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PARTISANREVIEW
anything but the modest virtues of modern liberty. ("Is he another Dan–
ton? ," Mathilde de la Ml)le asks herself when comparing Julien Sorel to
the bland young men of good society.) When, on the other hand,
Flaubert evokes Emma Bovary's youth, it is to recall her fascination for
the gallantry of centuries past and for the loves of the old Duke of
Laverdiere.
Beyond any manifest political divisions, what French literature of
the nineteenth century displays is less a simple nostalgia for an aristocratic
or revolutionary past than a continual effort to prevent the post-revolu–
tionary world (bourgeois or democratic) from falling into boredom
or
immobility by taking itself to be the end of history or nature's highest
achievement. And although it would be futile to extract a specific pro–
gram for reforming manners and passions from the aspirations expressed in
the novels, in the poetry, or in the lives of artists during this period, one
does note the search for a certain
stylization
appropriate to modern life.
Whether this search for a modern style bears any relation to the subse–
quent development of modern French society is difficult to gauge; but
when one compares the histories of women's emancipation and feminism
in France and the United States, one cannot help noticing a certain
French exceptionalism that may be reflected in these literary develop–
ments.
In the United States, for example, the emancipation of women was
rooted in the particular structure of American families, which, from the
colonial and revolutionary periods, progressively weakened traditional
patriarchy in a society that had also rejected "aristocratic" ideals such as
gallantry. But it was especially in the nineteenth century, from the 1850s
to the end of the Civil War, that American feminism acquired its most
remarkable characteristics: it began as a radical but respectable movement
among abolitionists whose demands soon influenced a rather large group
of urban bourgeois women. In France, on the contrary, the first feminists
played much more provocative roles as artists (George Sand) and activists
in socialist and revolutionary movements. This was far more difficult,
since it was necessary for these women both to overcome the relatively
narrow perspective of their privileged artistic (and often aristocratic) sur–
roundings, and to find a place in a political sphere which, at least since
the age of Proudhon and the revolutionary unionists, nourished a strong
masculine cult of heroes. Despite its long refusal to grant women's suf–
frage, the French republic would also play a certain role in later exten–
sions of sexual equality - notably in the slow assimilation of women into
the school system - but such advances were much more the fruit of cen–
tral state action than of independent social movements, as in the United
States.
Among its most radical representatives, American feminism finds its
