@article{Transformation:1749,
      recid = {1749},
      author = {Crisafulli, Rebecca Ann},
      title = {Sincerity and Social Transformation in the Work of Louise  d'Épinay. Sincérité et transformation sociale dans l'œuvre  de Louise d'Épinay},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-03},
      pages = {356},
      abstract = {This dissertation analyzes one eighteenth-century French  philosophe’s proposal to educate girls to be very sincere  as a way of rectifying social injustices built into the  economic and legal systems of Ancien régime France. Louise  d’Épinay (1726-1783) was the author of a novel, educational  works, a prodigious correspondence with leading  Enlightenment thinkers, and contributions to the  clandestine literary journal the Correspondance littéraire,  read by European heads of state. I argue that many of  d’Épinay’s proposals for changing French society have been  overlooked until now because one of her major works,  L’Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, a nearly 2,000-page  epistolary novel likely written over several years  beginning in 1756, has been misread for over two  centuries.

	Critics have long considered Montbrillant a  thinly-disguised and scandalous memoir. Through close  reading and study of the manuscripts of this work, I show  that it is better understood as a roman pédagogique (or  educational novel), according to the characteristics of the  genre set forth by Robert Granderoute. Read as such,  d’Épinay’s novel is just as much about pedagogy as those of  her works traditionally classified as educational, Les  Lettres à mon fils and Les Conversations d’Émilie. Read as  a roman pédagogique, we can see that Montbrillant contains  a curriculum for girls’ education that was radical for its  time. 

	Many critics have presumed that d’Épinay got the  majority of her educational ideas from her well-known  contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other male  contemporaries. I argue that d’Épinay’s educational  curriculum, based on intensive reading, writing,  conversation, and introspection, reinvents for the  Enlightenment a philosophical tradition we can trace back  to the great seventeenth-century French letter-writer  Madame de Sévigné. Thus, Montbrillant is part of a network  of works by women who looked to other women for reflections  on education. D’Épinay thought girls were as capable as  boys of using reason, reading and writing, learning from  direct experience, and grappling with abstract concepts.  Moreover, she thought girls must learn to do all of these  things, both for their own happiness and that of their  future husbands. Montbrillant champions a new type of  companionate marriage based on intellectual and moral  compatibility between two spouses rather than the size of  the woman’s dowry. The novel also offers practical guidance  for its female readers by including examples of legal  documents such as a separation of assets, as well as scenes  that illustrate how women can maximize their economic and  legal agency within the framework of a system that is  structurally biased against them. D’Épinay rejects  conventional educational methods – sending girls off to a  convent and boys to a collège with a précepteur –, she  shows mothers that they must secure the right to teach  their children at home in order to prepare them for this  new type of marriage, and she demonstrates ways they can do  so effectively. 

Above all, d’Épinay advocates teaching  girls to be sincere using forms of Catholic spirituality,  stripped of their religious content, including a daily  examination of conscience and reliance on a secular  “spiritual” director for guidance. She believes that not  only will their sincerity be worth more than a dowry to  those worthy men capable of recognizing it, it is also the  quality that will transform marriage from an unequal, often  abusive hierarchy into a partnership of equals and that  will allow women to acknowledge their common oppression. My  reading shows that d’Épinay’s educational curriculum was  meant not only to change the foundations of the family but  also to transform a corrupt state nonviolently, an  alternative to revolution. Montbrillant must be understood  as part of a larger project of d’Épinay and her  collaborator Friedrich Melchior Grimm’s – to broadcast a  new form of education based on the love of virtue to élites  who could promote it in their states.

	My analysis  stresses the seminal importance of d’Épinay’s educational  theories, no longer relegated to the shadows of Rousseau  but instead revealed as an innovative educational  curriculum meant to help women work around the constraints  of the existing marriage system and, ultimately, to change  that system. D’Épinay’s proposals make hers one of the most  important feminist voices of her era, and my work provides  an alternative literary history and a new understanding of  Enlightenment culture and women’s contributions to it.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1749},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1749},
}