Did women have an enlightenment? Graffigny's Zilia as female philosophe

In her article "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" Joan Kelly argues that women did not experience the expansion of social and personal opportunities that characterized this period for men. Rather, the same developments that inspired renewed cultural expression for men had a decisively adverse effect on women. Kelly thus challenges the traditional periodization that summarizes an era without regard for women's roles. In the past several years, Kelly's question has been reformulated with respect to another historical and literary category-the Enlightenment-for which women's experiences have not been taken fully into account. In most characterizations, the Enlightenment refers to the philosophical innovations undertaken by an elite male group. Women were certainly a favorite topic of the Enlightenment philosophe, whose fascination with otherness made the opposite sex a compelling subject of contemplation. Yet it remains unclear to what extent women themselves were able to participate in and profit from Enlightenment discoveries.

In American commentary on the French tradition, the question of how women experienced the Enlightenment has been inspired largely by a renewed interest in Francoise de Graffigny's Les Lettres d'une Peruvienne.1 This text was widely popular at the time of its publication in 1747, but disappeared from the French canon in the nineteenth century. A reading of Graffigny's novel suggests that, unlike the case of the Renaissance, the intellectual growth that characterized the Enlightenment could have had a certain advantage for women as well, creating an opening for otherwise silenced voices to speak. Even if-and perhaps especially because-Graffigny was not ultimately considered an intellectual peer to her male counterparts, it is striking to see the extent to which she shared in their critical approaches.

Graffigny's epistolary novel continues in the path of her canonized male predecessors, who conceived before her the encounter between French culture and the exotic other. Her novel, which weaves a tragic love story into the cultural exchange, was dismissed until recently by many critics as an inferior imitation of Montesquieu and Voltaire.2 The heroine of Graffigny's novel is a Peruvian woman, Zilia, shipped off by European captors to France, where she is held in the household of an amorous Frenchman, Deterville. The majority of the letters that comprise the novel are addressed to Zilia's Peruvian lover, Aza, from whom she has been...