Touché: The Duel in Literature

At first blush, the idea of exploring the duel in literature sounds scintillating—who cannot conjure up the bold image of two men (for indeed, it is only men who duel in these pages) at dawn, pistols or rapiers drawn? But this study from Cambridge language lecturer Leigh (Voltaire’s Sense of History) never quite gels. It does make a solid if repetitious case for using the duel as a way to examine tensions in the aristocratic and burgeoning bourgeois classes of the 18th and 19th centuries, each of which had vivid notions of honor, virtue, and self-expression. As Leigh finds, in his survey of mostly English, French, and German sources, authors of the period who tried to condemn dueling often ended up glamorizing its innate drama. He also raises the great paradox of the duel: an outlawed practice (albeit ineffectually so), yet subject to strict rules and protocols designed to clear duelists of charges of barbarism. Elsewhere, Leigh examines the use of ridicule to deter would-be duelists, and in the book’s best section, he looks at the relationship of women to dueling in the landmark 18th-century novels Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, and Julie, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Despite many diverting asides, however, Leigh’s volume mostly plods and will likely appeal mostly to the specialist in literature or history of the period, rather than the generalist. [em](June) [/em]