© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/0263990413Z.00000000037 romance studies, Vol. 31 No. 2, April 2013, 84–100 Becoming (M)other: Reflectivity in Le Journal des Demoiselles Susan Hiner Vassar College, USA This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (J.J.), editor-in-chief and columnist for the long-running Journal des Demoiselles (1833–96), vis-à-vis the dominant ideology of the feminine in nineteenth-century France. From 1833 to her retirement in 1853, J.J., a self- supporting and mature divorcée living alone, presented herself as a jeune fille who lived at home with her parents and corresponded about the latest fashions and trends with an anonymous and imaginary reader. This article argues that, in spite of the journal’s markedly conservative tenor as a vehicle for promoting respectable femininity and its explicit aim to prepare young girls for bourgeois marriage, the columns of its principal spokeswoman can be read as the expression of an alternative agenda centred in female sociabil- ity and autonomy. Analysing fashion plates and sewing patterns alongside sample columns from the twenty-year span of J.J.’s ‘Correspondance’, the article traces the idea of literal and figurative ‘reflectivity’ to investigate J.J.’s mixing of surface and subtextual messages. keywords Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy, Journal des Demoiselles, reflectivity, feminine press, sewing, fashion, marriage, women’s studies In 1853, at the age of seventy-seven, Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy, who signed her correspondence column for the Journal des Demoiselles simply ‘J.J’., passed her pen to one E.E. and headed to Trouville for a rest. Her successor thanked her in the journal’s next issue for her ‘voix amie qui, pendant si longtemps, nous a dirigées dans nos devoirs, nos études, nos travaux, comme la meilleure des mères, et s’occupait de nos plaisirs comme la plus douce et la plus aimable des sœurs’ (E.E., 1853: 282). Friend, mother, and sister, J.J. had spent the past twenty years chronicling contem- porary fashion and mores for the readership of the young ladies’ journal always in the guise of a youthful virgin eager to share with her fabricated provincial corre- spondent the latest news and trends from Paris. But beneath the discourse of the helpful and slightly more worldly sister-friend lay the gently prescriptive voice of a dominating mother whose task it was to form the daughters of France in her own virtuous image.