Abstract
This chapter traces the history of de Gouges’s reception and refutes the calumny her reputation has suffered. It cites the work of a number of critics and names the ones who carry on the denigration as well as those who take her seriously and read her carefully.
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Notes
French titles will be translated in to English the first time they appear. Subsequent references will be abbreviated by a noun from the French title.
Here are some examples: Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne suivi de Préface pour les dames ou Le portrait des femmes, éd. Emanuèle Gaulier, 2003; Olympe de Gouges et les droits de la femme, éd. Sophie Mousset, 2003; Olympe de Gouges suivi de Les droits de la femme, éd. Rechte der Frau et Karl Heinz Burmeister, 1999; “Déclaration des Droits de la Femme”, in La Démocratie “à la Française” ou les femmes indésirables, Eliane Viennot (dir.)., 1996; Déclaration des Droits de la Femme, in A. de Baecque, D. Godineau, and M. Reberioux, Ils ont pensé les Droits de l’Homme, Textes et Débats, 1989.
See the Works Cited for references to those taking her seriously—Spencer and Verdier among others I mention—and to those who engage in deprecation—Brown, Conway, Scott, Vanpée, for example.
The article consists of plot summary (L’Entrée de Dumouriez …) and reference to the difficulties its author encountered in having it staged. Conway misuses the ubiquitous hopefully (213) and seems unaware of the existence of pronouns, repeating the proper name de Gouges up to five times per paragraph. Furthermore, she translates Candeille’s Catherine ou la belle fermière as “the beautiful farmer’s wife” (227). The character is no longer a wife. She manages a farm for a fellow aristocrat and employs her own servants.
De Gouges’s plays, however, show some empowerment of women resulting from assertion and solidarity on their part, qualities that women have undoubtedly shared for eons but that were rarely depicted in patriarchal theater. Two articles celebrating her feminism are Uwe Dethloff’s, which presents Condorcet’s beliefs, stressing their startling modernity and adding three paragraphs on de Gouges’s similarities, and Liliane Lazar’s brief notice written to acknowledge the appearance of Gisela Thiele-Knobloch’s edition of some of her plays. Pierre Darmon calls her and Condorcet militant feminists and notes that two centuries passed before their “ambitions prométhéennes” even began to be accomplished (194).
The play itself illustrates the occasional nature of composition: it was first called Zamor et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage, then L’esclavage des nègres ou …, then L’esclavage des noirs ou … The changes in titles reflect the increasing focus on racial injustice as well as on the news of the massive slave uprising that occurred in the Caribbean in 1792. The considerable differences between the first and third version augment the urgency of the pedagogical and political intent by resisting the possibility of violence and by insisting on natural right: the lost-and-found three-year-old disappears from the later version, and two adult female servants are added and given eloquent speeches in defense of such rights.
Two articles treating the play are Mary Jane Cowels’s on the subjectivity of the colonial subject and Gregory Brown’s “Abolitionism and Self-Fashioning” in which he finds de Gouges more self-promoting than feminist or abolitionist. One version of it is also translated and commented upon in Kadish and Massardier-Kenney.
In Cartesian Women, Erica Harth uses the term “gradualist solutions” to describe Montesquieu’s, Condorcet’s and de Gouges’s response to the difficulties of abolition (227).
The errors: Sophie was abandoned not at birth (287) but at age five (III.13); Zamor was adopted not at birth (288) but at age eight (I.8). He did not murder his master but the latter’s homme de confiance who tried to rape Mirza (286) (I.1). It matters that the playwright imagines these events as occurring when the children are capable of remembering the parent. It matters also that Zamor not be accused of killing his adoptive father.
Blanc (1989) describes Beaumarchais’s intrigues and de Gouges’s reactions on pages 51–52.
In a serious treatment of the preface to Chérubin, Isabelle DeMarte traces the persuasive roles the author assigns to herself.
Charles Roy wrote and circulated an epigram about the novelist and playwright Mme de Graffigny—not about her play Cénie, but about her person. English Showalter describes it like this: “It implies that ‘bel esprit’ is equivalent to prostitution for women no longer young and beautiful enough to earn a living from the latter” (109, n.9).
She shows the author’s steadily expanding vision of the French nation and of its inclusiveness. She enumerates also the increasing official remembrances of her established in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in France.
To take only two relatively mild examples of comment on the hatred of politically active women, in the section of her book that treats de Gouges’s reactions to Rousseau, Mary Trouille speculates that Mme Roland and Olympe de Gouges were killed for not staying in the domestic sphere, for transgressing “gender barriers” (Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997, 278). In their introduction to Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France, the editors Winn and Kuizenga note the comparison often made between woman’s speech and sexual indecency (xviii).
The literature on misogyny is of course vast. For a recent review of it, see Pierre Darmon’s Femme, repaire de tous les vices: misogynies et féministes en France (XVIe–XIXe siècles) 2012. Two of the descriptive terms he uses can be seen to highlight de Gouges’s originality: “paternalistic feminism” (220 et passim) praises woman while assigning her to gender-specific duties, and de Gouges’s radical view of equality of rights does not suffer this manoeuvre. Neither does the “contextual alibi” find favor with her; it “understands” certain practices as belonging to a social group instead of what she knows to be the absolute, un-relativized horror that they are (221 passim).
One is tempted to imagine that the male unconscious equates artistic production by females with their ability to give birth: both creations produce in men endless (counter-phobic) efforts at domination. De Gouges often saw her writing as she would her child. In her article on figures of speech used in the playwright’s preface to Chérubin, DeMarte finds various such metaphors, including her text as newborn (259, 263), as still-born (264, 265), as aborted (266), and as orphaned (278).
A further aspect much mentioned in the last decades is woman’s assignment to the private domain. Habermas and his discussants insist on the distinction between the public sphere and the private, but it must be nuanced for women especially. Trouille mentions a few examples of such works (376–377, n.2) in which the salon is seen as participating in both spheres. It is there that women taught and learned most freely—and became even more dangerous.
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© 2013 Carol L. Sherman
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Sherman, C.L. (2013). Reception. In: Reading Olympe de Gouges. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343062_2
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