SOURCE: Stanton, Domna C. “Woman as Object and Subject of Exchange: Marie de Gournay's Le Proumenoir (1594).” L'Esprit créateur 23, no. 2 (summer 1983): 9-25.

[In the essay below, Stanton analyzes gender conflicts in de Gournay's Le Proumenoiur, especially underscoring the dynamics of manipulation in which men treat women as objects of exchange and women allow themselves to be “subjects of exchange.”]

“L'échange … Fournit Le Moyen de lier les hommes entre eux,” Lévi-Strauss writes in Structures élémentaires de la parenté; and of the goods men exchange, the ‘most precious’ is women, “sans lesquelles la vie … est réduite aux pires formes de l'abjection.”¹ Copiously analyzing the exogamous matrimonial rules that legislate the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss nonetheless fails to explore the “abjection” to which his universalist theory reduces women; he simply cites “[le] dur destin d'un exil … l'existence lointaine et isolée qui est le lot des filles nées sous les régimes patrilinéaires” (p. 354). Even when he describes certain figures in Gilyak mythology, such as the man who saves his sister or niece from the claws of the bear, as “profondément imprégnée d'une poésie qu'on appellerait volontiers féminine” (p. 354), the Father of Structuralism focuses on “les frères de ces femmes toujours portés à surestimer la perte qu'ils font, en se déssaisissant de leurs sœurs, par rapport au gain qu'ils réalisent en se procurant des épouses” (p. 354). Since the female constitutes an object of exchange, this “feminine poetry” on the marriage system is not ascribed to women; it is viewed as the (hyperbolic) production of man, the unitary Lévi-Straussian subject. Accordingly, in the seminal closing pages of Structures élémentaires de la parenté, where the relations between the sexes are defined as a modality of “une grande fonction de communication,” Lévi-Strauss speculates that “l'émergence de la pensée symbolique devait exiger que les femmes, comme les paroles, fussent des choses qui s'échangent” (pp. 566, 569). Women, he concludes, “représentent une certaine catégorie de signes, destinés à un certain type de communication” (p. 569).

However much it may be contested, Lévi-Strauss's (in)famous theory of women contains an undeniable, albeit partial, truth.² Woman has been and continues to be an object of exchange, a sign whose meaning is arbitrarily set by the motivations of men. However, as the “a-mazing” journey into the patrilineal past continues to reveal,³ woman has also been a subject who appropriates signs, manipulates semiotic systems, discursive modes and models, weaving a variety of textures for circulation in private and public systems of exchange. This act of appropriation represents the first stage of l'écriture féminine, which Hélène Cixous metaphorizes by the verb voler, to steal paternal discourse, explode it, fly beyond it.⁴ Contrary to what Cixous suggests, however, the flight beyond the realm of the Fathers, which Mary Daly names the “metapatriarchal space,”⁵ remains a wishful fantasy, at best, an empowering myth. For any text produced by a female subject is constrained by the contemporaneous discursive parameters—or to use the Gilyak image, the paralyzing claws of the paternal bear. “Feminine poetry” inevitably involves a mediation, a dialectical negotiation wrought with contradictions between the paternal and the non-paternal, what we might term “the gynetic,” constructs whose semes vary in specific discursive contexts.⁶ And this negotiation is necessarily affected by the fact that the predominance of the paternal over the gynetic determines woman's success in invading society's system of linguistic exchange, and having her semiotic textures deemed acceptable currency for circulation.

As Virginia Woolf discovered when she combed the shelves of the British Museum,⁷ numerous are the phallocritical strategies for denying circulation to female texts, indeed for branding the writer herself counterfeit in a system which defines authorial authenticity as a penistic emblem transmitted from Father to Son.⁸ In the annals of French literary history, for every Colette or Scudéry whose work was trivialized, how many more were consigned to oblivion from the Middle Ages on, effaced, erased. In this perspective, the case of Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) constitutes a classic instance of the workings of the phallacious mentality. Attacked throughout her life in satires and caricatural portraits—the first of these, L'Anti Gournay (1610) seems to have generated recurrent topoi and sealed her literary fate⁹—Gournay was labeled a pedantic reactionary for opposing, in a large body of erudite treatises and discourses,¹⁰ the “modernist” linguistic and stylistic trends represented by Malherbe. Thus, while summarizing Gournay's view on language in his study of Malherbe, Brunot did not challenge her traditional image as “triplement comique dans son rôle de vieille fille, de pédante et de revenante de l'autre siècle.”¹¹ Consigning to oblivion the most scholarly female critic before De Stael, literary history has cited Gournay almost exclusively as the editor of Montaigne's Essais (1595), and in the controversy over the authoritative edition, sometimes reduced her to a proofreader or reproached her for excessive tampering with the Master's pen.¹² Even more typical of phallic criticism, Gournay the progenitor of the first feminist treatises in French prose—Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) and Grief des dames (1626)—has been effaced, until the recent “re-vision” of Margaret Ilsley,¹³ in favor of Gournay, progeny of Montaigne, who names her his “fille d'alliance”¹⁴ in De la praesumption:

J'ay pris plaisir à publier en plusieurs lieux l'esperance que j'ay de Marie de Gournay le Jars, ma fille d'alliance, et certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus que paternellement, et enveloppée en ma retraitte et solitude, comme l'une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu'elle au monde. Si l'adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autres de la perfection de cette trèssaincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores. La sincerité et la solidité de ses meurs y sont desjà bastantes, son affection vers moy plus que surabondante, et telle en somme qu'il n'y a rien à souhaiter, sinon que l'apprehension qu'elle a de ma fin, par les cinquante et cinq ans ausquels elle m'a rencontré, la travaillast moins cruellement. Le jugement qu'elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier, et la vehemence fameuse dont elle m'ayma et me desira long temps sur la seule estime qu'elle en print de moy, avant m'avoir veu, c'est un accident de très-digne consideration.¹⁵

Although the passage underscores mutual esteem, and especially, a unique female capacity for friendship, seventeenth-century satires contain sexual (incestuous) innuendos about the relationship between Father and adopted Daughter, while ridiculing the “pucelle de mille ans.”¹⁶ Or, then, the “plus que sur-abondant” enthusiasm for Montaigne and the “vehemence fameuse” for his work, which we find, for example, in Gournay's preface to the 1595 edition of the Essais,¹⁷ have been interpreted as romantic rapture, lucid exploitation or spinsterly obsessiveness—familiar topoi for feminine eroticism in occidental thought.¹⁸

While such views are more revealing of phallologic than of (an always unrecuperable) reality, the Daughter's relation to the Father, in a symbolic sense, is central to any analysis of woman as object and/or subject in the systems of exchange of patrilineal regimes. How does the Daughter, who presumes to define herself as a speaking subject inscribe both herself and woman in relation to the authoritative Father? What tensions, what contradictions between paternal and gynetic constructs are couched in the “feminine poetry” that the Daughter tries to circulate and to have validated in a patristic exchange? These questions are generated by a “revision” of Marie de Gournay's first published work, significantly entitled, Le Proumenoir de Montaigne (1594).¹⁹ No less ignored than the rest of her work, Gournay's only prose fiction can be “re-viewed” as a critical instance of “feminine poetry” after Margaret Ilsley, who calls the Proumenoir “one of the first romans d'analyse written in France” (p. 60). And to support this claim, she cites E. Bonnefon who in Montaigne et ses amis (1898) began an extended list of French psychological novels with Gournay's text, and the comment, “il peut montrer l'embryon du genre” (II, p. 225). Going beyond Bonnefon and Ilsley, Le Proumenoir can be read heuristically as the “embryon” of the modern novel—a genre Marte Robert conceptualizes as the phantasmatic inscription of the Freudian familialroman, wherein the novelist/oedipal Son defines himself as “le bâtard” or “l'enfant trouvé.”²⁰ From this perspective, it is not surprising that Montaigne's “fille d'alliance,” casting the “family romance” in the feminine, should present her fiction as a symbolic baby issuing from and destined for the Father.²¹ Told by the Daughter, Le Proumenoir is the tale of a Daughter as object of exchange in a world of Fathers and Sons. The dual (and contradictory) vision of woman as subject and object of exchange, contained in both the framing letter and the narrative body of Le Proumenoir de Montaigne, constitutes the subject/object of my embryonic “feminine” examination.

FRAMING THE EXCHANGE: AN INFANTILE GIFT FOR THE FATHER

“Vous entendez bien, mon père,” the speaking subject begins, “que je nõme cecy vostre Proumenoir, parce qu'en nous promenãt ensemble, il n'y a que trois jours, je vous contay l'histoire qui suit.”²² A letter addressed to Montaigne, which bears the date November 26, 1588, the narrative frame of Gournay's text ascribes its authority to the Father who generated its telling, in a gesture at once presumptuous and self-effacing: “ne vous offencez pas que j'aye osé parer un si chetif jouët de vostre nom, car je ne l'y mesle que comme celuy de Jupiter parmy les sacrifices qu'on lui offre” (p. 2). The puny plaything that the devoted I offers the divine Thou, the tale is nonetheless designed to bring together two actors who have just cast themselves as Father and Daughter, in a friendship more powerful than “les affections naturelles” (p. 3), but who are separated at the moment of writing. Indeed, this “infantile” écriture, which is described logocentrically as the transcription of a previous parole, constitutes a “recherche du temps perdu,”²³ an attempt to recreate the past, to fill the void of absence by sending the Father a textual body to “courir apres vous” (p. 2). The “I” phantasizes that she might transform l'écriture into la parole once again in the Father's presence: “Or je voudrois vous pouvoir aller donner deux ou trois heures de ma lecture, pour vous faire rire moy-mesme du vain employ que j'ai faict de quelques Serées, mais un page en aura la commission en ma place, afin de vous garder l'un de ces soirs apres souper de travailler vostre ame à occupations plus serieuses” (p. 5). The Daughter, then, encodes her work as vain and laughable—an analogue to her self-representation as servant substitute—in contrast to the serious preoccupations of the Master/Father. This conception of her production does not simply rehearse the early-modern topos of fiction as diversion²⁴; it is overdetermined by the specific problematics of a female speaking subject fearful “de laisser couler des traitz un peu molz” (p. 4). To match “[la] bonne epee” that Minerva bestows upon the heroic male, the “I” appeals to the goddess to grant her “une aussi bonne plume” (p. 6).

Yearning for a phallic pen to consummate her writing, the “I” presents the substance of Le Proumenoir, not as an original creation, but a derivation. “Je rapporte l'argument de ce comte d'un petit livre que je leuz d'avanture, il y a quelque an,” she explains, “& d'autant que je ne l'ay sçeu revoir onques puis, j'ay mesme oublié son nom & celuy de l'aucteur encore” (pp. 3-4). However, this emphatic forgetting betrays an “anxiety of influence as Harold Bloom has named the haunting intertextual relation between the penistic Son and his symbolic Father.²⁵ In the instance of Gournay's “I,” this anxiety translates into willful oblivion so that the progeny will not contaminate the source, but also, not be contaminated. As she writes of this “missing” origin: “Si est-ce quand je l'aurois entre-mains, que je voudrois aussi bien qu'à cette heure, escrire sans luy rien emprunter, pource que je ferois religion de souiller ses inventions du meslange des miennes, & que je n'ay point apris l'exemple de la corneille d'Esope, sinõ pour le fuyr. J'ayme mieux estre vuide, que pleine de debtes” (p. 4). However much the “I” would avoid being a diminutive crow, her “cacophonous” fiction/gift is, like all texts, inevitably indebted. As Guillaume Colletet revealed in Les Vies des poètes françois, the plot of Le Proumenoir is modeled on the “piteuse histoire” recounted in Claude de Taillemont's Discours des Champs Faez à l'honneur et exaltation de l'amour et des dames (1553).²⁶ Indeed, G. L. Michaut maintained that Gournay followed her source “far too closely,” and corrupted Taillemont's “shorter and more energetic text,” whereas Ilsley extols the tighter “more classical” structure of the Daughter's text and its nuanced psychological analyses.²⁷ Such judgments are less significant, in my view, than the Daughter's repression of the paternal source. In a narrative framed by self-effacement, this real or strategic repression is tantamount to effacement of a Father. In that sense, the letter to Montaigne is, like all prefaces, according to Derrida (and Spivak), at once an homage and a parricide.²⁸

The parricidal effacement of the Father provides the female speaking subject the space for the inscription of “feminine poetry.” On the formal level, the Proumenoir abandons Taillemont's conventional structure with its multiple conversations and narrations, which sixteenth-century writers took from Boccaccio's Decameron, and exchanges the male je/female vous for a female “I” recounting a single tale to a paternal addressee. And on the level of the signified, where Taillemont's text exalts love and urges women, “assez sujettes à … mutation” to be “constantes et loyalles en amitié” (p. 222)—a lesson which pervades misogynistic sixteenth-century contes and nouvelles²⁹—Gournay's narration is designed “d'advertir les dames de se tenir en garde” (p. 4). This negative message of defense against the (phallocratic) system of sexual exchange exemplifies the function of negativity that Kristeva ascribes to woman as speaking subject in the symbolic order³⁰; like the “feminine poetry” in Gilyak mythology, Gournay's text signals the desire to avoid paternal claws. This message, and even more, the repeated interruptions of the paternal plot, wherein the “I” digresses/discourses on various gynetic semes, supported by Greek and Latin citations,³¹ necessarily produces a re-written, a different text. In that “distorted” re-writing, to use Bloom's term, lies what the Daughter herself terms the “utility” (p. 4) of the “infantile” gift sent to the transcendent Father. It remains to be seen, however, how the gynetic and paternal semes are con-joined in Le Proumenoir, and what tensions and contradictions emerge from this alliance.

WOMEN IN EXCHANGE AND THE SUBJECTS OF BETRAYAL

The defeat of Persia, which opens Gournay's narrative, prompts the victorious ruler of Parthes to exact marriage from Alinda, the Persian princess, in exchange for freeing her paternal uncle, the captured king. Destined to become the future queen of Persia, Alinda objects to becoming an object of exchange, the conqueror's trophy, doomed to a life of exile: “[elle] trouva fort dur qu'on l'allast faire renõcer au doux air natal … pour la jetter, comme confisquée par droict de victoire, en la mercy d'un hõme incongnu d'elle, & d'une nation fiere & barbare, ou la seulle douceur qui lui resteroit desormais, seroit pleurer & regretter la Perse tout son soul” (p. 8). Convinced by her Father to accept this “banishment” in the name of royal duty, Alinda, whose name suggests a female wanderer—from the Greek àλívδw to wander—sets forth on her journey, determined to return to her fatherland (Perse/Père). During an extended stop in a courtly Persian home, the chaste and guileless heroine is beguiled by the “dangerously handsome” and sophisticated Leontin, who desires her, and would replace her future “possessor.” Not the least of his seductive wiles, which inflame her passion, is his sympathy for her impending exile and his condemnation of her devalued status as prey and ransom (pp. 17, 18). Successful in his “monstrous plan Leontin runs off with Alinda, who remains anguished by “l'horreur de mon exemple” (p. 21), to the point of contemplating suicide. Buffeted by storms and passion, which take her ever further from Father and reason, the seduced maid, with her so-called “nouveau mari” (p. 20), lands in Thrace, only to find herself “prey” to the erotic “assaults” of Othalcus. Singleminded in his resolve to take from Leontin the resistant object of his passion, Othalcus plots with his sister, Ortalde, a perfect exchange: versed in the art of seduction, she will replace the faithful Alinda in Leontin's heart, thus removing the obstacle to the realization of his desire. So successful is Ortalde, so overtly smitten is Leontin, that Alinda decides to die a sacrificial death by executing two exchanges in the culminating ten hours of the narrative. Confronted with news of an impending marriage between Ortalde and Leontin, the heroine feigns to accept Othalcus on condition that he kill a maidservant who has shamelessly maligned their relationship, she claims; but she substitutes herself in the old woman's bed. As she awaits the daggers of Othalcus' men, Alinda writes Leontin a letter, condemning his betrayal, blaming him for her exile and her “murder,” but at the same time, yielding Ortalde her “list nuptial” in exchange for “le sepulcre” (pp. 40-41). Her parting words, however, just before she assumes a death that will also kill “le germe qui commençoit à s'animer en mon ventre” (p. 40), are addressed to her Father.³² Just as Alinda was plagued by the thought that her flight with Leontin constituted a betrayal of the Father(s)—“Sera-t-il dit que je trahisse mon pere, moy fille, dy-je, Alinda? Que je trahisse la liberté du Roy … !” (p. 21)—so too, in the end, does she ask for paternal forgiveness when he learns “de quelle punition les Dieux auront … jugé ton enfant digne pour l'offence qu'elle t'a faite” (p. 60).

That Leontin kills himself, overcome by remorse, and literally, by Alinda's blood on his hands, represents a second inscription of the tale's dominant thematic structure: transgression-betrayal-punishment. Alinda betrays the wishes of the Father(land), in exchange for the desires of the symbolic Son, and is punished in Le Proumenoir by an expiatory, self-inflicted death. However, the lessons that the “I” derives from the tale, and which form the subject of extended discourses addressed to “mon père,” do not merely underscore the need for women to guard against “l'amour, Tyran au monde” (p. 66), as the framing letter indicated. The Daughter valorizes la constance, as does Montaigne in De la constance, but only women's constancy, in opposition to phallocentric sixteenth-century thought, and denounces men as incarnations of the Montaignian seme, “l'instabilité de la nature humaine” (p. 43). In this gynetic rewriting, the speaking subject is transmuted into a female “we,” men into “you”: “Mais faictes nous paroistre que vous ayez la suffisance d'Epaminõdas & de Xenophon, & puis nous croirõs que vous serez capables de la fermeté” (p. 31). If men are weak, if they deceive women and break their promises, as Theseus did to Ariadne, Aeneas to Dido,³³ women's only fault is their foolishness and ignorance.³⁴ This can be remedied by education, which vulgar minds refuse women through male-volent arguments.³⁵ “[Le] commerce de ces admirables esprits anciens,” insists the “I,” whose text self-reflexively demonstrates familiarity with the ancients, will teach women to beware of men: “les dames … trouveront dans les livres que qui mieux congnoist les hommes plus s'en deffie” (p. 43). Even more, the study of “l'antique philosophie” will give women independence of mind—la suffisance (pp. 43-44)—and lead to sagesse, ideals inscribed in the Essais, which men and their phallo-echos deny the second sex can achieve: “les femmes en particulier y ont double malheur, car on ne pince que les actions sages aux hommes, a elles on pince le nom mesme de la sagesse, & quand il n'y auroit que ce tiltre seul d'une habille femme on en dira du mal” (p. 48).

Appropriating the Montaignian ideals of l'homme habile and l'homme de bien,³⁶ Gournay's “I” declares that une habille femme, une femme de bien (p. 51), and most especially, the independent woman who rejects the established path for “le droict chemin” (p. 66), will always be, as illustrious men have been, maligned and persecuted. Unlike her male counterpart, however, this different woman (dissemblable, p. 47), will be the victim of constant and constraining assaults on her reputation. Abandoning the listening/reading Father to address Roman women of old, the speaking subject envisions the moral opprobrium that would have tainted a female Saint Paul: “consolez vous que si S. Paul eust esté de vostre sexe il n'eust jamais peu se maintenir dame de reputation en establissant l'Eglise Chrestienne, & en ouvrant au genre humain les portes de Paradis. Car il luy fallut proceder en son dessein par peregrinations, conversations, & assistences, qui de vray sont bien dignes de sainct Paul, & d'un instrument du salut des hommes, mais non pas d'une femme de bien” (p. 51). Three hundred years before Woolf described the fate of Shakespeare's sister in A Room of One's Own, the gynetic “I” of the Proumenoir imagines the “scandalous” existence of a female Socrates:

Vous suffise dõc, pauvres dames Romaines, que si Socrates eust esté femme on n'en eust pas bien parlé non plus que de vous. Imaginez un peu pour voir au roolle feminin la vigueur de son ame, sa franchise à gourmer les communes oppiniõs ou elles blessent la verité, sa rondeur a deviser naturellement de toutes choses, & a les veoir & considerer de mesme, sa liberté d'aller & venir partout ou le besoing de quelqu'un ou bien son devoir le convie: vous trouverez a la fin que les actions qui le rendent Socrates seront, tout justement, celles qui le rendront la plus scandalisee femme d'Athenes

(p. 50)

Beyond this “maternal” consolation to women, the speaking Daughter signals a deliberate appropriation of the Father's text to defend female virtue and wisdom: “Or vous defendez, mon pere, en vos Essais … Plutarque & Seneque, de quelques reproches qu'on leur faisoit: je veux aussi defendre & cosoler en vostre Proumenoir Paule & Menalia” (pp. 49-50), Saint Margaret and the wise Theano as well, “sans parler d'un million d'autes dõt les livres & la memoire son plains” (p. 48).

This extended digression, which occupies almost a fourth of Le Proumenoir, marks a gynetic “peregrination” from the original paternal plot and the Father's semes. Destined to travel to Montaigne, the text paradoxically represents a symbolic journey away from the Father, not unlike Alinda herself whose wanderings take her ever further from Per(s)e. Structurally, there is a clear parallel between Alinda's deviation from the prescribed path, which is devalorized, and the wise woman's deviation from “le chemin frayé” (p. 46), which is valorized. Moreover, the pattern of female transgression/betrayal of the Father, which the narrative underscores, is contradicted by the “I” 's discursive emphasis on transgressions that Fathers and Sons commit against women in systems of meaning by “exiling” or excluding them from the code of valorized nominations. Here again, Alinda emerges as a figural correlative, for she is excluded from rightful queenhood by the Father(s) and finds herself at death, “une pauvre exilee: Alinda ne suis-je plus, j'ay laissé mon nom où je laissay mon diadesme” (p. 40). Indeed, the discursive “I” implies that patristic betrayal should be punished, as Leontin the Son is punished for his wrongs against Alinda. There is even the “monstrous” hint that the Father should be punished for betraying the Daughter, when Alinda initially thinks of pacifying paternal wishes, but in fact defying them by returning home, thus leaving the captured Persian King to die in exile. In Le Proumenoir, then, does the distance traveled by the discursive “I” from paternal fiction(s) displace/replace the Daughter's betrayal of the Father by the Father's betrayal of the Daughter? Or does Gournay's text, instead, inscribe an ambivalence, an unresolved tension between paternal and gynetic semes? And within such a product-in-contradiction, does not the female speaking subject herself inevitably represent a betraying and betrayed Daughter in any exchanges with the Father?

THE FEMALE SUBJECT: A DOUBLE IN ABJECTION

Although the intellectual and enlightened subject of enunciation in Le Proumenoir is constituted as different from the ignorant and naive object of enunciation, just as the constructive friendship of the one may be contrasted to the blind, self-destructive passion of the other, the “I” and Alinda are also essentially the same in relation to the Father. This confusion of the self with the other emerges in the narrative texture by the absence of discursive demarcation, concretized in the lack of quotation marks to set off Alinda's speech. It is often unclear, then, who is speaking to the Father, even in the opening phrase of the fiction: “le roy de Perse, mon pere, prins par un autre puissant Roy des Parthes a la finalle bataille d'une longue guerre …” (p. 6). Aside from such ambiguous addresses to mon pere, which can refer either to Alinda's natural father or to the “I” 's adopted Father, there is a doubling between presentation of the other and representation of the self. Not only is the seriousness of both females emphasized (pp. 4, 14), but Alinda's guilelessness is shared by the speaking subject with respect to the designs of the betraying Son. “Encore moins la simplesse qui est en moy,” says the fille d'alliance to her Father, “pourroit elle deviner avec quelles persuasions Leontin peu mener à chef le monstrueux dessein qu'il accõplit en Alinda” (p. 20). Above all, however, the thematic structure of transgression-betrayal of the Father's expectations, and thus the punishment of the Daughter, is doubled in the “I” 's framing letter. Since the Father believes the Daughter's “entendement … plus propre aux matieres solides legeres,” he will judge “incontinent” (p. 4) the frivolous, badly-written, infantile product she is sending him. This deficient, defective (speech)act elicits a wish that the authoritative Father correct its faults: “L'occasiõ qui m'esmeut à la coucher maintenant par escrit & l'envoier depuis votre partement …, c'est afin que vous ayez plus de moyen d'y recognoistre les fautes de mõ stile … Goustez le donc & me corrigez; mais j'ay peur que si je vous somme de notter ses deffaux, vous me disiez qu'il soit plus mal aisé de remarquer ses graces” (pp. 2, 3). Fear alternates with expressed intention and desire to be chastized by the paternal super-ego in order to experience his pen-istic power over her corpus: “encore ne sçay je si je ne prends pas volontiers plaisir à faire quelque niaiserie exprez, pour vous mettre, en me chastiant mon pere, à l'exercice de l'Empire que vous avez en moy” (p. 4). Beyond punishment for conscious transgression, however, the ultimate vision of le rapport du Père is, as in Alinda's instance, forgiveness for the (textual) sins of youth: “quel remede [?] si vous ne m'excusez, vous excuserez mon aage, & la bien-veillance que vous me portez, lui concedera son pardon, si la raison luy refuse” (p. 3).

Through the striking parallel between the thematic structures of the framing letter and the fictional narrative, Gournay's “I” emerges as Alinda's double in relation to the Father. But this initial trajectory toward reconciliation, through the Daughter's “abjection,” to use Lévi-Strauss's term, is con-joined with, and contradicted by, the assertive discursive subject who issues forth at the end of Le Proumenoir to denounce female abjection in no uncertain gynetic terms. Such an unresolved doubling of the subject, or what amounts to “le clivage du moi,” may also be termed “ab-jection,” in the Kristevan sense.³⁷ Re-writing this construct au féminin, the undecidability of identity in Le Proumenoir would stem from both an attraction to the Father, who represents symbolic activity (writing), and a repulsion of the Father, elaborated in a gynetic voice to replace what Kristeva calls the missing archaic maternal body. Wandering through the domain of being, “un exilé … un jeté, qui (se) place, (se) sépare, (se) situe et donc erre,” says Kristeva (p. 15), the ab-ject (female) “I” views (her) production as sinful, misshapen, a bloody flow (p. 66), which is literalized at the dénouement of Le Proumenoir in the extended description of Alinda's blood spurting from her punctured body (p. 61); her production is, then, “la mise en scène … d'un avortement, d'un auto-accouchement toujours raté” (Kristeva, p. 66). The “I” of Le Proumenoir and the problematics of the female subject that it inscribes constitutes a dramatic instance of Kristeva's concluding definition of literature as “une version de cette apocalypse qui me paraît s'enraciner, quelques qu'en soient les conditions socio-historiques, dans la frontière fragile … où les identités (subject/objet, etc.) ne sont pas ou ne sont qu'à peine—doubles, floues, hétérogènes … abjectes” (p. 245). Beyond the Son, it is the Daughter's always impossible identity in the claws of the paternal bear which exemplifies ab-jection, and which must become the subject of maternal exchanges.

THE CORPUS IN CIRCULATION

The product that la fille d'alliance created and posted to Montaigne was framed as part of a binding exchange: “un chetif jouët” (p. 3), a misshapen embryo, in return for a corrected, perfected reproduction by the Father. However, literary historians have unearthed no evidence of fulfillment of the contract, no letter, no redemptive response: the manuscript of Le Proumenoir, untouched by the paternal pen, was found among Montaigne's papers after his death. We can only speculate whether or not the authoritative Father remained silent,³⁸ and, if so, whether this signaled (or signaled to the Daughter) his contempt for the infantile fiction or a sense of transgression/betrayal. Such speculation aside, the fact that Le Proumenoir was not published before Montaigne's death suggests that what was destined to become “l'enfant trouvé” found no paternal champion, remained unrecognized, in short, “un bâtard,” consigned to oblivion. In all likelihood, it was the orphaned Daughter who reclaimed the corpus and decided to disseminate it, although the notice of the first edition states that the relatives of the deceased deemed the text worthy of publication to add “quelque chose à la gloire d'un si grand et divin personnage” (p. 2).

Put into circulation, Le Proumenoir de Montaigne is reprinted in 1595, 1596 and 1598, which is indicative of some recognition. In 1599, however, a revised edition is published which manifests one major difference: the elimination of the entire gynetic discourse on woman's betrayal and exiled status in the symbolic order.³⁹ Coincidentally, this re-writing contains a new address by Alinda to the dying embryo in her body:

Pauvre enfant, tu souffriras la mort & n'auras point encores jouy de la vie: & le v˜etre maternel te servira de sepulcre & de meurtrier! Bienhereux es tu pourtant de qui le tendre aage ne tremblera point soubs l'aygre courroux d'une marastre, qui ne lui requerras jamais le pain, ne verseras de piteuses larmes pour suplier ton pere d'avoir pitié de ta mere

(p. 38).

This cruel stepmother, who would neither nourish the sinful offspring nor serve as intermediary to obtain the Father's forgiveness, is replaced, in Alinda's own instance, by a loving Mother, a Demeterian figure, whom she describes searching the world for her erring Daughter (pp. 41-42).⁴⁰ At the same time, Alinda evinces greater ambivalence toward final communication with her Father, for, on the one hand, she imagines asking for and receiving forgiveness in his presence, and on the other, hopes he will never learn of her sin against him (p. 41).

These changes in the representation of Alinda and, above all, the mutilation committed on the gynetic discourse of the 1594 edition can be regarded as the phantasmatic inscription of shifts in the “family romance” of the novelist Daughter. In an intertextual perspective, however, the murder of the gynetic seme can also be related to assaults against the corpus which occurred in the process of circulation. For the version of Le Proumenoir which appears in L'Ombre (1626), and which remained essentially the same through the editions of 1634 and 1641 in Les Advis ou Les Presens,⁴¹ is preceded by an eleven-page Avis,⁴² wherein the “I” counters the many criticisms of her paternal “correctors” (pp. 651, 652). On the authority of writers from Plato to the Cardinal du Perron, the female subject justifies her treatment of love against those who impugn her propriety and rectitude (p. 644); and she upholds her use of citations, whom her attackers brand a sign of pedantry in the author and the mark of a “bastard work” (p. 649). Finally, she defends fruitful digression against the champions of linear narration, l'ordre du discours, even in a “roman,” as she now baptizes her “petit livre” (p. 646), which constitutes an illustrious, classical genre, “aussi glorieux qu'un autre genre d'ouvrage” (p. 651).

Although the gynetic discourse of Le Proumenoir (1594) was never reinstated, its trace was not effaced. It returns, displaced onto the utterances of the speaking subject in the Avis. “L'importance n'est point de ces costez-là,” the “I” concludes her defense,

elle est de cestuy-cy; que mes Escrits sont assez foibles pour me convier au silence, si mon sexe n'aymoit à causer … je ne m'entends point à me diaprer des plumes d'autruy, pour le moins en sorte qu'elles me puissent estre attribuées … & que je suis glorieuse jusques à ces termes, de mieux aymer que mes Œuvres demeurent les plus chetives de nostre aage, que de les devoir à la suffisance du tiers & du quart, suivant ceste mode trop vulgaire au temps où nous vivons

(p. 654).

Unearthing the phallologic of her critics, who condemn women either to silence or to trivial chatter, the “I,” no longer a subservient Daughter to the Father(s), affirms her independence, her indifference at their displeasure, even their disgust (p. 655), to pursue a deviant textual course that may well be judged the most “chétif” of the century.

Maligned and persecuted—as the discursive subject of the first Proumenoir insisted deviant woman always are—Marie de Gournay never did realize the suffisance for which she longed, judging by the defenses that permeate her work, and the attacks of her contemporaries and of literary historians until the recent past. Of course, as Lévi-Strauss suggests in the closing lines of Structures élémentaires de la parenté, absolute self-sufficiency is impossible in a symbolic system predicated on exchange:

Jusqu'à nos jours, l'humanité a rêvé de saisir et de fixer cet instant fugitif où il fut permis de croire qu'on pouvait ruser avec la loi d'échange … Aux deux bouts du monde, aux deux extrémités du temps, le mythe sumérien de l'âge d'or et le mythe andaman de la vie futur se répondent: l'un plaçant la fin du bonheur primitif au moment où la confusion des langues a fait des mots la chose de tous; l'autre, décrivant la béatitude de l'au-delà comme un ciel où les femmes ne seront plus échangées; c'est-à-dire rejetant, dans un futur ou dans un passé également hors d'atteinte, la douceur éternellement déniée à l'homme social, d'un monde où l'on pourroit vivre entre soi

(pp. 569-70).

Although this absolute self-sufficiency has been denied man, it is also man who has dreamed and instituted the paternal laws for denying relative self-sufficiency to the second sex and her texts. Nevertheless, if she upholds the gynetic “dream of a common language”⁴³ and of a symbolic order in which women are no longer exchanged, then the Daughter, becoming both Persephone and Demeter, can pursue her deviant wanderings, and rediscover the maternal textual bodies consigned to oblivion as “les plus chétifs” of their time. In that “a-mazing” journey, and at long last, Marie de Gournay, re-claimed, will circulate as a self-sufficient text of “feminine poetry.”

Notes

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Mouton, 1962), pp. 550-51.

2. See Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?,” Woman, Culture and Society, eds., Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 67-88. Critics of Lévi-Strauss's theory include, Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 15-16; and more generally, Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974).

3. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 10.

4. Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la Méduse” (L'Arc, 1975), p. 49.

5. Daly, p. 29.

6. Elaine Showalter has described “feminine poetry” as a combination of dominant and muted discourse. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry, VIII, 2 (Winter, 1981), 179-205. I coin the term “gynetic” after Alice Jardine's Gynesis, the subject of a recently completed dissertation, but the meaning is my own.

7. Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929).

8. See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

9. On these pamphlets, see Marjorie Henry Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Works (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), pp. 118 and passim.

10. Gournay's collected works were published in L'Ombre (Paris: Jean Libert, 1626), rewritten, expanded and retitled, Les Advis ou Les Presens, 1634 (Paris: Toussainct Du-Bray) and 1641 (Paris: Jean Du-Bray).

11. Ferdinand Brunot, La Doctrine de Malherbe d'après son commentaire sur Desportes (Paris: Masson, 1891) p. 556; as Ilsley observes, literary history has ignored the 17th-century writers who esteemed Gournay—these include Juste Lipse, La Mothe Le Vayer, Sorel and Bayle—as well as 19th-century critics, who took her views seriously; Sainte-Beuve, for example, insisted Gournay's work should be “comme correctif le bréviaire de chaque académicien” (Tableau de la poésie française au XVIe siècle [Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1876], p. 168). The only edition of Gournay's critical work published after 1641 is Anne Uildriks, Les Idées littéraires de Mlle de Gournay (University of Leiden, 1962).

12. E.g., Reinhold Dezeimeris (Ilsley, p. 45) and Mario Schiff, La Fille d'alliance de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 1910), p. 12. On Gournay's editing of the Essais, see Ilsley, pp. 44-47, 73-75 and R. A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), pp. 14-15.

13. Mario Schiff reprinted these two essays in 1910, but the attitudes he conveyed in his prefatory essay certainly did not help alter the course of Gournay's literary destiny; see pp. 1-44, 129. On writing as “re-vision” see Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 33-50.

14. Such honorifics were not unusual in the sixteenth century; Montaigne called La Boétie his brother, and Juste Lipse addressed Gournay as his sister in their correspondence.

15. Montaigne, Essais, Thibaudet-Rat, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 645-46. Since the passage does not appear in the Bordeaux edition, its authenticity has been questioned and the author has sometimes been thought to be Gournay herself. See Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), pp. 277-80; he views the relation between Gournay and Montaigne as one-(that is, female-)sided.

16. See Ilsley, p. 236. Because of such longstanding innuendos, Ilsley feels impelled to state that “there is no evidence anywhere to point to any other relationship than that of an idealized friendship” (p. 72); she suggests that Gournay may have filled the void left by the death of La Boétie.

17. The hyperboles in Gournay's preface to the 1595 edition were ridiculed, and led to its retraction in the one-page preface to the 1598 edition of the Essais. However, a different and much longer preface appears in the editions of 1617, 1625 and 1635.

18. E.g., Schiff, p. 12 and Fortunat Strowski, Montaigne, sa vie publique et privée (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1938), p. 249.

19. The volume also contains Gournay's Version du second livre de l'Aeneiade and several poems, among these quatrains on Montaigne and his family.

20. Marte Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, n.d.).

21. Montaigne also encodes his Essais as a misshapen offspring; see Lawrence D. Kritzman, “My Body, My Text: Montaigne and the Rhetoric of Sexuality,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13(1983), forthcoming. However, Montaigne's text is not represented as issuing from or destined for the symbolic Father.

22. Le Proumenoir de Montaigne (Paris: Abel Langelier, 1594), p. 2. For the sake of legibility, I make three orthographic changes in citing from Le Proumenoir: f>s;i>j;u>v.

23. In a broad sense, all novels, according to Robert, represent a “recherche du temps perdu” of childhood (pp. 68ff).

24. Self-denigration is a topos of 16th-century prefaces; see Barbara Bowen, The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

25. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

26. Taillemont, Discours des Champs Faez … (Paris: Galeot du Prez, 1571), pp. 174-224. The Colletet manuscript and its indication of Gournay's source was noted by G. L. Michaut in “Le Proumenoir de Montaigne,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de France, 41 (1934), pp. 397-98.

27. Michaut, pp. 397-98. Earlier still, Mario Schiff found only the title of Gournay's tale worthy of interest (p. 7). Although Ilsley perhaps overcompensates for readings such as Michaut's, her chapter on Le Proumenoir provides a study of differences between the texts of Taillemont and Gournay, especially in matters of plot and character.

28. See Gayatri C. Spivak, preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), p. xi.

29. See Patricia and Rouben Cholakian, The Early French Nouvelle: An Anthology of Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Tales (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 41-45, 50. According to the editors, the salient exception to the misogynism of 16th-century narrative prose is Marguerite de Navarre's L'Heptaméron; but Hélisenne de Crenne's Les angoysses douloureuses qui précèdent d'amours (1538) could also be cited. Whether or not Gournay was influenced by such matrilineal texts remains a moot question in the absence of any textual evidence.

30. Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 519.

31. The text contains 23 citations: seven from the Aeneid, especially Book IV, wherein Dido describes herself as a victim; five from Catallus 64, which narrates Theseus's betrayal of Ariadne; the rest are taken from Homer and Pindar, Horace and Ovid (on Philomela). Gournay leaves out certain lines from the original, changes certain words; in some instances, she seems to be quoting from memory, in others to have the text before her. My thanks to Mark Petrini, of the University of Michigan, for translating and identifying the quotations.

32. In the entire text, there are only six references to the Mother. In the last two, which are the only substantial passages, Alinda speaks not of a past betrayal of the Mother, as she does of the Father, but of a future when she will not be present to console the maternal old age; however, she envisions a union with the Mother beyond the grave.

33. See the quotations from Catullus, pp. 7, 19, 20, 41 and Vergil, pp. 14, 22, 27, 59, 61, 62.

34. The discursive “I” represses the dissimilar female type that Ortalde represents in the tale.

35. This was, of course, the dominant gynetic theme of the 16th-century Querelle des Femmes. In contrast to Gournay's “I,” Alinda hopes that “les meres … instruirõt leurs filles à fuir le mal” (p. 21).

36. On these terms, see Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 21-22, 46-53.

37. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 15.

38. Ilsley assumes that the correspondence has been lost (p. 34).

39. The ellipsis begins on p. 33 of Le Proumenoir de Montaigne (Paris: Abel L'Angelier, 1599).

40. On this gynetic quest, see Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 238-40; Hélène Cixous, Illa (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1980).

41. In this version, which codes the text as an amusement (p. 452), rather than a useful exemplum, there is a positive vision of courtly love (pp. 459-61); but the characterization of Leontin is more negative than in the 1594 edition.

42. And Le Proumenoir in the editions of 1626, 1634 and 1641 is followed by an extended Apologie pour celle qui écrit.

43. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978).