Dans les miroirs de l'ecriture: la reflexivite chez les femmes ecrivains d' Ancien Regime and Sagesse divine et folie humaine: etude sur les structures antithetiques dans l'Heptameron de Marguerite de Navarre, 1492-1549. (Reviews).

Jean-Philippe Beaulieu et Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, eds. Dans les miroirs de l'ecriture: la reflexivite chez les femmes ecrivains d' Ancien Regime 

Paragraphes XVII. Montreal: Universite de Montreal, 1998. 171 pp. $15. ISBN: 2-921447-10-X.

Britt-Marie Karlsson. Sagesse divine et folie humaine: etude sur les structures antithetiques dans l'Heptameron de Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549)

Romanica Gothburgensia XLVII. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2001. 286 pp. SEK 261. ISBN: 91-7346-392-2.

Karlsson's study of antithesis in the Heptameron is a published dissertation, with many of the associated flaws. The author acknowledges that this topic is not new to scholarship on Marguerite's work; but claims to be writing the only systematic study of this feature, seen at work on all levels of the text: from paired words and phrases, through the structure of individual tales, to the relations among tales and narrators in the dialectic of the frame. The study is organized logically along this expanding scale of operation, with analyses of examples at each level and frequent citations of previous criticism. Occasionally these analyses offer interesting observations: for example, that Marguerite uses lexical antithesis much more frequently than Boccaccio or French novella writers; that she sometimes combines a pair of opposites with a pair of words that is not exactly opposite but made to feel so by association -- "sages et fine" vs. "folz et malicieux" (108); or that certain narrators tend to use this trope more than others, and that those who do are more openly expressive of religious ideas. Karlsson traces the figure of antithesis to two roots: the amorous paradoxes of Petrarch and the religious texts of Paul and of reformers who imitated his style; Marguerite draws from both.

Less successful is the attempt to classify types of antithesis, both by form and by content. This involves trying first to distinguish among "simple" antithesis, parallel antithesis, chiasmus, paradox, paradoxism, and oxymoron. The thematic classification is even more problematic: many examples belong to more than one topic, and the members of the last and largest category, "other," could, as Karlsson admits, also be distributed under previous thematic headings. Therefore, the count of which topics are more frequent is unreliable. Moreover, the ensuing discussion of themes does not follow the initial list and begins to pursue more and more widely associated clusters, slipping, for example, from creator/creature (not part of the list as such) to spirit/flesh, God/man, heaven/hell, and finally good/evil, all under one heading. Such slippage merely demonstrates how hopeless any effort at a clean classicification must be. Karlsson does draw the interesting conclusion that Marguerite's antitheses usually offer a c learly positive and negative pole, so that her work is in that sense less balanced or open-ended than some scholars have suggested.

The analysis of tale structure again offers some good observations: for example, that many of the tales can be summed up with an antithesis, and that these antitheses can work in different ways (e.g., a wife can oppose her husband's infidelity either with her own amours or with her chaste fidelity). The antitheses of the framing debate are more familiar: men and women, monks and laymen, examples and counterexamples, logic and false logic, etc. Karlsson fails to acknowledge the manifold influence of the Decameron at this framing level (e.g. the use of Dioneo as a foil for other narrators, the reversals from one tale to another, the contrasting topics from one day to the next, the framing references to human reason vs. bestial appetites and to health vs. sickness, church and garden). She seems to have been distracted by the passage which she cites from Mathieu-Castellani, who opposes the dialectical contrasts of the Heptamiron to the vertical progression of the Decameron, a passage too quickly accepted by Karls son as a full and accurate description of Boccaccio's text.

On the whole, the conclusions of this study are neither new nor surprising, as the frequent approving citation of previous criticism indicates. Karlsson is thoroughly versed in the scholarship of the field, but many topics of discussion rehash well known ideas without advancing them further. The study proper begins on page 68; before this come various pieces of introductory material, not obviously relevant to the rest of the study: e.g. the brief discussions of Marguerite's varied rhyme schemes in her poetry or of the definition of the novella genre. The discussion of genre classification surprisingly focuses solely on the novella and omits the dialogue genre, which is brought in much later in a discussion of the antithetical debate structure of the frame; that is a good and logical place for it, but the earlier discussion could be dropped without loss. And surely no one picking up a book with this title will need a basic introduction to Marguerite's life and work. What reader does Karlsson have in mind? Unde rgraduates will not get through the somewhat tedious analyses and scholars will find too much here that they already know. Nonetheless, Karlsson does succeed in making the case that antithesis is a major and characteristic feature of Marguerite's writing at all levels of structure.

Quite different is the collection of essays on French women writers edited by Beaulieu and Desrosiers-Bonin. This will long remain a necessary volume for anyone interested in women writers. It spans from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (in chronological order), from well known writers such as Christine de Pizan, Pernette du Guillet, and Madeleine de Scudery to less well known examples such as Nicole Estienne and Madame Belot, and considers a wide range of genres: poetry, translation, lamentation, essay, dialogue, correspondence, etc. The editors asked contributors to focus on the self-reflexivity of the woman writing, a topic general enough to allow for a wide variety of approaches and materials, yet focused enough to create some convergence. Indeed, one of the best aspects of the volume is the connectivity among its essays. There are two on Christine de Pizan: one by Le Brun-Gouanvic on L'Avision, tracing the developing image of the author across all three parts; the other by Deslauriers on L'Epistre d'Othea, comparing the manuscript to the first printed edition, which enhances some of the images of eloquent women but effaces the presence of the author. Two other essays address Marguerite de Valois: one, by Viennot, presents Marguerite's correspondence with Brantome as a crucial intermediate phase of experimental identities in her slowly changing attitude towards "mon sexe;" the other, by Villemur, focuses on a positive "philautie," viewing Marguerite's love letters as a personal mythology that complements the self-portrayal of her Memoires. Two essays touch on the events surrounding the assassination of the Duc de Guise: one by Polachek on Anne d'Este, whose lamentation for her murdered husband and brother is seen as politically crafted rather than truly intimate. For a woman of her status, no publication could be "le lieu privilegie de revelations intimes," argues Polachek (75-76); such apparently personal writing was necessarily produced for a calculated political effect. Noiset returns to these turbu lent events in her discussion of Marie de Gournay's lifelong desire to contribute to the contemporary discussion on politics; the essay argues that scholars have been putting too much emphasis on de Gournay's "sensibilite feminine" (110) rather than attending to her intellectual aim to comment with authority on current politics and political theory. Both these essays suggest that scholars should pay more attention to the intellectual or political interests of women writers rather than overemphasizing aspects that may seem to be more personal or womanly. Two essays analyze avid correspondents of the eighteenth century with nearly opposite results: Fizet portrays the provincial Madame Belot as defining herself not so much through her own letters as through the identity of her addressee, i.e. via the sheer privilege of correspondence with a lady of high nobility. Minier suggests that Madame de Charriere, in contrast, did not much care to whom she wrote, seizing the writing itself as a means of articulating and t hus coming to know her own thoughts and feelings.

Polachek's study of Anne d'Este suggests more broadly that women do not necessarily share the modern interior subjectivity that other scholars have seen taking shape during the Renaissance; Anne's writing expresses her political position and the interests of her class and clan rather than a modern individuality. A similar question about the relation of female identity to a modern subjectivity arises in Cartmill's essay on Mme.de Sevigne: her correspondence with her male cousin Bussy-Rabutin reveals her tendency to modify her own discourse to suit her cousin's images of both of them; she becomes the mirror for his self-creation. Cartmill finds in these letters a premodern sense of identity; the "modern" subject here means a Cartesian abstract self, rather than the interior subjectivity of Polachek's essay on a preCartesian century; but the question of how women relate to male-based definitions of "modern" subjectivity links the two essays in an intriguing manner. (The discussion of the kind of reflexivity in S evigne's letters also adds a third point of comparison to the essays on the letterwriting of Belot and Charriere.) A further reference to the Cartesian subject comes in Mechoulan's essay on Madeleine de Scudery: looking at the reflections of Scudery in the characters of Sappho and Damophile within the Grand Cyrus, Mechoulan comes to the conclusion that the female subject is "systematiquement dedouble," caught between self-possession and self-abandonment, unity and heteronomy. Thus the modern subject is "minee par la dissymetrie des roles sexuels" (134).

Another theme that runs through several essays concerns the ways in which women use their relations to male writing, through response or translation, to create an identity for themselves. Rieu writes about Pernette du Guillet's poems as offering, under the appearance of a response to or imitation of Sceve's poetry, a critique and correction, by which Pernette seeks to create a different and more classical aesthetic of clarity, simplicity, and mediocritas. Her rhymes are thus not so much expressions of amorous pain as experiments in a new kind of writing quite distinct from that of her supposed models. Iverson and Pieretti present Du Chatelet's translation of Newton's Principia as a strategic means to her own glory, a way of publishing her own scientific commentary without appearing to trespass as a woman into the forbidden territory of scientific publication.

Two humanist women are shown actively trying to change women's family relations. Yandell argues against previous readings of Nicole Estienne's Miseres de la femme mariee concerning the aims of the text. It is neither a personal expression of regret for having married the wrong man nor an argument for preferring the religious life to marriage, but rather an attempt to suggest some improvements to the institution of marriage: chiefly, to replace its male tyranny with a greater equality between the partners. Larsen contributes an essay on Catherine des Roches' two dialogues from the Secondes Oeuvres, comparing their aims and strategies. The debate between fathers is followed by a conversation between their daughters in which the humanist arguments on behalf of women's education give way to a desire for the sheer pleasures of literacy. The girls' dialogue is directly about reflexivity since the main task of Pasithae is to get Iris to alter her self-image into one more positive and empowering.

The quality of these essays is very high, and the interactions among them are a real delight as well as a provocation to thought about important issues. The editors have done an unusually good job of defining a focus that permits a wide variety of studies to interconnect fruitfully in many ways.