Table Of ContentReading Olympe de Gouges
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
Reading Olympe de
Gouges
Carol L. Sherman
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
reading olympe de gouges
Copyright © Carol L. Sherman, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-34645-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–34306–2 PDF
ISBN: 978-1-349-46694-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2013
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137343062
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction
Reception
La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la
citoyenne 7
L’Esclavage des noirs 8
The Drama of Rhetoric
The daughter: Le Mémoire de Mme
de Valmont 21
The citizen: letters 33
The Rhetoric of Drama
Schools for husbands 51
Schools for wives 67
Children and friends 79
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062 v
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment is hereby made for permission to reprint
material from the article entitled “Polyphony and persua-
sion in de Gouges’s Mémoire de Madame de Valmont” in
New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 6 (Spring 2009)
edited by Samia Spencer and published by the Southeastern
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Acknowledgment is hereby made for permission to
reprint material from the chapter titled “Diderot and
Olympe de Gouges Convert the Tyrant and Transform the
Family” in New Essays on Diderot edited by James Fowler
and published by the Cambridge University Press in 2011.
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
Introduction
Abstract: An overview of the author is followed by mention
of the neglect and distortion her reputation has suffered.
The remedy will be to situate the latter in misogyny and
to read her carefully. The benefits of this approach are
enumerated, and her founding principles are described.
Sherman, Carol L. Reading Olympe de Gouges. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi: 10.1057/9781137343062.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
Reading Olympe de Gouges
In the last two-hundred years, critics have devoted most of their
writings on de Gouges to the story of her life, but in my opinion,
this emphasis on biography has largely contributed to diverting
attention from her literary work.
—Marie-Pierre LeHir (283, n.1)
It is to her literary work that I pay attention. The interest her life events
provoke can only be increased by careful reading of what she wrote. For
more than two centuries, a large portion of commentary has attached
epithets to her name—illiterate, uneducated, immoral, insane—instead
of talking about what she says. Chapter 1 in this book describes these
accusations and their probable causes. Her writings deserve to be read
first of all and to be read with attention to the political and moral ideas
expressed; they should not be ignored because of the fevered repetition
of calumnies that are said to describe her.
All artists reveal their contexts to a greater or lesser extent, but few
more transparently than Olympe de Gouges. Far from claiming time-
less value for her creations, she most often foregrounds their occasional
nature, the rapidity with which she wrote them and her ambivalent views
of her own talents. Somber pedant she is not. Shortly before and during
the first years of the French Revolution, her writings show her both as
observer of events and as someone who wants to influence them. She
blends autobiography with literary creation—this is her coherence—and
believing that certain rights are natural, she lived in concert with her
belief. She conducted all her activities at full tilt, writing, printing and
distributing her texts as fast as she could, on fire with the sense of oppor-
tunity for change in favor of those without power and for the creation
of a just nation. Trying to have her plays performed, she suffered the
immense frustration of dealing with societies of actors, themselves often
influenced by their sponsors. They often exhibited passive aggression
toward this author who had not quite arrived, a female playwright who
lacked the kinds of power—financial and social—at play. The obstacles
to her success and finally to her life itself were many, and they have
led to more than two centuries of distortion and neglect by critics and
historians.
The central thesis of this study is that neglect and deprecation have
their origins in misogyny, that is, in causes having little to do with
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
Introduction
assessment of the artistry and thought her writings express. Rhetorical—
that is, persuasive—skill and ingeniousness in composition of her plays
and essays mark her as an artist and thinker. In a few short years, she
conducted an evolving enrichment of her observations and texts. Her
remarkable evolution was both formal and thematic.
This approach—to situate the distortions and to read her carefully – is
needed because a rich, complex, and appealing voice has been obfuscated
or lost. Critics have begun to notice her abolitionist and feminist ideas,
remarkable in going against the grain of her contemporaries, but the
same persons neglect the rest of her writing as if her thoughts about race
and gender were accidental, mere lucky finds she mentioned in passing
without much thought or understanding.
The benefits of this approach are many.
For literary history, and specifically for the evolution of bourgeois
drama, de Gouges grasps the potential of the form and enriches it mightily.
Her plays exemplify the form’s opening out to multiple classes, ages, races,
and sexes. Sealed, orderly structures—private and public—are exploded
and expanded; the old rules are broken.
In the history of women, she is rare and perhaps unique in taking the
public stage and in taking the nation as her concern. Courageous and
committed, she adopts the Ciceronian viewpoint, that orating makes the
statesman and is not an academic exercise. She is Europe’s first—and for
a long time, the only—stateswoman.
Furthermore, in a complete history of the French Revolution, she
cannot be ignored. Both actor and observer, she is rare also in that she
situated and named what was happening. She had a meta-vision from
which she predicted and tried to halt the devolution that she feared.
Another benefit of these observations arises from the structural
parallels between family and state under the Old Regime and from the
fact that theater, the most social of literary genres, endlessly represents
families. Changes in dramatic presentation reflect ways in which social
identities and personal identities are entering into conflict before the
French Revolution and, with de Gouges, during it. The gradual increase
in the value attributed to the individual accompanied the period’s inven-
tion of natural right, and these shifts gradually affected patriarchal and
absolutist views of both the family and the state. Her writings experi-
ment with new ways of seeing power in families, new value assigned to
fidelity and to children, and new and evolving concepts of governing
the state.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137343062
