Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos

by Christine Roulston

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This book analyzes the ways in which female virtue was tied to a new concept of authenticity in 18th-century sentimental fiction, producing a redefiniton of gender relations on the one hand and a re-examination of the value and place of fictional narrative on the other.

As the old values of the aristocracy were being overturned and it was no longer possible simply to equate personal worth with rank or title, a new narrative protagonist was born--someone who was authentic, virtuous, and usually female. New questions arose at the same time: What kind of language could represent this authentic self? How far should the virtuous subject be tested, and what is the role of the reader in the process?

With in-depth analysis of four important 18th-century epistolary novels--Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Les Liaisons dangereuses--Christine Roulston shows that the female protagonist in these works is forced to protect her body and her writing from violation. She argues that a disturbing equation emerges between revealing the female body and revealing a female sensibility and, therefore, between pleasure--both narrative and visual--and virtue. Concluding with Les liaisons dangereuses and the end of the sentimental narrative tradition, Roulston questions even the possibility of sustaining authentic language. In these four texts, she says, writing becomes an ideological as well as a literary tool for the establishment of new cultural values.


Christine Roulston is assistant professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her articles have appeared in Dalhousie French Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

1998. 224 pp. 6 X 9.

Notes, bibliography, index.

    Cloth, $55.00

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"Deftly navigating the accumulated recent scholarship, Roulston presents a pithy and ingenious synthesis. This volume would be a good place to send beginning graduate students grappling with history of the novel and questions of realism, transparency in writing, authenticating the writing subject, and writing as a gendered performance, and as a performance of gender, in Judith Butler's sense." -- Choice

"Elegantly written and persuasively argued."--Janet Todd, University of East Anglia