SOURCE: Ching, Barbara. “French Feminist Theory, Literary History, and Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses.” French Literature Series 16 (1989): 17-26.

[In the following essay, Ching maintains that in Les Angoysses douloureuses de Crenne writes of her imprisonment in the female body that is used by men to make her an object, but then uses that status to express her subjectivity.]

The despairing claim of Luce Irigaray that “any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (133) raises the despairing question of the status and history of her own discourse (Felman 4). If women are categorically and eternally excluded from subjectivity, and therefore excluded from male discourse, speaking only in the name of the man—father or husband—who controls them, we have to wonder who Luce Irigaray is and how she came to write all this feminist theory.

Fortunately these are not the unanswerable questions critics of Irigaray make them out to be; they arise because Irigaray fails to theorize and historicize her own practice. Put quite simply, she re-appropriated those so-called “masculine” theories of the subject: she turned male language to her own use. Paradoxically, this practice, I would like to argue, is theorized and put into a historical framework by Monique Wittig, Irigaray's apparent opponent in the debates that have divided French feminists. While Wittig acknowledges women's speculum-like proclivity for “parrot speech,” she also insists that a woman, by saying “I,” “reappropriates language as a whole” and becomes a subject “for herself” (“Gender” 66). This blossoming of woman's subjectivity is in fact a result of her consciousness of her oppression, her consciousness of men's power over her (“One” 52). The point is not that women seeking freedom from patriarchal structures begin speaking and writing in a newly formed language of their own, in a “parler femme” or “écriture féminine”; rather, they seize the language that surrounds them and speak it from their own standpoint. Thus, Wittig discusses her appropriation of a line from Scève's Délie that allows Catherine Legrand, the main character of her L'Opoponax, to say “I” (“Gender” 72). Thus, Irigaray's discussions, heavily imbedded with quotation, or sometimes nothing but quotation, of Freud, of Plotinus, of Plato, of Marx, build a devastating feminist context for writing about, or even for repeating, but with a vengeance, the very words of these particular representatives of patriarchal discourse.¹

Women have always done this; however, this continuity, their history, has been rendered invisible. Their manifestations of subjectivity have in fact “always been appropriated by the masculine”; thus Irigaray writes as a woman, apparently (but only apparently) with neither a history nor a theory to call her own. Even Simone de Beauvoir, whose personal autobiography has been so important for the feminist tradition, claims that she wrote without feminist predecessors: “when I started, I could think of nobody as a model” (Blair 242). Again it is Wittig who offers the possibility of a history of this constant feminist appropriation and reappropriation of discourse: she calls it the “Trojan Horse”—her image for the history of feminist literary forms, for the tradition of encroachment upon patriarchal discourse, an image created in distinct opposition to “écriture féminine” (“Trojan” 46). Trojan Horses look familiar, unthreatening, and conciliatory, but they are actually new literary forms, “always produced,” she reminds us, “in hostile territory,” and operating “as a war machine upon the context of [their] epoch” (45). They turn language to the expression of women's subjectivity.

Thus, almost in spite of itself, French feminist theory leads us to a feminist literary history. To test this model I turn to an obvious expression of subjectivity, one of the earliest examples of autobiography in French, to what Simone de Beauvoir said she lacked, to what Irigaray claims has always been the province of the masculine, part I of Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (1538), disguised, true to the form of a Trojan Horse, as a sentimental medieval romance. Parts two and three are a traditional story of chaste love and chivalry. Municipal and legal documents of the time, however, indicate that much of part I is factual.

Hélisenne de Crenne appears to be the builder and giver of several “Trojan Horses” in France's literary history. Unfortunately, apart from the information her own writings contain, little is known about her. A Picarde, born between 1510 and 1520, her maiden name was Marguerite de Briet. Hélisenne, an unusual name,² was apparently chosen by Marguerite herself, in an interesting and rare act of self-assertion, to be both her pen name and the name of her autobiographical character in Les Angoysses, her first published work. Hélisenne thus not only creates a new form of saying “I”; she also names herself. In fact, she is the only French writer of the sixteenth century that I know of to use a “nom de plume.” In addition, what is particularly interesting about this pseudonym is that it at once allows Hélisenne creative authority without rendering her invisible: the name, pointing the curious to her home at Crasnes (her husband's estate), is relatively transparent. In 1539, continuing her autobiographical project and formal innovations, she published Les Epistres familieres et invectives; these letters repeat the story told in part one of Les Angoysses and go on to describe the publication of that book, and her husband's reaction to it. They also defend woman's role as writer and intellectual. While invective letters were a familiar form, Hélisenne's, again true to Wittig's notion of the Trojan Horse, contained something new: according to their American translators, in them “Hélisenne attempts what had perhaps never been attempted before in French literature, the progressive construction of a story through letters, without the use of connective materials” (Mustacchi 5). Hélisenne's last publication was her prose translation and annotation of the first four books of the Aeneid (1541). This work appears to be the first unabridged French prose translation.³

Les Angoysses was Hélisenne's most successful work, going through eight printings between 1538 and the last one in 1560. The plot is a common one of adulterous seduction and betrayal, yet it also lays bare the building of one of Wittig's Trojan Horses: Hélisenne exposes and counteracts male power as she creates her own discourse from it. The book opens with Hélisenne, a bored and very young married woman (she claims to have been wed at age eleven), urging her husband to plan a trip to the city; once there she immediately falls in love with an attractive young man (Guenelic). Subsequently she spends most of her time gazing at him, either from her window or in public places such as church or the courtroom. Her husband is enraged by this behavior but his anger only serves to force Hélisenne into secrecy: she meets clandestinely with her lover, exchanges letters with him, and most of all, continues to look at him. When her husband discovers that the liaison has continued to flourish, his anger turns to violence. In the meantime, rumor-mongers have defamed Guenelic to Hélisenne and Hélisenne to Guenelic. Disillusioned and heartbroken, she is taken to one of her husband's castles where she is kept prisoner in a tower; there she decides to write her story.

From the start it is clear that Hélisenne knows she has built a Trojan Horse within the walls of her husband's territory: the work insists upon an unusual degree of feminist consciousness. In an age when both literary production and consumption were almost exclusively the domain of elite men, Hélisenne's title page reveals that her book is dedicated “aux lisantes,” to women readers. Even when considered in the light of the few women writers of her time, Hélisenne's dedication is an unusual act: Pernette du Guillet wrote her Rymes (1545) for Maurice Scève, and although Louise Labé dedicated her Euvres (1555) to a woman, the dedication is to an individual, to Clemence de Bourges. Marguerite de Navarre, too, dedicated the works published in her lifetime to individuals. Only Hélisenne dedicates her work to women as a group. She insists upon this feminine audience throughout the book by continuously addressing her women readers. The title page is followed by “l'epistre dedicative de Dame Hélisenne à toutes honnestes dames” and exhortations to “trescheres dames” (1, 15), “mes dames” (5, 81), etc. are scattered throughout the chapters. Furthermore, her voice is not merely a mirror of male discourse: she reshapes the available discursive forms both to tell her own story and to make it a woman's story. Although she is writing autobiography, she does not solely stress the uniqueness of her personal experience; she also constantly reminds her “lisantes” that what happened to her could happen to any other woman. Within the framework of her own historical situation and experience, Hélisenne knows she is describing and critiquing the fate of women in her society.

As Wittig points out, giving form to this knowledge constitutes both consciousness of oppression and a revolutionary, subjective response to it. Thus, even while constituting herself as a subject of discourse, Hélisenne sees herself as a woman, man's oppressed other; she does not—indeed in a non-fictional life story of a married woman she cannot—refuse the role. In fact, she proudly and lengthily describes herself, particularly in the early chapters, almost purely as an object of male desire. She gives no indication of what she actually looks like; rather she stresses that men liked to look at her. As she makes clear in the first chapter, her body is the attraction; at least that is what men say:

… ma personne croissoit, et premier que pervinse au treiziesme an de mon aage, j'estoye de forme elegante, et de tout si bien proportionnée que j'excedoye toutes aultres femmes en beaulté de corps; et si j'eusse esté aussi accomplye en beaulté de visage, je m'eusse hardiment osé nommer des plus belles de France. Quand me trouvoye en quelque lieu remply de grand multitude de gens, plusieurs venoient entour moy pour me regarder comme par admiration, disans tous en general: «Voyez là le plus beau corps que je veis jamais». Puis après, en me regardant au visaige, disoient: «Elle est belle, mais il n'est à accomparer au corps.»

(3)⁴

This passage reveals the near anonymity with which Hélisenne is viewed: the male gaze constitutes her as a blank object of desire, a female body. Furthermore, this gaze surrounds her (in French “entour”—and recall that she is locked in her husband's “tour” at the end) to such an extent that before she becomes a writer its presence seems to be the most salient, most noteworthy feature of her existence. She boasts that from an early age “princes et grans seigneurs” went out of their way to look at her (3). Another long passage describes a similar occurrence in the city she and her husband move to:

En la compaignée de mes damoyselles, je cheminoie lentement … tout le monde jectoit son regard sur moy, en disant les ungs aux aultres: «Voyez là la creature excedant et oultrepassant toutes aultres en formosité de corps». Et après qu'ilz m'avoient regardée, ilz alloient appeller les aultres, les faisant saillir de leurs domiciles affin qu'ilz me veissent. C'estoit une chose admirable de veoir le peuple qui s'assembloit entour moy; et quand je fuz parvenue jusques au temple, plusieurs jeunes hommes venoyent en circuit tout à l'entour de moy.

(22)

Again the emphasis is on Hélisenne as female body, surrounded, indeed trapped, by the male gaze.⁵

Returning the desiring gaze is Hélisenne's first step away from this subjection and toward subjectivity.⁶ On the first day in the city, Guenelic, like many men, falls in love with her upon seeing her. However, he is the only man to whom she ever wanted to return the gaze:

… je veis ung jeune homme … Après l'avoir plus que trop regardé, retiray ma veue; mais par force estoye contraincte retourner mes yeulx vers luy. Il me regardoit aussi, dont j'estoys fort contente; mais je prenoye admiration, en moymesmes, de me trouver ainsi subjecte à regarder ce jeune homme, ce que d'aultres jamais ne m'estoit advenu. J'avoys accoustumé de prendre et captiver les hommes, et ne me faisoye que rire d'eulx; mais moymesmes miserablement je fuz prise.

(5)

Her heightened self-consciousness gives her insight into this mechanism of male power, a mechanism that she then attempts to turn to her own use. However, as the passage indicates, Hélisenne's enjoyable feelings of power in expressing her own desire, her subjectivity, are paradoxically accompanied by a sense of subjection: “je fuz prise.” Indeed, when Hélisenne's husband becomes aware of the affair, he resorts to beatings and punishments in order to tighten his hold on her. In spite of these brutal attacks, Hélisenne retains her newly acquired self-determination. Hélisenne and Guenelic continue conducting their love affair almost entirely through long sessions of this mutual gazing for a great deal of the book.

Hélisenne's refusal to break off the affair drives her once benign husband to beat her on several further occasions. However, the greater the exertion of his power, the greater the newly freed power that responds to it. Once Hélisenne is forced to give up the gaze directed at her beloved, she looks instead at her state of submission: thus the total subjugation to which her husband's brutality attempts to reduce her repeatedly incites her to writing, to what Monique Wittig calls “a direct exercise of power” (“Trojan” 48). The dedicatory letter establishes the links between the weakness (effeminacy) of her body, man's control over it, and her subsequent act of self-determination through writing, particularly through writing for women. Addressing “mes nobles dames” and “trescheres dames,” she describes her impotence, mentioning specifically “ma main tremblante” and “ma debile main.” The thought of communicating this weakness to her readers, however, allows her to fortify herself (“reprendre mes forces”) for the writer's task (1). Many times the fury of her husband reduces her to both speechlessness and bodily weakness (9, 13, 18, 33, 34, 87). She thereby comes to the realization that her body, so desired by men, is actually an “infelice prison corporele” under their control (18). The beatings, which begin in chapter eleven, highlight Hélisenne's bodily imprisonment at the same time that they inspire the text that we are reading. After her husband's first attack, the image of the weak and trembling hand recurs. She notes that

par si grand fureur et impetuosité me donna si grand coup qu'au cheoir je me rompiz deux dentz, dont de l'extreme douleur je fuz longue espace sans monstrer signe d'esperit vital. Et quand je fuz revenue de pasmoison, toute palle et descoulourée, je commençay à regarder autour moy sans dire mot, car, à l'occasion des griefves et insuperables douleurs interieures, la parolle m'estoit forclose; mais peu après grand multitude de souspirs vuydoient de mon estomach, et m'intervint diverses et merveilleuses fantasies si cruelles et ignominieuses que la recente memoire rend ma main debile et tremblante, en sorte que par plusieurs foys y laissay et infestay la plume; mais pensant qu'il me seroit attribué à vice de pusillanimité, je me veulx efforcer de l'escripre.

(34)

When her husband finds her writings he is so furious that he tries to kill her (82-83). Later we learn that he also burned these writings (94).

Each time Hélisenne's husband attempts to assert his power by appropriating the evidence of her subjectivity, she counters him by regaining it. When his murder attempt fails, he decides to imprison her in his castle tower. The all-encompassing male gaze is replaced by the all-encompassing phallic tower; thus Hélisenne's (woman's) enslaved relationship to man is rendered ever more clear as the narrative proceeds. Ironically, the tower serves as an ideal vantage point: once locked in the tower, reliving her memories, Hélisenne relives the empowering knowledge of her oppression as a woman. She again experiences the painful sensations of her “corps vaincu, les membres debiles”; again these sensations lead her to “donnay commencement à l'oeuvre presente” which is a reworking of the text her husband had burned (94). In effect, then, Hélisenne's writing in captivity, the book we are reading, product of the subjugation of her weak and trembling female body, overthrows, for at least the time of reading and writing, her husband's, that is to say men's, power over her by telling other women about that power. In Wittig's words, Hélisenne is “dealing a blow with words,” or, as Beauvoir's discussion of women's autobiographies makes clear, “exposing this dependence is in itself a liberation” (Second 789). Ultimately, the tower, phallic representation of male power, harbors the weapon, the Trojan Horse, that exposes it.

There is no need, then, to read this text solely as a sample of the libidinal energy of the “écriture féminine” that one version of French feminism posits as woman's escape from male discourse and masculine theories of the subject. Hélisenne does not write the body, but rather writes of her imprisonment in the female body that men use to make her an other, their object. The near annihilation of that body, the violence of male power, is then the impetus to her self-expression. Hélisenne thus self-consciously writes as man's other, seizing her authority from his power over her, and appropriating his language to express her own subjectivity. One last comment on her text makes this self-conscious situating clear: in her time, Hélisenne's sophisticated readers would have noticed yet another countering and exposure of male power in the very language of her text, for she extensively appropriates from the works of her male literary predecessors. Clearly, she interprets her own experiences through a widely shared literary tradition of courtly love, captive women, cruel husbands, etc. More specifically, however, Hélisenne comes close to using the very words of her predecessors. Appendix II of Demats' edition provides a twenty-page listing of borrowings (in a text that is only 97 pages long) from only three sources: the French translation of Boccaccio's Fiammetta, the translation of Caviceo's Peregrino, and Jean Lemaire de Belges' Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie. Doubtlessly scholars could uncover still more borrowings from still more sources; nevertheless, the available evidence already underscores the deliberate intertextuality that makes Les Angoysses douloureuses a woman's counter-text.

Why has Hélisenne's Trojan Horse been lost to literary history until recently? The answer to that question may be a horse of a similar color: we could find it in a history of male-centered literary history and criticism, a long story in the history that explains why Irigaray can in truth say that “any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine.’” Hélisenne's is only an early chapter in this history.⁷

Notes

1. Without any mention of Wittig, Toril Moi's discussion of Irigaray's “mimeticism” points in a similar direction (131, 140-141).

2. In her introduction to the critical edition of the first part of Les Angoysses douloureuses, Paule Demats discusses the rarity of the name Hélisenne and notes the very few literary characters in medieval and Renaissance literature who are called by it (viii).

3. I draw these biographical facts from the introductions of both Demats and Mustacchi and Archambault; both introductions also contain much more detail.

4. All citations are from Demats' edition; I have not attempted to modernize the text. I have, however, omitted Hélisenne's near constant use of italics. All added emphasis is mine.

5. Yet another such incident occurs in chapter sixteen: “… je commençay à regarder entour moy, et en regardant veis moult grand multitude d'hommes et aulcunes damoyselles, dont plusieurs vindrent à circuyr autour de moy et me commencerent à louer et extoller, en disant diversitez de propos. Les ungs disoient avoir esté en plusieurs pays et avoir veu plusieurs dames et damoyselles; mais ilz affermoient que j'estoye la plus accomplie en formosité de corps qu'ilz eussent jamais veue” (50).

6. While she does not place it in a feminist context, Winn discusses the thematics of the gaze in her article.

7. I would like to thank Rita Munson, Helen Solterer, and Monique Wittig for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Works Cited

Bair, Deidre. “‘My Life … This Curious Object’: Simone de Beauvoir on Autobiography.” The Female Autograph. Ed. Domna Stanton. New York Literary Forum 12-13. New York: NYLF, 1984. 237-245.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Crenne, Hélisenne de. Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours. Ed. Paule Demats. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968.

Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” Diacritics 5 (Winter 1975): 2-10.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Mustacchi, Marianna M. and Paul J. Archambault. A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986.

Winn, Colette. “La symbolique du regard dans Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours d'Hélisenne de Crenne.” Orbis Litterarum 40 (1985): 207-227.

Wittig, Monique. “The Mark of Gender.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 63-73.

———. “One is Not Born a Woman.” Feminist Issues 1.3 (Winter 1981): 47-54.

———. “The Trojan Horse.” Feminist Issues 4.2 (Fall 1984): 45-49.