Male and Female Roles in the Eighteenth Century

A contemporary of the French philosophes and in subtle dialogue with them, Isabelle de Charrière weaves a compelling novelistic framework that intrigues readers of women's writing. This study focuses on novels by the 18th-century Charrière writing in francophone Switzerland. It explores her determination to dehierarchize the positions of male and female in 18th-century society and to reject the conventional ideal of human destiny. The study simultaneously traces the transition from an Ancien Régime concept of self, particularly the female self, to a Romantic conception of the individual and modern individualism through the evolution of character. In order to present new conclusions, it considers Charrière's novels within a «feminine tradition» dating from the 17th century and also in the light of current French feminist theory.

Auteur

The Author: Kathleen Jaeger received her Ph.D. in French from the University of Iowa. She is assistant professor of French at Graceland College, Lamoni, Iowa, and has taught at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, and at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. Her teaching experience also includes seventeen years in public education in Clinton, Cedar Falls, and Waterloo, Iowa.

Résumé
"As a novelist, Isabelle de Charrière is in many respects the Jane Austen of French literature, a subtle ironist on the everyday life of men and women during the 1760-1805 period. Although Charrière's novels have only recently become available in paperback editions, readers have long admired the wit and modernity of her writing. Kathleen Jaeger offers us the first book-length study of an important novelist who is only now coming into her own. Jaeger has fresh ideas about Charrière's best-known novels, but she has also made some fascinating discoveries about the lesser-known works, which alter our notions of how gender is represented in the eighteenth-century novel." (Janet Gurkin Altman, The University of Iowa)