chorley, in the more liberal Athenaeum, reviews Kavanagh’s work
in mostly positive terms.56 Kavanagh’s use of the stereotypes on French women makes her
claims more plausible.
Marie Dronsart, in Great Women Travellers, uses the stereotype of the English as a nation
of travellers to support her argument that women played an important role as travellers and
as part of the civilising mission. Half of the women she mentions are English and she
declares that: ‘Les voyageuses de l’empire britannique sont légion,’ [there are a huge
number of English women travellers] and that therefore, she could portray only the best
known of them.57 She uses English women travellers to prove women’s influence in terms
of numbers. In addition, she refers to ‘leur très fréquente tendance à écrire’, English
women’s [very frequent tendency to write] to claim that women were also significantly
contributing to the body of travel literature.58
Dronsart’s claim that women are significant in the domains of travelling and travel writing
is less provocative than Kavanagh’s insistence on their influence and importance in history.
53
Sainte-Beuve for instance states: ‘L’Astrée, en implantant, à vrai dire, le roman en France, avait bientôt
servi de souche à ces interminables rejetons, Cyrus, Cléopâtre, Polexandre et Clélie’, [To tell the truth,
L’Astrée by implanting the novel in France was soon serving as nursery for its numerous children, Cyrus,
Cléopâtre, Polexandre et Clélie]. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, p.250.
54
Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.124. For instance Jameson wanted the title for her work to be
‘Historical Memoirs of celebrated female Sovereigns illustrating the influence of female government on
manners & literature’. According to Judith Johnston, Lawrance structured her work in a way which allowed
her to ‘trace the progress of arts, literature and social advancement along with the biographies of the
individual women’. Johnston, Anna Jameson, pp.55, 68.
55
'French Women of Letters by Julia Kavanagh,' Saturday Review 13 (1862), p.76.
56
The reviewer even remarks ‘Why should not its writer, who analyses fiction with so fine a touch, speak of
her own sister novelists?’ and cites a number of English novelists meriting mention. H. F. Chorley, ‘French
Women of Letters,’ 718. Chorley reviewed a considerable number of works by women and seems not to
display prejudice in his assessments.
57
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses , p.132.
58
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses , p.132.
216
Women travellers had been the object of earlier studies, some of which had been very
popular. For instance, William Henry Davenport Adams’ Celebrated Women Travellers of
the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1883, went through four editions to 1889 and a
further four to 1903. Amélie Chevalier’s Les Voyageuses au XIXe siècle, [The Women
Travellers of the Nineteenth Century] was published in its third edition in 1891.59 These
works offer a comparable choice of women travellers’ portraits from different countries.
Also, although Dronsart emphasises the women travellers’ courage and achievements, her
focus is not particularly on women’s independence and on women who travelled
unaccompanied. Around half of the women she portrays ventured out with their husbands
and helped accomplish their missions.
In Portraits, Dronsart portrays two men and five women who excelled in very different
fields. What they have in common is their writing of either historical works or
commentaries on the state of society during their lifetime. For instance, Dronsart insists on
the interest of the Duchess Marlborough’s and Lady Montagu’s historical writings and
mentions Lord Chesterfield’s historical portraits and Mary Berry’s work on France.60 For
Dronsart, Trollope’s autobiography, Eliot’s journals and letters and the Princess Alice’s
letters are equally interesting. Thus, Dronsart, as a writer of historical works constructs
herself a number of foremothers and forefathers. In the introduction to Portraits, she insists
on the significance of biographical writing for historical investigation. Moreover, like
Chesterfield and Berry, she is deeply interested in the two different cultures and writes on
the neighbouring country.
Dronsart’s representation of three of the women, the Duchess of Marlborough, Lady
Montagu and George Eliot which are more provocative than the others, is built on the
stereotypes of masculine English women which had clearly positive connotations in French
women’s texts in the 1880s and 1890s. For instance, similarly to Kavanagh’s Woman in
France, Dronsart emphasises the Duchess of Marlborough’s political power and public
59
An earlier edition was published in 1888.
Interest in Churchill’s historical writings and the list of her works are mentioned in Dronsart, Portraits,
p.73. Dronsart praises Chesterfield’s Portraits historiques depuis George Ier and refers to Berry’s work on
France. Dronsart, Portraits, p. 113 and 209. Berry published a work titled England and France: a
comparative view of the social condition of both countries, from the restoration of Charles the Second to the
present time.
60
217
activities without vilifying her unlike many English writers in the nineteenth century.61
Furthermore, she presents women as being capable of the same achievements as men. For
example, she puts Montagu on a par with her male contemporaries:
Contemporaine d’Addison, de Steele, de Pope, de Prior, de Swift et de bien
d’autres, longtemps liée d’amitié avec plusieurs de ces beaux génies, lady Mary a
pris sa place auprès d’eux. Ses lettres sont cousines germaines du Tatler et du
Spectator.62
[Being a contemporary of Addison, Steele, Pope, Prior, Swift and many others, and
for a long time bound by friendship to several of these beautiful geniuses, Lady
Mary took her place among them. Her letters are first cousins of those in the Tatler
and in the Spectator.]
Given that the Tatler and later its successor the Spectator were founded by Steele and that
he and Addison were its main contributors, Montagu and her works are aligned with the
most celebrated authors and essayists of her time. Yet, at the same time, Dronsart does not
focus particularly on Montagu, Berry and Eliot as writers. As the reviewer in Le Temps has
only praise for her Portraits, her work seems not to have been too provocative, although his
exclusive focus on her portrait of Anthony Trollope, one of the two men she portrays, may
indicate a certain uneasiness with her portraits of women.63
Kavanagh and Dronsart use their counterparts’ stereotypical strengths, French women’s
participation in cultural life in the salons, and English women’s travelling and writing, to
demonstrate the importance of women’s contribution in general to the specific field they
are investigating. Dronsart, in the Great Women Travellers, studies the tradition of female
travelling as a whole, even though grouping together the women of the different nations,
France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Holland and England. In addition, she reports incidents of
travellers of different origins meeting each other, such as Montagu with the French
ambassador’s wife Mme de Bonnac.64 Considering European women as one entity allows
61
Judith Johnston points out that Anna Jameson’s representation of Marlborough was ambivalent. While
Jameson attributes positive characteristics to Marlborough and blames the distortions of historiography in
Visits and Sketches, she reiterates the common vilifying comments in Memoirs of the Celebrated Female
Sovereigns. Johnston, Anna Jameson, p.59.
62
Dronsart, Portraits, p.128.
63
'Portraits d'outre-manche, par Mme Marie Dronsart,' Le Temps (23 nov. 1886), 3.
64
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses, p.146.
218
her to portray a large number of travellers from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
many of them English and to support her claim about their importance.
Similarly, Kavanagh presents the women of the two countries as part of a community of
letters, reporting their meetings and comments on each other, for instance, of Madame de
Staël and Madame Opie, or Madame de Genlis and Fanny Burney. Her French Women of
Letters and English Women of Letters ‘are parts of one whole, conceived and written at the
same time, and with the same object’, as Kavanagh writes in the preface to an edition of the
latter, published in 1863.65 In this combination of French and English literature, her work
differs from other collective biographies on women writers such as Mary Ann Stodart’s
Female Writers, Thoughts on their Proper Sphere and their Powers of Usefulness (1842),
Anna Katherine Elwood’s Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England (1843) and Jane
Williams’s The Literary Women of England (1861). Kavanagh’s presentation of women’s
influence on the genre of the novel is based on the discourses of literary history and on the
role of women in both countries. The combination of the history of the French and the
English novel allows Kavanagh to present a tradition of more than two hundred years of
women’s novel writing and, being a novelist herself, to construct a long series of
foremothers for herself. While in the English part of her work, she mentions only one
novelist from the seventeenth century, Aphra Behn, she includes one work by a French
woman published during the sixteenth century, Mademoiselle de Gournay’s Le Promenoir
de Montaigne, and two women who published their novels during the seventeenth century:
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and Madame de La Fayette. In addition, combining the history
of the novel in the two countries allows her to integrate novelists who were still
remembered and valued by her contemporaries such as Madame de La Fayette and
Madame de Staël.66 Moreover, French novels played an important role in Victorian society.
Kavanagh states: ‘The French novel has always been, and, until the decay of French
literature, it promises to be, the most popular of any written. … it has been abused and
often hated, but it has always been read.’67 Thus, Kavanagh’s focus on the genre of the
novel and its female writers in the two countries helps her to confer more importance on
both the genre as well as on women novel writers.
65
Julia Kavanagh, British Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches (London: R. Born, 1863), p.i.
Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, p.319.
67
Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1862), p.2.
66
219
Kavanagh and Dronsart refer to a large number of sources to give more weight and
credibility to their works and therefore to their claims. Kavanagh’s Woman in France opens
with a list of ‘authors consulted’ which contains almost a hundred names, mostly French
but also those of Helen Maria Williams and Horace Walpole, for example.68 She has
obviously consulted the letters and memoirs of many of the women she portrays, for
instance Madame du Deffant, Madame de Genlis, Madame de Lambert, Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse, Madame du Maine, Madame Necker, Madame de Staël and Madame de
Tencin. This demonstration of a broad base of documents may account for the fact that
unlike many works by women, Kavanagh’s Woman in France was not accused of
superficiality or untruth in facts by its reviewers.
Portraits are mostly based on the writings of Dronsart’s subjects. In some of the chapters
she mentions her main source in the title, for example ‘Lord Chesterfield d’après des lettres
inédites et les publications récentes’, [Lord Chesterfield According to Unpublished Letters
and Recent Publications], ‘Journal et correspondance de Miss Berry publiés par Lady
Thérèsa Lewis’, [Journal and Correspondence of Miss Berry, Published by Lady Thérèsa
Lewis] and ‘Une Autobiographie de romancier: Anthony Trollope’, [An Autobiography of
a Novelist: Anthony Trollope]. In addition, she indicates her sources by inserting
occasional footnotes. In both her works she uses memoirs, letters and travelogues by her
subjects of study who wrote extensively.69 This clear signalling of a solid basis of sources
may have prompted the reviewer in Le Temps to assert that ‘Cette dame a un véritable
tempérament d’historien; elle connaît à fond les personnages qu’elle met en scène et le
milieu dans lequel ils ont vécu’, [this lady has really the temperament of a historian; she
knows intimately the persons she portrays and the milieu in which they lived].
70
Even
though this critic has only praise for her work, Dronsart’s Portraits and Great Women
Travellers received little critical attention. Nonetheless her works had at least moderate
success: Portraits (1886) was republished in 1889 and the Great Women Travellers (1894)
in 1904 and 1909.
68
Kavanagh, Woman in France , pp. xi-xii.
For instance she refers to J. W. Cross’s work on his late wife George Eliot or to Miss Blind’s Biography of
George Eliot. Dronsart, Portraits, pp.213 and 283.
70
'Portraits d'outre-manche, par Mme Marie Dronsart,' 3.
69
220
Besides the mentioned references, Kavanagh alludes to specific French sources to support
her claim. For instance in Women of Christianity, she refers to Victor Cousin in a similar
tone to that used by Eliot in ‘Woman in France’. She claims that Cousin, whom she
describes as ‘one of the most celebrated of modern French writers’, had planned a similar
work to hers inspired by the great number of French Christian women.71 Kavanagh believes
that Cousin’s project ‘shows how much the truth and earnestness of these women could
impress a philosophic mind, in many respects opposed to the opinions which guided their
lives.’72 Kavanagh insists on the authority and importance of Cousin’s work in order to use
his project as a proof for the importance of the crucial historical role of the women she
portrays.
In French Women of Letters, Kavanagh employs specific French sources to rewrite the
history of seventeenth-century women, particularly Scudéry, to emphasise their literary role
and to position them as founders of a long tradition of novelists. Similarly to Eliot, she
rewrites the portrayal of French novelists based on some, mostly older, French sources.73
She was very conscious of the fact that in the nineteenth century women writers were often
not remembered for their literary achievements, as she writes that Gournay was ‘more
celebrated for her adopted relationship to Montaigne than for the excellence of her
numerous works’.74 Most probably, she was also aware of the fact that, as Faith E. Beasley
demonstrates compellingly in Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century
France, her contemporaries portrayed seventeenth-century women in ways which made
them correspond to contemporary ideologies of femininity, emphasising the salons’
importance for the refinement of manners and eliding or playing down their role for French
language and literature. To provide an alternative portrayal, Kavanagh seems to choose
very carefully the authorities she cites. For instance in regard to the hôtel de Rambouillet,
she refers to the French writer Louis Roederer to claim the importance of this salon for the
creation of the modern French language: ‘in his history of polite society in France,
Roederer plainly puts the ‘Précieuses’ on a par with the Academy, and refers the origin of
71
Kavanagh, Women of Christianity , p.161.
Kavanagh, Women of Christianity , p.161.
73
Mary Spongberg claims that Kavanagh’s novels influenced Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and works of
George Eliot. Spongberg, ‘Julia Kavanagh 1824-1877,’ p.300.
74
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 11.
72
221
both to the famous Hotel Rambouillet.’75 According to Beasley, Roederer was one of those
who rediscovered the hôtel de Rambouillet in the nineteenth century, after it had been
forgotten, and gave it first position among seventeenth century salons.76 Roederer, in his
work which was first published in 1835, mentions in his first chapter that the hôtel de
Rambouillet was not only important for the préciosité of manners and language but for
French language and literature and he links the foundation of the Academy to it.77 By
basing her statements on him, Kavanagh writes against dominant representations of
seventeenth-century salon culture. She mentions Rambouillet, although she was not a novel
writer, and acknowledges the contribution of her salon to the formation of the French
language as much as that of the Academy. She also confers some importance on the literary
activities in the hôtel Rambouillet when she states: ‘it was the real nursery, of the finest
geniuses, masculine and feminine’, and, ‘it helped develop the intellectual culture, and to
form the taste, of all the eminent ladies of that age, who wrote either for their friends or for
posterity’.78 There is no notion that the literary activities were mere amusements or that the
salon was only a school of taste and refined manners as in other historical studies of the
nineteenth century.
Kavanagh’s endeavour to rewrite literary history is most evident in her representation of
Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Under the heading ‘Rambouillet and Scudéry : Politesse and
Préciosité’, Beasley outlines how the representation of Madame de Rambouillet and
Mademoiselle de Scudéry changed in the course of time.79 Among their contemporaries,
both women were renowned for their salons, as well as their important role in the creation
of the French language and in literary production. Scudéry, moreover, was a very
successful author within and outside France. In addition, ‘She was responsible for creating
and exporting a positive image of the intellectual woman and writer to the rest of Europe’,
as Beasley states.80 During the nineteenth century, Rambouillet was constructed as
representing aristocratic salon culture and characteristics deemed typically French such as
‘politesse’ and ‘galanterie’. Rambouillet’s image shifted from the intellectual woman to the
75
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 17.
Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, pp.237-8.
77
Pierre Louis Roederer, Mémoires pour servir l'histoire de la société polie en France (Genève: Slatkine
Reprints, 1969), pp.10, 83.
78
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , I: 17.
79
Beasley, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, pp.228-243.
80
Beasley, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, p.234.
76
222
hostess who knows how to entertain her guests with different literary amusements. At the
same time, Scudéry, far from representing Frenchness and its qualities, was ridiculed and
conflated with excessive preciosity. Boileau and Molière were often considered to have
rightly mocked her person and work. Sainte-Beuve, for instance, includes a short remark on
Boileau’s ‘railleries’ of Scudéry and other predecessors in his portrait of another
seventeenth-century French novel writer, Madame de La Fayette and expresses his opinion
that the novel of this latter, La Princesse de Clèves, is by far superior.81 In Roederer’s work,
Scudéry does not figure in the table of contents. Her literary works are barely mentioned
within the text and only in negative terms. Instead of an appraisal of her work, Roederer
states that Scudéry carefully avoided publishing her earlier works under her own name.82
Another writer on salonnières, Tallemant des Réaux, presents a chapter focusing mainly on
her brother, ‘Scudéry and his sister’ in which she clearly plays a secondary role. Her works
are said to have been successful but not for literary reasons. He emphasises that women
liked to see themselves portrayed in her novels.83 While Madame de Rambouillet who has
not published could be recuperated by nineteenth-century historians, Scudéry, the author of
Clélie, according to Beasley the most successful novel of the century, could only be
ridiculed and reviled.
Kavanagh rewrites the portrait of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, giving her a particular
prominence by writing five chapters about her and her work, the same number she
dedicates to Madame de Staël, and pointing out that her works were internationally
acclaimed and translated into several languages at the time.84 Furthermore, she does not
agree with Boileau’s and Molière’s appraisal of Scudéry and her work. For instance, she
contradicts Boileau’s assertion that Scudéry had taken the model of d’Urfé’s Astrée for
Ibrahim. She also describes his criticism as ‘too literal and too narrow’, claiming that
Scudéry’s works only contained the faults which were characteristic of the works of her
time, such as historical inaccuracy which could also be found in Racine’s work. She
dismisses Boileau’s criticism by claiming that ‘even Boileau himself, then a young man –
lingered with delight over those seven thousand pages of lively or tender controversy’ of
81
Sainte-Beuve does hint at the fact that two eighteenth-century critics, Jean Regnault de Segrais and PierreDaniel Huet did not make this distinction and praised Scudery’s work as much as La Fayette’s. Sainte-Beuve,
Portraits de femmes, p.250.
82
Roederer, p.167.
83
Cerf, p.466.
84
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 37.
223
Clélie.85 In addition, Kavanagh asserts that Boileau, although satirizing Scudéry, called her
‘a person of infinite merit’.86 In other words Scudéry’s person was respected and her works
fascinated her contemporaries, even her worst opponents. With regard to Molière, she
presents him as an opponent to Scudéry’s ‘teaching’ rather than as a critic of the literary
merits of her work, as will be discussed in more detail later.
Kavanagh’s portrayal of Rambouillet and particularly of Scudéry differs considerably from
that of most French nineteenth-century texts by authors such as Sainte-Beuve and Victor
Cousin. Her obviously extremely well-researched work, draws heavily on seventeenthcentury French sources such as Pierre-Daniel Huet’s work on novels and letters by the
Bishops of Agen and Nîmes, Jules Mascaron and Esprit Fléchier and by the scholar Gilles
Ménage, to name a few.87 These authors acknowledged women’s role in French literature
and cultural life. As Beasley argues, in the seventeenth century woman’s freedom and
significant role in society was considered to be part of Frenchness.88 This idea was certainly
reflected in the texts Kavanagh used to emphasise the merit of French women novelists.
Kavanagh may also have been influenced by one nineteenth-century French text, Stéphanie
Félicité de Genlis’ De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française, comme
protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs which was, as the title indicates, a response to late
eighteenth and nineteenth-century French historians.89 According to her list of sources,
Kavanagh did use Genlis’ texts for Woman in France.90 In French Women of Letters she
mentions that Scudéry’s contemporaries could not foresee that her novels would be
forgotten and that de Genlis would be one of the last to have read Clélie as a child.91 A
comparison between Genlis’ and Kavanagh’s comments on Scudéry and her works reveals
certain parallels. Both emphasise the popularity of her works with her contemporaries and
particularly with church men and moralists. Further, they attribute the neglect of Scudéry’s
85
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 39.
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 168.
87
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 61-63. For more detail about Huet’s work and his assessment of
Scudéry and her work see Beasley, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, pp.19-20 and
232.
88
Beasley, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, p.15.
89
For more information on Genlis’ text see Beasley, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth Century
France, pp.199-204.
90
Kavanagh, Woman in France , p.xi.
91
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 127-8.
86
224
works to the fact that nineteenth-century women had less time to read than their ancestors.92
Genlis may have been Kavanagh’s inspiration for her portrayal of seventeenth-century
novelists, and particularly Scudéry, as important contributors to literature.
Presenting seventeenth-century writers as crucial contributors to the formation of French
language and to literature, and recovering Scudéry as a significant writer, Kavanagh
constructs a long tradition of women novelists. Scudéry and Lafayette, the two novelists
who are said to have brought delicacy into the genre, are posited as founders of this
tradition. Margaret J.M. Ezell observes that the term ‘delicacy’, which had been used by
George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, the authors of Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755), as
a characteristic which distinguishes women's writings from men's, evolved in Kavanagh’s
literary history ‘to the primary standard of literary merit for women writers’. I understand
Ezell’s use of the word ‘delicacy’ to mean ‘sensitive’ with regard to perception, feeling and
appreciation. As these are the characteristics commonly attributed to French salonnières in
their roles as good hostesses and literary critiques, Ezell’s assertion illustrates to what
extent Kavanagh drew on stereotypes of French women to create one tradition of French
and English woman novelists and argue for the importance of women novelists in literary
history.93
At the same time as emphasising one tradition, Kavanagh clearly distinguishes between
French and English novels. Whilst Ezell’s claim about the role of ‘delicacy’ in Kavanagh’s
work may be true for her French Women of Letters, it is only one of two important criteria
in English Women of Letters. Ezell states herself that Kavanagh did not consider the
increasing refinement, resulting from the major influence of women on the English novel,
an entirely positive development. While Kavanagh gives ‘delicacy’ a positive meaning
when she argues that if England had a woman like Scudéry, literature under the reign of the
second Charles ‘would not have been disgraced by so much shamelessness and profligacy’,
she also sees negative effects:94
92
Genlis, pp.93 and 95. Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 61 and 93-4.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993), p.93.
94
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 174.
93
225
The unfavourable [results] were and are the predominance given to love as the great
problem of human life, and an exaggeration of refinement that leads to social
hypocrisy. Effeminacy and falsehood are the two great increasing perils against
which the literature of women must guard in England.95
For Kavanagh, delicacy and refinement are not the quintessential characteristics of good
literature because reality is distorted by presenting high ideals. ‘Delicacy’ has to be
complemented and balanced with ‘truth’ and ‘manliness’ as it is in English novels.96 In
Kavanagh’s view, the French novel is extremely popular but has no lasting success or
influence while the English novel, because it contains ‘truth’ remains, although it is often
not as successful at the outset. By contrasting the English and the French novel and the
characteristics of ‘truth’ and durability versus the refined and ephemeral, Kavanagh draws
on national stereotypes to insist on the importance of English novels written by women.
Kavanagh employs stereotypes of French and English women to portray women in ways
which were acceptable for nineteenth-century readers. At the time, French salonnières were
seen as having improved manners in their salons, an influence which was described in
terms of ‘politesse’, ‘galanterie’, ‘sociability’ and ‘good taste’ among other aspects.97
Kavanagh builds on this stereotype and modifies it. She commends Scudéry not merely on
having improved people’s behaviour and presentation in society but rather on a more
thorough change of society, invoking not only the adjectives ‘polished’ and ‘refined’ which
were often used for the influence of salonnières but adding ‘virtuous’.98 Kavanagh contends
that Scudéry, through her novel writing, in which love is a crucial theme, provoked changes
in society because ‘she taught men to prize more than mere beauty, and women to be
something more that lovely [sic]’.99 Kavanagh claims that gender relationships as well as
women’s status in society changed because, due to Scudéry’s influence, more women
cultivated their minds which provoked men to become ‘courteous and gentle’ and women
‘intellectual and refined’.100 The changes led to increased ‘purity’ in both, a word she uses
in the sense of moral improvement. This claim echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s conviction
95
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p. 96.
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.2.
97
Beasley outlines this at the example of texts by Huet, Voltaire and Germaine de Staël. Beasley, History,
and the Creation of Seventeenth Century France, pp.178-81.
98
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.216.
99
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 165.
100
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 175.
96
226
that a serious education for women would improve both themselves as well as gender
relations. Under the pen of Kavanagh, Scudéry not only becomes an important writer of
novels but also a teacher and improver of society.
When Kavanagh presents Scudéry as a person whose main purpose in her writing is her
‘wish to improve the moral, social, and intellectual condition of women’, she transforms
her from a writer of French novels to a woman who is teaching, which is, in Kavanagh’s
words, a ‘thoroughly feminine quality’.101 While French novels, and consequently also their
writers, had a morally doubtful reputation, a woman teaching moral behaviour was very
acceptable for nineteenth-century English society.102 Kavanagh employs other strategies to
present Scudéry according to prevalent ideals of femininity such as emphasizing that she
wrote only because she was in financial hardship, that she had no originality, invention or
genius – the general stereotypes about women’s creational powers.103 In short, in every
aspect, except her literary success and important place in French literature and society,
Kavanagh presents Scudéry as a model of an acceptable nineteenth-century middle-class
woman.
In addition to being constructed as the founder of the French and English tradition of novels
by women, Scudéry is also portrayed as a forerunner in her role as an author/teacher. The
structure of Kavanagh’s two works on women of letters suggests that the chapter titled
‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s purpose’ can stand as a program for most of the writers. It is
the only chapter in French Women of Letters and English Women of Letters whose subject
is neither the life of a writer nor a novel. Moreover, Kavanagh suggests a tradition of
writers/teachers by mentioning some women as particularly successful teachers:
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de Genlis, and Miss Edgeworth.104 Her description of
the influence of women on literature in general, ‘delicacy, refinement, a pure moral and
religious tone’, buttresses the idea that all the novelists were trying to improve society
through their literature which means that all of them had acceptable roles.105 In the late
101
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1:157 Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.216.
See for instance the below cited comment of the reviewer in the Saturday Review that reading of many
French novels impedes on one’s judgment of right and wrong. ‘French Women of Letters by Julia Kavanagh,’
p.76.
103
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 44, 48.
104
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.216.
105
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.96.
102
227
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a tradition in English of didactic novels
by women novelists such as Susan Ferrier and Mary Brunton with which this account of
Scudéry accords.
The Reviewer of the Saturday Review vehemently reacts to Kavanagh’s interpretation of
the novelists as moral teachers: ‘It is not easy, we suspect, to run through a course of
French novels and retain our English ideas of right and wrong on all points.’106 He or she
argues that the contents of the French novels which Kavanagh analyses, cannot be seen as
moral because they contradict nineteenth-century ideas of gender relations: ‘The heroine of
a love story must, it seems, be a married woman, and the hero can scarcely be her
husband.’107 Similarly, with regard to Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves in the
eponymous novel, who asks her husband to be allowed to stay away from court because she
fears to betray her love for another man, the reviewer mockingly claims: ‘We side with him
[the husband], and have not much patience with the virtuous sufferings of his wife.’108 He
or she does not write against public opinion with his remarks; French novels were generally
seen as immoral. Kavanagh counters this idea by stating that Scudéry’s works were
considered to be edifying to an extent that Fléchier, the Bishop of Nîmes, wrote in a letter
that he was tempted to distribute them in his diocese.109 The more liberal among
contemporary readers seem to have approved of Kavanagh’s analysis of French novelists as
H. F. Chorley’s review of French Women of Letters in the Athenaeum demonstrates.110
Kavanagh’s construction of a tradition of moral teachers not only confers a more acceptable
image on novelists, it may also be a reflection of her moralist and religious convictions.
Interestingly, her first work was a pamphlet, The Montyon Prizes, (1846) whose subject
was a French award scheme for virtue.111 Her first novel, Madeleine: A Tale of Auvergne
Founded on Fact, (1848) equally focuses on women as moral exemplars. It is semi-fictional
and based on the story of Jeanne Jugan, the founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor which
106
'French Women of Letters by Julia Kavanagh,' , p.76.
'French Women of Letters by Julia Kavanagh,' , p.76.
108
'French Women of Letters by Julia Kavanagh,' , p.76.
109
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 62-3.
110
‘The analysis she offers is well executed, and reasoned out with womanly steadiness and clearsightedness
which give us a higher opinion of her power than we had derived from her former works.’ H. F. Chorley,
'French Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches. By Julia Kavanagh,' Athenaeum 1779 (30 Nov. 1861), 717.
Chorley is obviously alluding here to Woman in France which he reviewed as well.
111
Forsyth, p.17.
107
228
she describes also in Women of Christianity.112 This would suggest that Kavanagh indeed
sees women and herself as moral improvers of society, a view she shares with many women
biographers.113
Kavanagh’s image of novelists as improvers of morals has a feminist undertone. One of the
ways French and English novelists improved society was, according to Kavanagh, in their
representation of female characters. Kavanagh complains that in the early novels written by
men, heroines were ‘the embodiment of beauty and the object of passion’:
they are not witty, they are not wise, they are not lofty or intellectual; they have
none of the claims of real goodness or greatness; they are good-natured, often silly
young creatures made to delight man, to amuse, tease and obey him.114
Kavanagh contrasts this ‘coarse’ representation of women with the female characters
created by Scudéry, Lafayette and their successors, heroines with an individual character
who correspond to what Kavanagh sees as a more refined image of women.115 This French
tradition is paralleled among the English women from Fanny Burney onwards, Aphra Behn
and Sarah Fielding still presenting an ‘undoubtedly coarse or low ideal of womanhood’.116
The change Kavanagh observes in the description of heroines is towards both more virtue
and more individuality. Some of her descriptions of heroines could be read as a plea for an
empowering of women such as, for instance, the portrayal of Burney’s and Smith’s
heroines:
Instead of standing in the background, a lovely young creature, ready to be wooed
and won, she [Evelina] is a prominent figure, and acts a leading part from first to
last. …. She [Emmeline] is one of those women whose mental superiority over the
less read and more active men of the same rank so struck Madame de Genlis when
she visited England, towards 1782, that she prophesied the days were not far off
when the women of that country would acquire a high rank, and in some respects
supremacy in literature.117
112
Forsyth, pp.17-8.
As Spongberg asserts, Victorian biographers could see themselves in the role of moral teachers instead of
competing with male professional history writers. Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.122.
114
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.96. Kavanagh, speaking only of the English tradition, reiterates
here the idea that the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were coarse times which produced coarse
literature.
115
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.97.
116
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p. 97.
117
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.97-98.
113
229
Kavanagh, positing this image of women who are prominent agents or intellectually active,
as an example towards a better representation of women, seems to share feminist
convictions. The impression that she pleads for active women who are not only playing
secondary roles and submitting to their husbands is confirmed when she asserts that
Goldsmith ‘could not go beyond Sophia Primrose … a handsome, sensible, and quiet girl,
capable of appreciating a superior man’.118 Novelists, through drawing characters, would
therefore also educate women to take more active roles in different domains but particularly
in cultural life. Kavanagh’s choice of Scudéry as a foremother suggests this reading.
Scudéry’s most popular novel Le Grand Cyrus, is set during the Fronde and the Princess
Mandane is a description of Madame de Longueville, who was one of the main leaders of
the revolt. Spongberg puts it succinctly: ‘Scudéry’s most popular novel celebrated
contemporary women’s political and military subversion.’119 Spongberg notes that the
leading women of the Fronde could take ‘Amazon warrior’ positions without having to fear
sanctions due to their wealth and family relation to the king.120 Also, unlike their English
counterparts, they self-consciously recorded their own historical roles in their memoirs.
Kavanagh may have been aware of this context, given her strong interest in women’s
history. Thus, presenting Scudéry who portrayed Madame de Longueville in her fiction, as
the foremother of all the French and English women teacher/novelists, may be read as a
promotion of feminist ideas. Kavanagh’s challenge of essentialist ideas on femininity
supports this reading.
Kavanagh and Dronsart, in addition to claiming that women have an important role as
agents in history, question the underlying principle of social organisation and
historiography at the time, namely essentialist ideas on women’s characteristics and their
role and significance in society. They challenge these assumptions by using stereotypes
about their French and English counterparts. Kavanagh claims that although there is a
considerable natural difference between the sexes, it is education that deepens it even
further, to the detriment of women. Surprisingly, what leads to the boys’ advantage is not
the fact that they learn more, or different bodies of knowledge and skills, but: ‘It is that they
are trained to act a part in life, and a part worth acting, whilst girls are either taught to look
118
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.97.
Mary Spongberg, ‘Madeleine de Scudéry 1607-1701,’ in Spongberg, Caine and Curthoys, p.515.
120
Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.74.
119
230
on life, or, worse still, told how to practise its light and unworthy arts.’121 Kavanagh clearly
points to the fact that gender is a cultural construct and not naturally given. She is alluding
to the fact that girls are educated to both passivity and women’s accomplishments, designed
basically to improve their chances on the marriage market. This restriction of women to
feminine activities, according to Kavanagh, does not happen in France where women are
‘superior’ and ‘have ever been equal to action’.122 They have ‘spirit, courage, decision’
without being deprived of feminine characteristics. The stereotype of France’s feminine
women who actively participate in public life is not associated with superficiality or
doubtful morality, but with serious contributions to society and presented as an ideal.
Kavanagh aligns particularly Maria Edgeworth with French women. She argues that
Edgeworth acquired the same characteristics in the contact with her father who Kavanagh
describes as having ‘a strong, active mind’, through education.123 This idea that education
influences the characteristics of the whole sex challenges essentialist ideas on femininity
which formed the basis of mainstream nineteenth-century history writing.
The ideal characteristics Edgeworth acquired through education are a combination of traits
deemed feminine and masculine. Kavanagh describes her as ‘the most vigorous though the
least masculine of female writers’.124 Conflating her person with her writing, as was usual
at the time, Kavanagh also commends her style for this balance between feminine and
masculine characteristics such as delicacy and vigour. Kavanagh, like Eliot, considers that
good literature contains both male and female characteristics and believes that woman’s
contribution to literature is crucial and beneficial: ‘We had not the perfect and twofold
human being until women wrote. The whole of literature was influenced by the change.’125
Although Kavanagh sees differences in women’s and men’s contributions to literature, she
121
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.202-3.
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.203.
123
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.203. On the other hand, Edgeworth’s father’s influence is
represented as having been too long and having yielded negative results in her literary work. Kavanagh
speculates that if her father had died earlier, she would have been ‘infinitely more tender and amiable’. The
influence of Edgeworth’s father on her writing is still a topic in scholarship. For instance Mitzi Myers argues
for a subtle interpretation of Edgeworth’s texts and her engagement with masculine literary forefathers. Mitzi
Myers, 'My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women
Writers and Patriarchal Authority,' in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social
Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
pp.104-146.
124
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters p.203.
125
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.96.
122
231
does not, as Nestor claims, argue for separate standards for men and women writers.126
While for Eliot the equal contribution of women to literature was a goal to be achieved in
the future, Kavanagh argues that in the domain of the novel it has been achieved.
For Marie Dronsart, feminine and masculine characteristics are closely enmeshed with
national, French and English traits. She emphasises the intimate knowledge of French
culture and politics of most of the English persons she portrays, particularly of Lord
Chesterfield and Mary Berry and idealizes the combination of French and English traits.
Mary Berry, for instance, through French influence, became a true salonnière. The ideal of
a French/ English man is represented in the person of Lord Chesterfield who combines also
masculine and feminine traits. Dronsart compares his letters to his son to those of Madame
de Sévigné to her daughter, and perceives in them ‘des accents presque maternels’, [almost
maternal traits].127 National stereotypes and gender stereotypes allow a questioning of the
differences between the sexes which are commonly seen as natural. Dronsart uses the
stereotype of English women as intrepid, courageous travellers, attributing their strength
and courage to their education. Pointing out that ‘les femmes de race latine’, [women of the
latin race] travelled much less than those of the Anglo-Saxon race, she explains:128
L’éducation des Anglaises, plus virile que la nôtre, la liberté d’action qu’on leur
laisse dès leur première jeunesse et qui leur inspire la responsabilité d’elles-mêmes,
la pratique de la marche, de l’équitation, des jeux et des exercices en plein air, les
courses sur mer, le goût inné de leur race pour les voyages, tout cela réuni les
prédispose à courir volontiers le monde sans s’effrayer des fatigues et de mille
petites épreuves.129
[English women’s education, which is more virile than ours, the freedom of action
they are given from a young age and which inspires in them responsibility for
themselves, their practice of walking and riding as well as games and gymnastics in
the open air, yachting and the race’s innate taste for travelling, all that predisposes
126
Nestor, p.87.
Dronsart, Portraits, p.99. Dronsart gives another example of the happy marriage between the two cultures,
the fact that Berry through her contacts with other countries was able to open a true salon. ‘Ses qualités
naturelles, aidées par des circonstances favorables, développées par ses voyages et par ses rapports continuels
avec l’étranger, lui avaient fait découvrir le secret de créer ce qui est rare dans son pays, un salon, un vrai
salon, simple et de bon goût, sans raideur, sans ennui, sans rivalités ...,’ [Her natural qualities which were
helped by favourable circumstances, developed through her journeys and constant contacts with foreign
countries, made her discover the secret of creating a salon, a true salon, which is unusual in her country:
simple and with taste, without stiffness, without boredom, without rivalry.] Dronsart, Portraits, p.182.
128
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses , p.5.
129
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses , p.132.
127
232
them to gladly travel through the world without being afraid of the fatigues and
thousand little trials.]
Dronsart insists on the different education of women in England which provides them with
more freedom, independence, and physical strength. While the stereotype of England’s
masculine women was often used in a very negative sense, in the 1880s and 1890s, their
participation in physical activities and their independence were admired by many French
women as has been outlined in the first chapter. Here, taken together with the remark that
generally women had an increasing role in travelling, their more masculine education is the
one of the future. Like Kavanagh and Eliot, Dronsart believes the ideal woman to have
feminine and masculine characteristics. In this, they follow in the tradition of Mary Hays
and other women who were inspired by the historians Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay and
Mary Wollstonecraft in their attempt to challenge dominant ideas on gender
characteristics.130
Dronsart and Kavanagh, at the same time as challenging contemporary ideologies of
femininity, reiterate their key ideas. Dronsart echoes negative judgements on ‘masculine’
women.131 While ‘virile’ is used for characteristics such as strength of character, will power
and perseverance, ‘masculinity’ stands for lack of femininity. Kavanagh similarly
negotiates the different discourses, for instance in arguing that Edgeworth’s strength and
vigour is due to the influence of her father which is also represented as having yielded
negative results in her literary work. Kavanagh speculates that if Edgeworth’s father had
died earlier, she would have been ‘infinitely more tender and amiable’.132 Both women use
national stereotypes to negotiate this tension between prevalent discourses and their
personal contentions.
Similarly to their play with stereotypes to challenge assumptions about femininity,
Kavanagh and Dronsart both use national stereotypes to challenge evaluation criteria of
literature and thereby to recover women lost in historical tradition. The idea that the early
novels were coarse and crude corresponded to the tradition of nineteenth-century literary
130
Mary Spongberg, ‘Feminine biography,’ p.179.
Dronsart writes: ‘Cette influence masculine se fait trop sentir dans le talent de lady Mary, même avant son
mariage.’ [This male influence appears too much in Lady Mary’s talent, even before her marriage.] Dronsart,
Portraits, p.134.
132
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.210.
131
233
history writing in England.133 As Ezell contends in Writing Women’s Literary History in
regard to poetry, this judgment was originally not linked to gender issues, and women
writers were seen as part of a development towards a smoother and more refined language.
But due to the shift in the criteria of evaluation from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth
century, some early women’s writing such as Aphra Behn’s and Mary Montagu’s was
deemed to be coarse because it did not correspond to writing expected from women. Ezell
convincingly argues that eighteenth-century critics did not consider the sex of the writer to
be crucial for the work to be feminine writing.134 However, masculine traits such as
strength, force, sense and judgment made good writing. Women were seen as real rivals to
men and were considered to be able to surpass them. From the middle of the eighteenth
century, the difference between the sexes was more emphasized. Ezell names a key work
for this shift, George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain: who have been
Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Language, Arts and Sciences (1752), a
work which she considers to have influenced literary history throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Literary criticism tended to consider more the female writers’ lives and
expected their writing to be different from men’s:
His [Ballard’s] definition of the feminine – and that of many who used him as a
primary source - emphasized the domestic, the melancholic, and the impulse for
self-sacrifice over the public, the witty, or the defiant (not to mention the erotic) in
women's writing.135
Ezell shows how this shift excludes some women and some types of works from literary
history.
Kavanagh recovers Aphra Behn’s work although she disapproved of her, like her
contemporaries. She saw Behn, who had been considered a forceful and witty writer in
earlier periods, as lacking the virtues of middle-class domesticity. However, at the same
time Kavanagh excused Behn as a child of her times as she does also Sarah Fielding: ‘But
the ruder and more vigorous times in which she lived could endure the details of coarseness
and of barbarity which common refinement forbids to ours.’136 Moreover, Kavanagh, when
133
Ezell, p71.
Ezell, pp.72-74.
135
Ezell, p.88.
136
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.21.
134
234
comparing Behn’s work Oroonoko with the works of Scudéry and La Fayette, the Grand
Cyrus and with the Princesse de Clèves, clearly praises the work:
It is very true that in the hands of either lady all the gross and offensive passages
would have vanished; and that, had it issued from the pen of the latter, Oroonoko
would still be a classic. But though Mrs. Behn’s indelicacy was useless … she had
two gifts in which she far excelled either of the French ladies - freshness and
truth.137
This work is thus lacking in delicacy, the feminine characteristic, but it does have the
masculine ones: it is ‘vigorous’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘true’. Kavanagh’s use of these criteria,
which has been discussed earlier, allows her to recover the novel. She even calls it ‘one of
the first great works of English fiction’, in other words, the founding work of the English
novelistic tradition.138
Kavanagh seems not to have been able to convince her readers of the quality of Behn’s
novels. At least the novelist Geraldine E. Jewsbury, a long-term and prolific reviewer of the
Athenaeum, although appreciating her French Women of Letters, remains doubtful about
the quality of Behn’s work:
It is true that for force and freshness the passages quoted are very remarkable and
the story of ‘Orinooko’ [sic.] as given by Miss Kavanagh beats ‘Uncle Tom’ out of
the field for tragic interest and true pathos; but Miss Kavanagh would have done
better to leave both novel and author where she found them, in the mausoleum of
the British Museum.139
Jewsbury, as many of her contemporaries, seems not to have read Oroonoko, but her
response to Kavanagh’s presentation of the novel is very positive. This appraisal might be
partly due to the fact that the narrative about the beautiful and noble prince and slave could
be, and has been read as an anti-slavery novel.140 However, despite this positive view,
137
Kavanagh, English Women of Letters , p.23.
Janet Todd, who also points out the contrast between Kavanagh’s severe criticism of Behn and some of the
positive comments on Oroonoko, asserts that Kavanagh was one of the few nineteenth-century voices to
notice the extremely wide range of Behn’s pursuits. Todd, p.49.
139
Geraldine E. Jewsbury, 'English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches by Julia Kavanagh,' Athenaeum
1826 (1862), 527.
140
Paul Salzman, Introduction to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), p.x.
138
235
Jewsbury reiterates judgements about Aphra Behn, asserting that she and her work should
be forgotten.
Like Behn, Montagu was seen as coarse and lacking delicacy and femininity.141 Ezell
observes that some authors of literary history focused on anecdotes about her and Pope and
others on her exotic costume but she was not mentioned as a witty writer and poet.142 As a
consequence, her poems were not reprinted during the nineteenth century and her letters,
after having been reprinted thirty-one times between 1763 and 1853, would not have been
reprinted either, had not her great-grandson Lord Wharncliff republished them.143
Dronsart rewrites Montagu’s history by constructing her as an English Madame de Sévigné,
developing her text from a quotation by Montagu:
Je viens de lire les lettres de madame de Sévigné; elles sont très jolies; mais
j’affirme, sans la moindre vanité, que les miennes seront tout aussi intéressantes
dans quarante ans.144
[I have just read the letters of Madame de Sévigné; they are very nice; but I assert
without any vanity that my letters will be as interesting as hers in forty years.]
The parallel between the two women means, on one hand, that Dronsart portrays Montagu
as a loving mother and wife sending letters to her loved ones.145 In addition, she
emphasizes Montagu’s dedication to housekeeping and later to the work on her little farm
in Italy, comparing the beauty of her gardens with that of Madame de Sévigné’s.146 With
this focus on her femininity, Dronsart contradicts her image as an unfeminine woman to
141
Ezell, pp.93, 99-100.
Ezell, p.100.
143
Wharncliff published them in 1837, 1861, 1866, 1887, 1893. Ezell, p.106.
144
Dronsart, Portraits, p.125.
145
Dronsart writes : « C’est ... dans les lettres à sa fille que lady Mary montre le meilleur côté de sa nature;
...en parlant à lady Bute, elle révèle des qualités de coeur, une tendresse, une grâce maternelles, une
appréciation saine des choses élevées, des devoirs et joies de la famille, une bonté douce que son monde
ignorait trop.’ [It is in the letters to her daughter that Lady Mary shows the best side of her nature; …
speaking to Lady Bute she reveals qualities of the heart, a motherly tenderness and grace, a healthy
appreciation of great things, the duties and joys of the family, a sweet goodness which her society ignored too
much.] Dronsart, Portraits, p.167. Dronsart speaks of her ‘effusions toutes féminines’, [entirely feminine
effusions] in her letters. P.143. ‘Elle n'avait jamais cessé d'aimer ce mari qu'elle estimait profondément ’, [She
had never stopped loving this husband for whom she had much esteem]. p.174.
146
Dronsart, Portraits, p.141 ‘En effet, les descriptions de ce jardin, de ses développements, des bois, des
plantations, tiennent autant de place et sont aussi jolies que celles de madame de Sévigné aux Rochers.’
[Indeed, these descriptions of the garden, of her developments, the woods and plantations, take as much
importance and are as beautiful as those of Madame de Sévigné at the Rochers.] p.173.
142
236
which the poet Alexander Pope seems to have contributed. She does not repeat Pope’s
disparaging words about Montagu, using vague expressions such as ‘calomnies infâmes,
contre les moeurs et le caractère d’une femme’, [loathsome calumnies against the manners
and character of a woman].147 Instead, she contests the reliability of Pope’s testimony,
claiming that his enmity was due to the fact that he was disappointed in his expectations to
become her lover.148 In this way Dronsart both stamps Pope as biased and asserts
Montagu’s virtue. In brief, Montagu is presented as a feminine woman, according to
prevalent ideas in the nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time she is reduced to a letter and
essay writer. Her poems and her play are not mentioned at all.149 Moreover, Dronsart
claims that Montagu did not see herself as a ‘femme auteur’, on one occasion had asserted
that she had never published a line, while, in fact, her Court Poems had been published in
1719 and 1726.150
Beside the parallels, Dronsart outlines the differences to Sévigné, which she links to
national difference:
Les écrits de ces deux femmes d’élite possèdent un intérêt de nationalité, nous
dirions volontiers de famille, qui prime toute considération, même historique ou
littéraire. Au point de vue exclusivement français, madame de Sévigné restera sans
rivale, non seulement parce qu’elle nous associe à la vie quotidienne d’une des plus
grandes époques de notre histoire, parce qu’elle donne à notre langue un charme
exquis, mais encore parce qu’elle personnifie l’esprit français dans ce qu’il y a de
plus gracieux, la femme française dans ce qu’elle a de meilleur, de plus séduisant,
de plus aimable, au sens absolu du mot.151
147
Dronsart, Portraits, p.160. Pope mentioned Montagu in different poems, for instance in Epistle to a Lady,
where he calls her Sappho: ‘Rufa, whose eye quick-glancing o’er the Park, / Attracts each light gay meteor of
a Spark, / Agrees as ill with Rufa studying Locke, / As Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock, / Or Sappho
at her toilet’s greasy task, / With Sappho fragrant at an evening Mask: / So morning Insects that in muck
begun, / Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the setting sun.’ F. W. Bateson, ed., Alexander Pope: Epistles to Several
Persons (London: Methuen, 1951), pp.49-51.
Jill Campbell states that ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is known first to students of the eighteenth century not
as the authorial voice heard in her many poems, essays, three volumes of letters, and a play; but as the satiric
spectacle conjured in Pope’s portraits of her in several of his poems.’ Jill Campbell, 'Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity,' in History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century
Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p.64.
148
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.158-160.
149
Dronsart does mention that Montagu’s Journal was destroyed at her marriage and a History of her time
suffered the same fate later on. She asserts that a conserved fragment Le Tableau de la cour de George 1er à
son avènement gives an idea of the importance of the loss. Dronsart, Portraits, p.134.
150
Ezell, p.106. Dronsart, Portraits, pp.128 and 172.
151
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.125-6.
237
[The writings of these two exceptional women have a national interest; we would
like to say a family interest, which outweighs any other consideration, even
historical or literary. From an exclusively French point of view, Madame de
Sévigné will always remain without rival, not only because she associates us with
the daily life of one of the greatest periods of our history, because she gives to our
language its exquisite charm, but also because she personifies the French spirit in its
most gracious form, the French woman in what she has best, most seductive, and
most amiable in the absolute sense of the word.]
Using, as it was often done, the image of the family for the two nations, Dronsart alludes to
the image of seventeenth-century salonnières, asserting that Sévigné was representing
Frenchness, French greatness as well as French femininity. She expresses with much less
precision to what extent and why Montagu’s writing is of national interest but describes her
in the following way:
Voyageuse infatigable, presque héroïque, vu les difficultés de l’époque, observatrice
curieuse, admirablement servie par la situation pour tout voir, par son esprit pour
tout comprendre, par son savoir pour tout juger et par sa plume pour tout écrire, elle
a laissé, des pays et des sociétés qu’elle a traversés, un tableau brillant et vrai,
l’œuvre d’un maître.152
[As an untiring, and, given the difficulties of the period, almost heroic traveller; as
an inquiring observer, who is admirably enabled to see everything through her
situation, through her understanding mind, through her force of judgement and
through her exceptional writing skills, she left a brilliant and true picture of the
countries and societies she encountered, the work of a master.]
It seems that she is a typical English woman owing to her travelling and travel writing,
those characteristics which are stereotypically attributed to them. In her work Great Women
Travellers Dronsart states that there were many English travellers, due to the history of
expansion of the country as well as to women’s education, as has been mentioned earlier.
By describing their ‘virile’ education, English women are implicitly represented as more
masculine. Dronsart, instead of presenting Montagu as lacking femininity, as many
nineteenth-century writers did, explains what she calls her stronger and more virile nature
through her nationality. Masculinity, in this context, loses, at least to a large extent, the
negative connotations it had when attributed to women during the nineteenth century and
later for that matter and has clearly positive connotations.
152
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.127-8.
238
While Dronsart challenges negative connotations of masculine traits for women, she
endorses ideologies of femininity to positively assess Montagu’s writings, contrasting her
with the feminine Sévigné. For instance Dronsart claims that ‘Par de certains côtés, ses
lettres [celles de Montagu] sont d’un intérêt plus général que celles de madame de
Sévigné’, [In a way, ... [Montagu’s] letters are of a more general interest than those of
Madame de Sévigné].153 Furthermore, she states that, although the contact with men such as
Addison and Steele might have contributed to Montagu having little feminine delicacy, it
reinforced the strength, firmness and brilliancy of her mind.154 Finally, in the Portraits,
Dronsart even goes so far as to enumerate the weaknesses that could be perceived in
Sévigné by stronger women such as Montagu, and she names all the supposed
characteristics of female writing: driven by too much feeling, superficial, unstructured and
of limited interest.155 She repeats widely held ideas about the weaknesses of female writing.
By simultaneously constructing Montagu in parallel to Sévigné, as a very feminine woman
writing admirable letters, and in contrast to her, as a more masculine English woman,
Dronsart tries to give a favourable appraisal of Montagu and her work.
Interestingly, Dronsart uses the same contrast when discussing Frances Burney and
Germaine de Staël whose natures are described respectively as ‘délicate, reservée, très
feminine’, [delicate, reserved, very feminine] and ‘un peu virile, ardente, passionnée’,
[slightly virile, ardent, passionate].156 In this case, where the French woman is more virile,
Dronsart does not mention nationality. But Staël’s virility does not have a negative
connotation either. Burney is reported as mocking Staël’s talent for conversation but
passages from her letters and Dronsart’s comments convince the reader of the good
understanding and esteem between the two women. Burney is quoted as saying that ‘nos
caractères ont plus d’analogie que nos actions’, [our characters have more similarities than
our actions].157 So, once again, there is contrast and similarity and no value judgement.
Similarly, in the portrait of George Eliot, who is said to be very feminine in spite of being
153
Dronsart, Portraits, p.127.
Dronsart, Portraits, p.134.
155
Dronsart uses the phrase: ‘une nature plus forte, disons le mot, plus virile,’ [a more forceful nature, let’s
say the word, more virile]. Dronsart, Portraits, p.126. At the same time she asserts that Montagu could not
understand Sévigné’s qualities.
156
Dronsart, Portraits, p.200.
157
Dronsart, Portraits, p.202.
154
239
strong and virile in certain ways, this is not presented as a negative trait.158 The link to
nationality in the case of Montagu may be due to the fact that she had to be recovered from
history whereas Staël’s and Eliot’s fame was established towards the end of the nineteenth
century.159
Dronsart’s rewriting of Montagu can be linked both to her sources and the way she uses
them. While some writers of biographical works draw heavily on their predecessors, she
refers only to writings by Montagu herself and by contemporaries who may have been less
influenced by ideologies of middle-class femininity than her own age.160 Moreover, she
chooses positive statements. For instance while the friend of Dickens, Bryan Waller Procter
quotes Walpole’s statement that Montagu ‘was always a dirty little thing’, Dronsart quotes
him as describing her letters as ‘plus pleines d’esprit, de vivacité, de force, qu’on ne saurait
l’imaginer; supérieures à toutes les autres qu’il connaissait, excepté celles de madame de
Sévigné’, [more full of wit, vivacity and vigour than one can imagine, superior to all those
he knew except those of Madame de Sévigné].161 Similar to Kavanagh, Dronsart carefully
chooses her sources to provide a positive portrayal of Montagu.
Dronsart’s portrayal of strong, ‘virile’ English women whom she characterizes as feminine
- the Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Montagu, and George Eliot – can be seen in the
context of the emerging of French feminism towards the end of the century, a phenomenon
Dronsart describes herself ten years after the publication of Portraits in Le Mouvement
féministe. As outlined in the first chapter, it provoked a shift in French perceptions of
English women towards models of educated, independent women.
While Kavanagh and Dronsart mostly try to deconstruct ideas on femininity by pointing out
differences within what they construct as one group, that of travellers or of novel writers, in
other instances, they emphasise national difference, distinguishing, for example, between
158
But at the same time Dronsart reiterates all the assumptions about femininity and masculinity.
According to John Philip Couch, George Eliot’s works became increasingly popular in France in the
1880s. Couch, pp.86-7.
160
She quotes letters by the poet Alexander Pope, the historian Duc de Saint-Simon, Horace Walpole and a
certain Mme Montagu who according to Dronsart was related to her. Dronsart, Portraits, pp.159, 161,177-8.
161
[Bryan Waller Procter], Effigies Poeticae: Or Portraits of the British Poets, 2 vols. (London, 1824), 1:73,
quoted in Ezell, pp.99-100. Dronsart, Portraits, p.178.
159
240
French and English eighteenth-century society or the tradition of the French and the
English novel. Dronsart uses this strategy in her endeavour to recover Montagu.
One of the reasons for nineteenth-century censorship of Montagu was her reputation as
being witty and outspoken. Wit, which was still used as a compliment for a woman by
Matilda Betham in her Biographical Dictionary published in 1804, was not considered a
quality of female writing any more but rather perceived as a lack of delicacy and
reticence.162 Dronsart draws on national difference when alluding to this supposed fault in
Montagu’s writing: ‘la liberté d’expressions [sic], que lui a reprochée depuis la pruderie
anglaise, fait penser à Molière bien plus qu’à Addison’, [The freedom of expression, with
which English prudery reproached her, recalls much more Molière than Addison].163 Here,
what is acceptable is not dependent on gender but on nationality.164 While other critics
excuse Montagu’s lack of delicacy with the coarseness and corruption of the age which
tainted her writing, Dronsart rewrites Montagu’s portrait. She constructs Montagu not only
as an outsider in her own society by aligning her with the French writer Molière instead of
her compatriot Addison, but also because she sees her as a critic of English society, as a
writer who points out the flaws, and ridicules her society:
Lady Mary vivait au milieu d’une société corrompue et en même temps
prétentieuse, dont les affectations lui inspiraient un suprême dédain, et elle flagellait
franchement l’hypocrisie, sans épargner ni amis ni ennemis.165
[Lady Mary lived within a corrupt and at the same time pretentious society, whose
affectation inspired her extreme disdain and she sincerely flogged hypocrisy,
sparing neither friends nor enemies.]
Dronsart turns Montagu’s lack of delicacy into honesty and morality. Her outspokenness
and satirical wit are redeemed by her moral influence on society.
162
Betham uses it for Madeleine Scudéry, for instance. Matilda Betham, A Biographical Dictionary of the
Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (London: B. Crosby and Co. [etc.], 1804), p.779.
163
Dronsart, Portraits, p.129.
164
Dronsart reinforces the idea that Montagu’s works were merely criticised because of English prudery by
giving an example of an almost identical story related by Sévigné and Montagu. However, at the same time,
she reintroduces the notion that Montagu’s work did indeed contain objectionable passages, saying that while
the story was not shocking when related by the grand-mother Sévigné, it was when coming from the pen of
the young girl Montagu. Dronsart’s endeavour to recuperate Montagu leads to a text which is often
ambivalent and not always consistent. Dronsart, Portraits, p.129.
165
Dronsart, Portraits, p.129.
241
Dronsart represents Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough in a very similar way and
draws the parallel between the two women. When meeting Montagu, the Duchess of
Marlborough ‘était enchantée de rencontrer un esprit aussi agressif que le sien et trouvait
prudent de s’en faire un allié’, [was delighted to meet a mind which was as aggressive as
hers and found it prudent to make her an ally].166 Their outspokenness is not the only
parallel between them, according to Dronsart’s portraits. The Duchess of Marlborough is
also presented as a stronghold of sincere loyalty, faithfulness and as a defender of
principles at a corrupt court.167 Moreover, she is said to have founded several charity works
and contributed to the welfare of society.
Dronsart draws on the opposition between scepticism and tolerance on one hand and
superstition on the other, an opposition which was often used to distinguish Western
countries and ‘others’, to contrast Montagu and English society.168 Montagu, according to
Dronsart, contributed to the wellbeing of England’s population by introducing the
inoculation against the small pox from the Orient. But instead of bringing her recognition
and fame, this contribution to Western medical knowledge made her once again the target
of numerous enemies:
Pendant plusieurs années, ... [the vaccine, ‘ce bienfait à son pays’] compta parmi les
causes de l’animadversion qui se déchaîna contre elle. Les gens de science crièrent
au charlatanisme, les fanatiques à l’impiété; les uns l’accusèrent de vouloir
empoisonner jusqu’à ses propres enfants, les autres, de contrarier la volonté divine,
qui avait envoyé la petite vérole pour les péchés du monde.169
[During several years, … [the vaccine, ‘this blessing for her country’] counted
among the causes for the animadversion which broke forth against her. Scientists
called it charlatanism, fanatics said it was against piety; some accused her of
wanting to poison even her own children, others of frustrating the divine will which
had sent the small pox for the sins of the world.]
While Montagu is presented as the enlightened person and the vaccine as a blessing, her
contemporaries are said to be driven by fanaticism and superstition. Dronsart constructs her
166
Dronsart, Portraits, p.130.
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.15 and 41-2.
168
Dronsart, Portraits, p.129.
169
Dronsart, Portraits, p.155.
167
242
as a victim of her unadvanced society, as a martyr in the service of civilisation, a strategy
which recalls strongly Flora Tristan’s construction of herself in her works.170
Dronsart’s representation of Montagu as a civilising force, as bringing progress from the
Orient, has a feminist undertone like Kavanagh’s construction of Scudéry as a teacher.
Montagu brought not only a vaccine from the Orient but also accounts of Turkish women’s
freedom and civilised behaviour. Dronsard quotes several passages from them, for instance
the one describing Turkish women’s ‘mascarade’, their veil, which allows them to go
incognito wherever they please.171 Another passage she quotes, a scene in a Turkish bath,
describes Turkish women’s astonishment at the stays in her dress which they take as an
instrument of male power and control. Finally, Dronsart quotes Montagu describing the
mistress of a harem as very civilised and refined: ‘Je suis persuadée que, si on la
transportait sur le trône le plus civilisé d’Europe, cette femme, élevée dans un pays que
nous appelons barbare, paraîtrait ce qu’elle est: reine par la majesté, la grâce et la beauté
...’, [I am convinced that, if she was placed on Europe’s most civilised throne, this woman,
who was brought up in a country which we call barbaric, would appear as what she is: a
queen through her majesty, grace and beauty …].172 Montagu is challenging notions of
Western civilisation and ideologies on femininity, which are closely enmeshed with
them.173 Dronsart, although extensively quoting Montagu’s dreams of alternative modes of
life, does not explicitly comment on these passages, yet, she praises the letters generally
and emphasises their accurate depictions and their veracity.174
Montagu and some similarly unconventional women feature also in Dronsart’s Great
Women Travellers, published eight years later. In the preface to this work, she signals her
intention of focusing on contemporary women apart from some interesting exceptions.175
These exceptions, the French eighteenth-century woman Madame Godin des Odonais, the
170
See my chapter 3. Given that rationality was commonly seen as a masculine characteristic since the
enlightenment and the civilising mission considered as man’s burden, Dronsart plays again on masculine and
feminine characteristics.
171
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.149-50.
172
Dronsart, Portraits, p.152. Interestingly, Tristan constructs her text in parallel to the same passages about
Turkish dress and the bath scene. See my chapter 3.
173
A publication titled Woman not inferior to man: or, A short and modest vindication of the natural right of
the fair-sex to a perfect equality of power, dignity and esteem with the men / Sophia, a person of quality was
attributed to Montagu.
174
Dronsart, Portraits, p.145.
175
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses, p.4.
243
Spanish Catalina de Erauso, born in 1585, and the English Lady Mary Montagu and Lady
Hester Stanhope were all adventurous women, some of whom travelled completely on their
own, or, as for instance Stanhope, travelled with their dependants. Dronsart’s inclusion of
their portrayals testifies to the importance she accords them, particularly Montagu who
features in both her collective biographies.176
Dronsart’s representation of Montagu in the Great Women Travellers is very similar to that
in Portraits. Two of the above cited passages from her letters figure also in her later work.
The passage on women’s freedom resulting from the veil is not quoted but instead,
Dronsart suggests that Montagu herself took advantage of the veil: ‘Le plus grand plaisir de
lady Mary était de s’envelopper de ses voiles turcs, … d’aller courir la ville, les bazars, les
mosquées, de voir tout ce qui était curieux ...’. [Lady Mary’s greatest pleasure was to wrap
herself in a Turkish veil, … to walk through the city, to the bazaars, the mosques and to see
everything that was curious…].177 Dronsart seems to be aware of Montagu’s feminism and,
through her emphasis on her and her letters, endorses it to a certain extent.
Feminist ideas also appear when Dronsart ascribes Montagu’s satirical streak to her ‘esprit’
and superiority, instead of describing it as unfeminine.178 Dronsart quotes her as saying to
her daughter: ‘Si jamais vous vous sentez flattée de la réputation de femme supérieure,
souvenez-vous que vous la payerez en devenant un objet de soupçon, de jalousie et
d’aversion cachée’, [if you are ever flattered for having the reputation of a superior woman,
remember that you will pay for it dearly by becoming an object of suspicion, jealousy and
hidden aversion].179 Dronsart echoes here women such as Staël who similarly state that
superiority is not forgiven in women.180 She represents Montagu’s departure from England
to Italy in 1739 as a ‘fuite’, [flight] because her sincerity had created her too many enemies
in England.181 This interpretation can be seen as a criticism of society, especially if put in
176
Erauso spent part of her travels disguised as a man and Stanhope took to the costume of Turkish men.
According to Dronsart, Montagu dressed as a Turkish woman. Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses, pp. 69-84,
146, 156.
177
Dronsart, Les Grandes Voyageuses, p.146.
178
When her daughter relates that somebody did not want to be introduced to Montagu for fear of being
ridiculed because her ‘esprit’ had been lauded too much, the mother says that this might be a lesson for her
daughter. Staël wishes her daughter to know that the reputation to be a superior woman must always be dearly
paid. Dronsart, Portraits d'outre-Manche , p.130.
179
Dronsart, Portraits, p.130.
180
Staël, De la littérature, 2 : 332.
181
Dronsart, Portraits, pp.164 and 127.
244
the context of Dronsart’s statement: ‘on n’a pas en Italie les mêmes préjugés que dans son
pays; les femmes savants y sont en grand honneur depuis la Renaissance’, [there are not the
same prejudices in Italy as in her country; since the Renaissance, women of letters have
been held in great honour there].182 In brief, through her ‘othering’ of English society,
Dronsart turns those of Montagu’s traits which were deemed unsuitable for a woman during
the nineteenth century into virtues like courage and intellectual superiority. It is remarkable
that Flora Tristan uses some of the same passages in Montagu’s letters and adopts very
similar strategies to provide alternative standards of what is socially acceptable.183
However, as with Kavanagh’s works, Dronsart’s tone can be ambivalent. Montagu’s
frankness, satire and outspokenness are not only seen as signs of her intelligence and
superiority but also as faults. Dronsart clearly expresses the idea that Montagu should have
used her gifts with moderation or looked for comfort in the affection of her family instead
of responding to every attack.184 Furthermore, despite describing her good deeds and
characterizing her as morally better than her environment, Dronsart does not suggest that
Montagu had a meaningful life when she speaks of ‘l’amertume d’une vie manquée,
désillusionnée’, [the bitterness of a wasted and disillusioned life].185 So, while Montagu is
represented as a strong woman and an innocent victim of English society, she is also judged
in terms of what was deemed to be suitable feminine behaviour during the nineteenth
century.
Given Kavanagh’s and Dronsart’s positions in regard to ideas about women, one might
expect a clear plea for a better education for women. Yet, they are both very cautious,
reporting the words of their ‘feminist’ subjects of study, Scudéry and Montagu. Dronsart
inserts a long quotation from Montagu’s letter to her brother’s preceptor, bishop Burnet, in
which she deplores that she knows only Latin and not Greek because women are not
allowed this kind of study. She expresses her disgust at women’s ignorance and occupation
with frivolous subjects. Dronsart, without revealing her own opinion, nevertheless
182
Dronsart, Portraits, p.171.
See my chapter 3.
184
‘Son éducation ne lui avait pas appris à user de ses dons avec modération.’ ‘Une nature moins altière aurait
cherché consolation dans les affections de famille. Mais elle rend tous les coups reçus.’ [Her upbringing had
not taught her to use her gifts with moderation.] [Somebody with a less proud disposition would have sought
consolation in family affection. But she returns blow for blow.] Dronsart, Portraits, pp.130 and 164.
185
Dronsart, Portraits, p.168.
183
245
concludes ‘La discussion reste ouverte et le sera toujours’, [the discussion remains open
and will always be], thus implicitly signalling her own position.186 Kavanagh includes
extracts from Scudéry who accuses society of poor treatment of learned women, and
women themselves for their ignorance. Furthermore, Kavanagh dismisses the opinion that
women should merely be good mothers, wives and mistresses of the house, as belonging to
the past. Her plea for a better education has many parallels with Eliot’s writings on this
topic, which is characterized by a clear message for more education, at the same time as a
careful negotiation of contemporary ideas on femininity. On one hand she repeatedly muses
how the different women would have written, had they been men and acquired a better
education, for instance in regard to Radcliff, and often she excuses faults she sees in their
writing as attributable to their rudimentary education.187 On the other hand, she claims for
instance that Scudéry disliked learned women and ‘never ceased to talk and write against
female pedantry, to plead for modesty and moderation.’188 However, similarly to Eliot,
Kavanagh argues for a thorough knowledge and education as opposed to superficial and
ostentatious erudition.189 For instance, she complains that because, in her own period,
women read much more than men ‘books are made too light and too easy’.190 In her
appraisal of the different novels, Kavanagh, like Eliot, criticises them harshly, at the same
time as she points out their merits. In the importance Kavanagh and Dronsart accord to
women’s education they follow the ideas of Wollstonecraft, and to a lesser extent Mary
Hays, who emphasises more fully women’s domestic role.191
At the same time, both women see in Molière the enemy of female education. Molière, in
Kavanagh’s narrative, is the figure who undid Scudéry’s achievements in changing society.
‘It was a cruel and ungenerous attack; women were not too learned, as he knew, but too
ignorant, and his sarcasm frightened them into further ignorance.’192 On one hand she
asserts that he was conscious of the fact that his criticism was not justified: on the other
186
Dronsart, Portraits, p.133.
‘Had Anne Radcliffe been John Radcliffe and received the vigorous and polished education which makes
the man and the gentleman, we might have a few novels less, but we would assuredly have some fine pages
more in that language where, spite their merit, her works will leave no individual trace.’ Kavanagh, English
Women of Letters , p.123.
188
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 54.
189
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 165.
190
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 161.
191
Spongberg, Writing Women's History , p.117.
192
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 169.
187
246
hand she states: ‘the prejudices of his sex made Molière retrograde, and he foreswore his
privilege, as a man of genius, of seeing farther and better than his times’.193 So, she
separates him as a man from his undisputed roles as a literary talent whom nobody dares
criticize. Dronsart, more cautiously, does not criticise her compatriot directly, preferring the
indirect route, mentioning only Madame de Lambert’s complaint that Molière had made
women afraid of being well educated.194
In conclusion, there are many parallels between Kavanagh’s fictional and non-fictional
work. Eileen Fauset states that responses to her fiction make ‘Julia Kavanah seem
somewhat 'conduct book' conventional and rather benign in the area of sexual politics’ but
she argues ‘that beneath the surface tales of love, courtship and marriage, there is a
pronounced dissenting voice’.195 This dissenting voice can likewise be perceived in her
non-fictional work and also, albeit to a lesser extent, in Marie Dronsart’s biographical
works Portraits and the Great Women Travellers. Kavanagh and Dronsart recover Scudéry
and Montagu, both highly educated upper-class women of literary renown who were
written out of history or reviled because they did not correspond to nineteenth-century
ideals of womanhood. Kavanagh and Dronsart play with gender and national alliances to
challenge ideologies of femininity, in particular ideas on the nature of women, on separate
spheres, and on women’s role in society and history. They respond to the emergence of
feminism in their respective countries and agree that women have a significant influence or
play an important role in both politics and literature. At the same time they use the
references to the other culture to make their women more acceptable for nineteenth-century
readers emphasising particularly their virtues. However, both women align women’s virtue
with the need for better education and activity in the political and cultural domain.
193
Kavanagh, French Women of Letters , 1: 170.
Dronsart, Portraits, p.133.
195
Fauset, 62.
194
247
Conclusion
This study has provided examples of the intense socio-cultural exchanges between English
and French women during the nineteenth century and their transcendence of national
boundaries in the discussion of the ‘woman question’. It has illustrated that crossing the
Channel does not only mean entering an unfamiliar, potentially threatening place with
screaming exotic birds or ‘fighting’ in a ‘barbarous’ idiom as Louisa Costello and MarieAnne Bovet describe it in the epigraphs to my introduction. Displacement and the
concomitant adoption of different positions and points of view allow clever negotiation of
conventions on femininity. Preconceptions and stereotypes about the ‘other’ can be used to
question normalized assumptions about women’s nature and role. The English and French
women discussed in this work play on the various positions created by their alliances to
nation, gender, class and political parties. They take advantage of these positions in very
different ways, according to their personal economic situation, their agenda, their gendered
position within society, and the perception of their sisters in the other country.
In spite of the variety in their strategies, some parallels can be detected. The women tend to
align themselves with counterparts of the other culture, who do not conform to nineteenthcentury bourgeois ideologies of femininity and have considerable privileges due to their
class and wealth, such as French salonnières or English women travellers and writers like
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. English fascination with French salonnières can be traced
throughout the century up to the modern writer Virginia Woolf. This strategy of alignment
allowed women to create a tradition of foremothers, of female intellectuals and writers. The
women discussed in this investigation tend to construct these foremothers carefully,
outlining their merits as writers, travellers, social investigators, feminists and so on, at the
same time playing down their deviance from nineteenth-century expectations of femininity.
Therefore, in spite of drawing heavily on stereotypes and perceptions of the other nation
and including cross-textual references, their portrayals of their ideals often differ from that
of contemporaries in both nations. At the same time, they use ‘othering’ with regard to
class, nation or political affiliation, either to provide themselves with an authoritative
248
authorial voice, or as part of their arguments. All the French and English women whose
texts have been investigated aim at dispelling the negative reputation of intellectually active
women and at legitimising their own activity. They employ the mentioned strategies to
effectively criticise certain aspects of contemporary gender politics in their own society.
While my investigation offers some answers in the field of cross-cultural exchanges
between France and England and their impact on women’s discussion about their role and
identity, it reveals at the same time that there remains more territory to be mapped. The
ways women use their experiences of the other culture to negotiate gendered constraints
imposed on them and their writing, varies over time and with each individual woman and
her specific situation. As the scope of this work allowed only a certain number of primary
sources, there are interesting bodies of texts which could not be investigated in depth, for
instance the writings by Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Mohl, women who
all had a very close relationship to France.
My work includes different manifestations of cross-cultural exchanges such as travelogues,
historical writing, journalism, letters and journals and does not specifically focus on novels,
which offered women another way of expressing their view of gender and national
difference. 1 The investigation of their content as well as their reception in the other culture
has been undertaken with regard to the best known women novelists such as George Sand
and George Eliot, but lesser known novelists such as Henrietta Puliga de Quigini, who
published under the pseudonym of ‘Brada’, have attracted almost no critical attention.
The texts chosen for this investigation not only document cross-Channel exchanges, they
also feature national difference. This choice excludes other traces of exchange such as
adaptations and translations, genres which were practiced by many women. The ‘politics of
translation’, or in other words the question as to what kind of texts women adapted or
translated and for what reasons might shed more light on cross-cultural exchanges in the
discussion of the woman question. Translations, or texts closely based on writings in the
other language, can be a means of participating in this debate. For instance, English writer
1
I am restricting my view to testimonies in words, hence excluding paintings or theatre, for instance. It is
interesting that cross-dressing had a different status on English and French stages, or that actresses like Sarah
Bernhardt were much more successful in one country and not in the other. Her special representation of
female characters may have been the reason.
249
Sarah Lewis based her publication Woman’s Mission very closely on the work of Louis
Aimé Martin De l’éducation des mères de famille, ou la civilisation du genre humain par
les femmes, (1834).2 French author Marie Dronsart translated a considerable number of
texts by English women.
These few examples demonstrate, that broadening the focus of scholarship on the
nineteenth-century ‘woman question’ from the usual national focus to a cross-Channel
view, opens a whole range of new perspectives and insights. Through its broader approach
and by encompassing not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but
also cross-cultural experience, this study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century
discussions of the so-called ‘woman question’.
2
Elizabeth K. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question, vol.1, p.3.
250
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