The life and death of babbling, from Marianne to Suzanne

This work considers the figure of the woman writer in eighteenth century first-person fiction. In Marivaux’s work, Marianne’s writing is a reproduction of a kind of babbling speech that obeys a rhetorical system. This language was considered intolerable by Marivaux’s contemporaries, and was corrected by his imitators. Later, and for other reasons, the writing of babbling disappeared completely from the works of the Encyclopedists, and the return of the tragic in La Religieuse and La Nouvelle Héloïse sounded the knell of babbling.