L'école de la maladresse questions the concept of clumsiness as it emerged in eighteenth-century France and as it evolved from constituting the utmost social disgrace to becoming a sign of sincerity, naturalness, and eventually of originality. This work thus traces a history of maladresse from the emergence of the word in the French lexicon (in the early eighteenth-century) to the middle of the nineteenth century. The concept of maladresse has many lexical implications: as both physical clumsiness and social awkwardness, la maladresse is also in French, paradoxically, both an accident and the intrinsic quality of a person. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau's numerous and unfortunate faux-pas in the Confessions -- which result in his social exclusion -- to Rastignac's disastrous blunders in Le Père Goriot -- which on the contrary eventually allow him to make his way into high society -- the ways in which clumsiness was considered changed dramatically in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This period is a moment of transition between an understanding of clumsiness embedded in the Ancien Régime's civility codes -- and which as such rejected it as un-aristocratic and represented it as exclusively pertaining to the bourgeoisie -- to a modern account of la maladresse that progressively associated it to sincerity, naturalness, and eventually to originality. Yet, clumsiness cannot be confined to a stable definition and system of value: it is both the sign of sincerity and the impossibility to convey it, both an accident and a latent characteristic, both the result of ineptness and the necessary instrument in the subject's learning of agility and social adequacy. This project is one that incorporates multiple viewpoints, from literary representations (Balzac, Stendhal, Children's Literature) to autobiographical accounts (Rousseau, Stendhal), from civility codes and treatises to pedagogical texts and ideologies, including graphic arts and caricature renderings of the trope (Grandville and Gavarni), or travel narratives invoking the agility of savages and the physical ineptness of Europeans.
de Tholozany, Pauline,
"L'école de la maladresse: de J.J. Rousseau à J.J. Grandville, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles"
(2011).
French Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TM78CM
