The four participants are a mix of assistant professors at different stages and a full professor from different institutions, all with a dedicated interest in issues of gender and women’s writing. After a brief introduction, (1-2 minutes each), panelists will present for 12 minutes each, then participate in a discussion with the audience (15-20 minutes total).
The panel will begin with two papers on seventeenth century memoirs and the writing of female narrative resilience within the context of social precarity. First, one panelist will analyze Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Countess de Murat’s Mémoires (1697) as a manual of resilience. The Mémoires expose the hazards that the late seventeenth-century French reputation economy posed for women by foregrounding the extreme amount of resilience required of those whose reputations had been unfairly damaged. While it is generally assumed that a woman’s loss of reputation occurred as a result of male treachery or female jealousy, Murat’s Mémoires repeatedly identifies novelistic fiction as one of the most dangerous threats to female resilience by fostering unrealistic expectations of social outcomes and leaving women ill-equipped for a reality governed by gossip and precarity. By replacing romantic tropes with a survivalist model of wit and endurance, the Mémoires function as a cautionary yet empowering manual of resilience for women whose lives do not conform to social norms.
Our second panelist will turn to Marie-Catherine de Villedieu’s Les Mémoires d’Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1671) and its theorization of female alliances and informal infrastructures of resilience. Situating the novel within the cultural memory of the Fronde, this talk examines how Villedieu relocates women’s collective agency from the unstable sphere of public politics to networks of sociability and mutual assistance. Through this relocation, she offers an alternative vision of community in which female solidarity becomes a crucial strategy for navigating the precarious social landscape of early modern France.
The second half of the panel will move from the memoir genre to other forms of writing to examine other strategies of writing resilience and to put the 17th century in dialogue with the 18th. The third panelist builds on our prior discussion of individual versus collective strategies of resilience by comparing two Revolutionary women’s political writings: Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Charlotte de Corday’s testimony after her assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. This paper will argue that these texts allowed their authors to contest their subjugation and erasure in the revolutionary and Enlightenment projects and to call upon their fellow women to do the same. In so doing, both women construct resilience as a notion grounded in reason, justice, and self-representation.
The final paper will leverage affect theory to construct a new reading of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné’s Lettres. Although critics have long commented upon the gendered cultivation of wit and sociability in her epistolary collection, its affective dimension remains understudied. Building from a close reading of Sévigné’s letters about Nicolas Fouquet’s trial (1663-1665), this paper connects resilience back to networks of political resistance while also revealing the destabilizing impact of joyful affect in such collectivist projects. Joy, in this account, is a powerful yet destabilizing force which pitches the individual woman against her peers, thereby threatening both the political project of resistance and its social cultivation in the epistolary genre.
Taken together, these papers offer four new approaches to the question of women’s resistance and resilience in the face of war, revolution, gender discrimination and political repression in the 17th and 18th centuries.