Rousseau and other beasts: gender, virtue, and domesticity in the 18th century in dialogue with Villeneuve and Leprince Beaumont

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of an ideal of domestic femininity in the eighteenth century through a comparative analysis between Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s version of La Bela et la Bête (1756) and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially the Letter to d’Alembert (1758) and Émile (1762). Starting from the observation that Beaumont’s tale reformulates and simplifies Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s earlier narrative (1740), the article argues that the model of the ideal woman – modest, caring, virtuous, and attached to the domestic sphere – is already consolidated in the pedagogical tale prior to its systematization by Rousseau’s philosophy. Although Rousseau became the most influential voice in the normativization of femininity during the Enlightenment, his work engages with an already circulating imaginary, in which the home emerges as a space for the formation of virtuous citizens and the woman as an indirect moral agent of the republic. The article contends that this transition should not be attributed solely to Rousseau’s rhetoric but rather understood as the result of a broader network of discourses and pedagogical practices. The notion of the “paradoxical public woman”, central, yet confined, emerges as a key to understanding the enduring effects of this gender normativity that, under the sign of virtue, reorganizes roles, affects, and the very grammar of modern citizenship.