Defending the Queen: Wollstonecraft and Stael on the Politics of Sensibility and Feminine Difference

I shall therefore only speak of that verdict, analyzing the political, in telling what I have seen, what I know of the queen, and in depicting the hideous circumstances which have led to her condemnation. (1) GERMAINE DE STAEL, Reflections on the Trial of the Queen, a Woman, August 1793 STAEL'S essay in defense of Marie Antoinette at the time of her trial was initially published anonymously as authored only by a woman. Stael's identification of herself as a woman is significant. The Revolutionary criminal Tribunal, consisting of a male jury and nine male judges, ultimately decided Marie Antoinette's fate, yet the lower-class of Paris were among her most notorious and vicious enemies. Indeed, the first time that organized politically was to march to Versailles in October 1789 to demand that the royal couple guarantee bread to the people and approve the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen. The direct confrontation between the Queen of France and the mostly lower-class Parisian who marched to Versailles to capture the queen serves as a political moment peculiarly open to a variety of readings. In this essay, I am particularly interested in analyzing the readings of the two female political theorists who write about this event, Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Stael. As a feminist working in the field of political theory, I am drawn to specific historical moments and literary metaphors that function within theoretical texts as sites where ideas of femininity (as well as masculinity) are (re)produced and mediated. I have isolated the October 1789 Women's March to Versailles and the August 1793 trial of Marie Antoinette to be studied here because the status of femininity and women's role in are at the center of each event. The Women's March was the first moment in the Revolution that came together as a group of in order to act politically and make demands of their sovereigns. (2) One of these sovereigns is a woman who herself will be slandered and executed for stepping outside the role of proper femininity. In the bill of indictment against Marie Antoinette at her trial, she is accused of squandering public monies, siphoning money to Austria, and most outrageously, of engaging in incest with her son. A host of contemporary feminist scholars have studied the ways in which Marie Antoinette's status as queen symbolized, for revolutionaries, the feminization and corruption of the Old Regime. Propaganda at the time painted Marie Antoinette as woman, foreigner, prostitute, adulteress, and coquette. (3) And indeed, her trial and execution in August 1793 marks the moment after which all possibilities for women's formal participation in were closed off. Thus, we see the interpretive and political perils of these historical events for writers who sought to advance women's potential role in the New Republic. Marie Antoinette, the female victim said to symbolize the feminine excess of the aristocracy, is attacked lower-class market testing and enacting their newly found political power. How was the woman writer to understand the potential role of in and notions of the feminine when faced with such contradictory behavior of and diverse meaning attached to the feminine? To attempt to analyze the role of women in these events, one becomes increasingly drawn into an eighteenth-century discursive dynamic that Gunther-Canada has called the politics of sense and (4) Simply put, sensibility was identified with female virtues of sympathetic feeling, empathetic behavior, and romanticism; sense was associated with masculine rational discourse as exemplified in Enlightenment philosophy. Negotiating the gendered of sens e and sensibility proved to be significant challenge for who wished to see gender inequality alleviated. To continue to view and define the feminine self through the lens of sensibility was to run the risk of identifying with the very qualities that had been said to justify their exclusion from in the first place. …

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