Eighteenth Century Fiction

This book follows several strands: the study of seduction as the master trope of eighteenth-century literature, the focus on reading as creating a suspect response of mimetic identification, the culture of the book in the eighteenth century, and the fears associated with novels. There have been many studies of libertine material in recent years, but Paul Young’s interesting move in his book is to connect these libertine novels to the traditional novel and the anxieties about the genre.

Chapter 1 situates more precisely the objectives of the book and is the most intriguing of the five, as it is devoted to cultural and historical documents. The author focuses on the way “reading was coded as seductive in eighteenth-century France” (8). More to the point, and drawing on the work by Jean-Marie Goulemot and Robert Darnton, he puts into context the monitoring of the reader attempted by a number of pastoral texts that condemn “bad books” (mostly novels singled out for their capacity to pervert). He quotes some Catholic authors and Christian orators who campaigned against reading these impious books (Ambroise Lalouette, Dupuy La Chapelle, Antoine Dorsanne) and later in the century, in 1768, a certain Simon Paris, a lawyer at the Parlement with a declared Rousseauian influence. The chapter opposes the spectacle of repression of impious books with solitary reading viewed as a perilous moment for the individual. Young studies this in the context of the rise of literacy in the eighteenth century, reading as a private activity, and emulation as a sensitive factor for the reader.

Chapter 2 starts with the analysis of two pornographic best-sellers of the 1740s, Thérèse philosophe, attributed to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Argens, and Dom Bougre by Gervaise de Latouche. Young succeeds in providing an original reading of these novels. His analysis of volupté in these works stresses, however, what appears paradoxically as unarousing in the two novels. Young introduces this notion that combines pleasure with responsibility and intellect, in other words a superior form of pleasure. In Thérèse, the author insists on the “pitfalls” and dangers of the uses of pleasure. And in Dom Bougre particularly, he uncovers a series of dramatic pathologies of the main character (castration, impotence). Young examines how sex becomes challenged in the novel by risk and death. Dom Bougre paradoxically sets up a series of episodes of “depreciation of sex” (50), antagonistic to the erotic tale. The author analyses the way the novel incorporates disgust and dissatisfaction.

This leads him to chapter 3 and the study of the rediscovered popular novella by Jean-François de Bastide, La Petite maison. I thought there was nothing left to be said about this little text, but Young proves me wrong. He insists on the contradictions of private and public in the text. [End Page 386] He concentrates unusually on the seducer of the plot, Trémicour, and explores his “sincerity” in a complex debate about reading and misreading of interiority and exteriority put forth by Bastide. Young analyses Trémicour’s ambiguous place in the lineage of libertine characters, his mastery of the plot of seduction that he directs against Mélite, as he engages in a form of passivity towards his quest. It is Trémicour’s own interiority that is explored: the seducer offers his collection of “things” as “guarantor for sincerity” (66). Bringing into context the original ending of the novella, Young focuses on Trémicour’s libertinage, comparing him to the Versac of Crébillon’s Égarements. Young argues, placing La Petite maison into a more general cultural context, that the text articulates a critique of libertinage, with Bastide’s lament of transparency.

This same reading against the grain can be seen in his analysis of La Nouvelle Héloïse in chapter 4, a seminal chapter in the book, given Rousseau’s own ambiguous response to the anxiety about the novel and its seductive power. But Young interprets Julie against...