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The University of Chicago Sincerity and Social THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SINCERITY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE WORK OF LOUISE D’ÉPINAY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES BY REBECCA ANN CRISAFULLI CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2018 © 2018 Rebecca Ann Crisafulli All rights reserved For my wonderful parents Peter and Linda Crisafulli In loving remembrance Virginia L. Tatman and Dorothy J. Crisafulli For my mentors, especially Joan Grimbert For Katie and Kara With thanks to The Two Martins TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………..............................x Introduction: Rebalancing Women Authors’ Lives and Works…………………………………..1 Part One: Questioning the Traditional Narrative about Louise d’Épinay and L’Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant Chapter One: Re-thinking Louise d’Épinay and L’Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant’s Place in Enlightenment Culture…………………………………………………………………23 Chapter Two: The Many Genres of Montbrillant………………………………………………..58 Chapter Three: Montbrillant’s Manuscript, Publication, and Reception History..………………80 Part Two: Reading Montbrillant as Roman pédagogique Chapter Four: Teaching and Learning by Example…………………………………….............114 Chapter Five: Mothers as Educators: The Example of Sévigné………………………………..133 Chapter Six: Reading Montbrillant as an Education in Sincerity………………………………156 Chapter Seven: How Montbrillant Co-opts Forms of Catholic Spirituality to Teach Sincerity .191 Chapter Eight: D’Épinay’s Reforms for the Family and the State……………………………..213 Part Three: Re-reading Montbrillant in Context iv Chapter Nine: Montbrillant: A New Chronology…………….………………………………...241 Chapter Ten: Montbrillant and the Miroir des princes…………………………………………267 Conclusion: D’Épinay’s Legacies……………………………………………………………....284 Epilogue: A Long Tradition…………………………………………………………………….303 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………324 v ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Sincerity and Social Transformation in the Work of Louise d’Épinay,” analyzes one eighteenth-century French philosophe’s proposal to educate girls to be very sincere as a way of rectifying social injustices built into the economic and legal systems of Ancien régime France. Louise d’Épinay (1726-1783) was the author of a novel, educational works, a prodigious correspondence with leading Enlightenment thinkers, and contributions to the clandestine literary journal the Correspondance littéraire, read by European heads of state. Her work has now largely been forgotten, especially outside of France. I argue that many of d’Épinay’s proposals for changing French society have been overlooked until now because one of her major works, L’Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, a nearly 2,000-page epistolary novel likely written over several years beginning in 1756, has been misread for over two centuries. Critics have long considered Montbrillant a thinly-disguised and scandalous memoir. Through close reading and extensive study of the manuscripts of this work, I show that it is better understood as a roman pédagogique (or educational novel), according to the characteristics of the genre set forth by Robert Granderoute. Read as such, d’Épinay’s novel is just as much about pedagogy as those of her works traditionally classified as educational, Les Lettres à mon fils, written in 1756-1758, and Les Conversations d’Émilie, first published in 1774 and in an expanded edition first published in 1781. Read as a roman pédagogique, we can see that Montbrillant contains a curriculum for girls’ education that was radical for its time. Montbrillant presents readers with the exemplary life of Émilie, a poor noble, whom readers follow through her adolescence and adulthood, through an unhappy and abusive marriage and financial struggles, through childbirth and the separation of her assets from those of her vi husband; they witness her “mis-education” and discovery of the principles that will become the basis of her educational program when she becomes an educator in her own right. As a poor noble, Émilie has difficulties meeting the dowry requirements of a noble suitor of old aristocratic stock and instead marries her cousin, a fermier général (or tax collector). Though wealthy, Monsieur de Montbrillant’s unrestrained spending and lack of empathy and foresight reduce his wife and children to poverty and thus leave Émilie’s daughter, Pauline, without marriage prospects and virtually no other options but to enter a convent, which, d’Épinay argues, should be reserved for those with a vocation. The challenge, then, is to find a way to get Pauline married to a gentleman who has noble values and can provide for her, even though she might not have a dowry. Émilie thinks the solution lies in the education she provides for Pauline; it will develop her character and intelligence, and these qualities, and her sincerity especially, will be worth much more than the missing dowry. Based on intensive reading, writing, conversation, and introspection, d’Épinay’s educational curriculum reinvents for the Enlightenment a philosophical tradition we can trace back to the seventeenth century and the great French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné. D’Épinay thought girls were as capable as boys of using reason, reading and writing, learning from direct experience, and grappling with abstract concepts. Moreover, she thought girls must learn to do all of these things, both for their own happiness and that of their future husbands, as she championed a new type of companionate marriage based on intellectual and moral compatibility between two spouses rather than the size of the woman’s dowry. Montbrillant also offers practical guidance for its female readers by including examples of legal documents such as a separation of assets and a marriage contract, as well as scenes that illustrate how women can maximize their economic and legal agency within the framework of a system that is structurally vii biased against them. D’Épinay rejected conventional educational methods – sending girls off to a convent and boys to a collège with a précepteur – and she shows mothers ways they can teach their children at home in order to prepare them for this new type of marriage. D’Épinay shows women readers that it is necessary that they teach their children themselves and shows them how they can secure the right to do so and how to teach effectively. Above all, d’Épinay advocates teaching girls to be very sincere. She believes that not only will their sincerity be worth more than a dowry to those worthy men capable of recognizing it, it is also the quality that, more than any other, will transform marriage from an unequal, often abusive hierarchy into a partnership of equals, and that will allow women to acknowledge their common oppression. My reading shows that d’Épinay’s educational curriculum was meant not only to change the foundations of the family but also to transform a corrupt state nonviolently, an alternative to revolution. Part One of this study explores the educational preoccupations that we can trace throughout d’Épinay’s career and argues that although it has been classified almost exclusively as a memoir or autobiographical novel for the last two hundred years, Montbrillant actually displays the formal characteristics of many genres. This section also explains that Montbrillant came to be labeled as autobiographical because nineteenth-century editors, eager to make a profit from the revelations Montbrillant is thought to contain about famous men, transformed the text into a memoir. Modern editions and criticism bear the marks of this purposeful deformation. Part Two presents a reading of Montbrillant as roman pédagogique, showing how educational aims are central to the novel’s very construction. Critics have long presumed that d’Épinay got the majority of her educational ideas from her well-known contemporary Jean- Jacques Rousseau. I show that while d’Épinay did consult her contemporaries, she also drew inspiration from her seventeenth-century predecessor Mme de Sévigné. Sévigné and d’Épinay viii both form part of a network of women looking to other women for reflections on education, particularly women’s education. In examining d’Épinay’s intellectual and moral curriculum in detail, I show that she planned to inculcate sincerity using forms of Catholic spirituality, stripped of their religious content, including a daily examination of conscience and reliance on a secular “spiritual” director for guidance. Finally, Part Two explains how d’Épinay’s proposals for changing education, in particular the education of girls, would have had the potential to transform the State nonviolently, starting from the level of the individual family unit. Part Three reinscribes Montbrillant, newly understood as roman pédagogique, back into its context, and argues that the work may have been conceived of and written earlier than critics think and that it can be seen as a response to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Hélöise and a source of inspiration for Émile, ou de l’éducation. This section also shows that, along with 1755 essays by d’Épinay’s lover and longtime literary collaborator, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, then- editor of the Correspondance littéraire, and d’Épinay’s Lettres à mon fils, d’Épinay’s Montbrillant must in last analysis be understood as part of a larger project intended to broadcast a new form of education – based on a secular catechism centered on the love of virtue and truth
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