The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing 9781472442017, 1472442016

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The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series include: Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature Kathleen M. Llewellyn Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800 The Cloister Disclosed Barbara R. Woshinsky Publishing Women’s Life Stories in France, 1647–1720 From Voice to Print Elizabeth C. Goldsmith Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France Mastering Memory Faith E. Beasley The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France Print, Rhetoric, and Law Lyndan Warner

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France Women Writ, Women Writing

Domna C. Stanton The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Domna C. Stanton 2014 Domna C. Stanton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data a catalogue record for this book is available from the British library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: stanton, Domna c., author. The Dynamics of Gender in early modern france: Women Writ, Women Writing / by Domna c. stanton. pages cm. — (Women and Gender in the early modern World) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-1-4724-4201-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. french literature—16th century—history and criticism 2. french literature—17th century—history and criticism 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Women and literature— france—history—16th century. i. Title. PQ239.s73 2015 840.9’003—dc22 2014012049 isBn 9781472442017 (hbk)

Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments x Introduction   Part I

1

Women Writ

1 Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)?  

37

2 The Daughters’ Sacrifice and the Paternal Order in Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide  

63

3 The Female Mind Reformed:Pedagogical Counter-Discourses, Radical and Regressive, Under Louis XIV  

89

Part II

Women Writing

4 The Heroine at War: Self-Divisions in La Guette’s “Extraordinary” Memoirs   

123

5 From the Maternal Metaphor to Metonymy and History: Seventeenth-Century Discourses of Maternity and the Passion of Mme de Sévigné  

149

6 Overreading, Without Doubt:Ambiguity and Irony in La Princesse de Montpensier  

179

Afterword  

207

Bibliography   Index  

215 245

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Illustrations Cover

Abraham Bosse, Les femmes à table en l’absence de leurs maris (Women at Table when Their Husbands Are Absent), c. 1635–1636. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Legend: While our Husbands go off and give themselves free rein / And take their pleasure in town or in the fields, My Ladies, let’s have our banquet (Tandis que nos Maris s’en vont donner carrière / Et prendre leurs plaisirs à la ville ou au champs, / Mes Dames, banquetons)

I.1

Peter Paul Rubens, Le bonheur de la Régence (The Happiness of Regency). Scala / Art Resource, NY.

I.2

Abraham Bosse, La vraye femme (The Real Woman). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

15

I.3

Abraham Bosse, Contentement d’une dame noble (Contentment of a Noble Lady). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

20

8

1.1 Abraham Bosse, Visite à l’accouchée (Visit to the Woman Lying-in), 1633. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

43

1.2

Charles Estienne,“La partie interieure de l’arrierefaiz …” (“The Interior Part of the Afterbirth …”). From La dissection des parties du corps humain divisé en trois livres (The Dissection of the Parts of the Human Body, Divided into Three Books) (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1546). New York Academy of Medicine Library, Rare Book Room.

47

2.1

Illustration from Jean Racine, Oeuvres (Paris: Thierry, 1679), reprint of (Paris: Barbin, 1676), opposite p. 232. Book Division, the New York Public Library.

66

3.1

Abraham Bosse, La maîtresse d’école (The School Mistress), 1638(?). Snark / Art Resource, NY.

95

3.2 Jean Sauvé, after Pierre Brissart, Frontispiece to Les femmes savantes (The Learned Women), from Les oeuvres de monsieur de Molière (Paris: Thierry, Barbin & Trabouillet, 1682). In the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University Libraries.

97

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The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

4.1

Frontispiece of La Gallerie des Femmes Fortes (The Gallery of Strong Women) by Pierre Le Moyne, published in Paris, 1647 (engraving), Cortona, Pietro da (Berrettini) (1596–1669) (after). Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library.

127

4.2

Claude Deruet, Portrait equestre d’ Alberte Barbe Ernecourt, Dame de Saint Balmont (Equestrian Portrait of Alberte Beard Ernecourt, Lady Saint Balmont), 1640(?).© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

129

5.1 Frontispiece to Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London: T. and R. Cotes, 1631). Huntington Library, San Marino California.

154

5.2

Adrian van der Spieghel, Pregnant Woman with Fetus and Placenta Displayed in De formato foetu, 1626. Legend: “Femme enceinte dans un paysage [planche anatomique d’une femme gravide, écorché] (“Pregnant Woman in a Landscape [anatomical plate of a pregnant woman, écorché].”) New York Academy of Medicine Library.

155

5.3

Louis le Nain, Le repos de la sainte famille (The Rest of the Holy Family). From Tout l’oeuvre peint des Le Nain, edited by Pierre Rosenberg. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

156

5.4

Louis le Nain, La famille heureuse (The Happy Family, or the Return Following the Baptism), 1642. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

157

5.5

Louis le Nain, Intérieur paysan au vieux joueur de flageolet (Peasant Interior with an Old Flute Player), c. 1642. Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY.

158

5.6

Georges de la Tour, Le nouveau-né (The Newborn Child) [Nativity], c. 1645. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

159

5.7

Pierre Mignard, La famille de Louis de France, fils de Louis XIV, dit “le Grand Dauphin” (The Family of Louis de France, the Son of Louis XIV, Called “le Grand Dauphin”), 1687. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

160

List of Illustrations

ix

5.8 Louis Ferdinand (The Younger) Elle, Portrait de Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon avec sa nièce Françoise-Amable d’Aubigné, future Duchesse de Noailles (Portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon with Her Niece Françoise-Amable d’Aubigné, the Future Duchesse de Noailles), c. 1688. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

161

6.1

Final page of La Princesse de Montpensier. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS 1561.

196

6.2

La Princesse de Montpensier (Paris: T. Jolly, 1662) (first published edition), p. 142. Book Division, the New York Public Library.

197

Acknowledgments The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France represents decades of making and remaking. Courses, seminars, dissertations, lectures, conferences, papers and essays in embryonic and slowly more elaborated forms have all played their parts in the readings and thinking embedded in this work. It has been shaped by the students, colleagues, scholars, critics and theorists I have worked with, and whose ideas are incorporated with grateful thanks in the body and notes of the book’s chapters. The acknowledgments of my indebtedness are, of course, impossible to enumerate fully. I begin with Abby Zanger for her enthusiastic support in submitting the manuscript to Ashgate, for its series on Women and Gender in the Early Modern Period; then with Erika Gaffney for shepherding me through the acquisition process with expertise, flexibility and efficiency; next, editor Seth F. Hibbert for his knowledge and support throughout the editorial process; finally, copyeditor Rachel Martens for her attentive, detailed work on the manuscript. I am grateful to Sheryn Goldenhersch, my able and devoted assistant in life and work, to Amy Martin for her unflagging help with bibliography, library work, copy editing, illustrations, and computer literacy, and to Lucie Chloe Rousseau for her assistance in navigating permissions from French institutions. Thanks, as ever, to Alexandra and Sam, whose supportive understanding of workaholism comforts me, and whose love gives me daily joy. Early drafts of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared under the titles of “Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen,” in Sexuality and Gender in EarlyModern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, edited by James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 247–65, and “From the Maternal Metaphor to Metonymy and History: Seventeenth-Century Discourses of Maternity and the Case of Sévigné,” in The Mother in/and French Literature, French Literature Series 27 (2000): 1–32. I thank the editors of those publications for their knowledge and help.

Introduction Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose. That the terms recur is interesting enough, but the recurrence does not index a sameness, but rather the way in which the social articulation of the term depends upon its repetition … Terms of gender designation are thus never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade.1

In Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004), unlike her earlier work, gender figures prominently as “an historical category” whose “framework for understanding how it works is multiple, shifts through time and place … and is open to a continual remaking” (9–10). At any point in time, the prescriptions of gender, embodied in “masculine” and “feminine,” and by extension the set of terms that make up their semantic networks, constitute an historical norm, a distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime that Butler examines in Undoing Gender. Gender norms exceed human subjects in the broader sociality, they govern our intelligibility and determine our social recognition (11, 32, 41); as Butler writes, “[we] depend on there being norms of recognition that produce and sustain our viability as human” (33). Thus we cannot do without norms, but the fact that their forms are historically changeable and that they need to be sustained by constant repetition means that they only persist “to the extent that they are acted out in social practice and reidealized and reinstituted in and through” the rituals of daily life (48, 207). This, then, “provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have” and the site where norms can be challenged and transformed over time (33). At this normative juncture, the dynamics of history in Undoing Gender dovetails with Butler’s dominant concern, in both her earlier and more recent works, for setting out the limits of constructionism and delineating the critical place of human agency—arguably, the central issue of our post-modern times. However, this agential resistance to regulatory regimes is problematically articulated in Butler’s work, in my view. In Undoing Gender, for example, she suggests that if “gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized,” then “gender might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalized. Indeed, it may be that the very apparatus that seeks to install the norms also works to undermine that very installation, that the installation is, as it were, definitionally incomplete” (42). Although definitional incompleteness makes sense in a specific historical context, it is more difficult, I believe, to situate agency in “the apparatus” itself and to account for its workings. In so doing, Butler aims to foreclose the presence of a subject engaged in denaturalization prior to its coming into gendered existence, but she does not explain why and how one self denaturalizes gender and another

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does not; she asserts the historical determination of “‘one’s own’” sense of gender in relation to existing “social norms … that support and enable the act of claiming gender for oneself” (7), but she does not describe the complex acts and processes involved in this claiming of gender for “oneself.” The same problem appeared in the closing chapter of Gender Trouble (1989) where, in a move that recalls Lévi-Strauss, Butler describes agency as a kind of bricolage. Affirming that “there is no self that is prior to … its entrance into [the] … cultural field,” she claims that “[there] is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (185), without explaining, yet again, the nature of this enabling nor the constellation of factors that account for who does the taking up and who—what subject—does not. From Gender Trouble on, and in the quote from Undoing Gender with which I began, Butler also insists on the agential possibilities of the repetition of norms, where “the injunction to be a given gender” produces a variety of “incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction,” and thus represent failures of the regulatory norm and make possible “a subversion of [gender] identity.”2 And yet, variety, multiplicity, even proliferation (41–2) do not necessarily produce an “incoherence” that in turn allows for a defiance of norms, since variable constructs can be part and parcel of the sign system that makes up the “masculine” and the “feminine” at a particular historical moment; indeed, Butler recognizes that repetition per se is not subversive; on the contrary, it can further attach and subjugate human subjects (GT xxi, 76–7, 178–89).3 Nevertheless, I would agree with Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) that when normative gender identity is figured as always already comprising ambiguities as well as contradictions, this does engender “incoherences” that can be exposed, explored and exploited to make the norm a contested site of meaning.4 In that circumstance, then, we can speak of what Butler calls “recirculation,” “resignification” (GT 41– 3, 184)5 and, after Irigaray (and Derrida), “citationality” as a miming that is critical of dominant (gender) scripts. Discussing the ambiguities of Irigaray’s concept of miming, Butler’s Bodies that Matter observes that the author of Speculum, From the Other Woman (1974) “performs a repetition and displacement of the phallic economy. This is citation, not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original, but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the original” (45).6 Although Butler iterates the subversive possibilities of repetition and resignification in other works, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) she also cites and resignifies Foucault’s “reverse (or counter-) discourse” to deploy yet another instance of resistant agency that is meaningful for gender analysis, even though such analysis did not preoccupy Foucault.7 The concept first appears in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: in Foucault’s much debated analysis, power does not emanate from some central site—such as a sovereign—but rather, it represents an immanent “multiplicity of force relations … produced from one moment to the next … in every relation from one point to another … [and] that comes from everywhere … force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states

Introduction

3

of power … [that] are always local … unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable and tense.”8 But power is also productive of “the process which, throughout ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses” these force relations (92). For Foucault, the very existence of power relations “depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance,” a “swarm” of “mobile and transitory points” that do not only represent “a reaction or rebound … an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat” (96). On the contrary, power relations are modified over time by “continual shifts,” some strengthened some weakened, “so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all” (97, 99). In this process, one of power’s most productive forces is to generate discursive forms of knowledge (savoir-pouvoir). Foucault describes the discursive possibilities of opposing and undermining power, which is always fragile: We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it … there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. (101–2)

Pursuing this multivalent view of discourse’s relation to power in the construction of human subjects, Foucault concludes that the marginalized—the hermaphrodite, the homosexual, for instance—can engage in “the formation of a ‘reverse discourse’,” through which subjects can speak on their own behalf to demand legitimacy, even by enlisting the same categories that rendered them unintelligible, illegitimate in the first instance (HoS1 101).9 In evoking these Foucaultian unstable and shifting power relations that generate resistances to (gender) norms, Butler defines reverse discourse as one “possibility of subversion or resistance … in the course of subjectivation” (Psychic Life 92–3). And in resignifying this interlocked notion of power-and-resistance, she introduces a (gendered) subject always “in the process of being produced, it is repeatedly produced (which is not the same as being produced anew again and again),” adding her own emphasis on a constant, historical process of “repetition with a difference” and a proliferation of resistant effects: “It is precisely the possibility of a repetition which does not consolidate … the subject, but which proliferates effects that undermine the force of normalization. The term which … forms and frames the subject … mobilizes a reverse discourse against the very regime of normalization by which it is spawned” (93). These notions of unstable historical norms of gender, and the possibilities for resisting and resignifying them in and through shifting contextual power relations undergird The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France and are embodied in the idea of a dynamics—a seventeenth-century term coined by Gottfried Leibnitz

4

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

(1646–1716) in studying the forces that impel motion and the interactions between bodies in collision working to remove obstructions, a problem that preoccupied New Scientists and philosophers from Descartes and Hobbes to Newton and Kant.10 The set of readings that make up the six chapters of this book center on the French seventeenth century, with forays back into the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries and forward to the eighteenth (c. 1715), examine the textual conjunctures and negotiations of, and the accommodations and resistances to, unstable and changing contextual gender norms, themselves fraught with tensions and contradictions. Building on Butler’s and Foucault’s constructs, which I also rework, I cast the norms of gender emblematically as a normative repertory of types (each with constituent concepts) that coexist (and conflict) at any particular historical moment. These types, whose semes, to put it in stark binary terms, have positive connotations in some cases, negative in others, are contained in the usages and practices of different actors who are all socially legible, and who can take up (repeat with a difference), cite and resignify them counter-discursively. In this repertory of terms, individual meanings for types shift over time, and the repertory itself proliferates or contracts in different discourses—legal, economic and political, religious and cultural, scientific and medical, for example—and manifests internal incongruities and contradictions. In what constitutes their own process of constant formation and re-formation, human subjects act to make certain normative choices among the available normative options, and not others, a practice whose etiology still and always remains opaque, Butler to the contrary notwithstanding. Nevertheless, the early-modern texts (and discourses) on which I focus inscribe the overt and covert factors that account for accommodations, negotiations and resistances, in ways that make textuality particularly revelatory for (re)constructing the workings of gender norms. In the early-modern works I examine, subjects can repeat with (some) difference, depending on contextual freedoms and limitations within a horizontal of expectations and possibilities, and thus can effectuate resignifications and subversions, some more salient and more consequential than others. Indeed, it could be argued that the repetition of—or conformity to—one or more normative notions of gender, a repetitiveness that a gender system requires to sustain itself and that a subject needs to be recognizably human, represents the contingent precondition in texts for the articulation and practice of (some degree of) resistance and oppositional differentiation—a dynamic, dialectical process that is truly “never settled once and for all.” In the seventeenth century, this process of gender conformity, negotiation and resistance is embodied in the querelle des femmes, a debate that involved thousands of works and lasted over several centuries—some would say, to this very day. In its pre-Revolutionary forms, it has wrongly been characterized, in my view, as a static repetition of the same tired arguments about women, as Kelly, for example, argued in an early and still highly influential essay.11 As Butler rightly suggests, however, the mere recurrence of a term does not index sameness; after all, the articulation is embedded in a different historical and social context and may have different speakers with different goals (UG 10). Already established in

Introduction

5

the writings of medieval clerics, views on the nature, characteristics and capacities of women were both iterated and questioned throughout the early modern period, as men and women reworked—and were reworked—by gender norms in their responses to specific local and societal developments and events. A basic set of binary oppositions pitted critics against advocates des femmes, and propounded conflicting views of the proper or potential role in culture and society of le sexe, as the second sex was reductively known, in both dominant discourses and counter- or reverse discourses. To be sure, it is difficult to characterize the “two sides” of this querelle, much less all the intervening sides that subjects take up in particular discourses and texts. Since “feminist” and “anti-feminist” are, of course, anachronistic, I choose, as a convenient short-hand, albeit unsatisfactory solution, the term “misogynistic” for what are contextually, negative, even hate-filled representations of women, which often contain clichés about le sexe ranging from the imbecilic and the demonic to the modest, unloquacious saintly female who accepts authority and her ordained place in the private sphere. Now “misogynist” is used in the ancient works of Antipater, Chrysippus, Gallen and Menander, with which the learned in the seventeenth century would be familiar; and in the early modern period, the ironically entitled The Praise of Women (La louange des femmes, 1550), features the writer, Andre Misogyne; in fact, Edmond Huguet’s Dictionnaire de la langue française du XVIe siècle defines misogyne as “Enemy of women” and quotes Jean de Marcouville’s Bonté et mauvaisité des femmes (c. 1560): “That’s the way that misogynous men and enemies of the feminine sex, thinking they were acting in their own favor and against women, turned to the praise and exaltation of women,” probably a reference to the querelle des femmes.a12 On the other side, and equally problematic, I favor, “pro-woman,” an empty signifier that can assume meanings only in relation to hommes at a particular historical moment, here the French seventeenth century, and in resistance to—and deviation from—dominant discourses, which were essentially conservative and yes, misogynistic. Both, however, are subject to historical (and dynamic) shifts of meaning within the time frame I examine in this book. And yet, these early-modern gender wars should more properly be named la querelle des femmes et des hommes. Even though there was no formalized querelle des hommes, there was in relation to women and by contiguity, an extensive discourse on the excellence and frailty, the dignity and misery of man, as Warner has shown for the French Renaissance, and as the emerging field of masculinity studies for the French early modern period confirms.13 Both genders a “Voila comment cela que les mysogines et ennemis du sexe feminine pensoient faire pour eux à l’encontre des femmes est tourné à la louange et exaltation d’icelles.” In The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, all translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Only translated passages from early-modern French works that are a sentence or more in length and that are cited in the body of a chapter’s text will be footnoted; those cited in the endnotes will be preceded there by their English translation. Where I have revised a published translation to provide a more accurate version, I bracket these changes.

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in the seventeenth century were “an ambivalent commodity,” to cite Roper’s term,14 both “women” and “men” were contested notions and were defined and redefined in relation to each other according to numerous and shifting contextual factors. Thus it is important not to impose a single dominant interpretation of men, masculinity and the male body against which a fully constructed, victimized female is set. As Mclive’s “Masculinity on Trial” argues, male privilege was linked to proof of potency and the capacity to engender progeny. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sodomitical monarch, Henry III (1551– 1589), had no children and thus became the last of the Valois rulers; and Louis XIII (1610–1643) did not father an heir for some twenty some years after his marriage to Anne of Austria for reasons that the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux (1619–1692) attributed in part to his distaste for sexual coupling with the queen and yet again, to sodomitical tendencies. This generative inability, coupled with a protracted difficulty to procreate produced a crisis of sovereignty that potentially also emasculated the emerging nation. On a more private level, that the granting of divorce was predicated on proving the husband’s impotence placed enormous strains on men to perform under the surveillant eyes of medical and juridical authorities, as Darmon’s Le tribunal de l’impuissance shows. This institutionalized ritual also contributed to the notion of perilous male bodies that could be, as McLive concludes, unstable, uncertain, opaque and equivocal, and thus the source of anxieties.15 This is not to deny the marked privileges of (elite) masculinity in the early modern period, and the new patriarchal rights of the father as head of the family over mothers and children, a status that reflected and sustained the widely propagandized notion of the king as father to his people, what Hanley has called the family-state compact.16 But it is to question the longstanding idea that the male aristocracy was emasculated during the reign of Louis XIV. Recent studies have properly highlighted the complex ways in which the monarchy made sure to maintain the nobility’s prerogatives, even as its stature was compromised by the creation of la noblesse de robe to fill the monarchy’s emptied coffers, and by the appointments of bourgeois to important royal offices, which became hereditary over time as their holders’ fortunes grew exponentially in comparison to la noblesse d’épée.17 Although these ambiguities, which complexify the status of elites, are analyzed in some chapters of The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, my primary focus remains “women,” viewed here not as a unity based on oppression but as a sign where multiple corporeal, cultural and political semes converge, which is definitionally incomplete, temporally unstable, and which remains the site of contested meanings. To be sure, there are exclusionary implications to “women,” as Butler reminds us (BTM 18–21), but she also insists that “women” continues to be “absolutely … a category without which we cannot do,” at bottom because “it denotes … something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself.”18 By extension, then, a focus on women can be meaningful for studying all subjects who are excluded or

Introduction

7

othered in specific contexts and for understanding the workings of gender norms in their intersections with a host of factors. This is certainly true of the binary system of the early modern period, which perpetuated tropes from classical times that opposed male to female as mind to matter, reason to unreason, spirituality to carnality. In the French seventeenth century, women were legally not persons, except if they were widowed or single above the age of 25. Not only were they marginalized and abjected as perpetual minors, subject by law and custom to fathers and husband, but their legal and professional status steadily worsened, as Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” perhaps first demonstrated.19 And yet, the forces that affected and inflected the position of women in the seventeenth century are also complex and contradictory, both progressive and regressive relative to a particular context. Thus elite women played an active military role in the civil wars of the Fronde that divided France (1648–1653), and pitted the nobles and the parlement against the king and Cardinal Mazarin, in a way that did not happen again until the Revolution of 1789, even though the Fronde ended with the monarchy’s triumph. Royal women (as widows) were also able to govern (temporarily) over men through the male child they produced, even though France was the only European country that made it a fundamental law of the kingdom never to allow a woman to occupy the throne.20 For the first and only time in French history, this possibility became a reality three times in the period 1550–1650, in the regencies of Catherine de Médicis (1519–1589), Marie de Médicis (1573–1642) and Anne of Austria (1601–1666). These queens commissioned works to celebrate their rule—the most famous are the ten epic paintings by Rubens depicting Marie’s reign (see Figure I.1)21—and favored writers who extolled them, in part to offset the constant denunciation of their regency for causing and embodying social disorder(s), an over-riding societal threat in a period that had witnessed not one but two regicides by the dawn of the seventeenth century in France.22 La querelle des femmes et des hommes reveals particularly intensive activity at three moments in the seventeenth century in relation to social, cultural and political developments. The first, marked by a plethora of misogynistic texts— such as Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (1617)23— coincides with the time and the aftermath of the Regency of Marie de Médicis, and the establishment of Mme de Rambouillet’s chambre bleue, the first and most celebrated of the salons that women founded and ran in the seventeenth century.24 The second phase (c. 1654–1660) follows the Regency of Anne of Austria and the Fronde, with which the salons were associated; and it ends with Louis XIV’s assumption of monarchic rule fully in 1660, and his attempted (but failed) formation of a centralized, absolute state, based on the theory of the divine right of kings.25 It involves a mid-century outpouring of male satires against the précieuse as a ridiculous female who thinks she is made of a precious essence, prudishly loathes the material and the corporeal, and strives to regulate relations between the sexes by a reworked code of courtly conduct imposed on slavish men. The antithesis of the honnête femme, she is a pretentious know-nothing who arrogates

8

Fig. I.1

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Peter Paul Rubens, Le bonheur de la Régence (The Happiness of Regency). Scala / Art Resource, NY.

the Adamic right to name, to define taste, to criticize men’s works, even to wield the pen herself.26 The third and final phase, after the 1670s, represents what Linda Timmermans has called “the battle over learned women” (la querelle des femmes savantes),27 a period marked by repressions of deviations from Catholic orthodoxy—the persecution of Protestants that culminates in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and the elimination of unorthodox Catholic sects (Quietist mysticism and later Jansenism), and of othered populations through the promulgation of the infamous Code Noir (also 1685), which aimed to regulate the treatment of slaves (classified as meubles or material possessions), while also banning Protestants and Jews from the French New World Colonies. This third phase of the querelle coincides with Louis XIV’s muscular pursuit of imperial wars in Europe, North America and the Antilles: the height of the French army’s successes occurs in Flanders, in 1678, after which military losses and political defeats coupled with the staggering and sapping costs of war, and the famines of 1693–1694 and 1709 that annihilated three million French subjects, cast a pall over the declining years of the century and then the end of Louis XIV’s long reign.

Introduction

9

Now the complex and contradictory dimensions of the querelle des femmes et des hommes are evident not only in the case of gender, but of sexual difference as well. Here, I do not view the relation of sex to gender as the difference between unconstructed nature and culture, but rather, in the wake of Foucault and Butler, as norms elaborated by that regime of power-knowledge known as sexuality; thus, sex is as constructed as gender itself (GT 11). It is a regulatory ideal that produces bodies, the multiple ways they are differentiated and what those differentiations mean (BTM 1–2). Always already comprised of a multitude of cultural signs, bodies incorporate the behavioral and sensorial norms of gender on their surface, where gender performativity occurs. By that token, sexual difference, like gender, as Butler puts it, is not a given; it is negotiated in specific contexts and its definitions shift according to particular events and developments within a specific normative order (UG 181–6). In the early modern period, “woman” was primarily identified with the matter and materiality of the body. She was viewed as weak and fragile, subject to the assaults of her sensory impressions and imaginations, a passive, receptive vessel on which form was imprinted solely by the male seed, in a kind of immaculate conception. This gender division was replicated in the humoral system that was formulated in classical Greece after Aristotle, Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) and Galen (second century CE), developed by Arabic writers in the ninth century and by Europeans in the eleventh, and that continued to be deployed until the end of the seventeenth century, even among early-modern anatomists like Andrea Vesalius (1514–1564) and William Harvey (1578–1659): they quietly ignored humor theory, because they could not discover anatomical proofs of its existence, but they still spoke of women’s and men’s character and temperament on the basis of their humors. According to this humoral scheme, the human body contained four fluids—blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile—thought to correspond to the four elements of air, fire, earth and water, associated with qualities of hot, dry, cold and wet. While one humor could transform itself into a different humor or into any other fluid that the body produced under certain conditions, by and large men were believed to be hotter and drier, women colder and wetter in a gendered classification where heat was upheld as the most positive element, rising naturally toward the heavens and the brain, and thus to rationality and to creativity, while also making it possible for blood to concoct into semen. Women’s lack of heat was seen as the reason they menstruated (men burned up unneeded blood internally, whereas imperfect women had menstrual blood as an excess or residue) and they had wider hips and narrower shoulders because they did not have enough heat to drive matter toward their heads; more positively, feminine lack of heat meant a surplus of moisture that took the form of blood to nourish the fetus in utero or breast milk after childbirth.28 Aristotelians tended to describe women as imperfect, misbegotten or mutilated males, whose lack of body heat kept their sex organs inside, rather than pushing them out, as in the most perfect male; Galenists were prone to regard men and women as equally perfect and stressed male and female complementarity, a view that became more common after 1600.

10

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However, with the advent of the New Science in medicine, and with anatomies practiced in theaters and published in new print forms, including dissections of female bodies, as Park’s Secrets of Women shows, the internal body could now be seen and exposed. Although scientists could not always speak what they saw, attached as they were to “repeating” gendered norms and forms, new developments threatened to undermine the dominance of men, which was hypothetically based on their seminal capacity to engender. Chief among these was the “rediscovery” of the clitoris, described as a small penis, more phantasmatically, as having the size of a goose’s neck, even more, as a hypertrophied organ in same-sex practices between tribades or fricatrices, and invariably associated with the bodies of African women, in medical treatises such as the Anatomy of Thomas Bartholinus (1610–1680), and popularizing works, such as Dr. Nicolas Venette’s Tableau de l’amour conjugal (1687).29 Unquestionably as significant, as I show in Chapter 5, was the scientific discovery in the 1660s and the 1670s of the primary role of the ovum in reproduction, which eliminated the etiology for male dominance in the sex-gender system. This discovery led to the theory of preformationism, articulated by Harvey in On the Generation of Animals (1651), according to which all animals come from eggs—ex ovio omnia. In the work of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), all of humanity, present and future, is embedded in the female egg. Concomitantly, and perhaps not purely by coincidence, the early modern period was obsessed with monsters and prodigies in nature, as chief surgeon to four sixteenth-century monarchs, Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), entitled his work, but in particular with the phantasmatic figure of the hermaphrodite, whose prodigious “appearances” preoccupied early-modern medical and legal scholars. For Paré, such monsters could only appear when “the woman furnishes proportionately as much seed as the man,” thereby undermining proper gender asymmetry that organized the world.b30 He thought it permissible for women to become men, but not for men to “degenerate into” women, since “Nature tends always toward what is most perfect” (Monsters 33).c Beyond Paré, the hermaphrodite appears in a variety of works, ranging from Montaigne’s Essays, Thomas Artus’s political allegory, Description de l’isle des hermaphrodites (1605), and competing medical treatises on the organic basis for this “creature” (such as Jean Riolan’s Discours sur les hermaphrodites [1614]and Jacques Duval’s rebuttal in Des hermaphrodites [1612]), down to and including science fiction: in Gabriel de Foigny’s La terre australe connue (1676), a hermaphrodite flees France to find an island of hermaphrodites where “he” might discover how they are engendered, a secret about his origin that, unlike the myth of Oedipus, is never revealed to him.31 The hermaphrodite was unintelligible as human, or as Butler writes, after Foucault, of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin, s/he was “the sexual impossibility of an identity … [who] deploys and redistributed the terms of a b “la femme fournit autant de semence que l’homme proportionnément” (Des monstres et prodiges 23). c “Nature tend tousjours à ce qui est le plus parfaict” (Des monstres 30).

Introduction

11

binary system … [in a way that] disrupts and proliferates those terms outside the binary itself (GT 31).32 Over and beyond these highly gendered contestations in medical and scientific discourse, the meanings of specific norms with their constituent scripts, themes and terms in the querelle intersected or were in tension with other factors, such as class and wealth. One notable case is Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627–1693), Louis XIV’s first cousin and the richest woman in Europe, who took up arms against the crown during the Fronde and, as result, was exiled by the king.33 During her banishment and later, however, she commissioned the building and renovation of castles as no other woman had before her; and she wrote memoirs, novels and letters, notably a series of epistolary exchanges in which she envisioned a retreat led by women as a peaceful and happy alternative to marriage.34 But Montpensier also suffered at the hands of her powerful father and the absolutistic king, both of whom she challenged and with whom she had difficult relations. Although she aspired for many years to marry Louis XIV, when he did marry, she selected for her own husband, the Duc de Lauzun, a seductive and cunning man of conspicuously lower rank; Louis XIV first approved this misalliance and, in a stunning reversal, then forbade it with no appeal. Symptomatically, La Grande Mademoiselle, as she remained and is still known, embodies both the constraints of gender and the advantages of wealth and exalted status, which she also clearly exploited and lorded over others. Yet another example of the complex intersections of gender and class is the relationship between Descartes and his royal patron and learned correspondent, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680). In their epistolary relationship, Elizabeth assumes the gendered figure of a woman suffering from incapacitating melancholy,35 who wishes to be cured by the wisdom of the doctor-philosopher. But these tropistic roles are complicated by the disparate socio-economic ranks of the interlocutors: a wealthy royal princess and a poor bourgeois philosopher who pens properly admirative dedications to a sought-after female patron.36 Moreover, Elizabeth’s aptitude in mathematics and natural philosophy informs the substantial challenges she posed to Descartes’s dualism, by emphasizing the powerful impact of the body’s humors and passions on the mind, and thus on her public responsibilities; as a result, she had what is now recognized as a marked effect on Descartes’s later works—The Passions of the Soul (1650) and Treatise on Man (1664)—and more broadly, on his ethics and his conception of the human subject. To be sure, Descartes’s (possibly ironic) affirmation of a universally shared “good sense” in the opening lines of the Discourse on Method, and his assault on prejudices and superstitions placed him in the camp of the Moderns, in the century-long Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, and thus on the side with which elite women were identified—indeed his work was defended by a group of seventeenth-century “Cartesian women,” as Erica Harth called them. And yet, in his provisional ethic, Descartes never argued in favor of reforming customs, such as those that circumscribed the condition of women, however much they may fail the test of reason. And in what remains his only known comment on women,

12

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Elizabeth’s interlocutor ironized that he had published his Discourse in French because he “wished that even women could understand something, but that the most subtle minds could also find enough substance to occupy their attention,”d an iteration of the gender binary, articulated by the misogynistic faction in the querelle des femmes, according to which men have the subtle and women the feeble minds.37 In the early modern period, as in our own times, gendered associations were reflexively embedded into societal, national and supra-national issues and conflicts. Thus although concerns over unchecked upward mobility, and as a result, over widespread dis-order and decay are expressed throughout the seventeenth century, notably by conservative observers, such as the Duc de Saint Simon (1675–1755), from the outset, this societal problem is traced to Eve’s descendants, as the first three chapters of The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France demonstrate. A case in point is the identification of disorder with envious women in satires of the period (see Chapter 1), and more broadly, with the blurring of class distinctions in the female-led salons.38 On a European level, the generalized sense of radical dis-order in the early modern period derived from numerous political and religious factors, foremost among them, the fissure of Christian Europe: it catalyzed wars of religion that continued in some form until 1715, and powerfully affected conceptions of the monarchy in both Protestant and Catholic states, while in France, it exacerbated the monarchy’s conflicts with the Pope and with the Emperor for the dominance of Catholic Christianity. Still, the religious schism in Europe took on gendered dimensions, as Protestants, constructed in Catholic treatises and edicts as demonic and duplicitous heretics who had rebelled against Church and State,39 were more closely identified with the diabolical, witch-like female, and with tropes of femininity than the male and the masculine. In his Histoire du Calvinisme (1682), for example, Louis de Maimbourg insisted that Protestant psalms have “that certain air of a soft and effeminate song, which has nothing devout or majestic about it, as does the chant of the Catholic Church established by Saint Gregory.”e40 Analogously, in widespread efforts to underscore their national superiority, the French assigned gendered characteristics to particular European states, contrasting, for example, the virile free man (the Frank) with the effeminate (and sodomitical) Italian, the negative correlative to the cultural and artistic refinement Italy symbolized, and that the monarchy made every effort to equal and to outdo, in part by importing Italian artists and artisans.41 On a broader scale, French travel and missionary narratives projected femininity onto treacherous, duplicitous and sensual Orientals to reaffirm superior, civilized, masculine Frenchness and Europeanness, as well as onto the “savage,” non-rational, animalistic inhabitants of their colonies in the d “voulu que les femmes memes pussent entendre quelque chose, et cependant que les plus subtils trouvassent aussi assez de matière pout occuper leur attention.” e “un certain air de chanson mol & effeminé, qui n’a rien du tout de dévot & de majestueux comme le chant de l’Eglise Catholique reglé par Saint Grégoire.”

Introduction

13

New World to justify enslavement and economic exploitations.42 As these examples suggest, genderization can be used for a host of tactical and strategic ends,43 and the querelle des femmes could be deployed to transform the representations, and thus the perceptions, of political and religious economic and social issues that had ostensibly little to do with women. Connecting various regressive gender trends, Albistur and Armogathe in the 1970s highlighted “the great confinement of women” after 1650—a term that gendered le grand renfermement, which Foucault had coined to characterize the birth of the asylum and the internment of marginal populations, including beggars and prostitutes.44 In what subsequently became an accepted view, Albistur and Armogathe claimed that women suffered generalized repression during the long reign of Louis XIV, as compared to their social and political powers prior to 1653, the end of the Fronde. And yet, this “great confinement” also witnessed the largest body of women writers in the early modern period, authors who enjoyed remarkable success, at least until the Revolution, when their work was denied republication and was effaced from what was to become the canon of classicism and of the literary curriculum in schools after 1830.45 Implicitly accepting this idea of repression, regression or “confinement,” DeJean argued in Tender Geographies that after the Fronde women could no longer be political actors, and thus that they displaced their contestatory practices onto collaborative forms of writing in the salons.46 However, this scheme bifurcates the discursive and the political in gendered subjects, in a way that denies the political implications and consequences of discourse, which Butler, Foucault and Deleuze, among many theorists, have demonstrated.47 This bifurcation reproduces a binary opposition that Williams and other critics worked to bridge with the concept of praxis, a conjunction that de Certeau and Chambers, for example, upheld when they cast discourse as the locus where resistant subjects have political “room to maneuver.”48 As a case in point, this “confined” view of women in post-Fronde France denies the enormous political power that Mme de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, whom he married clandestinely probably in January 1684, wielded during the last 30 years of his reign. However much some of us may find her religiosity offensive, and her conservative views on social hierarchies and women’s properly subordinate roles misogynistic, Bryant convincingly documents the fact that Maintenon became the most powerful person in France, second only to Louis XIV, and a leading European stateswoman, especially after Minister of War Louvois’s demise in 1691, when there emerged a significant gap in the state’s administration that she filled astutely, in a deliberately selfeffacing manner—a position that fulfilled many of the functions of a first minister, especially as the king became increasingly fragile and maintained an ever more informal system of governance.49 Although Maintenon was excluded from official ceremonies, given public wariness of—and objections to—her power, the axis of the court nonetheless shifted to the marquise’s apartments after 1700. It was there that the ministers, military commanders, clergy (including representatives of the Pope) and ambassadors, the royals, leading courtiers and all manner of petitioners

14

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

sought her decisive influence and her favor with the isolated and mistrustful king, both for foreign policy (in relations with Spain, for instance, in the Flanders campaigns of 1692–1694, and the misguided French-sponsored Stuart invasion of Scotland, 1708), most especially, for appointments, promotions and protection in the vast network of clients and contacts she consolidated, as her enormous correspondence confirms. To be sure, because of her inexperience in matters of state, and arguably, her social and religious ideology, the results of Maintenon’s efforts were mixed, as Bryant documents. Still, as her friend, Mme de Sévigné, had shrewdly observed in 1684: “Mme de Maintenon’s position is unique: there has never been such a position and there never will be” (in Bryant, “Partner, Matriarch, and Minister” 77).f More importantly, the notion of “the great confinement” obscures the multivalent developments that characterize the long seventeenth century, until Louis XIV’s death in 1715, and its conceptions of women (and men) embedded in a shifting repertory of normative terms. For women, these ran the gamut from the most negative to the most positive and a number of (sometimes conflictual) negotiated and resistant combinations in-between that changed over time. They were also inflected by the particular situatedness of their subjects and their agential capacity to repeat with a subversive difference. It is to this dynamic repertory of terms, formed by/through a number of discourses—literary and cultural, medical, juridical and religious (moralistic discourses above all)—that I now turn.50 ***** The image of woman (see Figure I.2) that Abraham Bosse, the seventeenth century’s most famous French engraver, produced to admonish his own misguided gender does not simply reproduce in its legend the age-old binary of angelic Mary and demonic Eve (with the reference to Adam’s ribs [costes]). It defines woman as an irrational, constitutionally duplicitous monster,51 which would logically cast the Angel in the House as a sham as well. Moreover, this monster has two mask-like heads and two bodies, the one, basely animalistic, dark-skinned, satyric, priapic; the other, a feminine form holding a delicate fan, which is contradicted, however, by its bulging, muscular arm. Within the sharply divided image, the right side figures a church setting, with the virgin and a cross at the base, and a kneeling, implicitly supplicant wife. The left, the sinister side, represents its mirror image, a world upside down,52 in which the cowed male is kneeling in supplication before a dominant, browbeating wife with unruly hair (replicating the flagellate branches and the satyr’s whip), in front of a doorknocker depicting a male head with a ring through its nose. The association of the female with the demonic and the monstrous in Bosse’s engraving finds expression in early-modern medical, juridical and religious f “la place de Mme de Maintenon est unique: il n’y en a jamais eu, et il n’y en aura jamais.”

Introduction

Fig. I.2

15

Abraham Bosse, La vraye femme (The Real Woman). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

16

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

discourses. In On Monsters and Marvels (1579), Ambroise Paré regards “monstrous children” as the product of “[an] ardent and obstinate imagination that the [woman] might [have] at the moment she conceive[s],” based on the widespread idea that the weaker sex has no defenses against the onslaught of sensory or oneiric images (38).g Monsters could even be formed if the pregnant woman sat too long, or had her legs crossed—anodine activities that further exposed the inherent teratogeny of female bodies.53 Paré mentions acts committed by demons and witches, sorcerers and sorceresses, succubi and incubi (85–96), but in the early modern period no text described the demonic monstrousness of women—far beyond that of men—more violently and obsessively than the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer, 1486) by German Dominican monks, the Inquisitors, Henrich Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger. The reason that “the demons carry out their practices through women and not through men,” the authors explain, citing classical and Christian texts but especially their own “experience,” is that women are more deceptive and superstitious, unwilling to be ruled, prone to flux and insatiably carnal (117– 19, 259–69, 299). A chimera, a “triple-shaped monstrosity … befouled with the stomach of a smelly she-goat and armed with the tail of a poisonous snake,” all the more treacherous when coupled with a lovely face and voice, the female sorcerer, in a highly corporeal version of the Circean myth, does not simply change men into beasts, she even takes away their procreative limbs, and keeps 20 or 30 of these seminal organs alive in a cabinet.54 Monstrous women include midwives in the Malleus, for they are in league with demons, to whom they offer newborns.55 Phantasms about the Demonology of Witches, the title of the first French text on demonology, written by jurist Jean Bodin in 1580, translated into a historical cataclysm: the witch hunts that marked Europe (and parts of North America) in the early modern period. In France, these occurred most virulently in the periods, 1580–1630 and 1640–1680, says Muchembled, particularly in the troubled rural North-Eastern frontier, in newly conquered territories and/or regions resistant to the rise of absolutism; they predominantly targeted women, according to his estimates, representing 80 percent of those prosecuted for witchcraft.56 Supporting the views of demonologists, doctors, such as Edward Jorden in A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), associated bewitchment and possession by the devil with the condition that was said, since Hippocrates, to afflict women of all ages—a malady marked by choking sensations, unexplained seizures and deliriums that were labeled as hysterical, for instance, in Jean de Varandée’s Traité des maladies des femmes (1656).57 Closest to this monstrous pole that conjoins deviance, illegitimacy and power was the normative identification of woman with insatiable sexuality. It was derived from the notion of female instability, the correlative to her humoral coldness and wetness, linked to the earth’s matter. Jacques Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (1617), for instance, deploys biblical and classical references g “une ardente et obstinée imagination que peut avoir la femme cependant qu’elle conçoit” (Des monstres 35).

Introduction

17

to cast le sexe as “a Monster in Nature” (349), the emblem of concupiscentia carnis (“concupiscence of the flesh”), a rapaciously lascivious beast, much like a blood-sucking leech or vampire. And at the end of the century, Nicolas Venette’s Tableau de l’amour conjugal (1687), a text that continued to be reprinted and consulted until the twentieth century, claimed that women are prone to sexual promiscuity, and that their imagination leads to “erotic (uterine) fury,” or then to la suffocation de la matrice, which Varandée traced to an unfulfilled need for sexual intercourse (128–38); in 1771, D.M.-T. de Bienville (1726–1813) defined this condition as nymphomania.58 This excessive, uncontrolled and uncontrollable female sexuality extended to the whore and to the same-sex loving tribade or fricatrice, both associated with a hypertrophic-sized clitoris.59 In less extreme forms, the threat of unfettered female sexuality was projected onto the coquette, a negative figure from the 1630s on featured in treatises and plays of the 1650s and 1660s. In François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac’s Histoire du temps, ou Relation du royaume de coquetterie (1654), a hostile response to Madeleine de Scudéry’s famous Carte de tendre in Artamène, ou, Le grand Cyrus (1649–1653), the coquette is identified with the vices ascribed to salon women: moral duplicity, false religious devotion, lack of modesty (pudeur), frivolous speech, above all, dissolute pleasure-seeking living (la débauche), uncontrollable sexual appetites and as her most common trait, the conquest of multiple suitors (des galands) at any one time.60 In Félix de Juvenel’s Portrait de la coquette, ou La lettre d’Aristandre à Timagène (1659), in which an “outstanding man” (Arist-andre) strives to instruct his provincial nephew about women in the crimefilled capitol, the coquette is deemed the most evil woman he will encounter: the incarnation of artifice and hypocrisy, with no taste, judgment or reason, despite her pretensions, she treats learned and ethical men with contempt, and ruins her galands to satisfy her whims and pleasures. Although decorum prevents Aristandre from being explicit about her sexual activities, he nonetheless indicates that the coquette both arouses “violent desire” and puts off possession as long as possible.61 This sexually frustrating serial collector of men foreshadows Molière’s Célimène in The Misanthrope (1666), with her numerous amants and biting wit at their expense. Exposed in the end and abandoned by her suitors, Célimène admits that she does not want to marry again, but to enjoy freedom and her seductive rule over salon life.62 As Célimène suggests, the coquette was linked to the emerging figure of the libertine, emblematically identified in the French seventeenth century with Ninon de Lenclos (1620–1705). Although shifting meanings and individual usages make it difficult to define le libertin, much less la libertine, lack of belief in— or condemnation of—orthodox religious beliefs, as well as licentiousness and dissolute behavior, including sexual promiscuity and sodomy, were identified with libertine men of this period.63 Nevertheless, Ninon managed to sustain her irreverent views of religion, after a brief imprisonment in the Madelonettes Convent in 1656, at the behest of Anne of Austria for her reputed impiety and libertinage; she took on a number of notable and wealthy lovers, including the

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

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king’s cousin and Mme de Sévigné’s son, while achieving financial independence; and she ran a lively salon in the Marais and maintained a sought-after aristocratic profile, counting among her close friends both La Rochefoucault and Mme de Maintenon.64 Ninon was possibly the author of the anonymously published La coquette vengée (1659), a dialogue in which Eléonore warns her niece, Philomène, to avoid philosophers, especially the “salon philosophers who dogmatize in their armchairs,” but have nothing to say. One such philosopher censures everybody, especially le sexe, with such great presumption and self-satisfaction he engenders a “universal conspiracy” against him by all of Eléonore’s worldly friends, and is beaten to a pulp, then thrown out of her home—a satisfying revenge by the author against Félix de Juvenel, who had reputedly targeted Ninon in his Portrait de la coquette.65 The coquette was also linked to the threatening figure of the widow. The principal female considered a person in seventeenth-century France, the widow would revert to being legally incapable if she remarried, thus part of the imbecillitas sexus that should be subservient to her husband by law and custom.66 By contrast, as Pierre de Brantôme (1540–1614) emphasized in Les dames galantes (published in 1665–1666), widows “are in full freedom, and in no way slaves of their fathers, mothers, brothers, relatives and husbands, nor moreover, of any law court”;h67 and according to the trope of the lusty widow, which Brantôme deployed, she stood for sexual freedom. The political correlative to the threat that this sexual figure represented was the widowed female regent. In François Hotman’s La Gaule française (1576) and Claude Malingre’s “De la loi salique” (1615), biblical, mythical and historical queens form a catalog of infamous women, invariably depicted as Jezebels and denounced for causing profound upheavals. Richelieu’s Testament politique (1688) is explicit: “just as a woman doomed the world, nothing can harm states more than this sex, when it gets a foothold over those who govern them, and makes them move about as it wishes, well or badly.”i68 In Louis XIV’s Mémoires pour l’instruction du Dauphin, a text heavily reworked by editors, the Appendix for 1667 warns the king’s son and heir to beware of women, for they invariably “make us fall without our knowing it into whatever side they take,” thus “we” must “take pains to prepare never to believe them about anything that concerns our affairs or the people who serve us”: to fail to do this is to ignore history, which provides “so many fatal examples of extinct dynastic houses, overturned thrones, ruined provinces, destroyed empires”—another phantasm of being unmanned,

h

“sont en leur plaine liberté et nullement esclaves des peres, meres, freres, parents et marys & n’y d’aucune justice qui est plus.” i “comme une femme a perdu le monde, rien n’est plus capable de nuire aux Etats que ce sexe, lorsque, prenant pied sur ceux qui les gouvernent, il les fait mouvoir comme bon lui semble et mal.”

Introduction

19

here from the “absolute” king by divine right.j69 Analogously, the threat of queen regents is dramatized in several plays, including Corneille’s Rodogune (1644– 1645, thus during Anne’s regency, r.1643–1651), where the widow, Cléopâtre, who had her unfaithful husband murdered, plays off the passive, hapless twin princes (and legitimate male rulers) against each other, killing one son and attempting to poison the other, so that she can retain the reigns of power, which she desires above all else. A monster who refuses to allow patriarchal monarchy to perpetuate, and thereby endangers the perpetuation of the state, as Menke has shown, Cléopâtre also figures the perverted mother who threatens the foundations of the family.70 Her opposite, the chaste and modest widow, is so faithful to her husband’s memory she renounces the world and refuses remarriage. In dramatic literature, her exemplar is undoubtedly Racine’s eponymous Andromaque, loyal wife and uniquely devoted mother, who would even commit suicide to save her son and safeguard her own honor.71 In prescriptive moral and religious literature, including texts by Père Caussin (1583–1651) and Saint François de Sales (1567–1622), the good widow regards remarriage as a weakness, somehow regains her immaculate chastity, and does eleemosynary works for the sick and the poor; as Roger Duchêne observes, she will live like a nun in the world.72 In fact, some widows gave up secular life to assume religious professions and vocations. Like Jeanne de Chantal, Mme de Sévigné’s grandmother, who was extolled as “the saintly widow,” and upheld as a model for all women, they established schools for girls, became abbesses, and founded religious orders.73 In secular life, the good widow, like the exemplary maiden and lady, is identified with the private space (espace particulier). In Abraham Bosse’s The Contentment of a Noble Lady (Contentement d’une dame noble) (see Figure I.3), with its “emblematic sonnet,” this woman is enclosed in her chamber, and with downcast eyes, she studies her lessons and plays her luth, banishes the sparks of love and of feminine envy, and personifies honor, blushing modesty (la pudeur) and virtual silence, in contrast to the female who gads about in public, never ceases to move or talk and who displays the acts of a mad person.74 The positive portrait here can also be identified with l’honnête fille or l’honnête femme, the dominant ideal for the conduct of le sexe throughout the seventeenth century, for instance in the treatises of Christian moralists, such as Jacques Du Bosc’s L’honneste femme (1632), François de Grenaille’s L’honneste fille (1639) and Abbé Goussault’s Le portrait d’une femme honnête, raisonnable et véritablement chrétienne (1694)—a titular reminder of women’s ‘unreasonable’ and ‘untruthful’ nature.75 In contrast to the honnête homme, in his urbane, seductive and aesthetic conception (which was synonymous to le galant homme), the honnête femme j

“nous fait tomber insensiblement du côté où elles penchent; … de nous preparer avec étude à ne les croire en rien de ce qui peut concerner nos affaires ou les personnes de ceux qui nous servent; … tant de funestes exemples des maisons éteintes, des trônes renversés, des provinces ruinées, des empires détruits.”

20

Fig. I.3

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Abraham Bosse, Contentement d’une dame noble (Contentment of a Noble Lady). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

was propounded by Christian moralists who opposed worldly or public roles for women; but this was not the case for the virtuous and spiritual (or religious) acceptation of the honnête homme, typically identified with l’homme de bien.76 To be sure, even in the vast secular corpus that constructed the urbane honnête homme, outlined a vision of conquest over others and of mastery over the self to approach an indefinable ideal governed by le je ne sais quoi, the honnête femme is rarely upheld as his double;77 instead, she has the instrumental role of “civilizing” men—inculcating refined manners and politesse, taste and grace, above all, the sublime art of conversation. As a result, the honnête homme will emulate the feminine capacity for seduction in his art de plaire—the Chevalier de Méré evokes Cleopatra as a model—in order to captivate both women and men. And yet, in an iteration of the nature/culture gendered divide, women in the secular corpus of Honnêteté possess these skills innately, as part of their being; they do not acquire them by dint of hard work and constant self-overcoming, which defines men as aristocrats of merit. This conception of worldly women, identified with the salons that they founded and ran in the seventeenth century, prompted Christian moralists to deploy the honnête femme as a counter and a corrective.78 However, moralists had to contend

Introduction

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with—and somehow negotiate and accommodate—the new cultural and political possibilities for elite women. Thus, in outlining the ideal of the devout Christian woman in L’honneste femme, Du Bosc recognizes that “we must accommodate ourselves to the taste of those whom we wish to persuade,” but he thereby relegates important societal changes merely to individual fancy (1:26).k Still, virtue need not be austere, he insists, and devotion can be reconciled with moderate worldly pleasures that can contain the (prototypical) excessiveness of women (3:111–12, 3:208). However, what Du Bosc defines as worldly are “saintly occupations”— devotion to the care of the family and household, and traditional handiwork, such as weaving (3:97, 103, 106–7, 212–13); serious, profitable readings and conversations are encouraged, but certainly not novels, whose lascivious stories corrupt the weaker sex (1:10–22, 183–8).79 Even more forcefully than Du Bosc, de Grenaille upholds the female saint as the model for his honnête fille and castigates salon women for their exclusive devotion to superficialities (L’honneste fille 1: 20–21; 2:189ff, 206–7, 222ff, 253–5). He too tries to accommodate cultural and political trends that affected women’s roles, but basically by sleight of hand: women can be involved in politics, but this only means “ruling” the home. They can pursue knowledge—Latin, music, poetry, history—but it should translate into good works for the Church. Placing further limits on such accommodations, de Grenaille forbids certain offices and professions, since woman, “the imperfection of man,” is weak, fragile and devoid of the courage, power and ambition of men: “true force in women is as rare as their effrontery is common” (ibid. 2:319).l80 In iterating the traditional traits of female virtue, a repetition essential for sustaining and perpetuating gender norms, Christian moralists asserted their accommodation to new social conditions and exposed their failures to do so. Analogously, portraits of la femme forte upheld new public roles of women, the female regent above all, and praised their warring heroism, possibly referencing those who participated in the Fronde.81 Typically, however, they reaffirm Christian virtues by striving to make the “good wife” of Proverbs 31—mulierem fortem qui inveniet (“a good wife, who can find?”)—relevant to “modern” conditions. Pierre Le Moyne’s La gallerie des femmes fortes (1647), the most influential of these texts, is dedicated to Anne of Austria, legitimizes the valor of the “Amazonian” female ruler on the battlefield, and extols the virtuous lives of heroic women.82 But faithful to the roots of la femme forte in Marian literature, this latter-day ideal does not present a new negotiated synthesis between valor and virtue; it merely enlists military metaphors to embolden the conquest of virtues (such as chastity) and to give them heroic trappings.83 The central impact that Christian moralists had on the construction of idealized (and monstrous) figures extends beyond the saintly widow (and of course, the nun84) to new religious roles for women, coupled with caveats that maintained stringent gender limitations. In reaction to the Protestant Reformation, the “il faut s’accommoder au goust de ceux qu’on veut persuader.” “La vray force des femmes est aussi rare que l’effronterie est commune.”

k l

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Counter-Reformation saw women as key to the enterprise of recapturing souls lost to heretics and bolstering the Catholic faith. Moralists promoted maternalism, and the mother’s dominant role in educating daughters—not sons—to ensure the committed Catholicism of the family. As I show in Chapter 3, moralists cast girls, educated in les petites écoles and other convent-based institutions, as agents of the faith and a force against the monster of heresy. At the same time, the ageold view of Eve’s proclivities, especially her catastrophic curiosity, buttressed the stricture that women should never dabble in theology, which they could not, in any event, grasp.85 They should follow Church teachings, and not be tempted, as Eve was, by whatever is novel, and this included new religious sects, such as Jansenism (with its influential abbess, Mère Angélique Arnauld [1591–1661], and its innovative educator, Jacqueline Pascal [1625–1661], the sister of Blaise Pascal) and Quietism, as the French strain of mysticism came to be known for its passive but passionate union with God, which dispensed with Church intermediaries.86 The threat of women’s attraction to new sects led to a titanic battle between Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), the foremost orator of Louis XIV’s reign, and his chief disciple, Bishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651– 1715) over the Quietist writings and teachings of Jeanne-Marie de La MotteGuyon (1648–1717), which penetrated Saint-Cyr, the school for girls founded by Mme de Maintenon, and attracted—seduced, said Bossuet—Fénelon himself. The battle ended with Guyon’s imprisonment, Fénelon’s disgrace and effectively, the banning of mysticism in France.87 The potential threat of religious women, indeed of every seventeenth-century female type in the normative (and regulatory) repertory I have described was predicated on the amount and kind of knowledge that le sexe should have. This connection between pouvoir and savoir, the key issue in the querelle des femmes of the early-modern period, underlay the many issues over the education of girls and women that were debated, for example: the extent to which the second sex was even capable of instruction (if she was still regarded as the essence of irrationality, the passions and the material body, in contrast to man as mind, reason and spirit); the kind of education best suited to her function and status (particular or exceptional, public or private, noble or bourgeois); and the sites where learning could or should take place (the convent, les petites écoles, at home or in salons). The schools for girls that did exist, which were run by the Church and which afforded only the most basic education, with a predominance of religious instruction, at least provided a modicum of literacy, though figures for female—and male—literacy remain impossible to determine with any certainty.88 By contrast, the salons offered what Roger Duchêne has called “a permanent education” for elite women in the semiprivate, semi-public space where they refined the art of speech and style, heard poetry and saw performances, ultimately became cultural and literary critics, and writers themselves.89 In this gender battle over learning, savante had multiple meanings ranging from scholarly to slightly literate, but with rare exceptions (such as Poullain de la Barre in the 1670s and Gabrielle Suchon in the 1690s) the term had negative

Introduction

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connotations, as Molière’s influential Les femmes savantes (1672) dramatizes. Although this phase of the querelle manifests a commitment to the New Science among the pro-woman factions, buttressed by a vast discourse of popularization for the less-educated sex on the sciences and moral philosophy, there is concomitantly a condemnation of the threatening (and thus ridiculed) savante as pédante among misogynistic factions that cannot be dissociated from the closing of scientific academies to women. As a result, even those who supported savoir for women, such as Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), the most successful novelist of the century, echo Christian moralists, including Du Bosc, in maintaining that women can have extensive knowledge provided they never show it: they should make it a “secret treasure, a talent hidden in their kerchief,” as he puts it: “It would be better for them to be chaste and awkward, than learned and indecent” (ibid. 3:72, 183, 240).m Not surprisingly then, in contrast to the monstrous caricature of the pedantic savante, ironically named Damophile, Scudéry’s idealized self-portrait as Sappho in Artamène, ou, Le grand Cyrus, is, as Harth puts it, a projection of men’s idea of the unthreatening intelligent woman (Cartesian Women 50–56).90 ***** The case of Scudéry raises vexing questions about the relation (and tensions) between gender normativity and individual practice, and correlatively, the importance of deciphering the signs of conformity to gender codes and those of a subject’s resistance, which delineates the nature and extent of agency. This question lies at the core of the analyses in The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, readings that focus on the shifting complexities of early-modern gender norms, by also engaging and questioning developments in feminist and cultural theories. The six chapters that make up this book are each centered on a particular text (the one exception being Chapter 3, which examines theories of women’s education in two counter-discursive texts), and chronologically traverse the seventeenth-century, from the anonymous Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622), to Fénelon’s On the Education of Girls (1687) and the correspondence of Sévigné, which extends into the 1690s.The other primary texts, by La Fayette, Racine, Poullain de la Barre and La Guette, are written in the period of 1662–1681. The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France is structured in two parts. The first, Women Writ, contains three essays that feature representations of women (and men) in texts by men. The second, Women Writing, explores the construction of women (and men) by female authors, in every case seeking signs of conformity and of resistance to normative gender scripts and the tensions that their inscribed negotiations produce. I do not intend this division by gendered writing subjects to deify “the author,” years after Foucault importantly interrogated the author function, but I endorse the idea of “situated writing” and of a text’s relation, albeit m “Il vaudroit mieux qu’elles fussent chastes & malhabiles, que scavantes & impudiques.”

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ambiguous, even indeterminate, to its historical subject of enunciation, a figure and product of multiple determinations.91 Moreover, I do not take the key texts I analyze to be representative of all seventeenth-century works by men and by women, but I believe them to be symptomatic of broader issues and of negotiated gendered differences between women and men and among types within each gender. Indeed, the focal texts of Part I, Women Writ, help to create a context for Part II, Women Writing, for male-authored writings deploy aspects of the repertory of notions about le sexe, including women’s threatening reproductive bodies and sexuality, their cackle or useless and ridiculous speech, their upward mobility and their creation of social and global dis-order—works that display gender anxieties in men and textual strategies for coping with them. Thus in “Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)?” a melancholic man tries to cure himself by spying and reporting on women’s laughable “tittle-tattle” at a lying-in, thereby exposing a pregnant relation between his “placental text” and a female birthing body, but recuperating their threatening talk by casting them conservatively as opponents of social and political mobility and proponents of greater law and order (Chapter 1). In “The Daughters’ Sacrifice and the Paternal Order: Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide,” I read the heroine as the perfect subject of a patriarchal father (Agamemnon), and I argue that the birth of the (Greek) state, depicted in this play, is founded on the control of women, notably Helen of Troy (Chapter 2). In this second chapter, Racine’s invention of Eriphile, the Asiatic, sexual other/slave, who symbolizes disorder in the family and the state, constitutes the sacrificeable, in contrast to the eponymous heroine, who paradoxically turns out to be Eriphile’s double. In these and other ways, male authors provide models of exemplary female conformity to—even adoration of—the father and the state, as well as of pedagogical reform that can overcome the inherent defects of the minds of Eve (Chapter 3). In the third chapter of Part I, “The Female Mind Reformed: Pedagogical Counter-Discourses, Radical and Regressive, under Louis XIV,” I examine both the radical subversiveness of Poullain de La Barre (in De l’éducation des dames, 1674), and the reactionariness of Fénelon (in De l’éducation des filles, 1687), over and beyond the strained accommodations to expanded savoir for women among Christian moralists, and so doing, I try to gauge the dissimilar deviations of all three from dominant gender scripts on the education and status ofwomen, and as a consequence, on the possibilities of reforming society itself. Against this backdrop, in Part II, I analyze three examples of women’s writing, exploring in each case the nature and extent of conformity and resistance to normative constructs about le sexe. Inevitably, each woman-authored text grapples with the problematics of being an illegitimate writing subject, in light of men’s mockery of women’s speech, and moralistic strictures about her appropriating the pen. In the broad context of aristocratic memoirs of the period, which saw very few autographic texts by women published, La Guette’s signed memoirs boldly affirms the rights of a woman of middling rank to write her life, even as she constructs herself as an aristocratic man and describes her exploits during

Introduction

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the Fronde. As I show in this chapter, “The Heroine at War: Self-Divisions in La Guette’s ‘Extraordinary’ Memoirs,” the “I” inscribes other conflicting selves, who are divided between national loyalty and material exigencies, even more, between a normative moralism and her own unconventional acts (Chapter 4). More typically for seventeenth-century women, the correspondence of Sévigné was unpublished during her life (Chapter 5, “From the Maternal Metaphor to Metonymy and History: Seventeenth-Century Discourses of Maternity and the Passion of Mme de Sévigné”); it appeared in the eighteenth century in a form that eliminated the daughter’s half of the correspondence (destroyed by Sévigné’s granddaughter), and that gave a highly edited and shortened version of the mother’s writing. Within this corpus, Sévigné “performs” a superior and passionate maternal self before her beloved daughter, who represents both a mirror and an alienated other; in the wake of recent work on this correspondence, I show that life for the mother spelled death for the daughter. Finally, that La Fayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), the focal text of Chapter 6, was published anonymously, for reasons of gender and class, raises issues of uncertainty that are compounded within the narration by deceptive flattery in the relation of the authorial “I” to the referential subjects of her fiction. Unlike the works of La Guette and of Sévigné, the heroine of La Fayette’s novella is motherless, and the unschooled object of the erotic gaze and the desired possession of three powerful men (in the court of Charles IV). Her berating, controlling husband contrasts with the sympathetic Comte de Chabannes, the most ambiguous figure in this fiction, and an emblem of gender, religious and narrative uncertainties. A typical narrative of seduction, abandonment and punishment seems to dominate this, La Fayette’s first nouvelle, but the code of proper feminine behavior that the narrator upholds is contradicted by that of the text’s unpunished “bad woman,” Mme de Noirmoutiers. I focus on the narrative’s ironies, especially on the pleonastic “without doubt” (sans doute) in the final, moralistic sentence, and I raise the idea of women as “the irony of the community,” in Hegel’s formulation. In these chapters of Part II, as in those of Part I, I assume that no writing can mark a radical break with the discursive parameters of the French early modern period. All texts confront the necessity of negotiating shifting contextual notions of the legible and the illegitimate, and in seventeenth-century terms, of the decorous (la bienséance) and the implausible (l’invraisemblable), even if these notions can be challenged explicitly or covertly, at least to some degree, which is inscribed in a particular work. Like human subjects, texts must deploy conformity to (some) gender expectations to be intelligible; this represents a precondition for resisting contextual norms—or deviating from them—or negotiating particular modes of accommodation, which have specific historical semes. Beyond these basic issues of conformity, resistance and the limits of desubjectification to gender norms, each essay in The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France also addresses critical and theoretical issues. For like earlymodern texts, modern and postmodern metatexts inscribe their own dynamics of gender, and the history of interpretations contains blind spots and limitations inflected by gender norms. In Chapter 1, I interrogate the current critical trope

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of “the classical body,” and more pointedly, Bakhtin’s reading of le caquet de l’accouchée and his gendered preconceptions, which encompasses his idea of the grotesque and of carnival. In Chapter 2, I privilege the contextual, historical approach to tragedy that classicists have espoused in recent decades, and I go on to challenge both the conventional view of Racine’s theater as feminine, and the dominant readings of his Iphigenia, which have emphasized the heroine’s noble charity. Chapter 3 aims to thicken and to amplify the implications of Foucaultian counter-or reverse discourse, by considering the possibilities of its progressive and regressive forms, and I question as well the traditional view of Fénelon as a progressive, pre-Enlightenment thinker. Part II begins with the study of what I have called “the female autograph,”92 a form of life-writing that was ignored by critics until recent decades, and I examine the problematic inscription of multiple and contradictory selves in La Guette’s non-canonical, basically unread work (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, I reject the dominant view that close parent-child relations emerged only circa 1750, and discuss the various forces and discourses (visual representations, moralistic texts, medical theories) that converged to promote maternalism after 1650. I question as well the traditional heterosexual reading of Sévigné’s “love” letters to her daughter, searching for other models and intra-textual examples that can place this correspondence in the historical and rhetorical context of its time and in the history of emotions. Finally, in Chapter 6, I interpret differently (that is, ironically) La Fayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier, a nouvelle historique that has been ignored by critics in overwhelming favor of La Princesse de Clèves, and although my concerns here center on the ambiguities and uncertainties of interpretation, I also interrogate the privileging of manuscripts over other versions of a text, based on the recent work of historians of the book. Throughout, with the help of many readers, more than I could ever fully acknowledge in the endnotes to The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, I try to read closely and otherwise, or to paraphrase Julia Kristeva, to show in each chapter why critically, “that’s still not it.”93 Notes Butler, Undoing Gender, 9–10, hereafter UG. Butler, Gender Trouble, 185, hereafter GT. 3 In addition to repetition, Butler mentions hyperbole, internal dissonance and confusion, featured in drag and parody. See GT, 171–80. On proliferation see also GT, 190. 4 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 42–3, hereafter BTM. 5 On resignification, see also UG, 223ff, where Butler asks whether it constitutes a political practice, or one part of political transformation, and notes importantly that both conservative and progressive politics use these strategies; she concludes: “resignification alone is not a politics, it is not sufficient for a politics, is not enough” (243). 6 Butler’s relation to Irigaray is complex to say the least; after a critique in GT and in BTM of the French theorist’s essentialism, her exclusions of others, and the speculativeness 1

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of her claims (BTM 47–9), she provided a far less critical re-reading in her essay, “Bodies that Matter,” published in Engaging with Irigaray, a volume that played an important role in changing perceptions of Irigaray in North American after “the essentialism wars” in feminist theory; see Butler’s revised view of Irigaray in Cheah and Grosz, “Future of Sexual Difference”; on citationality, see also BTM, 12–16. And on Derrida, whom Butler cites on this notion, see BTM, 13. 7 Butler, Psychic Life, 94, 99, 104. Although her investment in psychoanalytic categories, especially the idea of loss and mourning and the abject, already appear in Butler’s GT and BTM, her attempts in Psychic Life to negotiate a position “Between Freud and Foucault” may be understandable since the unconscious affords a place from which a force that is constitutively “outside” can return and disrupt subjection; nevertheless, I find Butler’s move problematic, as does Huffer in Mad for Foucault, 165–78. On Foucault’s indifference to gender, and thus on feminists’ complex relation to his work, see Chapter 3. 8 History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 92–3, hereafter HoS1. 9 In “Intellectuals and Power,” Foucault agrees with Deleuze that when those usually spoken for and about by others begin to speak for themselves, they produce a “counter-discourse” that represents a practical, resistant political act for overcoming their indignity (209). For another Foucaultian articulation of “the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it,” that raises the question of power, strategies and “a field of possibles, of openings, indecisions, reversals and possible dislocations which make them fragile, temporary and which turns these effects into events,” see Foucault, “What is Critique?” (65–6). See also Chapter 3, where I propose that counterdiscourses can be both emancipatory or conservative and reactionary. 10 A branch of physics concerned with the behavior of physical bodies subject to displacements, mechanics was divided into statics and dynamics, with the first emphasizing the body in equilibrium, and the second with changes in its direction (or speed). From the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, mechanics was essentially transformed, growing in complexity, expanding its domain, and raising its intellectual status under the impact of new mathematical disciplines, notably calculus, whose invention is credited to both Leibnitz and to Newton (1642–1727), and of the new methods of experimentation and observation. In the course of the seventeenth century, Galileo (1564– 1642) questioned the dominant Aristotelian paradigms in his study of the mechanics of falling bodies (in Two New Sciences, 1638, translated partly into French by Mersenne [1588–1648] in 1639), even as theological pressure forced him to recant his adherence to the helio-centric Copernican system of planetary movement, which radically challenged the earth’s long-held immobility. In turn, Descartes (1596–1650) articulated laws governing the mechanics and dynamics of bodies (the human and the cosmic), rejecting Galileo’s work for lacking solid foundations; in yet another turn, Newton rejected the bases of Descartes’s laws as fanciful in Principia Mathematica (1687), his ultimate attempt to create an alternative to Cartesian mechanics. Considered principally responsible for the transformation of mechanics in the seventeenth century, Descartes famously cast the body as a “machine” subject to the mechanical laws governing space, time and motion, in accordance with the physics of the movement of matter. As Koch points out, however, in the seventeenth century a “machine” did not connote the inhuman or dehumanizing antithesis of vital life; on the contrary, knowledge of the dynamic workings of the mechanical body in anatomy and physiology “held the promise of sustaining, and even extending life” (Aesthetic Body 19). Descartes likened a universe in motion not simply to a clock, but more important, to a vortex or tourbillon, in which elements constantly strike and push each other and where

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gravitational action is the product of the force of one body impelling action on another by contact and collision (ibid. 240, 245). For Descartes, the human body is a sensory and mobile machine, with its own dynamic principles that can function independently of the mind (ibid. 35). On seventeenth-century dynamics, see also Meli, Thinking with Objects. 11 Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes,” in Women, History and Theory, 65–109. 12 See Warner, Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France, 7. See also Huguet’s Dictionnaire, s.v. misogyne. For a seventeenth-century usage, see de Grenaille, L’honneste fille, 2:311. 13 Warner, Ideas; Reeser, Moderating Masculinity; Seifert, Manning the Margins. 14 Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 109, 117. 15 McLive, “Masculinity on Trial.” 16 See Hanley, “Engendering the State,” and “Family and State in Early Modern France.” 17 See Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and Descimon and Haddad, Epreuves de noblesse. 18 Cheah and Grosz, “Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview [with Butler],” 22, 27. 19 Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” in Women, History, and Theory, 19–50. 20 See Ranum on The Fronde. On women’s involvement in these civil wars, with a new emphasis on cross-class participation, see Carrier, “L’action politique et militaire des femmes dans la Fronde,” in Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes, ed. Fauré, 49–70. On the historical transformation of a law for the inheritance of land, into a custom, an ordinance, and then in the fourteenth century, into a fundamental law of France, see Beaune, Birth of an Ideology. See also Fauré, “La loi salique,” in Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes, 13–30. 21 See Marrow, Art Patronage. 22 Anne of Austria, the last of France’s three female regents, was castigated for her “unspeakable” sexual practices with Cardinal Mazarin during the Fronde in many of the more than 5,000 mazarinades. See Carrier, ed., Les Mazarinades. On the regency of Marie de Médicis, see Chapter 1. The powerful Catherine de Médicis appears briefly in La Fayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier (Chapter 6). On these regencies, see Crawford, Perilous Chastity. 23 Olivier, Alphabet, 14, 18, 23. Olivier’s work amplified a text by Archbishop Antonius Foreiglione (c. 1503), and especially, Le Sieur de Ferville’s Cacogynie ou La méchanceté des femmes (1617). 24 On salons, see Lougee, Paradis des femmes; Dejean, Tender Geographies; Beasley, Salons; Viala, La France galante. 25 Louis XIV may have aspired to create an “absolutistic” state, even within the substantial limitations placed on a seventeenth-century monarch’s power, but he never succeeded. On the meaning of absolutism in this period, see Cosandey and Descimon, L’absolutisme en France. As Marin argued in Portrait du roi, Louis XIV’s absolutism existed in and through forms of representation and illusion that elicited something close to religious belief. See also, Louis XIV, Mémoires, 193–4. 26 See Stanton, “Fiction of Préciosité.” 27 Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture. 28 On the theory of humors, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 107–14. Venette’s Tableau (1687) still iterates this theory. 29 See Park, “Rediscovery of the Clitoris.” On women’s anatomy, see Correia, Ovary of Eve. On the early-modern tribade, see Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism.

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Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 26. See McLive, “Masculinity on Trial,” 48–56. On the meanings of this obsession with hermaphrodites, see Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites, 39; Long, Hermaphrodites; Park and Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions” and Daston and Park, “Hermaphrodite and Nature.” 32 Butler finds Foucault’s appropriation of Herculine “suspect” (see GT 32). In UG, she is concerned with the new gender politics that involve trans-gendered and trans-sexual persons, who may constitute a third gender or sex, and urges a rethinking not only of gender and sexual presuppositions, but of the body as a mode of becoming, even a continuum (28–9, 143). 33 On this exile, see Cherbuliez, Place of Exile. On Montpensier, see also Beasley, Revising Memory and Pitts, La Grande Mademoiselle. 34 See DeJean, Against Marriage. 35 See Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia; on male melancholy, see Chapters 1 and 4. 36 There are few representations of the lower end of the social spectrum in this book; see however, Chapter 1. And see the still rare study of Ronzeaud, Peuple et représentations sous le règne de Louis XIV. 37 See Shapiro, ed., Correspondance Between Elizabeth … and … Descartes. On the revisionist view that underscores the impact of Elizabeth on Descartes’s later works, see Koch, Aesthetic Body and Wilkin, Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth, who provides a review of early feminist readings of Descartes and a judicious re-reading of his work. See Descartes, Oeuvres et letters, 991. 38 On upward mobility in seventeenth-century salons, see Lougee’s Paradis des femmes. See Chapter 1 and in a non-satiric vein, Chapter 4 on upward mobility. 39 See Dompnier, Le vénin de l’hérésie. 40 Maimbourg, Histoire du Calvinisme, 1:149. 41 For traits that the French ascribed to different nations for reasons that were not only self-promoting but that worked to construct national identity, see for instance, “De la contrariété d’humeurs,” written for Richelieu by La Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672); Schaub, La France espagnole and Yardeni, “Antagonismes nationaux.” 42 On Oriental and New World others, see for instance, Longino, Orientalism; Dorlin, La matrice de la race; Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized and Garraway, Libertine Colony. On the relation of gender ideology to nation formation, see Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality; Parker et al., eds., Nationalism and Sexualities and Stevens, Reproducing the State. 43 On the differences between a tactical and strategic use, see de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, especially xiv–xxiv, 37–40. 44 Albistur and Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme frança­is, 1:196; Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 56ff. 45 See DeJean, “Classical Reeducation.” 46 DeJean’s Tender Geographies states that the proliferation of facts and fictions about “scandalous women” at the end of Louis XIV’s reign is another sign of this generalized repression. But see Harth’s critique of DeJean’s repressive thesis in Cartesian Women, 185–7. 47 As Foucault writes in L’ordre du discours, “discourse is not simply that which expresses struggles or systems of domination, but that for which, and by which, one 30 31

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struggles; it is the power which one is striving to seize” (12). In his 1972 dialogue with Deleuze, Foucault substitutes theory for discourse to express the same idea: “[T]heory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice” (“Intellectuals and Politics” 208); and Deleuze specifies: “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another and theory is a relay from one practice to another” (206). 48 See Williams, Keywords, 317–18; de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life; Chambers, Room for Maneuver. 49 Conley, ed., Madame de Maintenon, 1; Bryant, “Partner, Matriarch and Minister,” 79, 98. For a fuller analysis of this view of Maintenon, see Bryant’s doctoral dissertation, Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon: Religion, Power and Politics. He also argues that Maintenon cannot be blamed for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes but that she played an important role in the persecution of Jansenists, and of course, that she turned against the mystical Mme Guyon; for Maintenon’s pedagogical views, see Chapter 3. 50 The repertory of normative types that follows will be familiar, at least in part to readers, and builds on the work of many French early-modernists. I re-view these types to thicken and to highlight the dynamic and shifting nature of what the signifier “women” embodied and encompassed in the seventeenth century. 51 On woman as monster, see Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” 62–8. 52 On images of “the world upside down,” see Beaumont-Maillet, La guerre des sexes; see also Ronzeaud, “La femme au pouvoir.” 53 This view of female imagination could justify confining women and denying them sensory stimulation, as well as physical and other activities. 54 Institoris and Sprenger, Witches’ Hammer, 121, 123, 146, 162, 259, 267, 280, 503. In a version of original sin carried only through the female line, the daughters of sorceresses themselves become sorceresses, “in fact virtually the entire progeny is tainted” (326). 55 On midwives in league with the demonic, see Institoris and Sprenger, 111–12, 162– 3, 254, 268, 321. Semantically, the sage femme is linked to the Latin saga, soothsayer. On the midwife and her fears of persecution as a witch, see Chapter 1. 56 Muchembled, Le roi et la sorcière. A royal edict of 1682 put a stop to the trials in France, in part because they were thought to undermine public order. Sallmann states that women represented from 79 percent to 90 percent of those accused in the witch-hunts on two continents (“La sorcière” 456). He suggests that the geography of the witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is related to the conflictual contact zones between Protestants and Catholics, though witch hunts were more numerous among the second than the first (465). Queen Marie de Médicis’s close friend and advisor, Leonora Galigaï, was burnt as a witch; and the reign of Louis XIV was scandalized by l’affaire des poisons (1679–1682), during which the Marquise de Brinvilliers and one of her supposed minions were executed as murderous witches. 57 Varandée, 142. 58 See Furetière’s Dictionary, s.v. fureur: (“There is also a women’s malady/sickness, named fureur utérine”). 59 See Park, “Rediscovery of the Clitoris” and Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism; see Venette (14–17, 39, 138–40, 461–80), who also depicts tribadic practices. On laws restricting prostitution and the internment of prostitutes, see Servais and Laurend, Histoire et dossier de la prostitution, 179ff. On sexual seventeenth-century works, see DeJean, Reinvention of Obscenity and Mainil, “Dans les reigles du plaisir.” On the sexual exploits

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and prowess of the female characters in Chorier’s L’académie des dames (1660), which outdo those of men, see Turner, Schooling Sex. 60 Hédelin, Histoire du temps, 10, 12–15. 61 There are two versions of La mère coquette, by Visé in 1665 and in 1666 by Quinault, both of which depict this mother as threatened by her attractive daughter, with whom she competes for suitors. In Les caractères (1688), La Bruyère identified the coquette with la femme galante, an ambivalent term, in contrast to the galant homme or homme galant, a synonym for the worldly honnête homme (Oeuvres complètes 109, 111–12); see also Esprit’s critique of this female type in Fausseté des vertus humaines, 2:358; Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel 1690 (s.v. galant) identifies her with the courtesan. 62 On the idea of the oppressions of marriage within the pro-woman factions of the querelle des femmes, see, inter alia, DeJean, Tender Geographies, and late in the century, Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics and On the Celibate Life in A Woman Who Defends all the Persons of Her Sex, 121–5, 234–5, 255–6, 265–7. 63 S.v. libertin, -ine in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694), which also gives this example for dissolute conduct: “this woman exists in great libertinage” (“cette femme est dans un grand libertinage”). 64 It is said that Ninon owed her freedom from prison to former Queen Christina of Sweden who wrote to Mazarin on her behalf. According to Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes: “She confessed to me [that as of the age of thirteen] she knew that religions were only baseless fancies, and that there was nothing true in all that” (“elle m’a avoüé … elle savait bien que les religions n’estoient que des imaginations, et qu’il y avoit rien de vray à tout cela,” 2:441). See Verdier’s examination of Ninon’s representations in the eighteenth century (“Libertine, Philanthropist, Revolutionary”); see also Colombey’s edition of her Correspondance. The epicurean poet, Antoinette Deshoulières (1634–1694), a disciple of atomist natural philosopher, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), could also be considered a libertine. On libertine women in England, see Linker, Dangerous Women. 65 See La coquette vengée in Lenclos, Correspondance, 177–88. Another portrait in the satire may target Louis de Lesclache (1600–1671), who gave popular lectures for women on moral philosophy. 66 As Biet points out, however, in this period, the widow was still considered capitis diminutio, literally, a lessening of the head, in the north of France. On the legal definition of incapable, see Biet, “La veuve,” 216. A widow under the age of 25 was defined as a minor as well, according to the Edict of Blois (1579); see Winn, “Introduction,” in Veufs, veuves et veuvage, 9–10. 67 Brantôme, Les dames galantes, 449. Among many examples of the lusty widow in the theater, see Beline in Molière’s Le malade imaginaire (1673), thrilled to be “delivered of a great weight” when she thinks her hypochondriacal husband is dead (Oeuvres complètes, act 3, sc. 12, v. 657–8). On new edicts dealing with the remarriage of widows, see Warner, “Widows,” 89–90 and Menke, “Widow,” 205. Neither Madame de La Guette (the subject of Chapter 4) nor Mme de Sévigné (see Chapter 5) remarried. 68 Testament politique, 300–301. 69 Louis XIV, Mémoires, 240–42. And yet, when his mother, Anne, dies (in 1666), Louis writes movingly (albeit defensively) in his Memoirs of the “courage” with which she sustained his throne at a moment when he could not yet act on his own, and above all, “the full renunciation of her sovereign authority” as regent, which made him “recognize that I

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had nothing to fear from her ambition” (“m’avait assez fait connaître que je n’avais rien à craindre de son ambition,” 157). 70 Menke, “Widow.” One of the most positive representations of the widow is to be found in Corneille’s La veuve (1632–1633): she recognizes her suitor’s worth, despite his lack of means, and takes the initiative to propose marriage; one of the most negative is De Hauteroche’s Le feint polonais, ou, La veuve impertinente (1686), in Les oeuvres de théâtre, 3:339–427, where Rusile is depicted as immoderate, bizarre, extravagant, mad and a devil. 71 See also, Alceste in Quinault and Lully’s eponymous tragédie lyrique (1674). 72 Roger Duchêne, “La veuve au XVIIe siècle,” 221–3. 73 See Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, “Jeanne de Chantal.” See Suchon, A Woman, for her vision of the widow who would take up the Neutralist (celibate) life, 229–32, 251–4, 265, 289. On religious women who founded orders and/or became educators, see Timmermans, L’accès des femmes, 567ff; Rapley, Social History of the Cloister. 74 The legend of Bosse’s sonnet reads: “It gives satisfaction and a pleasing life / To see the Maiden in her home / Take her Luth in hand, study her lesson / And marry her voice to its harmony. / She drives away all melancholy, / She finds tranquility in all seasons, / She banishes the spark of love / And has no knowledge of infernal envy. / If someone comes to see her duty-bound by honor / We see her blush, proof of her modesty / And scarcely can we hear her speak: / But the woman on the go, who runs here and there / Who speaks every which way / In rambling fits and starts / Displays the acts of a mad person.” 75 This section on l’honnête femme and la femme forte is indebted to Maclean’s erudite study, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652. However, unlike Maclean, I focus on the ways in which Christian moralists recuperated and contained emancipatory trends in the querelle des femmes and see no sign of “triumph” during Anne’s regency (1640–1647), which he characterizes as “a glorification of women and an enhancement of their prestige which provoke little opposition” as well as “a flourishing of feminism” (267), an anachronistic usage of “feminism.” 76 On the honnête homme, in its most ideal expression, see the works of the Chevalier de Méré in Stanton, Aristocrat, passim; on l’homme de bien, ibid., 46–50, 52. 77 See Méré, Oeuvres complètes, 2:31, 3:70. See Stanton, Aristocrat, 42, 121, 123. But as Seifert points out, some men can embody the ideal of Honnêteté, which means that they can do without women (Manning 52); see Seifert on the homosocial implications of this male ideal. See Elias on The Civilizing Process. 78 It is no accident, then, that Du Bosc’s text, the first major work on l’honnête femme, appears two years after Faret’s L’honnête homme (1630), which outlines a strategy of social arrivisme and delineates the instrumental role of salon and court women in achieving this goal. On the relation between the honnête femme and the homme de bien, see Pekacs, Conservative Tradition, 21–32. 79 On novels, see de Grenaille, 3:224, 230–35. This negative view persists throughout the early-modern period, and according to Danahy, even in modern times. He shows that the novel is marked with the negative stereotypes of femininity (Feminization of the Novel). 80 On these themes, see also de Grenaille, L’honneste fille, 1: 364–9; 2:253–4, 315–16. He emphasizes women’s proper subservience to men as “chief and master” in L’honneste mariage (1640), where the man corrects and punishes his wife, should control and administer her wealth; indeed, she should do nothing without his permission. 81 Nevertheless, L’honneste mariage (1640) denounces female regents, for the disorder they cause society (221–3, 232–7).

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Le Moyne, Gallerie. In devoting a chapter to each woman, and grouping them into four historical categories (fortes juives, fortes barbares, fortes romaines and fortes chrestiennes), Le Moyne’s text recalls catalogues of illustrious women, which date from the Middle Ages, and still appeared at the end of the seventeenth century. For other portraits of la femme forte, see Du Bosc’s La femme héroïque (1645) and Saint Gabriel, Le mérite des dames (1660). On la femme forte see Chapter 3. The Amazon evoked far more ambivalent responses; see Chapter 4, where Mme de La Guette, who models herself on the “Christian Amazon,” Mme de Saint Balmont, hyperbolizes the hunting and warring dimensions of this ideal, while struggling with its moralistic elements. 83 Le Moyne ultimately refuses to allow women to participate in warfare because, he claims, it goes against nature, law and custom (Gallerie 177). 84 On seventeenth-century nuns, see, inter alia, Rapley, The Dévotes and Social History of the Cloister; Woshinsky, Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces and Timmermans, L’accès des femmes, 393–811. However, there were voyeuristic concerns about the sexual practices of nuns in the cloister: see Stanton, “Vénus dans le cloître.” 85 See e.g. Suchon’s condemnation of the Church’s refusal to allow women to read theology, in A Woman, passim. 86 See Timmermans’s L’accès des femmes for its pioneering work on Jansenist, mystical and more broadly, women religious. See also Conley, Adoration and Annihilation. 87 On this Bossuet/Fénelon battle, see Stanton, “1685.” On Guyon, see Bruneau, Women Mystics. See Chapter 3 on Fénelon and Maintenon. 88 On the difficulty of determining figures for literacy, see Cavallo and Chartier, eds., History of Reading in the West, 124ff. As Ferguson observes, we need to ask “what counts as literacy for whom, and under what particular circumstances,” in addition to how people read and in what social and institutional circumstances (Dido’s Daughters 4). There are also issues of place (different parts of France had different levels of literacy) and of class and religion, over and beyond gender. Estimates of literacy usually range from 12–20 percent for women. Female literacy is also related to the rise of vernacular languages, often identified with the impure feminine (ibid. 107–8, 119, 133, 140–41), in contrast to the masculine tongues of Greek and Latin, which were not offered to girls in the petites écoles, but were privileged in the all-male collèges. 89 See Roger Duchêne, “L’école des femmes au xviie siècle.” 90 On Scudéry’s Sappho, see Dejean, Tender Geographies. By contrast to Scudéry, see Marie de Gournay’s advocacy for women’s learning and writing (in Stanton, “Woman as Object”) before 1659, and before 1700 (Suchon, A Woman). 91 See Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 113– 38. For an evaluation and rethinking of Foucault’s position, see Chartier, Order of Books, who probes Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universel for the meanings of “auteur,” both male and female, in the French 1690s (39–59). See also Haraway, “Situated Knowledge.” 92 See Stanton, “Auto-gynography: Is the Subject Different?” 93 Kristeva, “Un nouveau type d’intellectuel,” 3–8. 82

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Part I Women Writ

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Chapter 1

Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)? Since the 1970s, the notion of “the classical body” has remained essentially uncontested, some 40 years after three writers from different historical contexts (Stalinist Russia, pre-Nazi Germany and post-war France) had their seminal work on the topic translated into English: Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1968); Elias’s The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1969); and Foucault’s The History of Madness (1961), Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978). The differences among these theorists extend to critical approaches (Marxism in Bakhtin’s case, psychoanalysis and German sociology in Elias’s, as compared to Foucault’s critical relation to both Marxism and psychoanalysis). Bakhtin’s paean to the ambivalent grotesque realism of the carnival, which subverts dominant hierarchies and beliefs, and affirms the devalued and denied, finds its crowning expression in Rabelais, only to be recuperated by the absolutist state and reduced to a low literary genre with monologic meaning. In the process, marketplace frankness about the “lower bodily” organs of ingestion, excretion and reproduction, upheld as openings to the world, was suppressed by civilized manners; and the emerging classical body was bounded, closed off, privatized and homogenized with the rise of high, serious official culture and the bourgeoisie. Like Bakhtin, Elias marshaled a host of examples to show how body functions—eating, spitting, ejecting mucus, farting, secreting urine—which had been acceptable to elites, came to be viewed as beastly with the advent of court society, associated with shame and guilt and repressed; thus the self was molded into producing socially desirable behavior that displayed self-control, decorum and dignity. This disciplining of the subject, which marks the early and middle Foucault, devolves from the exclusion of marginal bodies as “mad,” with the founding of the Hôpital Général in 1656. And with unreason (déraison) banned, Foucault’s “classical age” incorporated the structure of the prison into its social institutions, controlled subjects “panoptically,” incited confession about sexuality and the body, valorized decorum and marked the rule of monogamous conjugality. And yet, at the end of History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault evoked a utopian vision for the future, “the possibility that one day” there will “perhaps” be “a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (159), not unlike the final paragraph of The History of Manners, where Elias imagines a time when “the tensions between and within states have been mastered,” and “self control … can be confined to

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those restraints which are necessary in order that men can live with each other and with themselves with a high chance of enjoyment and a low chance of fear” (524). Rather than look forward, Bakhtin looked nostalgically back to a populist utopian, prelapsarian moment of unconstraint, bodily freedom and joyful laughter. Although Elias, Bakhtin and Foucault have received critical scrutiny—here in ascending amounts—the “classical body” and its components continue to be widely deployed and to remain unquestioned.1 Still, Bakhtin’s Rabelais— which will be my initial focus here—generated a judicious and astute reading in Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) that rightly continues to be cited: they reject the “false essentializing of carnivalesque transgression” (144), and caution that the licensed release of carnival could be a form of social control serving the interests of the official culture it apparently opposes (13). Moreover their analysis shows that the grotesque “is formed through a process of hybridization or inmixing of binary opposites” (44), indeed that an ongoing dialectical process perdures between the “grotesque” and “the classical,” terms I both use and put under erasure here: “The classical body splits precisely along the rigid edge which is its defense against heterogeneity: its closure and purity are quite illusory,” Stallybrass and White emphasize, “and it will perpetually rediscover in itself … the ‘neither/nor’, the double negation of high and low which was the very precondition for its social identity” (113). By that token, and as with Foucault’s transitional moment between the “pre-classical” and the “classical age” in The Order of Things (1970), discursive forms can epitomize both modes (“and/ and”) or signify a complex shift from one to the other, a determination that requires in every instance, “a close historical examination of particular conjunctures” (16). This includes conjunctures of gender ideology.2 Rabelais and His World introduced me to Le caquet de l’accouchée (“The Cackle of the Confined Woman”), a set of short, anonymous texts published sequentially in 1622, which Bakhtin cites to illustrate the “degeneracy” of grotesque realism.3 He concedes that “a tiny spark of the carnival flame is still alive” in these “fashionable” writings—eight of which were collected in the Recueil général des caquets de l’accouchée (1623) and reprinted an impressive seven times before 1650—but he highlights their differences from the “very old” tradition of “female gathering[s] at the bedside of a woman recovering from childbirth … They were marked by abundant food and frank conversation, at which social conventions were dropped … The acts of procreation and eating predetermined the role of the material bodily lower stratum” (105–6). By contrast, in the post-Rabelaisian Caquet de l’accouchée, “the author eavesdrops on the women’s chatter while hiding behind a curtain. However in the conversation that follows, the theme of the bodily lower stratum … is transferred to private manners. This female cackle is nothing but gossip and tittle-tattle. The popular frankness of the marketplace with its grotesque ambivalent lower stratum is replaced by chamber intimacies of private life, heard from behind a curtain” (105). Exemplifying these shifts from the lower bodily stratum to manners, from the popular, public marketplace to the private bourgeois chamber, the Caquet de l’accouchée thus sets the stage, in Bakhtin’s argument, for the “alcove realism” of the nineteenth century (106).

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However, as De Lincy showed in the introduction to his 1855 edition of the collected Caquets de l’accouchée—still the best edition (and the one to which all later ones refer)—fifteenth-century texts by Aliénor de Poitiers and Christine de Pizan highlight the luxurious chambers of recuperating aristocratic and bourgeois women.4 In what became a topos of the genre, Pizan’s Trésor de la cité des dames (1405) inveighs against the pretensions and upward mobility of wealthy bourgeoises who act like queens at their lying-in (Caquets xxxiii–xxxv). Already in fifteenth-century texts, then, mythical marketplace frankness is conspicuous by its absence; but the enclosed setting nonetheless sets the stage for important social issues that undermine reductive antitheses between public space and private life, in favor of a fluidity where boundaries shift in particular instances, as they do with the salons of the seventeenth century.5 Although Bakhtin underscores his concern with what The Formal Method calls that “ideological environment, which forms a solid ring around man,”6 he does not examine gender ideology in scenes of recuperating women in male-authored, sixteenth-century texts. Guillaume Coquillart’s Les droits nouveaux (1513), for example, uses the lying-in to satirize women’s rivalrous squabbles over their bodies—the beauty of their face, or the particular shape of their ass (“Each one has hers touched to see / If it’s ill-formed, if it’s fine / If it’s tucked, if it’s tight / If it’s thin, how, and how much / If it’s long or round, or square”);a to chastise women’s audacious criticisms of men (“That’s where they discuss our minions. / And spare neither the deaf man nor the fool.”);b above all, to ridicule their “jargon” and “jumble.”7 Bakhtin ignores the misogynistic implications of the term caquet, declaring tautologically that in the Caquet “female cackle is nothing but gossip and tittle-tattle” (105): the term denotes “the hen’s clucking when she lays an egg,”8 and its early-modern synonyms, as Cotgrave’s Dictionary confirms, were “prattling, tattling, babbling, tittle tattle, much talking.”9 By analogy, the term generated verbs, adjectives and other nouns, including caquetoire, “a place where women meet and prattle together” (s.v. caquetoire); or as Henri Estienne explained in 1583, caquetoire designated the chairs “on which the ladies were seated (especially about a recumbent woman) when each one wanted to show her mouth wasn’t frozen-stiff.”c10 By extension, however, a man can be disparaged (and feminized) as caqueteux for his “boring, backbiting, simpering, sugary prattle” (Edmond Huguet, s.v. caqueteux). Still, as late as 1694, the primary association for caquet in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française was “le caquet de l’accouchée, the discussion of trifles that usually occurs at the home of women in childbed.”d

“Chascune fait taster le sien: / S’il est fagoté, s’il est bien, / S’il est troussé, s’il est serré / S’il est espés, quoy et combien, / S’il est rond, ou long ou carré.” b “La est que on traicte nos mignons. / La on n’espargne sot ne sourt.” c “sur lesquels estant assises les dames [et principalement si cestet alentour d’une gisante] chacune a voulu monstrer n’avoir point le bec gelé.” d “le caquet de l’accouchée, l’entretien de bagatelles qui se fait ordinairement chez les femmes qui sont en couche.” a

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Women’s conversations in the absence of men have traditionally been denigrated not only as bagatelles, but as gossip. And the connection between a gossip, a term that first defined a godparent, and le caquet is highlighted in Ben Johnson’s definition, “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying in.”11 As Spacks has written, gossip is identified with women, more broadly, with subordinates whose “idle” talk betrays the secrets of the dominant, can challenge their powerful public image and create cohesion among the unempowered. Woman’s “loose tongue,” with its erotic connotations, can constitute a threat to the superordinate image and interests of men, and thus to the perpetuation of early-modern gender norms that regarded a closed mouth a sign of female chastity. Beyond their devaluation of women’s talk, the Caquets de l’accouchée recuperate the exclusive femaleness of the lying-in by the secret presence of a voyeuristic narrator who wants to see and to record/report what women say when, as Gallop put it, “men are out of the room.”12 The re-presentation of the scene through a male gaze frames and controls the gathering and loose bantering around fertile women. By penetrating this space, he symbolically avenges the excluded males of Les quinze joies de mariage, the anonymous late fourteenth-century satire to which the caquets’ narrator alludes, and, for instance, the late fifteenthcentury satire, Evangile des quenouilles.13 His presence contains and assuages the phantasmatic fear of becoming targets of criticism by the second sex, and thus of reversing normative roles. Yet, even when they are present, men can be emasculated by their fertile wives: in the third joy, or more accurately tribulation, of marriage, a husband is reduced to being the cook and housekeeper for his lazy, extravagant and duplicitous wife, and he is eaten and drunk out of house and home by a stream of women at the lying-in, who nonetheless denounce what they judge to be his domineering manner. “He is so tamed,” bemoans the male narrator, “you could lead him by the chain to tend the sheep … [he] will end his days miserably” (19, 25–6).e This textual structure of a dominant fertile female and an excluded and/or emasculated male assumes special significance in the socio-political context of early seventeenth-century France. The proliferation of caquets in 1622, and the publication of the Receuil général in 1623, edited to create a (more-or-less) coherent narrative frame and chronology, follows upon the troubled Regency of Marie de Médicis (1610–1617), a female “reign” in Salic France so unpopular with the nobility that Duccini has characterized its turbulent years as “a Fronde before the Fronde.” Unlike the mid-century civil wars, however, this one principally involved struggles for power between the royal mother and her son, Louis XIII (1601–1643), whom history has described as timid and indecisive, suspicious and taciturn, with a congenital speech impediment, a melancholic man who was not able to father a child for 23 years after his marriage to Anne of Austria at the age of 14.14 Dubbed “Louis the Chaste,” he is depicted in Tallemant e “Il [est] si dompté que l’en le pourroit mener par le lardon garder les brebiz … [il] finira miserablement ses jours.”

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des Réaux’s notoriously gossipy Historiettes, as having numerous male lovers, including his equerry, Francois de Baradas, the Connetable de Luynes, the falconer who became the king’s closest advisor and M. le Grand [the Marquis de Cinq-Mars], later executed for conspiring with the Spanish. On one notable occasion, Tallemant reports, Monsieur le Grand came to the king’s bed “decked out like a bride,” but otherwise unresponsive to the king’s passionate embraces and “great ardor.”15 Resenting his mother’s overweening power, Louis (prodded by Luynes) had her hated Italian minister, Concino Concini, better known as the Maréchal d’Ancre, assassinated, his body hideously dismembered in the streets of Paris in 1617; and his wife, Leonora Galigaï, the queen-mother’s lady-in-waiting and closest confidante, burnt as a witch. Once Richelieu threw his ambitions in with the king, and no longer with his mother, the struggles between king and queen mother culminated in Marie’s exile to Blois, followed by military confrontations between her army and her son’s until their tenuous reconciliation in 1620, which the Cardinal had engineered. The publication of the Caquets coincides with the king’s absence from Paris to launch military campaigns against the “heretical” Huguenots of Béarn, who had defied a number of royal decisions—Louis XIII is said to have preferred soldiering (and hunting) to ruling the kingdom—that succeeded in re-establishing Catholicism as the official religion of that province, while Marie, returned from exile and reinstated in the ruling State Council in 1622, brazenly commissioned Peter Paul Rubens to glorify her life and reign in 24 monumental paintings.16 That Marie incarnated the woman on top in deviation from the fundamental Salic Law of the kingdom, the virago who usurps the place of her rightful ruler, and thereby turns the world upside down,17may also explain in part why the end of her regency coincided with the onset of the first and perhaps most virulent of the querelles des femmes in the seventeenth century, which endlessly debated the rightful place of men and women, both reworking dominant gender norms to confront new conditions and contesting them, as the Introduction showed. This centuries-old debate was re-ignited by Jacques Olivier’s extraordinarily popular Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (1617)—the text enjoyed 18 editions before 1650—which denounces women’s faults from A to Z, supported by classical and biblical references: Regnorum Ruina (“The Ruin of Kingdoms”), Truculenta Tyrannis (“Cruel Tyranny”) and Garulum Gutter (“Chatterbox”), the “idle words” of “shameless women.”18 Olivier derives from Genesis the notion that “God [formed] woman’s body from a brittle and crackling rib, man’s from mute and silent clay,” thus that man is “taciturn and noiseless,” woman, to the contrary, “brattling and babbling” (76).f Even worse, women’s speech is linked to the diabolical: put four women in the same room, says Olivier, and “while cackling and chattering, they go … from insults to blows with such rage and f “Dieu [forma] le corps de la femme d’une côte dure & craquetande, & celui de l’homme de terre sourde & muette”; “taciturne & silencieux … caquetante & babillarde.”

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frenzy you could classify them as Hell’s furies.”g Their crazed, demonic talk at the marketplace resembles nothing so much as “the damned who endlessly shout, howl and blaspheme against His divine Majesty” (81). In this phantasmatic perspective, the cackling woman at the lying-in may function as the ludicrous correlative of Marie, the maternal virago; in the binaried dynamics of gender ideology, women’s dis-ordering license—discursive, political or religious—must threaten male rule(s). To counter this multi-faceted threat, the male-narrated Receuil général des caquets de l’accouchée, like satires of old,19 recuperates the “loose talk” of women at the lying-in, and then uses it as a screen to denounce social disorder, chiefly attributed to women, and to proclaim the cure of rigid, androcentric rule. So doing, the Caquets figure what Ronald Paulson calls the structural goals of satire: to depict the corruption of the ideal order because of the massive presence of a false society; to affirm the return to that ideal as a corrective; and to ensure some mode of punishment for the cause of this upheaval.20 In Freud’s reading, jokes (here extended to satire) provide a pleasurable expression of aggression against that cause, and through the process of degradation, a victory over the “enemy.”21 For Kreis, the comic, as a defense mechanism, aims to master and ward off certain emotions, above all, anxiety,22 but for Karen Horney, this anxiety (terror, in her wording) involves threats to phallic primacy, which men can deny to themselves, objectify in creative work or then find relief in “the disparagement of women … The attitude … of disparagement implies: ‘It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who … is such a poor thing’.”23 To be sure, this conservative view of satire as countering a threatening degeneration has been questioned by Griffin, for instance, who argues that some satires are more dialogic and open-ended, written in order “to explore a moral issue, rather than to close it,” and thus that they provoke, challenge and unsettle our beliefs.24 Leaving aside narrative structure and aims, says Griffin, the satirist is often a peeping Tom, and even more relevant to the Caquets de l’accouchée, one who views mirth as a sovereign remedy against his melancholy, the splenetic condition that he vents in (and as) his text (170–73).25 In what follows, I argue that the narrator’s psychophysical condition replicates the post-partum state of the “delivered” woman at the lying in, with problematic gender consequences that feminize him, since like her, he produces a corpus into the world and then readies for a cure back to health. But at the close of the Caquets, the narrator’s mirth ends with an un-Rabelaisian call for “great confinement” (le grand renfermement), a societal condition that Foucault, like Elias and Bakhtin, identifies with the rise of absolutism. Whether this ending closes off the “lower organs” and bawdy talk, and heralds the enthronement of the “classical body,” remains an open question.

g “en caquetant & jasant elles viennent … des injures aux coups, avec tant de rage & de furie, qu’on les peut mettre au prédicament d’une furie d’Enfer.”

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The Placental Text

Fig. 1.1

Abraham Bosse, Visite à l’accouchée (Visit to the Woman Lying-in), 1633. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The unnamed narrator decides to infiltrate the lying-in out of a need to recover from an unspecified “great and painful illness,” as well as from one of those “cold and dank maladies,” to which he is subject, and which casts a melancholic humor over the imagination; and in a more general but unexplained way, he associates his voyeuristic action with a determination to govern his life by a better regimen (Caquets 7, 45–6). He had consulted two doctors, the second of whom urged him to seek curative pleasures and diversions, first by going to the theater; but he ended up at the carnivalesque Pont-Neuf in the hands of charlatans, all the worse for his health, humor and finances. As a far better remedy, insisted the first doctor, he should get permission from une accouchée, and “slip into the bedroom alcove after dinner to hear the latest news from the many women who come to see her, and to keep a faithful record … it will rejuvenate you and restore your pristine health” (9–10), he declares, while never explaining the logic of this particular remedy for his patient’s illness and his melancholy (see Figure 1.1).h “vous glisser à la ruelle du lict une apresdinée, pour entendre les nouvelles qui se racontent par la multitude des femmes qui la viennent voir, et en tenir bon registre … cela vous fera rajeunir et remettre en vostre pristine santé.” h

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Now in the early modern period, melancholy is regarded as one of the four primary humors—along with the phlegmatic, the sanguine and the choleric or bilious—but it is differentially described depending on the gender of the sufferer. Melancholy was identified with creativity in men, as far back as Pseudo-Aristotle Problem XXX, 1 (now ascribed to Theophrastos) as the following question and response confirm: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? … Many too are subject to fits of exaltation and ecstasy, because this heat is located near the seat of the intellect.”26 The notion of melancholy as the source of la fureur poétique/fureur divine is upheld in the Renaissance by, among others, Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa and the Pléiade poets, for example, in Ronsard’s “Elegy to Jacques Grevin,” where the “I” knows that “my art grievously torments me” and that he cannot free himself from the humor that enslaves him, which is “fierce and suspicious, sad and melancholic.”27 At the turn of the seventeenth century, however, melancholy was being viewed as damaging, even feminizing, rather than productive, just as poets, including François de Malherbe, were to reject divine inspiration in favor of hard work and attention to rules.28 In the instance of women, on the other hand, the melancholic were thought to be victims of excessive imagination and to be susceptible not only to pathological effects, such as fureur utérine, but in fact to demonic possession, as Johannus Weyer had emphasized in De praestigiis daemonum (1563).29 In the case of the Caquets’ narrator, melancholy is still connected to creativity, since he will produce what he claims to be “a faithful record” in writing, but it is associated as well to the aesthetic tradition that defines the cure for this disease as laughter, arguably his mirthful response to the babble and gossip of cackling women; in fact, the doctor dubs the laughter generated by his patient’s written record a “balm.” To be sure, therapeutic laughter has been praised by medical authorities since Aristotle, as Barbara Bowen observes, noting the large number of Renaissance medical treatises and joke collections interested in risus as proprium hominis, to cure anger, fear and melancholy.30 Thus in Rabelais’s Quart livre we read that “nobody, however sad, vexed, sullen or melancholy he might be … would not have found new joy, and smiled with a hearty spleen seeing the noble convoy of ships [ready] to sail … and would not have judged as a sure prognostic that the voyage … would be perfect in joy and health,” although, as Bowen shows, not all laughter in Rabelais is joyful and curative (145).i31 In the Caquets de l’accouchée, this laughing cure for melancholy is effective, but in ways that also complicate the narrator’s gender identity and undermine his masculinity, beginning with the fact that the narrator’s “cold and dank” malady parallels women’s “cold and wet temperament” or humor, as the sixth Caquet i “personne n’estoit, tant triste, fasché, rechigné ou melancholique feust … qui n’entrast en joye nouvelle, et de bonne ratte ne soubrist, voyant ce noble convoy … et ne jugeast en prognostic asceuré, que le voyage … seroit en alaigresse et santé perfaict.”

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notes (196).32 While he denies having any prurient curiosity whatsoever about women, which means, of course, that he could justifiably be accused of harboring such voyeuristic intentions, the narrator seeks out his cousin, in childbed at home on the “Street of Nasty Words” (11), and is easily (facilement) allowed to eavesdrop on what constitutes the first Caquet. By the second, his malady is “much diminished”; by the fourth, he can exclaim: “Banished all melancholy!” (125). His daily return to record the women’s prattle until the final, eighth Caquet, entitled Le relèvement de l’accouchée, links the production of his corpus—the one we are reading—to the women’s room and womb, and to the return of the postnatal (and postpartum) body to its pristine state—a variation on the topos of female generativity as a metaphor for male creativity.33 That the narrator claims to see the newborn at the end, but that he can’t—or won’t—say if it’s a boy or girl (227), may point to a primary interest in his own productivity rather than in his cousin’s corporeal output,34 and perhaps, metonymically, to his liminal position between the masculine and the feminine. Part of the narrator’s mirthful pleasure lies in the titillation of hearing and seeing the forbidden—what a psychoanalytic reading would call a primal scene— without being discovered and punished. From one text to another, the narrator shifts his hiding place—behind the curtain folds of his cousin’s ruelle, the corner of a tapestry, the cabinet at her bed-head, and in a little room behind her bed gained through a little door (12, 46–7, 94, 128, 216). These details of ever more secret enclosures set the stage for the suspenseful moment when an attending woman warns that “the walls have ears,” and another declares, in one of the texts’ many self-references: “I was told the other day that while a respectable, polite company came to visit milady in childbed, a certain someone hid behind the bed and kept a register of everything that was said; which only makes us look bad, for everybody is calling us prattlers. If he were here now, we’d let him have it” (63).j The threat of discovery and punishment by women is heightened when the indignant female guests search the room to make sure that no man has intruded: as “a wrinkled old woman” approaches the alcove, the narrator gleefully relates that “she found the nest but the bird had flown away. And I … [I] split my sides laughing” (63).k35 That the male—here cast as naughty boy—outfoxes the pursuing old hens compounds the pleasure of the secret, and of the joke at their expense. Throughout the Caquets, the narrator’s guffaws at the women’s prattle marks a triumphant reversal over their mockery of men. On the fifth day, for example, the women’s laughter sets off his own uncontrollable, lower-bodily laugh at them: “Each of these bourgeois women … began to laugh with such pluck that it “on me disoit l’autre jour qu’une honneste compagnie estant venuë voir madame l’accouchée, qu’il y avoit derrière son lict un certain quidam qui tenoit registre de tout ce que la compagnie disoit; ce qui ne tourne qu’à nostre desavantage, car chacun nous appelle caqueteuse. Si d’avanture il y estoit maintenant, il nous lui faudroit bailler son change.” k “elle trouva le nid; mais l’oyseau s’estoit envolé. Et moy … [je] m’esclattois de rire.” j

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sounded as if female donkeys were in a field braying to be covered by males. And I who speak, though hidden in the alcove, I had to loosen my codpiece, for fear of pissing in my breeches” (Caquets 191).l Aside from deriding their deafening barnyard cackling, he defaults to the misogynist trope that women only seek to be sexually mounted by men, even as his own organ threatens urinary ejaculation, thus conflating mouth and anus, orality and genitality. In yet another reversal that links mouth and anus, he degrades the women’s chatter as unstoppable excrement (153, 182, 231): it is as natural, he explains, “for women to chatter with their upper and lower dentures,” as it is for birds “to shit everywhere” (231). The narrator’s laughter is especially satisfying because it is shared with another, intra-textually with his complicitous cousin in each text’s narrative frame. “We roared with laughter,” he states at the beginning of the fourth day, and at the end, “you can well imagine how we laughed” (126, 154).m In effect, l’accouchée functions as the narrator’s double and alibi, and thereby undermines the potential solidarity of the female gathering and conversation, though, like him, “she wouldn’t want it discovered for anything in the world” (12).n In league with her male cousin, and differentiated from the women of all ages and classes who visit her chamber, she remains conspicuously silent throughout the Caquets, in part, suggests the text, because of a fever caused by her copious production of milk (40), but arguably, because she alone knows that she is objectified (“confined”) by his gaze. According to the narrator, however, her silence marks her superiority over the other women, whose “deafening talk” and nasty gossip offend her, along with their inappropriate discussion of serious subjects, which she deems fit only for men (100, 242).36 In a word, l’accouchée is recuperated in the text as the exception that proves the rules of women’s laughable nature, and as a female who chooses complicity with a man over her own gender. Because of her compliance to normative gender scripts, l’accouchée also helps to assuage men’s phantasmatic fear of—and repulsion at—the bloated and open, expelling and leaking lower body that defines the birth-giving scene. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes this repulsion, “the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body,” the emblem of the impure, the abject, not only because of its identification with menstrual blood, parturition and infantile excrement, but as the symptom of “something horrible to see at the impossible doors of the invisible.”37 In De l’heureux accouchement des femmes (1609), a midwifery treatise by French surgeon, Jacques Guillemeau (1550–1613), the pupil and sonin-law of the legendary Dr. Ambroise Paré, the womb from which he extracts the child also contains monstrous masses such as l’arrière faix (the “after birth”) (see “Chacune de ces bourgeoises … se prindrent à rire de si grand courage qu’il sembloit à les entendre que ce fussent des asnesses dans un pré qui brayassent pour estre couvertes. Et moy qui parle, je fus contrainct, quoy que caché à la ruelle du lict, d’en destacher mon esguillette, craignans de pisser dans mes chausses.” m “Nous en rismes à gorge déployée”; “je vous laisse à penser si ce fut sans rire.” n “pour rien elle ne voudroit cela estre decouvert.” l

Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen

Fig. 1.2

47

Charles Estienne,“La partie interieure de l’arrierefaiz …” (“The Interior Part of the Afterbirth … ”). From La dissection des parties du corps humain divisé en trois livres (The Dissection of the Parts of the Human Body, Divided into Three Books) (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1546). New York Academy of Medicine Library, Rare Book Room.

Figure 1.2), which he declares to be “a thing against nature” (chose contre nature) that must be expelled or this “dead thing” [le mort] will cause “very-pernicious accidents, such as … the suffocation of the mother, and by rotting, can even be the cause of her death,” for its “malign vapors” can rise and attack the “noble” organs of the body, and “kill the living.”38 In addition, Guillemeau, like Paré, depicts moles (from the Persian moli, deformed thing) or false conceptions in the womb produced by semen that is either infertile or then so weak it is “suffocated” by an excessive amount of menstrual blood. Although there are several different types, writes Guillemeau, a mole is basically comprised of many glands and “superfluous” flesh that amass into an ever growing tumor the size of a fist or a bell, which can deprive the embryo of nourishment and kill it, but which can also remain in the womb for the duration of a woman’s life (15–16, 22).39 And yet, the narrator of the Caquets appropriates the matter that issues from the “lower bodily” parts of the woman in childbed as the emblem of his own

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“ample” production, which he disparagingly dubs his excremental text. “What I’m doing here,” he explains, has the form of an AFTERBIRTH … If we want to consult Mme Perrette, midwife of the faubourg Saint-Martin, [the afterbirth] is nothing but a superfluity of matter that is evacuated from the womb after childbirth; since it is excremental, and is retained in the cavities of the womb and stuck in its membranes, this superfluity could have greatly inconvenienced the mother; it must be thrown out so that she may regain her original health. (214–15)o40

The narrator thus assumes the form of the birthing maternal body, but only to throw out his faithfully recorded register as the superfluous, misshapen matter41 that I call, more euphemistically, the placental text.42 He offers this matter of his text up to the reader, with whom he will share the best laughs. His alliance with l’accouchée, and his recuperation of her lower body do not deter him from revealing the secrets confided in her home, while acknowledging that she will be furious with him for doing so. And yet, this is a minor consideration before his need to exploit and to expose what he heard. After all, a secret is valuable only at the moment it is given away; or as Chambers puts it more paradoxically, “only divulgence makes a secret … because a secret exists only as discourse … the discourse which ‘realizes’ the secret is that which destroys it as a ‘secret’ (something unspoken).”43 And the narrator, etymologically, “the one who makes it known,” can use its matter to establish a complicitous bond with readers, onto whom he projects his fascination with the trivial (Chambers 72). As the pre-textual author, conflated with the text’s narrator, says of the Caquets in the prefatory verses to the Receuil général: “Ready your open throats to laugh / At all that I tried to describe / In these cackles of confinement; / Because the matter’s so trivial; / No subject matches it, / To gain one’s satisfaction” (5). At the same time, the author/narrator recasts his eavesdropping as the valiant efforts of a faithful secretary who wishes to “please those whose curiosity sparks the mind” (180). Ascribed to his ideal readers, mental curiosity is deployed to distinguish him from the trivially, gossipy women whose caquets he has been recording, but by contiguity, this activity once again threatens to feminize him. Curiosity was, of course, Pandora’s crime, and as seventeenth-century misogynistic texts of the querelles des femmes never fail to emphasize, the sin of Eve that caused the downfall of man. Thus the instant he incorporates women’s speech under his own pen, however selective their volubility forces “the best o “Ce que je fais icy ce n’est qu’en forme d’ARRIERE-FAIX … Si nous nous voulons rapporter à madame Perrette, sage-femme du faux-bourg Sainct-Marceau, [l’arrièrefaix] n’est autre chose qu’une superfluité de matière qui s’esvacuë de la matrice après l’enfantement, laquelle superfluité, comme elle est excrementielle, aussi estant retenuë dans les concavitez de la matrice et engluée dans les membranes qui se retrouvent là-dedans, cela eut de beaucoup incommodé l’accouchée; c’est pourquoy il la faut jetter dehors, afin [d’être] reintegrée dans sa première santé.”

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secretary” to be, he can still be feminized as caqueteux, degraded and derided (178). This fear may account for the defensive prefatory remarks in the Recueil général, where the author/narrator recognizes that some critics “will roar with laughter at the secretary who collected such a sterile thing to share with the public,” a textual after-birth, “and will strive to tarnish his reputation” (3).p The anxiety that he will not be perceived as a member of a creative fraternity, but instead, as the feminized object of male laughter haunts the text from the preface to the end. It undergirds his proclaimed indifference to the backbiting “cawing crows,” which may include the virulent author or authors of the 1622 Anti-caquet, a text that in the fourth Caquet the narrator brands as the work of idiots written in most improper French (3, 126, 249–60). Not surprisingly, then, the author’s preface strains to assure the reader that his own rank “separates me from the common herd” (4), while the narrator strives to sever all ties to his cackling objects of representation and to use heroic images that can “virilize” his efforts: he will “enter the lists and put the lance of discourse in the stirrup of an admirable course, where [he] can pursue the career of eloquence” (215).q Moreover, he strives to legitimize his text by intertextually referencing Rabelais’s oeuvre, confident that those who wish “to consume the pithy part of writings, do not stop with the bark … under lowly appearances there are lofty effects worthy of satisfying the most demanding minds” (4);r as Rabelais’s “I” instructs his readers in the Prologue to Gargantua: “by keen reading and frequent meditation, break the bone and suck the substantific marrow … for within, you will truly find another taste and more abstruse doctrine” (5).s The low gossip of curious women is reframed as the superficial envelope that contains “something fit to satisfy the appetite” of the author/narrator’s lofty addressee, a desired male double who can profit from his productive labor and his text’s fundamentally conservative purpose: “it was published only to reform morals, regulate actions and eliminate abuses” (4).t With this traditional definition of satire, the author cuts the cord connecting him to the birthing female body and the placental text, reaffirms his identification with superior, creative men to regain his compromised masculinity and instead of being a male patient, to become the doctor who would cure society’s ills and the dis-order of the body politic.

p “riront à gorge desployée du secretaire qui a ramassé une chose infructueuse pour en faire part au public, et … s’efforceront à ternir sa reputation.” q “entrer en lice et mettre la lance de discours dans l’estrié d’une admirable suitte où [il] puisse courre la carrière de bien dire.” r “de ronger la moelle des escrits, ne s’arrestent à l’escorce … sous des apparences basses, il y a des effects relevez dignes de contenter les ames les plus difficiles.” s “puis par curieuse leçon et meditation fréquente, rompre l’os et sugcer la sustantificque mouelle … car en icelle bien aultre goust trouverez et doctrine plus absonce.” t “il n’a esté mis au jour que pour reformer les moeurs, reigler les actions et retrancher les abus.”

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Sexe and State in Dis-order The Caquets’s appropriation of women’s prattle serves as a screen for exposing and denouncing societal licenses and abuses. In this process, the texts make little reference to what would conventionally be called “women’s themes”: a few remarks on children’s education and behavior; some specific comments on daughters who lack dowries, are forced to become wives or nuns against their will, and are exploited by parents and husbands; and a couple of exchanges on unwanted pregnancies (69, 76, 82–3, 90, 119, 187–8, 244–5). L’accouchée of the fourth Caquet, for example, is stuck with five tormenting brats, and in order to have no more, is determined to forgo the conjugal bed; elsewhere, a mother quips that if she had known her daughter would become pregnant so quickly, “I would have let her scratch her private parts until the age of twenty-four without getting married” (13, 129).u Such earthy, indecorous, “unclassical” talk dots the Caquets. Although premarital sex is discussed and there is even gossip of incest (88–90, 118–19, 246–7), adultery predictably preoccupies le sexe that was considered insatiably lascivious in seventeenth-century medical and moralistic texts, as I noted in the Introduction:44 thus a young woman married to an old geezer wants a lover; an old woman would pay a young fellow to keep her juices going; an overburdened wife desires but has no time to sleep around, as the many women do whose affairs are disclosed in bits and pieces and longer anecdotes throughout the Caquets, in part by the narrator himself (19, 20, 29, 616–20, 179, 244). If adultery is occasionally condemned, the women mostly ridicule the tropistic “cuckold” in male writing since the Middle Ages, a term derived from the Old French for “cuckoo,” the bird that purportedly lays eggs in another’s nest. In three versions of the same tale, two husbands follow their wives to trysts, “hear them making hay like a two-backed beast,” but meekly take consolation in the communality of their plight; “I ask you whether these husbands don’t deserve it,” remarks a lawyer’s wife in the third Caquet (112).v And in the seventh, husbands, disguised as monks, see through a keyhole “the wood that the horns about to be planted on their forehead were made of”;w once they become members of the “most populated brotherhood in Paris,” they have understandable difficulty putting their monastic hoods on their horny heads (219). In the narrator’s version of this tale, however, the “loose” women are punished, which prompts l’accouchée’s only objection that he is telling it like a man and that “these fools clearly deserve to wear antlers” (127).x45 Nevertheless, l’accouchée and her male cousin ultimately agree that cuckoldry may be the unavoidable fatality of marriage, but that it is still preferable to abstinence (128). u “je luy eusse laissé gratter son devant jusques’à l’aage de vingt-quatre ans sans estre mariée.” v “entende[nt] faire la feste à la façon de la beste à deux dos”; “Je vous demande si ces maris-là ne meritent pas bien cela.” w “de quels bois estoient faites les cornes qu’on leur alloit planter sur le front.” x “ces sots meritent bien de porter le ramage.”

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And yet, sexual themes pale by comparison with the depiction of social corruption that dominates the women’s gossip and that ventriloquizes the conservative aim of this satire to condemn socio-economic changes in society. Money, far more than sex, makes the world go round in the tales of these predominantly bourgeois, but also upper- and lower-class, women, who cite historical names and referential places that create “libelous” effets de réel.46 “Everything is corrupt today, money is everything,” declares a law clerk’s wife categorically (76).y From the salt sellers who rob their clients to “the fraud and embezzlement committed by the army’s chiefs and leaders” (165) and the Tartuffian greed of men of the cloth (71–2, 90–91), “there is deceit everywhere (54).z Usurers, financiers and treasurers are targets of condemnation, but above all, clerks, attorneys, magistrates and judges, who have achieved new powers and whose wives populate the Caquets: What purpose do so many bailiffs and sergeants serve? to rob the peasant; what good are so many marshals’ provosts? to hang those who have no money; so many criminal judges? to take from others so they can cancel the debts they incur buying their offices; so many commissioners of Chastelet? to get pensions from tarts, pimps, bakers and all those who sell flesh, for today everything is allowed. (37–8)aa

Beyond individual professions, the attacks center on the recently created noblesse de robe as a symbol of the power of money to wreak havoc on traditional class distinctions; as Jay Smith observes, such attacks became more vigorous and sustained after 1604 with the edict on the paulette, which made most offices of the crown in justice and finance fully inheritable.47 But as one woman observes, underscoring the logical consequences of these societal changes: If emperors, by their own appointments and tidings, intended to proclaim lawyers noble, even though they were of low birth, why would we want to correct their actions, since they have pushed ahead by their merit? … if lawyers now wear cassocks of damask, instead of serge, then it’s not any more inappropriate for a simple and shameless procurator to do the same thing. (237–8)ab

“Tout est aujourd’huy corrompu, l’argent fait tout.” “les fraudes et malversations des chefs et conducteurs de l’armée”; “il y a de la

y z

tromperie partout.” aa “A quoy servent tant d’huissiers et sergens? … à piller le manan; tant de prevosts de mareschaux? à faire pendre ceux qui n’ont point d’argent; tant de juges criminels? à bien prendre pour acquitter les debtes qu’ils contractent pour acheter leurs offices; tant de commissaires de Chastelet? à prendre pension des garses, des maquerelles, des boulengers et de tous ceux qui vendent viandes, car à présent tout est permis.” ab “Si les empereurs, par leurs constitutions et par leurs nouvelles, ont entendu declarer nobles les advocats, quoy qu’ils fussent de basse extraction, pourquoy voudroit-on aujourd’hui corrriger leurs actions après s’estre advancez par leur vertu? … si les advocats portent en ce temps des soustanes de Damas au lieu de sayes, il n’est point si mal à propos qu’à un simple procureur qui ne sera honteux d’en faire de mesme.”

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Such speech exposes tensions among the women, between an affirmative discourse of social advancement and a discourse of moral condemnation for a dis-ordered society that the Caquets also put into their mouths. Indeed, the backbiting women denounce the unchecked ambitions of powerful men, but they chastise even more virulently the pretensions and upward mobility of their own sex. The cloth-maker’s daughter struts about like a peacock in her finery, disdaining her peers to seek the judge’s son in marriage (246–7); the wives of artisans, merchants and attorneys, “whose silks trail from head to toe,” try to ape ladies of high birth and breeding (179); the widow who sold jam three days ago is now married to a nobleman, and wears “high collars with four and five layers of lace … I don’t know how that’s tolerated,” says the draper’s wife of such pretensions and misalliances (22),ac and this includes the women who commit adultery to gain wealth and to better their station (179–80, 247).48 In this climate, substance counts for naught, appearance is all, an “invention” that women have perfected, says the narrator, “if vice is to be called perfection” (179); the impoverished nobility and the virtuous gens de bien, who represent true quality, have become society’s pariahs. Used to criticize the proverbial materiality of their gender’s ambitions, women at the lying-in are recuperated as vociferous opponents of the pervasive corruption wrought by class confusion and the social “dis-order” they are also portrayed as causing. As I emphasized in the Introduction, this dual and contradictory view assumes particular significance through the lens of the seventeenth-century querelles des femmes when proponents and opponents of enlarging the sphere of women’s activities highlighted the role of le sexe as an agent of upward mobility— in the salons they created, as Carolyn Lougee has shown—and thus as a threat to the class distinctions that defined the hierarchy of orders in the Ancien Régime. “Today, everything is permitted and tolerated,” bemoans a counselor’s wife, while another female deplores, as satires typically do, “the reign of confusion that now shines bright” (145, 238).ad Accordingly, the women look back nostalgically to a time when rigid distinctions existed: “in the past the linnet and the goldfinch were apart in different cages; but now, everything is in the same aviary” (33).ae Traditional signs of class difference, such as sartorial fabrics and ornamentation, have been effaced beyond any recognition: “today you no longer know anything from a person’s clothing; everything is allowed, provided there’s money” (106– 7).af To counteract this widespread confusion and to recreate the old idealized order, the women advocate the rule of law, in the narrator’s reconstruction of their talk, urging archers, the police, courts and the parlement to discipline and punish, “in order to prevent disorder” (23). Over thirty years before the founding of the “les colets montez à quatre et cinq estages … je ne scay comment on tollère cela.” “Tout est aujourd’huy permis et toleré”; “le règne de la confusion [est] en lustre.” ae “autrefois la linotte et le chardonneret estoient à part en diverses cages; mais à ac

ad

present tout et en mesme vollière.” af “aujourd’huy l’on ne cognoist plus rien aux habits; tout est permis, pourveu que l’argent marche.”

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Hôpital Général (1656), which Foucault enlisted in Madness and Civilization to document the onset of the disciplinary society, women here extend the need for repressive laws to the most marginal segments: a wealthy bourgeoise wants to regulate “the disorder” created by vagabonds, tramps and beggars, so that they will be usefully employed in public works or isolated from the rest of society (69– 70). By and large, the cackling women mouth the reactionary impulses of (some) satires that “the great disorder that now exists will engender a system of good order; edicts will be passed that will regulate everything; and we will then know the merchant from the noble, the man of justice from the work hand” (31).ag49 Ultimately, however, only the king can restore order to the realm, referentially Louis XIII. But his often-mentioned absence from Paris, because of battles against the “vicious” Protestants who have “ruined the kingdom” (53, 84–5), compounds the magnitude of the present disorder. Moreover, the king is said to be exploited by his closest counselors and is cast as a figure of compromised masculinity unable to assert his sovereignty. Thus his ministers and military officers, including the Connetable de Luynes and his brothers (66), profit from the civil war to line their own pockets. “Oh God, what disorder!” exclaims one woman, “I don’t think the king knows the half of what goes on,” a situation that leaves the monarch as unmanned as the cuckolded husbands of the Caquets (37).ah50 Nevertheless, the women also give voice to satire’s utopian, conservative vision: they project beyond the end of the religious wars to proclaim their faith that the king, become true patriarchal sovereign and society’s ultimate doctor, “will bring … such good order to the disorders, which have crept among the people, that the regime of order he will institute, following his ancestors’ example, will guarantee that every person is known for what he actually is” (238).ai This is the ultimate recuperation of the women whose caquets the model law-and-order narrator has “faithfully” recorded. First, the women at the lyingin are punished by the narrator’s comic degradation of their “cackling.” In turn, their gossip condemns the sexual license, social pretensions and upward mobility that have corrupted society—traits with which le sexe is usually identified. And finally, they are made the proponents of an absolutist, disciplined order. Voluble, lower-bodily females are brought in from the margins, their threat to masculine dominance is overturned, and they are used to bolster dominant discourses, and to become, spokesmen in drag for repressive rule. Do the Caquets de l’accouchée thus herald the advent of the “classical age” and the “classical body”? ag “le grand desordre qui est à present engendrera un bon ordre; l’on fera des edicts qui regleront toutes choses; l’on cognoistra le marchant d’avec le noble, l’homme de justice avec le mechanique.” ah “O Dieu! quel desordre! Je ne croy pas que le roy sçache la moitié de ce qui se passe.” ai “donnera … si bon ordre aux desordres qui se sont coulez parmy le peuple, qu’à l’imitation de ses ancestres, la police qu’il introduira fera que chacun sera cogneu pour ce qu’il est.”

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The Doctor’s Recuperation and the Sage Femme At the outset of the eight texts and the anti-caquets that make up the Recueil général, the old doctor is able to prescribe the lying-in as a curative diversion for the melancholic narrator presumably because he must have already attended to birthing women at such female gatherings. On the seventh day, in fact, the narrator goes to the home of l’accouchée unexpectedly disguised as an apothecary (216). As historians of medicine confirm, the seventeenth century marks the moment when the medical profession achieved new knowledge through widely published works, new modes and means of analysis (anatomies, dissections), new instruments (ranging from the telescope to the speculum) and thus new legitimacy, social power and prestige. In this process of medicalization, doctors and surgeons took over the care of bodies, women’s bodies and their “secrets” included,51 and displaced midwives. In the third Caquet, for instance, a doctor and a surgeon arrive to treat l’accouchée, thus forcing the women to silence their attacks on the greedy and pretentious doctors who disguise “the herbs we often rake in our gardens” in fancy Greek and Latin names (Caquets 103–4). And yet, when one woman observes that “we could surely benefit from [herbs] and use them for our health, if we were acquainted with them,” she is possibly suggesting that this special province of female healers and midwives is now a thing of the past, a lost art (103), replaced by “modern” medicine.aj From Rabelais on, doctors regularly denounced midwives as ignorant fools who harmed their patients. Gargantua’s difficult birth, for instance, is ascribed to the lack of knowledge of an old midwife, “who had the reputation of being a great doctor,” but who uses such a horrible astringent all the newborn’s sphincters are obstructed (Oeuvres 21); and later, Pantagruel’s mother, Gargamelle, dies in childbirth while the midwives “prattled [caquetoyent] … about petty matters amongst themselves” (224). Moreover, like witches, midwives were branded the devil’s allies, an association embedded in the term sage femme, since saga signifies a witch, and sagana, a soothsayer or fortuneteller. Heinrich Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the foremost treatise on demonology, states unequivocally that “great … losses are inflicted on the Faith by midwives in connection with this Heresy of Sorceresses.”52 Not surprisingly, then, Louise Bourgeois, midwife to Marie de Médicis’s six children, warned her own daughter in 1616 never to keep “the membrane amnios … in as much as the sorcerers utilize it,” indicating, in fact, that “strangers asked me for them, with offers of money that I certainly rejected,” for fear of being accused of witchcraft.ak She reminds her daughter both of the high calling and morality of the midwife, casting “wise Phanerote,” Socrates’s mother, as her model, and emphasizing the prestige of their family—“the entire medical corps is represented in our aj “dont nous pourrions bien [nous] ayder et servir pour notre santé, si nous en avions la cognoissance.” ak “la membrane amnios … d’autant que les sorciers s’en servent … [des incognus] m’en ont demandé, avec offres d’argent que j’ay bien renvoyés.”

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family” (202).al Nevertheless, Bourgeois acknowledges and condemns the recent popularity of accoucheurs, of women’s shocking preference to be delivered by a man—“it is presently the fashion”—and the contempt that midwives suffer, in part, because of the lack of gratitude and loyalty of young ladies (215, 230, 234–6, 245).53 More broadly, the popularity of accoucheurs, of doctors and surgeons at births derived from powerful institutional sources of legitimation, including the Church and the legal profession, which proclaimed their competence and ensured their prestige. Despite the widespread view that it was indecent for any man other than her husband to penetrate a woman’s body, prelate and magistrate placed the doctor on the side of God and the law during the witch hunts, as well as in cases of impotence.54 Indeed, when in 1663, Louis XIV selected Julien Clément to deliver his mistress’s children, the monarchy joined the Church and the law to privilege the doctor over the midwife.55 The gradual loss of the midwife’s knowledge and power, which the Caquets de l’accouchée already inscribes, parallels the suppression of the opposition to the “libelous” texts reputedly voiced by women. To be sure, the Recueil général includes “La response des dames et bourgeoises de Paris au Caquet de l’accouchée” (“The Response of the Ladies and Bourgeois Women of Paris to the Caquet de l’accouchée,” 1622), supposedly written by a Mademoiselle E.D.M, and published “under the sign of the three Maidens” (195). In this text, women decry the fact that they are the eternal butt of insulting satires by men, who can be impervious to their own faults because they have power. “A female philosopher” then propounds a defense of women—an intertextual echo of Marie de Gournay’s recently published Egalité des hommes et des femmes (Equality of men and women, 1622)—which reaffirms their inherent equality to men, and documents their achievements with historical and literary examples (202ff). A closing “Letter of Disavowal” denounces the Caquets as foundless calumny, and calls upon women of all classes to cease and desist from reading “a piece so pernicious to our sex” (211). The oppositionality of this Response des dames is compromised, however, by being staged at the baths, where the women undress and swim naked, constrained by the fear of being observed by men. Indeed, in his efforts to standardize the narrative frame, the editor of the Receuil général systematically replaces the first-person female narrator of the Response with the overseeing third-person male narrator, who has the last word.56 No less significant is the omission of Les essais de Mathurine from the Receuil général,57 a short piece purportedly written by “mad Mathurine,” the female jester of Marie de Médicis’s court, who is mentioned on day five of the Caquets. This earthy first-person narrative derides Le caquet [sic] de l’accouchée as the fiction of a sex-starved “rapacious bird,” who was rejected by the countless number of females he pursued, and who in fact knew no woman’s sexual secrets (269): “if she had let the cat have the cheese there isn’t a single woman who is so foolish as to reveal it to her confidante … there isn’t one so young who wouldn’t prefer to do “le corps de la Medecine est entier dans nostre maison.”

al

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it twenty times than to talk about it once” (274).am Affirming female sexuality and her own jouissance, Mathurine traces the narrator/author’s contempt for women to the hideous old whore who promised him great potency with the “classiest, most crested ladies,” but who gave him a venereal “love sickness” instead, and turned him into “an eviscerated falcon” (272)—yet another emasculated male figure, who is, in fact, even worse off than the henpecked husband of Les quinze joies de mariage. “Would to Saint Fiacre,” the patron saint of gardens and of venereal diseases, “that his arse were full of boiling water,” exclaims Mathurine, who sends forth the call for communal female action (269):an “Let every woman smear his face with cow dung! let every girl soil his moustache with spit, and let all women together heap so many curses upon him he can only shit after a good thrashing, and prowl about like a werewolf all the rest of his days!” (274)ao Going beyond the author of these Caquets to le caqueteux in general, Mathurine turns back to the moment of his own engendering, envisioning that had he not found a large enough “sluice in her lower quarry … he would have devoured the belly of his mother to get out as vipers do”; thus because she made him “kiss her ass on his way out, which was somewhat dirty at the time, and died without a legitimate heir from her body, he wants to besmirch the entire female sex” (266).ap Though he reprints this “grotesque,” properly excremental text, in which Mathurine becomes the “bodily grave of man,” as Bakhtin would say, De Lincy prudishly remarks in his 1855 introduction: “It contains several racy and witty strokes, but they are ruined by a type of verbal cynicism that cannot even be excused by the madness of the character who utters it … this piece cannot possibly compare with the caquets that it tries to censure” (xxiii–xxiv).58 The fear of female mockery thus strikes this nineteenth-century learned man no less than the editor of the Recueil général or the narrator/author of the Caquets, and prompts the degradation, recuperation and/or the suppression of discourse ascribed to women. As one of the nude women of the sixth Caquet remarks: “Men always lay us on the carpet, and then afterwards we serve as their plaything and the topic of their conversation” (198).aq And this includes Bakhtin, with whom I began. For the proponent of frank marketplace humor never mentions the Essais de Mathurine, the most am “il n’y en a pas une si sotte, si elle avoit laissé aller le chat au fromage, d’en parler à sa plus confidente … il n’y a si jeunette qui n’aymast mieux le faire vingt coups que d’en parler une fois.” an “Pleut à sainct Fiacre que [son cul] fust plein d’eau boüillante.” ao “que chasque femme barboüille son visage d’une bouse de vache, que chasque fille salisse sa moustache d’un crachat, et que toutes ensembles luy baillent tant de maledictions, qu’il ne puisse fienter qu’à coups d’estrivières et coure le garrou tout le reste de sa vie!” ap “eust-il rongé, ainsi que commes les vipereaux, le ventre de sa mère pour sortir … vers la basse carrière une bonde grandement large”; “elle luy fit baiser son cul en passant, qui estoit un peu sale pour lors, et deceda sams hoirs legitimes de son corps, il voudroit prendre à tasche tout le sexe feminin.” aq “on nous couche tousjours sur le tappis, puis après nous servons de joüet et d’entretien aux hommes.”

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“Rabelaisian” of the caquets and anti-caquets, to mitigate his critique and modify his assertions regarding the suppression of lower bodily functions with the rise of “serious” seventeenth-century state culture. To be sure, from the first to the last day of the lying-in, the narrator/author(s) of the Caquets promote the kind of disciplinary order that Bakhtin opposed and exposed. Does this, then, mean that the counter-discourse contained in the caquets should be ignored to herald and bemoan the onset of the “classical body” and the “classical age”? Indeed, which is the dominant discourse and which is the counter-discourse in these anonymous texts? And what are the overlapping lines between that confuses them? In the (never) final analysis, I believe, it is only when we maintain a dialectical tension between discourses, when we recognize they work in a productive tension, that we can begin to grasp the complexities and the cross-currents that exist at any point in historical time, rather than default to the safe but ultimately defeating havens and labels of binary oppositions. Not surprisingly, criticism’s reductive tendencies and its stakes in reaffirming old gendered scripts have also permeated tragedy, as the next chapter emphasizes, and symptomatically, interpretations of Racine, who at a moment that was labeled high neoclassical, also gendered threatening dis-order in the state and ascribed it to desiring (and therefore, deviant) women. Notes See e.g. Huffer, Mad for Foucault and Greenberg, Baroque Bodies. Stallybrass and White make no reference to gender in The Politics, aside from a passing remark that Bakhtin is uncritical about the violent abuse and demonization of weaker social groups—women, ethnic and religious minorities (19), but Stallybrass’s “Patriarchal Territories” emphasizes the “exclusion” of gender in Bakhtin as he examines the intersection of gender and class in early-modern English texts. As Davis observed, also in 1986, the carnival may have widened some behavioral options for women, and affirmed their “excessive” life-giving powers, but it also redeployed “taboos around the female body as grotesque … and as unruly when set loose in the public sphere” (123, 130–31). That the masquerade of the fierce virago was often donned by men, and incited popular uprisings in the early modern period, suggests the power of this misogynistic representation, just as its enactment of role reversals dramatized women’s subordinate status (Clark, “Inversion” 103–4). For a recent critique of Bakhtin’s gender politics and Wayne Booth’s “feminist” defense of his misogyny, see Staples, “Primal Scenes/Primal Screens.” 3 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 104–5. Bakhtin also cites the Caquets des poissonnières (1621–1622) and Caquets des femmes du Faubourg Mont-Martre (1622?), which do not use the setting of the lying-in, but still confirm the popularity of the caquet as genre. Le caquet des marchandes poissonnières et harangères (1649), which Bakhtin does not cite, seems to be the latest seventeenth-century text entitled caquet. On the caquet as a genre in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts and engravings, see Grieco, Ange ou diablesse, 308, 324. 4 Les caquets de l’accouchée, ed. Fournier, vii–ix; all references to the Caquets are taken from this edition. See the most recent (1922) edition of Les caquets, published by André Plicque & Cie (Paris), v–vi, which also cites 1847, 1855 and 1888 editions. The three anti-Caquets (L’anti-caquet de l’accouchée; Les essais de Mathurine and Sentence par corps) were first published separately in 1622. 1 2

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See Read’s Birthing Bodies (2011), which I recently discovered and which emphasizes connections between gatherings at the lying-in and the ruelles where women’s salons were held (21, 42–52). 6 Medvedev and Bakhtin, Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 14. On Bakhtin’s authorship of this and other “controversial texts,” see Bocharov, “Conversations with Bakhtin,” 1009–24. 7 Coquillart, Oeuvres, 233–5, lines 2130–34, 2100–2101, 2143, 2085. 8 Robert, s.v. caquet, Dictionnaire. 9 Cotgrave, s.v. caquet, A Dictionarie. 10 See Huguet, s.v. caquetoire, Dictionnaire. 11 Cited in Spacks, Gossip, 26. 12 Gallop, “Why Does Freud Giggle When Women Leave the Room?” 13 On the trope of the beleaguered male spouse, see Read, Birthing Bodies, 22–5. 14 In his Testament politique, Richelieu addresses the king directly, cautioning him that “Your Majesty [has] a delicate nature, a weak health and an impatient and anxious humor” (“V.M. [est] d’un naturel délicat, d’une santé faible, d’une humeur inquiète et impatiente,” 1:269); and admonishing Louis that “he must have masculine courage and do all things out of reason without giving in to your Inclinations” (“Il faut avoir une vertu mâle et faire toutes choses par raison sans se laisser aller à la pente de ses Inclinations,” 1:276)—remarks that suggest his nature is something less than “masculine.” 15 Historiettes, 1:346–7. 16 On Marie de Médicis’s regency, which required the convocation of a special assembly called the lit de justice in Salic France, see Crawford, Perilous Performance. In Concini (139), Duccini argues that the cannibalism and necrophagia committed on his body were not atypical in this period of religious wars (33). See Marrow’s Art Patronage of Maria de Medici, which views Rubens’s monumental cycle as the first to concern entirely the autobiography of a person still aspiring to power, though the passivity of Rubens’s Marie seems symptomatic of an inability to depict heroic, historical women (43, 71–2); on Marie’s sculpture garden, “the first … visual interpretation of the illustrious women theme in France,” see 67–8, 74–5. For Millen and Wolf, the cycle is vindictive rather than a vindication; they claim that it contributed to Marie’s downfall (Heroic Deeds). Marie died penniless in exile, in Cologne, in 1642. Richelieu became the object of Marie’s hatred—not the least for constantly outmaneuvering her efforts to bring about his demise, including on the so-called Day of Dupes (Nov. 10, 1630), and for becoming the person on whom Louis XIII depended to be a monarch. Blanchard claims that at the very least the king knew of Cinq-Mars’s plot against him (Eminence 216). For a general evaluation of Richelieu’s “reign,” see Blanchard, 224–7. 17 Le monde renversé is a trope in engravings of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. See Beaumon-Maillet, La guerre des sexes. In a broader perspective, the problem of anxious and threatened masculinity in this period is raised in McLive’s, “Masculinity on Trial,” and in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early-Modern France, edited by Long. 18 Marrow claims (74) that Marie is the figure on the frontispiece of Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection, 1617, which I cite here from a later edition, 75–81, 221–30, 239–46. See also Louis Turquet de Mayenne’s La monarchie aristodémocratique (1611), which aimed to combat female rule; and Ronzeaud, “La femme au pouvoir,” 10–22, 32. On the querelle des femmes, see the Introduction. 5

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See for instance, Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (Juvenal and Persius), where the satirist penetrates the all-female orgiastic rites of Bona Dea (vv. 314–45). 20 See Paulson, Fictions of Satire. 21 See Freud, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” Standard Edition, 8:103–8, 189–202. 22 Kreis, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 215–16. 23 Horney, “The Dread of Woman,” 136. 24 Griffin, Satire, 42, 160. A related view appears in Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody, which both differentiates parody from satire but also links them through irony. 25 See also Griffin’s “Venting Spleen.” 26 See Klibanky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 24. 27 Ronsard, “Elégie à Jacques Grevin,” Oeuvres, 2:1112, vv. 44–52. 28 Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance. And yet, Furetière’s Dictionary (1690) contains both the positive (creative, poetic, meditative) and the negative traits (fear, sadness, “unreason,” even madness) (s.v. melancolie). 29 Weyer, 180–85, 346–7, 498; on melancholy as a negative force among men, see Du Laurens, “Second Discourse,” which concerns melancholy and its cures, 213–318; on this gender divide, see also Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, 12ff; Dixon, Perilous Chastity, 198ff, n.d.; Wilkin, Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth, 10–12, 76–9, 103–15. As Du Laurens insists, erotomania in men can also derive from melancholy; see Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou mélancholie érotique (1623), though the narrator of the Caquets does not show signs of that disease. 30 Bowen, Enter Rabelais Laughing, 141–2, 145. 31 Rabelais, Oeuvres, 538. 32 The narrator explains that his melancholy is related to “his cold and wet humors” (41). On women’s humors, see the Introduction. This is the first of several links to the birthing female I describe below. 33 See Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor.” 34 We learn that she has already produced “five little rascals [canailles]” (120). 35 Although he is never discovered, the narrator intimates a fear of being punished for his transgression. In an intertextual echo of an anecdote in Rabelais (Gargantua, Oeuvres 21), which has been traced to the Mystère de la vie de Saint Martin, the Caquets’ narrator imagines that he suffers the fate of the devil, who, “hidden behind a church pillar to register everything that three or four women said, and trying to lengthen the sheet of paper with his teeth, unhappily struck his head against the pillar” (“qui, tenant registre derrière le pillier d’une église de tout ce que trois ou quatre femmes disoyent, et voulant allonger le papier qui luy manquoit avec les dents, de malheur il se frappa la teste contre le pillier,” 92). 36 The primary narrative function of l’accouchée seems to be to change the subject: see 20, 31, 53, 100, 110, 118. By contrast, Read’s Birthing Bodies claims that “male and female wisdom coexist” in a text he regards as collaborative (47ff, 56). 37 Kristeva, 99–100, 215–16. 38 Guillemeau, 217–22. 39 See Calbi, Approximate Bodies, 57ff, on moles in Guillemeau and Paré, Oeuvres. In Varandée’s Traité des maladies des femmes (1666), le mole is also “contre nature” and since nature abominates it, a mole is monstrous (131, 146, 169, 392, 409). Though he 19

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places blame on defective male sperm, Varandée ascribes the monstrous mass mostly to an overheated female. 40 By contrast, Louise Bourgeois does not view the arrière faix as a monstrous mass. In her chapter on “Le moyen d’expulser l’arrierefaix aux femmes estans accouchées,” she blames the surgeons who deliver women for creating problems and begs them “either to pull the afterbirths with patience, as midwives do, or to let them be taken out by the midwife, because of the tearing of the afterbirths that I have seen, when some Surgeons try to locate it: they take the afterbirths out in such a state they are frightful to see, it being impossible to judge it they are whole or not, since they are all cut up … what assurance can you have for the life of a woman when you see the afterbirth all cut up … ?” (“ou de les tirer comme les sages femmes avec patience, ou les laisser tirer à la sage femme, pour le deschirement que j’ay veu aux arrierefaix que quelques Chirurgiens vont querir: car il les ameinent en tel estat qu’ils sont effroyables à voir, il est impossible de juger s’ils sont entiers ou non, veu qu’ils sont tous desrompus…quelle asseurance pouvez-vous avoir de la vie d’une femme voyant l’arrierefaix tout rompu … ?,” Observations diverses 3:76–7). I have not found the image of the placental text in others works of the period. In Montaigne’s De l’oisiveté (Essais I, viii; Frame trans., 1: 25) there is a related image, but it stresses female deficiency, evidenced by menstruation and false conception (meaning, I assume, the mole). The afterbirth refers to both the membrane that surrounds the fetus as well as to the placenta. 41 Paradoxically, melancholy was thought to derive from a superfluity of black bile. 42 However, see below for the dangerous associations of midwives with the placenta. 43 Chambers, “Histoire d’oeuf,” 67. His essay features La Fontaine’s “Les femmes et le secret” in discussing the false secret of an egg-laying man, a tale taken from The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry (1371–72). 44 See for example, Venette’s influential Tableau de l’amour conjugal (1687), 2:14– 22. 45 The cuckold’s horns may signal the absence of the phallic organ in its proper place. 46 On le libelle or defamatory text see Smith, Culture of Merit, 180, 185, 249; on the popularity and political significance of the libelle, see Harth, Ideology and Culture. The presence of magistrates’ wives at the caquets may justify their extensive knowledge of the legal profession, its administration and recently enacted laws (see Caquets 32–7), but for the wives of jam, glove, jewelry and perfume makers, or the housemaids who attend the lying-in as well, such knowledge is unconvincing. 47 Smith, Culture of Merit, 13; see also, Descimon and Haddad, Epreuves de noblesse; and Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree. 48 The traditional notion that nobles should dress differently from non-nobles was undermined by the sumptuous clothing that wealthy bourgeoises could afford to wear. The large number of repetitive sumptuary edicts between 1543 and 1639 points to the monarchy’s failure to sustain sartorial boundaries among the orders. 49 On women as agent and symbol of dis-order, see the Introduction, Chapters 2 and 3. See Lougee, Le paradis des femmes. 50 See the attacks on Luynes (66–8, 156), his secretary, Monsigot (148–53), his cohort, Deplan, a laquais who became marshal of France (160–61), and his wife, the future Mme de Chevreuse, who was to play a role in the Fronde (148–9, 222). There are also critical references to the king’s ministers, advisers and officers, to Huguenot leaders and to the future Cardinal de Retz. 51 See Park, Secrets of Women.

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Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), 2:320. Observations diverses, 2:206–7. By contrast, in Six couches de Marie de Medicis, where she recounts the birth of Louis XIII, with du Laurens, the Queen’s head doctor, and Guillemeau, the king’s surgeon, in attendance, Bourgeois depicts herself as being in charge and enjoying Henry IV’s confidence and praise (110–13, 123–5). However, Bourgeois was held responsible for the death of Gaston d’Orléans’s wife in 1627, and was condemned in a lengthy report (written by Guillemeau, among nine other doctors) for leaving “a little part” of the after birth in the womb; she then penned a justification, categorically denying the charge and blaming others for the death. See Sheridan’s “Whither Childbreading,” which traces differences between the careers of Bourgeois and Guillemeau and the battles between them, including this final one, after which Bourgeois, discredited, cared for less exalted pregnant women and published her work. 54 See Darmon, Le tribunal de l’impuisssance. 55 For attacks on midwives, see Gélis, La sage femme ou le médecin, 350–51, 386, 470ff, which insists that the first witch hunts coincide with the onset of doctors’ control of childbirth c. 1550–1580 (484). However, according to McTavish’s Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, the notion that male practitioners wrested control of childbirth from women overestimates male prestige and underrates women’s continuing ability to limit male practice. The treatises she examines (see 25–56) suggest that men’s entry into the lying-in chamber involved complex negotiations, and required them to adapt to women’s demands. 56 The pro-woman response was apparently catalyzed by the publication of the second and third caquets (207, 210). On Marie de Gournay, see Apology for the Woman Writing, which includes the essay, Equality. “People speak of nothing but the women’s prattle,” remarks one of the women at the baths, “Never was the bed of the woman in confinement more shaken up; they keep turning it inside out and skimming it” (“on ne parle que du caquet des femmes. Jamais le lict de l’accouchée ne fut mieux remué; il est souvent retourné et feuilleté,” 197). 57 The Recueil also excludes “L’anti-caquet de l’accouchée (1622), which is directed at the errors and failures of “monsieur le satyrique” (252). 58 Although Mathurine apparently never wrote any texts, several “libelles” appropriate her name, including La sagesse approuvée de madame Mathurine (1608); Le feu de joye de madame Mathurine (1609); and La cholère de Mathurine contre les difformez réformateurs de la France (1616). In 1622, she was still living on a king’s pension, according to Batiffol, La vie intime d’une reine de France, 146. 52

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Chapter 2

The Daughters’ Sacrifice and the Paternal Order in Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide In On Racine, Barthes ironizes that we have upheld the tragedian’s work as “eternal literature,” instead of assuming the responsibility of “test[ing] out on Racine all the languages our century suggests [to us]”; his genius, Barthes continues, “is to be located … in an unrivaled art of availability, which permits him to remain eternally within the field of any critical language”—and this would include, I would argue, socio-historical readings of the context of production, which undergird the languages of gender analysis.1 Now, in part, this eternalization of Racine devolves from dominant conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in the West—from Aristotle to Hegel, from Freud to Girard and even to Lukacs and Goldmann, which consider tragedy and the tragic as universal and thus ahistorical in their significance.2 In Racine’s case, this eternalization also derives from his stature as the exemplar of seventeenth-century “classicism,” that mythic literary historical notion with nationalistic imperatives, claimed as France’s particular achievement.3 Accordingly, students of Racine’s (psycho)biography, career or even of the aesthetic, political and theological context in which he produced his twelve “classical” plays—six of which bear their heroines’ names—dismiss and/ or “transcend” the issue of gender. Goldmann, for example, explains that Racine’s tragic characters are all female, except for Titus in Berenice, because his audience would have found extreme passion in a man implausible; but this gendering of affect is dismissed as one of those “external considerations that do not touch the essence of [the] plays” (352). As Berg observed, however, in what was perhaps the first (and still rare) feminist reading of Racine, Goldmann effaces the specificity of women and “treats [the heroine] as a function of a Jansenist logic … the woman is made to represent a masculine ideal on a transcendental horizon.”4 More recently, Desnain’s comprehensive study of “the construction of female characters in Racine from a feminist perspective” (2002) does not merely challenge the traditional universalizing definition of the tragic by highlighting the genre’s imbrication in patriarchy, she also shows that Racine insightfully explores the mechanisms of the oppression of women even as he reinforces the status quo.5 In contrast to French studies, classical studies over the past three decades have conjoined an emphasis on history and social context with a focus on gender ideology, in the works of Vernant in France, and of Winkler, Zeitlin and Dubois in the United States, for example.6 Vidal-Naquet has stressed the “long polemic against the genos gunaikon (female species) instituted by Hesiod and taken up so many times, especially by tragedy”—a principle that informs the work of Loraux in France as well (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 2:123–4). Contrary to Girard’s claim

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of violent “undifferentiation” between the sexes (V&S 126–8),7 Loraux makes gender politics a crucial function of (Athenian) tragedy as a social institution that dramatizes a struggle “so that the community of Andres” may live.8 In a parallel trend among North American feminist classicists, Zeitlin’s Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (1996) highlights the asymmetrical nature of Greek tragedy, and the ways in which “the feminine” dominates tragedy even as it serves masculine ends, though she rejects earlier feminist concerns with oppression to focus on the transactions, negotiations and compensations of female characters.9 Rabinowitz’s Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (1993) examines tragedy’s work to impose a gender hierarchy consistent with the contextual gender system, and in the process, to glorify women for their patriarchal virtue and their freely chosen victimization, as well as to contain through punishment strong, resistant women (such as Hecuba, Medea, Phaedra); but she also considers the possibility of a subversive reading by female members of the audience.10 And if Foley’s Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (2001) confirms that “Greek tragedies are undeniably androcentric and do indeed provide poetic justification for the subordination of women, foreigners and slaves,” they also deploy women not only for public lamentation but to voice difficult ethical choices involving death, marriage and inheritance, indeed to mouth dissent and to defy cultural expectations—signs of agency that were curtailed, however, as the fifth century wore on.11 For French studies on the “neo-classical” period, the failure to analyze constructions of women’s specificity seems especially paradoxical in view of the longstanding tradition identifying Racine with the feminine. His capacity to move his audience to tears through his depictions of love was already a cliché in Racine’s day, and was compared unfavorably, according to Charles de Saint-Denis, Sieur de Saint-Evremond, with “the expression of heroic greatness, the strength of passions, the sublimity of discourse” in Corneille’s work.a12 To be sure, the notion of Racine’s “feminine” obsession with love, instead of a “virile” concern with reason, politics and heroics, was perpetrated by Corneille’s cabal, which tried to thwart the appeal of the younger playwright’s deheroicized, pessimistic, tortured sensibility.13 That gender ideology entered into this power struggle is suggested by Pierre de Villiers’s Entretiens sur les tragédies de ce temps (1675), which urges Racine to imitate Corneille, but chiefly attacks his contemporaries’ ubiquitous interest in love and la galanterie.14 Observing that the ancients did not privilege love because they were not obliged to consult the tastes of women (or of the young), implicitly in contrast to the present, de Villiers proposes that tragedy do without female characters, “since all of the passions, except for love, can be presented without them.”b15 A century later, Voltaire continued to attribute the reputedly weak male characters in Racine’s work to the period’s predilection a “par l’expression d’une grandeur d’âme héroïque, par la force des passions, par la sublimité du discours.” b “car, excepté l’amour, toutes les autres passions peuvent se soûtenir sans elles.”

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for insipid galanterie, but in his efforts to canonize seventeenth-century works as “classics,” he extolled the tragedies as masterpieces that have an unparalleled capacity to touch the depths of the heart and a beauty “[for] all times and nations.”16 The “classical” Racine also dominated post-Stendhalian nineteenth-century criticism, and in the 1870s Gustave Lanson, one of the founders of literary history, could still make the claim that “the empire of woman in literature dates from Racine,” and, as Jules Lemaître added in 1908, “lasts to this day.”17 A few years later, Proust iterated the “feminine” view of Racine—the proverbial inability to portray “virile” characters—but he expressed his own desire to become a woman, even “an hysteric of genius,” if it could mean writing like Racine. Despite the positive connotations he associated with Racine-as-(the-)feminine, Proust proffered an essentialist definition of femininity.18 This tendency to propound unhistorical notions of femininity informs Paul Valéry’s declaration that Phaedra captures the essence of woman born for and crushed by love, and more recently, the praise heaped by Goyet and Batache-Watt on Racine as “a great feminine psychologist,” the creator of a “feminine theater.”19 By comparison, Barthes’s On Racine (1963) attacked the cliché of Racine’s “feminine” tendresse20 by highlighting the tragedies’ violent master/slave dialectic and the primacy of the Freudian or Darwinian parricidal horde. And by identifying the masculine with the tyrant, the feminine with the captive in Racine, Barthes at least defined gender by position of power, rather than by biology or personality, though he presents this structural division of roles and functions as an essential given, rather than a culturally specific construct of seventeenth-century gender norms. Nevertheless, the Barthesian connection between femininity and powerlessness promotes a gender analysis of the victim whose sacrifice, according to Girard, founds and sustains the cultural order, and symptomatically, structures Racinian tragedy.21 In a polyvalent sense, sacrifice pervades Racine’s oeuvre—from La Thébaïde and Andromaque to Phèdre, Athalie and Esther. But no play exposes the function of female sacrifice in the paternal order as dramatically as Racine’s 1674 rewriting of Euripides’s Iphigenia.22 Girard’s claim that “women are never, or rarely, selected as sacrificial victims,” notwithstanding their marginal status “in many cultures,” and that the identity of the scapegoat is irrelevant so long as “he” is sacrificeable (V&S 12, 127), is belied by Iphigenia and other Racinian and Euripidean plays, indeed by classical tragedy as a whole, in Loraux’s view. For whereas only one male virgin—Menoeceus in Euripides’s Phoenissae—offers himself for sacrifice in Greek tragedy, observes Loraux, female virgins—including Polyxena, Macaria and the daughters of Erechtheus—consent docilely to their “sacrificial throat-cutting” (or sphagé) at the hands of men, in what represents both a fictive transgression of the taboo against human sacrifice, and a metaphorical rite of marriage and defloration (Tragic Ways 4, 13, 67–73). As Loraux explains this gender anatomy of tragic death, female virgins are killed because they have even less autonomy than married women, who attain freedom and glory by committing “feminine” suicide with a rope, and more rarely, “virile” suicide with a sword; but men commit

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suicide only when dishonored, and as a rule, suffer death by murder at the hands of their own gender (17, 28). Although each play can—and often does—ambiguate or confuse the lines between “masculine” and “feminine” death, writes Loraux, Greek “tragic discourse … did not ultimately allow [women] to transgress the frontier that divided and opposed the sexes … Tragedy … never [transgresses] to the point of irrevocably overturning the civic order of values” (60). Iphigenia’s Rewriting in Context

Fig. 2.1

Illustration from Jean Racine, Oeuvres (Paris: Thierry, 1679), reprint of (Paris: Barbin, 1676), opposite p. 232. Book Division, the New York Public Library.

The conservative relation of (Greek) tragedy to the cultural (and gendered) order23 is confirmed by the contextual circumstances of the production and reception of Racine’s Iphigenia (see Figure 2.1). Written expressly for a lavish festival at Versailles celebrating Louis XIV’s victory in the second Flanders campaign in 1674, three years before Racine became official historiographer to the monarch who espoused absolutism, Iphigenia was to rank as the most successful play of his career.24 Performed in a chamber of the Orangerie bedecked with giant

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representations of the sun to glorify Louis XIV, the play “drew tears from everyone’s eyes,” de Villiers conceded (Entretiens 22), or as Robinet [Charles de Saint Jean] wrote in 1674: thus filled with weeping, the court Created yet another scene In which eyes most beautiful, Surely the most imperious Wept without any artifice Over this fabled sacrifice.c25

All the more notable in a century that witnessed several dramatizations of “this fabled sacrifice,” the success of Racine’s Iphigenia may be related to Racine’s decision to abandon his initial attempt to portray the priestly female sacrificer of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, and instead, to rewrite for Louis XIV’s court the myth of the sacrificed female.26 After all, this sacrifice constitutes the condition sine qua non for ensuring the favorable outcome of a world-renowned military campaign (the war against Troy), maintaining the king (Agamemnon) on his throne, and essentially guaranteeing the existence of the young and fragile state (Greece). This is not to reduce Iphigenia to a tragédie à clef or an allegory of Louis XIV’s reign. And yet, Racine’s complex rewriting of Euripides’s tragedy dramatizes the need for absolute kingship to abolish dis-order, and it does so, in my view, by erecting a paternal order on the sacrifice/suppression of women. This contextual reading would seem to contradict Racine’s preface, which subscribes to the notion of tragedy’s universality when it proclaims the identity of ancient and modern times. “The spectators of my play were touched by the same things which once moved to tears the most cultured people of Greece,”d he writes, as he extols the “ancients” against the criticisms of the “moderns,” and concludes that the good sense [le bon sens], reason and taste are “the same in every century.”27 However, this proclaimed trans-historical identity is contradicted by lengthy explanations of the changes Racine felt he had to make to render Euripides’s text plausible and convincing to his audience. The most radical of these changes concern the Euripidean dénouement, in which, says the tragedian somewhat reductively, Diana takes pity on Iphigenia at the moment of sacrifice, and substitutes a hind “or another victim of this kind,” while the daughter is carried off to Tauris (Iphigenia 49). So doing, Racine eliminates the slaughter of Iphigenia at the culmination of Aeschylus’s and Sophocles’s tragedies, but for reasons that highlight socio-cultural differences between Greek and seventeenthcentury French notions of justice and credibility (vraisemblance) (ibid.).28 As he explains in the play’s preface: c “pour lors, la cour toute pleine / De pleureurs, fit une autre scène / Où l’on vit maints des plus beaux yeux, / Voire des plus impérieux, / Pleurer sans aucun artifice, / Sur ce fabuleux sacrifice.” d “Mes Spectateurs ont été emus des mêmes choses qui ont mis autrefois en larmes le plus savant peuple de la Grèce” (Racine, O.C. 1:698).

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How could I have possibly sullied the stage with the horrible murder of so virtuous and lovable a person as Iphigenia necessarily had to be in this play? And again, how could I possibly have succeeded in bringing my tragedy to an end with the help of a goddess and stage machinery, and by a metamorphosis which might have found some credence in Euripides’s days, but which would be too absurd and too incredible in ours? (50)e

Racine’s defensiveness exposes a pressure to imitate ancient texts or the “facts” of the celebrated legend as a precondition for the legitimacy of his own work, or else, face charges of novelistic invention, which his alterations drew, in any case, from some of his contemporaries.29 Moreover, the suppression of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, which this Jansenist (sympathizer) surprisingly terms “murder” in the play’s preface, signals a deviation from biblical tradition—the potential sacrifice of Abraham’s son (Gen. 22), or the actual sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in return for military victory (Judg. 11)—as well as from the fundamental Christian myth of the sacrifice of a chosen one for the salvation of humanity.30 The reasons for Racine’s deviation from biblical and classical exempla may also involve political exigencies, over and beyond the need to represent perceived contemporary notions of justice and verisimilitude. That Iphigenia “necessarily had to be [so virtuous and lovable] in this play,” as the preface states, suggests constraints in portraying the king’s beloved daughter, before Louis XIV and his court, most especially her horrible “murder,” contrary to the monarch’s (Agamemnon’s) expressed wishes.31 This superlatively “virtuous” daughter is thus saved from the sacrificial knife in Racine’s play, and lives to see an apparent reconciliation between her father, her mother (Clytemnestra) and her betrothed (Achilles). In lieu of sacrificing the king’s daughter, another Iphigenia is revealed in the play’s closing scenes, one who is said to be the illegitimate daughter of Helen and Theseus and to fulfill the seer’s prophecy: her death effectively fills the Greek sails bound for Troy. Racine’s preface justifies the creation of this illegitimate Iphigenia by referring to classical sources, notably Pausanias (Iphigenia 49–50; O.C. 1:698).32 But Pausanias never speaks of two Iphigenias; he speculates that Clytemnestra’s daughter may have been the illegitimate offspring of her sister, Helen: it is said that [Helen] was with child, was delivered in Argos … giving the daughter she bore to Clytaemnestra, who was already wedded to Agamemnon, while she herself subsequently married Menelaus. And on this matter the poets Euphorion of Chlacis and Alexander of Pleuron, and even before them, Stesichorus of Himera, agree with the Argives in asserting that Iphigenia was the daughter of Theseus. (Description of Greece 1:xxii, 6–7)

“Quelle apparence que j’eusse souillé la Scène par le meurtre horrible d’une personne aussi vertueuse et aussi aimable qu’il fallait représenter Iphigénie? Et quelle apparence encore de dénouer ma Tragédie par le secours d’une Déesse et d’une machine, et par une métamorphose qui pouvait bien trouver quelque créance du temps d’Euripide, mais qui serait trop absurde et trop incroyable parmi nous” (O.C. 1:698). e

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Racine’s “misprision” of Pausanias thus authorizes the invention of “this other Iphigenia,” who is essential to his tragedy; by his own admission, “I would never have dared [undertake] this tragedy” without the “fortunate discovery” of the character he names Eriphile (Iphigenia 50).f Just as the mythic Greeks required a sacrificed female to wage their military campaign, Racine needed a sacrificeable female to create his tragedy, and to find a solution to its chaotic crisis. Anything but an arbitrary choice, this victim, the only character, says Racine, “whom I was able to represent [just] as I wanted” (ibid.), reveals the ideology of “the sacrificeable,” and of the female as its emblem.g Indeed, the reasons why Iphigenia cannot/should not be the sacrificed scapegoat and why “the other Iphigenia” can and should be killed (re)produce the differences between the “good” and the “bad” daughter in the patriarchal order of seventeenth-century France, a specific period that is universalized by the evocation of classical myths, characters and texts. Whereas Girard dismisses the identity of this tragedy’s victim—“Iphigenia— or rather Ériphile,” he writes, “the difference is unimportant”—in my reading, the construction of this particular female subject as the scapegoat makes all the difference to the preservation of the fathers’ social and political order (Job 42). The Father’s Daughter and Dis-Order The “immobile sea” and “silent winds,” which have “barred the way” to Troy to 1,000 Greek ships and 20 kings for three months before the opening of Iphigenia, figure both the paradigmatic scene of Racinian confinement as well as the frustrated aggressiveness that catalyzes the Girardian sacrificial crisis.33 In this explosive climate, which “[Consumes the army and disrupts all Greece]” (1.1.186),h Calchas, the powerful but unseen seer, has predicted to Agamemnon that the Greeks will never reach Troy “Unless in high and solemn sacrifice A maiden pure of Helen’s race Stains with her blood Diana’s altar here. If you would have the winds that heaven denies, Iphigenia you must sacrifice.” (1.1.58–62)i

Although some sacrificial crises scapegoat the ruler, others, including the Iphigenia legend, metonymically substitute the king’s daughter (Girard, V&S 196–9). Both the father/daughter bond and the sororal ties between Helen, whose flight with f

“cette autre Iphigénie”; “ je n’aurais jamais osé entreprendre cette Tragédie” (O.C.

1:698).

“j’ai pu représenter tel qu’il m’a plu” (ibid.). “Trouble toute la Grèce, et consume l’Armée.” i “Si dans un sacrifice auguste et solennel / Une Fille du sang d’Hélène / De Diane g

h

en ces lieux n’ensanglante l’autel, / Pour obtenir les vents que le Ciel vous dénie, / Sacrifiez Iphigénie.”

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Paris has mobilized the Greeks against Troy, and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife and Iphigenia’s mother, dramatize the personal sacrifice that revenge exacts, or, as Ulysses puts it, the spilling of “[the] most precious blood” (Racine, Iphigenia 1.1.188). And yet, this topos does not explain Diana’s demand that Iphigenia should be the sacrificial victim, rather than, for example, Orestes, her brother. By omitting Euripides’s emphasis on the slaying of Diana’s hind by Agamemnon, which renders the demanded sacrifice of a virgin a retribution for the slaughtered female animal, Racine’s king is cast as an innocent victim of divine arbitrariness.34 Now at the outset, Agamemnon is represented by Arcas, his reverent servant, as a powerful, blessed figure, descended from the Gods: [King], father, [favored] husband, [powerful] Atreus’s son [You possess] the richest land [of the Greeks]. On every side sprung from the blood of [Jupiter] Marriage links you still … to the Gods [from whom you come]. (1.1.17–20)j

But the king emerges as anything but an exemplary ruler. To be sure, the “barbarous” order that will arouse the audience’s “compassion and terror” leaves the all-toohuman Agamemnon racked by the conflicting imperatives of state and family, duty and love, power and passion (Iphigenia 51; O.C. 1:699). He exemplifies the “Sad destiny of kings! Slaves … / Of fortune’s rigour and the [tongues] of men / … the most wretched [men, who] dare to cry the least” (1.5.365–6, 1.5.368).k However, this first king of the newly formed Greek state changes his mind about his daughter’s sacrifice seven times during the play, not only out of love, but also out of weakness, dread, homosocial rivalry and obsession with power. Manipulated by Ulysses, who upholds as paramount the needs of the state, Agamemnon fears the power of Calchas over “the furious people” who may threaten his person if they are denied their victim (1.2.293–5); and he fears the ambitious men who may seize the opportunity to “wrest from me my envied power” (1.1.140),l the power that he envies above all: For me (with some [shame] I confess), Full of my greatness, [bewitched by] my [own] power, These titles, king of kings and [leader] of Greece [Aroused the haughty frailty of my heart]. (1.1.79–82)m j “Roi, Père, Époux heureux, Fils du puissant Atrée / Vous possédez des Grecs la plus riche Contrée. / Du sang de Jupiter issu de tous côtés, L’hymen vous lie encore aux Dieux dont vous sortez.” k “Triste destin des Rois! Esclaves … / Et des rigueurs du Sort, et des discours des Hommes, / …les plus malheureux [qui] osent pleurer le moins.” l “M’arracheront peut-être un pouvoir qui les blesse.” m “Moi-même (je l’avoue avec quelque pudeur) / Charmé de mon pouvoir, et plein de ma grandeur, / Ces noms de Roi des Rois, et de Chef de la Grèce / Chatouillaient de mon coeur l’orgueilleuse faiblesse.”

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During the violent Act 4 confrontation that Agamemnon has dreaded and avoided since his wife’s arrival in Aulis in Act 1, Clytemnestra denounces his idolatry for power: The thirst to reign that nothing can assuage, [The pride of having twenty kings serve you, fear you, The laws of a whole empire in your hands: Cruel man,] These are the gods to whom you sacrifice. (4.4.1289–92)n

In contrast to Clytemnestra, who rises to excoriate Agamemnon’s insatiable, infanticidal quest for power, Iphigenia unwaveringly upholds the father/king as absolute. Coming to Aulis because of a marriage proposal from Achilles, which, unbeknown to her, was penned by Agamemnon to bring her to slaughter, Iphigenia affirms her filial pride and love for her father: [What pleasure to see and to behold you] In all your gleaming new magnificence! What power! what honours! [Already] renown Had [heralded] … them in prodigious tales … With what [love] Greece reveres you, Sire! What fortune to be such a father’s child! (2.2.539–42, 2.2.545–6)o

The good fortune of being her father’s daughter is but one of many ironies in Racine`s play, which also exploits the classical ambiguities between the sacrificial and the marital altars.35 Even more ironic, her death, the sine qua non of Agamemnon’s continued kingship, will destroy the only person who considers him absolute. In that sense, Agamemnon is right when he says to Iphigenia insensitively that “The coming blow will kill you less than me” (4.4.1244).p More than man’s enlarging mirror, to cite Virginia Woolf’s definition of women’s function in a male-dominated order,36 Iphigenia provides Agamemnon with a transcendent imago of divinity. Thus when she learns of her impending sacrifice and her father’s treachery at the play’s mid-point, Iphigenia displays no shock or anger (3.6.1014); instead, she envisions Agamemnon wailing at the fatal blow that awaits her (3.6.1017); and she proffers the credo that he is “A father whom I love,

n “Cette soif de régner, que rien ne peut éteindre, / L’orgueil de voir vingt Rois vous servir et vous craindre, / Tous les droits de l’Empire en vos mains confiés, / Cruel, c’est à ces Dieux que vous sacrifiez.” o “Quel plaisir de vous voir, et de vous contempler, / Dans cet nouvel éclat dont je vous voir briller! / Quels honneurs! Quel pouvoir! Déjà la Renommée / Par d’étonnants récits m’en avait informée … Avec quel amour la Grèce vous révère! / Quel bonheur de me voir la fille d’un tel père!” p “Du coup qui vous attend vous mourrez moins que moi.”

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a father whom / I worship” (3.6.1002).q As with a God or even a king-by-divineright, Iphigenia defines her life as his property: When you command me, you will be obeyed My life is [your possession]; you wish to take it back … With the same [happy glance], the same submissive heart I took the husband that you promised me. [Obedient victim, I know how to hold out My innocent head to Calchas’s blade] And, honouring the blow that you ordained, Give back to you [all the blood you gave to me]. (4.4.1176–84)r

It has been said that Agamemnon’s daughter exemplifies stoic constancy in the face of misfortune; nobility (Iphigenia means “nobly born”), generosity, and compassion in a barbarous or petty bourgeois world, even the charity of the “Christian maiden.” But in my view, Iphigenia is constructed as the father’s perfect daughter, who, as Goldmann argued, never rebels against authority, and thus cannot be tragic.37 In fact, she is far more submissive than the Iphigenias of Euripides or of Jean de Rotrou, the author of a 1640 Iphigénie en Aulide; both heroines accept death for the sake of their community—Pan-Hellenic culture or the state.38 Racine’s Iphigenia, on the other hand, dedicates herself exclusively to Agamemnon as “the total Father,” Barthes observes, noting that she is not portrayed as a subject who has attained virtue, but as an available “characterobject” who has abdicated responsibility and who willingly becomes someone else’s property (On Racine 110–11). The incarnation of unblemished goodness, who roused emotions in Louis XIV’s court, as Racine’s preface states, Iphigenia may figure not only the ideal daughter-as-object to the father king, but metonymically, the ideal subject of the absolutist state. This reading would seem to require the depiction of an exemplary king, and would thus presumably be undermined by Racine’s Agamemnon, who is in many ways the antithesis of Louis XIV’s carefully sculpted superheroic image: of the “king’s two bodies,” Agamemnon represents the fallible, secular, not the unblemishedly sacred.39 However, through the poetic or oneiric processes of the text’s political unconscious, such as the use of contradiction and displacement,40 Agamemnon’s unmanly weakness as king, husband and father, and the fragility of the young, feudalistic Greek state may represent the scene of (Frondean) disorder that traumatized the minority of Louis XIV, as the memoirs for his dauphin vividly recall: “un Père que j’aime, un Père que j’adore.” “Quand vous commanderez, vous serez obéi. / Ma vie est votre bien. Vous voulez

q r

le reprendre … / D’un oeil aussi content, d’un coeur aussi soumis / Que j’acceptais l’Époux que vous m’aviez promis, / Je saurai, s’il le faut, Victime obéissante, / Tendre au fer de Calchas une tête innocente, / Et respectant le coup par vous-même ordonné, / Vous rendre tout le sang que vous m’avez donné.”

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But one must picture the state of things: terrible turmoils throughout the kingdom before and after my majority; a foreign war, where these domestic troubles had made France lose thousands of advantages; a prince of my blood and one with a renowned name leading the enemies; many cabals within the state; the high courts [parlements] still in possession of-—and eager for—authority they had usurped; in my own court, very little loyalty without self-interest, thus, even the most apparently submissive persons were as much a burden for me, and I had as much to fear from them as from the most rebellious subjects.s41

This phantasmatic sense of turmoil, rebelliousness and dis-order would, by condensation, also demonstrate the need—and provide the alibi—for an absolutist monarchy, embodied by the Herculean Sun King. In fact, Iphigenia’s belief in Agamemnon’s ownership of her life as his property and her adoration for the agent of her destruction spell the ultimate fantasy of imperialist power at the very moment that Louis XIV was not only successfully waging expansionist wars in Europe, but also pursuing (Colbert’s) global mercantilistic goals, which included colonialist enterprises in the Caribbean and in North America to challenge the dominance of the Portuguese and Spanish, the Dutch and English.42 Now Iphigenia’s submissiveness as an object to the absolute father/king as master subject contrasts with Clytemnestra’s and Achilles’s aggressive defense of her life, and thus, of the rights of the individual and the family against the state. At the outset, Clytemnestra is dominated by familial ambition for the splendid marriage with Achilles that she has engineered. But when she discovers Iphigenia’s impending sacrifice, she denounces Agamemnon’s failure to resist the “inhuman order” to commit his daughter’s “murder,” and she brands him the true incarnation of the blood of cannibalistic Atreus, since he is willing to “serve [Iphigenia] to her mother in a hideous feast” (Racine, Iphigenia 4.4.1252, 1255, 1267; 5.4.1690).t Her assault on Agamemnon further undermines his masculine stature, though Clytemnestra is principally obsessed with the phantasm of her daughter’s violated body: A priest, surrounded by a cruel mob, Will on my daughter lay [criminal] hands, Tear her breast open, and, with curious eyes, Consult the gods in her still throbbing heart! (4.4.1301–4)u

“mais il faut se représenter l’état des choses: des agitations terribles par tout le royaume avant et après ma majorité; une guerre étrangère, où ces troubles domestiques avaient fait perdre à la France mille et mille avantages; un prince de mon sang et d’un très grand nom à la tête des ennemis; beaucoup de cabales dans l’Etat; les parlements encore en possession et en goût d’une autorité usurpée; dans ma cour, très peu de fidelité sans intérêt, et par là mes sujets en apparence les plus soumis, autant à charge et autant à redouter pour moi que les plus rebelles.” t “d’en faire à sa Mère un horrible festin.” u “Un Prêtre environné d’une foule cruelle, / Portera sur ma Fille une main criminelle? / Déchirera son sein? Et d’un oeil curieux / Dans son coeur palpitant consultera les Dieux?” s

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Ready to die instead of Iphigenia, or to die with her in a double sacrifice that would maintain the union between them—“Death, and death only, can [break] the bonds / In which my arms will [join and lock us both]” (5.3.1635–6)v— Clytemnestra is never able to sever Iphigenia’s primary attachment to her father. That the daughter tries to make Clytemnestra swear “by a mother’s love, / Never [to] reproach my father with my death” (5.3.1653–4) is yet another irony in Racine’s play, which repeatedly points to legendary narratives of regicide beyond its own ending, notably Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of Clytemnestra and her lover.w43 The dis-order wrought in the patriarchal family and the monogamous couple in Iphigenia must eventually undermine the state, whose foundations these institutions both strengthen and structurally reflect. Outraged that Agamemnon, whom he had “[named chief of twenty rivalrous kings]” (3.5.967),x dared to use his love to trick Iphigenia into coming to the murderous camp, Achilles affirms the rights of the betrothed over those of the father: AGAMEMNON: And who [gave you charge of] my family? [Can’t I dispose of my daughter as I would? Am I her father no longer?] … ACHILLES: No, she is yours no more … I will defend my rights based on your oaths. (4.6.1349–52, 1356)y44

This juridical debate over ownership of Iphigenia as an object of exchange (Reiss, Tragedy 241ff)45 between men hides a deep homosocial rivalry. Spurred by Clytemnestra’s entreaties, Achilles strives to become head and protector of the family, and to replace the father as the primary object of Iphigenia’s love. He complains bitterly to the too-loving daughter: Your sole concern is [his serenity]! You close my mouth, excuse him, pity him; For him you tremble, and it’s I you fear? (3.6.1026–8)z

The betrothed may be narcissistically injured by her love for Agamemnon, but Iphigenia rejects his “order” to ignore her “supreme duty,” and will follow her father’s “absolute commands” (5.2.1573, 1577, 1583).46 v “La mort seule, la mort pourra rompre les noeuds / Dont mes bras nous vont joindre, et lier toutes deux.” w “par cet amour de Mère, / Ne reprochez jamais mon trépas à mon Père.” x “nomm[é] chef de vingt Rois ses Rivaux.” y “AGAMEMNON: Et qui vous a chargé du soin de ma Famille? / Ne pourrai-je sans vous disposer de ma Fille? / Ne suis-je plus son Père? … / ACHILLE: Non elle n’est plus à vous. / … Je défendrai mes droits fondés sur vos serments.” z “Le soin de son repos est le seul qui vous presse? / On me ferme la bouche? On l’excuse? On le plaint? / C’est pour lui que l’on tremble, et c’est moi que l’on craint?”

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As obsessed by this homosocial rivalry as Achilles, Agamemnon resolves to sacrifice his daughter in Act 4 in order to prove he does not fear the younger and more powerful warrior: “[The interests of my glory tip] the scales” (4.7.1430).aa But his possessive love for Iphigenia, which exposes a latent incestuousness that offended some of Racine’s contemporaries, finds a more satisfactory solution at the end of Act 4: Iphigenia will live, take protective flight, but never see Achilles again: “She’ll live for [another, not for him]” (4.8.1460)ab—and this other may unconsciously be none other than the father.47 Ignoring that interdiction, a furious Achilles threatens to kill both the murderous seer and the infanticidal father, an act tantamount to regicide for which Iphigenia, he insists, would ultimately be responsible: And [the first victim will become the priest] … [Amidst] the horrors of [extreme disorder], [If] your father falls and perishes himself, Then, seeing the [sad fruits] of your respect, Admit the blows were guided by your hand. (5.2.1606, 1609–12)ac

While the principal Greek warrior readies to exact violent reprisals against the sacred and secular powers of the state, the army threatens to unleash chaos. The soldiers become bloodthirsty when they learn of Iphigenia’s impending escape, they hold Clytemnestra at bay, and they demand their sacrificial victim: “This is [no longer a rabble assembled in disorder],” says one of Clytemnestra’s attendants, “It’s the whole army blinded by [a fatal zeal]” (5.3.1623–4).ad At the paroxysm of the sacrificial crisis, Achilles’s forces clash with the Greek soldiers become “frantic mobs” at the altar where Iphigenia is about to be killed (5.3.1643). And in the midst of this anarchy sits King Agamemnon, “[dispossessed of his power]” (5.3.1627), “shield[ing] his eyes from [the] murders he foresees,” which may herald the death-throes of the nascent Greek state (5.5.1709–10). The Invented Double as Monstrous Trouble The cycle of reprisals catalyzed by Iphigenia’s impending death essentially means that she is not sacrificeable. After all, as Girard observes, sacrifice is designed to prevent the contagion of violence, quell internal discord and ensure society’s cohesion (V&S 14, 24, 30). Thus, in the play’s closing scene, when “discord, “Ma gloire intéressée emporte la balance.” “Elle vivra pour un autre que lui.” ac “Le Prêtre deviendra la première Victime / … Et si dans les horreurs de ce désordre aa

ab

extrême / Votre Père frappé tombe, et périt lui-même, / Alors, de vos respects voyant les tristes fruits, / Reconnaissez les coups, que vous aurez conduits.” ad “Ce n’est plus un vain Peuple en désordre assemblé. / C’est d’un zèle fatal tout le Camp aveuglé.”

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mistress of the camp / Had laid its fatal [blind fold] on every eye” (5.6.1734–5),ae Calchas forces his way through the warring Greeks and revises his oracle: he reveals that the Iphigenia who must die is Eriphile, Helen’s illegitimate daughter. As Ulysses later recounts the event, citing Calchas: “Listen, Achilles. Listen, Greeks,” he cries, “The god who by my voice now speaks to you Explains its oracle, [and reveals] its fateful choice. Another child of Helen—[another] Iphigenia [On the block] must lay down her [immolated] life … She sees me, hears me, stands before your eyes. She is the victim whom the gods demand.” (5.6.1746–50, 5.6.1759–60)af

The subtle shift to “another child of Helen” (“un autre sang d’Hélène”) from the stipulation in Act 1, “a maiden of Helen’s race” or Helen’s relative (“une fille du sang d’Hélène,” 1.1.59), suggests that Calchas, like Racine, has found what Barthes calls an “elegant solution” to the chaotic impasse of the sacrificial crisis (On Racine 111). He has invented “another Iphigenia,” whose name signals the requisite resemblance between the surrogate and the original victim (Girard, V&S 10–11, 161). This sleight of hand, which is not uncommon in designating the surrogate, says Girard (V&S 82), does not escape Eriphile: in her angry response to the seer, she refers to Helen and Theseus, her purported parents as “[these heroes from whom you claim I descend]” (Racine, Iphigenia 5.6.1773).ag Eriphile is sacrificeable because she lacks what Iphigenia has—a powerful father, family, lover and allies to protect her. Of unknown birth and mysterious origin, like Oedipus, Eriphile is tormented by her loveless, abject identity: Placed among strangers from my earliest days, Neither at birth [nor ever] have I seen Mother or father [deign to] smile on me. I know not who I am; and, crowning [horror], A [frightful] oracle binds me to [this] ignorance, And, when I seek to learn [the blood that bore me, Says that without death I cannot know] … who I am. (2.1.424–30)ah ae “Déjà de tout le Camp la Discorde maîtresse / Avait sur tous les yeux mis son bandeau fatal.” af “Vous, Achille, a-t-il dit, et vous, Grecs, qu’on m’écoute. / Le Dieu, qui maintenant vous parle par ma voix, / M’explique son Oracle, et m’instruit de son choix. / Un autre sang d’Hélène, une autre Iphigénie / Sur ce bord immolée y doit laisser sa vie … / Elle me voit, m’entend, elle est devant vos yeux, / Et c’est elle en un mot que demandent les Dieux.” ag “ces Héros, dont tu me fais descendre.” ah “Remise dès l’enfance en des bras étrangers, / Je reçus et je vois le jour que je respire, / Sans que mère ni père ait daigné me sourire. / J’ignore qui je suis; et pour comble

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A stranger to herself, “[a daughter without name]” (2.5.708), Eriphile is also a powerless stranger among the Greeks at Aulis; she is the booty of Achilles’s victory over Lesbos, an abducted captive who dubs herself, “a [vile] Greek slave” (2.1.451). To veil the link between powerlessness and sacrificeability, and to justify Eriphile’s designation as the scapegoat Racine casts this enslaved have-not as Iphigenia’s symmetrical opposite, a monstrous double of illegitimate birth and of desire for Achilles. For like Phaedra, Eriphile is possessed by a forbidden love that shames her, as she admits to Doris, her only confidante: Shall I [still] recall the hideous memory, The day that into bondage cast us both? In the [cruel] hands of this fierce [abductor], I long remained unconscious and inert. At last my sad eyes [searched for] the light, And seeing myself [crushed] by bloodstained arms, I shuddered, Doris, and I feared to meet The [horrid] face of [a savage] conqueror. [I boarded his vessel], cursed his violence, Averting still my horror-stricken gaze. I saw him. There was nothing fierce in him. I felt reproach expire upon my lips; I felt my heart declare [itself] against [myself]. (2.1.487–99)ai

This overpowering desire for Lesbos’s conqueror, the murderer of the one person—Doris’s father—who could have revealed her identity, constitutes une faiblesse, a punishable flaw. And yet, the love of the enslaved captive for her captor, which Racine may have modeled on Achilles’s relation to the Lesbian Briseis in Homer and Ovid;48 and in ideological terms, the implicit idea that a woman loves her conqueror because he robs her of autonomy does not merely delineate the economy of phallic fantasy. It assumes political meanings in 1674, during Louis XIV’s war against the Spanish Netherlands, which in the summer of that year, gave him control of the Franche-Comté, over and beyond his colonial enterprises in the New World (Canada and the Antilles); and it legitimizes—even sentimentalizes—an imperialist erotics of power based on a politics of seduction.49

d’horreur, / Un oracle effrayant m’attache à mon erreur, / Et quand je veux chercher le sang qui m’a fait naître, / Me dit que sans périr je ne me puis connaître.” ai “Rappellerai-je encor le souvenir affreux / Du jour qui dans les fers nous jeta toutes deux! / Dans les cruelles mains, par qui je fus ravie, / Je demeurai longtemps sans lumière et sans vie. / Enfin mes tristes yeux cherchèrent la clarté. / Et me voyant pressée d’un bras ensanglanté, / Je frémissais, Doris, et d’un vainqueur sauvage / Craignais de rencontrer l’effroyable visage. / J’entrai dans son Vaisseau, détestant sa fureur, / Et toujours détournant ma vue avec horreur. / Je le vis. Son aspect n’avait rien de farouche. / Je sentis le reproche expirer dans ma bouche. / Je sentis contre moi mon coeur se déclarer.”

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Eriphile’s hopeless passion, which is never declared to Achilles much less returned, breeds her desire to destroy Iphigenia. An emblematic instance of the Girardian mediation of desire, but here, desire “between women,” Achilles is a symptom of Eriphile’s need to possess her double’s identity, to have what she has not, and then, to destroy Iphigenia. In an unholy alliance with the gods that foreshadows Phaedra’s, Eriphile reveals the royal family’s “criminal plots” (4.1.1130–32) for saving Iphigenia’s life to Calchas and the Greeks, who then prevent the virtuous daughter’s escape from Aulis and lead her to the sacrificial altar. Eriphile’s action thus serves to arouse the spectators’ needed antipathy to the surrogate victim, as Girard indicates (V&S 272–3). This negative view intensifies with Iphigenia’s diametrically opposite nobility and generosity; as Doris remarks to Eriphile, “Lovable Iphigenia / In open hearted friendship is [united] to you. / [She pities you, she] sees you with a sister’s eyes” (2.1.409–11).aj Indeed, Iphigenia insists that Achilles free his captive even after her horrified realization that she has nurtured a rival (2.5.687–722; 3.5.854–96).50 In this process, however, Racine hyper-valorizes his eponymous heroine as an ideal of femininity that the inferior other envies with murderous intensity. And he deflects attention from other betrayals in the play: Arcas, for example, betrays to Clytemnestra and Achilles Agamemnon’s secret plan to sacrifice his daughter, but this is excused as “[a happily imprudent act]” (4.10.1473). Accordingly, in Act 5, several characters denounce Eriphile’s betrayal—the betrayal of one powerless woman against another—as monstrous: “Know you the crime and who betrayed you, and / Know you, ah! Queen [Clytemnestra], the [inhuman] snake, / [Iphigenia took into her breast]?” (5.4.1674–6).ak This betrayal provides a way of “framing,” of scapegoating Eriphile, as Racine suggests in the preface: “I was able to represent [this other Iphigenia] as I wanted … as she meets the fate which, in her jealousy, she wished to bring upon her rival, … [she] deserves [in some way] to be punished, without being, however, altogether unworthy of compassion” (50).al Although Eriphile merits some compassion, she does act to destroy the good daughter she cannot be, and even more, she strives to exacerbate discord among the Greeks. She searches for signs of strife in Agamemnon’s family, which might terminate the betrothal; and she yearns for the outbreak of conflict in the Greek camp both to avenge the fate of Lesbos, where she has been raised, and to prevent the destruction of Troy, from where, it has been predicted, she originates. As she exults to Doris:

“L’aimable Iphigénie / D’une amitié sincère avec vous est unie. / Elle vous plaint, vous voit avec des yeux de Soeur.” ak “Ah! savez-vous le crime, et qui vous a trahie, / Madame? Savez-vous quel serpent inhumain / Iphigénie avait retiré dans son sein?” al “j’ai pu représenter [cette autre Iphigénie] telle qu’il m’a plu, et qui tombant dans le malheur où cette Amante jalouse voulait précipiter sa Rivale, mérite en quelque façon d’être punie, sans être pourtant tout à fait indigne de compassion” (O.C. 1:698). aj

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How would the incense in Troy’s temples burn If, [disrupting all the Greeks], I could avenge My prison, [arm Achilles against] the King; And if their hate, forgetting Troy, could turn Against themselves the sword reserved for her, And my [dangerous counsels make a happy] sacrifice Of the whole camp, to Troy, [my homeland]. (4.1.1134–40)am

In her desire to unleash chaos as a sacrifice to her state, Eriphile would eagerly contaminate others with her own misfortune. As she explains to Doris the reasons she has come to Aulis: A voice within me ordered me to go, Told me that my [importunate] presence here Might bring perchance my misfortune … with me, That [approaching these] oh! [too] happy [lovers] Some … of my [woes would sully them as well]. (2.1.516–20)an

And yet, this destructive desire has always already been signaled by the negative associations of her name, whether it is spelled Eriphyle, which etymologically means “disunited tribe,” or Ériphile, in Racine’s spelling. That name evokes the evil and venomous monster, Eriffila, in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, but it also signifies “the lover of discord,” the goddess Eris who threw the apple of discord that Paris awarded to Aphrodite for promising him the fairest wife (Helen), and who thus aroused Athena’s enmity, which led to the Trojan War. Symbolically and psychologically, then, Racine “blames” Eriphile for the discord in the family and the state, even though it is the opposition of both the ruling family and the state’s foremost warrior to the execution of the oracle that creates the chaotic impasse of the dénouement and requires the invention of the surrogate victim.51 That Eriphile, Helen’s proclaimed daughter, is cast as the “cause” of dis-order whose sacrifice would ensure the return to order, exemplifies the dual function of the scapegoat as pharmakos, poison and remedy, katharma and katharsis, as Girard reminds us.52 However, the poison of discord and dis-order, which obsessed seventeenth-century France in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion and of the Fronde, has a gendered specificity, Girard to the contrary notwithstanding. As misogynistic treatises of the querelle des femmes discussed in the Introduction am “Que d’encens brûlerait dans les Temples de Troie! / Si troublant tous les Grecs et vengeant ma prison / Je pouvais contre Achille armer Agamemnon, / Si leur haine, de Troie oubliant la querelle, / Tournait contre eux le fer qu’ils aiguisent contre elle, / Et si de tout le Camp mes avis dangereux / Faisaient à ma Patrie un Sacrifice heureux.” an “Une secrète voix m’ordonna de partir, / Me dit qu’offrant ici ma présence importune / Peut-être j’y pourrais porter mon infortune, / Que peut-être approchant ces Amants trop heureux, / Quelqu’un de mes malheurs se répandrait sur eux.”

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show, and as Chapter 1 confirms, women were identified with witchcraft, which the church, the law and the emerging medical profession enflamed to eradicate; with violent nature, which the discoveries of the New Science tried to control by man-made mechanisms; with animality and voracious sexuality, which domesticity aimed to civilize; and with an unruly body (politic), which increased patriarchal and monarchic power strove to master absolutely. In contrast to “lovable” Iphigenia, who channels all desire to the father and represents the ideal daughter/subject of the new etatic order, her monstrous double incarnates uncivilized dis-order, like the savageness of the indigenous and enslaved inhabitants of the French colonies in Martinique, Guadeloupe or Saint Domingue,53 which must be sacrificed at the altars of the male-bonded state. And the Sins of the Mother The connection between desire and dis-order that Eriphile embodies marks both her difference from Iphigenia and her resemblance to Helen, her proclaimed “mother.”54 Just as Eriphile aims to “disrupt (troubler) all the Greeks,” Helen’s “mad passion” “disrupts (trouble) both Europe and Asia,” as Clytemnestra angrily observes, in her constant efforts to dissociate herself from her sister, and thus from her lineage of fatally destructive desire (4.1.1135, 4.4.1278, 4.4.1269–80). Identified with “perfidious Troy,” Greece’s barbaric, sensual, decadent, Orientalist other, which is often named “Asia” in the play, Racine’s Helen has committed an adulterous “crime” that has caused Greece’s “eternal shame” (1.5.382, 1.1.76, 1.2.210, 2.7.804, 4.4.1361, 4.4.1269, 1.2.228).55 As with Eriphile’s “excessive” passion for Achilles, Helen personifies female desire that refuses the boundaries of man-made rules sanctifying the marriage contract, the family and the state.56 Helen’s transgression has posed the first critical test for the state, which was founded on the phallocratic imperative to control her sexuality, or what Pateman has called a sexual contract to establish “the law of male sex right.”57 In fact, in an early-modern dramatization of Engels’s thesis,58 which links the control of women to the formation of the state, Ulysses reminds the conflicted Agamemnon of The vow that Helen’s suitors took when once Your brother’s rivals—almost all the Greeks— Flocked to her father begging for her hand[.] [Whoever was favored, as the happy spouse], His rights we swore thenceforward to defend. And, if [a brazen man should steal his conquest, Our hands promised him the ravisher’s head]. (Racine, Iphigenia 1.3.300–306)ao ao “les serments / Que d’Hélène autrefois firent tous les Amants, / Quand presque tous les Grecs, rivaux de votre Frère, / La demandaient en foule à Tyndare son Père[.] / De quelque heureux Époux que l’on dût faire choix, / Nous jurâmes dès lors de défendre ses droits, / Et si quelque insolent lui volait sa conquête, / Nos mains du Ravisseur lui promirent la tête” (O.C. 1.3.299–306).

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When Menelaus suffered his wife’s “[shameful] affront” (4.6.1391), it was Agamemnon and he alone, insists Ulysses, who summoned the rivals to honor their vow, and thereby became the founder of the state: Now, but for you, would we, freed from this love, Have carried out this love-dictated vow? You alone … [made] us leave our children and our wives. And when, assembling here from every side, [The honor to avenge you alone shines bright], When Greece, already giving you its vote, Hails you [the author of this great exploit], [When its] kings, who could contest that rank with you, Are willing to shed their blood [to serve you], You, you alone, refusing victory … And, from the start surrendering to fear, Command the Greeks only to send them home. (1.3.307–17, 1.3.319–20)ap

The threat to the nascent state, the patriarchal family and the monogamous couple, which Helen’s “crime” represents, exposes the logic underlying Chalcas’s designated female scapegoat. Eriphile is not to be sacrificed instead of Iphigenia, as he claims; on the symbolic level, she is to be punished as Helen’s daughter, her metonymic surrogate. By that token, however, Helen’s “crime” would be avenged before the Greeks ever sailed for Troy. Indeed, this revenge has already occurred metonymically through the destruction of Lesbos, as Agamemnon points out to Achilles in Act 1: Sir, has not your [valor], forestalling us, Taken sufficient vengeance for us all? The fate of Lesbos ravaged by your hands Still terrifies the whole Aegean Sea. Troy saw the flames, and even to its ports The waves brought in the wreckage and the dead. Nay, Troy laments another Helen whom You to Mycenae sent as captive. For … no doubt this [fair] maiden holds in vain A secret her proud bearing has revealed. (1.2.231–40)aq ap “Mais sans vous, ce serment que l’amour a dicté, / Libres de cet amour, l’aurionsnous respecté? / Vous seul … / Nous avez fait laisser nos Enfants et nos Femmes. / Et quand, de toutes parts assemblés en ces lieux, / L’honneur de vous venger brille seul à nos yeux, / Quand la Grèce déjà vous donnant son suffrage, / Vous reconnaît l’Auteur de ce fameux ouvrage, / Que ses Rois, qui pouvaient vous disputer ce rang, / Sont prêts pour vous servir de verser tout leur sang; / Le seul Agamemnon, refusant la victoire … / Et dès le premier pas se laissant effrayer, / Ne commande les Grecs, que pour les renvoyer[.]” aq “Votre valeur, qui nous a devancés, / N’a-t-elle pas pris soin de nous venger assez? / Les malheurs de Lesbos, par vos mains ravagée / Epouvantent encore toute la Mer Egée. / Troie en a vu la flamme. Et jusque dans ses ports / Les flots en ont poussé le débris et

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This early hint in the play of the symbolic identification of Lesbos with Troy, and thus of Eriphile with Helen serves to confirm that the paternal order repeatedly reenacts, by metonymic displacement, the destruction of disorderly women. Such a notion challenges Freud’s belief that civilization is founded on the murder of the father, as well as Girard’s rivalrous claim that it is established by the scapegoat’s sacrifice. Instead, it could be argued, in an essentialist, rather than an historicist reading, that fear of the sexual mother, whom Julia Kristeva calls “the heretic of love,” structures the West’s symbolic order.59 Or, as Luce Irigaray states more radically, in her opposition to—and appropriation of—patriarchal myths: “our society and our culture operate on the basis of an original matricide … an even more ancient murder, that of the woman-mother.” Moreover, Irigaray’s “Body to Body: In Relation to the Mother” ascribes the son’s murder of Clytemnestra— “[the passionate] lover”—to the desire of “the God-Father [to assume] the ancient powers of the earth-mother.”60 Racine’s Iphigenia could be said to dramatize the rewriting of such an essentialized structure for the French seventeenth century: fear of (Helen,) the sexual mother/woman founds the phallic order and the state, which are cemented and upheld by violence against desiring females, here, by the erotic daughter’s sacrifice. Eriphile does not go gently to her death, however. In the play’s closing scene, when the raging mob hears the revised oracle and clamors for her death—a device that ensures once again that the king is blameless—Eriphile refuses to be defiled by what she terms Calchas’s “[profane hands],” and “[In a fury], rushes to the altar, grasps / The sacred knife, plunges it in her breast” (5.6.1774–6).ar Rejecting the destiny of female submission, Eriphile commits what Loraux would call “manly suicide.” In an Antigonian refusal to legitimize the sacred and the ritualized violence that binds the social order, she reaffirms the dis-order of (some) women’s acts, and the agency enacted in their resignification of the normative. But only for a moment. Paradoxically, even perversely, her death produces the effect that the paternal order wishes to achieve. For although Eriphile is not a consenting victim, as the Girardian scapegoat must be, and does not possess the pure blood of a conjugal offspring, as Calchas’s oracle stipulated, her defiant death wondrously brings about nature’s long-awaited help, bolsters the sacred bond, and creates social cohesion, precisely the opposite of what she hoped to accomplish.61 As Ulysses relives the scene: Hardly has [her] blood flown, reddening the earth, Than the gods loose the thunder on the [altar]. The winds furrow the air [with blessed tremors], And the sea answers [them with muffled roars]. les morts. / Que dis-je? Les Troyens pleurent une autre Hélène, / Que vous avez Captive envoyée à Mycéne. / …je n’en doute point, cette jeune Beauté, / Garde en vain un secret que trahit sa fierté.” ar “profanes mains … Furieuse elle vole, et sur l’autel prochain / Prend le sacré couteau, le plonge dans son sein.”

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The shore far off resounds, whitening with foam. Unlit by hand, the pyre bursts into flame. The heavens open, and the lightning’s flash Spreads sacred awe that reassures us all. (5.6.1777–84)as

Like the pharmakos, then, Eriphile seemed to cause irreparable damage to the couple and the family, the monarchy and the state, but at the play’s end, she serves to strengthen and stabilize the social order and its institutions. Does this mean that opposition or resistance is doomed to solidify the paternal and absolutistic order? Or is that what the future historiographer to Louis XIV would have his contemporaries believe in what some have called the most royalist of his plays? As the soldiers hasten to leave for Troy, however, and as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Achilles are about to be reunited with Iphigenia in their “communal joy” (5.6.1790), the “happy ending” of Iphigenia seems short-lived, even spurious.62 The Greeks are no longer impotent because of the immobile sea, but they will eventually be destroyed by the mer/mère—with which Eriphile and Helen, Lesbos and Troy are metonymically identified in Racine—as Clytemnestra had desired: To drown the thousand vessels of the Greeks, [Oh sea! will you not open new abysses?] … Will not the winds, these winds so long accused, Cover [you] with [the] wreckage of its ships? (4.4.1683–4, 4.4.1687–8)at

In what constitutes yet another of the tragedy’s many sources of dramatic irony for Racine’s audience,63 Achilles will be killed at Troy, and Agamemnon will be murdered by the sexual-mother of Orestes, the son who will then go mad. Sacrifice provides only temporary relief, as Girard reminds us; it is a “formidable … illusion and mystification” that can eliminate neither the threat nor the reality of disorder (Girard, V&S 12). It is also possible, of course, that the devastation of the Trojan War and its aftermath will occur because no true sacrifice occurred, only “a manly suicide” (82), and perhaps, because Eriphile may not be Helen’s illegitimate daughter in the flesh, only in rebellious spirit. Finally, however, it is the image of Iphigenia alone “[mourning her enemy]” that problematizes the play’s close for this twenty-first-century feminist reader as “A peine son sang coule et fait rougir la terre; / Les Dieux font sur l’Autel entendre le tonnerre, / Les Vents agitent l’air d’heureux frémissements, / Et la Mer leur répond par ses mugissements. / La Rive au loin gémit, blanchissante d’écume. / La flamme du Bûcher d’elle même s’allume. / Le Ciel brille d’éclairs, s’entr’ouvre, et parmi nous / Jette une sainte horreur, qui nous rassure tous.” at “Quoi pour noyer les Grecs, et leurs mille Vaisseaux, / Mer, tu n’ouvriras pas des abîmes nouveaux? … / Les Vents, les mêmes Vents si longtemps accusés, / Ne te couvriront pas de ses Vaisseaux brisés?”

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(5.6.1789–90). To be sure, the weeping heroine may be interpreted as displaying singular generosity and compassion for Eriphile. But she may also be mourning her other, a sister from whom, Iphigenia insisted earlier in the play, she could not bear to be physically separated: “[You could not stay without me in Mycenae; / Without you, could I ever leave with the Queen?” (2.5.665–6).au In this reading, Iphigenia would not simply be alone at the end, she would be, as Goodkin has insightfully observed,64 the only Iphigenia left, mourning an irretrievable loss— the destruction of the other within, her repressed double, the rebellious, deviant self that was/might be Eriphile, and who is sacrificed in order to exemplify the ideal, patriarchal daughter.65 After all, if Eriphile is both “another Iphigenia” and “another Helen,” as Racine’s text states, then logically and symbolically, Iphigenia must resemble both Eriphile and Helen, her maternal aunt, and beyond the ending of Racine’s play, the Clytemnestra who beds Aegisthus and kills Agamemnon. By that token, radical differences between the virtuous Iphigenia, who upholds the father as absolute, and the monstrous Eriphile, the enslaved “maiden with no name,” who embodies dis-order and “illegitimate” desire, would not simply be tenuous, but false. Indeed, if Girard is right that the survival of a social order is predicated on maintaining its existing cultural distinctions, then Racine’s play would serve to (re)construct and (re)affirm the differences between the “good” and the “bad” women according to seventeenth-century gender norms, analogously, between good and bad subjects of the absolutistic malebonded state, and in so doing, to deny both the resemblance between the women and their common sacrificial destiny. For in the end, both Eriphile and Iphigenia are victims of this paternal order, outsiders or others within who do evoke pity, but terror as well for the scene of repetition that this order and the tragedy still perform three centuries later. This ordering of daughters, who are identified with disorder in early-modern gender ideology, requires the reforming of their minds, as the next chapter shows. Notes Barthes, On Racine, ix–x. “Racine lends himself to several languages,” Barthes continues, “others can be invented, others will be invented; none is innocent” (64). 2 See Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics, 1451b, 6–8; Hegel, Hegel, On Tragedy, 21, 25, 28–9, 85; Freud, Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13:150–61; Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, 4:261–2; Girard, Violence and the Sacred (hereafter V&S), 127, 150. I refer to Girard in several instances, but this does not minimize his problematic universalism, in my view: as he maintains: “far from reprehensible, the quest for universally valid principles appears to me to be alone worthy of pursuit” (“Ancient Trail” 120). See Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, 35; see also “Metaphysics of Tragedy,” 172; Goldmann, Hidden God, 22–4, 33–4, 61. By contrast, see Felski, Rethinking Tragedy, 1–28, on the 1

au “Vous ne pouviez sans moi demeurer à Mycène. / Me verra-t-on sans vous partir avec la Reine?”

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difficulties of defining tragedy. Of course, important context specific studies of tragedy have appeared since the 1960s, including Williams’s Modern Tragedy (1966), 32–46, 74ff, Reiss’s Tragedy and Truth (1971), and recently, Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003). 3 See Benedetto, “Legend of French Classicism,” 134, and Stanton, “Classicism.” 4 Berg, “Impossible Representation,” 423. 5 Desnain, Hidden Tragedies, xv, xxx, xxxii, xxxvi, 159, 161. 6 See Vernant, “Tensions et ambiguités”; Winkler and Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to do with Dionysos?; DuBois, Slaves. 7 Contrary to this principle, some of Girard’s textual analyses do show that sexual difference is not abolished in tragedy, and that gender determines power relations. His reading of the Bacchae, for instance, examines how violence is projected onto women, the weakest inhabitants, as a strategy for exonerating adult males (V&S 36, 139–41). 8 Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, 34, 20. 9 Zeitlin, Playing the Other. 10 Rabbinowitz, Anxiety Veiled. 11 Foley, Female Acts, 12–17, 333–8. 12 Saint-Evremond, quoted in Descotes, Racine, 20; see also 7–39, which trace the reception of Racine from the hostility of some of his contemporaries to his “idolatry” in the eighteenth century. 13 As Beasley’s Salons shows, however, in her analysis of the querelle du Cid, Corneille was acutely aware of the newly-developing salon public, dominated by women, to which he wanted his works to appeal, in opposition to the learned and authoritative critics in matters of literary and cultural taste (101–14). 14 La galanterie encapsulates the principal code used to depict love as an ideal of sociability in the seventeenth century. Based nostalgically on rewritten tenets of courtly love (men submitting themselves to women, whom they serve in hopes of receiving the gift of love), this idea(l) was practiced in the female-dominated salons, albeit figuratively and playfully, and embedded in a wide array of literary works, in contrast both to the historical realities of women’s declining status in the seventeenth century, and of course, the strain of violence throughout the literature of this period, including in Racine. See Pelous, Amour précieux, amour galant; Habib, Galanterie française and Viala, France galante. 15 Abbé de Villiers, Entretiens, 1:7, 43–6. 16 Voltaire, “Art dramatique,” 12:411–13, 417. On Voltaire’s role in canonizing seventeenth-century writers, see Stanton, “Classicism,” 3–5. 17 Lanson is quoted in Batache-Watt, Profils, 31; Lemaître, Jean Racine, 314. 18 See Compagnon, “Proust sur Racine,” 60–63; for the late nineteenth-century’s “revision” of Racine, which influenced Proust, see 39ff. 19 Valéry, “Sur Phèdre femme,” 504–6; Goyet, “Le type de la jeune fille,” 55; BatacheWatt, Profils, 10. 20 On la tendresse, see Pelous, Amour précieux, despite his rigid distinctions between tendre and galant; Viala’s France galante highlights the overlaps between the two notions. The term, tendre, recurs in amatory maps that depict the paths and dangers of love; see Peters, Mapping Discord. 21 Barthes, On Racine, xi–xii.

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On this critical theme in Racine’s oeuvre and its connection to absolutist France, see Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, 213ff; see also Lewis, “Sacrifice and Suicide,” 74, note 5. 23 On tragedy as conservative, see Spyropoulos, Gender … of Athenian Tragedy. 24 Much of Racine’s historiography is lost, but fragments can be found in his Oeuvres complètes (hereafter, O.C.), 2:193–334, and include his Eloge historique du roi sur ses conquêtes depuis l’année 1672 jusqu’en 1678, praising the Flanders campaign. From 1670 on, Racine received an annual pension of 1500 francs; see Forestier’s biography, Jean Racine. Jasinski indicates that Racine’s Iphigenia was performed 95 times between 1680 and 1700; he includes texts published by the anti-Racine cabal (333–69). 25 Robinet is cited in Jasinski, Vers le vrai Racine, 2:33. On the extraordinarily elaborate decor for this performance that highlighted Louis’s glory, see Divertissements de Versailles, (1674–1676) by Louis XIV’s historiographer, André Félibien. 26 The extant fragment of Iphigénie en Tauride—an outline of the first Act—can be found in Racine, O.C., 765–7. 27 Racine’s Iphigenia, trans. and ed. Caincross, 51 (Racine, O.C. 1:699). The “good sense” does not capture the nuances of le bonssens, a valorized seventeenth-century concept closer to the intuitive “the right sense.” 28 According to Walker, the Euripidean dénouement that Racine cites is “the spurious ending, or exodus” of an “unusually corrupt” text; the version that Walker has edited ends with Iphigenia leaving the stage about to have “Her body’s lovely neck / Slashed with a sword to death.” Euripides, Complete Greek Tragedies, trans. and ed. Grene, vol. 4 (Euripides), 291–2, 387. Unlike Racine, Rotrou adopted Euripides’s dénouement in his Iphigénie en Aulide (1640). On le vraisemblable, see Bérénice: “only the verisimilar touches in tragedy” (Racine, O.C. 1:451, “Il n’y a que le vraisemblable qui touche dans la Tragédie”). 29 For seventeenth-century comments about Iphigenia as “the novel of M. Racine,” or “a dramatic novel,” see Gliksohn, Iphigénie de la Grèce 63–4. 30 For seventeenth-century interpretations of the Iphigenia legend as an allegory of Christian sacrifice, see Gliksohn, 59ff. 31 De Villiers suggests the anxiety that scenes of royal murder aroused when he expresses opposition to nations who “have never shown perfect obedience to their monarchs and who want to see no spectacles but those representing royal deaths” (1:5; “n’ayant jamais pu garder pour leurs souverains une obeisance parfaite, ne veulent point d’autres spectacles que la mort des princes”). 32 It is possible, of course, that the idea of “two Iphigenias” came from the edition of Pausanias’s Description of Greece that Racine used, but he does not provide a reference; see Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1:365. 33 Racine, Iphigenia, 1.1.27–31. References are to act, scene and line for the English and French editions, except where noted. 34 The anonymous author of “Remarques sur l’Iphigénie de M. Racine” (1675) was critical of the playwright for failing to explain the gods’ anger, thus making them seem capricious or unjust, and the king innocent (see Granet, Dissertations 2:321–3). 35 On the confusion between the two altars, see 3.1.781ff, 3.5.910ff. On this homology, see Foley, Ritual Irony, 84–90. 36 Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 35–6. 37 See Goldmann, Hidden God, 360–71. Racine defines the conjunction of virtue and flaw essential to the tragic hero(ine) in his prefaces to Andromache, Britannicus and Phaedra; his Iphigenia has no flaw.

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On these ideals, see Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, 1375–400, 1420, 1470–75, 1555; and Rotrou, Iphigénie en Aulide, in Oeuvres, act 4 sc. 5 p.316–17; act 5 sc. 2 p.325–6; act 5 sc. 3 p.327–9, act 5 sc.3 p.334. 39 See Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. 40 See Jameson, Political Unconscious. On the techniques of this oneiric process— including contradiction, displacement and condensation, see Freud, Interpretation of Dreams. For Apostolidès, the play justifies absolutism (Roi machine 117–24), and for Gliksohn, it dramatizes the state’s weakness had the transition from feudalism to monarchism not occurred (Iphigénie de la Grèce 90–91). This issue still had meaning for Racine’s audience in 1674, twenty years after the end of the Fronde. On the Fronde, see Ranum, The Fronde; Pernot, La Fronde; and in this book, Introduction and Chapter 4. On Louis XIV as Hercules and on his construction and representation as Sun King, see Caverivière, L’image de Louis XIV passim. 41 Louis XIV, Mémoires, 44–5. 42 On Louis’s colonialist enterprises, which involve the Atlantic Triangle and a slave trade (from Senegal most notably) beginning in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, see Pritchard, In Search of Empire, which covers the period 1670–1730; see below, note 53. 43 Barthes views Clytemnestra only as “a virile and ambitious woman,” not “a Niobe” (On Racine 112). He does not mention her corporeal bond to her daughter and thus her hope that the Greek cause fail. In this play, as in Andromaque, Racine points to the new post1650 mother/child intimacy that I discuss in Chapter 5. 44 Achilles wishes to defend Iphigenia, but feels no bond to the Greek state (see 4.6.1352–424). He was frequently deployed to praise Louis XIV’s military prowess; see Néraudau, L’Olympe du roi-soleil, 82. On the Achilles-Iphigenia love plot developed by seventeenth-century writers, see Gliksohn, 100ff. 45 See also Stanton, “Woman as Object.” 46 As Goodkin rightly points out, however, Iphigenia disobeys her father in continuing to desire marriage to Achilles (“Killing Order[s]” 100). 47 On the incest theme, see de Villiers, 22; and among twentieth-century critics, Mauron, L’inconscient dans l’oeuvre et la vie de Racine, 135–6. 48 Cited by Racine as a source (Iphigenia 49; O.C. 1:697), Ovid’s story of Briseis and Achilles can be found in both the Heroïdes (poem 3, line 137; poem 20, line 69) and his Amores (1.9.33; 2.8.11). 49 During this Dutch War (1672–1678), France also laid waste to much of the Palatinate to prevent it from supplying the Spanish/Hapsburg imperial troops; by January 1675 Louis had also gained control of Alsace. As Melzer emphasizes, the French mode of conquest and colonization presented itself as “a kind of love story,” a “voluntary subjection” (“Voluntary Subjection” 95ff); Melzer develops this idea in Colonizer or Colonized. See Perrault’s representation of the conquered who are enthralled with their conqueror in his panegyric poem, “Siècle de Louis XIV,” vv, 480ff. 50 Although the violence of this passion is foreign to Iphigenia (2.5.672ff), in her only outburst in the play, she accuses Eriphile of treachery. That Eriphile denies the charge makes her even less sympathetic to the audience. Ironically, however, Eriphile’s new freedom makes her capable of consenting to her own sacrifice. 51 On the plural meanings of Ériphile or Eriphyle, see May, D’Ovide à Racine, 146–7. On Eris’s association with Helen, see Loraux, Les expériences de Tirésias, 240–41. Moreover, the Greek eriphos (goat) evokes a “sacrificeable animal.” These meanings are not 38

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necessarily pertinent to other seventeenth-century characters named Ériphile, for instance in D’Urfé’s L’Astrée, De Pure’s La prétieuse and Molière’s Les amants magnifiques. 52 On the scapegoat as pharmakos, see Girard, V&S, 309–10, 317–18, who acknowledges his debt to Derrida’s “La pharmacie de Platon.” 53 As Pritchard’s In Search of Empire indicates, the French took possession or conquered ten islands in the Antilles, some of which changed hands several times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (xvii and table, 45). 54 I use quotations marks around “mother” to indicate the uncertainty of Helen’s relation to Eriphile. 55 Clytemnestra feels contaminated by Helene’s “crime” and believes that Agamemnon avoids and/or mistreats her when she arrives at Aulis because she is Helen’s sister; see Racine, Iphigenia, 3.2.823–6, 4.4.1269–70, 4.4.1280. 56 The negative view of Helen as the promiscuous casus belli, which is shared by Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and Ulysses, and which also exists in the Iliad (6.311–70), for instance, suppresses the important tradition that absolves her of responsibility for her relation with Paris, denies she ever went to Troy, and asserts her chastity. Euripides’s Trojan Women and Helen dramatize the two traditions and thus the ambiguity of her myth. The poet Stesichorus is said to have been blinded because he blamed Helen; he recanted and reputedly regained his sight; see Suzuki, Metamorphosis of Helen, 13ff. 57 Pateman, Sexual Contract. 58 Engels, Origin of the Family. 59 Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, 234–63. This might be an instance when “strategic essentialism,” to cite Spivak’s term, has an illuminating function (In Other Worlds 205). 60 Irigaray, “Body to Body,” in Sexes and Généalogies, 11–12; the empire of this God-Father also requires “the birth of the virgin goddess, obedient to the law of the father” (17–18). 61 Senior highlights the way in which “Racine systematically burdened his sacrificial victim with all imaginable sins: sexual deviancy, jealousy, revenge, murder and, most important of all, the crime of inciting the sacrificial crisis. As such, she becomes a truly malevolent, even demonic presence in Aulis,” and her murder is thus justified by the community striving to bond at the expense of a self-denouncing victim. See In the Grip of Minos, 185–6. Unlike Antigone, in Racine’s Thébaïde, Eriphile rejects the legal/religious processes. 62 Campbell summarizes the history of belief in this happy ending, which he rejects, in Questioning Racinian Tragedy, 133–54. 63 Ekstein emphasizes the difference between dramatic irony, based on what spectators (like the gods) know and characters do not, and the communal blindness of characters rushing toward their fate, which involves tragic irony. As she observes, the fact that Iphigenia is not sacrificed could also mean that other aspects of the future may be unpredictable and thus that “the play has been wrested free from the constraints of history” (“Destabilization of the Future” 927–9). 64 Goodkin, “Killing Order(s),” 97ff. 65 On Eriphile as Iphigenia’s repressed double, see Mauron, L’inconscient, 138. On the stranger as the difference within—the sexual, diabolical, repressed “illegitimate” self— see Kristeva, Étrangers. I disagree, then, that the “ruse” of the double, as Greenberg puts it, eliminates the tragic from Racine’s play (Racine 175, 186, 196).

Chapter 3

The Female Mind Reformed: Pedagogical Counter-Discourses, Radical and Regressive, Under Louis XIV “Is it surprising that … factories, schools, barracks, hospitals … all resemble prisons?” Foucault asks in Discipline and Punish (1975), as he highlights the shift from the spectacular exercise of sovereign power on condemned bodies to the orderly ways in which modern institutions produce knowledge to “discipline” human subjects.1 These institutions feature such instruments of disciplinary power as hierarchical observation or continuous “panoptical” surveillance; normalization, which is inculcated through a system of “micro-penalties”; and above all, examination, which is, for Foucault, “at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge” (192).2 Schools and their pedagogical ideology are crucial to the formation of the disciplined, docile subject in the post-modern era, as it was in the early modern French state.3 After all, “discipline” means getting learning into the child (from the Latin disci, learning, and plina