The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Women Writ, Women Writing

Domna C. Stanton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472442017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317035107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

PART I
Women Writ

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 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). 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

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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Women Writ
• Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l'accouchée (1622)?
• The Daughters' Sacrifice and the Paternal Order in Racine's Iphigénie en Aulide
• Women Writing
• The Heroine at War: Self-Divisions in La Guette's “Extraordinary” Memoirs
• Overreading, Without Doubt: Ambiguity and Irony in La Princesse de Montpensier
• Bibliography
• Index