Babbling and feminine philosophy in Fanny de Beauharnais’s La Marmotte philosophe

With La Marmotte philosophe, Fanny de Beauharnais aims to overturn the prejudices associated with women in the context of the “querelle des dames” in France. She uses babbling as a narrative strategy to highlight the didactic and moral properties of a feminine rhetoric of frivolity. This mode of expression, here associated with women, becomes a weapon brandished against the rationalist discourses and the methodological spirit of the Enlightenment, which excluded members of the “fair sex.”