as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2010 to 2020. Her research interests include early modern philosophy and literature, theories of language, literary theory, and translation studies. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 2010, she is past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Hayes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women Moralists in Early Modern France, and reported the following:
Women Moralists in Early Modern France examines observations on the human condition by seventeenth and eighteenth-century women writers. At a time when women intellectuals were largely barred from French institutions of knowledge, moralist writing—an approach to social and psychological analysis not to be confused with “moralizing”—provided a platform for engaging questions that had exercised predecessors from Aristotle to Montaigne. Each chapter discusses a separate topic: Self-Knowledge, Friendship, Happiness and the Passions, Marriage, Age and Experience, and Women’s Nature and Capabilities. The book has two overarching goals: to demonstrate the relevance of early modern moralist writing to the field of philosophy, which has often dismissed it as “literary,” and to make visible the contributions of women to the genre, which has traditionally been defined in terms of male writers.Learn more about Women Moralists in Early Modern France at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 falls about three-quarters of the way through the chapter on friendship; it begins and ends with quotations from Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805) one of the key figures in the book. This page focuses on one aspect of her book-length treatise on friendship, De l’amitié (1761), the question of whether women and men can be friends. Opening the book to this page, the reader will quickly understand that d’Arconville takes a dim view of women’s “weakness of character,” but lays the fault for their failings on poor education and a society that rewards vanity and frivolity. It is therefore symptomatic of a broad societal failing that many women lack the strength of character required for true friendship. Like many of her predecessors, d’Arconville finds that mutual attraction between the sexes derails the possibility of friendship between men and women. But whereas the philosophers of antiquity had excluded women from friendship altogether, arguing that true friendship could only exist between virtuous men, d’Arconville takes a different turn. First, women’s weakness of character is cultural, not natural. Second, she rejects same-sex friendship between either women or men as fraught with competition and mistrust. To quote page 99, “Her rare depictions of sincere friendship are thus between men and women who are no longer susceptible to passionate feelings, either because of age or because, as physical desire cools, as it inevitably must, ‘they have had the time to know one another and to learn to love one another before ceasing to desire one another.’ The friendship that comes after love is the rarest and most precious of all in d’Arconville’s lexicon, based as it is not simply on virtue, but on virtue regained.” D'Arconville’s treatise looks at the possibility of friendship in a wide range of life circumstances and relationships and finds most of them wanting, so the chapter on friendship after love stands out. To found friendship on difference, rather than sameness, marks a radical departure from the classical tradition.
There are some obvious ways in which the Page 99 Test does not give an accurate idea of the book. The question of sameness and difference is only one of the issues taken up in the chapter on friendship, and friendship is only one of the topics addressed in the book. Also, page 99 discusses the views of a single figure, whereas the book examines works by over two dozen women writers.
On the other hand, page 99 is a useful microcosm of the book. Here, d’Arconville takes on the standard view of the impossibility of true friendship between the sexes—found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne—and turns it on its head. For Aristotle, friendship between virtuous men formed the basis of the polis; the exclusion of women from friendship is also an exclusion from citizenship. Rather than simply replacing male friendship with female friendship, d’Arconville (and other figures discussed in the chapter) replaces a politics of sameness with a politics of difference. We see similar intellectual moves in the other chapters. Women moralists were keenly aware of the gaps in the classical tradition; they turn to age-old topics and reimagine them in terms of their own lifeworld.
Page 99 is also representative of the book through its focus on an understudied writer, Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, whose extensive published work and unpublished manuscripts have a major role in the book. While I discuss several well-known figures, such as Émilie Du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël, my goal is to broaden the canon of women philosophers and intellectuals by incorporating lesser-known figures as well.
--Marshal Zeringue
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