The Gender of Pseudotranslation in the Works of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Mme Beccari and Cornélie Wouters

Abstract

While authorship recognition was a challenge for all eighteenth-century aspiring writers regardless of their gender, the social position of women was such that public claims of authorship and ownership over a text were even less self-evident in the public sphere. As will be illustrated in this article, female writers especially made extensive use of transfer strategies (such as translation and pseudotranslation) to establish their authorship, thereby turning paratext and narrative into a dynamic maneuvering space. Considered from a gender perspective, the challenge for eighteenth-century female writers was to gradually “invent” themselves, or rather establish a voice of their own. Taking on a different (cultural) persona—even if only on a paratextual level—could provide them with a discursive “platform” from which they could negotiate their way into the literary field. In order to illustrate this gender-specific emancipatory quality of pseudotranslation, as established mainly in their paratexts, the present article proposes a comparative analysis of their forms and functions in the career and oeuvre of three eighteenth-century French women writers, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Mme Beccari and Cornélie de Wouters, who all made extensive use of pseudo-English fiction.

« I am not a French woman, you know »

“…Les dernières années de sa longue carrière à la Comédie Italienne sont marquées par la publication de ses Lettres de mistress Fanni Butlerd (1757), de son Histoire du marquis de Cressy (1758) et de ses célèbres Lettres de Juliette Catesby (1759) qui sont connues et louées partout en Europe. Si ces premiers romans se présentent sous le déguisement de « traduction », participant de ce fait pleinement à la vogue des pseudo‐traductions de l’anglais, plusieurs de ses œuvres plus tardives relèvent du genre pseudo‐anglais par une mise en scène « à l’anglaise » (voir entre autres Herman, Peeters & Pelckmans, 2007 ; Kaplan, 2020 ; Vanacker, 2018). La fascination de Riccoboni pour la langue et la culture anglaises se reflète, en plus, dans la publication de nombreuses traductions d’œuvres d’outre‐Manche et d’un recueil de comédies anglaises, le Nouveau théâtre anglois (1768–1769), adapté à la langue et au goût français.…”