Professor of French, Michigan State University • aurorawg [at] msu [dot] edu
My area of specialization is 17th- and 18th-century French women writers. I am the author, translator, or co-translator of three books, including the just-published translation of Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. For a look at my complete CV, scroll down.
(Above: Place d'Albertas, Aix-en-Provence.)
BOOKS
Beauty and the Beast: The Original Story
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the little-known author of Beauty and the Beast, was a successful novelist and fairytale writer in mid eighteenth-century France. While her novels are rarely read today, her compelling fairytale has become universally recognized. This edition is the first integral English translation of Villeneuve’s original tale. The introduction seeks to illuminate the publication of Beauty and the Beast in its historical and literary context, and brings to life the dynamic female characters that first populated this enchanting tale: the courageous Beauty, the Fairy Queen, the Amazon Queen, the Lady Fairy, and the powerful, but mischievous elderly fairy.
L'Honnête Femme: Respectable Woman in Society and the New Collection of Letters and Responses by Contemporary Women
This edition offers a translation of two works by the seventeenth-century French Franciscan, Jacques Du Bosc: selected passages from L’Honneste femme (1632-36) and the entirety of Nouveau recueil des lettres de dames de ce temps (1635). Both of these texts articulate the theory and practice of the emerging ideal of honnêteté for women. To Du Bosc’s way of thinking, the honnête or “respectable” woman’s role in society is not only that of mother and wife; she is primarily a member of a social elite who embodies the art of pleasing through her politeness, urbanity, and conversation. Du Bosc’s work aims to justify this new role for women, even as he sets out the rules of moral conduct to guide them. In so doing, he refutes traditional misogynist attitudes while insisting that women follow a Christian moral code of conduct. Like his predecessor François de Sales, Du Bosc treats women as reasoning beings capable of guiding their own conscience.
Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730-1782
Analyzing four best-selling novels -- by both women and men -- written in the feminine voice, this book traces how the creation of women-centered salons and the emergence of a feminine poetic style engendered a new type of literature in eighteenth-century France. Writing in a female voice allowed writers of both sexes to break with classical notions of literature and style, so that they could create a modern sensibility that appealed to a larger reading public, and gave them scope to innovate with style and form. The 'female voice' in literature came to embody the language of sociability, but also allowed writers to explore the domain of inter-subjectivity, while creating new bonds between writers and the reading public. Through examination of Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd, and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, I show that in France, this modern 'feminine' sensibility turned the least prestigious of literary genres -- the novel -- into the most compelling and innovative literary form of the eighteenth century. Emphasizing how the narratives analyzed here refashioned the French literary world through their linguistic innovation and expression of new forms of subjectivity, this study claims an important role for feminine-voice narratives in shaping the field of eighteenth-century literature.