Roland, Marie-Jeanne | Béatrice Didier (essay date 1997)
Béatrice Didier (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Didier, Béatrice. “Mme Roland: History, Memoirs, and Autobiography.” In Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, edited by Colette H. Winn and Donna Kuizenga, pp. 363-72. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
[In this essay, Didier examines how Roland's memoirs constitute both self-representation and a form of self-formation, particularly in the face of threats to her self—both her physical person and the coherence of her inner self—experienced in prison.]
Mme Roland's [1754-1793] Mémoires interest us for many reasons. They present characteristics that one might find in the work of George Sand or Yourcenar—minimal paratext, the central role of parents, and a vivacious expression of feeling: three traits that express the subordination of the self to the interests of family lineage and its reassertion at the level of individual sensations, while...
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