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Author Biography

Jennifer Law-Sullivan (Oakland University), Associate Professor of French, teaches undergraduate courses in nineteenth-century French literature, Francophone film and literature, and language. Her research interests include issues of gender, nation, mothering, and sexual anxiety in French Romanticism. She has published on Germaine de Staël, Flora Tristan, and Théophile Gautier. She is the President of the International Conference on Romanticism.

Abstract

Abstract: “The Secret(s) to Success: Genlis’s Guide to Raising a Foolproof Daughter”

Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore ou lettres sur l’éducation, first published in 1782, is an epistolary conduct novel that examines the question of how best to educate girls. Attempts to answer the question were exceedingly in vogue in the late 18th century and can be traced back to Fénelon’s 1681 Traité de l’éducation des filles. Genlis’s novel offers a robust critique of previous education treatises, Rousseau, and a patriarchal society that did little to educate girls and mothers. She couches her critique in a series of secrets that she uses as a means to disseminate and parcel out wisdom and knowledge. The mother in the novel, Madame d’Almane, closely holds on to each secret until the moment is right to share it with her newly empowered daughter, Adèle. I argue that the work uses these secrets to demonstrate to readers how to raise a daughter who would thrive in a world chockfull of pitfalls and dangers for the unsuspecting girl and naïve mother. In the context of 18th-century France, when women had to be creative when it came to finding agency, secrets were a powerful tool. Genlis’s deft handling of secrets coupled with her conception of the inherent quality of both the secrets themselves and the secret keepers, show us just how precarious a woman’s position was and how careful a woman had to be in acquiring and sharing knowledge.

Keywords

Genlis, Secrets, Mothers, Daughters, Education

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