The lowly babbler in Jeannette seconde, for a study of stereotypes in the novel of manners

Babbling is studied here as a stereotype of the memoir novel. Novels that follow in the wake of Marivaux’s works about “parvenus,” or social climbers, are often studied as evidence of the emerging bourgeois values of the time. The study of Gaillard de la Bataille’s Jeannette seconde, however, reveals the contradictions and tensions in the novel’s representation of the relationship between the lowly babbler and the heroine narrator, as well as how the novel addresses these representations.