Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze

Perspectives on gender, class, and politics in the Heptaméron

Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367346720
• eBook ISBN: 9781315394329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, has long been an interpretive puzzle. De Navarre (1492-1549), sister of King Francis I of France, was a controversial figure in her lifetime. Her evangelical activities and proximity to the Crown placed her at the epicenter of her country's internecine strife and societal unrest. Yet her short stories appear to offer few traces of the sociopolitical turbulence that surrounded her.In Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze, however, Elizabeth Zegura argues that the Heptaméron 's innocuous appearance camouflages its serious insights into patriarchy and gender, social class, and early modern French politics, which emerge from an analysis of the text's shifting perspectives. Zegura's approach, which focuses on visual cues and alternative standpoints and viewing positions within the text, hinges upon foregrounding "les choses basses" (lowly things) to which the devisante (storyteller) Oisille draws our attention in nouvelle (novella) 2 of the Heptaméron, using this downward, archaeological gaze to excavate layers of the text that merit more extensive critical attention.While her conclusions cast a new light on the literature, life, and times of Marguerite de Navarre, they are nevertheless closely aligned with recent scholarship on this important historical and literary figure.

1 Introduction

The gaze of Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) has long been elusive, even on a pictorial level. In the putative portrait of her that is attributed to Jean Clouet, which hangs in the Walker Gallery of the National Museums of Liverpool, the young noblewoman’s face and ornately clad body are angled slightly away from the viewer or artist, upon whom her eyes and one belonging to the green parrot she holds are fixed in contrapposto on the vertical axis of the painting.¹ Because of her Spanish-style costume, betrothal ring, and small image of Cupid on the hat, scholars speculate that the three-quarter-view painting, tentatively dated at around 1527, celebrates her engagement to Henri de Navarre.² Despite the outward orientation and seeming directness of her gaze, which is unusual in extant images of Marguerite, her half-smile is enigmatic in the style of La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), causing collectors of the early nineteenth century to attribute the work to Leonardo.³ Moreover, the body language of the noblewoman and her bird, whose torsos are turned inward toward one another, points to an earlier, private gaze between Marguerite and the parrot that the artist and viewers have interrupted. Exactly what the conventional, public pose camouflages is uncertain: depending on the bird’s symbolism, it may have been an intimate exchange between the lady and her “amant vert” or “green lover,” echoing Jean Lemaire de Belges’ verses for an earlier Marguerite;⁴ or an allusion, grounded in the bird’s capacity for speech, to the female subject’s eloquence or even the Word of God.⁵

In subsequent likenesses of her, including portraits by François Clouet and illustrations for Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis (Catherine de’ Medici’s Book of Hours), Ysambert de Saint-Léger’s translation of Le miroir des dames (The mirror for ladies), the anonymous Office de sainte Anne (St. Anne’s prayer book), and Marguerite’s own La coche ou le débat de l’amour (The coach, or the debate of love), the queen of Navarre’s enigmatic gaze is even less legible. Though her eyes are averted in these drawings and paintings, she appears to focus successively on a point in the distance (Clouet’s portraits), a mirror (Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis), her ladies-in-waiting (L’office de sainte Anne), Saint-Léger himself (Le miroir des dames), a peasant or farm worker (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol. 3r; Musée Condé MS 522, fol. 2r), and a book she herself has written (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol. 44v; Musée Condé MS 522, fol. 43v).⁶ On one level, lowered eyes such as hers are often a sign of female “modesty, chastity, and obeisance” in early Renaissance iconography.⁷ While the pose is not gender-specific in sixteenth-century France, as evidenced by her brother the king’s own averted glance in several paintings, Marguerite’s portraitists likely draw upon the aforementioned tradition to some degree, purposely (re)constructing the strong-willed and occasionally troublesome noblewoman as a circumspect, tractable matron with downturned eyes.⁸ Yet the queen’s superior, enthroned position in two of the illuminations (Le miroir des dames, L’office de sainte Anne), and her larger size relative to that of the menus gens or “little people” in a third one (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol. 3r), imbue her downward gaze with reminders of her lofty rank as well as her gender, splintering both the field of connotations at work in her portraits and the implications of her lowered eyes.⁹

Because of their conventional nature and semiotic multiplicity, these enigmatic poses tell us little about the private thoughts and emotions of the historical subject. Yet bits and pieces of Marguerite’s complex public persona and traces of her actions emerge in the margins of her portraits, as we consider the objects of her gaze. In the human figures and material items toward which she peers, we find iconographical allusions to the queen’s reflectiveness and outward beauty (the mirror, Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis), to her patronage of the arts and scholarly activities (the translator, Le miroir des dames), to her solidarity with other women (the ladies-in-waiting, L’office de sainte Anne), to her concern for the underclasses (the fence maker, illustration for La coche), to her writings (the mirror, referring to Marguerite’s Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse or The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, in Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis; and a proffered book, which Marguerite hands to the Duchess of Etampes, in an illumination for La coche), and to the world around her (a point outside the frame, portrait by François Clouet).¹⁰ Taken individually, the subject’s ocular expressions in most of the illustrations seem flat and static; yet together, they map the disparate objects and overwritten traces of an ulterior, moving gaze—one that lingers pointedly on mirrors and books, on the poor as well as the rich, and on the outside world as well as the inner psyche. It is this type of gaze—a kaleidoscope of framed looks, swiftly veiled glances, and shifting, elusive perspectives that may be visual or attitudinal in nature, and constitutive of either the viewing subject or the viewed object—that we encounter in Marguerite de Navarre’s enigmatic magnum opus as well.¹¹

Composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, the multiscopic Heptaméron has long been a puzzle, in large measure because of the shifting perspectives that inform it.¹² Words relating to “seeing” and “sight” abound in the work; and many of its 72 short stories hinge upon a revelatory diegetic gaze, the dialectics of dissimulation and (in)sight, and the characters’ divergent outlooks. To further complicate matters, the storytellers or devisants interpret each nouvelle (novella or short prose narrative) from differing viewpoints in their frame discussions, mobilizing our own gaze(s) in the process. In part, this perspectival maze is an outgrowth of the nouvelle, fabliau, and medieval “bourgeois” narratives with their reflective frames and metatexts, their wily “watchers” and unseeing victims, and their voyeuristic realism. Like these antecedents, Marguerite’s shifting gaze inverts and interrogates socially entrenched viewpoints by illuminating marginalized realities and viewing positions in her culture, including those of women and the underclasses. Yet myriad other ocular traditions and strategies, such as patriarchy’s hegemonic gaze, the rhetoric and rituals of looking in courtly literature, the experiential gaze of first-person testimonials and quasi-mimetic narrative, and the godly, heavenward focus of scripture and religious texts also inform the Heptaméron’s perspectival explosion, leaving readers at an interpretive impasse. On one level, the short-story collection is an exercise in seeing that implicitly urges us to hone our viewing skills and judgmental acumen—so that we not only see, but see differently. At the same time, however, its myriad and conflicting points of view leave the narrative without a stabilizing perspectival anchor, and us, without a clear sense of its directionality or underlying goals.

On the surface, the Heptaméron clearly aims to entertain us with its provocative tales of adultery, treachery, trickery, and murder. Yet according to narratological theory, we compose stories for other reasons as well: to share experiences and insights with others, to express ourselves in ways that fulfill emotional and psychological needs, and to teach readers and listeners either institutionalized values or idiosyncratic lessons that we have gleaned from the “school of life.”¹³ Traces of all these goals arguably figure in the Heptaméron; but most notably, narrative cues such as the nouvelles’ opening and closing morals suggest that they are teaching vehicles.¹⁴ That we must “see” to learn is implicit in the locution “Voylà, mes dames,” meaning “see here, my ladies,” a formula Marguerite uses to construct the moralizing conclusion of many of her stories in pointedly visual terms. For all its moralistic rhetoric, however, the Heptaméron’s instructional thrust is splintered by the competing viewpoints inscribed within it. As a result, the text’s intentionality is no less enigmatic than the historical Marguerite’s pictorial gaze.

Ambiguity abounds in Renaissance literature, and reading the Heptaméron contextually—against the backdrop of the era’s religious, political, and ideological ferment, the querelle des femmes (woman question), the dialogic discourse so prevalent among humanists, and even Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments in optics and perspective—helps us understand Marguerite’s multiperspectivism as a function of her culture, and the polyvalent discourses and viewpoints that inform it. On a biographical and sociological level, however, contextualizing de Navarre’s nouvelles is more problematic. To borrow from Montesquieu, who warns that his satiric Lettres persanes may “clash” with his “character” and appear unworthy of a “serious man,”¹⁵ de Navarre’s gossipy, ribald, and oftentimes indecorous stories clash markedly with the sobriety and decorousness of her painted likenesses and with her public identity as a serious-minded matron and peer of France. The picture that Brantôme paints of an aging noblewoman who spins innocuous narratives casually, during journeys with friends—or that Marguerite herself constructs in the prologue, where amiable travelers opt to share stories recreationally en plein air, while lounging comfortably on the grass—is an appealing one; but the very nonchalance of these images sits uneasily with the darkness, and subversive realism, of many nouvelles. Underneath the volume’s placid exterior, the author’s use of marginalized standpoints and inferior viewing positions, which she associates with revelation or heightened objectivity, builds upon scriptural and literary traditions that privilege insights “from below,” such as those of servants and children; but it also smacks of an inverted class consciousness, privy to gender- and class-based brutality, that is unexpected in a princess of France. Moreover, the Heptaméron’s worldly, and oftentimes salacious, tales of sexual violence, marital infidelity, clerical malfeasance, and abusive masters—revealed by a downward, archaeological gaze that peels back layer after layer of surface appearances—differ radically from the pious, other-worldly image of Marguerite that we glean from her religious poetry.¹⁶

All of us, and especially writers, have many faces, to be sure—an observation that argues against attaching too much significance to the shifting gazes and inconsistent public personae of the historical Marguerite. We remain leery, after all, of venturing too close to the “intentional fallacy,” still mindful of Foucault’s famous paraphrase of Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking—or why?”¹⁷ In the case of early modern female writers, however, Foucault’s “author question” strikes a false note. Banishing the flesh-and-blood author entirely from our critical gaze limits our ability to read contextually and diminishes the experiential resonances of the text—which, in the case of the Heptaméron, are underscored intratextually by reminders that the stories are “true” and by references to the “real-world” writer, her relatives, the French court, and public figures personally known to the author. Through the mediacy of these cues, which function as hinges between the literary and life worlds, the inside of the Heptaméron repeatedly points to its outside, drawing the reader’s gaze back and forth between Marguerite’s magnum opus and the cultural discourses and intertexts, contemporary and historical events, that fuel it. For this reason, both sociocultural and biographical contextualizations will inform the textual and scopic analyses of this study.

In its departure from the radical textualism of much twentieth-century theory, the goal of this monograph is neither to construct a cultural biography of the author, nor to abandon the attentiveness to textuality and discourse that is a hallmark of the New Criticism and its poststructuralist and postmodern successors. Nor does the study purport to smooth out the dissonances in—and between—Marguerite’s text(s) and biography, or to affirm a relationship of direct causality between the queen of Navarre’s life and works. Rather, our discussion will reflect briefly on the interface between the Heptaméron and its contexts, cultural and historical as well as biographical, with an eye toward elucidating both the text and the social and political conditions under which it was written. Clearly we cannot fully know Marguerite d’Angoulême, her intentions, or her mindset at a distance of five centuries from her lifetime. Even if this were not the case, there is some wisdom in Foucault’s ruminations on “writing’s relationship with death,” on “the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics” in literary texts, and on the subject’s role as “a variable and complex function of discourse”—a discourse, or network of swirling discourses, that neither begin nor end with the author or his or her œuvre.¹⁸

Despite the usefulness of these insights, however, the suggestion by Foucault and others that the writer’s identity is irrelevant seems untenable when applied to Marguerite de Navarre. “To women and people of color, who hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Between life and literature: the many faces of Marguerite de Navarre
• 3 Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view
• 4 Upstairs, downstairs: the dynamics of class and rank in the Heptaméron
• 5 Power, politics, and modes of governance in the Heptaméron
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index