Dans cet article je réfléchis sur l’éventuelle spécificité des narrations féminines, et notamment sur l’emploi de certains topoï narratifs.
À la question « comment repérer ces topoï "féminins" ? », je donne comme réponse : par le recours à certains « topoï de la réception », bien spécifiques et susceptibles de nous orienter dans la bonne direction.
In Isabelle de Charrière's novels, there are repeated scenes of meals where the protagonists talk about eating. The novelist uses them to characterize her characters and to create situations, which allow her to illustrate her theses. The confrontation between the correspondence - currently being digitized - and the novels clearly shows this link between her democratic convictions (expressed in some of the letters) and their staging, aiming to reach a wider audience.
The Dutch-Swiss writer Belle de Zuylen/Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) was born in the Dutch noble family Van Tuyll van Serooskerken, but married (in 1771) outside of nobility. As a child she had a Swiss gouvernante, like so many children of the European elites, and in spite of being quite familiar also with the Dutch language, she would continue using French all her life, both for private correspondence and for her literary works. Most of these were published in Switzerland. Indeed, once she had married Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, former tutor of her brothers, she went to live with him in his family house near Neuchâtel. This is where she started publishing and found recognition with her contemporary readers. In her novels and plays, she tends to confront characters representing different social classes – the reasons of which are often formulated in exchanges of letters with family members or friends who either helped her copying the texts, or were enthusiastic readers. As she wrote to her German translator, in these fictions she could illustrate the potential ‘nobility’ of the ‘so-called lower classes’. This is what she considered ‘her own democracy’.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.