American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the
French Revolutionary Era. by Madelyn Gutwirth
Review by: Carol Blum
Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 491-493
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2739418
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 REVIEWS 491

MADELYN GUTWIRTH. The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and

Representation in the French Revolutionary Era. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Pp. 440, xxi. $39.95.

Studying eighteenth-century French culture one becomes aware of deep

anguish, bizarre ideas, and an inescapable sense of unresolved conflict
concerning women, sexuality, and marriage in the Age of Enlightenment.
Beginning with rococo nymphs whirling in swings and ending with the
denial of the Rights of Man to women, the Age of Reason is undermined
by its ambivalence toward masculine privilege and violence. An adequate
understanding of this component of social history, this silent half of the
story, has only begun to emerge within the last decades. This is not because
previously there were no scholars to address the issues; there have been
a number of eloquent writers like the obscure Mme de Cailli, whose Griefs
et plaintes des femmes malmariees of 1789 offers a lucid account of legal
and political misogyny in the France of the ancien regime, or Leopold
Lacour, whose remarkable treatment of Revolutionary women in Les Ori-
gines du feminisme contemporain (1900) is still a classic. These works,
however, remained isolated islands in a sea of repression. It has only been
within recent years, in the context of feminist theory and with the aid of
such archival tools as EDHIS' Les Femmes dans la Revolution franqaise
(1982) that a unified picture has begun to emerge of what constituted
the politics of gender during the period. American historians and literary
scholars like Darline Levy, Harriet Applewhite, Erica Harth, Mary
Johnson, Dena Goodman, Nina Gelbart, Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Dorinda
Outram, Sara Melzer, and Leslie Rabine as well as a number of French
critics such as Elisabeth Badinter and Francis Ronsin have begun the pro-
cess of demonstrating that the history of women within male-dominated
society is not an addendum to "real" history but rather that the distorted
representation of the female, psychologically, politically, philosophically,
and historiographically, is currently itself the most urgent and most re-
warding area of inquiry.
In Madelyn Gutwirth's brilliant Twilight of the Goddesses, the giddy girl
in the Fragonard painting and the guillotined Olympe de Gouges are both
understood in relation to masculine postures of dominance and the repres-
sion of female independence. Gutwirth has produced an interpretation of
eighteenth-century French culture that not only synthesizes recent theoret-
ical and historical work, but integrates the eruption and eventual defeat
of Revolutionary women's claims to political life into the complex and
disturbing evolution of gender relations across the century. 120 plates of
rich visual images are used less as illustrations than as iconographic texts
the author explicates with insight, erudition, and wit.

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492 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

Gutwirth divides her study into two parts. In the first section, she deals
with the rococo and the neo-Classical revolt against it in the late eighteenth
century, attempting, in her words, "to delineate some of the gender dy-
namics inherent in the campaign against the rococo, which had as its major
feature a denigration of the style as frivolous, morally tainted, erotic, and
'feminine,' in contrast with the heroic, virtuous, manly neoclassical" (p.
135). A bourgeois ideology of "family values," most successfully articu-
lated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, triumphs over the allegedly corrupt taste
of the aristocracy, but, as Gutwirth demonstrates, the victory of the middle
class is largely a defeat for women, who, under a smarmy rhetoric of
domesticity are effectively denied even the small access to the public sphere
a few enjoyed under the old regime. She comments on the ubiquity of the
new morality for women: "Rousseauist familialism had become in the
decade preceding Revolution so prevalent, so insistent, that it can be seen
as a quasi-religious dogma, embracing all statements about women. Its
imperatives are so absolute that they co-opt and deform all other frame-
works for discussion" (p. 150).
The second part of the study presents the Revolution itself, torn between
its great promise of universal human liberty and the overwhelming need
of most of its actors to keep women in control. This is a complicated story,
riddled with ambivalence and ambiguity, with sincere argument and sly
sophistry, and shaped by underlying political forces often remote from
public discourse. Gutwirth treats the historical women's movements in the
context of writers like Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Louis-Marie Prud-
homme, culminating in the definitive suppression of women's political
rights in France in October 1793.
In a well-argued and well-documented section, Gutwirth focuses on
three types of representation of women: allegory, what she calls the
"Maenad factor," and the breast. In her treatment of allegory she makes
illuminating sense of the numbingly peculiar nature of a form of representa-
tion displaying nearly naked women, incarnating such abstractions as lib-
erty and justice, in a political world denying women these very advantages.
In her analysis of the "Maenad factor," Gutwirth relates male fears of
female violence to an ancient rupture between the Apollonian and Diony-
sian orders, as depicted most vividly in Euripides' Bacchae. She demon-
strates how Pentheus-like Revolutionary male writers sounded, assigning
themselves a hyper-masculine theatrical posture and simultaneously as-
cribing hysterical blood-lust to a "denatured" female portion of the popula-
tion. "Not men, and refused recognition as women, the components of their
female humanness rejected, the engaged women of the Revolution are
transposed to a nonhuman plane. There they are refashioned into psycho-
logical scarecrows, for men to hate and for women to flee in fear of
contamination" (p. 325).

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 REVIEWS 493

The last chapter, entitled "Caritas and the Republic: Imageries of the
breast," brings together a vast amount of text and imagery, some of it quite
startling, riveted on the female breast, and here Gutwirth is at her best,
discussing the sexual, nutritional, and political significance of such creepy
Revolutionary icons as multi-mammaried, semi-bestial representations of
"Equality," and the "Fontaine de la regeneration" in the form of Nature,
spouting water from her breasts for the delegates to imbibe at the Fete de
l'unite in mid-Terror of August 10, 1793. In the Postlude she sketches the
diminished status of women and their massive psychological conditioning
to marginality in the Napoleonic era. "Trapped in age-old misogynist rhet-
oric and categories," she concludes, "the radical Revolution ratified, rather
than challenged, male sex-right. This is largely because the French Revolu-
tion itself arrived in the midst of a longer and broader struggle to resist
women's advancement in society and to restore an unquestioned male su-
premacy" (p. 383).
Despite its humor and charm, Twilight of the Goddesses is a profoundly
serious and scholarly work, respecting the rich complexities of the subject
it treats. Unlike some recent commentators, Gutwirth does not sacrifice
accuracy and detail to a thesis, and readers are obliged to maintain the same
equilibrium in examining the nuances of the hundreds of examples she
brings to their attention. This is an essential book for scholars wishing to
understand a crucial period of the West's struggle with sexuality, gender,
and political existence.

CAROL BLUM
State University of New York
Stony Brook

CLAY RAMSAY. The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in

1798. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992. Pp. 311. $45.

The news of the seizure of the Bastille rocked France. This Parisian
explosion, which began largely as an effort of self-protection, quickly came
to symbolize the demolition of despotism. The news produced a large rural
aftershock, with agrarian riots that included the seizure and destruction of
seigneurial archives to break free of what were perceived as unfair financial
burdens. Another distinct part of the rural response was the Great Fear in
which the French people throughout the provinces armed themselves in a
broad social compact against "brigands," who were believed to aim at
destroying that year's crops.

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