Language and Reality in Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne
Diane Fourny, University of Kansas
Volume 4, no. 3, April 1992
©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
Several recent studies have pointed out the complex and problematic nature of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Peruvienne (1747). As Elizabeth MacArthur has shown, Graffigny’s work challenges convention by its refusal of closure. Like its precursor, La Princesse de Cleves, Graffigny’s novel rejects both marriage and death (or exile) as suitable conclusions, leaving the love intrigue suspended with a heroine determined, so to speak, to establish a room of her own. Another destabilizing factor — and perhaps a more important one — is the author’s “double-voiced discourse” or what Nancy K. Miller describes as the reproduction of the female critical subject. By inventing a heroine who must negotiate between her marginalized “savage” world of Peru and the “civilized” world of the Enlightenment philosophes, Graffigny successfully depicts the unique plight of the female writer: one who participates in and works with the dominant (male) culture yet whose writing acts as a type of “cultural intervention” questioning and undermining that dominant discourse.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Graffigny” include:
Friendship, Fainéantise, and Fraternal Correction in Graffigny’s Letters to Devaux 1752–53
by HEIDI BOSTIC (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
“Une voix Plébéienne” in Eighteenth-Century France: Charlotte Curé, “La Muse Limonadière”
by PAUL J. YOUNG (ECF 23.2, Winter 2010-11)
Righteous Letters: Vindications of Two Refugees in Lettres d’une Péruvienne and Its Unauthorized Sequel, Lettres taïtiennes
by GIULIA PACINI (ECF 18.2, Winter 2005-6)
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