SOURCE: Cottrell, Robert D. “Female Subjectivity and Libidinal Infractions: Hélisenne de Crenne's Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours.” French Forum 16, no. 1 (January 1991): 5-19.

[In the following essay, Cottrell examines the issues of female authorship and female readership in Les Angoysses douloureuses, focusing on the problem of female subjectivity as it relates to the female narrator and to the text itself.]

Several claims have been made for Hélisenne de Crenne's novel Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours, published in 1538 and reprinted at least eight times by 1560. Gustave Reynier, whose 1908 study on Le Roman sentimental avant l'Astrée renewed interest in Les Angoisses, called de Crenne's text the first “roman sentimental” in French literature.¹ Agreeing with Reynier, later scholars have maintained that it is also, as Fritz Neubert puts it, “the first original French novel of modern times,”² and, further, that it is France's first autobiographical novel.³

Thanks to the research of several scholars,⁴ we know that Les Angoisses was written by Marguerite de Briet, who published under the pseudonym of Hélisenne de Crenne. In Part I of the novel (the only part that has been reedited since the sixteenth century and the part on which this essay will focus), the fictional Hélisenne de Crenne, writing in the first person, recounts how her marriage was disrupted when she fell hopelessly in love with a young man beneath her in social station and wealth. Although we do not know if Marguerite de Briet herself did indeed fall in love with such a man, the documents available do tell us that she was wealthier than her husband, that her marriage had begun to turn sour by the time she wrote Les Angoisses, and that by 1552 she was legally separated from her husband. Reexamining the documentary evidence, Paule Demats, the scholar responsible for the modern edition of Part I of the text, points out that nearly all of de Crenne's works—including Les Angoisses, a collection of fictional letters (the most interesting of which are invective letters addressed to a malevolent husband), and a text called Le Songe—were written in the late 1530s when Marguerite de Briet's marriage seems to have been headed for the rocks.⁵ Noting that each of these texts repeats the same scenario and, further, that this scenario seems to have been shaped, in part at least, by events in Marguerite de Briet's own life, Demats concludes that the works that bear the signature of Hélisenne de Crenne all relate the same “drame bourgeois” (xi), a drama that, in Marguerite de Briet's own life, would conclude with her separation from her husband.

Using the vocabulary of narratology, we can say that the narrator in Les Angoisses is the “I as protagonist.” The primary consequence of this narrative strategy is that all the situations and events recounted are viewed from a fixed center, the point at which the narrator is located. In the penultimate chapter of Part I, the narrator explains that her husband has imprisoned her in a tower in a remote country castle. She has written down the story the reader has been reading because she hopes that her text will fall into the hands of her amy, Guénélic, who, because he is located on the same diegetic level as the narrator, is the narratee. However, he never reads the manuscript, which, wrapped in white silk, was discovered only after Guénélic and the narrator had both died.

If the narratee inscribed in the text is male (a male who never hears what the female narrator tries to tell him), the implied reader is female. The narrator frequently interrupts the narrative and speaks directly to female readers. Abandoning momentarily the narratorial voice of Hélisenne de Crenne, the narrator—because in these instances she speaks from beyond the narrative—seems to assume the authorial voice of Marguerite de Briet, addressing, beyond the implied female readers, a readership composed of real female readers. Far more aggressively than other sixteenth-century texts that explicitly address female readers, this text, by virtue of its repeated shifts from (in Benveniste's terms) histoire to discours, from narrative to direct address aimed at female readers, excludes the male reader and denies him easy access. Beginning with the prefatory poem, entitled “Hélisenne aux lisantes,” and continuing to the final chapter of Part I, which is addressed to “treschieres et honnorées Dames” (96), the narrator speaks to female readers. She seeks to alert them to the dangers of love. She warns them that if ever they should experience the first stirring of an illicit, libidinous passion (the word “libidineux” appears repeatedly in the text) they must nip it in the bud. Should they fail to do so, it will flourish quickly and soon reduce them to despair and humiliation. Hers is a cautionary tale, intended to demonstrate to female readers the terrible consequences of “amours impudiques” (96). “Je serviray d'exemple aux aultres” (4), she says, stating clearly the exemplary status she ascribes to her story.

At the same time, however, the narrator is motivated by another impulse that is even more powerful than her desire to warn female readers against love. Claiming that “les dames naturelement sont inclinées à avoir compassion” (1), she seeks to arouse pity in her female readers and to move them so deeply with the account of her grief and pain that they will weep while reading her story. “J'estime,” she says at the very beginning of the novel, “que mon infortune vous provocquera à quelques larmes piteuses” (1). Quite deliberately, Les Angoisses sets out to be what film buffs, speaking of movies purportedly produced for a female audience, call a “weepie.”

Les Angoisses can be read as a representation of the process by which subjectivity is formed. It demonstrates how the subject, that is to say, the Self, is shaped and molded by the gaze and the voice that come from the Other. In the pages that follow, I shall focus on the problematic of subjectivity as it relates first to the female narrator and then to the text itself, for at the metatextual level, the text, like the female narrator, is a subject whose speech discloses the process by which its Self was formed.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator, having informed her readers that she is of noble birth, explains that when she was eleven years old several suitors asked for her hand in marriage. The husband chosen for her was a young nobleman she had never met. Nevertheless, she was pleased to accede to the socially sanctioned status of “wife.” She claims that the love between herself and her husband was mutual and reciprocal. This claim bespeaks familiarity with the latest and most “advanced” neoplatonic notions about love, for the neoplatonism that was becoming fashionable in the late 1530s stressed the mutual and reciprocal nature of love.⁶

Neoplatonic commonplaces may figure the narrator's desire for reciprocity but they do not express the reality of her marriage as it was experienced by her body. The narrator tells us that because she was married too young (she was eleven) her health deteriorated, adding, however, that whenever her husband was away from home for an extended period of time her health improved and her body began to regain its former vigor. Rebelling against a marriage judged to be, in one sense at least, unnatural (“j'avoys esté mariée en trop jeune aage” 3), the narrator's body registered the desire of the Other as abuse and violation. Her body, on which the Other's desire was inscribed as injury, offense, illness, spoke a discourse of pain and subjection that belied neoplatonic commonplaces and that prefigures the discourse of corporeal suffering that will constitute much of the text. Unfolding as a series of scenes in which she is wounded, bruised, and battered, the novel repeats over and over the trauma of a wedding night that the narrator reconstructs in a fantasy, the central image of which is that of a child being beaten.

By the time she was thirteen she had matured physically, her body having become so beautifully proportioned that she can say, “J'estoye de forme elegante, et de tout si bien proportionnée que j'excedoye toutes aultres femmes en beaulté de corps” (3). She explains that had her face been as beautiful as her body she would have been one of the most beautiful women in France. Whenever she appeared in public, men would gather around her and, gazing at her, would say, “Voyez là le plus beau corps que je veis jamais” (3). Then, looking at her face, they would add, “Il n'est à accomparer au corps” (3). The face, which is the symbolic locus of mind and selfhood, is presented, therefore, as a bodily fragment that is inferior to, and isolated from, the rest of the body. By dismissing her face, by—through the agency of the gaze—remapping the terrain of the female body so that it becomes an elegantly elongated form from which the face has been detached, cut off, the men who look at her are able to assure themselves that they alone possess the gaze, for the object of their voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure, being a body deprived of the selfhood disclosed in a face, does not look back at them.

Not that she resisted the reification to which she was subjected by the male gaze. On the contrary. Identifying narcissistically with the image of the castrated Other that was reflected back to her in the male gaze, she delighted in being the object of male pleasure. Before leaving her house (to go, for example, to church, accompanied always by her husband), she paid great attention to the elegance of her clothes. She arranged her hair and chose her jewels with great care. Then, like a peacock (the word is hers), she would begin to walk back and forth in front of her mirror, admiring herself. She was immensely pleased when, as she walked down the street, “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’” (22). The anonymous men who surround her and whose gaze she feels pressing on her body are themselves never described. Men are the subject, not the object, of the gaze. They are positioned in the shadows as viewers whereas she, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed and highly lit, is positioned as the object that is seen. She participates in her own reification and introjects with narcissistic fervor the gaze that comes to her. Seeing herself as others see her, she never describes her own face, except to note that her eyes are green. With the exception of this detail, which is formulaic (in Renaissance depictions of female beauty the woman's eyes are nearly always green), the narrator's own face is erased from the image she has of herself. She sees herself as a body that is defamiliarized by the male gaze, a body that the male gaze redrafts as a sightless, passive object, the function of which is to arouse and sustain masculine desire. In other words, she finds her identity as woman by exhibiting her body and by masquerading as the object men want, by becoming a representation of male desire.

But the story line of Les Angoisses hangs on the woman's sudden claim to repossess her face, to appropriate the gaze, and to constitute herself as a subject who looks. Leaving their country castle (which is the very castle to which she will be returned as a prisoner at the end of Part I), the narrator and her husband moved to an unnamed city. Immediately upon their arrival at their city house, the narrator sat down in front of a window. For the first time in Les Angoisses she begins to “look.” The next morning she got up earlier than usual. So eager was she to station herself at the window and to indulge in her newly discovered capacity for scopophilic as well as exhibitionistic pleasure that she rushed to the window as soon as she got out of bed. Standing in front of the open window, she finished getting dressed. Suddently, she saw a young man at a window in the house on the opposite side of the street. Because it was very hot, he was wearing only a black satin doublet. Eagerly, her eyes traced the contours of his partially exposed and well-shaped body. Sizing him up, she was struck by the youthful beauty of his beardless face, by his smile, and by his blond, curly hair.

This scene, which is de Crenne's version of the innamoramento, or the process of falling in love, is composed of petrarchist commonplaces that, in the discourse of male poets, had been used for centuries to depict idealized feminine beauty. When appropriated by a female author for the purpose of depicting masculine beauty, they become charged, however, with transgressive power. In the economy of the text, or better yet, in the economy of the fantasy the text records, the young man (and the text insists on his youth) is installed in the feminine position vis-à-vis the narrator's gaze, which is not only aggressive but also—to borrow the word psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre uses to describe vision generally—prehensile.⁷

Looking at the young man in the window opposite her, the narrator, accustomed to being the object of the Other's desire, suddenly becomes a desiring subject. She yearned to “avoir jouissance de [ce jeune homme]” (10). At first, she tried to resist the imperatives of desire, reminding herself that she was “lyée de mary” (5). But desire was stronger than reason. “Usant de regards impudicques” (8), she sought to communicate her passion to the youth and to solicit from him a response to her wordless message of desire. Soon, he responded, looking at her with a gaze that was not only prehensile but phallic as well. [“Il me jeta”], she says, “une tresperçante œillade qui me fut penetrative jusques au cueur” (5). In the days that follow their first encounter, the narrator and Guénélic position themselves at their respective windows. As they exchange glances, the narrator's husband stands nearby and watches both his wife and the young man, perfectly aware of his wife's desire.

From the moment she fixes her gaze on Guénélic, the subject pitches her erotic narrative in the register of fantasy. Stressing the fantasmatic nature of her libidinal desire (“mes fantasieuses pensées” 30, “ma cruelle et furieuse fantasie” 48, “mes furieuses fantasies” 51, “mes diverses fantasies” 80, and so forth), the subject points to a truth about human sexuality that Freud will later articulate, namely, that all forms of human sexuality, even those a given culture may define as “normal,” marginalize need and substitute a fantasmatic object for the original object. Shaped by a single voice, Les Angoisses unfolds as a fantasy that articulates what fantasy always articulates: the subject's desire. Freud likened fantasies to daydreams and fictions that the subject creates in an effort to satisfy a desire that demands expresion but that, because it is censored, cannot find expression elsewhere.⁸ Fantasy always articulates both the desire and the prohibition.

In their important reformulation of the Freudian notion of fantasy, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis observe that what the subject imagines or aims at in the fantasy is not really an object; rather, it is “a sequence in which the subject has its own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible.”⁹ The primary function of fantasy is to provide a setting for desire. Fantasy is a scenario, a characteristic feature of which is the shifting place of the desiring subject.

In the fantasmatic scenario that is staged in Les Angoisses, the female subject's desire shifts between two opposing aims: an active aim (to look at, to subjugate); and a passive aim (to be looked at, to be subjugated). As the female subject puts it, “le sexe fœminin n'est jamais rassasié de veoir et d'estre veu” (4). In the language of the perversions, the active aim is, of course, scopophilia, which Freud associates with sadism; the passive aim is exhibitionism, associated with masochism. Unfolding in a specifically visual field, Les Angoisses registers a fantasy that is engendered by spectatorial desire. The three protagonists are bound together in a triangle of desire that is constructed by the gaze.

In the erotic geometry mapped out in the text, both men, though from radically different positions, act to objectify the woman and to deny her an active role in the economy of desire. Unlike the desiring female subject who moves in fantasy from an active to a passive aim, from scopophilia to exhibitionism, the two male protagonists, at least in the fantasy created by the female subject (which is what we have in the text), occupy always the active position and strive relentlessly to fix her in the passive position of object. Guénélic humiliates her publicly when he points her out to his male friends, and, in a voice that is loud enough for her to hear, boasts, falsely, that he has possessed her. Sorrowfully, she accepts this humiliation as the inevitable accompaniment of female desire. Throughout much of the novel, her husband heaps verbal abuse on her, subjecting her to a masculine discourse that figures woman as a beast of unlimited libidinal capacity and appalling lust. As the novel unfolds, he tries to “correct” her by administering punishment that becomes increasingly violent. At first he beats her with his fist; later, with a club. During one beating she falls and breaks two teeth. Another time, he beats her until she is black and blue. Sometimes his rage stimulates his erotic desire; seeing his wife battered, tearful, and bloody, he throws himself on her “pour parvenir au plaisir de Venus” (19).

Pale, fragile, shedding torrents of tears, often fainting, succumbing to bouts of fever and fits of trembling, lamenting the day she was born, trying unsuccessfully to kill herself, Hélisenne never blames or accuses the males who persecute her. She blames only herself. And for what? For desiring. She situates the male Other in the position of absolute power and absolute right, calling him “seigneur et maître” (80). Over and over she says that the beatings she receives from her husband are intended to protect her from her own depravity. Acknowledging her shamelessness and lasciviousness, she speaks of “mes regardz impudiques” (15), “mes inicques pechez” (42), “mon appetit desordonné” (65) [my emphasis]. She internalizes the male voice and the male imago as the super-ego and thus participates in her own degradation. In the “fantasmatic” that unfolds in the text, she looks at herself from the position of the super-ego, whose censorship and punishment become so severe and overpowering that they assume sadistic proportions.

Sadism (Freud's other term for it is Destrucktionstrieb)¹⁰ that turns around on the subject's own self is, of course, masochism. Failing to wrest the gaze from the male Other and to experience desire in the active mode, the female subject shifts back to the passive mode and experiences desire as masochism. In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,”¹¹ Freud distinguished between two categories of masochism, both of which are at bottom “erotogenic,” meaning that both are linked to the fantasy of corporeal pleasure-in-pain. He called the first category “feminine” masochism, which is associated with fantasies of the body being bound, beaten, defiled. He called the second category “moral” masochism, which originates in a sense of guilt and “a need for punishment at the hands of a parental power” (169). In “moral” masochism, the super-ego, which—at least in the present social order—is always the paternal function, beats not the body, as in “feminine” masochism, but rather the ego. By calling masochism a “need,” Freud situates it among the active drives. Much of the subsequent literature on masochism has, however, stressed its passivity. Claiming that the apparent passivity enacted in masochism is a ruse intended to allow the masochist to disavow sexual agency and pleasure, Linda Williams has recently observed that “masochism is a strategy for negotiating pleasure from a position of relative powerlessness.”¹² Williams continues:

Because women have so often been presumed not to have sexual agency, to be objects and not subjects of desire, masochism has often been taken as the “norm” for women under patriarchy—as if women only suffered the sexual pleasure of others. But we need to recognize the extent to which this “suffering” is also a performance to both self and others; for suffering in sex has not only been the way women have often experienced sex, it has also been the way women negotiate pleasure while submitting to patriarchal law. To a certain extent, then, … masochism represents a subversion of this law, a devious act of defiance.

(53)

If the masochism that is staged in the fantasmatic scenario we know as Les Angoisses represents a subversion of patriarchal law, writing, as it is thematized in the text, is an equally devious act of defiance. At the metatextual level, Les Angoisses demonstrates the process by which the text's subjectivity was formed. As in the case of the female narrator's subjectivity, the text's Self is to a large extent produced by the gaze and the voice that come from the Other. There is scarcely a page of Les Angoisses that does not contain borrowings from the works of earlier, invariably male, authors: Boccaccio, Piccolomini, Diego de San Pedro, Juan de Flores, and others. These purloined passages, which, in sixteenth-century editions of Les Angoisses, are not identified as the work of another author, vary in length from a few words to several lines. In her modern critical edition of the text, Paule Demats italicizes and identifies the passages de Crenne lifted from earlier works, making immediately apparent that the voice we often hear in the text is not that of the female author but that of authoritative male authors whom the desiring female subject impersonates, deploying the speech of male Others to form and shape her own discourse.

In Les Angoisses, the male voice, being that of the super-ego, censures and punishes the female ego. A significant number of the passages in which the narrator heaps blame and contempt on herself were, in fact, written by male authors. The female subject appropriates them and beats herself with them. “Je suis basse et infime” (81), she says, condemning her female lubricity with words that are now her own but that originated in patriarchal discourse, in this case, in a text by Caviceo, whose novel Il Peregrino was widely read in the early sixteenth century.

There has been a tendency in the criticism devoted to Les Angoisses to see in the massive borrowings from canonical male-authored texts a sign of the female author's lack of imaginative intensity and creative energy. Female erotic desire and female suffering seem to have no voice of their own in the text, for they come, by and large, from male discourse. The scripts of female desire, female pleasure, female suffering that are inscribed in Les Angoisses were in most cases written by men, who vilified erotic desire in woman. In the male-authored passages that de Crenne cites, female desire and female suffering are expressed in language that is highly rhetorical. Critics have often concluded that the female author of Les Angoisses betrays a “feminine” fondness for highly embellished discourse and for the seductive charm of rhetoric. Embedded in this conclusion is the misogynistic view, widely held in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that rhetoric, the art of persuasion and seduction (linked metonymically to cosmetics) was essentially “feminine,” for woman, like rhetoric, was thought to be skilled in the ruses of deceit.¹³ Woman, according to this view, was an overdetermined signifier that lured man away from the signified. By contrast, logic and grammar were thought to be essentially “masculine.”

A different conclusion, however, is possible. The mannered artificiality of the male-authored passages de Crenne borrows suggests that the female desire depicted in such passages originates in the male “fantasmatic” and is, therefore, a male pathology. The female author sometimes mimics the male authors whose words she borrows and, to portray female desire, writes a prose that equals theirs in rhetorical flourish. But such passages do not constitute female speech. Rather, they mimic male speech, which, to the extent that it claims to depict female desire, is a masquerade of female speech and of womanliness. Sometimes de Crenne heightens the masquerade by altering a word in the male-authored passages she cites, substituting a boldly ostentatious Latinate neologism for a more common word and increasing in this way the artificiality of a masculine discourse that claims to speak for women.¹⁴ Because de Crenne's text consists of many borrowed pieces that are stitched together, it can be seen as “mimicking” the exemplary female activity of piecing, patching, quilting.¹⁵ But it can also be seen as illustrating the compositional design we know as montage. And, as art critic Griselda Pollock has noted,¹⁶ montage is particularly useful for criticizing culture, for getting behind conventions of representation and exposing the ideology those conventions serve. For, in its juxtaposition of disparate elements, montage employs “dis-identificatory practices” (158) that are designed to liberate the viewer—in this case, reader—“from the state of being captured by illusions of art which encourages passive identification with fictinoal worlds” (163). In short, montage and masquerade disrupt the illusionist procedures of fiction and introduce distance within the space of the text.

Joan Riviere, in her famous 1929 article, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” was the first to theorize femininity as mask.¹⁷ Riviere, who was a lay analyst, reports the case of one of her patients, a professional woman who, after presenting a brilliant paper before a largely male audience, could not resist flirting in a blatant and overt way with the men in whose company she found herself. Riviere states that the woman felt compelled to compensate for her intrusion into masculine territory, for her usurpation of discourse, her theft of masculinity, by exaggerating the gestures of feminine flirtation, by flaunting womanliness. Riviere notes that the woman mimicked genuine womanliness and, in masquerade, took on an undeniably feminine identity shortly after her incursion into what she perceived to be masculine territory. Riviere then remarks: “The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade.’ My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.” This startling statement means, as Stephen Heath points out, that for Riviere “to be a woman is to dissimulate a fundamental masculinity.”¹⁸ In Riviere's formulation, femininity is precisely that dissimulation.

Riviere's theorizing is, I believe, relevant to the blatant and overt citational practice of the implied female author of Les Angoisses. The borrowed passages, all by famous male authors, serve, certainly, to illustrate how female desire and female suffering are represented in patriarchal discourse. The male authors whom the implied female author cites articulate womanliness as, on the one hand, lubricity and, on the other, suffering. “O pauvre dame infelice et malheureuse” (84), the narrator in Les Angoisses says about herself, citing Boccaccio. Speaking in the somewhat hysterical voice that early Renaissance male authors apparently believed to be the authentic voice of womanliness, the female subject implores death to release her from her suffering by repeating the words Caviceo had written for the female protagonist in Il Peregrino: “O ciel, O la terre, O corps superieurs, O vagues esperitz, O ames irreposées, conspirez ma mort, et imposez fin à ma miserable vie!” (85).

If we apply the logic of Riviere's argument to Les Angoisses, we can say that the implied female author, perhaps even the real female author, felt compelled to compensate for her usurpation of discourse, for her theft of masculinity, by—through stress on female lubricity and female suffering—exaggerating the gesture of feminine pain that was traced out in texts by male authors, by producing herself as an excess of womanliness, by, in other words, foregrounding the masquerade and thus dissimulating the masculinity she exhibits by speaking, by writing.

If female erotic desire and female suffering are mediated by patriarchal discourse, the desire to write is not. It is articulated only through the discourse of the implied female author. When the husband is informed by a servant that he can probably learn the truth about his wife's involvement with Guénélic by reading the manuscript she has been writing secretly, he kicks the door down to his wife's room and bursts in upon her. Startled and frightened, she did not have time to hide what she calls “mes escriptures” (83). Having read the manuscript, he became so enraged that he pulled out his sword and would have killed his wife then and there if servants had not restrained him. “O meschante et detestable,” he says to her, “à ceste heure suis bien informé, par les escriptures de ta main escriptes, de ton effrenée lasciveté! … tu es de luxure si prevenue que tu ne desire que l'execution libidineuse” (83). He destroys her manuscript, and she, utterly bereft, implores the figure of death to free her from “ceste peine inhumaine et insupportable tribulation, qui incessamment me tourmente” (83).

Driven by an urge to write (an urge that may in fact be an effort to regulate her sexual energy), the narrator started over and rewrote Les Angoisses during her imprisonment in the country castle. This version, too, was taken away from her, confiscated by the woman her husband had engaged to guard her. Presumably she wrote Les Angoisses yet a third time, and this is the version that was discovered after her death.

Throughout Les Angoisses, the narrator's libidinous passion, “ceste vulpine subtilité feminine” (85) of which her husband accuses her and of which she accuses herself, is inseparable from her desire to record what she calls “l'experience de ma furieuse follie” (96). Ultimately the narrator's “appetit venerien” (17) stands metonymically for that other perverse female desire: the desire to accede to the Symbolic and to register in a text the experience of the moral and physical degradation she suffers under the law of that implacable male god Cupid, “[qui] avoit sur moy,” she says, “domination et seigneurie” (83).

Locked up in a tower at the end of Part I, the narrator, now away from her husband and away from the gaze of male Others, usurps the male voice and creates the long narrative of Parts II and III of the novel, a narrative in which the speaking subject, the “je,” is a male, Guénélic, who relates his chivalric adventures as he searches for the imprisoned Hélisenne. The fictional Hélisenne retains for herself, however, the role of implied author, for she reveals that she is writing Guénélic's story for him. Moving away from the compositional design of Part I, the female author composes a long sustained narrative of adventure that conforms to literary tradition and so affirms her accession to the Symbolic.

Because Les Angoisses solicits specifically a female readership, how, we may ask, is a female reader to read this text? The female reader who accepts the urgent invitation extended in Part I of Les Angoisses to engage with the fantasy inscribed in the text becomes herself the subject of the textual fantasy she appropriates. Now as Laplanche and Pontalis have argued, the subject's place in fantasy is not fixed. Fantasy, like reverie and daydream, allows the subject to shift from one place to another, to disregard all boundaries, to cross all lines of demarcation, including the bar of gender. The female reader of Les Angoisses can, by narcissistic identification, put herself in the position of the female subject as it is mapped out in the text's fantasmatic scenario. In this position, she will be the passive or masochistic female subject. But the female reader, like the males in the text who gaze at the female body, is necessarily in the position of the one who sees, who looks. Thus she can—indeed, in some ways, must—identify with the possessor of the gaze and situate herself in the active or sadistic position. Identification with the position the text clearly defines as male entails, however, an acceptance of what we can call, borrowing from Laura Mulvey's important work on female spectatorship in cinema, a certain “masculinization” of readership.¹⁹ Because the text defines “looking” as, essentially, a male activity, the female reader, obviously possessor of the gaze, must occupy the position of the one who looks, even though she can occupy that position only by impersonating the male.

The fact that the implied author in the text is female, and further, that the author who created her is also female, subverts, however, the neat alignment of female with passivity and masochism, on the one hand, and male with activity and sadism, on the other. Throughout much of the text, “womanliness” is presented as a fiction created by male authors. The fact that the woman can appropriate “womanliness” and wear it like a mask when it suits her purpose means that for the female reader narcissistic identification with the woman in the text does not necessarily entail identification with the figure of woman as lustful beast or tender wound. It can also entail identification with the figure of woman whose claim to be lustful beast or tender wound is a strategy designed to permit her to slip into the Symbolic. What characterizes fantasy is precisely that, though the positions are fixed, the subject (in this case, reader) who engages with textual fantasy shifts from one position to another. The reader appropriates textual fantasy in ways the text cannot entirely anticipate or determine, for appropriation of textual fantasy depends on the particular psychic scenarios the reader brings to the text. Exhibiting the self-awareness that characterizes so many Renaissance works, Les Angoisses, then, maps out with considerable precision the problematic of female authorship and female readership, that is to say, the problematic of female subjectivity, in a society that privileged patriarchal discourse.

Notes

1. Gustave Reynier, Le Roman avant l'Astrée (Paris: Colin, 1908) 99-122. Also: M. J. Baker, “France's First Sentimental Novel and Novels of Chivalry,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 36 (1974): 33-45; Anne R. Larsen, “The Rhetoric of Self Defense in Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours (Part one),” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 29 (1982): 235.

2. Fritz Neubert, “Hélisenne de Crenne (ca. 1500-ca. 1560) und ihr Werk. Nach den neuesten Forschungen,” Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur 80 (1970): 303.

3. Reynier, Le Roman avant l'Astrée 117. Also: Neubert 300; Colette Winn, “La Symbolique du regard dans Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours d'Hélisenne de Crenne,” Orbis Litterarum 40 (1985): 207. Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault, A Renaissance Woman, Hélisenne's Personal and Invective Letters (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986), call Les Angoisses a “seemingly autobiographical tale” (3).

4. Especially V.-L. Saulnier, “Quelques nouveautés sur Hélisenne de Crenne,” Association Guillaume Budé 4^e Série, 4 (1964): 459-63, and “Hélisenne de Crenne: notes biographiques,” Studi Francesi 31 (1967): 77-81.

5. Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours, ed. Paule Demats (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968). All citations are from this edition and are identified by page number in the text.

6. Introduced into France by Symphorien Champier (La Nef des dames vertueuses, 1503), the neoplatonic notion of love was powerfully articulated by Castiglione in the Courtier, published in Italian in 1528 and in French in 1537. Texts by Ficino began to appear in France in the 1540s. Furthermore, neoplatonism and the status of women were among the issues that were debated in the Querelle des amies in the early 1540s.

7. “Certain Relationships between Fetishism and Faulty Development of the Body Image,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 8 (1953): 91.

8. On Freud's use of the word “phantasy,” see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1967) 152-57, rendered in English as The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973) 314-19. Cotgrave translates fantasie as “a vision, representation, or image of things conceived in the mind.” This is the Stoic definition of fantasie, for according to Stoic epistemology, which depended on an empiricist psychology, external sources inscribe on the mind impressions (phantasia) analogous to those made by a seal on wax. On the importance of the Stoic concept of fantasie in the Renaissance, see Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 48.

9. The Language of Psycho-Analysis 318. For a fuller development of their concept of fantasy, see Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986) 5-34.

10. “Das Ökonomische Problem des Masochismus,” in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1940) 13: 377.

11. In The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961) 19: 159-70. In his introduction to Le Miroir des femmes, ed. Luce Guillerm et al. (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983) 2: 7, J.-P. Guillerm notes that novels produced in France during the 1530s are marked by a sado-masochistic strain: “En marge des poésies platonisantes et/ou pétrarquisantes, les romans semblent assumer la part plus ouverte et plus vulgaire des mises en scène clairement sado-masochistes.” See also Luce Guillerm, “La Prison des textes ou Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours d'Hélisenne de Crenne (1538),” Revue des Sciences Humaines 195 (1984): 10-23.

12. “Power, Pleasure and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography,” Representations 27 (1989): 51.

13. In the late twentieth-century, Jean Baudrillard has restated the view that “the female,” defined as “a principle of uncertainty,” is the figura of artificiality and seduction, which he, unlike medieval and Renaissance male writers, praises over “masculine production.” See his Séduction (Paris: Galilée, 1979).

14. On p. 79, for example, de Crenne lifts several passages from the French translation of Caviceo's Il Peregrino, but changes “malheureuse” to “infelice” and “navra” to “vulnera.”

15. Luce Guillerm, “La Prison des textes …,” speaks of de Crenne's “écriture en patch-work” (11). For the notion of piecing applied to women's texts, see Elaine Showalter, “Piecing and Writing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 222-47. Tom Conley, “Feminisn, Ecriture, and the Closed Room: The Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours,” Symposium 27 (1973): 322-32, points out that the text reflects the conditions that confronted a woman who, like Marguerite de Briet, wanted to write: lack of privacy, narrow range of lived experience, etc. See also Colette Winn, “Perception spatiale dans Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours,” Degré Second 9 (1985): 1-13.

16. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988).

17. Rpt. in Formations of Fantasy 45-62.

18. “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy 49.

19. “Afterthoughts … inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework (Summer 1981): 13. See also two articles that have attained canonical status: Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6-19; Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (1983): 74-87.