Personalities Merging? by Judith P. Zinsser

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Somewhere people got the idea that history is "true," and that all a historian has to do is string one "true fact" after another. Actually, we construct it like a puzzle, and sometimes we put pieces in the wrong place. They look right, but are not. That sense of connection with your subject can lead you into this kind of mistake if you're a biographer. You try to make allowances for another time and place, but inevitably, your time and place become intertwined. You only hope that this doesn't distort the history you're trying to tell.

As a feminist, I wanted to make this unorthodox woman a champion for her sex. Du Châtelet certainly acted as a feminist might, challenging the intellectual authorities of her day; insisting that they read her writings on the nature of fire, on metaphysics, on the Bible, on morality, and that they judge them as they would those of a man. I could hear my stepmother asserting: "I pride myself that I think like a man." Barbara Lewis Zinsser was one of three women in her law school class at Columbia University, and always insisted that she didn't understand what the feminists of the 1970s were talking about. So, I thought I understood that part of Du Châtelet's attitudes. I, too, as an admirer of my lawyer stepmother, had once believed "you think like a man," the highest praise one could receive as an intelligent woman. When I remembered that, I avoided forcing Du Châtelet into a twentieth-century feminist mold. This eighteenth-century genius did acknowledge that her successes proved women's capabilities, but she met the challenges for herself, not for all women.

Du Châtelet was essentially self-educated. She had the help of able mentors, not only her lover and companion Voltaire, but also two of France's most renowned mathematicians. She invited the learned to come to the country chateau where she and Voltaire worked and wrote off and on from 1735 until 1745. I invited historians of science to Oxford, Ohio, almost as remote as Cirey-sur-Blaise, and listened and learned as they described their research. Was I trying to replicate her life? Had the sense of connection slipped into identification? Sometimes passing by that mirror I imagined doing one of those one-woman shows, and practiced in a fake French accent using phrases of Du Châtelet's that I'd just read. Leaving the mirror aside, and my late night dramatics, were there real cross overs from her life to mine? I remember my pride in the fellowship to a Cambridge college, Selwyn, and when my first article on her writings was published in the Royal Society journal. Du Châtelet wanted to go to England and, had she been a man, would certainly have been elected a foreign member of that prestigious London scientific institution. Can a biographer inadvertently realize her subject's dreams?

Not this one. Du Châtelet was fearless. She delighted in besting the man who attacked her ideas, in her answering pamphlet matching him point for point and sarcasm for sarcasm. I still have trouble, despite the efforts of a gifted psychotherapist, being angry for myself. But it's different when it's on someone else's behalf, my daughter's, for example. And, I do remember when I started to be angry for Du Châtelet. She was treated abominably by her twentieth-century biographers. Dazzled by Voltaire's reputation and trusting his own descriptions of her, they made "Emilie" into a silly, sexual character, truly a Miss Piggy running after her reluctant Kermie. In reality she was a Cate Blanchett-type heroine, the kind of woman who is beautiful not so much for her looks as for her manner-the suggestion of sexuality, but also of strength and intelligence with a pride tempered by her loyalty to those she loves, and an indefinable vulnerability.

Reviewers of my biography have commented on how Du Châtelet, like modern women, was a "multi-tasker," and indeed she was, managing responsibilities to her family and household, to the court, to her own talents and ambitions. Most women of my age had some of that in their life. However, it is her bravery that always strikes me. She took risks, made big mistakes, had great triumphs. In particular, I admire the way in which she created her own intellectual authority. I was first angry about the way institutional intellectual authority works when I realized how easily all of women's experiences had been erased from our common historical memory. Just dismissed as unimportant. And I guess that is the core of the connection, of the identification for me. Not that I am like her, but that I want to be as brave as she was, on her behalf, on behalf of other women, on behalf of myself. I like to think that writing this blog was my first big step.

View more information on Judith P. Zinsser's Emilie de Chatelet

Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie du Chatelet, history, philosophy, Enlightenment, Voltaire, Newton, France, Paris, Penguin Books, books