Intertexts

I n t r o d u c t i o n S h a r o n D i a n e N e l l T e x a s T e c h u n i v e r s i t y La femme, au dix-huitieme siecle, est le principe qui governe, la raison qui dirige, la voix qui commande. Elle est la cause universelle et fatale, Torigine des evenements, la source des choses. ...Elle ordonne ala cour, elle est maitresse au foyer. Les revolutions des alliances et des systemes, la paix, la guerre, les lettres, les arts, les modes du dix-huitieme siecle aussi bien que ses destinees, elle les porte dans sa robe, elle les plie ason caprice ou ases passions. Elle fait les abaissements et les elevations. (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La femme au dix-huitieme siecle 371-72) [Woman, in the eighteenth century, is the principle that governs, the reason that directs, the voice that commands. She is the universal and fetal cause, the origin of events, the source of things. ...She orders at court, she is the mistress of her home. The revolutions of alUances and systems, peace, war, letters, arts, the fashion as well as the destinies of the eighteenth-century— she holds them in her gown, she bends them to her caprice or to her passions. She brings low and she exalts.^] The articles in this issue of Intertexts were presented at the Thirty-Third AnnualTexasTechUniversityComparativeLiteratureSymposium,“Woman in the Eighteenth Century,” January 27-29, 2000. The idea for this confer¬ encedatesto1996whenIparticipatedinanNEHSummerSeminarforCol¬ legeTeachers,entitled“Women’sPlace:Women,Marriage,Sex,andRepro¬ ductioninEighteenth-CenturyFrance”anddirectedbyCarolBlumand Madelyn Gutwirth. “Woman in the Eighteenth Century” continues and ex¬ pands the dialogues begun during that seminar. The seminar debated issues that are neither new nor resolved. In fact, the Goncourt brothers’ assessment of the power of women in eighteenth-century Francemaybecalledintoquestionbylatetwentieth-centuryscholars(Brady 130; Starobinski 55). But, as the papers in this issue demonstrate, what EdmondandJulessaidofWoman’sreignispertinentinwaystheyneverantic¬ ipated.La/ewmeliterallyfoughtinrevolutions;she“broughtlowandexalted intheliteraryfield;shewasthemistress—bothasmotherandasguardian of her home.At the same time, through actions that blur the distinction be¬ tween public and private, she elicited the “repressed anxieties and resent¬ ments” (Gutwirth 79) of eighteenth-century male writers who, like the nine¬ teenth-century Goncourts, found it necessary to project “caprice” and un¬ predictable “passions” onto her. The purpose of the present issue, however, is not to simplify and generalize in the manner of the Goncourt brothers, nor, within the limited scope of ajournal issue, to exhaust the topic. Our purpose, rather, is to celebrate the complexities of eighteenth-century Woman while wecontinuetoexpandourideasofwhatwaspossibleforhertoaccomplish 9 1 9 2 I N T E R T E X T S and, at the same time, to interrogate her fictional representation in the texts of the period. In this issue of Intertexts, Woman reigns supreme. The first article, Abbie L. Cory’s “Women, Rebellion, and Republican¬ ism: The United Irish Risings of 1798 and 1803,” deconstructs the oppositional models of Jurgen Habermas and Nancy Armstrong who see women as relegated to the domestic sphere while men participate in “manly” republicanactivities.TheinadequaciesofthesemodelsbecomeclearinCory’s essay.IntheUnitedIrishrisingsofthelateeighteenthandearlynineteenth centuries, both Catholic and Protestant women, particularly working-class women, exceeded the acceptable, “appropriate” role of women in political cropping their hair, smuggling guns, even fighting and dying on ^ While women did participate in traditional activities to support testrugglebypreparingfoodforsoldiersandcaringforthewounded,they oenmaskedtheirpoliticalactivitieswiththetrappingsofthedomestic—by carryingtheirbabies,forexample,duringmissions.TheHabermasiandefinilonothe “classic”publicsphereexcludeswomen,butProfessorCoryshows at women such asAnne Devlin, Martha McTier and Rose Hope did particiP ^*''ate and public political activities. Professor Cory thus rePaces the private/public opposition with amodel in which realms of official ersus unofficial operate in interconnected ways and feature other factors, suchasreligion,classandgender. CO Salonnieres: Reclaiming the Literary Field,” Aurora Wolfgang wolna^? “epicenter” of the literary world in the eighteenth century, the Profes" ^ todayweequateliterarysuccesswithpublication, pated foil . demonstratesthatsalonnieresandtheirsalonsparticifact th eighteenth-century literary field. In Diderot’s opinion, in forded awA " important than publication because the salon afmanv audience.Noblemen,statesmen,artists,andwritersinvested week attending the salons of famous salonnieres such as Mme Lesniniic’c "'j Lambert, Mme de Tencin, Mme du Deffand, Julie de know Necker. In order to be successful...