Rape and Writing in the 'Heptameron' of Marguerite de Navarre.

Novella 4 of the Heptameron tells of a Flemish princess who fights off a rapist while visiting a nobleman's chateau. The princess, suspecting her host, wants to denounce her assailant and have him punished by her brother. However, her lady-in-waiting--or "lady-of-honor"--dissuades her, saying that no one will believe that she did not encourage the attack. It is a classic case of blaming and silencing the victim, and in the classroom the story never fails to elicit passionate discussion as students draw analogies with present-day treatment of rape victims. A similar response of late twentieth-century feminist sensitivity to the Heptameron is both the strength and the weakness of Patricia Cholakian's book.

Brantome, court gossip and memorialist, later recorded that the attack's victim was really Marguerite de Navarre herself, thinly disguised as the Flemish princess. From that report Professor Cholakian builds the central argument of her book: that the incident recounted in novella four became the generating force behind the Heptameron, that because of the experience, the woman silenced became a writer, retelling in her fiction the story she was prevented from telling that day, finally, that the Heptameron needs to be read as a gendered, autobiographical work. The ensuing chapters yield several new and interesting discussions of the troubling sexual exploitation and violence in the Heptameron. They pursue as well the central question of how a woman writer's gender influences her depiction of rape.

Cholakian's argumentation is at times rather shaky. Hypothesis glides into assertion and is soon presented as fact. While she recognizes that the plot of novella four is common to the genre, as are stories of rape and violence to women in late-medieval literature, she nevertheless argues: "In my view, the large number of novellas depicting sexual violence constitutes evidence in itself that the author was the victim of a traumatic rape experience that left an indelible mark on her psyche (and her text)" (10). Other elements crucial to her argument are presented without convincing substantiation. For example, she asserts that "[w]ithin the literary traditions of early modern France, rape and seduction amounted to the same thing" (12 and ch. 9). No doubt it would be fruitful to compare those related behaviors, but to conflate them into "the same thing" confuses both issues. Many of her subsequent discussions ensue from that conflation. Even the dying unrequited lover in novella 9 is called "the rapist" (84).

Although they do not emerge in any sustained theoretical framework, quotations from contemporary feminist and psychoanalytical theory are frequently brought to bear on Cholakian's discussion. A Freudian reading of a story where a woman soiled in a filthy outhouse becomes the object of laughter is original and thought-provoking. However, documentation from sixteenth-century sources is generally superficial. Definitions of key words are offered with little philological documentation. Marguerite's correspondence is referred to only sporadically, while her mystical poetry, which often overtly exploits images of ravishment and rapture, is ignored. At times there are misleading references to the historical context of the Heptameron, as when the word designating the reformist group "evangeliques" is explained as "noblewomen," whereas that important group consisted of both women and men, including Marot and Rabelais. Strong statements are occasionally based on misreadings or inaccurate word choice, as when, discussing the rape and murder of the mulekeeper's wife, Cholakian says, "the act of rape takes place while she is senseless" (51). Novella two insists that, while the brutally stabbed victim was raped only after she had lost "speech" and "bodily force," even as she was dying "she showed that she had not lost understanding (entendement)."

Cholakian's book records understandable indignation at the plight of victims of sexual exploitation, violence, and silencing in any century. She has raised vital questions about how Marguerite's femininity informs the Heptameron. Although some will argue with her scholarship and methodology, she has contributed to a forum in which she and others may explore the effects of sexual oppression on the growing voices of women writers in early modern France.

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA