Figures controversees: Retif de La Bretonne (1734--1806) et la femme.

Abstract

This thesis proposes a synthetic analysis of his contradictory attitudes toward the female sex. The author's obsessive ambivalence toward the feminine, it is argued, signals a complex personality ill at ease with eighteenth-century expectations of masculinity. To situate this argument, Chapter 1 gives an overview of the representation and status of women in Ancien Regime France. Within this literary and historical context, the next chapters develop close readings drawn from the range of Retif's works. Chapter 2 examines traditionalist or retrogressive elements in his writing. The third chapter analyzes contrastingly progressive notions that suggest an early form of feminism. The antithetical currents brought forward in these chapters parallel ambiguities in the author's own literary persona, analyzed in Chapter 4. Retifs women ultimately mirror the author's own psychopathology. His contradictory portraits figure fault lines in a masculine self whose full realization entailed painful deviance from the ideal.

The French novelist and reformer Retif de la Bretonne devoted his life to writing about his own experiences and in particular his numerous encounters with women. His works---whether fiction, autobiography, or non-fictional treatise---detail both unusually complete and strikingly contradictory portraits of feminine figures in Ancien Regime France. Retif defends women's merits and expresses a reformist's concern for their precarious social status. Elsewhere, round criticism of failings seen as typically feminine undermines the progressive tendencies. Correspondingly, scholarly analyses of Retif s writing either ascribe to him a traditionalist viewpoint that denigrates women as members of the second sex, or trumpet his virtues as an early champion of women's rights.