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Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France - Medicine and Literature (Hardcover, New Ed)
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Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France - Medicine and Literature (Hardcover, New Ed)
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In her study of eighteenth-century literature and medical
treatises, Mary McAlpin takes up the widespread belief among
cultural philosophers of the French Enlightenment that society was
gravely endangered by the effects of hyper-civilization. McAlpin's
study explores a strong thread in this rhetoric of decline: the
belief that premature puberty in young urban girls, supposedly
brought on by their exposure to lascivious images, titillating
novels, and lewd conversations, was the source of an increasing
moral and physical degeneration. In how-to hygiene books intended
for parents, the medical community declared that the only cure for
this obviously involuntary departure from the "natural" path of
sexual development was the increased surveillance of young girls.
As these treatises by vitalist and vitalist-inspired physiologists
became increasingly common in the 1760s, McAlpin shows, so, too,
did the presence of young, vulnerable, and virginal heroines in the
era's novels. Analyzing novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Choderlos de Laclos, she offers
physiologically based readings of many of the period's most famous
heroines within the context of an eighteenth-century discourse on
women and heterosexual desire that broke with earlier periods in
recasting female and male desire as qualitatively distinct. Her
study persuasively argues that the Western view of women's
sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force-Freud's "dark
continent"-has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.
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