[In the following essay, Jensen discusses the general assumption that Les Angoysses douloureuses is autobiographical, maintaining that this belief has obscured de Crenne's text.]

In her “First Invective Letter,” published in 1539 in the collection Epistres familieres et invectives, Hélisenne de Crenne struggles to correct a misreading of her novel, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, published a year before in 1538. Addressing her husband who has read the novel's first-person narrative of adulterous love as evidence of his wife's infidelity, Crenne asserts herself as a writer, as a creator of fiction rather than a transcriber of personal fact:

Your heart's hasty judgment has led you to imagine that my Angoysses (which I had composed, in fact, only to pass the time) were intended to immortalize an illicit love. You believe, moreover, that I really experienced the lasciviousness about which I wrote. I am surprised you should imagine this to be the case, for as I was modest and temperate in my young and tender years you cannot allow yourself to believe that I am lascivious now that I am older.¹

Thus Crenne implies that her husband is not only hasty but naïve in equating her person with her writings. He should be able to distinguish between them based on his personal knowledge of her past. I want, for the moment, to bracket the question of adultery to concentrate on Crenne's articulation and anticipation of a problem that has beleaguered women writers throughout history: the critical (not to say “naïve”) tendency to equate a woman's person with her writings; the assumption that when women write, they “simply” write their lives. With little fictional craft and virtually no narratorial distance, women, as literary critics have often read and thereby dismissed them, “naïvely” transfer their own amorous and domestic preoccupations to their heroines.

Crenne's Angoysses has been nothing if not dismissed by centuries subsequent to her own. The last printing of the three-part novel in its entirety dates from 1560, and while Part One was reprinted in two editions in 1968², it has received even less critical attention than other Renaissance women writers and rarely figures on graduate or undergraduate reading lists. Insofar as a number of critics of the Angoysses have read it as the author's account of her life, I would wager that this “autobiographical assumption” has played its pernicious part in obfuscating Crenne's text.

This “autobiographical assumption” is particularly ironic given Crenne's warning against it in her “First Invective Letter.” Clearly, she was sufficiently concerned about distinguishing her writing apart from her life to bring this distinction to public attention. In publishing what was presumably a private letter written to her husband, Crenne re-addressed her claim to a distinct writerly identity to a wide audience. The original address, moreover, may itself be a fiction; Crenne may never have really written this letter to her husband, but fabricated it out of whole cloth for publication, in order to plead her case as a writer to a general audience, who, like the supposed husband, may have judged her as an adulteress on the basis of her “autobiographical” novel³.

If, as this “First Invective Letter” might suggest, a woman's writing was read in Renaissance France, by husbands and public alike, as transparent to her life, then, we might wonder why Crenne wrote about so personally damning a topic as adultery in the first place. Why not choose a “safer”, less self-incriminating subject for her novel?

In trying to answer this question, we immediately confront the problem that there were, in effect, no “safe” topics for the Renaissance woman who would write; at issue was not so much the topic as the mere act of writing. For a woman to write at all or even to speak outside the confines of a rigidly guarded private, domestic arena was, itself, tantamount to sexual promiscuity. In one of her studies on Renaissance women poets, Ann Rosalind Jones reviews a spectrum of texts by sixteenth-century male social theorists that consistently equate women's public speech with their (naked) bodies and irresistable sexual temptation. As Jones assesses: “The equation between women's bodies and women's speech depends upon a further assumption: women's onlookers and hearers are always men.”⁴ So while women were prohibited from speaking, there were also: “… prohibitions against women's being spoken about. Men's eyes and tongues were assumed to share the power to define and possess a feminine object” (78-79). The ideal woman, then, as these theories construct her: “… was distinguished by what she did not do, or, equally important, by what men did not do to her: she was unseen, unheard, untouched, unknown—at the same time that she was obsessively observed.” As Jones concludes: “This must be what is meant by saying that women occupy a negative position in culture” (79).

The question becomes: how did Renaissance women writers negotiate around this cultural negation of female subjectivity? How did they circumvent the feminine ideal of silence and invisibility and become subjects of language whose writings were published and, therefore, deemed assimilable by a culture whose ideals they violated? Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours provides an intriguing avenue through which to pursue these questions because the novel itself features a Renaissance woman who comes to writing. As I shall argue, by showing adulterous love to be both the means and the price of textual production, Crenne thematizes the double-bind constricting the woman writer in the Renaissance—and beyond.

In Part One of the Angoysses, the first-person female narrator, named Hélisenne, tells how she was overtaken by adulterous longing. Although married to a man who loved her and whom she loved, Hélisenne falls hopelessly in love with a young man she sees from her window during a trip she and her husband take to a nearby city. Returning her gaze, Guénélic, the young man, becomes fatefully enamoured of Hélisenne. Eventually, the lovers begin to exchange letters on the sly and later, manage to meet clandestinely, but never actually consummate their passion at any point in the three-part novel. When Hélisenne's husband discovers her adulterous desire, he is enraged, and as she continues to pursue her passion, he becomes physically violent, beating her and ultimately incarcerating her in a castle tower. The end of Part One, then, finds the heroine, as she says: “… prisonnier en la fleur de ma jeunesse” (158).

Apart from the letters she writes to Guénélic, Hélisenne produces another text out of her illicit desire, a self-addressed journal or memoir writings: “… [où] estoient exhibées et bien amplement déclarées toutes les fortunes bénévoles et malévoles qui m'estoient avenues depuis que Cupido avoit sur moy domination et seigneurie” (142). This text leads directly to her downfall, for her husband (guided by a treacherous servant) breaks into Hélisenne's room in search of these incriminating writings: “escriptes” as he says, “de ton effrénée laciveté” (142). After reading this material proof of his wife's adultery, he tries to kill her—“toute vermoulue d'iniquité” as she is (142)—at swordpoint, but is prevented by his servants. As the next best thing, he imposes a living death upon her by imprisoning her in the tower and burns, as we find out later, in implicit effigy, the corpus of her writings.

The fact that Hélisenne's writings are seen to be as sinful as any physical performance of her illicit desire could be clearly illustrates the Renaissance equation between women's language and women's bodies. This fateful link between the transgressive forces of female language and body is overdetermined not only by Renaissance gender ideology but also, relatedly, by how Western literary tradition defines female plot. So the act of women's writing is implicated in the topic, and vice versa. Whereas male plot is classically determined by epic adventure and heroic action, a woman's story consists in romantic love, which, furthermore, is distinct from marriage. A woman, that is, has had a story—whether she tells it or whether it is told about her—precisely to the extent she defers or deviates from marital union. By definition, then, the happily married Hélisenne does not have a story. Only when she falls in love with Guénélic, thereby becoming subject to passion's pain and pleasure and marital unhappiness, does she have something to tell. But this, of course, leads right into a double bind. In following prescriptions for conventional female plot, Hélisenne violates the laws regulating female virtue. By writing out of her adulterous desire and producing a text that records it, Hélisenne assures herself of nothing but of a text that the righteous guardians of womanly virtue will use against her.

The only way to loosen this double bind, as Hélisenne's narratorial stance will show, is for the woman writer to act in place of the righteous and use her story against herself. After her husband destroys her writings, Hélisenne starts over. While in her tower, she begins: “… l'œuvre présente, estimant que ce me sera trèsheureux labeur …” (156). Initially, then, the purpose of this second memoir, like the first, is to have the pleasure that putting amour and angoysses into writing provides. The imprisoned Hélisenne hopes, moreover, that this second text might give her another pleasure: “… si ceste félicité m'est concédée qu'elle tombe entre les mains de mon amy, je luy prie qu'il ne me vueille frustrer de mon espérée et attendue suavité …” (156). Although Guénélic eventually does rescue Hélisenne, thereby fulfilling at least one of her long-awaited desires, it is not because he had gotten hold of her writings. These, she re-addresses at some unspecified point⁵ to a public audience, specifically, to “toutes honnestes Dames” in order that they could “honnestement aymer, en évitant toute vaine et impudicque amour” (34). From the very beginning of the final (published) version of her memoir, Hélisenne sets herself up as the bad example, the fallen woman. As the narrator, she frames her story—and herself—with the ruling morality, judging and condemning her illicit love. At this price of self-condemnation, she can justify writing and publishing her “shameless” tale of love: “ce que selon l'opinion d'aucunes dames timides se pourra juger plus digne d'estre conservé en profond silence que d'estre publié ne vulgarisé” (159). Illustrating what not to do, Hélisenne's story will protect other women from a similar fate: “… par l'expérience de ma furieuse folie, vous puis aviser et donner conseil qui vous sera utile et prouffitable pour de tel embrasement vous conserver” (159). The text that Hélisenne's husband destroyed, then, can re-emerge from the flames fit for public viewing only because the female narrator has repented and judges her adulterous self guilty and depraved.

This repentence through narratorial perspective is not quite enough, however. In Part Three of the Angoysses, when at long last Hélisenne and Guénélic are reunited, Hélisenne, so weakened by her ordeal of imprisonment and amorous suffering, dies; but not before seeing the light and begging God to forgive her sins of adultery, unconsummated though they were. She also urges her lover to follow her moral example and repent in turn. Guénélic does not repent, but, instead, dies of sorrow. That their illicit desire ends in death—the classic Liebestod—gauges, of course, even as it romanticizes, the cost of deviating from the ruling morality. Death is not, however, the end of their story or of the novel.

The fourth part of the novel, entitled “Ample narration faicte par Quezinstra”⁶—Quezinstra being Guénélic's companion in the epic adventures that were the subject of Parts Two and Three—explains how the book we have just read came into being and into publication. As Quezinstra mourns the death of the lovers at their tomb, the god, Mercury, approaches him; for it is Mercury who will conduct the souls of the deceased to Hades. As the god anoints the corpses, he notices near Hélisenne's body: “ung petit pacquet couvert de soye blanche” (n.p.), which turns out to be a book. Inspecting it himself, Quezinstra sees that it recounts all the “entreprinses & voyages” that he and Guénélic undertook during their lengthy quest to find Hélisenne. He further identifies the author of the book: “… je peuz facilement comprendre, que la paovre defuncte lavoyt escript, apres le recit que Guenelic luy en pourroyt avoyr faict” (n.p.). Thus we find that not only did Hélisenne write her narration, that is, the female plot of adulterous passion, but she also wrote Guénélic's and Quezinstra's heroic tale of epic adventure, acting as her lover's amanuensis. In fact, however, she already identified herself as the apparent author of the novel's epic; for Parts Two and Three were presented as: “composees par Dame Helisenne, parlant en la personne de son amy Guenelic” (n.p.). If we only find out her role as mere amanuensis, rather than as creative author, after “her” novel has supposedly been completed, why do we need to find this out at all?

The answer has to do with what it means to be a (Renaissance) woman writer condemned to and by female plot and female genre. At the end of Part One, after justifying the moral value of her immoral narrative, Hélisenne apologizes for the inadequacy of her “petite œuvre”, whose style, in contrast to that of “orateurs” and “historiographes”, can only be seen as “rude et obnubilé” (159). She goes on, however, to attribute her deficiency to the gender of writing: “Mais en cela me doibt servir d'excuse que nostre condition féminine n'est tant scientifique que naturellement sont les hommes” (159). If one's sex affects how one writes and the degree to which one's “langaige” is “rude” or “élégant” (160), it also determines what one writes about, as Hélisenne's reference to orators and historiographers indicates. In our cultural, literary hierarchy, the “high” styles and genres—such as history, drama, and epic—have belonged to men while “low” styles and genres—love letters, journals, the novel in its early years—have been women's lot to the extent that they have managed or been allowed to write at all. We have already seen what it cost Hélisenne to write “at all” and in accordance with conventional female plot and within the female genre of memoir. How could a Renaissance woman dare to transgress the literary-sexual boundaries of genre and expect to live—as a writer, that is, without alienating her readership?

Clearly, Hélisenne's role as Guénélic's amanuensis functions as a strategy, allowing her and her author—Crenne—to move out, at least momentarily, of the double-bind and self-negation of female plot and into male epic adventure without seeming to violate the sexual limitations of genre. While having Hélisenne write “in service of” her lover masks the real author's—Crenne's—ambition to write more than female plot, I believe this ambitious wish is readable in the gap between Hélisenne's implied authorship of Parts Two and Three and Quezinstra's belated revelation of her role as scribe. Crenne's ambitious writing wish is further evident in the fate of Hélisenne's book. Mercury decides to give it as a present to Pallas Athena: “laquelle singulierement aux lectures se delectoyt” (n.p.). This present, however, generates a nasty quarrel; Venus takes offense that Mercury did not give the book to her since it is about love and therefore “… doibt estre dedie a ma divinite” (n.p.). Athena counters, also on the grounds of genre, that since the book is about war, it should be given to her. This impasse is surmounted only when Jupiter steps in and takes the book away from both goddesses to give to Mercury whom he sends to Paris to get the book published: “… affin de manifester au monde les peines, travaulx, & angoysses douloureuses, qui procedent a l'occasion d'amours” (n.p.). Published under the auspices of the highest god on Mount Olympus, object of desire and contention of goddesses, Hélisenne's book is distinguished as a highly precious and morally instructive work. So positive a representation testifies, I believe, to Crenne's wish that her own novel—obviously an overlapping version of Hélisenne's—be similarly lauded and treasured.

During her lifetime, Crenne's wish, it seems, was fulfilled. The Angoysses, along with her Epistres and Le Songe, a philosophical allegory, were printed seven times between 1543 and 1560. Now, some 450 years later, the Epistres have been republished in an English translation and, as I mentioned, Part One of the Angoysses exists in two recent editions. This exclusive focus on the part of the novel bound to female plot strikes me as somewhat ironic since I suspect it was the part that least interested Crenne. My suspicion is based on what I see to be her singular effort in the Angoysses to use the female plot of adulterous love as the means to write epic, as a way to provide herself with a knight errant whose adventures she could author while her heroine recorded them. Crenne's last work, significantly, her final publication, was a translation of Vergil's Aeneid. That she ended her career as Vergil's “amanuensis” gauges, I think, not only her interest in epic, but also the extent to which she had already exhausted the possibilities open to the Renaissance woman who wanted to write narrative prose.

Notes

1. A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters, ed. and trans., Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 81.

2. Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, Première partie, ed. Paule Demats (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968). And Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, ed. Jérôme Vercruysse (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1968). All my references to Part One of Crenne's novel come from the Vercruysse edition and occur parenthetically in the text, a practice I follow for all texts from which I quote more than once.

3. In adopting the pen name, “Hélisenne de Crenne”, Marguerite de Crenne, née Briet may have been the first in a long line of women writers who adopted pen names (or, alternatively, published anonymously) in order to shore up authority for their fictions by keeping them distinct from their persons.

4. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric”, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 77.

5. In fact, Hélisenne would never have had the chance to re-address and revise her memoir. She continues to love and desire Guénélic until the moment she repents before God and dies.

6. Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, composées par dame Helisenne de Crenne (Paris?: ca. 1540), n.p.