Women's memoirs of the French Revolution: Gender, genre, and self-representation

Women's memoirs of the French Revolution are a largely untapped corpus of women's writing that illuminates many areas of revolutionary life and suggests the complexity and variety of women's experiences of the Revolution. While the study of women's memoirs of the French Revolution straddles the domains of literature and history, my methods, focus, and conclusions are of a more literary nature. My study focuses on female memoirists' representations of their experiences of the Revolution and writing, arguing that these representations respond to socio-economic, political, and cultural forces.;Weighing heavily on the majority of French female memoirists (most of whom were from the nobility) were gendered stereotypes of women writers and Rousseauian ideals of domesticity. The public and private nature of women's memoirs, particularly the emphasis on the private nature of their lives and memoirs to legitimize their publicness, suggests that private and public—rather than being distinct oppositional spheres—are interrelated and unstable. Indeed, many women memoirists use writing strategies that blur and redefine to their advantage the distinctions between the public and private sphere and between genres. Female memoirists' writing strategies affirm their gender in the content and form of their writing, including genre selection and use, themes, and a dual discursive mode in which they explicitly state one thing (adherence to domestic ideals) and demonstrate another (participation in events and historical interpretations), presenting their experiences and interpretations of revolutionary events in a manner more acceptable to French society than autobiography or direct social and political criticisms.;Ironically, most female memoirists present themselves as respectful of the social order in order to subvert it and claim they are not entering the public sphere in order to enter it. In contrast, the memoirs of women from the urban working class and modest rural backgrounds pose a direct challenge to the ideology of domesticity that held little relevance to their lives. Female memoirists thus were able to use their memoirs—directly or indirectly—to affirm themselves and their interpretations of revolutionary events and actors, supporting and challenging various viewpoints and contributing to the debates on the Revolution.