Novelists Humanizing Male and Female Characters in 1800

Staël, Edgeworth, Austen, Charrière

Objective

By comparing texts and strategies, this class aims at situating Charrière, Edgeworth, Staël, and Austen in the context of contemporary gender constraints and the new concept of human rights, remembering what Virginia Woolf said of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman: as far as gender is concerned, their originality has become our commonplace.

Content

The general focus of the class is about the male and female characters created by novelists within the common paradigm of humanity in the aftermath of the French Revolution and its Declaration of Human Rights. The characters invented by Charrière, Edgeworth, Staël, and Austen contrast with previous eighteenth-century stereotypes of the masculine and the feminine, rendering problematic the generally accepted hierarchy between men and women.

Charrière’s Honorine and Florentin as well as her Sainte Anne and wonderful Mademoiselle d’Estival, Edgeworth’s Belinda and Clarence Hervey, Staël’s Corinne and Oswald, and, last but not least, Emma and Mr. Knightley radically question the stereotype of a self-evident binary difference between men and women. Qualities of the heart and those of the mind are shown to be common to them all and so is their moral judgment. Problematic gender expectations such as illustrated by secondary characters mean not only different possibilities of accessing universal categories for men and women but, also, different forms of social acceptance or rejection based on gender.

With these novelists, heroines and heroes are singled out because of their shared sense of humanity. Reading their novels together suggests how getting away from gender stereotypes is central to their definition of characters as heroic. Charrière, Edgeworth, Staël, and Austen were the offsprings of Enlightenment, but they renegotiated its philosophy and politics based on a male-centred concept of humanity in their fiction, where new kinds of men and women are being invented.