Regressive Fictions

In a cultural shift around the midpoint of the French eighteenth century, the mode of wit is increasingly displaced by bourgeois pathos. Social sophistication and sexual experience are rejected in favor of a retreat into ideal imagination. Instead of the novel of worldliness, we encounter fictions of better worlds: original, natural, familial, innocent and harmonious, protected against reality and time. The regressive shift is traced in this study in general terms, and then through detailed analysis of three of the best-selling novels of the period. The turning-point is represented by Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747, 1752) with its profound ambivalence towards knowledge. A new order is revealed and set out, but still declared lacking, in Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761). The visionary return to the organic wholeness of nature is offered by Bernardin's Paul et Virginie (1788).