Nicholas White

Book Review: Maria C. Scott: Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the FemaleStendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female. By ScottMaria C.Oxford: Legenda, 2013. Pp. 142. £40.00.

Legenda, an imprint of the MHRA and Maney, has played a remarkably significant role in the recent dissemination of ideas on European literature and culture, not least by scholars based in the UK and Ireland. In short, it is literally impossible to imagine the current state of European literary studies in this country without the achievements of Legenda. And within that output, its Research Monographs in French Studies, sponsored by the Society for French Studies, has played a particularly cherished role, until recently under the General Editorship of Ann Jefferson, and now of Diana Knight. The thirtyseventh volume in the series, by Maria Scott, follows in the wake of some excellent nineteenth-century volumes by the likes of Christopher Prendergast, Diana Knight and Jennifer Yee; and it sits well among such company. It is a truism to observe that Stendhal has long been associated with a particular sensitivity for feminine interests. Stendhal himself, of course, famously fantasized about future female readers who might properly understand his literary labours; and as Scott recalls, he is also a privileged figure in Simone de Beauvoir’s epoch-turning Le Deuxième Sexe. But for Scott, Beauvoir represents a problematic instance of the way in which ‘the influence of andocentric criticism reaches even into feminist criticism’:

Book Reviews : The Life of Céline. By Nicholas Hewitt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Pp. xvi + 360. £45.00

Babylone (1810), a play whose ’oriental’ setting (a supposed eighth-century Baghdad) is in effect a non-realistic context for a story of love and devotion. It offers a pre-orientalist exoticism, which she might have assimilated to certain forms of English Romanticism. To illustrate the way that with changes in society ideas of the Orient also changed, she has chosen an example of military or national drama, Victor Sejour’s Les Massacres de Syrie (1860), which purports to represent atrocities of the day, with implied consequences for the expansions of France’s empire. That in both of her chosen plays Pao should find inconsistencies, even contradictions, in the characterizations and plot situations, is not surprising. Quite how far these confusions can be interpreted as semiotic pointers to systematic social attitudes, and how much in terms of the competence of authors whose grasp of history, genre and characterization were not always of a high order, remains unclear. Nor is it ever clear whether she is claiming that some or all of the audiences of her plays believed them, or how the depictions in the plays might have contributed to French political life. The implicit tendency of the book is to valorise genre over discourse. Pao’s work has many merits along the way, including bringing out the compliments that censors paid to the prompt recognition by the theatregoing audience of allusions to contemporary situations. The exotic is thus dangerous not because it is foreign and different, but because it is domestic and the same. This is, however, a reminder of how little imagined places have to do with real ones. There is an interesting, potentially contradictory moment towards her conclusion which suggests that despite the shifts between her two spectacles, fantasy-exoticism was never replaced by empire-orientalism. In a series of all-too-brief references to film, she reminds us that celluloid sheikhs preserved popular erotic wishes and anxieties.

Reviews : Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse. By Marie-Christine Leps. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 262. £13.50

particularly powerful. It is rare to read such an original interpretation, rarer still to find an interpretation which suggests a model for future work. With remarkable sure-footedness, Dr Leask finds his own way around the binary polarities posited by recent trends in ’orientalist’ interpretations of the expansion of Europe; he knows the work of Said, Bhabha, Parry, but avoids their essentialist insistence upon a series of simple relationships of power. His research into the forgotten poems and novels of the period compels respect, and the book is full of revealing moments about numerous ’minor’ writers. Reservations might be expressed about the psychoanalytic categories called into play throughout the text, or the readiness to see analogy as a demonstration, but by and large these are convincing readings, and it is to be hoped that the book attracts a readership beyond literary critics of romantic poetry. Literature which changes the way we think, whether it be Don Juan or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, plays its part in our attitudes to

Reviews : French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Material World. Essays in Honour of D.G. Charlton. Ed. by Brian Rigby. Basingstoke: Macmillan,1993. Pp. x + 233. £ 40.00

Using object-relations theory on Adolphe, Mossman charts the absence of the maternal which forms a sub-plot to a son-father relation premised on an economics of time and correspondence, ’a system of symbolic exchange in which, during each transaction, something is left over’ (p. 82). It is this surplus-value that ’claims Ellenore’ (p. 87). By contrast to this masculine structure, the feminine-maternal (a somewhat easy use of Kristeva here) surfaces in ’rhythmic clusters which bear the stigmata of the body’ (p. 97). All through ’this lexically bland novel’ (p. 123), a matricide is carefully plotted, culminating in the slow strangulation of Ellenore’s voice. In the third and last ’Cycle’, Rousseau leads the way to Michelet, Zola and most other male nineteenth-century French authors. Here, ’a politics of anxiety’ (p. 140) expresses itself through ’a cartography of uterine annexation’ (p. 140) or ’mind over mater’ (p. 143). Rousseau’s use of the maternal image in both literal (tmile) and figurative modes (Du Contrat social) is picked over to trace the lost body in the ’body politick’. Once again, there is no mother: Emile is appropriated even prenatally by conscientious