To what extent is female power illusory in X novel?

Many French novels of the eighteenth-century were ostensibly feminocentric, extolling the reign of powerful and mythical women. However, while women and their destiny were often placed at the heart of fiction, this did not mean the simultaneous elimination of androcentric privilege. Indeed, to celebrate the reign of women over the society of this period is one thing; to give women the means to be themselves is another. This contradictory depiction of women can partly be explained by the scepticism of contemporary French society regarding female independence, despite the support of many philosophes for women’s intellectual and social emancipation. Both Prévost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut and Graffigny’s 1747 epistolary novel Lettres d’une Péruvienne reflect these tensions and reveal the fragile nature of female power. Arguably, the nature of female power in novels of the century was fragile and more contradictory than it would initially appear. Although Prévost makes an arguably indirect feminist gesture by thematising the lack of a female voice through his narrative strategies, he ultimately conforms to eighteenth-century convention by portraying Manon’s female reign as illusory. She remains a shadowy, hollow presence with her sense of Self effaced, an ‘exquisite cadaver’ controlled and represented by men. While Zilia is initially dominated by her male masters, Graffigny exploits her feminist authorial ambitions to offer Zilia an alternative reality. She stages the becoming of Zilia’s voice and her rejection of her fixed social role, thereby reinventing the inherited fictional model of her male predecessors. By concluding her novel in this way, Graffigny posits a new way of considering female destiny, and implies that for women to truly experience freedom, they must enjoy a relative independence from male dominance.