Author: Roddey Reid

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780804722247

This interdisciplinary study shows how a new commercial and learned print culture attempted to write and regulate individual and collective practices in terms of a master idiom of family, sexuality, and gender upon which a post-revolutionary national community would turn. Offering a radical new approach to family and textuality in the field of cultural and literary studies, the author argues that from its very inception this print culture - from domestic manuals to public health reports and, most notably, prose fiction - promoted new norms of behavior and selfhood, not through narratives of idealized family life, but instead by means of a rhetoric of danger, lack, and pathology. The book follows familial discourse as it assigns deficient or illicit behaviors to ever wider social groups, from the Old Regime nobility and the traditional bourgeoisie to the new middle classes, urban workers, and the peasants in the countryside to, finally, the new social elites of the late nineteenth century. The author describes how the lack of normative family and sexuality became the primary tactic for designating social others within the social body and for reworking social and gender identities so as to authorize new knowing practices and expertise and new objects of knowledge and discipline. Furthermore, through analyses of novels by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sue, Balzac, Sand, Zola, and Gide, the author demonstrates that the peculiar force of the French novel resided in its power to reach wide, newly literate audiences and to inscribe new identities and desires through the reading process. Finally, the book proposes the provocative thesis that because of these tales of threatened or failed family life the domestic conjugal household has never "worked," even down to our time; it has always been in crisis, endangered by forces from without and within, and thus in constant "need" of protection and renewal.