ABSTRACT

In response to the unprecedented number of women authors in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century France, a debate arose concerning the merits and distinctive qualities of women’s writing. A myth of a distinctly feminine style resulted, one that called for a woman’s writing style to directly reflect her femininity or womanliness. Contemporary critics most often associated a feminine style with ‘delicatesse’ (delicacy), ‘naturel’ (naturalness), ‘aisance’ (ease), ‘negligence’ (nonchalance), and ‘absence de recherche’ (absence of research). Two new qualifiers-‘spontaneity’ (spontaneity) and ‘instinct involontaire’ (involuntary instinct)—were added to this list in the eighteenth century, due to new theories of sensibility which related women’s heightened emotionality to their biology.1 In a letter to Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, for example, Choderlos de Laclos expressed the century-old literary commonplace that women communicate their womanly charms to the written page with ease; he ends by likening Riccoboni’s own text to a simple reflection of herself:

Ironically, Riccoboni began her writing career, not by imagining her own heroine, but by demonstrating her stylistic virtuosity when she overheard a challenge that no one could imitate the style of Marivaux. The continuation she wrote of his unfinished novel La Vie de Marianne was so convincing and well received that Marivaux was forced to acknowledge publicly the identity of the real author. Thus, from the beginning, Riccoboni excelled at imitating contemporary versions of a woman’s style 3

According to her compatriots, Riccoboni remained within the domain of ‘feminine’ writing.4 The discourse of authenticity within Riccoboni’s first novel was meant to prove that the letters that comprised it were not the result of art. Ironically, however, her

fictional construction was so powerful that it created an enduring myth of her novel as autobiographical. In this chapter, I study the production and reception of a so-called gendered writing in Riccoboni’s Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd in order to show how women’s writing comes to be valued. Riccoboni is an especially intriguing choice of study, since she both fits and challenges the dominant orders of gender and writing. Her novel conformed to culturally acceptable notions of ‘feminine" writing at the same time as it portrayed a strong heroine who denounces sexual double standards.5 Riccoboni chose the conventional format of love-letters, but her heroine unconventionally discovers a passion for writing that turns her into an author when she decides to publish her letters 6 By defining her heroine’s text as quintessentially feminine, Riccoboni sets it apart from the writing of men. The portrayal of Fanni’s writing as ‘true,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘spontaneous’ aims to deny the artful nature of her text. However, the heroine plainly revels in her literary talent and takes deep pleasure in writing. Her lover’s absence and her letters are the pretext-both precondition and justification-for displaying her verbal prowess.