Family Remains: the politics of legacy in eighteenth-century France

Abstract

This dissertation accounts for the persistent occurrence of outsider figures (orphans, bastards, and exotic Others) in eighteenth-century French literature, and analyzes how these figures interrogate traditional and patriarchal models of family. As Michel Foucault argues in the first volume of <italic>History of Sexuality</italic>, the family unit serves as a generative site of power in early modern European societies. While Foucault focuses primarily on the marital and parents-children axes and their relevance to the formation of the individual political body, this dissertation analyzes how such power is also generated in the absence of these relationships. I argue that in their portrayal of figures that remain on the fringes of the family unit, the authors studied in this dissertation participate in a utopian experiment - one intended to create a better society through a discourse on evolved family relations. "Family Remains" combines structuralism with political and psychoanalytic theory to propose a new way of reading non-domestic fictional literature through the lens of the family. In so doing, it suggests that by arranging characters into non-heteronormative intimate communities, these authors create a new language of family politics, and in the process they propose new forms of power that are not necessarily passed from fathers to sons.