SOURCE: “‘Written in the Mind with an Iron Pen’: The Failure of Misogynistic Cliché; in the Rondibilis Episode of Rabelais's Tiers Livre (31-34),” in French Studies, Vol. XLIX, No. 3, July 1995, pp. 275-82.

[In the following essay, Berry considers the gender ideology behind Panurge's quest for a wife in Tiers Livre.Berry states: “Trapped between contradictory clichés about women,” Panurge is “unable to proceed with the projects of marriage and paternity he so desperately wants to undertake.”]

The consultation with the physician Rondibilis in Rabelais's Tiers Livre is one of the most shockingly misogynistic episodes in all of his four books. Panurge, we remember, wants to know if he should marry or not, a question which leads him to consult with figures representative of all known forms of wisdom, human and divine. As do all of the earthly sages, Rondibilis tells him he should. If Panurge feels ‘les poignans aiguillons de sensualité’ (p. 533),¹ and if he is unable to find relief through wine, medicinal drugs and herbs, hard labour, or fervent study, the four means other than the sexual act that restrain physical desire, he should indeed marry (Chapter 31). However, Panurge has a second question: will he be cuckolded if he marries? The rub is that Rondibilis also answers this question in the affirmative (Chapter 32), and launches into a long gynophobic tirade:

Quand je diz femme, je diz un sexe tant fragil, tant variable, tant muable, tant inconstant et imperfaict, que Nature me semble […] s’estre esguarée de ce bon sens […] quand elle a basty la femme […]. Certes Platon ne sçait en quel rang il les doibve colloquer: ou des animaus raisonnables, ou des bestes brutes. Car Nature leurs a dedans le corps posé en lieu secret et intestin un animal, un membre, lequel n’est es hommes […] par la poincture et fretillement douleureux [duquel] […] tout le corps est en elles esbranlé, tous les sens raviz, toutes affections interinées, tous pensemens confonduz; de maniere que, si Nature ne leur eust arrousé le front d’un peu de honte, vous les voiriez comme forcenées courir l’aiguillette, […] parce que cestuy terrible animal a colliguance à toutes les parties principales du corps, comme est evident en l’anatomie.

(pp. 539-40)

However, as Lawrence Kritzman has argued,² this depiction of the womb as animal avidum generandi,³ and of women as monstrous figures who both shock and frighten, has less to do with women than with men and with the mixed emotions that make up male subjectivity as it is expressed in this episode.⁴ On the one hand, there is attraction and dependence, for what makes a man a man in Panurge's and Rondibilis's eyes is the power to reproduce, and clearly, men need women to constitute them as fathers and patriarchal figures. On the other, there is a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety in the face of inexorable female lust. Panurge's repeated assertions of potency throughout the Tiers Livre are also expressions of his underlying fear of insufficiency and impotence, a spectre held up to him by Frere Jean in the episode of ‘les cloches de Varennes’ (chapter 28)⁵ and quite openly expressed in this episode by Rondibilis: ‘[N]e vous esbahissez si sommes en dangier perpetuel d’estre coquz, nous qui n’avons pas tous jours bien de quoy payer et satisfaire au contentement’ (p. 541). Above all perhaps, the anxiety derives from the unknowable nature of female sexuality, hidden in a dark and secret place, an animal with an independent life which lies beyond the grasp of men's reason and language. Women are described as an absence or a lack in this episode, as invisible as the moon when the sun shines, and with a dark, hidden life of their own.⁶ ‘If, as Lacan claims, woman's place is outside of language (“le sexe de la femme ne lui dit rien”), then man is inevitably fated to be incapable of taking hold of her discursively, or in any other manner.’⁷

It is this discursive failure which interests me above all in this episode: how the male interlocutors fail to read the text of women as they themselves speak and write it, and how they consequently become the victims of their own clichés. A change of rhetorical style occurs after Rondibilis's medico-scientific treatise in chapters 31 and 32. The remainder of the episode consists of three exemplary tales, each with a negative moral about women's nature, a moral which, to use Rondibilis's phrase, is to be written in men's minds with an iron pen: ‘escrivez ce mot en vostre cervelle, avec un style de fer’ (p. 538). But between the lines of these tales, another message emerges which contradicts and subverts the ironclad cliché. The fables of the Rondibilis episode illustrate the same crisis of exemplarity that François Rigolot discerned in another intensely misogynistic juncture of Rabelais's books, Panurge's and Pantagruel's amatory adventure with a lady of Paris (Pantagruel, chapters, 21-24).⁸ The stories in this episode of the Tiers Livre also strive to ‘come on top’ (venir au dessus) of the woman,⁹ but she eludes the prison of their words. Like the Parisian lady, women remain a blank page and an enigma to be deciphered in the Rondibilis episode, always beyond the range of men's comprehension and their language, a dark continent still unexplored.¹⁰

The first tale, recounted in chapter 33, is offered by Rondibilis as a ‘remedy’ to the fate of cuckoldry,¹¹ a fate made inevitable, according to the theories he has just set forth, by the insatiable sexual desires of women. But this is surely the strangest and most contradictory ‘remède à Coqüage’ ever offered, for the theme of the fable is men's attraction to infidelity rather than their fear of it. First left out of Jupiter's distribution of feast days and then given a day he must share with Jealousy, Cuckoldry is depicted as a God who visits only those who worship him,¹² husbands with beautiful wives:

Adjoincte feut promesse […] infallible qu’à ceulx qui […] chommeroient sa feste, cesseroient de toute negociation, mettroient leurs affaires propres en non chaloir pour espier leurs femmes, les resserrer et mal traicter par Jalousie […], [Coqüage] seroit continuellement favorable, les aymeroit, les frequenteroit, seroit jour et nuyct en leurs maisons; jamais ne seroient destituez de sa praesence.

(p. 544).

Marital faithfulness, not infidelity, is the tragedy in Rondibilis's story. If husbands do not participate in Cuckoldry's worship, if they do not spy upon, imprison, beat, and otherwise mistreat their wives, the god withdraws his ‘favours’ and leaves them eternally alone: ‘pourrir seulz avecques leurs femmes, sans corrival aulcun’ (p. 544).

We are back in the labyrinth of male subjectivity, for this tale has little to do with women. Not only does Rondibilis suggest that Cuckoldry derives from men's rather than women's desires, his allusion to the rival as a friendly enemy also brings forth the ever-apparent fact that it is men who make other men cuckolds. Carpalim recounts with pride ‘the colour’ of the rhetoric he uses with married women ‘pour les mettre aux toilles et attirer au jeu d’amours’ (p. 545), and the implications of his bragging are not lost on the would-be husband Panurge. At the end of the chapter, he insists that under no circumstances can Rondibilis come to his wedding or treat his future wife if she falls ill (pp. 548-49). This syndrome of seduction and betrayal victimizes men as well as women, a victimization both desired and feared.

And even sadder and more complex aspects of the Fable of Coqüage emerge when we consider the exemplary anecdote on which it is based, an Aesopian fable recounted by Plutarch,¹³ which Rondibilis has recast in a most revealing way. In Plutarch's version, Grief or Mourning, not Cuckoldry, was the god forgotten by Jupiter in the distribution of feast days, and Sorrow and Tears, not Jealousy, were the goddesses with whom Mourning shared his day. These underlying regretful emotions belie the surface insouciance of Rondibilis's text and infuse it with feelings far different from those openly expressed. But the interlocutors remain impervious to the interlinear and intertextual implications of the story, and respond with satisfied laughter, bad readers of their own natures and their own moral tales. And women, the ostensible ‘subject’ of the fable, have been left out of it almost entirely, their role in ‘le jeu d’amour’ marginalized and their feelings about it suppressed. They continue to stand beyond the range of comprehension, their enigmatic silence still unbroken.

And the silence of women begins to weigh heavily on the episode. Despite the interlocutors' apparent complacency, there seems to be a growing unease about the premisses of the long conversation that has occurred among them, an uncomfortable awareness that they have failed to ‘come on top’ of women, that women's nature and truths have eluded all their theories and stories. This uneasiness prevents the episode from concluding with the Fable of Cuckoldry. Hippothadée brings the chapter to a close by alluding to Eve and the desire for knowledge she incarnates,¹⁴ and this evocation opens onto a new chapter entitled: ‘Comment les femmes ordinairement appetent choses defendues’. As the title indicates, we are firmly in the domain of clichés about women, but here the focus changes significantly—away from the subject of sexuality that has dominated the prior chapters, to the issue of voice and language. Tales are told to illustrate that speech is the ‘forbidden thing’ that women desire, but, as with the Fable of Cuckoldry, the interlocutors are blinded to the real message of the stories they are telling. For these tales have less to do with Eve than with Adam, with the male desire to hear women speak and finally to gain knowledge of them. And this male curiosity proves to be the most forbidden and dangerous ‘thing’ of all.

The chapter consists of two exemplary tales, ‘morales comoedies’ (p. 547), to use Rabelais's term, and both are stories of imprisoned women whose voices have been suppressed. The first, recounted by Ponocrates, concerns the petition of the nuns and ‘meres discretes’ (p. 546) of l’abbaye de Coingnaufond to Pope John XXII for the right to hear one another's confessions: ‘alleguantes que les femmes de religion ont quelques petites imperfections secretes, les quelles honte insupportable leurs est deceler aux homes confesseurs: plus librement, plus familierement les diroient unes aux aultres soubs le sceau de confession’ (p. 546). The Pope responds negatively to their petition, alluding to women's indiscreet speech, and the nuns reply indignantly that they can keep secrets quite well ‘et plus que ne font les homes’ (p. 546). To test them, the Pope gives them a box which they are instructed not to open ‘sus poine de censure ecclesiasticque et de excommunication eternelle’ (pp. 546-47), a box in which he has placed a living bird, a small finch.

This image of the bird in the box explodes in many directions. It is, first, the very image of the nuns' imprisoned condition and of the suppression of their voices; it is a ‘voice box’ kept closed by male command. Further, it mirrors the image of the womb as Rondibilis described it, a container ‘posé en lieu secret et intestin’ with a living animal inside it. Women have two dangerous ‘members’ hidden within their bodies, but of the two, women's voices are far more threatening and demand stronger and more violently repressive measures. The tale of Hans Carvel's attempt to plug his wife's sexuality by always wearing her ‘ring’, told by Frère Jean in chapter 28, is referred to again in this episode as a fine joke,¹⁵ but stories of male efforts to repress women's voices are not funny at all. The bird in the box evokes Philomela, whose tongue was cut out by her brother-in-law after he had raped her and who was given voice again by her metamorphosis into a nightingale. In a similar way, the nuns’ finch threatens to break the cruel silence imposed on them, perhaps to tell of similar crimes. The prospect of such a dangerous liberation also recalls the story of Pandora who, like the nuns, was given a container she was instructed not to open. Like her, the nuns burn with curiosity as they regard the box, ‘elles grisloient en leurs entendemens d’ardeur de veoir qu’estoit dedans’ (p. 547); and also like Pandora, they open it, symbolically to loose female voices and female truths upon the world. With such a spectre in mind, the Pope consequently refuses the nuns the right to confession they have requested.

However, we must ponder the role of the Pope in this story, for to tantalize with closed boxes, especially those with living voices inside them, is covertly to encourage that the boxes be opened, that the voices be freed and heard. In fact, the Pope says that he would like to accede to the nuns' request (‘“Il n’y a rien […] que voluntiers ne vous oultroye”’ [p. 546]). and in the anecdote on which this story is based, he does so. Tradition has it that John XXII, pope of Avignon from 1316 to 1335, granted to the nuns of the abbaye of Fontevrault, near Saumur, the privilege of confessing to their abbess.¹⁶ As with the Fable of Cuckoldry, Rabelais tampers with an exemplary anecdote to change its outcome. It is thus by his hand that the nuns are silenced, he is their real oppressor. Yet the curiosity he shares with the Pope to hear what they have to say not only persists, it emerges to the surface of the episode and becomes the subject of the final tale.

Like the fable of Cuckoldry, ‘la morale comoedie de celluy qui avoit espousé une femme mute’ (p. 547) is a story of remedies that fail and of ‘bad medicine’. This ‘patelinage’ (p. 548) is a didactic play for doctors-to-be presented years before at Montpellier by a group of medical students, among them Rondibilis and one François Rabelais.¹⁷ Though we do not know what part he played (while nine physicians are named, the farce only has three characters), it is of utmost significance that Rabelais inscribes himself by name as an actor/spectator of the play, and it is also important that he presents himself as a student who has a lesson to learn from it. The writer seems to be cautioning himself against the temptation to give voice to women, a temptation that has been growing throughout the episode. This play seems written by Rabelais as a warning for himself.

Epistemon recounts the plot, and by a slip of the tongue, reveals that the wife has not always been mute. He says that ‘[sa] parole [fut] recouverte’, suggesting a recovery not a discovery of speech. The wife's tongue has been, if not cut like that of Philomela, then tied by ‘un encyliglotte qu’elle avoit soubs la langue’ (p. 547). Yet, despite this suggestion that the wife's muteness was desired and perhaps violently achieved in the past, her present silence stands as a mystery that neither the husband nor the physician can resist or endure. The men play the part of Pandora in this play. It all begins when the husband brings his mute wife to the physician because he wants her to speak: ‘Le bon mary voulut qu’elle parlast’ (p. 547). The doctor accedes to the husband's desire as if he possesses it too. He cuts the wife's tongue free, liberates her ‘mother tongue’ that was bound in the past, a transgression and act of ‘bad medicine’ for which he will be punished in the future.

However, the astonishing expression of male desire for female speech which opens the farce is simultaneously contravened by the regiment of nine physicians who, as actors and spectators, loom around the lone woman as if to usurp her voice, and the author's narrative strategy accomplishes that usurpation. Rabelais eschews the dialogic form he uses so frequently throughout the Tiers and Quart Livres, and is instead content with Epistemon's third-person plot summary. Consequently, though we are told that the wife explodes in talk (‘elle parla tant et tant’ (p. 547)), her voice is not heard, her words are not recounted. As he silenced the nuns in the previous tale, as he effaced the writing of Pantagruel's Parisian lady, Rabelais again uses his art to stifle the act of communication that his characters want to achieve. The articulateness of women, even as it is imagined, must be contained and controlled by the author and his medical confrères who desire to remain masters of public speech and spectacle. The power of language must be closely held and guarded, for a speaking or writing woman can be dangerous.¹⁸

Turning away from the temptation truly to give voice to the mute wife, the play, appropriately, moves on to develop the theme of deafness, and the mechanism of deafness to the speaking wife is a cliché. Now the author takes refuge in a series of predictable events expressed by equally predictable set phrases ‘written with an iron pen’ by the medieval misogynistic tradition: clichés first about women's incessant speech and then about their terrifying physical power. We are told that the wife spoke so much that the husband wants her tongue tied again. He returns to the physician for a second and counter-remedy ‘contre cestuy interminable parlement de femme’ (p. 548), but the physician replies that once the Pandora's box of female speech has been opened, it cannot be closed again: ‘en son art bien avoir remedes propres pour faire parler les femmes, n’enavoir pour les faire taire’ (p. 547). The only cure, he says, is ‘surdité du mary’ (p. 548), and he makes the husband deaf by magic.

Driven to rage by this development, the wife turns on her husband and beats him, becoming the violent and frightening figure of Panurge's worst nightmares, and the animalistic creature described by Rondibilis in chapter 32. At the same time, however, the validity of that portrait is undermined by the farce, for surely the wife's rage at her husband's refuge in deafness is understandable. Despite itself, this tale projects an acknowledgement that female hysteria comes not from the womb as Rondibilis suggested, but from women's linguistic imprisonment, their anger at not being listened to or heard.

As if to acknowledge this insight, the farce culminates in an act of poetic justice, for the physician learns what it is like to have his own voice fall on deaf ears. When he asks the husband for his salary, the latter replies ‘qu’il estoit vrayement sourd et qu’il n’entendoit sa demande’ (p. 548). The structure of the remedy now collapses entirely, as the physician makes his third mistake. He sprinkles a magic powder on the husband to make him crazy, but the revenge backfires. The mad husband and the enraged wife together turn on the doctor and beat him almost to death. And thus ends the didactic tale of how not to practise medicine. The moral of the story is to keep women mute, keep their voice boxes closed, else pandemonium will be loosed on the world of men. As husbands stand in danger of being ‘coqu[s]’, so do doctors stand in danger of being ‘battu[s]’ and ‘desrobbé[s]’, a fate which Rondibilis and Panurge recall and act to forestall by the elaborate ceremony of payment which occurs in the last lines of the episode.¹⁹

But, as we have seen, other and more subversive messages peep out from between the lines of this farce and of the other tales told in this episode, messages which reverse their overt exemplary meanings. These stories are as deaf as the husband, deaf to their own truths. Despite itself, the Rondibilis episode acknowledges the oppression of the phallocentric order—that women have been denied language, imprisoned in silence, have had their tongues tied. It acknowledges their desire for speech, even their right to it, and, most significantly, these stories acknowledge men's desire and curiosity to hear women speak. But this desire is mingled with fear, of the rage of women at having been imprisoned in silence for so long, and of their potential power to talk back—and to strike back. Thus, while expressing the seduction of female speech, these stories condemn it as a ‘forbidden thing’ and, with comic ferocity, punish those who are tempted to yield to its allure.

Yet underlying it all is the Mourning evoked by the Fable of Cuckoldry, sadness at ‘le jeu d’amour’ which victimizes men and women alike and at the broken communication which condemns the game to continue. If women are imprisoned in silence, men are imprisoned in ironclad habits of mind and of language which keep them from attaining their desires. Indeed, this is the crux of Panurge's dilemma in the Tiers Livre. Trapped between contradictory clichés about women, ‘sarcasmes, moqueries et redictes contradictories’ (p. 440), he is unable to proceed with the projects of marriage and paternity he so desperately wants to undertake, and those same habits of mind prevent him from seeking out the one voice that can resolve the dilemma, the voice of his prospective wife. And the desire to hear that voice does not go away; on the contrary, it becomes the dominant concern of the Quart Livre. The goal of this new voyage is precisely to hear a word pronounced by a woman's voice, one held in a container very similar to the nuns' voice box, ‘le mot de la dive Bouteille Bacbuc’.

However, if the quest for a woman's voice is generative of the Quart Livre, the prohibition against hearing it militates against the successful outcome of that quest. To the end, women remain a silence and an absence in Rabelais's four books, literally and figuratively ‘un trou à remplir’. Because he could not escape the prison of his own words and conceptualize women positively, the future stands in jeopardy at the end of the Quart Livre. A wife is not found, the oracle of the divine bottle is not heard, no child is born, and the genealogy of the giants comes to an end with this book.²⁰

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, references to the Tiers Livre, included in parenthesis, are from Vol. 1 of Pierre Jourda's edition of Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols (Paris, Garnier, 1962).

2. Lawrence Kritzman, ‘Rabelais and the Representation of Male Subjectivity: The Rondibilis Episode as Case Study’, in The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 29-44.

3. See Plato's Timaeus, 91c ‘The animal within (women) is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity […].’ Trans. by Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1210.

4. Kritzman calls the Rondibilis episode a ‘case study’ in male gender identity because it ‘problematizes the quest to become a man, and with it the way in which gynophobic myths risk trapping men within the reified male/female dichotomy, rendering them angry victims of their own paranoia’ (p. 30).

5. ‘Desja voy je ton poil grisonner en teste. Ta barbe, par les distinctions du gris, du blanc, du tanné et du noir, me semble une mappemonde […]. [Q]uand les neiges sont es montaignes, je diz la teste et le menton, il n’y a pas grand chaleur par les valées de la braguette’ (pp. 519-20).

6. ‘Mon amy, le naturel des femmes nous est figuré par la Lune, et en aultres choses et en ceste qu’elles se mussent, elles se constraignent, et dissimulent en la veue et praesence de leurs mariz. Iceulx absens, elles prennent leur adventaige, se donnent du bon temps, vaguent, trotent, deposent leur hypocrisie et se declairent: comme la lune, en conjunction du soleil, n’apparoist on ciel, ne en terre; mais, en son opposition, estant au plus du soleil esloingnée, reluist en sa plenitude et apparoist toute, notamment on temps de nuyct. Ainsi sont toutes femmes femmes’ (p. 539).

7. Kritzman, p. 33.

8. ‘Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity’, PMLA 109.2 (1994), 225-37. See also two articles by Carla Freccero: ‘Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel 24),’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1985), 57-67 and ‘The Instance of the Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais’. Rabelais's Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art, ed. by Raymond C. La Charité (Lexington, French Forum, 1986), pp. 45-55.

9. Rigolot, ‘Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity’, pp. 229-300.

10. It was Lacan who spoke of the ‘dark continent of sexuality’. Quoted by Kritzman, p. 33.

11. ‘[E]scrivez ce mot en vostre cervelle avec un style de fer, que tout home marié est en dangier d’estre coqu. Coqüage est naturellement des appennages de mariage […]. [Q]uand vous oirez dire de quelqu’un ces trois mots: ‘Il est marié’ si vous dictez: “Il est doncques, ou a esté, ou sera, ou peult estre coqu” […]’ (p. 538).

12. A point made by Kritzman, p. 43.

13. Consolatio ad Apollonium, XIX, 112.

14. ‘Certes (dist Hippothadée), aulcuns de nos docteurs disent que la premiere femme du monde, que les Hebrieux noment Eve, à poine eust jamais entré en tentation de manger le fruict de tout sçavoir s’il ne luy eust esté defendu’ (p. 545).

15. ‘—Ha, ha, ha (dist Carpalim en riant), voylà un remede encores plus naïf que l’anneau de Hans Carvel’ (p. 544). He is referring to the Fable of Cuckoldry.

16. Jourda, p. 546, n. 2.

17. ‘Je ne vous [Rondibilis] avois oncques puys veu que jouastez à Monspellier, avecques nos antiques amys Ant. Saporta, Guy Bouguier, Balthazar Noyer, Tollet, Jan Quentin, François Robinet, Jan Perdrier, et François Rabelais, la morale comœdie de celuy qui avoit espousé une femme mute … ’ (p. 547).

18. Ann Rosalind Jones makes these points in her Introduction to the ‘Cluster on Early Modern Women’, PMLA, 109.2 (1994), 187.

19. ‘Puys (Panurge) s’approcha de luy et luy mist en main, sans mot dire, quatre Nobles à la rose.

    Rondibilis les print tresbien, puis luy dist en effroy, comme indigné: “Hé, hé, hé, monsieur, il ne failloit rien. Grand mercy toutesfoys. De meschantes gens jamais je ne prens rien; rien jamais des gens de bien je ne refuse. Je suys tousjours à vostre commendement.

    —En poyant, dist Panurge.

    —Cela s’entend”, respondit Rondibilis’ (p. 549).

20. The ideas for this article were generated during an NEH summer seminar, ‘Marguerite of Navarre and Rabelais: Reading the Heptameron and the Third Book’, conducted by Professor Marcel Tetel at Duke University, Summer 1991.