[In the essay that follows, Freccero discusses the significance of a passing reference to Lucretia in the context of the Heptameron's depictions of marriage, desire and law.]

Every encounter with a representation of the rape of Lucretia is an encounter with a literary topos of Western civilization. And, as topos, the meaning of this rape is constructed as universal, transcending historical conditions: in every age and place, Lucretia had to be raped so that Rome could be liberated from tyranny.

—Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism

At the end of The Heptameron's “Novella 42,” Parlamente concludes her tale in characteristic exemplary moralistic fashion with the words, “‘Je vous prie que, à son exemple, nous demorions victorieuses de nous-mesmes, car c'est la plus louable victoire que nous puissions avoir,’” (294; “My appeal to you is that we should all follow her example, that we should be victorious over ourselves, for that is the most worthy conquest that we could hope to make,” 389).¹ Oisille, the surprisingly feisty grandmother of the group, remarks, “‘Je ne voy que ung mal, … que les actes vertueux de ceste fille n'ont esté du temps des historiens, car ceulx qui ont tant loué leur Lucresse l'eussent laissé au bout de la plume, pour escripre bien au long les vertuz de ceste-cy’” (294; “There is only one thing I would regret … and that is that the virtuous actions of this young girl didn't take place in the time of the great [Roman] historians. The writers who praised Lucretia so much would have left her story aside, so that they could describe at length the virtue of the heroine of your story,” 389). The name of Lucretia in such a context reminds us, as Stephanie Jed points out, of “the meaning of Lucretia's rape in the history of ideas: a prologue to republican freedom,” presenting feminist scholars with a peculiar political (and ethical) dilemma: “To retell the story of the rape of Lucretia … is to enter into some sort of binding relationship with all of those readers and writers who somehow found the narrative of this rape edifying, pleasurable, or even titillating, and to be bound by the vision of those readers and writers to look at the rape as they did (and do)—as a paradigmatic component of all narratives of liberation.”²

Thus it is with trepidation (and grief) that I confront the apotropaic power of this name as memorial to and icon of my entry into and complicity with humanism. But like Hélène Cixous, who argues against the phallogocentricity of horrifying myths of femininity and says, “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing,” Oisille takes a skeptical view.³ For what is already (and strikingly) apparent in Oisille's invocation of the topos of the rape of Lucretia is the way in which she first un-topics Lucretia by referring to the work of historians, thus historicizing the tale and its exemplary function, then dismisses “her,” this emblem, this proper name, as “their” creation, “leur Lucresse.” Lucretia lived, and should have been left, she says, at the tip of their pens, the point of contact or penetration that constitutes the humanist philogical impulse to contaminate and violate in order, subsequently, to castigate and purge. To leave Lucretia there, “au bout de la plume,” is to name her a patriarchal fantasm, the ventriloquizing automaton that permits what Alice Jardine has called gynesis.⁴

Jed argues that “only the description of textual experience can interrupt this tradition of imagining freedom in the context of sexual violence” (52), and she examines the relations between (masculinist) philology, the production of meaning, and the political ideologies of humanism. While her work makes possible the re-imagining of cross-historical philological relations, in this study she does not discuss what might arise from a textual encounter less clearly conceived of as adversarial. What else might obtain in the encounter between a feminist scholar and a woman writer of the past? In the case of Marguerite de Navarre, feminists have sought either to claim or to disavow a potentially sororal (af)filiation.⁵ What if this sorority were also queer? While I cannot here propose to study the conditions of production of The Heptameron, I would like to describe disturbances produced by the intercalation of some of the castigated manuscripts and editions of this text as they relate, in part, to the interplay between the woman writer and the apparatus through which we may (wish to) read “her” text.

Editors argue that “Novella 42” deals with a family romance starring Marguerite's brother, the young prince François. Patricia Cholakian concurs, and devotes a chapter to it, aptly titled, “My Brother, My Hero.”⁶ In at least three places in the narrative and discussion of “Novella 42,” the definitive edition A (ms. français 1512), reproduced by Michel François, and Adrien de Thou's 1553 manuscript (ms. français 1524) seem at war with the 1559 edition by Marguerite's first recognized and accredited editor, Claude Gruget, an edition commissioned by Marguerite's daughter Jeanne after her death.⁷

The struggle, what Bakhtin has called the dialogics of discourse, competing voices unharmoniously coexisting on different registers in a text, turns around, predictably, the person of the king, here described in terms that the editors and Cholakian attribute to Marguerite's enscripting of her sibling worship: “Des perfections, grace, beaulté et grandes vertuz de ce jeune prince, ne vous en diray aultre chose, sinon que en son temps ne trouva jamays son pareil” (L'Heptaméron, 286; “I shall say nothing of the perfections, of the grace and beauty of this young prince, except that in his day there was no one equal to him,” 381).

In Longarine's speech praising the self-control of the female protagonist Françoise, manuscript A includes the passage “et celluy qu'elle aymoit plus qu'elle-mesmes avecq toutes perfections,” referring to the young prince:

Et voiant les occasions que ceste fille avoit d'oblier sa conscience et son honneur, et la vertu qu'elle eut de vaincre son cueur [;voyant les occasions et moyens qu'elle avoit, je dy qu'elle se povoit nommer la forte femme.] et sa volunté et celluy qu'elle aymoit plus qu'elle-mesmes avecq toutes perfections des occasions et moyens qu'elle en avoit, je dictz qu'elle se povoit nommer la forte femme. (295, with intercalated variant from Gruget; ms A “addition” in italics)

Considering the opportunities which this girl had when she might have been tempted to override her conscience and forget her honour, considering her virtue in overcoming her heart and her desires, and considering the way she resisted the man she loved above all else, I declare that she was worthy to be truly called a woman of strength and honour.

(390)

This “adding” of flattery is found also in Adrien de Thou's summary of the story:

Un jeune prince meit son affection en une fille, de laquelle (combien qu'elle fut de bas et pauvre lieu) ne peut jamais obtenir ce qu'il en avoit esperé, quelque poursuyte qu'il en feit. Parquoy, le prince, congnoissant sa vertu et honnesteté, laissa son entreprinse, l'eut toute sa vie en bonne estime, et luy feit de grands biens, la maryant avec un sien serviteur (286).

A young prince falls in love with a girl whose favours in spite of her lowly station he fails to win, with the result that in recognition of her virtue the prince abandons the chase, holds her in great esteem for the rest of his days and marries her to a gentleman of his service.

(54)⁸

The Gruget edition is far more terse, relegating (returning?—the relation between the first officially published edition and the “earlier” manuscript is in question here) the narrative to the genre of medieval pastourelle with its predictable, class-conditioned rape scenario that, in this case, has a happy ending: “Continence d'une jeune fille contre l'opiniastre poursuitte amoureuse d'un des grands seigneurs de France et l'heureux succez qu'en eut la damoiselle” (481; “Continence of a young girl in the face of persistent amourous pursuit by one of the great lords of France and the happy result obtained by the young lady,” author's translation). As these variants and others suggest, what tears at the narrative is a gendering of heroic virtue at the site of nationalism, at the site of what also might be called a conflict between the people and their prince. Lucretia meets Marianne.⁹

Jed's study of the relation between the rape of Lucretia and the philological birth of humanism shows, in part, how a certain relation to “liberty” is established via a chastizing or castigating of a corrupted/violated body, which is in turn associated with the excessive passions of tyranny (27-28). Jed retells the narrative of Brutus the castigator, Lucretia's brother, who admonishes the Romans not to cry for the death of Lucretia but to take up arms against the Tarquins in order to found Republican Rome (15-17). Although she rightly marks Brutus's relation to Lucretia as a projective displacement, in other words, she points out that “Brutus finds in Lucretia's chastity the female version of his self-castigation” (15), she does not explain why this narrative of masculine initiation into nationhood (into a being-for-the-state) should require passage through the violated and castigated female body in order to erect itself. This narrative of masculine accession to impassivity, to chaste thinking, to objectivity, literally passes through the body of a woman; it founds itself upon the bloody remains of a violated and excised femininity.¹⁰

Jean-Joseph Goux discusses masculine initiatory transitions in terms of loss and compensation:

In this transition it is, among other things, the sacrifice (the bloody loss necessary for the establishment of the phallus) that is recovered, forgotten, or rather changed in meaning to the point of becoming quite unrecognizable … That which the exercise of philosophy necessitates, is it not the cutting off of, the break with, sensible nature, the immediate, those things which alone allow elevation, ascension? It is in this movement of death to the sensible, indeed of the execration of bad matter, source of all evil, for the purpose of attaining the enjoyment of the idea, that the sacrificial motion would continue by interiorizing and sublimating itself. This restoration, this liberation, were archaically called phallic.¹¹

In his account, the sacrifice of initiation is a symbolic castration, a movement from the penis (corruptible materiality, the body) to the phallus (incorruptible ideality, the mind), a movement from the realm of the mother (matter) to the father (idea), negotiated by and through the masculine initiate himself (56-61). As mythic antecedent to modern phallocentricity, the symbolic initiatory process haunts, as Jed's narrative of the birth of humanism helps to show, the valorization of a chaste impassivity, an adult masculine heroics of citizenship, won or restored at the cost of a violent and “bloody renunciation,” a cutting off:

Access to the phallus is thus, in the initiation, the compensation, the symbolic reward for the loss that the masculine subject must suffer by the bloody renunciation of maternal ties, the sign of the torturous emancipation from an anterior bond, sealed by the first birth. The phallus has thus the role of a detachable value (it is detachment itself) which arises from the bloody cutting of a vital bond (“symbolic castration”) and which rewards (by a second birth) the metaphoric joining of the paternal ancestors, even if they are only evoked by a name which continues the lineage and allows admission to the society of males.

(“The Phallus,” 61)

In the symbolic order that constitutes phallocratic modernity, this process inhabits, as representational remnant, the constitution of the citizen-subject, and a splitting off occurs whereby instead of the penis (body) of the masculine subject himself, the bloody matter that is excised, destroyed, castigated, is figured as the body, the mother, woman. This displacement must also, in some sense, constitute a disavowal of other libidinal matters, such that the price of admission into the society of males is a renunciation not only of incestuous heterosexual desire, but of other desires as well, though these remain implicit in Goux's account as well as in the cultural narrative it seeks to describe. For Marguerite, whose textual economy adopts this model, the excision required is, as we shall see, also potentially one that involves same-sex desire. In the narrative of the rape and death of Lucretia as the prelude to republican freedom, in the narrative whereby, mythically and eternally, “in every age and place, Lucretia had to be raped so that Rome could be liberated from tyranny,” this (meaning of the) constitution of citizen-subjectry—as masculine and as “straight”—is reenacted.

Cholakian makes the point that “Novella 42” “develops the theme of the sentimental education … The question is how the hero will make the transition from boy to man (and from prince to king)” (Rape and Writing, 168), and thus is, in some sense, an initiatory narrative. But, as she also notes, the narrative shifts in point of view between a masculine perspective and a feminine one, for the moment the prince catches sight of the girl, a genealogy and a name, Françoise, is conferred upon her. If this is an encrypting of the hero's name, François (and for the purposes of my argument it will suit me well to go along with the belief that this is a story about Marguerite's brother, the king), then it is also a narrative about, at its simplest figural level, an accession to royal heroic virtue that passes through the (middle-class) body, person, of a woman. For what the story is designed in part to demonstrate is how the prince develops from a boy into a (worthy) king. From penis to phallus. From François, through Françoise, to France. Françoise, the feminine form of the nation for which François is the nominal icon, is thus somehow also France or French matter; and the French are, indeed, the people, the members of the body politic whose mind is their king. French matter, in its encounter with the royal imprint, is also, and not incidentally, the text.

This story is about Françoise too; indeed it is her heroic virtue which Parlamente and the other women praise at the end of the novella, heroic virtue defined in classic consonance with chaste thinking: “‘Je vous prie que, à son exemple, nous demorions victorieuses de nous-mesmes, car c'est la plus louable victoire que nous puissions avoir,’” says Parlamente (294; “My appeal to you is that we should all follow her example, that we should be victorious over ourselves, for that is the most worthy conquest that we could hope to make,” 389); while Longarine adds, “‘il fault estimer la vertu dont la plus grande est à vaincre son cueur’” (295; “One should always give due respect to virtue, and the greatest manifestation of virtue is to overcome one's emotions,” 390).¹² Or is it? Chilton's English translation supplies the name of Saffredent as speaker in the passage that follows Longarine's remark above. In manuscript A (ms 1512), however, it is Longarine (and not Saffredent) who goes on to contradict herself by saying: “‘Puisque vous estimez la grandeur de la vertu par la mortiffication de soy-mesmes, je dictz que ce seigneur estoit plus louable qu'elle, veu l'amour qu'il luy portoit, la puissance, occasion et moien qu'il en avoit’” (295; “Since you take the degree of self-mortification as the measure of virtue I declare that the prince in the story was even more to be praised than the girl, because in spite of his love for her he still refrained from utilizing his power, although he had ample opportunity to do so,” 390). Thus she nearly echoes the words [she?] used to praise Françoise.¹³ Once again, textual variants manifest (or produce—the question of the philological production of a text is precisely what is at issue here) the symptoms of what Cholakian calls the problematic perspectival shifts between masculine and feminine points of view in these narratives. These variants suggest the possibility that what is occurring is, indeed, a splitting of the same (subject) into masculine and feminine subjects of heroic virtue. Whose story is this anyway?¹⁴

Aspects of the tale suggest that remnants of symbolic masculine initiatory transitions mythically haunt the accession to sovereign masculinity. There is, in “Novella 42,” what has been called an “excessive” reference to kinship ties, most notably around Françoise:

Ung jour, estant en une eglise, regarda une jeune fille, laquelle avoit aultresfois en son enffance esté nourrye au chasteau où il demeuroit. Et, aprés la mort de sa mere, son pere se remaria; parquoy, elle se retira en Poictou, avecq son frere. Ceste fille, qui avoit nom Françoise, avoit une seur bastarde, que son pere aymoit très fort; et la maria en ung sommelier d'eschansonnerye de ce jeune prince, dont elle tint aussi grand estat que nul de sa maison. Le pere vint à morir et laissa pour le partage de Françoise ce qu'il tenoit auprès de ceste bonne ville; parquoy, après qu'il fut mort, elle se retira où estoit son bien. Et, à causequ'elle estoit à marier et jeune de seize ans, ne se vouloit tenir seule en sa maison, mais se mist en pension chez sa seur la sommeliere … elle sembloit mieulx gentil femme ou princesse, que bourgeoise … Et quant il fut retourné en sa chambre, s'enquist de celle qu'il avoit veu en l'eglise, et recongneut que aultresfois en sa jeunesse estoit-elle allée au chasteau jouer aux poupines avecq sa seur, à laquelle il la feit recongnoistre.

(287)

But one day, when he was in a church, he caught sight of a young lady who had been brought up in the chateau which was his home. This girl was called Françoise. Her father had remarried after her mother's death and she had moved to Poitou with her brother. She also had an illegitimate half-sister, of whom her father was extremely fond, and who had been married to a butler in this young prince's household, with the result that she was as well-placed as anyone else in the family. The father died and left everything he possessed to Françoise, who went to live in her newly inherited property, just outside the town. But being marriageable, and only sixteen years old, she preferred not to remain alone in her house, and instead went to board with her sister, the butler's wife … she looked more like a noblewoman or a princess than a townswoman … When he returned to his chamber he made inquiries about the girl whom he had seen in church, and realized that when he had been small she had come to the chateau to play with her dolls with his sister, who, once reminded of her childhood friend, sent for her, gave her a warm welcome and invited her to come see them often.

(381)¹⁵

The continuous reminder, throughout the narrative, that Françoise was raised in the household of the prince serves to impose the incest taboo on their relationship.¹⁶ The kinship references in the tale are thus specific and overdetermined, for they function to mark the sororal relation of Françoise to the prince. “It is this sororal incest,” Goux remarks, “which he must sacrifice in order to be able to enter into the exchange [of women]” (63).

Françoise, in the tale, both is and is not the prince's sister. The resemblance prevaricates so that she can be simultaneously circulating goods and prohibited sister. But the question of initiation and entry into a circuit of exchange applies as much to Françoise as it does to the prince. The narrative makes clear the dysfunctionality of her kin relative to their responsibility to circulate her properly (and to prohibit incest): her sister begs her to meet with the prince, while her brother-in-law arranges a tryst at his behest. The agent of accession to heroic virtue in the tale thus also becomes Françoise herself, for herself as much as for the prince.

Another element that marks the narrative as initiatory remnant is the determining presence of the prince's mother in the tale, she who recalls the prince to the household, or detains him there, who is his treasurer, and whose disapproval places constraints upon his actions; in short, she who controls his circulation. The family romance thus entails not the relation of the son and his desired, passive, and prohibited mother, to the father (or the law), but rather a relation between the son and his closest female kin. If the mother succeeds in keeping her son within the household, how does this young prince then accede to phallic sovereignty, for, Goux argues, “he must himself be able to enter into the ceremonial transaction as an available agent, and that presupposes, precisely, detachment, cutting off, the sacrifice of the mother which is the most obscure and the most torturous heart of the initiatory passage” (63-64)? Does the mother embody both maternal and paternal positions in the way that Françoise acts both as the prince's split subject (his abjected bodily self) and as resistance to the ideology of chaste thinking that would have her body as the castigated cost of its achievement? Here the narrative seems to militate against both heterosexual and phallocratic teleology by strengthening and rendering efficacious the maternal-filial relation and by installing the law as a maternal, rather than a paternal prohibition (291; 386; 292; 387). The place of sovereign phallic privilege is conserved, as we might expect it to be (Marguerite must have been a royalist, n'est-ce pas?), with an interesting twist: the phallic feminine—she who keeps her phallus and her son—rules. And yet, is this maternal (writer, queen) not herself a split subject, both sovereign and sororal (both Louise and Marguerite)?¹⁷

Female agency in Marguerite's tales frequently coincides with class difference, that is, with a nonaristocratic subject-position, and while this is a commonplace of more comic narratives of female agency (clever and/or lusty lower-class women) and a stereotype of the lower born in The Heptameron as elsewhere, it also works in this tale as a recognition of bourgeois resistance to aristocratic abrogation of privilege, where the Christian and courtly ideologies of “vraye amitié” (true friendship) equalize, as Longarine/Saffredent points out, “le prince et le pauvre” (295; “prince and pauper,” 390). Françoise is French, after all, and a bourgeoise. Thus her resistance to inscription in the narrative of abjection, that is, as bloody, mutilated corpse that is defiled, reviled, castigated, etc., makes of her a revolutionary force. But this resistance is performed in the name of chaste thinking, that is, in the name of a self-castigation, a cutting off from desire and pleasure, for the good of the prince, the nation, honor. She is victorious in the tale, victorious over herself, as Parlamente points out, adding that this is the lesson that “nous,” the female addresses of the moral exemplarity of the tale, must learn. Then our accession to honor would be achieved, like Lucretia's, through the self-castigating gesture of overcoming our emotions and desires, like Lucretia, for the good of the state.

Lucretia's self-castigation was suicidal, and the rebirth it produced was in her brother-citizens. Marguerite's narrative, with its split agency, its double rebirth into honor of both masculine prince and feminine pauper, suggests a more modern path toward the narrative of republican “freedom,” one where the woman may live. The life into which one is reborn in this narrative is, as Goux notes, a phallic order; it is, indeed, phallocracy.¹⁸ Marguerite's tale thus indicates one direction in which female subject-citizenry will be constituted, attested to by the advent of bourgeois nationalism in Europe and the documents of nineteenth-century liberal political philosophy.¹⁹

Goux argues that “in Western society, the masculine agent must consent to a sacrifice to which the returns (his entitled returns) correspond only virtually and abstractly,” and that “what remains is subjection to a universal law, a symbolic order which is the same for all, and to which the subject must submit. This symbolic order arises from the interiorization of certain demands which are no longer experienced as social demands, and above all not as the demands of a social exchange” (“The Phallus,” 67). His concern in this essay is to historicize and culturally delineate the phallus or symbolic order of contemporary (Lacanian) psychoanalysis and to show how an archaic and mythic initiatory configuration inhabits the unconscious of modern philosophical phallocentrism. In modernity, he argues.

We see that the phallus must thus take on a new meaning. Rather than appearing as the immediately negotiable restitution of a loss, it becomes pure mediation, the mark of an integrity rediscovered after the sacrifice of the mother. With the phallus, the masculine subject affirms himself, but without any nuptial counterpart being necessary to ratify the function of renunciation. The phallus becomes a mediation in itself, an abstract opening which attests to the subject's accession to an order and a unity conceived of in their metaphysical elevation. Obtaining a woman surrendered by the group and thus the function of communication, is no longer the point. Erected for itself, the phallus is a monastic, celibate attestation of the detachment of “matter” and “nature” which guarantees integrity, identity, unity.

(68)

The result is that “that which had been thought of as a procedure of gift-exchange, of giving and receiving between present and living partners maintaining a reciprocal relationship, is now broken into two acts which not only may be unaware of each other, but which no longer have any necessary relationship, either in social space or in social time, save the abstract subjection to a constraint which becomes law” (70). What remains implicit in Goux's description is that the subject, through his sacrifice, is initiated not only into “the exchange of women,” but also into compulsory heterosexuality itself, through this process of renunciation. Thus, what is also permitted by the abstraction and interiorization of these social demands, as well as by the separation between sacrifice and entitled returns, is the abstraction and universalization of a law of heterosexuality. The occultation of this narrative of renunciation makes possible what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the “homosocial,” a masculine affinity whose homoerotic boundaries are less clearly drawn for being less violently and definitively marked by excision or repudiation than the maternal bond.²⁰

In his concern with the phallus as the “general equivalent for the objects of the drives,” and thus for the inscription of the phallus within a Marxian economic logic, Goux overlooks or does not concern himself with what might be thought of as the intermediary historical stage of the symbolic or, to work against the notion of a progressive historical evolution of the phallus, what might be called another moment in the genealogy of phallocentrism, a moment that might also be said to mark Marguerite de Navarre's text as both early and modern. For in this text, it is true that the demands one must interiorize, the constraints to which one must submit, are not experienced as concretely (and entirely) social, as part of an immediate exchange, and do indeed become law. The order and unity to which the subject accedes are conceived of in their metaphysical elevation, as honor and virtue. Yet the biographical aura of the novella and the absent place of its paternal prohibition (and the present place of its maternal, royal, and phallic prohibition) suggest not quite a “pure” mediation; indeed, they suggest the presence of a nuptial counterpart in the nation, France her/itself. Nor is this symbolic order the same for all, though we might want to argue that the erection of the phallic sovereign subject of the nation-state produces the appearance of the godhead as guarantor of the universality of that symbolic order. Rather, what “Novella 42” delineates, in its tortured and (more or less) unconscious way, is the subject's submission to a law that is the nation-state, a place of phallocracy that is not quite yet phallocentrism. And that law is marked as heterosexual. Both François and Françoise, in the self-castigating movement that leaves behind emotion and desire, are reborn into honor and virtue, into France.

And it is here that we can witness one of the peculiarly modern inflections of Marguerite's text, in that it designates a future site not only for the masculine citizen-subject of the nation (whose sacrifice of incestuous desire is explicitly represented), but for the feminine one as well. In its most nationalistic version, we might read a directive to the nation's women to let their honor, virtue, and self-restraint be the civilizing force behind the nation's barbaric, appetite-driven, but nevertheless noble, virtuous, and heroic men, even as those men learn that women, as citizen-subjects, have the right (and the duty) to accede to honor and virtue, to be themselves citizens, Françoises. Unlike the earlier narrative of republicanism, aptly illustrated in the fifteenth-century Italian wedding celebrations studied by Susanne Wofford, whereby “violence against women is figured as a necessary originary moment of male control and domination that makes possible the ensuing benefits of civilization which are brought by and symbolized by the women, but only after they are subjected to their husbands,” “Novella 42” finds a way out of this sexual violence (homicidal or suicidal) by constructing a female subjectivity and the possibility of female citizenship on the model of the masculine renunciatory sacrifice.²¹

Yet this “equalizing” scenario, one that nevertheless firmly installs marriage as the foundation of the nation-state, also suggests traces of something other than the regimes of compulsory heterosexuality in this early modern narrative of nationalism. For, we might ask, what of the feminine force of the tale, its disdain for Lucretia, articulated by Oisille, the matriarch of The Heptameron's storytelling group? And what of, on the other hand, the maternal phallus, the phallic feminine placed and displaced throughout The Heptameron's conspicuously absented paternal/royal spaces? What of, finally, the absent narrative of (feminine) desire sacrificed; supplemented, ultimately, by the excessive love of the sovereign in manuscripts 1512 and 1524? An alternative heroic female figure haunts this narrative, haunts it because she appears only in the Gruget edition and substitutes for the name of Jambicque, whose story follows that of Françoise and the young prince. Jambicque is a woman who acts upon her desire, her pleasure, and gets away with it, as do many of the women in the tales of the fifth day (stories that deal with successful female agency).²² Gruget replaces the name of Jambicque with Camilla throughout his edition. Camilla, amazon-like servant of Diana, chaste (lesbian?) warrior of Virgil's Aeneid and Aeneas's intratextual twin, assists Turnus against the ancestors of those whose historians will later celebrate the rape and death of Lucretia. Hers is a service to the state specifically marked by the absence of a sexual sacrifice, a refusal to assist in the construction of the masculine citizen-subject through self-castigation and the social exchange of marriage. Can we speak then of another archaic remnant in this text, the remains of what myth and anthropology, as well as radical lesbian feminism, might call matriarchy? A dream of another social order, a feudal one nevertheless, where women rule, where, in Luce Irigaray's formulation, the goods get together, where the traffic is among but not in women?

… She is a warrior;
her woman's hands have never grown accustomed
to distaffs or the baskets of Minerva;
a virgin, she was trained to face hard battle
and to outrace the wind with speeding feet.
Across the tallest blades of standing grain
she flies—and never mars the tender ears;
or poised upon the swelling wave, she skims
the sea—her swift soles never touch the water.
And as Camilla passes, all the young
pour out from the field and house; the matrons crowd
and marvel, staring, in astonishment
at how proud royal purple veils Camilla's
smooth shoulders, how a clasp of gold entwines
her hair, at how she bears her Lycian quiver,
her shepherd's pike of myrtle tipped with steel.

(Aeneid VII: 1057-72)²³

A guerrilla girl and not a Roman matron. And how might we understand this substitution in an edition commissioned by a mother's only daughter? Elsewhere I have discussed Jeanne's sacrificial role in acceeding to the demands of the nation-state, the demands of a social exchange, the social exchange of marriage, imposed as law by Marguerite, her mother, and her mother's brother, the king of France.²⁴ Whose desires, and what kind, return to haunt a scene of excision, only to be castigated once again by future phallologists?

And what if Turnus, and not Rome? Is it a ruse of modern and Western phallocentrism, of the nation-state that France and elsewhere will become, that passion, emotion, lust, desire—incestuous, homosexual—cluster on the side of tyranny, to become the rapist designs of a Tarquin? That to be enfranchised citizens women must also excise these emotions from ourselves and ally with a Brute who would kill his own for the sake of the nation? “Marguerite” seems to suggest that yes, indeed, we must. And yet, in the disturbances of her texts, the texts we read as hers, shadows of a (utopian) doubt remain.

Notes

1. Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, ed. Michel François (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1967); Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. P. A. Chilton (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984; rpt. 1986). All citations refer to these editions; page numbers to the French edition are given first.

2. Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 54, 49. She also argues that feminist scholars “become not only part of the scene of violation but agents in the reproduction of a violated body, a prod to prurience in a humanistic peep show” (49).

3. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 245-64, 255.

4. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

5. Patricia Cholakian, in Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), argues for Marguerite's feminism, as does Ann Rosalind Jones in “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 135-53; and Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, L'Histoire du féminisme français, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1977), 156. See also Deborah Losse, “Distortion as a Means of Reassessment: Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron and the ‘Querelle Des Femmes,’” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 3 (1982): 75-84; John Bernard, “Sexual Oppression and Social Justice in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19, no. 2 (1989): 251-81. Colette Winn is less certain of Marguerite's sisterhood; see “La Dynamique appellative des femmes dans L'Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Romantic Review 77 (1986): 209-18, among other essays. I have also argued against a feminist reading of Marguerite; see “Rewriting the Rhetoric of Desire: Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron,” in Marie Rose-Logan and Peter Rudnytsky, eds., Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 454-73; and especially “Marguerite de Navarre and the Politics of Maternal Sovereignty,” Cosmos 7 (1992): 132-49, Special Issue: Women & Sovereignty, ed. Louise Fradenburg.

6. See Michel François, L'Heptaméron, 481: “Il n'est pas de doute que Marguerite veuille ainsi désigner son propre frère, le futur François Ier; on se souvient qu'elle a déjà usé de la même périphrase dans la vingt-cinquième nouvelle. La ville de Touraine est donc Amboise où résidait Louise de Savoie.” Cholakian, Rape and Writing, 167-68: “All the evidence points to Marguerite's brother François as the hero/villain. The author's close emotional involvement with her male protagonist causes this tale to be split in focus between the heroine's and the hero's perspectives.”

7. Pierre Boaistuau's 1558 edition is banished by Michel François as corrupt because it “défigure par trop le texte de la Reine” (L'Heptaméron, xviii) and because “Le texte est incomplet; il ne compte que 67 nouvelles qui ne sont pas divisées en journées et ont été distribuées dans un ordre arbitraire” (p. xxv). For the question of the publication of the Gruget edition, and how it might relate to a feminist reading of Marguerite de Navarre, see Antoine Compagnon, “The Diminishing Canon of French Literature in America,” Stanford French Review 15, nos. 1-2 (1991): 103-15, at 114, where he takes me to task for failing to include this fact in my discussion of the relation between Marguerite and Jeanne. This article is conceived, in part, as a playful response.

8. Michel François, L'Heptaméron, 286; Chilton, The Heptameron, 54. François notes that the summaries provided for each story in the definitive edition come from Adrien de Thou's manuscript.

9. See Neil Hertz, “Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” and the responses from C. Gallagher and J. Fineman, in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161-217; also Kaja Silverman, “Liberty, Maternity, Commodification,” new formations 5 (Summer 1988): 69-89.

10. See Elizabeth Pittenger's discussion, via Luce Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak, of a similar phenomenon as it relates to textuality, in “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 395: “The female body serves as symbolic site in which social meaning is concretized at the same time that any concrete, material specificity is emptied out of ‘the female body’ in order to insure its service as a pure and proper vehicle. The power of Irigaray's argument is the link she makes between sexuality and textuality. The formulation ‘female as bearer of imprints’ exposes the implications of a textuality figured as female.” See also Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985): 170-91; and Gayatri Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. M. Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 169-95.

11. Jean-Joseph Goux, “The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the ‘Exchange of Women,’” in differences 4: The Phallus Issue (Spring 1992): 40-75.

12. That it is Parlamente who tells this story and provides its moral gloss is significant, marking the tale as a narrative of nationalism. Her name suggests her role as mediator and legislator of the group. She is also often believed to be the Marguerite persona of The Heptameron, which seems to reinforce the maternal, national, and biographical thematics of the narrative.

13. The differences are that puissance appears in this phrase, whereas desire and love appear in the first; honor and virtue are mentioned in the first but not the second, which takes a distance from chaste thinking by disparagingly calling it self-mortification.

14. Using the notion of split focalization, Cholakian argues that Marguerite deliberately encodes a “view from elsewhere” (20) to insert female agency and perspective into the conventional narrative plot of male desire. My argument differs in that I attribute the shifts in novella 42 to a phenomenon of twinning or splitting, whereby what is at work in the text is a (gendered) splitting or doubling of the subject of heroic virtue. Thus I am concerned less with authorial intentionality and agency and more with a psychoanalytics of the text.

15. Cholakian says of Françoise's genealogy that “although it does provide a kind of garrulous verisimilitude, this explanation seems at first glance to supply more information than the reader can possibly want or need” (Rape and Writing, 169).

16. Cholakian, Rape and Writing, 173.

17. This is another instance of the way in which The Heptameron can be called a maternal text, and Marguerite's praxis that of maternal sovereignty. See my “Marguerite de Navarre and the Politics of Maternal Sovereignty.” See also Goux, “The Phallus,” 63: “The phallus would thus be the more or less cryptic symbolic attestation that the masculine subject (and it is this which makes him a subject) is entitled to enter as a taker into the circuit of the exchange of women: the sign, more precisely, that he has satisfied the differentiated requirements of a double sacrifice—maternal and sororal.”

18. See Goux, “The Phallus,” 64: “It would be archaically, as a male subject, and in a close relationship to the phallic simulacrum, that the subject would constitute itself.”

19. See Cora Kaplan's discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's “reply” to Rousseau in “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 31-56; see also Carla Freccero, “Notes of a Post-Sex Wars Theorizer,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (London: Routledge, 1990), 305-25.

20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2-3: “To draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.” See also 25: “We can go further than that, to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence. For historical reasons, this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two.”

21. See Susanne Wofford, “The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli,” in D. Quint, M. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, W. Rebhorn, eds., Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992), 189-238, 202.

22. I disagree with Colette Winn's view that “l'appellatif Jambicque dénonce ainsi la hardiesse de la femme qui affirme son désir d'aimer” (“La Dynamique appellative des femmes dans L'Heptaméron,” 217). To argue that Jambicque is denounced for her desire is to accept only the moralizing judgments of some of the devisants. The narrative, in this case, contradicts their judgments, so that the question of Jambicque's desire is, at the very least, problematized.

23. The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. A. Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 189 (VII: 1057-72).

24. See Freccero, “Marguerite de Navarre and the Politics of Maternal Sovereignty”; also “1527: Margaret of Navarre,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 145-48.