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Claire Loves Julie: Reading the Story of Women's Friendship in La Nouvelle Héloise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Lisa Disch
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Abstract

Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise is two novels in one: a story of wifely virtue and a counterstory of women's friendship. Whereas the virtue story exemplifies what feminist readers since Mary WoRstonecraft have considered to be the most oppressive of Rousseau's prescriptions for women, the friendship counterstory questions the ethical foundations and social manifestations of the model of patriarchal authority that Rousseau ordinarily defends. In this essay, I read the novel with an eye for both stories and the tension between them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Summer 1994 , pp. 19 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by Hypatia, Inc.

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