la république des lettres 56

LA RÉPUBLIQUE DES LETTRES 56
NARRATIONS GENRÉES
ÉCRIVAINES DANS L’HISTOIRE
EUROPÉENNE JUSQU’AU DÉBUT
DU XXe SIÈCLE
Études éditées par
Lieselotte STEINBRÜGGE ET Suzan VAN DIJK
ÉDITIONS PEETERS
LOUVAIN - PARIS - WALPOLE, MA
2014
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Suzan VAN DIJK, Lieselotte STEINBRÜGGE
Perspectives de femmes? Narrations genrées vues par-delà les
époques et les frontières linguistiques. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
Vera NÜNNING
Gender, authority and female experience in novels from the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century: a narratological perspective
19
Carin FRANZÉN
Christine de Pizan’s appropriation of the courtly tradition . . . . . .
43
PARATEXTES MASCULINS ET FÉMININS
Madeleine JEAY
Le double discours de la dédicace aux dames dans les recueils de
nouvelles des XVe-XVIe siècles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
61
Henriette PARTZSCH
Manipulating genre and gender: the novella in early modern Spain
77
Isabel MORUJÃO
Présentation et représentations de la femme-auteur dans les paratextes des œuvres narratives féminines portugaises à l’âge moderne
95
Geneviève PATARD
La «défense des dames» dans les Mémoires de Madame de Murat
(1668?-1716) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
117
NARRATION FÉMININE ET FICTION
Esther Suzanne PABST
Une liaison dangereuse au Siècle des Lumières: le roman épistolaire du point de vue des études de genre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
131
Marianne CHARRIER-VOZEL
Du larmoyant à la comédie: à propos du roman sentimental et de
la femme auteur au XVIIIe siècle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
149
344
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Marianna D’EZIO
Eighteenth-century British women writers and the Arabian Nights’
Entertainments: Transmigration of a genre, creation of new literary paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
167
Valérie COSSY
Ces héroïnes qui ne lisent plus de romans: le topos de la lectrice
romanesque et la légitimité de la romancière au tournant du
XIXe siècle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
185
Hendrik SCHLIEPER
Une cellule à soi. Dulce dueño (1911) d’Emilia Pardo Bazán et le
«lieu» de la femme auteur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
199
NARRER OU INFLUENCER LE RÉEL
Carme FONT PAZ
The cry of a virgin: gender and self-representation in Lady Eleanor Davies’ prophetic texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
215
Véronique CHURCH-DUPLESSIS
Entre fiction et non-fiction: le roman anthropologique pour une
autre condition féminine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
227
Elisa MÜLLER-ADAMS
Gender and the city: urban narratives by German women travelling to London (19th century) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
245
Ursula JUNG
On the relationship between non-fiction and short stories in Emilia
Pardo Bazán’s œuvre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
263
RÉCEPTION ET ÉVALUATIONS
Kerstin WIEDEMANN
Le roman à l’épreuve des femmes: quelques réflexions sur la
différence des sexes et la poétique du roman en Allemagne
1830-1848 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
285
Katja MIHURKO PONIZ
Gender and narration in the writings of three 19th-century Slovene
women: Pavlina Pajk, Luiza Pesjak and Zofka Kveder . . . . . . . . .
301
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Hanneke BOODE
Considerations of gender and genre: the reception of Margit
Kaffka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
345
321
INDEX
Auteur-e-s étudié-e-s et mentionné-e-s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
337
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION
OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
Carin FRANZÉN
Linköping University
In the closing chapter of the Livre de la Cité des Dames from 1405
Christine de Pizan addresses a female public and declares that the city
has been constructed for “les passees dames, comme les presentes et
celles a avenir”1. As a concluding vision to her allegory it has a rather
worldly purpose warning women from engaging in the domain of passionate love:
O! mes dames, fuyez, fuyez la fole amour dont ilz vous admonnestent!
Fuyez la pour Dieu, fuyez, car nul bien ne vous en peut venir, ains
soiés certaines que quoyque les aluchemens en soient decevables que
tousjours en est la fin a voz prejudices […].2
This attitude constitutes a principle in pre and early modern discourses of
love, which will reverberate until the 17th century, and not at least so in
women’s writings3. The criticism of passionate love is certainly an important concern in Christianity, which is one of Christine’s main references,
but it is also sensed in the courtly tradition. In her debate poem Le Livre
du Debat de deux amans, written five years earlier than the Cité des
Dames, she lets a knight, a “courtois chevalier aimable”, articulate his
experience of love with the same words she uses in her allegory: “Quieulx
que soient d’amours les commençailles / Tous jours y a piteuses deffinailles. / Fuyez, fuyez, jeunes gens!”4. In the poem the knight’s speech is
however scrutinized by a Lady who puts in doubt its seriousness: “Et
quant a moy, tiens que ce n’est que usage / D’ainsi parler d’amours par
1
Christine de Pizan: Livre de la Cité des Dames – La Città delle Dame, ed. by Earl
Jeffrey Richards and Patrizia Caraffi, Rome: Carocci 2004, p. 496. I refer in my following
quotations to this edition.
2
Id., p. 502.
3
Passionate love is still called “folle amour” in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron
(1559), and in Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) the heroine’s refutation
of the lover’s invitation is the main motif.
4
Altmann, Barbara K. (ed.): The Love Debate Poems of Christine de Pizan, Florida:
The University Press of Florida 1998, p. 104.
44
CARIN FRANZÉN
rigolage”, and she sustains her view referring to the critical assessment of
courtly love in “le Rommant de la Rose”, the authoritative text on the
topic during the later Middle Ages5. It is well known that Christine refutes
the misogynistic aspects of this work, but here she makes a strategic use
of its criticism of “amours fines”, which in Jean de Meun’s understanding
is equivalent with passionate love6. Considering that fin’amor, as courtly
love was called in Occitan by the troubadours in the 12th century, more
justly could be understood as the opposite to passionate love, which is
obvious in the first part of the text where Guillaume de Lorris resumes its
rules, and that de Meun actually promotes sexual consummation at the end
of his part, the Lady’s words in the love debate poem seem to be a generalized argument against passionate love from a woman’s point of view.
Simply put, because of men’s falseness, “les losangeurs decevables”7 as
Christine puts it in the Cité des Dames, women risk to lose their idealized
position, “voz honneurs et la beauté de vostre loz”8, if they acquiesce to
passion. Barbara Altmann summarizes the meaning of the Lady’s intervention in the love debate poem as follows: “The crucial distinction, then,
is between real life and a parlor game”9.
However, this distinction is not so easy to draw, especially when we
are obliged to resort to medieval discourses of love, or we consider the
possibility that these discourses has an effect on real life. As Slavoj Zizek
suggests referring to the idealization of the Lady in courtly love, the
“very semblance of man serving his Lady provides women with the
fantasy-substance of their identity whose effects are real”10. To be sure,
this “semblance” also hides the other side of idealization, which is
debasement, and women are subjected to both configurations in medieval
society. The division of love and its object is in fact fundamental in the
courtly as well as in the Christian tradition where Eve stands for man’s
5
Le roman de la rose was written in two parts, the first by Guillaume de Lorris around
1236, the second by Jean de Meun 1270-1280. The misogynistic aspect of the second part
of the book gave rise to an epistolary debate between Christine and defenders of de Meun,
who criticizes courtliness and promotes a more materialistic view on love, which I will
come back to. See Strubel, Armand (ed.): Le roman de la rose, Paris: Le livre de Poche
1992.
6
Strubel: Le roman de la rose, p. 273.
7
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 498-502.
8
Id., p. 502.
9
Altmann: Introduction, in: id.: The Love Debate Poems of Christine de Pizan, p. 31.
10
Zizek, Slavoj: The Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Woman and Causality,
London: Verso 1994, p. 108.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
45
perdition and Mary bears the promise of his salvation11. Howard Bloch
even claims, in his study on medieval misogyny, that courtliness is “yet
another ruse of sexual usurpation thoroughly analogous to that developed
in the early centuries of our era by the fathers of the church”12. When the
object of desire changes into a subject in female writers’ texts one can
note that the configuration of divided love is maintained (because it is
hegemonic), but used in a different manner, which I would like to understand in the perspective Foucault makes possible when he defines historical events in terms of a “reversal of a relationship of forces, the
usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against
those who had once used it”13. In Christine’s writing, which undoubtedly
can be considered a historical event, we find an appropriation of the
dominant discourse of love in the later Middle Ages, which is neither a
passive reception nor a refutation. As has been noted many times, an
innovative reworking of established models, and especially that of the
courtly tradition characterize her technique. According to Altman she did
both “engage and dismiss the topic of courtly love”14. Christine’s rewriting of the courtly tradition has been thoroughly assessed in relation to
her lyric love poetry15. Her so-called erudite work has often been seen as
a “terrain for the investigation of premodern feminism” to use Altman’s
11
Sigmund Freud notes that the division of love in the two directions of idealization
and debasement, often referred to as “heavenly” and “earthly” love, is an “extremely
common characteristic of the love of civilized men”. He suggests that it is due to a psychic
incapacity in men to unite sensual passion with psychical valuation of the object. Considering the extent of this division in cultural history this “incapacity” also seems imposed
by discourse. Freud, Sigmund: On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere
of Love, in: Strachey, James (ed.): Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth 1957, vol. 11, p. 179-190.
12
Bloch, Howard: Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1991, p. 196.
13
Foucault, Michel: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in: Language, Countermemory,
Practice. Selected essays and interviews, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon,
New York: Cornell University Press 1977, p. 154.
14
Altman: Introduction, p. 5.
15
See Willard, Charity Cannon: Christine de Pizan’s Cent Ballades d’Amant et de
Dame: Criticism of Courtly love, in: Burgess, Glyn S. (ed.): Court and Poet. Selected
Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Liverpool: Francis Cairns 1981, p. 357-364; Smith, Sidney E.: The Opposing Voice: Christine
de Pisan’s Criticism of Courtly Love, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990. Jeffrey
Richards refers to the Cité des Dames in his article “Poems of Water without Salt and
Ballades without Feeling, or Reintroducing History into Text: Prose and Verse in the
Works of Christine de Pizan”, in: Richards, Earl Jeffrey (ed.): Christine de Pizan and
Medieval French Lyric, Gainesville: University Press of Florida 1998, p. 206-229. His
assessment of Christine’s criticism of courtly love seems however primarily to take into
consideration her references to courtliness as lyrical composition, and formal aesthetics.
46
CARIN FRANZÉN
words again16. It is however difficult to draw a sharp line between
Christine’s different kinds of works, considering that the didactic, moral
concern is a general feature in her writing. In the following I wish more
precisely to assess the strategies Christine develops to gender the division
in the two directions of idealization and debasement of love and its
object, the woman, by some examples taken from the Cité des Dames.
SPEAKING OTHERWISE
To speak allegorically means to speak otherwise, to say other things,
than what is meant. This definition of the concept of allegory is taken in
a literal sense in the strategies Christine is using when she criticizes the
misogyny of her time. Her writing exemplifies the subversive potentiality
of the allegorical genre during a historical period – the later Middle Ages
– when freedom of expression was rather restricted, and especially so for
a woman writer. In fact, Christine is the first professional woman writer
in France, and her case is unique in many aspects. Originally from Italy
she came to France as a child when her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was
offered a position as astrologer at the court of Charles V around 1360.
She began her own writing after her husband’s death, becoming responsible for the support of her children and her mother. According to her
own words in the allegory Le livre de l’advision Cristine, written some
months after the Cité des Dames, she started to write her first poems
“regrettant mon ami mort et le bon temps passé”17. The economical urge
was probably an equally strong motivation. In any case Christine began
her professional career as a courtly poet, but she soon turned towards
prose and allegorical writing with a more obvious political dimension18.
Even though Christine never questions the hierarchal ground of medieval
society as such her assessment of the misogyny of this order is of a new
and radical kind19.
16
Altman: Introduction, p. 4.
Christine de Pizan: Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. by Christine Reno and
Liliane Dulac, Paris: Honoré Champion 2001, p. 107.
18
Willard derives this shift to Christine’s participation in the debate over Jean de
Meun’s part in Le roman de la rose, in: Willard, Charity Cannon: Christine de Pizan. Her
Life and Works, New York: Persea Books 1984, p. 73. See also Altmann: Introduction,
p. 4.
19
See among others, Richards, Jeffrey: Christine, Courtly Diction, and Italian Humanism, in: id. et al. (ed.): Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, London: The University of
Georgia Press 1992, p. 263-264.
17
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
47
Christine is conscious of the force of literary figuration20. In the Cité
des Dames she counteracts the negative aspects of misogyny by producing a subject position for women within a male dominating discourse that
she appropriates for her own purposes, and I wish to focus on how she
both uses and dismantles its divided figure of love and women. Let us
start from the beginning with Christine’s direct confrontation with
debasement.
In the opening scene of the allegory the narrator sits in her study cabinet and decides to lay aside the scientific books she is reading and divert
her self with some poetry. She finds a book by Matheolus said to talk “a
la reverence des femmes”21. Reading it she discovers however a paradigmatic example of misogyny revealing to her that none of the other books
she was studying previously contradicts its defamatory language. And
she begins to wonder
[…] qu’elle peut ester la cause ne dont ce peut venir tant de divers
hommes, clercs et autres, ont esté et sont si enclins a dire de bouche
et en leurs traictiez et escrips tant de deableries et de vituperes de
femmes et de leurs condicions, et non mie seulement un ou ·ij·, ne
cestui Matheolus, qui entre les livres n’a aucune reputacion et qui
traicte en maniere de trufferie, mais generaument auques en tous traictiez, philosophes, poetes, tous orateurs desquielx les noms dire seroit
longue chose, semble que tous parlent par une mesme bouche et tous
accordent une semblable conclusion, determinant les meurs femenins
enclins et plains de tous les vices.22
This opening scene in Christine’s allegory illustrates the female subject’s
meeting with the objectification of her identity – the misogynistic representations of women in medieval canon – that will be refuted by the
construction of a city of Ladies. Following the genre convention she
passes through the topic of the dream, which she significantly changes
into a state of “letargie”23 caused by the reading. In fact, the image she
depicts of her distress prefigures the famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer
some hundred years later: “En celle dolente pensee ainsi que je estoie,
20
It has been claimed that Christine’s case in the debate over Le roman de la rose
“was based largely on the belief that the author was consciously seeking to produce a book
that would corrupt its readers”. Brown-Grant, Rosalind: Christine de Pizan and Medieval
Literary Theory, in: Hicks, Eric (ed.): Au champ des escriptures. IIIe Colloque international sur Christine de Pizan, Paris: Honoré Champion 2002, p. 587-588. See also Willard: Christine de Pizan, p. 81.
21
Pizan: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 40.
22
Id., p. 42.
23
Id., p. 44.
48
CARIN FRANZÉN
la teste baissee comme personne honteuse, les yeulx plains de larmes,
tenant ma mains soubz ma joe accoudee sus le pommel de ma chayere
[…]”24. At this moment of distress the allegory begins by the sudden
entrance of three crowned Ladies, Raison, Droiture, and Justice, who
wake Christine up from her passive state, giving her the mission to
construct a city of Ladies, where “les dames et toutes vaillans femmes
puissant dorenavant avoir aucun retrait et closture de defence contre tant
de divers assaillans”25. This mission is also formulated, by the voice of
Raison, as a reading instruction, i.e. a specific allegorical strategy:
Et des poetes dont tu parles, ne scez tu pas bien que ilz ont parlé en
plusieurs choses en maniere de fable et se veulent aucunefois entendre
au contraire de ce que leurs diz demonstrent? Et les peut on prendre
par une figure de grammaire qui se nomme antifrasis qui s’entent, si
comme tu scez, si comme on diroit tel est mauvais, c’est a dire que il
est bon, aussi a l’opposite.26
This advice is a clear invitation not only to use the allegorical mode of
speaking otherwise, but also to appropriate the medieval literary tradition
against those who used it to defame women, or as Joël Blanchard puts it,
“Christine plays the game with perfect bad faith because the authors who
speak against women are at the same time the very ones who will inspire
her”27. This rhetorical technique is innovative and astonishing in that
Christine without hesitation assumes the authoritative right to critique
and retell cultural tradition. By this revision she also creates a place
where female experience can be rearticulated and represented on other
conditions than those prescribed by men. The effort this costs her can
however also be felt at the beginning of the book.
Christine’s self-presentation in the opening scene is one of ambiguity.
She depicts herself as a learned woman but at the same time she feels
despair because her knowledge comes from books where women are
24
Id., p. 46. The motif of the cheek in the hand signifying sorrow and pain is of course
more ancient than Dürer’s engraving, and Christine demonstrates here, as elsewhere, her
acquaintance with cultural tradition. Richards: Christine, Courtly Diction, and Italian
Humanism, p. 260, thinks that this scene “seems modelled directly on the opening of
Petrarch’s Secretum”, and that “the psychological situation of both autobiographical protagonists is remarkably similar; both are in a state of spiritual despair”. The cause of their
spiritual crisis are however rather opposite. Petrarch suffers from self-provoked “sins”,
such as his love for Laura, and his literary ambition, Christine from misogynistic projections.
25
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 54.
26
Id., p. 48 [original emphasis].
27
Blanchard, Joël: Compilation and Legitimation, in: Richards et al.: Reinterpreting
Christine de Pizan, p. 232.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
49
presented as the incarnation of “tous les vices”. For a moment Christine
doubts that she knows better than the books she is reading, and believes
that their authors tell the truth. This doubt is nevertheless also the driving
force of her writing. She must only find what she lost in reading, namely
her judgement. Hence, Raison asks Christine where her good judgement
has gone: “Comment, belle fille, qu’est ton sens devenu?”28. By this
initial scene Christine points to the negative effects of literary configuration representing her narrator’s power to think and judge (her “sens”) as
blocked by misogynistic projections, but she also shows that it can be
liberated by an opposing reading (“antifrasis”) leading to the construction of, as Michèle le Dœuff puts it, “un imaginaire, la cité peuplée de
femmes respectables qui sont autant d’appuis psychologiques pour toutes,
une poétique qui est en même temps une éthique et un monde de
résistance”29. The awakening is the beginning of the allegorical setting
where men’s representations of women will be turned against them.
A fundamental issue in Christine’s dispute with the dominant representations of women in medieval canon, in particular in the Roman de la
rose, which brings together the medieval opinions on women, regards
ethics. Although Christine is a humanist she cannot accept de Meun’s
depiction of physical desire, least of all the allegorical description of the
sexual act at the end of the book when the young man finally takes his
rose by force, because she is concerned with the connection between
(defamatory) language and its effects on the public. Christine’s objection
to de Meun’s part regards precisely, as Willard puts forward, his refutation of the “ideals of chivalry, courtesy, and asceticism expressed in the
part of the poem written by Guillaume de Lorris”30. This has been called
a prude or moralistic position, first by de Meun’s defenders, Jean de
Montreuil, Pierre and Gontier Col, but it still seems to be a problem for
a modern reader taking the liberty to speak at face value31. Christine’s
critique makes however explicit the relation between literary configuration and power in medieval society. Hicks’s formulation on this issue is
instructive, “la décence demeure la clé de voûte de l’intégration sociale
28
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 48.
Le Dœuff, Michèle: Le sexe du savoir, Paris: Flammarion 2000, p. 227.
30
Willard: Christine de Pizan, p. 77.
31
See Brown-Grant: Christine de Pizan and Medieval Literary Theory, p. 583, and
Hicks, Eric: Situation du débat sur le Roman de la Rose, in: Dulac, Liliane/ Ribémont,
Bernard (ed.): Une femme de Lettres au Moyen Age. Etudes autour de Christine de Pizan,
Orléans: Paradigme 1995, p. 63.
29
50
CARIN FRANZÉN
des femmes”32. It has been claimed that Christine’s criticism of courtly
love above all regards the influence on the court of what could be taken
as an invitation to free or extramarital love, and the moral, or political
implications of such behaviour33. The consequences of sexual relations
outside marriage is in the discursive context of courtly love however not
only an institutional problem. It concerns women’s subject position and
it has a real impact on their social reality.
In fact, the Roman de la rose incorporates a radical change from courtly
love and its idealization of the Lady to an openly misogynistic attitude
towards women. This can in part be attributed to the socio-historical
change from feudalism to growing bourgeoisie. It is significant that de
Meun was, as Willard points out, “a member of the rising middle class”34.
On a symbolic and psychological level de Meun’s refutation of courtly
ideals could also be regarded as seizure of the inaccessible Lady. His part
of the text implies, to quote Julia Kristeva, “le mouvement qui le [de
Meun] mène hors de l’espace amoureux courtois, dans le temps d’une
aventureuse et agressive prise de l’objet. ‘Fin amor’ est morte, vive la
procréation seule digne d’intérêt, et éventuellement, le plaisir qui n’en est
que la ruse”35. From this perspective Christine’s position regarding the
Roman de la rose is not a simple refutation of courtly love, rather the
contrary. In the Cité des Dames she refers to the effects of its decrease
during the later Middle Ages deploring the abandonment by “les nobles
homes qui par ordenance de droit deffendre les deussent”36. Even though
Christine criticizes the destructive impact of passion, she uses the essential
thread in courtly love, which is the idealization of the object of desire, for
her own purposes37. When she, in the voice of Droiture, warns women
from getting into the domain of passionate love: “celle mer tres perilleuse
32
Hicks: Situation du débat, p. 62.
Willard: Christine de Pizan, p. 81; Brown-Grant: Christine de Pizan and Medieval
Literary Theory, p. 595.
34
Willard: Christine de Pizan, p. 76.
35
Kristeva, Julia: Histoire d’amour, Paris: Denoël 1983, p. 363.
36
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 54.
37
In his introduction to Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, Jeffrey
Richards claims “that Christine’s poetry hardly served courtly ideals but instead called
them profoundly into question, in part because Christine probably viewed courtly ideals
as outmoded from a humanist perspective” (id.: Christine de Pizan and Medieval French
Lyric, Gainesville/ Florida: University Press of Florida 1998, p. 17). Considering that both
Dante and Petrarch build their idealization of love and women (i.e. Beatrice and Laura)
on the courtly love code, we are dealing with a question of transmission rather than with
a rupture with something “outmoded”.
33
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
51
et dampnable de fole amour”38, this is hence not a simple criticism of
courtly love.
Courtly love is above all a literary and moral code, which can be used
in different ways. It can be interpreted as an invitation to extramarital
passion, probably as a consequence of a system of arranged marriages,
but it is also a code of “raffinement psychologique”, which transforms a
relation where women are inferior into a game where she is superior39. It
seems rather obvious that this kind of reversal of power relations needs
a cultural context where women have other values than as wives and
daughters. In this perspective the centrality of the Virgin Mary in
Christine’s discourse is as important as the central place the courtly tradition attributes to the Lady, “place éminente à la dignité de la femme”,
to use Charles Camproux’s words40. It can indeed be argued that this high
evaluation of women in the courtly tradition is but a projection of male
fantasy, or that it only serves the moral developement of man41. It is
nevertheless evident that women, as Christine when she rewrites the
courtly tradition, can appropriate this value.
More than changing the courtly love code as such, Christine is using
it to dismantle misogynistic representations in order to defend a subject
position for women in a culture where they more or less lack this status
in a social sense. Let us now look more closely to some of her strategies
in doing this.
THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
The architectural metaphor of the Cité des Dames is constructed in the
form of examples of highly idealized women, most of them taken
from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1374). Christine nevertheless
changes these examples at her own discretion presenting all women in a
38
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 404.
Spitzer, Leo: L’Amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours, in: University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature
5, 1944, p. 33.
40
Camproux, Charles: Le Joy d’Amour des Troubadours, Montpellier: Causse &
Castelnau 1965, p. 110.
41
Ferrante, Joan M.: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth
Century to Dante, New York: Columbia University Press 1975, p. 35-36. See also her
article “Male Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature”, in: Women’s Studies 11,
1984, p. 67-97. Kristeva talks about the troubadours’ Lady as a “destinataire imaginaire,
prétexte de l’incantation”, p. 354.
39
52
CARIN FRANZÉN
favourable manner. They constitute, as Le Dœuff points out, an imaginary and comforting place with the purpose to protect women from
misogynistic attacks of different kinds. At the same time it is a strikingly
violent place. That a war is going on is not only indicated by Christine’s
use of military terms, the foundation stones of the city wall are all warrior
queens, Semiramis, the Amazons, and other women, known for their
capacities on the battlefield.
This insistence on female warriors seems at first contradictory considering Christine’s argument against the traditional view that women are
week in every sense of the term: “que femmes ont le corps foible, tendre
et non puissant en fait de force, et par nature sont couardes”42, which
“par le jugement des homes appetissent moult le degré et auctorité du
sexe femenin”43. In the voice of Raison she states that:
[…] Dieux (et Nature) a assez fait pour les femmes qui leur en a donné
impotence, car a tout le moins sont elles par cellui agreable deffault
excusees de non faire les cruaultez orribles, les murtres et les grans et
griefs extorcions, lesquelles a cause de force on a fait et fait on continuelment au monde.44
Christine’s critique against a world where “cruaultez orribles” are committed can be seen in many of her writings, and it has often a direct
reference to the wars and political crisis of France during the reign of
Charles VI. Nevertheless, and as a direct refutation of the dominant view
of feminine weakness it is also said that “toute force a hardiece corporelle” are not excluded from “sexe femenin”45. The development of the
argument against feminine weakness takes now the form of an example.
She presents, as the first stone of the city, a woman of “moult grant vertu
en fait de fort et vertueux courage es entreprises et excercice du fais des
armes”46, namely the mythological queen Semiramis.
As Monique Niederoest points out, misogynistic violence demands
another violence, which deconstructs the hegemonic view on women and
offers an alternative construction of femininity. Niederoest claims that it
is Christine’s “position de l’outsider”, which makes this possible47. With
42
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 102.
Id., p. 102.
44
Id., p. 104.
45
Id., p. 104.
46
Id., p. 106.
47
Niederoest, Monique: Violence et autorité dans la Cité des Dames, in: Hicks, Eric
(ed.): Au champs des escriptures, IIIe Colloque international sur Christine de Pizan, Paris:
Honoré Champion 2002, p. 400-401.
43
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
53
Foucault it could be argued however that it is impossible to conceive
subjectivity outside the interplay of discursive elements constituting the
dominant discourse, i.e. that there is no possibility to stand outside power
relations. What is possible is the use of strategies impeding these
relations to work as a general system of domination. Christine’s defence
of women could therefore be understood as a point of resistance within
a dominant discourse rather than a bringing into discourse something
from the outside.
The violence used against misogyny in the Cité des Dames does not
only serve as a protection, or a construction of a new feminine identity.
Christine reveals the mechanism of repression in the process of idealization by paying homage to what tradition condemns48. In other words she
absolves the motives for the debasement of women found in authors such
as Dante and Boccaccio.
While Dante places Semiramis in the second circle of hell in the Commedia, because she married her own son, she still remains an example of
virtue, “a noble dame”, in Christine’s eyes, and as a justification she is
said to have been living during a time when there was “ancores point de
loy escripte”, only the “loy de Nature”49.
One could interpret this highly interesting passage in the light of
Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological account of the incest taboo as the founding
act of civilization (the passage from nature to culture), and as a prerequisite for social relations, with an evident parallel in the psychoanalytic
theory of the Oedipus complex, where it stands for the law that generates
sexual identity and the desire for the other. If the incest taboo is the
pivotal point between nature and culture it also follows, according to
Lévi-Strauss, that it is based on men’s trade of women. It is the woman
– the sister or the mother – which must be exchanged for social relations
to work50. Gayle Rubin has, in a classical article, objected that this conception does not designate a universal, timeless fact, but a description of
a certain social system: “the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves”51.
48
For a detailed analysis of the didactic function of Semiramis in the Cité des Dames
compared to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, see Dulac, Liliane: Sémiramis ou la Veuve
héroïque, in: Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux, vol 1,
Montpellier: C.E.O. 1978, p. 315-331.
49
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 108.
50
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. by James Harle
Bell, Boston: Beacon Press 1969, p. 481.
51
Gayle, Rubin: The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ’Political Economy’ of Sex, in:
Reiter, Rayna R. (ed.): Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review
54
CARIN FRANZÉN
A social order can change and according to Rubin it is hence necessary
to “liberate human sexual life from the archaic relationships which
deform it”52. Maureen Quilligan has Rubin’s article in mind when she
argues that Christine’s use of Semiramis serves to liberate feminine
desire and to create a place where no “scripted, male-authored law”
limits her power. Quilligan claims that Christine’s presentation of Semiramis not only and simply opposes a written misogynistic tradition, but
more profoundly the “original oedipal anxiety” or “castration anxiety”
from which she also wants to derive this tradition. To choose Semiramis,
an incestuous warrior queen, as the first foundation stone of the city is,
according to Quilligan, equivalent of saying “for woman, castration anxiety simply does not apply”53.
I think that psychoanalytic theory can be revealing of Christine’s
appropriation of hegemonic discourse, i.e. the divided configuration of
love and its object, but I cannot see that she is exempt from castration
anxiety. If one looks to Christine’s explanation of Semiramis’ behaviour,
the main motive seems first of all to be power, and more precisely maternal power, which Quilligan also points out. It is said that Semiramis “ne
voulait mie que en son empire eust autre dame couronnee que elle” and
that “il lui sembloit que nul autre homme n’estoit digne de l’avoir a
femme fors son propre filz”54. According to Quilligan this exclusion of
any other alliance than that of a mother’s with her son as a foundation of
her edifying construction is a rhetorical strategy, which opens up a discursive space for women “unimpeded by any limits”55.
However, considering that the Cité des Dames not only has an incestuous mother as its base but the mother of God, the Virgin Mary, as its
crown, the maternal power could not be more absolute, and I think that
this feminine fantasy, rather than a refutation, serves as a protection
against the castration anxiety the surrounding misogynistic attitudes
causes in women. This omnipotent fantasy, which protects and constitutes the “cité tres belle sanz pareille et de perpetuelle duree au monde”56,
also explains its violent grounding as a need to counteract the other side
of idealization, which is debasement. This strategy can be made even
Press 1975, p. 177.
52
Gayle: The Traffic in Women, p. 200.
53
Quilligan, Maureen: The Allegory of Female Authority, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press 1991, p. 80-84.
54
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 108.
55
Quilligan: The Allegory of Female Authority, p. 84.
56
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 56.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
55
clearer by looking at another example of violence, namely the motif of
decapitation, which recurs in various places in the Cité des Dames.
As “ensuivant pierres” which follows upon the foundation of the city
Christine presents the Amazons, and she gives special attention to queen
Thamaris who has Cyrus, the king of Persia, decapitated and then orders
his head to be thrown into a bucket with the blood of his barons, but even
inside the walls we find descriptions of this specific kind of violence. In
her enumeration of noble Ladies that have done good things for humanity Christine situates the Old Testament heroine Judith. The legend about
her contribution to liberate the Jewish people from an oppressor
by decapitation, could according to Freud be understood as a “symbolic
substitute for castrating”, and in this case as a vengeance against deflowering57.
Even if Freud’s theory of castration derives from a male analyst’s
theory, which does not apply to women, as Quilligan claims, and Judith
stays a virgin in Christine’s narration, she puts the violent act of this
female heroism in the foreground, “sanz paour prist l’espee qu’elle vid
au chevet et la trait nue, puis la haulça de toute sa force et trancha a
Olophernes la teste”58. If we further on take into consideration the
Christian context of Christine’s writing, and the fact that she gives virgins the highest status in a city crowned by the Virgin Mary, the motive
of vengeance represented by Judith seems to derive from a desire very
different from the discursive space described by Quilligan as “unimpeded
by any limits” where feminine sexuality could be liberated. Christine’s
strategy is as far as I can see a part of the hegemonic context, which it
nevertheless puts into process by a reversal of power relations, and by
an “appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once
used it”59.
AGAINST YOUR ENEMIES
On the one hand, the catalogue of women constituting the Cité des Dames
are idealized incarnations of virtues, they are all said to be “dames de
grant excellence”60, protected by the Virgin Mary even though they are
57
Freud, Sigmund: Contribution to the Psychology of Love: The Taboo of virginity,
in: Strachey (ed.): Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11, p. 207.
58
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 300.
59
Foucault: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 154.
60
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 250.
56
CARIN FRANZÉN
pagan or Jewish. This feature could indeed be related to the medieval cult
of Mary which, as Sarah Kay points out, is “both influencing, and
influenced by, that of the courtly Lady”61. On the other hand the stories
about these honourable Ladies are also in a fundamental manner connected to war and violence. Hence, Christine’s most effective argument
against misogyny could be understood as an upheaval of the hegemonic
division of love and its object by an opening of the idealization towards
what it represses, i.e. a cultural unconscious of violent and incestuous
dramas.
According to Kristeva the very possibility of idealization disappears
when the representation of women is transformed from an inaccessible
reference in courtly lyric to an object of knowledge and possession in
allegories such as the Roman de la rose: “La courtoisie est devenue
séduction et possession, et l’incantation, réalisme”62. Courtliness has
however from the beginning had its counterpart in the form of obscene
‘realistic’ poetry and satire, which Christine also points to at the beginning of her allegory referring to Matheolus’ book as a mockery, “qui
traicte en maniere de trufferie”. Idealization always has another side, or
as Howard Bloch puts it, “antifeminism and the idealization of the feminine are mirror images of each other”63. It is precisely this dualistic,
divided representation of love and its object, as either idealized or
debased, which is turned into an ambiguous discourse in the Cité des
Dames by a demonstration of the violent founding of an idealized femininity, which is also turned against male desire and its divided discourse.
It was certainly not Christine de Pizan’s purpose to de-idealize the
courtly representation of woman. In her book she uses a didactic
discourse presenting a virtue ethics where the object of medieval allegory
is addressed and represented as a subject of high dignity. At the end of
her book she writes:
Et mes tres cheres dames, chose naturelle est a cuer humain de soy
esjouyr quant il se treuve avoir victoire d’aucune emprise, et que ses
ennemis soient confondus. Si avez cause orendroit, mes dames, de
vous esjouyr vertueusement en Dieu et bonnes meurs par ceste nouvelle Cité veoir parfaicte, qui peut estre non mie seulement le refuge
61
Kay, Sarah: Courtly Contradictions. The Emergence of the Literary Object in the
Twelfth Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001, p. 180.
62
Kristeva: Histoire d’amour, p. 356.
63
Bloch: Medieval Misogyny, p. 160.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN’S APPROPRIATION OF THE COURTLY TRADITION
57
de vous toutes, c’est a entendre des vertueuses, mais aussi la deffence
et garde contre voz ennemis et assaillans, se bien la gardez.64
The ethical attitudes required for living in the Cité des Dames does not
challenge the medieval social order where woman’s virtue is determined
by a patriarchal and feudalistic order. However, and this is my concluding point, Christine’s reworking of the courtly tradition transforms the
other side of the idealization of women, i.e. debasement, into new symbolic representations, which dismantles the power of misogynistic
attacks: “que ses ennemis soient confondus”.
The change from melancholia into joy in the Cité des Dames bears
witness of a point of resistance constituting a feminine subject position
in a hegemonic discourse where women are assigned as objects for male
desire and fantasy. The devices Christine is using to achieve this are
perhaps adding fuel to the war of sexes, but they articulate a strategy
against misogyny and its effect, melancholia, and are the real reason why
the author, at the end of her book, can enjoin all women to rejoice.
64
Christine: Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 496-498.