SOURCE: Nash, Jerry C. “The Rhetoric of Scorn in Hélisenne de Crenne.” French Literature Series 19 (1992): 1-9.

[In the following essay, Nash argues that de Crenne angrily but effectively attacked male domination and marginalization of women in her writings—in a restrained manner in her novel but bluntly and with clear scorn in her letters.]

As a Renaissance female writer, Hélisenne de Crenne was deeply and extensively involved in the “querelle des femmes,” the heated debate in the early sixteenth century on the nature and status of woman. This is the subject that virtually every study of her writings over the past decade and even beyond has pursued to one extent or another. She is shown, and justifiably so, to be one of the Renaissance's chief defenders and proponents of women's rights and women's art.¹ There is, to be sure, another querelle that Hélisenne was also interested in and which she portrays especially in her Epistres—the reversed one that might be called Hélisenne's “querelle des hommes.” Going much beyond simply defending women's rights and praising female accomplishments as a response to male marginalization of them and male domination, this side of Hélisenne's feminist anger and outrage can be seen in her taking the offensive and going on the attack by turning the invective blade of the knife back upon the male aggressor. Not content to remain in, and simply to lament, the depressing and demeaning clutches of “womanhood” (her “muliebre condition” as she calls this condition of being abused and scorned by men in words and deeds—EI4/sig. O4^v), Hélisenne most defiantly through her own rhetoric of scorn strikes back by returning this scorn. She avenges herself and women in general through assaults of demolishing verbal invective. It is the strategies and effectiveness of these assaults that I shall focus on in the present study.²

If Hélisenne's anger and anguish in the Angoisses douloureuses appear necessarily repressed or restrained in silence and aphasia and are held in harness by (male) conventions of the novelistic genre, as Beaulieu suggests in his study discussed above (i.e., the Angoisses illustrating “the near impossibility for an educated woman of that time to make herself heard on social matters”—p. 36), her views on the male sex are heard loud and clear in the blunt, scornful verbal manner of the Epistres. Hélisenne is always extremely conscious in this epistolary work of the rhetorical strategies of scorn to inveigh against and to debunk the male maligner-aggressor. Her new-found ability to use invective language to expose and thus demolish male malice is a constant thought and preoccupation of hers. “Cruel fortune” in the form of male injustice and abuse is what truly compels her to turn to scorn as a rhetorical weapon, as she informs the reader in the preface to her invectives: “Certes sa cruaulté intollerable me stimule de sorte qu'elle me contrainct (nonobstant mon naturel au contraire) qu'aux Epistres invectives je donne commencement” (sig. M2^v). She views her writerly recourse to the strategies of scorn to be a vital and constant necessity, and she highlights this awareness throughout her eighteen letter as well as at the very end of them, in EI5. Reflecting in this final letter back upon all the others, she asks herself if, in her wish to portray just some of man's natural vices and perverse habits, her epistolary art had indeed been sufficient to the task: “Je debvois avant penser si mon stile estoit apte à divulger l'extremité de vos perverses coustumes.” And later on in the same letter, she ponders again the relationship between her art and her anger when she asks herself if her “plume” had been adequately “occupée à user d'invectives” in order to expose such intense male abuse. All this writerly self-conscious questioning aside, Hélisenne cannot, and by now at the end of her letters, has not kept silent any longer: “… la faulte que j'ai commise au passé [in her Angoisses?] tenant souz silence vos iniquitez, je vueil reparer pour l'advenir” (sig. 08^v-P1^v).³

Hélisenne has amended her silence on her husband and on man bluntly and persuasively with a scornful vengeance, not only for the future but also for the present. “Ce deceptif et frauduleux sexe viril” she writes, exploding into invective, in her “Fifth Familiar Letter” (sig. I3^r). Hélisenne will use most frequently these two derogatory epithets in her direct denunciation of man. The defining characteristics of man's deception and man's fraudulence are in fact the two targets of the most scornful contempt in the Epistres. Man is considered by her to be “fraudulent” because, contrary to the image of self which he has seen to construct from time immemorial, he is actually incapable of rational and firm thought and decisive actions. He is derided and summarily dismissed in the Epistres as full of fickleness and mutability:

Car pour estre la condition virile assez prompte à se pouvoir divertir d'un lieu pour s'obliger en un autre, je n'en sçaurois bien juger: car considerant que par longue usance, mutabilité & inconstance aux hommes est faicte une chose naturelle.

(EF11/sig.L2^r)

In spite of the fact that man considers himself more rational and more intelligent and more prudent than woman, he is contemptuously portrayed as abandoning reason to embrace sensuality:

Car puis que l'homme se dict exceder la femme en prudence, … mais nonobstant qu'il se dise tant scientifique, delaisse la raison, à la sensualité adhere.

(E13/sig.N8^r)

Not reason or moral integrity but sexual conquest and superiority are man's real interests and motives, as Hélisenne considers to be the preoccupations of her misogynic husband:

Parquoy donnant lieu à fureur, par dessus raison superiorité obtint.

(EI1/sig. M4^v-M5^r)

Tu es si remply d'insolence que la raison te defaillant, … generalement tu detestes la feminine condition.

(EI3/sig. N6^v-N7^r)

What the above statements on male fraudulence are really leading up to and serve to reinforce is Hélisenne's primary portrayal of male “deception,” that is, the ways in which man exploits sexuality in order to master and degrade women as submissive sexual objects. She is singularly outspoken (and outraged) for someone in the Renaissance in her awareness of past and present insult and injury, and in her refusal to take them any longer. In her “Fifth Familiar Letter” in particular, Hélisenne avows that to tell the tale of all the women who had been deceived and abused and exploited sexually by men would take her more time than to restore Rome to its past glory: “Qui vouldroit faire recit de toutes les dames par les hommes contemnées, trop plus de temps à le narrer s'y consumeroit, que ne feroit à restaurer Romme au premier point de son antique Empire” (sig. I3^r). But she does of course narrate and comment on these abuses in her own “recit de toutes les dames par les hommes contemnées”: the abuse by the Athenian hero Theseus who, having “acomply son desir (auquel Adrienne [Ariadne] satisfit), en lieu solitaire, pasture de Loups, proye de Ours, viande de Lyons, seule la laissa & abandonna, pour aller ravir Phedra sa soeur”; the abuse by the handsome hero Paris who “monstra jamais à dame plus d'evidence d'amitié que fit le pasteur troyen à Oenonne. Et toutesfois il ne differa de la repudier apres que son infortune eut permis le ravissement d'Helaine” (the latter act having been the cause of the Trojan War); the abuse by Demophon, Theseus's son, who “se manifesta jamais plus doulx … à sa tres benigne hostesse Philis, & non pourtant apres que d'elle se fut absenté, il ne fut observant de la foy jurée de son brief retour” (and who thus was responsible for Phyllis hanging herself); the abuse by Jason of Hypsipyle, “laquelle pour remuneration du bien par elle à luy faict, acompagnée de pleurs & lamentables gemissemens, la delaissa” (and doing this only after having spent two years with her as lover and having promised to marry her); and so on and so on with the depiction of many other instances of deception and sexual abuse performed by equally famous male heroes-aggressors (sig. I2^v-I3^r). Such cataloguing of despicable male actions, which the reader encounters over and over again in Hélisenne's letters and which she has been stylistically criticized for (especially by male readers) as needless, tedious redundancy, is really a necessary and important feature of this feminist writer's rhetorical strategy and art of scorn. In providing the reader with example after example of this deception, Hélisenne's rhetorical scorn becomes not only painfully obvious but exceedingly effective. She is truly practicing the classic definition of rhetoric as the art of persuading, one might even say of overpowering, the reader. Such condemning and disgusted redundancy forces the reader to be at least as aware (if not as outraged) as the author is of a fully documented, sexually abusive tradition by providing the reader with irrefutable evidence of this tradition. That is, such “veritable narrations” (“veritables parolles”) of the cultural facts surrounding the above mythological instances of male deception prove to be beyond questioning, beyond counter-argumentation by the reader. Hélisenne's rhetorical question on this very strategy clinches her argument, her querelle, once and for all: “Que pourrois-tu donc respondre à ces veritables parolles” (EI3/sig. N8^r)?

This kind of scornful rhetoric can be seen in many other passages and letters where Hélisenne employs it in the service of promoting her “querelle des hommes.” This quarrel is forever portraying man's “natural” habit and vice of slandering women, his engrained “detestable vice de detraction,” his “appetit … de contemner les dames,” with the verb “contemner” clearly having two distinct meanings: to contaminate, through slander, the reputation of and to deceive/abuse sexually (EI4/sig. 06^r). There is another ingenious question that Hélisenne constantly puts before the reader and which she uses to expose the contradictory, false logic of the slanderous male argument that women are the ones who are lustful and deceptive and dangerous, and thus ought to be “quarantined” (“O que le sequestre en seroit bon,” as the husband blurts out in EI2/sig. N6^r)! If man is as reasonable and wise as he believes himself to be, why does he let himself become associated with something as harmful or dangerous as woman: “Car puis que l'homme se dict exceder la femme en prudence, il ne devroit converser avec cela qui se persuade luy estre nuysible & perilleux” (EI3/sig. N8^r). But of course the painful truth of the matter, in Hélisenne's eyes, is that deception and seduction really belong to the domain of man, not woman:

O que c'est une execrable iniquité d'homme de telle faulte à la femme attribuer, veu qu'en cela sa secrette conscience le juge: & sçait bien que luy mesme tousiours s'efforce d'estre le decepteur.

(EI3/sig.N8^r-v)

And not only does man deceive and seduce, but he performs these crucial, identity-bestowing acts with the persistence and vengeance and sheer brute force that come with conquering a city with war machines:

Car depuis que l'homme par luxurieux desir jette ses yeulx impudicques sur l'honneste beauté de quelque dame, il use de continuelle poursuyte de sorte qu'il semble qu'il ne s'efforce moins de la subjuguer, que si par machine ou instrumens belliqueux pretendoit à assieger une cité!

(EI3/sig.N8^v)

Or, as Hélisenne describes in another letter man's ever-renewed desire for conquest, the male character is so intent on such brutal maneuvers and is so adept at subterfuge to gain its end that initially it desguises itself as sweetness only in order to conceal its inherent bitterness and ultimate aim of deceiving:

La condition est telle que du commencement ilz sont fort doulx, & à la fin tres amers. Et voyons ordinairement que apres qu'ilz on de leurs dames victoire obtenuë, ilz aspirent à nouvelles conquestes, delaissant celle que [on] faignoit à perpetuité vouloir aymer.

(EF5/sig. I2^r)

Indeed, the greater the degree of deception performed by man, the greater is the esteem in which he is held by his fellow comrades-in-arms. After their rejoicing over their “conquests,” the only thing left for these kinds of victors to do is to decide among themselves which one of them to honor the most for his deception: “Puis apres les faulx & desloyaux pleins de libidinosité resjouyssent & reputent heureux celuy qui est plus deceptif” (EF5/sig. I2^v)!

As a rhetorical strategy, sardonic and mocking scorn was the primary and only appropriate offensive weapon in Hélisenne's militant confrontation of perceived male malignment and abuse. An author's reliance on scorn is always for the purpose of going on the attack and demolishing one's aggressor, of inflicting serious injury on him. As used by Hélisenne, it is the means of bestowing a harsher fate on the male aggressor, “à aucuns pour avoir contemné les dames,” which Hélisenne amply describes again for the reader in her cataloguing of example after example of those (“aucuns”) who earned and truly deserved such a fate:

N'as-tu regard à la punition qui fut prinse de Thiresias [the Theban Tiresias] pour avoir fait jugement que le sexe feminin, plus que le masculin, estoit lubrique? Certes ceste temeraire & folle prononciation fut cause de le priver de veue. Aussi fut tres griesve la vengeance prinse de Herisiton [Erysichton], pour avoir la Deesse Ceres desprisée. Car si bien tu te recordes, par faim exorbitante luy mesmes se mangea. Ne fut pareillement payé de sa desserte condigne Ajax Oyleus [Ajax son of Aiolus], qui envers Minerve de detraction avoit usé [whom he had blasphemied by kidnapping the Trojan princess Cassandra]? Autres se retrouvent que je te rememoreroys.

(EI3/sig. O3^r)

Or, if these kinds of just retributions are no longer possible for the present and future, then Hélisenne's sincere wish is that the fate that awaits the male aggressor might at least include the following:

Mon desir, qui totalement aspire, [est] que ancien, infirme, aveugle, sourd, muet, indigent & souffreteux je te puisse veoir. Et si pour n'avoir en toy force de telles calamitez supporter, [que] Atropos te couppe le fil de ta miserable vie. Je vouldroys qu'apres telle dissolution, ton corps sans honneur de sepulture puisse demourer, à fin qu'il devienne pasture des Leopards, Loups affamez, Lyons, Ours, Tigres, & de toutes bestes cruelles, pour à leur exorbitante faim de ton malheureux corps satisfaire.

(EI5/sig. P3^v)

And so as not to forget all the other male “warriors” in addition to her husband, Hélisenne ends the above demolishing passage with this wish, which is her last one and which comes at the very end of her letters:

Et avec ce desir mettray fin à mon epistre. Ne voulant tes compagnons oublier, les adverty que je vouldroys que ce qui intervint à Dathan & Abiron leur puisse avenir.

(sig. P3^v)

Because of their own conspiracy and deception in Numbers 16:12-30, Dathan and Abiron earned the ultimate wrath and punishment, the wrath of God. They were devoured by the earth that opened beneath their feet. The same kind of punishment of “divine justice” is what our Renaissance wrathful rhetorician wishes upon her husband and all his “companions.”

In addition to helping one “bury” the oppressor, there is of course another reason why writers like Hélisenne, or Albert Camus, turn to scorn. As Camus recognized so very well at the end of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, scorn is perhaps the only sure strategic means of helping one to overcome one's own fate. There is, in the final analysis, a certain dignity and therapy that can come from scornful struggle. This is one of the major conclusions Camus draws from the daily ordeal and struggle of the abused Sisyphus. He is both emphatic and optimistic on this score: “Il n'est pas de destin qui ne se surmonte par le mépris.”⁴ This dual fate—that of burying the oppressor and freeing the oppressed—is what Hélisenne's rhetoric of scorn strives to bring about.

Hélisenne's letters will undoubtedly prove unsettling and even uncomfortable for some readers, female as well as male. If so, their scornful rhetoric has achieved its intended purpose. However, these letters are far from expressing purely personal female ire or irascibility, and very far from simply being exercises in sheer unpleasantness. There was after all a reason, a cause, behind them. Hélisenne was obviously voicing woman's collective historical anger (in addition to a personal one) and its recourse to finding an outlet in scorn. In Hélisenne's epistolary art, the rhetoric of scorn is a powerful means to redress the injustice and pain inflicted upon women at the personal and collective levels, as well as to inflict this pain back upon its giver.⁵ Such scorn is almost always the only recourse of abused, yet rebellious, heroes-heroines like Sisyphus and Hélisenne. Indeed, as her primary rhetorical weapon to expose and counter male malignment and abuse and as her primary rhetorical strategy to assert female anger and dignity in her letters, scorn was the only woman's language a socially committed writer like Hélisenne could turn to. And she makes it clear to her chief male antagonist that she will not hesitate to use this language again in the future, and even in more infuriating and avenging terms, if circumstances require it:

Mais si … tu persistes en ton antique folie, qui seroit cause de faire esmouvoir la fureur de ma plume, laquelle me stimuleroit te rescrire propos plus fascheux que tu ne pourrois precogiter!

(EI4/sig. 08^r-v)

With such scornful and defiant words, Hélisenne always launches her rhetorical assaults. In analyzing her anger and capturing its energy for her art—in the very act of writing it down in the form of rhetorical scorn—Hélisenne is certainly anticipating one of the major strategies of the feminist movement as we know it today. Namely, the strategy that the best defense is an offense, a rhetorical offense that is angry, militant, violent, even murderous, and all of these for positive ends. Here is how the contemporary feminist critic Julia Lesage describes these ends of female identity and female dignity that come from a woman's rage and rhetoric: “Anger is a cleansing force. It frees the woman from … despair and inaction; it makes her fearless and restores her self-respect.”⁶ Much ahead of her time, Hélisenne reaches, and benefits from, these same conclusions on the rhetorical strategies of scornful anger: “Si oncq' lettres ou parolles fidellement reserées eurent vigueur & puissance de pouvoir prester salut …” (EF2/sig. H2^v). This “power of words” to bring “solace” and “salvation” is, finally, what Hélisenne's anger, scorn, and rhetoric are all about.

In addition to her rhetoric anticipating more modern feminist concerns and writing, Hélisenne is also adopting and demonstrating generically, though for altogether different, in fact opposite rhetorical ends, the satirical view of Juvenal: “Si natura negat facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest,” which can be paraphrased: “Indignation will supply the power of writing in any literary mode which nature may have denied me.”⁷ For Hélisenne too, indignation becomes “la fureur de la plume,” that is, a conscious rhetorical mode—with the female difference of course of being directed against man, not woman as is Juvenal's—to vent her anger. It “makes” (“facit”: is what produces) the writing of invective letters, Hélisenne's “propos fascheux.”⁸

Notes

1. See, for example, the following representative studies of and approaches to Hélisenne's feminism and feminist concerns: Tom Conley, “Feminism, Ecriture, and the Closed Room: The Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours,” Symposium, 27 (1973), 322-32; Barbara Ching, “French Feminist Theory, Literary History, and Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses,” French Literature Series, 16 (1989), 17-26; Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault in their Introduction to their translation, A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters (Syracuse University Press, 1986), which contains an excellent discussion of the historical context of the “querelle des femmes” in the sixteenth century (especially pp. 17-24); Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, “Erudition and Aphasia in Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours,” L'Esprit Créateur, 29 (1989), 36-42, which stresses the thematics of “silence” and “speechlessness” in her novel: “In battling with a husband who beats her and a lover who is only trying to take advantage of her, Hélisenne loses the capability of expressing herself and becomes the silent witness of her own drama” (p. 39); and my essay on “‘Exerçant oeuvres viriles’: Feminine Anger and Feminist (Re)Writing in Hélisenne de Crenne,” in Ecrire au féminin à la Renaissance, François Rigolot, editor, L'Esprit Créateur, 30 (1990), 38-48, which explores Hélisenne's revision and rewriting in her letters of cultural-intellectual history.

2. Quotations from the Epistres will be from the facsimile edition of Hélisenne's Oeuvres of 1560 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977). All editing of this Renaissance text is mine (the modernization of i and j, u and v, m or n for the tilde, etc., and the addition of accents and punctuation where needed for intelligibility). Each reference will include “EF” or “EI” to designate “familiar” or “invective” letter, followed by the number of the letter and page number. Since the initial blank leaf was not reproduced in the facsimile edition, rectos and versos appear side by side. Unless otherwise indicated, all italics in this study are mine.

3. As will become obvious, in spite of her tendency to generalize, Hélisenne's querelle does not propose a blanket condemnation of all men (indeed, there are those, both mythological and real, whom she highly praises in her letters). The object or addressee of her epistolary scorn is always a particular kind of man or class of men, thus portrayed in the singular and in the plural, who denigrates and abuses woman (misogynists, in the true sense of the term), and who is also often embodied in the passages we will be considering as the husband of Hélisenne. This accounts for the third-person and second-person narrations in these letters.

4. Albert Camus, Essais, R. Quilliot and L. Faucon, editors (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 196.

5. For discussion of other works containing a rhetoric of scorn, and especially that of more modern writers (Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Léon Bloy, Bernanos, Céline, etc.), see Albert Sonnenfeld, “The Pathology of Anger: Wrath and Rhetoric,” The Romanic Review, 78 (1987), 405-19. Sonnenfeld explores the following in the above authors: their “scorn” and “angers” and “pains” which seek an outlet in “the word as ‘action’” (p. 411), “the assault through language” (p. 412), the use of “anger to inspire anger” (p. 418), “repressed rage and [its explosion] into invective” (p. 419), and so forth. Obviously, I believe Hélisenne would fit nicely in this company of “wrathful rhetoricians.”

6. “Woman's Rage,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1988), quoted by Jane Marcus, Art and Anger (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), p. vii.

7. Liber primus, Satire I, lines 79-80, in J. D. Duff, editor, Fourteen Satires of Juvenal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

8. For more discussion of anger and art and the notion of therapy in Hélisenne's letters, see my article on “Anguish and Art: Writing as Therapy in Hélisenne de Crenne,” forthcoming in Anna Maria Raugei and Michel Simonin, editors, Chemins de la connaissance, 1992.