PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0013 222 Theresa Varney Kennedy: Women’s Deliberation. The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650-1750). London-New York, Routledge, 2018. 201 p. Women’s Deliberation presents a typology of female heroines in a broad array of female-authored plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author devotes a chapter to each of her four categories: 1) the irrational heroines who are driven by a violent passion of some sort; 2) the dutiful heroines who subsume their emotions to virtue and honor, often demonstrating leadership skills; 3) the bold and brazen heroines who ignore social constraints in the name of romantic love; 4) and finally the deliberative heroines, who blend rationality and sentiment to form a kind of ideal female protagonist. “The deliberative heroine combines all of the respective positive qualities from the irrational, dutiful, and bold and brazen heroines: the capacity to make active choices, the selflessness to put others first when duty calls, and the determination to follow her heart. At the same time, the deliberative heroine combats the negative stereotypes and traditional gender roles that limit the other heroine types” (141). The greatest strength of this work is to offer the reader an introduction to a broad corpus of largely unknown plays. Kennedy is remarkably thorough in her treatment of individual plays. For each of the 22 plays that she presents in depth, the author provides the plot, a brief biography of the playwright, the performance history, the play’s sources, and information about its reception. One comes away enlightened about a significant corpus of plays that have attracted (too) little attention. The four-part typology of heroines is not only central to the work, but overwhelms it. One senses that this structure was built up painstakingly over an extended period of time. Each of the author’s heroines is thoughtfully fitted within a category, buttressed by careful argument that foresees possible objections. In Kennedy’s commitment to her typology, however, she leaves significant lacunae. Any female-authored play of the period that does not contain one of these four types of heroines is simply passed over. The book’s greatest shortcoming is that it seems to exist in a vacuum. Nowhere is there acknowledgment that a theatrical character is a construct, not a person, or that the term “heroine” might require explanation or discussion. Kennedy demonstrates strong knowledge of what has been published on the women playwrights she discusses, but seems singularly divorced from the critical discourse surrounding the study of early modern French theater in the last 30 years. The names Forestier, Biet, Viala, Lyons, etc. are nowhere to be found. Feminism is represented by only four works in the bibliography, the most recent of which is over 20 years old. The most Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0013 223 glaring shortcoming concerns the great playwrights of the seventeenthcentury. Molière is not mentioned, while Racine and Corneille exist as only the most blinkered stereotypes. According to Kennedy, Racine’s female protagonists are irrational and Corneille’s are duty-bound. She repeatedly accuses Phèdre of refusing to take responsibility for her crimes, seemingly unaware of the complexities of Racine’s character in that regard. Indeed, there are no secondary references in the bibliography about Racine; and Corneille is favored with a sole article. Kennedy’s line of argumentation is ameliorative, as though there were some chronological forward movement leading the theater from the first three rather defective types of heroines to the deliberative heroine: “This development culminated in the emergence of what I call the ‘deliberative’ heroine” (6). The triumphal progression is starkly undermined, however, by the fact that all four categories contain plays from both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The contents of her categories thus contradict any claims of a chronological development of heroine types, yet throughout the book, the suggestion of a march towards a more positive (deliberative) heroine recurs frequently. It would have been interesting to know if the author found evidence of such heroines in plays of the period written by men, but aside from an occasional reference to male playwrights as sources (e.g., Marivaux, Goldoni), they have no place in this study. The unspoken presupposition is thus essentialist, and one may only conclude that the deliberative heroine is necessarily a female creation. In the conclusion to the chapter on the deliberative heroine, Kennedy makes the following strong point: “The deliberative heroine does what no other character can do: puts women center stage in an unequivocally positive light” (167). It is followed, however, by a concluding chapter that goes in two surprising (and surprisingly discordant) directions. First the author addresses what she refers to in her introduction as the “modern-day deliberative heroine” (9). She takes her examples from recent Star War films as well as the Disney characters Mulan, Merida, Moana, Tiana, and Belle, followed by young adult literature, such as the series Divergent and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (173-74). She then shifts to a brief analysis of a Graffigny play from 1733 (La Réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit) in which she espies a self-conscious recapitulation of the characteristics of the ideal (i.e., deliberative) heroine. In order to make her argument, however, she is forced to equate “wit” with “heart,” an ungainly move at best. She ends this section with an outsized claim for this lesser-known Graffigny play: it “redefined the way early modern female playwrights thought about heroines and, in turn, the way society thought about women” (177). PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0013 224 I am deeply sympathetic with Kennedy’s efforts to come to grips with Early Modern women playwrights, for having tried to do so myself 25 years ago. As a source of information about a significantly large body of such plays, this work is successful. It is ironic then that the author has placed these diverse women characters in the straight-jacket of her four categories. The title of the book - Women’s Deliberation - is striking in its double meaning, but nowhere does Kennedy acknowledge the possibility of “liberation” that the title suggests. Nina Ekstein