SOURCE: “Desire and Writing in Scudéry's ‘Histoire de Sapho,’” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 37-50.

[In the following essay, Hannon illuminates Scudéry's depiction of desire in her “Histoire de Sapho,” from Artamène. Employing the insights of the twentieth-century French feminist Hélène Cixous, Hannon explores how Scudéry's writing about the female body in her amatory fiction imagines a place of greater freedom for women.]

Scudéry scholarship often focuses on her 1654 novel Clélie, which contains the “Carte de Tendre,” the best known of the many amorous geographies in vogue during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scudéry's sometimes ambiguous distinction between the friendship or “amitié tendre” of the land of Tendre and the passionate love of the “Terres Inconnues” has elicited divergent critical interpretations: certain critics emphasize the novel's intellectual, spiritual love reflective of the purgation of passion, whereas others stress its apology of passion, valorizing of the affective dimension, and legitimation of sentiment.¹ However, the issue of eroticism in Madeleine de Scudéry's works is seldom addressed.² My reading of “Histoire de Sapho,” the tenth and final volume of Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1653), reveals that what appears to be an idealized or intellectualized love includes an important erotic dimension.³ The argument for eroticism in Scudéry's œuvre is strengthened by selecting a text written prior to Clélie: “Histoire de Sapho” can be conceived of as a kind of hiatus before the lines separating love from friendship, the land of Tendre from the “Terres Inconnues,” are more forcefully delineated.⁴ For in this anterior text, love's body is defined by “inclination”—“pente qu'on a naturellement à quelque chose” (Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois, 1680)—guaranteed by its very irrationality to be free of ulterior motives. “Si je dois votre amour à quelque chose,” explains Sapho to Phaon, “c'est à votre inclination” (560). Love is born not of the marriage contract—“Je veux un Amant sans vouloir un Mari” (415)—but arises rather from “inclination,” “une liaison avec quelqu'un qu'on peut choisir” (412):

Jugez donc, Phaon, si je trouverais bon que vous puissiez m'aimer par nulle autre raison que parce que vous me trouvez aimable, & parce que vous ne pouvez vous empêcher d'avoir de l'affection pour moi.

(561)

⁵The nature of Sapho and Phaon's “inclination” is clarified by analyzing the scene in which the heroine poses for her portrait under the watchful eyes of the salon habitués. Although the eroticism of this scene is usually neglected in favor of a more traditional reading of “saphonisme” as the sublimation of passion, its literal encoding of the body into gestural language could easily be transposed to the boudoir, which here seems to trespass on the limits of the public drawing room. Salon society is the third term in a triangular configuration wherein a mute Sapho and Phaon communicate through well-placed glances and meaningful blushes. The lovers' glances, “il savait si bien l'art de parler d'amour sans en parler” (444), are signs to be deciphered in an amorous game where mediated expression is the rule. Just as their glances are a kind of broken sentence interrupted by the group surrounding them, so too are the lovers' bodies fragmented into synecdoches against the encompassing scene. Sapho is reduced to an “aimable rougeur,” “beaux yeux,” and especially “rêverie”; while Phaon is dispersed into “regards,” “visage,” and “un air si languissant & si amoureux dans ses yeux” (444-45). The references to Sapho's blushing and daydreaming underscore the erotic components of this passage where the painter reveals the soul of his subject already undressed by her lover's glances: “par un aimable rougeur qui paraissait sur le visage de Sapho, … elle trouvait que les regards de Phaon lui en disaient trop” (444). The numerous references to Sapho's “rêverie” which close the passage suggest a jouissance compatible with the restraints of this social gathering: “Sapho, rêvant assez profondément, arrêta ses beaux yeux sur le visage de Phaon, qu'elle ne voyait pourtant pas …” (445).

Scudéry's Sapho recalls the original poetess of sexual desire when she loses control: “elle regardait Phaon sans le voir,” and “en rougit” (445). On yet another level, Sapho's embarrassment results from her violating the ideal of sociability by a personal statement of mute passion. In one of her later Conversations, Scudéry does in fact condemn “rêverie” as inappropriate for social reunions: “Mais pour cet enchaînement de rêveries continuelles qu'ont certaines gens; qui ne sont jamais où on les voit … je trouve qu'il est bon de s'en corriger.”⁶ The tension between the expression of personal sentiment and the dynamics of polite society, expressed here by a confusion of the boundaries between salon and boudoir, will be resolved only by the utopic solution, intimated by the synecdochic suppression of the characters from salon space. This literal writing of the body through gesture does not however define “l'écriture scudérienne”; Scudéry's gesture language instead travels the erotic distance to “elsewhere,” the land of writing and passion that is the New Sauromates.

Clearly, there is no place to go but “elsewhere” for the seventeenth-century woman writer, doubly constrained by bienséance—first as an aristocrat, then as a woman—to the expression of mute passion as exemplified in the portrait scene. For “Histoire de Sapho” is above all the mise en scène of the woman writer, who will rescue the mute body of passion from oblivion by transforming it into poetry. The novel stages the heroine's coming to writing in a curious never-land in between the antique Mytilene and seventeenth-century Paris. The opening portrait displaces the traditional topoï of physical perfection to valorize an intelligence not divorced from sentiment, “les charmes de son esprit surpassent de beaucoup ceux de sa beauté …” (333). This fictionalized portrait identified with Scudéry by her contemporaries appropriately emphasizes Sapho's hands, “dignes de ceuillir les plus belles fleurs de Parnasse” (333), since they endow the mute body with poetic voice. Scudéry evades the usual opposition between eros and logos by describing Sapho's eyes, “si amoureux, & si pleins d'esprit,” as communicating an “esprit amoureux.” There is a “certain tour amoureux à tout ce qui part de son esprit,” and “un caractère amoureux dans tous … [ses] Ouvrages” (333). In her verse, Sapho maps out the “Terres Inconnues” on the outskirts of the “Carte de Tendre,” since she charts the “anatomie d'un cœur amoureux” (334). However, professional writing was considered reprehensible in the eyes of polite society:

dès qu'on se tire de la multitude, par les lumières de son esprit, & qu'on acquiert la réputation d'en avoir plus qu'un autre, & d'écrire assez bien en Vers, en Prose, pour pouvoir faire des Livres, on perd la moitié de sa Noblesse, si l'on en a. …”

(366)⁷

Moreover, the century tended to designate conversation as women's realm in opposition to writing, associated with the all-male academies.⁸ Thus, in concession to bienséance, not only is the heroine's poetry concealed, but also numerous references to her modesty deflect attention from the bold enterprise of celebrating a woman writer. This oft-touted modesty assures the seventeeth-century reader that, despite her writerly ambition, Sapho possesses quintessentially feminine qualities, such as her contemporary Lescale here describes:

La Modestie est une vertu tellement particulière & propre aux femmes, qu'on ne peut pas separar d'avec elles, mesme apres leur mort. De sorte qu'il semble qu'elle soit née avec elles & que de dire “estre Modeste, & estre femme” soit une mesme chose.⁹

Lescale, who praised women's “Eloquence muette,” clearly uses “modesty” as a code word for “silence.” Thus Sapho's professed self-effacement is at odds with her writing and at once marks her progressive withdrawal from Mytilene and her eventual exile to the New Sauromates. Indeed, this subdued Sapho should be read in the context of the last letter of Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres, “Sapho à Erinne,” published in 1641.

Because Scudéry's preceding Sapho character in Les Femmes illustres was not associated with the autobiographical elements widely attributed to her second Sapho, the former takes certain liberties denied the latter. The first Sapho comments on the century's custom of denying women the right to engage in poetry by conceding to her friend, the aspiring writer Erinne, that “par un usage que les hommes ont établi … l'étude nous est autant défendue que la guerre. Faire des vers est la même chose que donner des batailles” (158). Nevertheless, even though bienséance considered writing a male enclave, Sapho twice cautions Erinne against the pitfalls of the “fausse honte” associated with women's writing, and encourages the neophyte to “faire elle-même son portrait” (161).¹⁰ Sapho thus invites Erinne to join her in writing poetry on the summits of Permesse:

C'est là Erinne, que je vous veux conduire: c'est là que vous me surpasserez, aussitôt que vous y serez arrivée: c'est là que vous acquerrez une Beauté, que le Temps, les années, les saisons, la vieillesse & la mort même ne pourront vous dérober; c'est là enfin que vous connaitrez parfaitement, que notre sexe est capable de tout ce qu'il veut entreprendre.

(160)¹¹

This “c'est là que” of writing, this “Permesse” which is unsuccessfully transposed to Mytilene and finally conflated with the utopia of the New Sauromates, uncannily evokes the “ailleurs” of fiction invented by yet another advocate of women's writing, the contemporary theorist, novelist and playwright, Hélène Cixous:

Il doit y avoir un ailleurs me dis-je. Et tout le monde sait que pour aller ailleurs il y a des passages, des indications, des “cartes”—pour une exploration, une navigation. Ce sont les livres. Tout le monde sait qu'il existe un lieu qui n'est pas obligé économiquement, politiquement, à toutes les bassesses et à tous les compromis. Qui n'est pas obligé de reproduire le système. Et c'est l'écriture. S'il y a un ailleurs qui peut échapper à la répétition infernale, c'est par là où ça s'écrit, où ça rêve, où ça invente les nouveaux mondes. C'est là que je vais.

(131-32)¹²

Both Scudéry and Cixous affect an incantatory tone to encourage women to break the “éloquence muette” described by Lescale: when Sapho urges Erinne “Mais si de votre propre main, vous laissez quelques marques de ce que vous êtes” (162), she presages Cixous' “C'est en écrivant … que la femme affirmera la femme autrement qu'à la place à elle réservée dans et par la symbolique, c'est-à-dire, le silence …” (171-72). The localization of writing in elsewheres, be it “Permesse” or the “nouveaux mondes,” engages these two writers in what will prove to be a dialogue on writing and sexuality that spans the centuries. This unwitting partnership, which illuminates both writers' discourses on the desire for writing and the writing of desire, is elucidated by superposing Les Femmes illustres, “Histoire de Sapho” and “Sorties.” While it is true that the nature of Erinne's poetry is not explicitly addressed in “Sapho à Erinne,” most if not all Scudéry's readers recognized the historical Sappho's link with passion.¹³ The later “Histoire de Sapho” suggests this connection in the portrait painting scene, which may be considered a mise en abyme or a miniature of the novel's project as a whole, that is, the portrait of the woman writer.

One will recall that the painter's portrait of Sapho is contextualized by an encoding of the body into gestural language in such a way that the artist's depiction of the writer is simultaneously one of sexual desire: the poet is depicted as she responds to Phaon; her desire cannot be separated from her portrait as a writer. “Elle avait un feu dans les yeux qui était inimitable” (466), says Phaon of the portrait. Moreover, this mise en abyme, by virtue of its central position in the textual economy, serves as a pivotal point around which the reading turns: the link between writing and sexuality is insinuated throughout the entire text by a back and forth play originating from a central, structuring vantage point.¹⁴ In fact, Cixous' somatizing of writing—“Texte mon corps”—likewise resounds, albeit from the sidelines of bienséance, in Scudéry's “Elle [Sapho] ne pouvait même s'empêcher, quand la fantaisie lui prenait de faire des Vers, de penser à Phaon” (437). Sapho's “très violente inclination” for Phaon is converted into writing, since, according to bienséance, “L'Amant doit toujours témoigner toute son amour … L'Amante doit se contenter de leur permettre de deviner toute la sienne” (415). If one considers Scudéry's “Permesse” an amalgam of “Parnasse” and “permettre,” her heroines' “c'est là que” of writing is suggestively related to Cixous' own “où ça s'écrit,” meaning the instinctual forces of passion. Bienséance, says Sapho, forbids even the most innocent love, “que les Femmes n'aiment jamais rien,” and although it was judiciously established, she continues, “je ne laisse pas de dire, qu'à parler positivement, elle est injuste” (411-12). Clearly, for both Scudéry's second Sapho and for Cixous, desire must speak. When Cixous enjoins “Ecris-toi, il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre” (179), woman's body is synonymous with the force of desire; it is a site of writing characterized by a constant metamorphosis deriving from the body's joyous participation in a world of differences beyond binary opposition, “jouissance.”¹⁵ Scudéry's seventeenth-century Sapho does indeed participate in the skewing of gender identities that Cixous considers a necessary condition of “writing,” the province of poets. The heroine, who possesses “toutes les bonnes qualités des deux Sexes” (344), partakes of Cixous' inventive “bisexuality” both genealogically and diegetically: Sapho, daughter of “Scamandrogine,” addresses what her admirer Phaon assumes to be love poems to her female friends. Nonetheless, Sapho must hide her poems wherein “ça s'écrit”; in order to write unashamedly “les choses galantes et passionnées,” she must undertake a voyage to where “ça invente les nouveaux mondes,” be it the loftiness of Permesse, the desert-enclosed Nouveaux Sauromates, or Cixous' mythological “antiterre.”

For both Scudéry and Cixous, “elsewhere” is invented via the writing of the feminine body understood as the body of desire.¹⁶ Both conflate writing with passion, and both designate poets, including Sappho, Kleist and Shakespeare, as their spokespersons. Scudéry and Cixous are united, as we shall see, by a web of common mythological and historical personages, Penthesilea and Achilles, Antony and Cleopatre, all passionate lovers who inhabit lands “où le désir fait exister la fiction” (181). For both writers, the eroticized dynamics of writing can speak only in utopias removed from society's compromises: “il n'y a pas de place pour ton désir dans nos affaires d'Etat,” mimics Cixous (121). This localization of writing (of the body) in utopic “antiterres” is an implicit recognition of the historical and social dimension of sexuality. When Scudéry and Cixous de-contextualize the body and place it in an elsewhere, they attest to the power of the discourses on sexuality, which are grounded in a socio-historical context that both defines and confines the body's expression.¹⁷ Both advocates of women's writing seek to free the body from history, as if, in a site far removed from political maneuvering, the body could generate its own language to celebrate a passion beyond compromise. The land of the New Sauromates invented by Sapho aspires to be a state of mind, a state of body, and a state apart, another name for “jouissance.”¹⁸

Everyone knows, says Cixous, that the route to “elsewhere” is facilitated by “‘cartes’—pour une exploration, une navigation. Ce sont les livres.” Sapho's admirer Phaon reaches the “ailleurs” of the New Sauromates by following Sapho's “map” or “ticket,” a poem which his own desire for writing will force him to steal. “Histoire de Sapho” is in part the story of men's desire for women's writing: “Les plus Grands hommes du monde demandaient ses Vers avec empressement” (337); the narrator Democede and Phaon urge Sapho “d'avoir la bonté de nous vouloir montrer les Vers qu'elle avait faits” (445), and Phaon “ne faisait autre chose que demander à tout le monde des Vers de Sapho” (470). This desire for Sapho's poetry implies that it expresses what bienséance silences. Since these poems can be written openly only in the “c'est là que” of the New Sauromates, this privileged space, like Cixous' “ailleurs,” is suggestively traversed by passion. Phaon himself desires Sapho's poems beyond all bienséance:

j'ai même l'audace de penser qu'elle ferait des Vers où ma passion serait dépeinte: & je me forme enfin mille plaisirs dont je ne jouirai peut-être jamais, & qui ne laissent pas de faire naître en foule dans mon cœur mille désirs différents, qui l'agitent, et qui l'inquiètent étrangement.

(411)

The heroine's reverie in the preceding portrait scene will soon be matched by Phaon's own, when Sapho finally allows him to read her poetry, although not in her presence. The “bizarre & surprenant” effect of that reading arouses Phaon's jealousy and reduces him to the silence prefiguring his eventual change of identity. After reading the poems, Phaon “regarda attentivement sans rien dire” (256). His “rêverie” joins Sapho's and indicates his participation in her writing of the body:

Elle dépeignait admirablement la douceur des regards; le battement de cœur; qu'une agréable surprise donne; l'émotion du visage; l'agitation de l'esprit; et tous les mouvements d'une âme passionnée.

(456)

The text compensates for Sapho's writing beyond bienséance by emphasizing her blushing and Phaon's silence (459-60). Phaon's is truly a “jalousie sans objet,” since the other man he imagines behind the poetry is in reality himself. Rather, Phaon is jealous of Sapho's writing—“n'étant jaloux, que parce que vous écrivez avec des sentiments si tendres & si passionnés” (495)—which in comparison to Homer's, has certain somatic properties:

si vous comparez les sentiments d'amour qui sont dans Homère à ceux qui sont dans les Vers de Sapho, vous y trouverez une grande différence: le bon Homère a bien mieux représenté l'amitié de Patrocole & d'Achille que l'amour d'Achille & de Briseis.

(462)

According to Phaon, Sapho's originality lies in her representation of love, a depiction so nuanced—“certains sentiments délicats, tendres, & passionnés” (462)—that it could only stem from experience, from the body. Cixous' “Sorties” refers to Kleist's version of the same Homeric character Achilles, who undergoes a “métamorphose inquiétante” when he uncharacteristically grieves over the loss of Penthesilea, another personage common to both Cixous and Scudéry, as will be seen. Phaon too undergoes a transformation and unsettling of identities; a metamorphosis effected by his “bizarre jalousie,” his “émotion étrange,” and his “inquiétude,” all animated by Sapho's poetry.

Phaon's obsession with Sapho's writing incites him to steal one of her poems in order to discover the name of her beloved. The scene of the crime, Sapho's study, is framed by her obligatory blushing at the sight of a tablet of poems inadvertently left on a table. She rushes to hide them, but her blushing betrays her. This stealing episode reenacts the appropriation of the original Sappho's works by the seventeenth century.¹⁹ And yet, in Scudéry's rendition of this theft, the perpetrator of the crime undergoes changes while the poetry remains intact. Scudéry highlights this desire and theft of Sapho's writing by inscribing it as a mid-point in the novel, shortly after the portrait scene.²⁰ And since the latter emphasizes, as we have seen, the link between Sapho's writing and sexuality, the stealing episode, which marks the onset of Phaon's eventual transformation, is fraught with sexual connotations. Upon reading Sapho's poem, Phaon experiences a paralysis presaging the undoing of his identity: “ces Vers excitèrent un si grand trouble dans son cœur, qu'il fut un quart d'heure sans les pouvoir relire, bien qu'il en eût envie” (473). The drama of this poem focuses on the missing name, represented here by five stars:

Voyant ***** mon âme est satisfaite,
Et ne le voyant point la peine est dans mon cœur:
J'ignore encore ma défaite,
                                                  Mais peut-être est-il mon vainqueur.

(471-72)²¹

The reader participates in Phaon's search for the missing name, all the more so as this same verse is reproduced on the following page. From the outset, Phaon's quest admits of the alterity so important in Cixous' concept of writing, since he seeks another's name where his own should rightfully be. Even when Democède proves that only Phaon's name metrically fits the empty space, Phaon remains unconvinced, and his hesitation fosters the reader's own doubts. Phaon in turn becomes a poet as he desperately seeks to fill in the blank; this exploration of identities is his first step toward participating in Sapho's “écriture” in the land of the New Sauromates. Phaon experiences incorporation—“il n'avait alors dans l'esprit que les Vers de Sapho”—which endangers his identity even as he forgets his name: “car pour moi je ne me suis seulement souvenu que je me nommais Phaon” (447). Phaon's metamorphosis indeed suggests another version of Cixous' Achilles, since “l'amour le mêle à la femme qu'il laisse monter en lui” (215). The transformed hero's inability to conceive of himself as the subject of Sapho's love poem expresses his resistance to becoming her invention. “Ces terribles Vers … qui donnent tant de confusion” (494) reduce Phaon to an oft-mentioned reverie bringing him ever nearer to becoming a fiction of Sapho.²²

According to Richelet, “rêverie” can designate both self-alienation and poetic creation. Phaon's reverie, his “ticket” to the land of the New Sauromates, partakes of both. It suggests the notion of permeable identity not unrelated to Cixous' concept of “l'amour autre,” a poetics driven by the unconscious (body) and unthreatened by otherness. Phaon's journey to Sapho's utopia is initiated by the episode of the boat ride, a group outing where Phaon is confronted with Tisandre, his rival for Sapho's affections. The unstable Phaon, “passant de l'esperance à la crainte,” falls into a reverie, somewhere in between his future identity and his role in this worldly gathering. In the course of the “Promenade Maritime,” the hero, “sans savoir ce qu'il voulait faire,” and “sans s'en apercevoir” (479), lets Sapho's poem fall out of his pocket, directly at the feet of Tisandre. This acte manqué indicates his reluctance to becoming Sapho's creation, since it implicitly invites Tisandre to take his place as the new man according to Sapho's desire. When Tisandre returns the poem to Sapho inscribed with Phaon's name, the latter's transformation is certain. The hero understands that Sapho's poems “me coûteront peut-être la vie” (501-02), a premonition soon confirmed: “tout ce qui était dans l'esprit de Sapho passa dans celui de Phaon, & tout ce qui était dans celui de Phaon, passa dans celui de Sapho” (503). Democede rightly refers to Sapho's writing as “ces vers qui causaient tant de désordre” (489-90), since in this love story a man falls in love with a woman's writing.

To explore the nature of the “désordre” caused by Sapho's writing, the reader need merely travel back in textual memory to yet another boat ride wherein an earlier Scudéry character effects the mise en scène of the lover's body. Scudéry's “Cléopâtre à Marc Antoine,” the third epistle of Les Femmes illustres, depicts a passionate Cleopatre who thus recalls her first appearance to Antony:

je parus dans un vaisseau dont la poupe était d'or, les voiles de pourpre et les rames d'argent qui, par une cadence mesurée, suivaient le son de divers instruments concertés ensemble. J'étais sous un pavillon tissé d'or, et comme je savais que votre naissance était divine puisque vous êtes descendu d'Hercule, j'avais, comme vous ne l'ignorez pas, un habillement pareil à celui qu'on donne à Vénus. Toutes mes femmes étaient habillées magnifiquement en nymphes et cent petits amours, à l'entour de moi, étaient encore un effet du désir que j'avais de vous vaincre. …

(55)

Now, both Scudéry and Cixous are readers of Plutarch's “Life of Antony,” which the latter interprets as a victory of love in history.²³ In fact, Scudéry's Cleopatre, who boldly flaunts her passion, seems as distant from bienséance as she is close to Cixous' conception of the same personage in a rendition of the exact passage. Purple sails, silver oars, a golden pavilion, cherubs, and nymph-like ladies-in-waiting join Scudéry and Cixous in a feast of sensuality:

la barque où elle était couchée, resplendissait comme un trône, incendiait l'eau; la poupe était d'or martelé; de pourpre les voiles et parfumées au point que les vents amoureux pâmaient sur elles; les avrions étaient d'argent, qui battaient les flots en cadence … sous un pavillon drap d'or, elle reposait plus belle encore que cette image de Vénus, où l'imagination fait honte à la réalité; à ses côtés de mignons garçons potelés, pareils à des cupidons souriants. … Ses suivantes, comme autant de Néréides … attendaient l'ordre de ses regards. …

(236-37)

The Cleopatre of both Scudéry and Cixous is an artist who celebrates passion by staging the ornamental body beheld by her lover. Scudéry's bold Venus writes the body of desire, and, with no concession to modesty, claims authorship when she describes this magnificent scene as “un effet du désir que j'avais de vous vaincre” (55). The term “Vénus,” Richelet informs us, can in fact signify well-written or spoken language. Although Scudéry's later Sapho conceals her “violente inclination” for Phaon with a meek “Mais peut-être est-il mon vainqueur,” her earlier Cleopatre unabashedly ventures “vous fûtes plutôt ma conquête que je ne fus le vôtre” (54). The evident inversion of gender roles in “Cléopâtre à Marc Antoine” is not entirely absent from “Histoire de Sapho.” Indeed, Sapho's poetry is responsible for “tant de désordre” because, by conflating “permettre” and “Parnasse,” passion and writing, it somatizes the latter and consequently unsettles traditional oppositions such as those between reason and passion, writers and conversationalists, men and women. Certainly, some of Cleopatre's audacity filters through Sapho's modesty in the portrait painting scene, where bienséance veils but does not obscure the body of desire.

“Histoire de Sapho” includes a second boat ride not unlike the Cleopatre version, since it too is motivated by a woman's story of passion. According to this story, the lovers Sapho and Phaon must journey to a country where sincerity and inclination—“pente qu'on a naturellement”—are indissociable, where the longing for a certain transparency of sentiment will oppose society's counter version, gallantry. Sapho's idealism is a passionate one which cannot accommodate Phaon's indifference to her absence. The latter's lightheartedness and pursuit of pleasure can be associated with gallantry, defined by Pelous as the emerging dominant sensibility in court society after 1655 (153). Indeed, in light of the preceding analysis, one must surely speak of Sapho's passion for sincerity. When Sapho learns that Phaon has embarked on a liaison with a former lover, he becomes in her eyes one of the “nouveaux galants” (530) “qui embarrassent dix ou douze intrigues, sans avoir aucune amour” (529). The heroine opposes gallantry as a debasement of genuine emotion. Clirante arrives at this moment from the land of the New Sauromates, home of the Amazons according to Herodotus. Scudéry's later Conversations will question such a utopia, however she still spares Penthesilea, Cixous' own figure of limitless passion: “On pardonne à Homère sa Pentasilée … Mais de s'imaginer un grand Empire d'Amazones, cela est assez difficile à concevoir.”²⁴ Nevertheless, when Phaon agrees to follow Sapho to this country ruled by a queen, one is reminded of Cixous's description of the Amazon and her lover:

Et elle emmène le vaincu dans son monde qu'il n'a jamais osé imaginer. Là-bas l'attend la fête; une femme qui n'est pas une esclave. Et dans cet univers de reines on produit, on célèbre.

(217)

Sapho does produce—“elle écrit sans doute tous les jours”—and celebrate—“les choses galantes et passionnées” (608). She not only celebrates passion, but also her access to political life: like Scudéry's own friend Fouquet, Minister of Finances under Louis XIV, “Sapho distribue toutes les grâces que la Reine des Sauromates fait aux autres …” (607). Neither bienséance nor salic law prevail in this “c'est là que,” this “Permesse” where Phaon will join Sapho in writing a love story beyond marriage.

For both Scudéry and Cixous, this ideal body of writing is understood to entail liberating possibilities. Firstly, though, the body must be wrested from an oppressive milieu thought to silence its desire. This evasion of context, as we have seen, tacitly recognizes the social and historical component of sexuality even as it seeks to elide it. In “Histoire de Sapho” as well as in “Sorties,” the poetic body, conceived of as a site of liberation from power's dictates, is represented as incompatible with society.²⁵ And yet, an analysis of the relation between power and the expression of desire in “Histoire de Sapho” suggests that bienséance, meaning the social imperatives of polite behavior, not only silences passion but also motivates its expression: the salon's curtailing of amorous discourse exists alongside Sapho's cabinet, where love's body is converted into poetic language. Indeed, it would seem that the distance travelled to the New Sauromates merely rearranges the spatial composition left behind in Mytilene. In this exclusive utopia of the New Sauromates, the configuration of power is juggled so that a queen replaces a king, and the laws of the land include “les Loix pour l'amour.” Hierarchy defines this society which becomes not only the place where desire is expressed openly, but also the site where the discourses defining sexuality, in the form of the “Loix pour l'amour,” are intensified. This profusion of discourses regulating amorous behavior suggests that Scudéry's “Permesse” of the New Sauromates constrains the body to an extent exceeding the coerciveness of Mytilene's bienséance; the “Loix pour l'amour” cannot help but shape the expression of desire. In Scudéry's Nouveaux Sauromates, and perhaps in Cixous' “ailleurs,” the writing of the body becomes a writing on the body, and the space of liberation yet another, albeit alternative, ideology. The important erotic component in “Histoire de Sapho” consists of the journey to “Permesse”; the voyage (of writing desire) is in itself the destination.

Notes

1. The intellectual and spiritual dimension is stressed by, among others, Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978) and Jean-Michel Pelous, L'Amour Précieux, L'Amour Galant: Essai sur la représentation de l'amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines (Paris: Klincksieck, 1980). Joan DeJean's Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) and James S. Murno's Mademoiselle de Scudéry and the Carte de Tendre (Durham: Durham UP, 1986) emphasize the affective dimension.

2. One notable exception is DeJean's analysis in Fictions of Sappho (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989), 96-110.

3. Madeleine de Scudéry, “Histoire de Sapho,” Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, vol. X. 1649-53 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), 328-608.

4. Pelous (71-101) and Murno (entire analysis) agree that Clélie distinguishes between love and friendship while favoring the latter. Murno notes that in comparison with the later heroine, Sapho's “defense of love is more direct and explicit” (62).

5. Sapho earlier explains to her friend Cyndon that the love she seeks is founded “sur l'estime & sur l'inclination” (415). Thus, although love is initially based on feeling, it is not incompatible with reason.

6. “De parler trop ou trop peu et comment il faut parler,” Choix de Conversations de Mlle de Scudéry, ed. Philip J. Wolfe (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1977).

7. Domna Stanton discusses the nobility's disdain for professional writing in The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1980), 96-97.

8. See Erica Harth's Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 15-26. Harth discusses Scudéry's “problematic status as a writer” in the later published Conversations, 44-50.

9. Adam Scaliger Lescale, Alphabet de l'excellence et perfection des femmes (Paris: Nicolas de la Vigne, 1631), 234.

10. Madeleine de Scudéry, Les Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroïques, 1641 (Paris: Côté Femmes, 1980). In the last paragraph of “Sapho à Erinne,” Scudéry specifies that Sapho's encouragement of Erinne's writing extends to seventeenth-century women, “nos dames” (163).

11. Erinne does heed her mentor's advice, since the former reappears in “Histoire de Sapho”'s Mytilene, where “elle fait même de fort agréable Vers” (339).

12. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” La Jeune Née (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1975), 115-246.

13. In Fictions of Sappho, DeJean shows how Sappho became the focus of those of the century's writers who sought to depict women's passion. The majority, rather than consult Sappho directly, instead preferred the Ovidian version, the Heroïdes' fifteenth epistle. Ovid's Sappho served as the model for the lamenting heroine abandoned by her lover, and gave rise to such works as the Lettres portugaises. According to DeJean, Scudéry's originality is to have created a Sappho capable of empowering women writers. See 43-115.

14. The portrait painting scene occurs at approximately mid-point in the novel. See Lucien Dällenbach on the centrally-located mise en abyme in Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), 89-94.

15. Cixous thus describes her Derridean concept of writing: “L'Ecriture, c'est en moi le passage, entrée, sortie, séjour, de l'autre que je suis et ne suis pas, que je ne sais pas être, mais que je sens passer, qui me fait vivre—qui me déchire, m'inquiète, m'altère, qui?—une, un, des? plusieurs, de l'inconnu qui me donne justement l'envie de connaître à partir de laquelle s'élance toute vie” (158).

16. Cixous' argument for feminine writing is not based entirely on biology. Women have a more intimate relation to what she defines as “writing” for historical reasons.

17. Michel Foucault develops this idea in The History of Sexuality I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

18. Cixous' “jouissance” has economic and political implications beyond the obvious sexual ones.

19. See DeJean's Fictions 78-96.

20. The portrait painting scene precedes Phaon's theft by about 25 pages. Both episodes are situated approximately at the novel's center.

21. DeJean interprets this poem as a précieux version of Sappho's Fragment 31 in Tender Geographies, 49-50, 106.

22. In Scudéry's Clélie, the first sign of tendre love is often accompanied by a change of identity signalled by the lover's reverie. See Pelous 53-56, 64.

23. This same passage is also quoted by the seventeenth-century moralist Jacques Du Bosc, who describes Cleopatre as a “coquette.” The Accomplish'd Woman, trans. La Femme héroïque, 1645 (London: J. Watts, 1753), 118.

24. “De la Tyrannie de l'usage,” in Wolfe 73.

25. This conception of writing is related to what Foucault has defined as the “repressive hypothesis,” namely the belief that the relation between sex and power is one of repression. See A History of Sexuality 17-49.