Célestin/Célestine: Ambiguities of Identity chez Mme de Genlis
Bonnie Arden Robb, University of Delaware
Volume 12, no. 4, July 2000
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
The title of Félicité de Genlis’s short story “Célestine ou I’Innocence” is not surprising, since her preoccupation with moral issues is well known. Pervasive moralizing has always been expected, though imperfectly tolerated, by her readers. Whereas contemporaries saw hypocrisy in the discrepancy between the author’s preachy page and her worldly lifestyle, a more recent view has been that her righteous didacticism precluded artistic creativity, that her goal was to moralize, rather than to create. Such judgments are called into question by a careful reading of “Célestine,” a story constructed on ambiguities of identity and presenting innocence in a portrayal by turns sincere and disingenuous. An examination of its strait-laced but not always straightforward moralizing sheds light on Genlis’s creative disposition.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Female Sexuality” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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