The Boudoir in Philosophy, or Knowing Bodies in French Fiction

Abstract

Writing toward the end of the eighteenth century, Jean-François Marmontel characterized the essential formal difference between French and English novels as primarily one of rhetoric. Marmontel held that the oratory and bombast of French fiction contrasted sharply with the simple, straightforward expression typical of English novels, which he believed best suited for narrating both factual truth and plain moral virtue. The English have put into their novels “neither the elegance nor the flamboyance nor the facile grace of our licentious novels…” he wrote, “but with their natural style alone, which they have made interesting and profoundly philosophical, they have gathered into their novels the highest degree of realism, pathos, truth, and high moral tone.”¹ A decade later, in 1797, Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan seconded that view, writing that while English novels have “the merit of offering up a faithful depiction of morals, of men, and of a nation,” French novels “are almost all devoid of style and invention …. A great number [of them] … offer up only unintelligible babble and uncontrolled imagination with no real substance.”² One hundred and fifty years later, Ian Watt opined that eighteenth-century French fiction “stands outside the main tradition of the novel” for the same rhetorical reasons: “For all its psychological penetration and literary skill, we feel it is too stylish to be authentic.”³