10 - Gender and narrative possibilities

Summary

The fortunes of Juliette are always solitary. And they are endless.

Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses

Within the critical canon on Juliette, it is generally acknowledged that the heroine's trajectory demonstrates the characteristics of a Bildungsroman. And Juliette's passage from innocence to sophistication, ignorance to knowledge, apprenticeship to mastery, can indeed be classified as the story of an education – even a spiritual one, for the eschatological intersects the scatalogical at every point. It has also been observed, however, that the Bildungsroman is a “male affair,” “a male form because women have tended to be viewed traditionally as static, rather than dynamic, as instances of femaleness considered essential rather than existential.” The typical subject of the genre is a sensitive young man, who, upon moving from a sheltered environment to the challenges of the world, loses an original innocence as he achieves a measure of social integration and savoir-vivre. Although radically transformed by her exposure to life as experience, Juliette represents a double exception to that formula: she does not perform in the world as the reader is likely to know it, and she is a female apprentice. Thus, reading Juliette's apprentissage as an intertext, say, to Wilhelm Meister's reveals, on one level, a text whose specificity lies in a relation of variance with an ideal (generic) model. But there is a further methodological consideration: how is the semiosis of apprenticeship generated when the feminine sign must be articulated within a system of signification in which it has no place? The answer lies in a characteristic trait of Sadean écriture: reversal.