Women write back : strategies of response and the dynamics of European literary culture, 1790–1805

Abstract

Salvador Dali’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire adorns the front cover of Stephanie M. Hilger’s book, providing an oblique though fitting visual foretaste of what is to come. Under the gaze of an ambiguously marginalised slave girl in the left of the picture, the bust of Voltaire ‘‘disappears’’ or, rather, is disclosed to be not a solid, discrete object, but a space—a ruinous gap in once-monumental architecture, in fact—animated by a motley human gathering. There is, then, something transformative, indeed rather subversive, about the slave girl’s gaze. Yet, there is another gaze that must also be taken into consideration, namely that of the person viewing the painting who takes in the whole scene, viewing the girl’s subjective gaze objectively, comprehending at a distance the revisionary and appropriative mechanisms at work. It is this latter perspective that Hilger, with admirable skill and compelling clarity, seeks to open up in relation to women authors writing in the fraught social and political period immediately following the French Revolution.