Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman Janie Vanpée Patrick Coleman. Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 249. It is the rare book that brings fresh perspectives on how anger and gratitude shaped the conception of self and sociability in the French eighteenth century and also resonates with our contemporary social and political practices. Patrick Coleman’s book focuses on writers and thinkers of the French Enlightenment, but his erudite readings of their innovative deployment of anger and gratitude in social interactions comment indirectly on how contemporary attitudes toward gratitude, recast today inversely as entitlement, and anger, deployed as political opposition, still determine the way we conceive of ourselves in the political sphere, as the recent 2012 presidential election brought to the fore. Anger and gratitude were not newly discovered emotions in eighteenth-century France. One of the strengths of the book is to ground its inquiry in references to and knowledge of both the classical and the Christian heritage the better to show how Enlightenment thinkers diverged from the established tradition. Coleman identifies two significant developments that changed attitudes toward these two antithetical sentiments. On the one hand, the idea of moral equality, spread through the writings of the philosophes and in the salons, freed anger to be voiced with dignity against both personal injuries and social injustices and allowed gratitude to be expressed beyond the weakening bonds of the patronage system. On the other hand, the rise of the social ideal of governance of human behavior through impersonal laws erased the useful role that anger and [End Page 169] gratitude had played in upholding social cohesion. The book examines the tension between these two changes and their rhetorical expression in the works of Challe, Marivaux, Rousseau, and Diderot. Each of these writers advances the transformative effect of one or both of the two emotions. Bridging the classical era and the beginning of the Enlightenment, Challe’s treatise, Difficultés sur la religion, focuses on the author’s anger in his existential relation to God. In La Vie de Marianne, Marivaux explores how Marianne’s gratitude toward her benefactors inspires the recognition of her independence and moral worth as a human being. Rousseau plays the key role, invoking both sentiments to powerful effect. Anger and gratitude figure prominently in both his personal social encounters and in his works, the fiction as well the discursive texts. From the moment of his inspiration on the way to visit Diderot incarcerated at Vincennes, anger serves the polemics of his attack on injustice and inequality. Rousseau’s anger will have an illocutionary force on his readers, inspiring their gratitude to him and redefining their sense of self in relation to Rousseau the man. His anger and his discomfort at the way gratitude in a relation of patronage weakens personal liberty and identity will lead him to propose the neutral rule of law to govern all ranks in society equally. His works will thus exceed their descriptive value to have a far lasting effect in reshaping personal relations, first between author and reader, and second, extended to other social and political relations. Anger, resentment, and the vicissitudes of gratitude resurge in the polemics between Lui and Moi in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, as each provokes the anger of the other and Lui suggests that Moi should gratefully acknowledge his debt to Lui as an inspiration for Moi’s own genius. By the close of the century, these two sentiments, described and dramatized in the texts of major authors, succeeded in redefining the individual in his relation to the social and political sphere. One can question whether Voltaire or other Enligthtenment writers should have been included. What is clear is that Coleman’s monograph lays the groundwork for exploring bourgeois drama or novels by women, such as Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, where the bourgeois or marginalized individual who expresses anger or gratitude merits respect and the recognition of his or her rights as a social being. Janie Vanpée Smith College Copyright © 2013 L'Esprit Créateur