Suffering Scholars by Vila Anne C.;

Author:Vila, Anne C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Sexual Dimorphism and the Dilemma of Learned Women: Staël’s Corinne

Whatever their personal motives for citing certain literary writers, the early French alienists contributed to the practice of pathography that became widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, taking such forms as phrenology, “cerebral biographies,” and the school of “physiological” literary criticism.78 Pinel summed up the logic behind those endeavors when he asked rhetorically “Can the physician remain a stranger to the history of the most intense human passions, since these are the most frequent causes of mental alienation? And from that point on, shouldn’t he study the lives of people who have been the most famous through their ambition for glory, their enthusiasm for the fine arts, the austerities of monastic life, the delirium of an unhappy love?”79 Three out of four of those conditions (excluding monastic life) were integral to the existence of Germaine de Staël and her fictional woman genius Corinne—both of whom embodied the dilemma particular to women intellectuals in their era.

That was not an entirely new situation. During the Old Regime, learned women enjoyed greater social prominence than in centuries past, but they were still vulnerable to the biting ridicule made popular years earlier by Molière’s satires of pretentiously intellectual précieuses. Despite efforts made by women moralists as well as certain male authors to refute the notion that learning could be nothing more than a vainglorious fad among women, that idea sometimes tainted the public image of learned women: for example, Émilie Du Châtelet, who was attacked after her death for having appeared too “singular” in both her scholarly aspirations and her love life.80 The double bind that confronted learned women is evident in Voltaire’s memorial tribute to Du Châtelet, where he underscored that “never was a woman more scholarly than she, and never did anyone deserve less that one say of her: ‘she’s a femme savante’ . . . amidst a mass of projects that the most laborious scholar would scarcely have undertaken, who would have believed that she found time not just to fulfill all the duties of society but avidly seek out all of its amusements? She devoted herself to high society as she did to study.”81 In other words, a woman like Du Châtelet might be just as adept as a man at cultivating knowledge, but she had to counterbalance her scholarly achievements with dutiful attention to social obligations—obligations that were particularly extensive for Du Châtelet, given her status as an upper-class, wealthy woman (of course, that status also allowed her to pursue intellectual distinction with greater ease than those of more modest social standing).

This double bind became more acute in the wake of a theoretical development in a normative area of biomedical theory: namely, the effort to define the essential “nature” of the male versus female sex. Starting in the 1770s, vitalist physicians like Pierre Roussel began to argue that the female constitution was “soft,” hypersensitive, and womb-centered. Praising Rousseau for drawing attention to the radical specificity of women’s “nature” in book V of

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