ABSTRACT
By 1782, the feminine-voice novel was no longer a literaiy battleground for traditional critics and modem writers, as it had been in Marivaux’s day, half a century before. A significant production of feminine-voice narratives by talented authors from France and England-from the bestsellers of Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Rousseau to those of Richardson and Defoe-had caused its prestige to rise exponentially. Thus, when Choderlos de Laclos came to the novel, he entered a conquered terrain, a field in which he needed to show his own particular mastery of the female voice in order to outperform his illustrious predecessors. Laclos did just that; for, as Susan K. Jackson observed, the masterpiece status now conferred on Laclos5s novel overshadows and silences the tradition of women’s writing from which it sprang. Indeed, Laclos’s genius lies in his stylistic manipulation of multiple feminine types. 'The novel’s virtuosity,5 Jacksonnotes, ‘depends less on superficial ventriloquism than on the wide-ranging possibilities of the novelist’s own inner voice, on his feeling equally at home in the three registers of mastery, co-mastery, and victimization. ’1 From these multiple positions, Laclos mocked and contested this established genre which had imbued women’s writing with sincere, natural, and moral qualities.
