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Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse ed. by Almut Suerbaum, George Southcombe, and Benjamin Thompson (review)

in her reading of the conflicting female selves constructed by La Guette’s defence of female life-writing, Sévigné’s assertion of maternal love, and La Fayette’s ironic narratorial ambiguity. These three chapters, unlike the chapters in Part I, are not organised chronologically: Chapter 4 analyses La Guette’s 1681 memoir, Chapter 5 examines Sévigné’s letters to her daughter, which date from the early 1670s to the 1690s, and Chapter 6 considers La Fayette’s 1678 novel La Princesse de Montpensier. In her Afterword, Stanton suggests that some of the negative depictions of women she identifies in the male-authored texts in Part I are resisted by the female-authored texts in Part II. For example, representations of mother love in Chapters 4 and 5 run counter to the negative and ambivalent depictions of mothers in Chapters 1 and 3. But this comparison is not straightforward, as Stanton notes that La Guette’s moralising discourse in Chapter 4 includes ‘virtually misogynistic attitudes toward daughters’ (p. 209). Stanton’s critical approach to ‘reading-as-a-feminist’ employs a number of strategies to uncover ambiguities in the discursive construction of gender in early modern France. Perhaps due to the nature of the book as a series of case studies, Stanton does not develop strong conclusions about the significance of the gender types identified by her ‘dynamic contextual historical approach’ (p. 211). The Introduction acknowledges the limits of her close reading methodology, claiming that the key texts analysed in the book are ‘symptomatic of broader issues’, rather than ‘representative of all seventeenth-century works by men and by women’ (p. 24). The Afterword reiterates the feminist politics of this approach, situating Stanton’s method of critique within an ‘always unfinished’ (p. 212) project of deconstructing forms of alterity.