SOURCE: Goff, Barbara. “Figures of Antiquity in the Memoirs of Mme Roland: The Classical, the Revolutionary, and the Feminine.” Classical and Modern Literature 17, no. 1 (fall 1996): 57-84.

[In this essay, Goff evaluates Roland's use of references to classical texts in her memoirs.]

In her book Feminism without Illusions, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes some provocative paragraphs on her relationship to the “canon.”¹ As a child she was introduced by her father to the central works of Western philosophy and literature, which she “loved” (170) and which by her own account do not cease to signify for her. Reflecting on her early reading, she revisits her relationship to these texts:

I uncritically accepted the terms of the discourse presented to me. … In retrospect, I can see that I was torn by contradictions I had no words to express. I did not give much thought to women's having been excluded from the debates that engaged me, even less to the implications of their exclusion for myself.

(171)

This exclusion, she claims, operated in her case on the grounds not only of sex but also of class, since, allegedly, she was “reared on the margins of privilege.” But again, exclusion from the canon did not amount to exclusion from pleasure in it:

Beyond its mission of initiation of the elite, the canon was also taken to represent civilization to the less privileged, who, if not viewed as its custodians, were expected to internalize its premises. … Those who, like myself, were reared on the margins of privilege often took their own pleasure in knowing the general outlines of the story of the rise and triumph of Western civilization.

(168)

This exclusion, she suggests, and the stubborn pleasure generated despite the exclusion, have often characterized the relation of women to the canon. She argues that women cannot easily find personal models with which to identify in canonical texts; invited instead to identify with the ostensible values of the canon, they can only manage this identification in accordance with the roles it assigns, and they are thus brought to internalize their own submission and the domination of others (169). Fox-Genovese's own ability to write as a feminist scholar, of course, complicates this picture of domination and submission, and suggests a more dynamic negotiation between the writing woman and her uncompromising literary inheritance. In this paper I would like to trace a similarly complex negotiation between the feminine and the canonical in a text that is far removed from Fox-Genovese's, but that features as a footnote to her discussion. My investigations are designed not so much to validate the applicability of her model as to extend a discussion of the relation between the woman and the canon by a specific inquiry.

In a footnote to her argument, Fox-Genovese instances Mme Roland's childhood reading of Plutarch and Rousseau and her transformation of their message “to fit her own aspirations” (281, n.6). This is a reference to a particularly striking passage in the autobiographical Memoirs, a work written while Mme Roland was in prison; an influential member of the Girondist faction in revolutionary France, she was incarcerated and finally executed at the instigation of the Jacobins.² The figures of both Plutarch and Rousseau are invoked at crucial points in the Memoirs' narrative, but in this paper I am more interested in the general invocation of classical antiquity, here represented by Plutarch, than in the Memoirs' relationship with the arguments represented by Rousseau. The figure of antiquity is drawn upon by the Memoirs to model its private moments as well as its public, political pronouncements, but nonetheless “transformation … to fit her own aspirations” may be too simple a formulation of the text's often complex relation with classical antiquity.

The notion of antiquity prevalent in the eighteenth century was, of course, very different from that which is current now. The eighteenth century's concept of Greece and Rome was emphatically conditioned by a reading of Plutarch, and the ancient societies were valued chiefly as political exemplars that could be deployed to demonstrate the probable success or failure of contemporary political designs. The close of the century was marked by an efflorescence of political experimentation and analysis, and much of this new discourse cast itself in terms of a classical history of the rise and fall of republics. Within this history the actions of past individuals became exemplary of heroism or villainy. A certain coherence was attributed to this construct of antiquity by the practical exclusion of most of what we now understand as constitutive of it, such as Athenian tragedy, so that each element could perform as a metonym for the whole. But this is not to say that the construct could not be a site of contestation. While much of the public discourse of the eighteenth century was saturated with the trope of classical antiquity, the leaders of the Revolutionary period have been seen as particularly disposed to articulate themselves and their policies by means of this metaphor³; the metaphor is both available to all parties, and contested by opposing political factions.

For the Memoirs, classical antiquity is represented by a variety of figures, drawn from the discourse of what we call myth as well as from that which we call history. While the Memoirs' deployment of its figures might be accounted for in diverse ways, I shall suggest that the complexity of the textual operations entails that a simple model of “tradition” or “influence” cannot offer an adequate account. I shall argue that the text does project on to its repertoire of classical figures a certain ideological consistency which serves its own agenda, but I shall also argue that the text cannot completely control the classical discourse which it admits into its own narrative space. The discourse of antiquity possesses a certain autonomy, derived from its immense authority in the period, which separates it from any individual text. The text of the Memoirs, then, experiences both success and failure as it tropes antiquity in its own project of constructing a subjectivity that is at once that of a revolutionary, a woman and a writer. Sometimes the discourse of antiquity can be subsumed within the Memoirs' project; at others the independent authority of antiquity threatens to overwhelm the Memoirs and the emerging subjectivity which it constructs.⁴ I shall suggest that antiquity provides the metaphors deployed to manage and overcome the contradictions not only of Revolutionary history, which have placed Roland in the anomalous position of writing these Memoirs, but also of her class and gender. Yet at the same time the invocation of antiquity is often most marked precisely at those points where the contradiction is most insoluble. Antiquity thus represents both a possibility of transcendence and a denial of it.

“L'histoire peindra-t-elle jamais l'horreur de ces temps?”

(Memoirs, 235)

The quest for models of republican politics gave classical antiquity an unprecedented hold on the political discourse of the Revolutionary period. The Memoirs constitutes a political autobiography, and as such could not be produced in the late eighteenth century without repeated and dense invocation of antiquity. Representative types from Plutarch and Tacitus appear as a code by which to distinguish friends and foes. M. Roland is described as “Juste comme Aristide, sévère comme Caton” (54); Buzot “professait la morale de Socrate et conservait la politesse de Scipion” (100)⁵; whereas Danton is “aussi cruel que Marius. plus affreux que Catilina” (179). The code only breaks down when Thomas Paine, a republican, appears as Sulla, traditionally a hostile figure:

La figure de Payne m'a quelquefois rappelé la comparison que faisaient les Romains de celle de Sylla avec une mûre aspergée de farine.

(170)

The breakdown is contained by attributing the comparison to the Romans rather than to the Memoirs itself, but the anomalous likeness can be seen to be determined by a reservation about Paine which the Memoirs duly notes:

Je crois que Payne a de commun avec la plupart des auteurs de valoir moins que ses ouvrages … je le croirais plus propre à semer, pour ainsi dire, ces étincelles d'embrasement qu'à discuter les bases ou préparer la formation d'un gouvernement. Payne éclaire mieux une révolution qu'il ne peut concourir à une constitution.

(169)

The equivocal politics of the comparison between Paine and Sulla can remind us that antiquity was available as a repository of vicious types as well as of virtuous. As such, it was mobilized by conservative writings in opposition to the progress of the Revolution⁶; the examples of Athens and Rome could be activated to demonstrate that rule by the people was destined to issue forth in anarchy. The Memoirs, which has as its task to justify the actions and decisions of the Rolands by an “Appeal to Impartial Posterity,” may thus effectively criticize the present state of the Revolution with the trope of antiquity. There is a piquant irony in deploying this trope to critique a revolution that had frequently found its own origins in the classical republics and had often sought to make itself in their image.⁷

In fact the text of the Memoirs constitutes history largely by comparisons between antiquity and the Revolution; there is little reference, for instance, to the republics of the Italian Renaissance, of Switzerland, or of America. Frequently these two points in history, namely antiquity and the Revolution, are said to reproduce one another, so that the underlying model of historical change seems to be circular. The reign of Tiberius has returned in France, and classical demagogues in Robespierre:

On croit être au temps de Tibère; c'est également le règne des délateurs.

(186)

C'est la marche de tous les agitateurs, depuis Hippon, le harangueur de Syracuse, jusqu'à Robespierre, le bavard parisien.

(159)

More rhetorically effective are those moments when the Memoirs claims that not even antiquity can provide a model for understanding the Revolution; the Revolution has exceeded the possibilities of history and almost those of representation. The Memoirs writes its version of the Revolution by claiming that it cannot be done:

L'histoire peindra-t-elle jamais l'horreur de ces temps affreux et les hommes abominables qui les remplissent de leurs forfaits? Ils passent les cruautés de Marius, les sanguinaires expéditions de Sylla.

(235)

Platon avait bien raison de comparer la démocratie à un encan de gouvernement, une sorte de foire, où l'on trouve mêlées toutes les espèces de gouvernement possibles. Mais comment faut-il caractériser celui où des hommes tels que ceux-ci disposent de la liberté de leurs concitoyens?

(189)

Neither history nor philosophy can encompass the unprecedented events of this period.

The trope of antiquity also emerges as a method of representing the narrator's length of perspective and maturity of judgment, implicitly qualifying her to write on the Revolution. The Memoirs represents its subject's early relationship to antiquity as one of total identification, performed in the actions of lamenting, weeping, sighing, and dreaming⁸:

Je ne lisais point le récit d'une belle action que je me disse: “C'est ainsi que j'aurais agi.” Je me passionais pour les républiques où je rencontrais le plus de vertus qui excitassent mon admiration et des hommes dignes de mon estime; je me persuadais que leur régime était le seul convenable aux uns et aux autres; je ne me trouvais pas audessous des premières, je repoussais avec indignation l'idée de m'unir avec un individu qui ne valût pas les seconds, et je me demandais en gémissant pourquoi je n'étais pas née dans leur sein!

(256)

Dans les premiers élans de mon jeune coeur, je pleurais à douze ans de n'être pas née Spartiate ou Romaine.

(52)

But the Memoirs takes care to note that the untroubled youthful identification does not persist. Of a visit to Versailles the text recounts:

Je soupirais en songeant à Athènes, où j'aurais également admiré les beaux-arts, sans être blessée par le spectacle du despotisme; je me promenais en esprit dans la Grèce, j'assistais aux jeux olympiques, et je me dépitais de me trouver Française. Ainsi frappée de tout ce que m'avait offert le beau temps des républiques, je glissais sur les orages dont elles avaient été agitées; j'oubliais la mort de Socrate, l'exil d'Aristide, la condamnation de Phocion.

(258)

The newly judicious assessment of antiquity is a prerequisite for a proper understanding of the Revolution. Retreat from identification with the Revolution is paralleled by second thoughts about the republics of antiquity:

Aussi, dans mes lectures, je me passionais pour les réformateurs de l'inégalité; j'étais Agis et Cléomène à Sparte, j'étais Gracque à Rome, et comme Cornélie j'aurais reproché à mes fils qu'on ne m'appelait que la belle-mère de Scipion; je m'étais retirée avec le peuple sur le mont Aventin, et j'aurais voté pour les tribuns. Aujourd'hui que l'expérience m'a appris à tout peser avec impartialité, je vois dans l'entreprise des Gracques et dans la conduite des tribuns des torts et des maux dont je n'étais point assez frappée.

(271)

This movement of new and painful understanding can itself be analyzed in terms of figures from antiquity:

O Brutus! dont la main hardie affranchit vainement les Romains corrompus, nous avons erré comme toi. Ces hommes purs dont l'Âme ardente aspirait la liberté, que la philosophie avait préparés pour elle dans le calme de l'étude et l'austérité de la retraite, se sont flattés comme toi que le renversement de la tyrannie allait ouvrir le règne de la justice et de la paix; il n'a été que le signal des passions haineuses et du débordement des vices les plus hideux.

(235)

The narrator's version of the Revolution claims all the more discursive authority because it parallels that of the republican hero, Brutus, himself.⁹

This account of the narrator's ripening judgment illuminates not only the historical position of the Girondists but also that of the figure of antiquity within the autobiographical text. The trope of “second thoughts” is rhetorically effective in producing the figure of a certain kind of narrator. This narrator claims to have overcome the delusions that beset her immature self; she thus emerges as especially well-equipped to narrate both the history of that youthful subject and the present condition of the state. The figure of antiquity crucially mediates between the adolescent enthusiasms of the Memoirs' autobiographical subject and the mature reflection of its writing persona, and thus produces that rhetorical identity between the two which it is the task of autobiographical narrative to establish and elaborate.

The trope of “second thoughts” also provides a wider framework for understanding the deployment of antiquity in the Memoirs. As a repository of virtues, antiquity holds out the promise of the just republic, and this republic is not only a utopia but has historically been realized. Yet since the time span of antiquity also canvasses the several failures of the just republics, the figure of antiquity can also be seen to block the access of the present—the Revolutionary generation—to the utopia which it offers. This movement of promise and denial, I shall suggest, motivates the emergence of the figure of antiquity not only in the Memoirs' political pronouncements but also in its private and domestic moments. The subject of the Memoirs is partly accounted for by an enthusiastic and total identification with classical antiquity. But the youthful subject has other identifications to achieve as well, which are both more compelling and less congenial. In particular, she has to site herself in relation to her class and gender. Within both of these troubled efforts the metaphor from antiquity is pressed into service, to signify both the desire to transcend conditions of class and gender and the impossibility of doing so.

“Je me sens comme enchainée dans une classe … qui n'est pas la mienne.”

(Lettres, 1: 375)

The Revolutionary period allowed access to political activity in France for a whole new set of personnel, and the Memoirs registers this anomaly when it undertakes to describe the political career of an obscure bourgeois female. One of the ways in which the Memoirs seeks to account for the emergence of a revolutionary identity is by describing the unusual and difficult class position which produces its subject. Roland was the daughter of an engraver, whom contemporary classification accounted not an artisan but rather an artist. This is indicated within the text of the Memoirs by the standing and occupation of the men whom M. Phlipon judges worthy of his daughter's hand in marriage; they include a jeweler and a doctor, but emphatically not a butcher or a guitar teacher. The engraver provided his daughter, by her own account, with an anomalously good education, which consequently did not mould her efficiently to accept the destiny allotted to her class and gender. Roland seems historically to have registered the uncomfortable pressure of her situation; in an early letter to a friend, Sophie Cannet, she laments “je me sens comme enchainée dans une classe et une manière d'être qui n'est pas la mienne.”¹⁰ The Memoirs frequently notes the disjunction between its subject's talents and accomplishments on the one hand, and on the other, the inadequate recognition that she was afforded by those who, though apparently her moral and intellectual inferiors, were superior to her in class terms. This contradiction was systemic in pre-Revolutionary France, which did in fact deny advancement to all but the nobility of sword or robe and thus did not provide a “career open to talent.”¹¹ The contradiction is also, of course, recognizable as the complaint common to an emergent middle class whose economic weight is disproportionate to its cultural or political sway.

The Memoirs takes care repeatedly to throw its subject up against the limitations of her class position, and is punctuated by encounters with disagreeable nobility. A particularly horrible episode ensues when Roland and her mother are invited to dine at the house of a distant relative. This relative is a tax farmer, emblematic of the corruption and iniquity of the ancien régime,¹² and no less culpable in the ostensibly private context of the Memoirs. Roland's great aunt had married the steward of this household and the elderly couple lived in a cottage on the estate. Manon Phlipon, as Mme Roland was then called, and her mother are invited to the house by the tax farmer, but discover with dismay that they are expected to dine below stairs, with the servants, where the aunt's husband had been in charge. What is significant for my purposes is that the figure of antiquity appears, briefly and grotesquely, in the account. In the drawing room

Je recevais des compliments qui me flattaient peu, et que je relevais avec quelque finesse lorsque certains parasites à croix de Saint-Louis, toujours errants chez l'opulence comme les ombres sur les bords de l'Achéron, se mêlaient de les renforcer.

(274)

The “turning aside” of the unwanted compliments is not only claimed but has already been enacted by the preceding simile; antiquity here supplies not only a figure to describe the incident, the specters on the banks of Acheron, but also a means of registering the narrator's intellectual superiority to those who are thus diminishing her, by demonstrating her command of the classical sources. The episode as a whole enacts the difficulty of class identification—is the young Phlipon to be ranged with the servants or with the tax farmer's family upstairs?¹³—which is also a live issue for those of the Revolutionary generation who identify themselves as Girondists and endeavor to offer a third way between the aristocratic counter-revolutionaries and the Jacobins. Solution of the contradiction is as urgent at the time of composition of the Memoirs as it is at the dramatic moment of this incident at the tax farmer's. An identification with the poets and philosophers of antiquity, rather than with any historical class in France, offers a solution both for the Roland who writes and the Roland who is written.¹⁴ Only for the latter, however, can the solution be successfully maintained, because it is a textual solution to a problem that is here posed only textually. For the Roland who writes, the “third way” has already failed, and indeed after her death she was particularly excoriated for having desired to appear “learned.”

When faced with the contradiction of its subject's class position under the ancien régime, the text of the Memoirs takes refuge in a culture which is far removed in historical and geographical terms from that of France, but whose transcendent authority permits it symbolically to overcome the injustices which contemporary French society metes out. A similar resort to antiquity can be read in the Memoirs' account of Roland's visit to Versailles. The Memoirs represent the youthful Phlipon as keenly aware of exactly what is going on at the palace:

Mais le visage sans rouge de ma respectable maman, et la décence de ma parure annonçaient des bourgeois; si mes yeux ou ma jeunesse faisaient dire quelques mots, cela sentait presque la protection, et me causait autant de déplaisir que les compliments de madame de Boismorel. … Je n'étais point insensible à l'effet d'un grand appareil, mais je m'indignais qu'il eût pour objet de relever quelques individus déjà trop puissants et fort peu remarquables par eux-mêmes.

(257)

The Memoirs' diatribe against Versailles closes with the passage which I quoted earlier in the discussion of mechanisms of identification. In context, at the end of the Versailles episode, it enacts an escape from a situation which seems to indict both French history and the narrator's own class position:

Je soupirais en songeant à Athènes, où j'aurais également admiré les beaux-arts, sans être blessée par le spectacle du despotisme; je me promenais en esprit dans la Grèce, j'assistais aux jeux olympiques, et je me dépitais de me trouver Française.

(258)

The ancient republics appear, as often in the writings of the Revolutionary generation, as a desirable alternative to contemporary corruption and inequality, but they also seem on occasion to be represented as a refuge from the personal affronts to which the narrator's class position exposes her.

The passage quoted above points up a problem inherent in the autobiographical genre. We are of course not compelled to accept, as the passage would like us to, that the historical Roland “sighed for Athens” when at Versailles. In fact this account of her reactions is not completely borne out by the account which Roland sends in a letter, contemporary with the visit, to Sophie Cannet. The description of Versailles here reads:

Dans mon état, j'aime mon prince … l'éducation de mon état m'a appris ce que je dois aux puissances et me fait respecter et chérir par devoir et réflexion ce que je n'aurais pas aimé naturellement.

(Lettres, 1: 228)

The point is not, of course, to use the letter to challenge the truth value of the Memoirs as a representation of Roland. In neither text is a true or accurate representation of Roland at issue, because both are produced not as exercises in mimesis but with particular kinds of audiences and particular historical functions in view. For my purposes, the evidence of the letter about the visit to Versailles is significant because it directs attention to the rhetorical, rather than strictly autobiographical quality of the Memoirs' invocation of antiquity. In the Memoirs passage on Versailles we may read the narrator of the text, the writing persona, projecting onto her youth a precocious republican awareness which bolsters her revolutionary credentials. The genre of autobiography consistently tries to close the gap between the writing persona and the subject who is written, by positing the narrator as seamlessly produced from the biographical narrative. The trope of antiquity, in the text of the Memoirs, can be seen to do some of this work of production. The discourse of classical antiquity is invoked in the Memoirs not at random moments, but when it is engaged in solving for the text some problem of its subject's class or gender by supplying a cultural paradigm completely different from the lived history of that subject. If such problems can be solved, not of course in a historical actuality but at the level of the text, then the narrator of the Memoirs can emerge successfully from the life that she narrates for herself.

On two occasions the discourse of antiquity is invoked by the Memoirs to describe the written subject herself, rather than other characters in the narrative. These occasions are linked by the fact that each is engaged in asserting and celebrating her social mobility. Her position as a bourgeois apparently provided her opportunities not only to feel slighted but also to exhibit a flexible versatility that is retrospectively prized by the Memoirs. What was contemporaneously uncomfortable can be subsequently valued for the ways in which it helped to construct the subject who survived the Revolution and can thus speak authoritatively on it. Describing that subject's childhood, the Memoirs claims

Cette enfant, qui lisait des ouvrages sérieux, expliquait fort bien les cercles de la sphère céleste, maniait le crayon et le burin, et se trouvait à huit ans la meilleure danseuse d'une assemblée de jeunes personnes au-dessus de son âge … cette enfant était souvent appelée à la cuisine pour y faire une omelette, éplucher des herbes ou écumer le pot. Ce mélange … m'a rendue propre à tout; il semblait prédire les vicissitudes de ma fortune, et m'a aidée à les supporter. Je ne suis deplacée nulle part; je saurais faire ma soupe aussi lestement que Philopoemen coupait du bois, mais personne n'imaginerait en me voyant que ce fût un soin dont il convînt de me charger.

(216)

The contradictions of her position, lamented in the encounter with the tax farmer, are here celebrated as a “mixture” which has proved its worth in the vicissitudes of the Revolution. The classical reference, to Philopoemen, is projected back into the infancy of the subject from a writing position which has already managed most of those vicissitudes; it performs the double function of summing up the “mixture” while also dignifying it with the authority of an antique parallel. The parallel thus finally aligns the “mixture” on the side of unalloyed success and implicitly claims that it no longer requires the continuing negotiation which we shall nonetheless see registered elsewhere. That the mixture is in fact not open to negotiation is also insisted upon by the phrase “mais personne n'imaginerait en me voyant que ce fût un soin dont il convînt de me charger.” Those who read the Memoirs are by definition able to “see” neither the narrated subject nor the narrator; the claim to visible superiority is instead borne out textually by the narrator's ability to supply the appropriate classical reference. The subject that the Memoirs constructs escapes contradiction here either by her own unmediated presence or by the narrator's invocation of antiquity. It is not to be expected that the text of an autobiographical work will raise problems that it has not already to some extent solved; what is interesting to me is the way in which the metaphor from antiquity is deployed to solve them, and the kinds of problems it is deployed to solve.

The “mixture” which is successfully transcended in the above passage requires renewed negotiation elsewhere in the text. The Memoirs describes an aspect of life in prison:

Lorsque j'étais arrivée à Sainte-Pélagie, on m'avait donné une femme, prisonnière pour de petites choses, et dont les soins pouvaient être utiles à ma faiblesse, comme je savais les rendre utiles à sa misère. Ce n'est pas que je ne susse fort bien me servir moi-même; tout sied bien aux généreux courages, a-t-on dit à l'égard de Favonius rendant à Pompée malheureux les services que les valets ont coutume de rendre à leurs maîtres; cela n'est pas moins vrai pour l'infortuné, dénué de moyens, et suffisant à ses besoins, ou pour l'austère philosophie dédaignant toute superfluité. Quintius faisait cuire ses raves en recevant les ambassadeurs des Samnites; j'aurais bien fait mon lit dans la celulle de Sainte-Pélagie.

(190)

This second passage is linked to the one previously discussed in that prison affords an opportunity to bear out the claim to a versatile self-reliance. In the prior passage that claim was supported by a classical reference and here too the metaphor from antiquity is prominent. The resourceful heroine of the Memoirs is equal to anything, even in prison, and in particular she is equal to the heroes of antiquity.¹⁵ As in the previous passage, the issue of class contradiction is also prominent; prison can enforce the anomalous equality among women which would have required Roland to “make [her] bed.” The enforced equality can be both redressed and celebrated by textual invocation of the discourse of antiquity, which signs not only pragmatic readiness but also social and educational superiority, a marker of the difference that really subsists between the subject and the other women with whom she must mingle.

Invocation of antiquity can mark the subject's success at this point because it is also called upon to mark her struggles with just such socially fluid situations. But even here the success is provisional, and the negotiation regularly signed by the discourse of antiquity is not resolved. The narrator could make her own bed, yes. But to manage the total equality prescribed by the prison was more demanding:

Mais il faut traverser de longs espaces et se mêler avec leurs diverses habitantes pour aller chercher de l'eau ou autre chose semblable, et je trouvai très bon d'avoir une personne que je pusse obliger en lui donnant de telles commissions.

(190)

In the face of certain situations the vaunted adaptability discovers its limitations, and the subsequent reliance on others indicates that the narrator does not securely occupy the position previously identified with Favonius, Philopoemen, Quintius et al. The Memoirs invokes classical antiquity to manage a difficult moment in the narrative, but the figures thus admitted into the text may bring with them such a weight of inimitable authority that they escape the control of the narrative and serve instead to point up its contradictions and evasions.

“Je suis bien ennuyée d'être femme.”

(Lettres, 1: 374)

One evasion that is readily apparent to late twentieth-century readers is that of the misfit between the narrator's gender and her unquestioning celebration of classical antiquity. The construct of antiquity current in the eighteenth century was peopled almost solely by men, and the women of antiquity were the object of little scholarly or popular interest. But this very lack may have made possible Roland's celebratory identifications; for instance, the Memoirs shows an apparent unawareness that most women were not able to attend the Olympic Games, so Roland can dream of her own attendance without having to confront the classical republics' resolute exclusion of women from positions of public visibility. But we should note that as with the contradictions of class that were negotiated by means of the classical metaphor, so in the case of gender the figure of classical antiquity can sign a transcendence of constraints as well as reinscribe them.

Explicitly feminist scholarship has not taken a great deal of interest in Mme Roland, despite her anomalously powerful position at the heart of the Girondist faction. This neglect can perhaps be partly attributed to the biographical tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Beginning with Michelet,¹⁶ biographers have tended to credit the Memoirs' words on its subject and thus to describe her in glowingly, but conventionally, heroic terms.¹⁷ Recent scholarship on Revolutionary women is inclined to pass Roland over in favor of more extravagant figures such as Mme de Staël, Théroigne de Méricourt, and Olympe de Gouges.¹⁸ One reason for the new preference, and probably for the old preference, is that Roland's writings rarely articulate what would now be called feminist sentiments, whereas other Revolutionary women were as ready to question hierarchies of gender as they were all other hierarchies. Although some feminist scholars have dismissed the statements that Roland does make about the condition of femininity, a renewed attention to the figure of classical antiquity may restore a feminist dimension to Roland's politics. For instance, part of the letter to Sophie Cannet, quoted above, reads:

Je suis bien ennuyée d'être femme: il me fallait une autre âme, ou un autre sexe, ou un autre siècle. Je devais naître femme spartiate ou romaine, ou du moins homme français.

(Lettres, 1: 374-375)

Madelyn Gutwirth reads these lines as evidence for Roland's “domestic ideology”; Roland indulges in a “Plutarchian fantasy of the virtuous Roman or Spartan matron, always dutiful and generous, shunning the limelight.”¹⁹ Such would be the connotations if the woman Roland fantasizes were an Athenian; but Roland's contemporaries read the text of Plutarch for the uncompromising republican virtue of its male heroes, and they prized the women of Rome and Sparta as signs for and partners in that virtue. The texts of Plutarch's Sayings of Spartan Women and Virtues of Women display such matrons explicitly criticizing their men when the latter do not uphold the standard of civic virtue.²⁰ Roland's fantasy, then, may be of a model of womanhood which is far from dutiful and retiring, but is instead constructed from an active republican virtue that transcends the conventional limits of gender.

In the letter to Sophie, the preferred alternatives to Roland's position are either a Spartan or Roman woman or a French man. The women of antiquity are thus represented as less sexually marked than is Roland herself; if Roland had been born during classical times, she suggests, she would not have confronted such a clash between her destiny and her own desires. In the letter a form of female emancipation is projected on to classical antiquity in the same way as were the republican ideals of the Revolutionary generation. But the invocation of antiquity does not always signal such a successful negotiation of gender. At several points in the Memoirs the figure of classical antiquity seems to be deployed to get the narrative through a problematic moment in the emergence of the narrator's sexual identity,²¹ but it is sometimes painfully clear that antiquity cannot manage female sexuality. The conjunction of the two opposed notions sometimes results in grotesque irony rather than in an accomplished fabric of metaphor and simile.

Heroes and villains of antiquity provided, as I pointed out above, a code to distinguish friends and foes. But it was a code available to all educated writers, and it could be used against Roland by her enemies. The Memoirs explains that she kept women from her dinner table in order to preserve the solemn atmosphere, but in spite of this exclusion, or perhaps because of it, the Jacobins described her as a “modern Circe” presiding over Girondist orgies.²²

Tels furent les repas que les orateurs populaires traduisirent à la tribune des Jacobins en festins somptueux, où, nouvelle Circe, je corrompais tous ceux qui avaient le malheur de s'y asseoir.

(168)

The Jacobins describe in sexual terms what the narrator needs to represent as a purely political context. The repository of classical antiquity is a resource that may be drawn on by all sides and the narrator is not always able to control the figures, especially perhaps when they manifest themselves in conjunction with her sexuality. That sexuality is important to the Memoirs as the index of a developing subjectivity, which itself had been validated as an object of discursive interest by the Confessions of Rousseau. This emergent sexuality can be modeled as either success or as struggle, and in both aspects, the metaphor from antiquity can represent it.

The Memoirs recounts that Roland began to learn Latin, but did not receive enough instruction to provide a real competence in the language. Nonetheless, when faced with an otherwise opaque conversation in Latin, her gender comes to her rescue and renders the language sufficiently transparent:

Ils se virent au parloir en ma présence, se parlèrent en latin que je n'entendis pas parfaitement, mais dont je compris quelques mots à mon avantage. Ceux-là n'échappent jamais à une fille, telle jeune qu'elle soit, et dans quelque langue qu'ils soient dits.

(225)

Latin, with Greek, is a language that has historically been frequently denied even to educated women; but the gender of the narrator gives her access to an alternative language of sexuality which puts her on an equal footing with the scholars and confounds their attempts to elude her comprehension.

In this case, the confrontation of youthful female sexuality with the ancient world produces an unusual moment of mastery for the former. Frequently, however, such a confrontation signs a point of narrative unease. As with the issue of class, the text tends to take refuge from such unease in the invocation of antiquity. At one point the Memoirs embarks on a short account, apparently occasioned by a description of M. Roland's voice, of political oratory during the Revolutionary period. A comparison is made among various orators, such as Mirabeau, the Clermonts, and Larive, all of whom are found wanting. Suddenly the subject of the Memoirs herself makes an appearance:

Lorsqu'à l'ouverture de mon adolescence j'éprouvais cette sorte d'agitation que donne le plaisir de plaire aux jeunes personnes du sexe, j'étais émue au son de ma propre voix; j'avais besoin de la modifier pour me plaire à moi-même.

(323)

The eruption of the youthful female figure into the recital of the prestigious orators is bizarre. The text is presently claiming that its subject is not comparable to this company, and yet is mentioning them all, as it were, in the same breath. The brief account of adolescent trauma is immediately followed, in the text, by the resort to antiquity:

Je conçois que l'exquise sensibilité des Grecs leur fît attacher beaucoup de prix à toutes les parties de l'art de la parole.

(323)

The text frequently represents a tension between the subject's ambitions and her social position; is it implausible to conclude that the Greeks emerge into the text here, endowed with that exquisite sensibility, because their very transcendence of local issues like that of gender allows them to defuse that tension?

As with the subject's class, so with her gender; the cultural authority of classical antiquity entails that it seems to supply a position of ahistorical transcendence which offers both an alternative to and an avoidance of the historically determined particulars of her situation. But, as we have noted, the metaphor from antiquity sometimes seems instead to draw attention to the distance between itself and the position of the written subject, thus reinscribing in the text the limitations of her situation. The discourse of antiquity possesses too much independent cultural weight to be wholly malleable to the needs of a particular narrative, especially when that narrative is focussed on a subject who is nominally excluded from that discourse.

A particularly striking instance of this movement whereby the trope of antiquity can be seen to reinscribe, rather than solve, contradiction can be read in a part of the Memoirs which recounts the onset of adolescence. Its youthful subject is awakened several times from her nightly slumbers by bodily sensations which can only be called pleasurable, and which therefore seem to threaten her devotions. The task of putting these sensations into words, in order to articulate them at confession, is almost more than she can handle. Finally, the Memoirs claims, she discharges herself of the words:

“Je m'accuse … d'avoir eu des mouvements contraires à la chasteté chrétienne.” Ah! la bonne phrase! Santeuil ne fut pas plus content d'avoir trouvé sa rime, et Archimède la solution de son problème, que je me sentis aise de l'expression.

(253)

Here, emergent sexuality presents the Memoirs with a problem, which is represented as particularly a problem of language, and is solved on two levels. The subject's mastery of the situation in the confessional is figured in linguistic terms when she is compared to a poet finding a rhyme. The Memoirs itself, however, apparently cannot finally master the episode without accounting for it in terms drawn from the completely distinct discourse of classical antiquity. Nor does antiquity appear in just any guise, but as a version of scientific objectivity which, famously in the case of Archimedes, is oblivious to the particulars of its own situation. But that the Memoirs is not completely in control of its classical figures is suggested by the fact that Archimedes is best known not only for his moment of triumphant discovery but also for running through the street naked.²³ The problem of sexuality is not, then, completely erased from the passage by the invocation of antiquity. On the other hand, the humor of the passage does suggest a writing position which has already negotiated the struggles with sexuality. Here, then, the narrator can be read to indicate how her youthful conflicts have successfully produced her adult, writing self. The scene of articulating the onset of adult sexuality may in fact be understood as paradigmatic for the production of autobiographical narrative.

At other moments in the Memoirs, antiquity provides not a refuge from or alternative to sexuality but instead an active obstacle to the subject's development into a mature woman. As daughter of an engraver, she was marked out to marry a man well established in a respectable form of commerce, such as a jeweler. But her anomalous education had apparently generated a disposition quite contrary to this fate:

Occupée dès mon enfance à considérer les rapports de l'homme en société, nourrie de la plus pure morale, familiarisée avec les grands exemples, n'aurais-je vécu avec Plutarque et tous les philosophes que pour m'unir à un marchand qui ne jugerait ni ne sentirait rien comme moi?

(284)

As in the letter to Sophie Cannet on the “Spartan or Roman woman,” we can read here the metaphor from antiquity being deployed to figure resistance to a prescribed destiny. But at the same time it is important to note that the discourse of classical antiquity, which offered an alternative to contradictions in the subject's social position, itself here enters into contradiction with that position, and can afford no relief from it. The appearance here of the figure of antiquity, in an isolated paragraph rather than in the middle of a flowing narrative, seems to model the lack of integration of which the paragraph speaks. It is no coincidence, then, that the first account which the Memoirs gives of M. Roland, who by definition goes on to satisfy the exacting conditions set by Mme Roland, connects him firmly with antiquity. He is described to his future bride as follows:

“M. Roland de la Platière, homme éclairé, de moeurs pures, à qui l'on ne peut reprocher que sa grande admiration pour les anciens aux dépens des modernes qu'il déprise, et le faible de trop aimer à parler de lui.”

(322)

M. Roland is the only suitor who can elude the difficulties that surround the prospect of marriage, because he brings with him the discourse of antiquity that otherwise stands in the way of the prospect.

As far as marriage is concerned, then, the Memoirs finally succeeds in joining its subject's personal destiny, which is chiefly conditioned by her class and gender, to the transcendent discourse of antiquity. The discourse supplies the cultural mastery for the text to solve its narrative problems and grounds the Memoirs in a powerful authority. At times, however, as we have noticed, the classical ground slips from under the Memoirs' feet and the gap between antiquity and the contradictions of the subject's class and gender not only remains unbridged but calls attention to itself. Even within the marriage, there is staged a poignant confrontation between the classical and the feminine:

Lorsque je suivis les anciennes sectes des philosophes, je donnai la palme aux stoïciens; je m'essayai comme eux à soutenir que la douleur n'était point un mal, et cette folie ne pouvant durer, je m'obstinai du moins à ne jamais me laisser vaincre par elle; mes petites expériences me persuadèrent que je pourrais endurer les plus grandes souffrances sans crier. Une première nuit de mariage renversa mes prétentions, que j'avais gardées jusque-là; il est vrai que la surprise y fut pour quelque chose, et qu'une novice stoïcienne doit être plus forte contre le mal prévu que contre celui qui frappe à l'improviste lorsqu'elle attend tout le contraire.

(256)

The classical paradigms are defeated by the defining physicality of female identity in the act of defloration. The discourse of antiquity, which had promised an alternative to a gendered destiny, here represents the failure of resistance to that destiny—or at best a decidedly Pyrrhic victory.

“Une femme qui écrit est toujours ridiculisée.”

(Lettres, 1: 305)

The deployment of the figures from antiquity indicates that the Memoirs is conscious of the limitations of the feminine role and often seeks symbolically to overcome them. One limitation that the text does not even countenance, however, is the supposed inadequacy of female authorship. The figure of the writing woman is never a problem for this text, even though contemporary female writers regularly articulate reservations about their activity. Mme Roland had written a great deal of political commentary before the Memoirs, but all her literary production had appeared under her husband's name. Various of her letters assert the inadvisability of women making an appearance as authors. In 1775 a letter to Sophie Cannet states:

Quand on n'a pas de prétentions, il est permis de se contenter de ses productions, dès qu'elles plaisent à ce que l'on aime. Je n'ai pas envie de les produire jamais dans le monde; je suis aussi persuadée que toi du danger qu'il y aurait à y jouer le rôle de spirituelle ou de savante, sans avoir un grand fonds pour y soutenir ses avances. Une femme qui écrit est toujours ridiculisée, à moins qu'elle n'ait beaucoup de talent.

(Lettres, 1: 304-305)²⁴

This reticence is not quite appropriate for the Memoirs, however, which has as its task to construct a subject who can not only be and do what it recounts, but who can then also produce the narrative of her own production. The Memoirs claims that its subject can produce texts because her life is largely conditioned by other texts; it describes a subjectivity suspended between Plutarch and Rousseau. In particular, the metaphor from antiquity can be seen, I shall suggest, to mediate the emergence of the female author at several points in Roland's text. I shall also suggest that within the discourse of authorship, the figure of antiquity signs an untroubled success and not the uncomfortable negotiation that I have traced elsewhere.

A mediation between the literary and the female, achieved by the figure of antiquity, may even be read as a fleeting possibility in the letter quoted above about the “Spartan or Roman woman.” I give here a longer version:

Je suis bien ennuyée d'être femme: il me fallait une autre âme, ou un autre sexe, ou un autre siècle. Je devais naître femme spartiate ou romaine, ou du moins homme français. Comme tel, j'eusse choisie pour patrie la république des lettres, ou quelqu'une de ces républiques où l'on peut être homme et n'obéir qu'aux lois.

(Lettres, 1: 374-375)

Comme tel, by the grammatical rule that all collectivities take the male gender, could stand for “a French man” alone or for “a Spartan or a Roman woman or … a French man.” The clause “I should have chosen … the republic of letters” follows, and given that there is a subsequent alternative introduced by or, namely “one of those republics where one can be a man and obey only the laws,” it reads momentarily as if the “republic of letters” were coordinated with the women from antiquity and “one of those republics” with the French man. The more plausible, and historically responsible, reading is of course to understand that the French man under the ancien régime would devote himself to literary pursuits and thus inhabit the republic of letters. Once this reading is performed, the women of antiquity might again be fleetingly coordinated with “one of those republics,” but it would swiftly become obvious that they would have no choice as to their domicile, whereas the French man might emigrate and thus choose to live in “one of those republics.” The “Spartan or Roman woman,” then, finally emerges at the end of the passage as an empty figure with no access to the republic either of letters or of law; but I would still suggest that there is a momentary identification of the female with the literary that is mediated through the figure of antiquity.

If there were very few women in the eighteenth century's version of the ancient world, there was, however, a great deal of Plutarch. The cultural authority of Dacier's translation of the Lives was such as to make invocation of Plutarch by a member of the Revolutionary generation almost compulsory.²⁵ The Memoirs claims that Roland, as a child of 8, took Plutarch to church in place of a prayer book:

Je fis une note de ce que j'aurais à me procurer: d'abord les Vies des hommes illustres de Plutarque, qu'a l'âge de huit ans je portais à l'église au lieu d'une Semaine-Sainte, et que je n'avais pas relues à fond depuis cette époque.

(50)²⁶

The Memoirs thus appropriates the Lives of Plutarch as a text significant within the life that the Memoirs itself writes, but it is important to note that Plutarch accompanies the subject only to church and to prison. That is, the text is explicitly represented as absent from the subject's adult existence prior to her imprisonment; Plutarch appears only at the opening of life and at its end. Again we may read the figure of classical antiquity pressed into service to provide the identity between subject and narrator which it is the task of the narrative to secure. That this identity may be rhetorical rather than literally autobiographical is an inescapable function of the narrative qualities of the autobiographical text itself.²⁷

Consonant with the intellectual activity of the Revolutionary generation, the relation between Christianity and classical paganism indicated by the substitution of Plutarch for prayer book is overtaken by that between classical antiquity and Rousseau. The occasion for this latter synthesis is the death of the subject's mother; the absence of the maternal figure in the Memoirs is compensated for by the presence of Rousseau's text. The comparison with Plutarch, which introduces the new text, indicates how significant this text is to be:

Mais Rousseau me fit alors une impression comparable à celle que m'avait faite Plutarque à huit ans: il sembla que c'était l'aliment qui me fût propre,²⁸ et l'interprète de sentimens que j'avais avant lui, mais que lui seul savait m'expliquer.

Plutarque m'avait disposée pour devenir républicaine: il avait éveillé cette force et cette fierté qui en font le caractère; il m'avait inspiré le véritable enthousiasme des vertus publiques et de la liberté. Rousseau me montra le bonheur domestique auquel je pouvais prétendre, et les ineffables délices que j'étais capable de goûter.

(302)

The two texts are first compared for their similar effect, and then distinguished in terms of their alignment with a public or a private sphere. Antiquity is conducive to civic virtue, Rousseau to domestic. Together they produce a satisfactory totality that begs to be identified with Mme Roland. This passage is followed, not coincidentally, with an account of how the Memoirs itself comes to be written.

Dans le siècle corrompu où je devais vivre et la Révolution que j'étais loin de prévoir, j'apportai de longue main tout ce qui devait me rendre capable de grands sacrifices et m'exposer à de grands malheurs. La mort ne sera plus pour moi que le terme des uns et des autres. Je l'attends, et je n'aurais point songé à remplir le court intervalle qui nous sépare du récit de ma propre histoire, si la calomnie ne m'avait traduite sur la scène pour attaquer plus grièvement ceux qu'elle voulait perdre. J'aime à publier des vérités qui ne m'intéressent pas seule, et je n'en veux taire aucune, pour que leur enchaînement serve à leur démonstration.

(302)

Here the narrator represents the conjunction of national history and individual character which produced that life of Mme Roland which the Memoirs writes, and which can again be coordinated with the synthesis of Plutarch and Rousseau. On the one hand, the account of personal virtue vindicated and the lessons of history inculcated recognizably draws on eighteenth-century notions of heroic history such as those which had conditioned the reading of Plutarch.²⁹ On the other, the paragraph seems to close with the sign of Rousseau, when the necessity of “suppressing nothing,” of “confession,” is alleged. Roland's own text claims to emerge through the coordination of these two cultural imperatives.

The Memoirs does not often explain its own production, as it does here, except insofar as it frequently represents its subject composing letters and “historical notes.” These activities may themselves be represented by models from antiquity. During Mme Roland's second imprisonment, in Sainte-Pélagie, her friend Champagneux encouraged her to continue the Notices historiques with which she had employed herself at L'Abbaye prison. The Memoirs' account of her compliance goes thus:

Le sensible Champagneux, qui m'engageait si vivement à prendre la plume pour continuer les Notices historiques que j'avais commencées: ce que je fis à sa prière, abandonnant pour quelque temps mon Tacite et mon Plutarque, dont je nourrissais mes après-dîner.

(183)

The writing can be seen here to account for itself in terms of a genealogical descent from the heroic history of Tacitus and Plutarch; but this writing is also represented as a departure from, or even a replacement of, that history. The woman who reads classical history here gives way to the woman who writes her own. But her writing still advertises its intimate relation to the texts of classical antiquity, and may even be read to invite comparison with them.³⁰ The “nourishment” that Tacitus and Plutarch provided is transformed into the Memoirs' own production.

There is one other indication in the Memoirs of a determining link between the figure of antiquity and that of the writing woman. A particularly memorable passage in the Memoirs, dealing with visits to Meudon, achieves something of a tour de force in its coordination of the characteristic elements of the cult of sensibility and of incipient Romanticism. Meudon is chosen as a spot preferred for its “bois sauvages, ses étangs solitaires” over the “routes frequentées, aux taillis uniformes du bois de Boulogne, aux décorations de Bellevue, aux allées peignées de Saint-Cloud” (265). The excursion into nature removes the family from the scene of early industrialization; the boat they take conveys them past the glassworks “dont on aperçoit d'une grande distance l'épaisse et noire fumée” (265). They have a regular stopping-place where a dairywoman supplies them with a bowl of fresh milk, a food emblematic of natural innocence. But the scene is not only that of a retreat to unspoiled nature. Description of the excursion to Meudon is prefaced with the note that “les odes de Rousseau, un volume de Corneille ou autre, faisaient tout mon bagage” (265).³¹ The whole episode is thus placed under a sign of high French culture. At the end of the narrative the sign of classical antiquity will similarly be invoked, and will be deployed, I shall suggest, to figure the writing woman.

On one particular visit to Meudon the party comes across a little house and its inhabitants. “Nature” pure and simple here gives way to nature organized by civic virtue. The house's inhabitants “n'avaient ni l'air des villes, ni ces enseignes de la misère si communes dans les campagnes” (266), and in fact they are the family of the man “chargé de veiller à l'entretien des canaux qui conduisaient les eaux dans quelques parties du parc” (266). The bounty of nature is thus joined to human ingenuity to produce a benign, well-regulated environment. The garden of the house is another such environment, divided into four equal parts with paths and a central fountain. Nor is this all:

Des fleurs mêlées aux légumes rendaient l'aspect du jardin riant et gracieux; le vieillard, robuste et content, me rappelait celui des bords du Galèse, que Virgile a chanté.

(266)

The circle is complete; Rousseau and Vergil enclose the scene and give to “nature” the authoritative seal of high culture. Moreover, the invocation of these texts suggests the inference that the scene is also generated between and from them, and is determined more by these literary paradigms, in particular by the trope of the locus amoenus, than by mimesis of “reality.” But to note this genealogy is also to note the anomaly of the writing woman who has offered herself for comparison with these texts. Not only Vergil and Rousseau, but also Roland, are writing this scene. She could not write it without them, but the acknowledgement of their determining presence is also and unavoidably a challenge. As it establishes the narrator's identity as a narrator, the Memoirs claims to subsume and perhaps even supersede the texts both of French culture and of classical antiquity.

The Memoirs proceeds to celebrate its own agency in producing the description:

[Le vieillard] causait avec plaisir et bon sens et, s'il ne fallait que des goûts simples pour apprécier une telle rencontre, mon imagination ne manquait pas d'y joindre tout ce qui pouvait lui prêter des charmes.

(266)

The narrative then goes on to apostrophize Meudon, which thus completely leaves the realm of the real and takes on all the traits of the literary topos:

Aimable Meudon! Combien de fois j'ai respiré sous tes ombrages, en bénissant l'auteur de mon existence, en désirant ce qui pourrait la compléter un jour, mais avec ce charme d'un désir sans impatience, qui ne fait que colorer les nuages de l'avenir des rayons de l'espoir!

(267)

The episode closes by explaining that narratives of such excursions found a place in Roland's letters to Sophie Cannet, where, moreover, the epistolary prose often broke into verse:

Le récit de mes promenades et du bonheur qu'elles me faisaient goûter avait sa place dans ma correspondance avec Sophie; quelquefois ma prose était coupée de vers, enfants irréguliers, mais faciles et parfois heureux, d'une âme pour qui tout était vie, tableau, félicité.

(268)

Rousseau and Vergil together can be seen to usher in the writing woman, both here in the Memoirs and in the Memoirs' account of former letter-writing.

In the preceding paragraphs I have suggested that it is possible to read, in the Memoirs, a series of links between the figure of antiquity and accounts of the Memoirs' own production. If these links are read as such, they indicate that the Memoirs could draw on a representation of the classical world to signal the narrator's identity as a writer and her accompanying mastery of her material. When it comes to Roland's authorship, the figure of antiquity seems to signify unqualified success rather than the uncomfortable negotiation that we have noted in connection with the discourses of class and of gender. That resistance to the project of constructing a Revolutionary female identity which I have traced on the part of the classical figures deployed within Roland's text, falls away when the woman becomes a writer. The anomaly may be explained in various ways. The very existence of the autobiographical text, of course, necessarily establishes the narrator's identity as a writer, so that in this case the classical figures can buttress a narrative of untroubled development rather than undertaking to solve the contradictions of gender or class identification. Moreover, the construct of “antiquity” itself emerges from a corpus of literature, and any access to this construct may be mediated only through the exercise of a literate, educated faculty. If antiquity is deployed within Roland's text to sign her own literary production, then, the metaphor and the activity it is called upon to represent mutually reinforce one another instead of offering reciprocal resistance.

Accounts of Roland's execution allege that she called for pen and paper from the tumbril, on the way to the scaffold. At what stage she would have been prevailed upon to stop writing, is a question that must remain moot. Her famous last words are well-known; she apostrophized a neighboring statue with the words “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.” The testimony of a friend, Sophie Grandchamp, also preserves some not-quite-last words which are germane to my investigation. Roland is due to be guillotined with another prisoner, whom she encourages and comforts. In prison, they are visited by the barber who cuts off their hair to facilitate the descent of the blade. He attends to the other prisoner first:

Après qu'on lui eut coupé les cheveux, elle le regarda attentivement et lui dit: “Cela te sied à merveille, tu as en vérité une tête antique.”³²

Whether or not this mot is apocryphal, its resonances are the same; the head is both that destined to fall on the scaffold and that which, on antique coins and sculptured busts, speaks of a transcendent cultural authority. The phrase is apt—delicately poised within the argument explored in this paper; the authority of classical antiquity can be understood as a contributing factor to the project of constructing a subject who is a Revolutionary, a woman and a writer, but can also be seen as a threat to this project by exposing the incongruity between the transcendence of antiquity and the specificities of that subject. As throughout the Memoirs, so here in the narrative by Sophie Grandchamp the figure of antiquity offers both failure and success; oblivion on the scaffold or classical heroic immortality.

I began with an argument from Fox-Genovese which indicated, in her own case and that of others, a problem which arises between, on the one hand, a self-identification strongly conditioned by early exposure to canonical texts, and on the other, a later recognition of the principles of exclusion around which the canon is constructed. In this paper I have briefly tried to examine some moments in a similar case between a writing woman and the classical canon. While many texts are canonical, the texts of antiquity are perhaps more canonical than others, and in the Memoirs of Mme Roland we can trace the resistance of the classical figures to the project of Revolutionary female selfhood which they are asked to facilitate. But the Memoirs' model of authorship also indicates that this resistance is not total, and is constantly overcome. That the jury is still out may be indicated by a similar situation to be read in the recent collection of essays titled Feminist Theory and the Classics.³³ In this volume various feminist classical scholars consider the difficulty of a double allegiance both to political change in the present and to the preservation and elaboration of an uncompromising literary past. Pervading these essays, which draw on the traditional canon to help construct a political practice that is egalitarian and inclusive, is the anxiety, articulated fully in the paper by Shelley Haley, that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”³⁴ But the relations between writing women and the classical canon, a particular historical example of which I have traced in this paper, could also suggest that the master's tools may be found perfectly adequate for the building of one's own house.³⁵

Notes

1. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: U of NC Pr, 1991).

2. The most recent edition of the Mémoires de Madame Roland is that of Paul de Roux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986). French quotations from the Memoirs are taken from this edition, and references are noted in the text. On occasion I have also had recourse to the edition of Claude Perroud, in two volumes (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1905). What is usually designated by the title Memoirs comprises several compositions written in prison between 1 June and 8 November 1793, including “Private Memoirs” in three parts, a number of more political writings such as “Historical Notes” and “Portraits and Anecdotes,” accounts of M. Roland's ministries and of her own two arrests and imprisonments, records of her interrogation and a draft of the defense to be delivered at her trial (which she was not permitted to deliver). Most of this material, heavily censored, was first published in 1795 under the title “Appeal to Impartial Posterity.” The edition of Perroud publishes all this material, together with many other related documents, whereas that of Roux is more selective. The present paper is chiefly concerned with the material of the “Private Memoirs” and the accounts of arrest and imprisonment.

3. See Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago: U of Chicago Pr, 1937), passim, and Simon Schama, Citzens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), 169-170.

4. My analysis of antiquity in the Memoirs thus differs in a crucial respect from the analysis of Rousseau's influence with Mme Roland's life and writings mounted by Mary Trouille, “Revolution in the Boudoir: Mme Roland's Subversion of Rousseau's Feminine Ideals,” Eighteenth Century Life 13.2 (1989): 65-86. For Trouille, Roland is able unproblematically to “subvert” the less promising aspects of a Rousseauist philosophy; my analysis of antiquity within the Memoirs leads me to suggest that there is a less comfortable and less complete negotiation between the woman writer and those influences which she acknowledges.

5. Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion are three of the Memoirs' favorite figures for the unjustly condemned leader.

6. See e.g., Parker (above, note 3) 80-88.

7. See e.g., Parker, ibid., 72-79.

8. See also Parker, ibid., 37-46 for accounts of such identification among others of the Revolutionary generation.

9. On Brutus as the defining republican hero, see Parker, ibid., 139-140.

10. Letter to Sophie Cannet, 5 February 1776, in Lettres de Madame Roland, Nouvelle Série. 1767-1780, ed. Claude Perroud and Marthe Conor (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1913), 1: 375. Subsequent references to this edition of the Letters will be found in the text.

11. See Parker (above, note 3) 47-61. The republics of antiquity were thought by the Revolutionaries to have afforded opportunities to talented citizens regardless of birth. But see Schama (above, note 3) 116, on the porous qualities of the French nobility and its openness to “new blood.”

12. See on tax farmers Schama (above, note 3) 72-73.

13. We might note that “below stairs” the narrator discovers a whole other system of minute class differentiations, e.g., between the “officers” and the “domestics” (Roux [above, note 2] 275).

14. I owe this insight to Jennifer McBride.

15. Parker (above, note 3) devotes a chapter, “Socrates and Phocion” to discussion of how the Revolutionaries identified themselves with the martyrs of classical antiquity. Roland here asserts that she bears out the claims she made when dreaming of classical heroes in her youth—“Whenever I read of some noble action I would say to myself, ‘that is what I would have done!’” (Roux [above, note 2] 256).

16. See Jules Michelet, Les femmes de la revolution, ed. with introd. Françoise Giroud (Paris: Carrère, 1988).

17. See e.g., John S. C. Abbott, The History of Madame Roland (New York: Harper, 1850); Ida M. Tarbell, Madame Roland: A Biographical Study (New York: McClure & Phillips, 1905); or Evangeline Blashfield, Manon Phlipon Roland: Early Years (New York: Scribner, 1922). The most recent biography, Gita May's Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York: Columbia U Pr, 1970) relies less on the testimony of the Memoirs to reconstruct its subject but still takes many of the text's statements at face value.

18. For instance, Mme Roland does not feature at all in the collection of essays edited by Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford U Pr, 1992). Annette Rosa, Citoyennes: Les femmes et la revolution française (Paris: Messidor, c.1988) has chapter headings for Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Corday, Théroigne de Méricourt, and Lucile Desmoulins, but not for Roland.

19. Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U Pr, 1992), 195.

20. That Roland knew the Sayings of Spartan Women is shown by the reference in the letter to Sophie Cannet, November 1773, Lettres, 1: 166.

21. It is by no means always antiquity that is so deployed; the impulse to sexual confession might be seen to derive from Rousseau.

22. See also Trouille (above, note 4) 77. Danton called Roland the local “Circe.”

23. I owe this point to Michael Simpson.

24. See also the references collected by Trouille (above, note 4) 69-82.

25. Parker notes that editions of Dacier's translation in this century outnumber those of the competition by almost two to one. See Parker (above, note 3) 29 and note.

26. In the personal, rather than the political, part of the Memoirs the same figure is repeated: “Plutarque semblait être la véritable pâture qui me convînt; je n'oublierai jamais le carême de 1763 (j'avais alors neuf ans), où je l'emportais à l'église en guise de Semaine-Sainte. C'est de ce moment que datent les impressions et les idées qui me rendaient républicaine sans que je songeasse à le devenir” (Roux [above, note 2] 212-213). That this vignette is a rhetorical figure rather than a faithful reproduction is suggested by the fact that Rousseau also claims to have read Plutarch first at the age of nine. See Gita May (above, note 17) 15.

27. The account that the Memoirs gives of a youthful allegiance to Plutarch need not be historically accurate to be significant; the Lives signs an early allegiance to republicanism, and its replacement of the prayer book to a corresponding anti-clericalism, which it is the task of the Memoirs to establish and develop. The appearance of Plutarch in church can be seen to herald the skepticism about the church's teachings which leads to the later vignette of the narrator taking communion while thinking on the words of Cicero (Roux [above, note 2] 260-261). Parker (above, note 3) 40-41 claims that in Roland's letters Plutarch signs a desire for “active, heroic virtue” rather than for republican institutions.

28. Rousseau, advocate of breast-feeding, here provides the maternal nourishment of which the subject has just been deprived. Heroines of 18th- and early 19th-century novels are frequently “motherless” either literally or in the sense of having a bad mother. See Janet Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia U Pr, 1980). It is thus appropriate that Roland's entry into this culturally validated state should be accompanied by a work of literature (La nouvelle Héloise) knowledge of which, moreover, had allegedly been denied her by her mother.

29. See Parker (above, note 3) 28 for an account of how “history,” particularly ancient history, was understood in this period.

30. See also the more decisive challenges noted by Trouille (above, note 4) 81.

31. We are here concerned with J.-B. Rousseau, not the philosopher Jean-Jacques, but the coincidence of the name may be too striking to be a coincidence.

32. Perroud (above, note 2) 2: 461-497 [=Appendix 14, “Souvenirs de Sophie Grandchamp,” 494].

33. Feminist Theory and the Classics. Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Remembering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering, ed. Nancy S. Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (New York: Routledge, 1993).

34. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Pr, c.1982), 112, quoted in Shelley P. Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics,” 23-43 in Rabinowitz and Richlin (above, note 33) 26.

35. It is a pleasure to acknowledge those who have helped with the development of this paper. My thanks go first and foremost to Michael Simpson, who taught me how to write about autobiography, and always makes the one I shall write some day more interesting. Useful comments on the paper were provided by Simon Goldhill, John Henderson, and the anonymous reader for CML. Jennifer Roberts was very encouraging at an early stage. Audiences at the Department of Classics in the University of Texas at Austin, and at the 126th meeting of the American Philological Assocation at Atlanta, Georgia, were helpful and supportive. The paper could not have been written, however, without the experience of teaching a Plan II Honors seminar on “The Use and Abuse of Classics” at the University of Texas at Austin. To my students in that seminar, and particularly to Jennifer McBride, I owe a special debt.