Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France
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A01=Mary McAlpin
Author_Mary McAlpin
Category=DSBF
Category=QDHM
Choderlos De Laclos
Corday
De La Croix
De Merteuil
Des Grieux
Eighteenth Century French Culture
Eighteenth Century French Society
eighteenth-century medicine
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
female puberty medicalisation
French Enlightenment discourse
furor
gendered subjectivity
Genital Fluids
Green Sickness
histoire
hygiene
Hygiene Treatises
jean
Jean Antoine Nicolas De Caritat
Jean Baptiste Greuze
jeanne
Julie's Scars
La Caze
Laurent Versini
Madame De Merteuil
marie
Marquis De Condorcet
Marquise De Merteuil
Mme De Merteuil
Montpellier Vitalism
moral decline theory
naturelle
Private Memoir
riccoboni
Sade's Late Century
surveillance of adolescence
treatises
uterine
Uterine Furor
Vicomte De Valmont
vitalist physiology
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409422419
- Weight: 521g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In her study of eighteenth-century literature and medical treatises, Mary McAlpin takes up the widespread belief among cultural philosophers of the French Enlightenment that society was gravely endangered by the effects of hyper-civilization. McAlpin's study explores a strong thread in this rhetoric of decline: the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls, supposedly brought on by their exposure to lascivious images, titillating novels, and lewd conversations, was the source of an increasing moral and physical degeneration. In how-to hygiene books intended for parents, the medical community declared that the only cure for this obviously involuntary departure from the "natural" path of sexual development was the increased surveillance of young girls. As these treatises by vitalist and vitalist-inspired physiologists became increasingly common in the 1760s, McAlpin shows, so, too, did the presence of young, vulnerable, and virginal heroines in the era's novels. Analyzing novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Choderlos de Laclos, she offers physiologically based readings of many of the period's most famous heroines within the context of an eighteenth-century discourse on women and heterosexual desire that broke with earlier periods in recasting female and male desire as qualitatively distinct. Her study persuasively argues that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force-Freud's "dark continent"-has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.
Mary McAlpin is Associate Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, USA.
