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The well-established idea since Antiquity of a gendered regime of emotions persisted into the eighteenth century, being relayed by certain moral or medical discourses, which viewed women as beings with exacerbated sensitivity, prey to constant agitation. The novel-memoirs that were being written in the 1730s echoed these representations but above all in a distanced and critical manner: the advent of first-person discourse became incompatible with a binary system of emotions which is constructed and dictated by a norm outside the subject. This article sets out to shed light on the different narrative strategies by which novelists highlight the characters’ trouble as a confused and protean feeling par excellence with a view to blurring the traditional expectations of gender and instilling a new fluidity there.