Measuring Up: Infertility and “Plénitude” in Sophie Cottin’s Claire d’Albe
Michael J. Call, Brigham Young University
Volume 7, no. 2, January 1995
©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
Sophie Cottin’s story, little known to modern readers on either side of the Atlantic, may nevertheless be a perfect case study in gender role conflict and a woman’s coming to writing in post-revolutionary France. Out of her struggle to reconcile Rousseauian notions of femininity and the realities of her own infertility arose a novel, Claire d’Albe (1799), condemned by at least one prominent female contemporary for its “immoralite revoltante.” The novel inscribed both Cottin’s anguish as a barren woman in a pronatalistic culture which valorized women according to their fertility and productivity, and the difficulty she faced in constructing a counter-identity for herself and women like her.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Genlis” include:
Writing for Charity: Mme de Genlis and Thérésina
by MALCOLM COOK (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
Une nouvelle géographie épistolaire dans quelques romans féminins de l’Émigration
by ÉRIC PAQUIN (ECF 14.1, October 2001)
Destin du conte moral
by HENRI COULET (ECF 13.2-3, January-April 2001)
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