SOURCE: “Recognizing Differences: Perrault's Modernist Esthetic in Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. 10, No. 18, 1983, pp. 135-48.

[In the following essay, Berg contends that the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was “not only a literary debate, but also the manifestation of a political position regarding the status of women and their right to participate in the culture of their society.”]

Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes represents the principal articulation of his literary theory and his essential contribution to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. The Querelle is the culmination of an argument that continues throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the relative merits of the literature of classical antiquity and that of contemporary France. In its final stage, the debate pits Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, aristocrats such as Condé and the Prince de Conti, and Christian philosophers around Bossuet as defenders of antiquity against Perrault, his brothers, Fontenelle, the Mercure Galant, the “beaux esprits,” and women, on the side of the Moderns.¹ Just as Boileau's theoretical writing contains the foremost statement of the position of the Anciens, Perrault's Parallèle is the main expression of the Modernes.

The viciousness of the Querelle, the insults hurled from both sides, cannot simply be explained by differences of opinion. The two parties eventually found themselves to be essentially in agreement on a moderate position that credited both periods with a relatively equal greatness (and superiority over all other countries and periods). As Boileau makes clear in his reconciliation letter to Perrault (1694), their disagreement is minor, and stems principally from Perrault's polemical tone in Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1687).² Neither favors either dismissing the classics, or blindly admiring and imitating them.

Since both parties basically agreed on their idea of the proper use of the classics, we must ask why the Querelle was so violent.³ In my view, the Querelle hinged on the question of value in literature, specifically on the problem of determining who has the right to establish standards and evaluate literary texts. Boileau accorded this right to a group of enlightened men and regarded himself as their spokesman. Throughout his Réflexions critiques, he uses “les hommes” to refer to both writers and the literary public. The sublime, he argues, emanates only from great men: “Il n'y a proprement que les grands hommes, à qui il eschappe de dire des choses grandes et extraordinaires.”⁴ The unique value of an exclusively masculine tradition—one in which Boileau easily finds his place—is essential to Boileau's reflections. As the proper heir of that tradition, he makes himself the primary reader of literature: “Le secret est d'abord de plaire et de toucher: / Inventez des ressorts qui puissent m'attacher.”⁵ By contrast, Perrault habitually uses “les gens” to refer to the public, and his references to the taste of courtly readers frequently drift into specific discussions of women as readers.⁶

Indeed, Perrault grants the right to establish standards and evaluate texts to women as the possessors of innate good taste. Accordingly a key issue in the confrontation between Perrault and Boileau concerns their judgment of women. In response to Boileau's scathing Satire X on women (1692-94), Perrault wrote his Apologie des femmes (1694) and defended their good character. This difference of judgment on the subject of women figures throughout the Querelle and constitutes a social component of the modernist-traditionalist clash. The Querelle then, is not only a literary debate, but also the manifestation of a political position regarding the status of women and their right to participate in the culture of their society.

Women comprised an increasingly powerful faction in literary circles under Louis XIV.⁷ Their apparent domination of court culture—even though this appearance does not necessarily reflect real power relations in the court—and the increasing importance of the court in determining literary taste produced constant appeals among writers to a female readership and a greater concern for women's opinions in literary matters. Women were singled out as a distinct and homogeneous group possessing different, and definable, tastes and standards. It is generally agreed (although not extensively documented) that women as a group took a modernist stance, and preferred contemporary novels to the classics.⁸ Women's alliance with modernism is usually explained on the basis of their limited education in classical languages, although one might suspect that they also perceived the values expressed in contemporary literature as closer to their own concerns.⁹ Women as a group were thus potentially an important source of support for the Moderns.

Perrault articulates in the Parallèle a direct relationship between his esthetic and the elevation of women as arbitors of taste. In contrast to le président, who represents the role of the Ancients in the Parallèle, l'abbé, Perrault's spokesman, argues that critics are prevented by their erudition from judging accurately a work of art, but that women are endowed with an innate good taste unhampered by learning, which allows them instinctively to select superior works:

Le président—Je ne pense pas … qu'en général le goût des dames doive décider notre contestation. L'abbé—S'il ne la décide pas entièrement, il est du moins d'un grand préjugé pour notre cause. On sait la justesse de leur discernement pour les choses fines et délicates, la sensibilité qu'elles ont pour ce qui est clair, vif, naturel et de bon sens, et le dégoût subit qu'elles témoignent à l'abord de tout ce qui est obscur, languissant, contraint et embarrassé. Quoi qu'il en soit, le jugement des dames a paru d'une si grande importance à ceux de votre parti qu'ils n'ont rien omis pour le mettre de leur côté.¹⁰

Women immediately perceive what is valuable in a work of art, whereas men (as critics) arrive at judgments through the intermediary of erudition. This unmediated vision is here accorded the value of truth. The validation of women's judgment is strategically important in establishing a base of support for the modernist position. Perrault appeals repeatedly to the authority of women to demonstrate the obscurity of the classics and the greater attractiveness of contemporary literature. Thus his elevation of the Moderns necessitates the valorization of a different type of reader; no longer is the ultimate judge of literary quality the educated man, but rather the naturally sensitive woman.

Boileau takes the opposite position. He accords this right to make literary judgments only to those men who are sufficiently erudite to appreciate fully the classics in their original language.¹¹ In fact, he accuses Perrault of failing to comprehend the classics because of his ignorance of Greek. The task of Boileau's exemplary reader is to understand why all men with taste have always admired the classics, thereby raising himself to the level of the great men of the past. Boileau's project as a critic, as he states in his seventh Réflexion, is to explain rationally the admiration of men throughout the centuries for the classics. Boileau's reader, then, is the heir of a tradition that he must assimilate, and then justify retrospectively by giving the consensus of taste a rational basis. Truth is defined as a recognition of what all men (with taste) have always seen; and if a critic fails to recognize this truth, it only proves that he lacks taste:

Que si vous ne voyez point les beautés de leurs écrits, il ne faut pas conclure qu'elles n'y sont point, mais que vous êtes aveugle et que vous n'avez point de goût. Le gros des hommes à la longue ne se trompe point sur les ouvrages d'esprit. Il n'est plus question, a l'heure qu'il est, de savoir si Homère, Platon, Cicéron, Virgile sont des hommes merveilleux, c'est une chose sans contestation, puisque vingt siècles en sont convenus; il s'agit de savoir en quoi consiste ce merveilleux qui les a fait admirer de tant de siècles, et il faut trouver moyen de le voir, ou renoncer aux belles-lettres, auxquelles vous devez croire que vous n'avez ni goût ni génie, puisque vous ne sentez point ce qu'ont senti tous les hommes.¹²

Any deviance from the norm is branded an illusion. Thus the example of the sublime that Boileau cites at the opening of his tenth Réflexion—“Que la lumière se fasse, et la lumière se fit”—is, on the level of the signified, emblematic of his literary theory, which is dominated by the idea of obedience to established standards and opinions.¹³ There is little room in Boileau's theory for expressions of difference or departures from the masculine tradition he upholds.

In the Parellèle, Perrault makes the important—and very modern—point that the insistence on erudition as a prerequisite of judgment is nothing more than a form of exclusion. In arguing for the use of translations, he notes:

Ce que je viens de dire est si raisonnable qu'il n'est pas que vous n'en conveniez au fond du coeur, mais vous soutenez le contraire afin d'exclure par là une infinité de gens d'esprit de porter leur jugement sur la question que nous agitons, ce qui est très injuste.¹⁴

Boileau, and others, by appealing to the authority of the classics, and insisting that they must be read in the original, are in fact only trying to monopolize the right to dictate literary standards. Although Perrault may also be advancing here his self-interest, he defends the right of women to speak from their own particular knowledge.

Perrault insists repeatedly in the Parallèle on the importance of “interest” in determining literary taste. Refusing to acknowledge the disinterested “universal judgment” of enlightened men, he argues that the elevation of the Ancients is dictated by “la condition et emploi” of critics,¹⁵ who have a professional interest in maintaining the classics as their exclusive property—and as valuable property. He suggests, in what is surely his strongest attack on Boileau, that what is at stake in literary criticism is self-interest and not good taste. Although Perrault does not draw the conclusion, one could easily extend his reasoning and argue that all literary judgments are self-interested, that there is no universal standard of good taste, but only reflections of differences among individuals.

Perrault puts forward “reason” as the proper foundation of literary judgments, in opposition to Boileau's emphasis on accepted beliefs. “Reason,” in Perrault's work, means the right to contest the judgment of other critics, particularly older critics, and to form an opinion on the basis of one's own knowledge, however particular or limited it may be. Specifically, “reason” functions in the Parallèle as a weapon against authority and justifies a rejection of the “généalogie des savants.”¹⁶ For Perrault, the possibility that the disciple will surpass (and, implicitly, reverse) the work of the master is an essential principle of artistic achievement. Thus whereas Boileau sees the ideal disciple or “son” surpassing the master or “father” only by a complete assimilation of his teachings (“the Moderns are good writers to the extent that they have fully understood the classics”), Perrault privileges the “son” who deviates from the “father” to improve upon his work. He valorizes the “son” who is different from—and thus better than—the “father.”

In this elaboration of an esthetic of difference, Perrault emphasizes the historical specificity of the Ancients. The Ancients, he argues, cannot be wholly adopted as models for contemporary writing because of the historical and cultural gap that separates seventeenth-century France from classical antiquity. The different standards and beliefs of the Ancients make passages from the classics inaccessible or unacceptable to modern readers. Classical mythology, for example, is foreign to the cultural context of contemporary readers and should be replaced by modern fables, which are equally legitimate:

Les Anciens ont employé dans leurs poésies les fables qui étaient connues de tous ceux de leur siècle, comme faisant la meilleure partie de leur religion; si nos poètes veulent faire comme les Anciens, il faut qu'ils mettent dans leurs poèsies ce qui est connu de tous ceux du siècle où nous sommes; et comme les poètes grecs et latins n'employaient point dans leurs ouvrages la mythologie des Egyptiens, les poètes français ne doivent point employer les fables des Romains et des Grecs s'ils ont envie de les prendre pour leurs modèles.¹⁷

Cultural differences between Ancients and Moderns create the need for a different, contemporary literature.

Perrault's esthetic is founded on a refusal to recognize himself in the classics, on an assertion of difference. This opposition between recognition of the same and acknowledgement of differences is concretized in a distinction between two types of images.¹⁸ According to Perrault, images that are “natural and universal” respond to the pleasure the reader takes in recognizing his own image in a work of art. This type of image, which still appeals to us in the Ancients, functions by a sort of mirroring. The other type is “artificial and particular,” involves aspects of morality and religion, and differs from culture to culture; it engages history as a form of difference. Perrault regards both types of image as essential to art. Art requires both a mirroring of the same and an assertion of otherness, but it is the assertion of otherness that is the focus of his argument.

Perrault's acceptance of differences, of otherness ultimately contains the meaning of his “feminism.” He rejects Boileau's portrait of women as inherently and exclusively evil, emphasizing instead women's diversity in the context of their equal capacity for moral and intellectual virtue.¹⁹ In the debate between Perrault's acceptance of otherness and Boileau's imposition of a single standard that must be recognized and assimilated, the discussion of women's merit was essential, for it focused the argument on the question of deviance from an authoritative masculine standard. Perrault's portrayal of women's virtue supported the validation of feminine taste—that is, of an equal (or superior) taste that is different from the masculine tradition. Whereas Perrault's esthetic was based on an acknowledgement of differences, Boileau's concept of the sublime underscored a continual return of the same in the form of “great men.” Perrault's refusal to recognize identity in what is foreign assumes its full meaning as an attempt to reject a single standard that is, in the end, the masculine tradition. For this, Perrault was described as a blind man who refuses to recognize the beauty of the sun,²⁰ and to the extent that the sun represents the unique source of truth and the emblem of all that is indisputable—all that is identical to itself in its perfect transparency—Boileau may have been right. Under the rule of the sun-king, the refusal to recognize the beauty of the sun could well signify the ultimate rejection of patriarchy.

If Perrault's esthetic entails an assertion of difference and a rejection of patriarchy, the liberating prospect of his modernism has finally only a very limited scope. What might have been an open-ended affirmation of diversity collapses all too easily into a dogmatism and a hierarchy even more rigid than that of the Ancients.²¹ Not content simply to accord equal value to ancient and contemporary literature and emphasize their different values, Perrault elevates contemporary standards of taste to the level of absolute truth, affirming a doctrine of progress to promote the superiority of his own beliefs (and in the process reaf-firming the superiority of Louis XIV's France as the pinnacle of civilization). Under pressure from the modernist attack, the Anciens modify their position and defend the literature of antiquity by asserting the equal value of other standards represented by the Ancients. They abandon the appeal to universal truth, focusing instead on the specific virtues of some works of ancient literature. In the Parallèle, le président eventually speaks of the “different taste of the Greeks” to justify their infraction of certain rules, while l'abbé replies by referring to “universal” standards such as the unity of the work of art, or “la politesse.”²² The very project of the Parallèle—to systematically compare the achievements of the two periods—presupposes a common measure of comparison, and thus reduces the alterity of the Ancients to a primitive version of contemporary art. While Perrault's “reason” seems at times to reflect only a relative value rooted in contemporary reality, at other times it assumes the status of truth. Ironically, it is finally Boileau who pleads for the particular value of the classics against Perrault's assertion of the absolute superiority of the Moderns.²³

The appeal to the authority of women buttresses this modernist dogmatism. While Boileau rejects women as immoral and disagreable, Perrault defends women in his Apologie des femmes by dividing them into two classes: a minority which conform to Boileau's negative portrait of women, and a majority of submissive wives. Thus the assertion of feminine difference solidifies into a hierarchy of good and bad women in the same way that the assertion of the Moderns' difference solidifies into a dogma of progress. The possibility of plurality is reduced to a binary hierarchy carrying a moral judgment.

Moreover, while Perrault insists on giving women a voice and accrediting their authority as readers, this authority is based precisely on a lack of education, which allows their instinctive good taste to operate unhampered by erudition or tradition. It is their exclusion from culture that creates their value as readers. The validation of women's authority services to maintain their exclusion and at the same time to preserve this enclave of “naturalness,” so that it may be used for self-interested ends. For in the last analysis, Perrault was neither a woman nor a pedant, but viewed himself as an “honnête” or “galant homme”; it is quite appropriate, then, that in his letter of reconciliation, Boileau appealed to Perrault as a “galant homme” to join the many other galants hommes who, in contrast to pedants, appreciated the classics for their true worth.²⁴ Interested though he was in attacking the dominant, patriarchal tradition and aligning himself with women, Perrault was equally interested in maintaining the exclusion of women from any real authority and promoting the modernist caste to which he wished to belong, les galants hommes.

The repeated alignment of feminism with modernism is inevitable. For modernism represents a rejection of the patriarchal tradition, a rejection that is necessary to feminism. And yet modernism, in the case of Perrault or any other modernist esthetic dominated by men, ultimately serves to pass authority, not from men to women, but from a group of men in power to a group of men seeking power—through the intermediary of women. Modernism is an agent of social transformation which may allow for a temporary manifestation of differences—which in fact must validate differences in its attempt to transform values—but which eventually solidifies those differences into a hierarchy, reproducing male domination like a phoenix arising from its own ashes in the dazzling sun.

Notes

1. Henri Bénac, Le Classicisme (Paris: Hachette, 1949) p. 109. Antoine Adam, Historire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Mondiales, 1962), V, 80.

2. Boileau, “Lettre à M. Charles Perrault, de l'Académie française,” in L'Art poétique, ed. Guy Riegert (Paris: Larousse, 1972), pp. 102-08.

3. The tendency of literary critics since the seventeenth century to perpetuate the terms of the debate in their own analyses of the Querelle—to continue the Querelle, as it were—suggests that what was at stake in the seventeenth century continues to be at stake in twentieth-century criticism. See, for instance, Hugh Gillot's self-interested defense of the Ancients in La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes en France (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968).

4. Boileau, Réflexions critiques, in Dialogues, Réflexions critiques, Oeuvres diverses, ed. C-H. Boudhors (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1960), p. 165.

5. Boileau, L'Art poétique, p. 62.

6. See, for example, the shift from “les dames et les cavaliers” to a discussion of educated women. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964), p. 209/II, 118. I give first the page number from this edition, followed by the volume and page number of the original.

7. See Bernard Magne, Crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV: Humanisme et nationalisme, I (Paris: Champion, 1976), pp. 515-17. Complaints about the excessive power of women in literary circles in fact antedate Louis XIV. See Domna Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosite and the Fear of Women,” Yale French Studies, No. 62 (1981), pp. 107-34.

8. Antoine Adam, Grandeur and Illusion: French Literature and Society 1600-1715, trans. Herbert Tint (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 163. Bénac, Le Classicisme, p. 109. Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 18. Magne, Crise de la littérature française, p. 515. Jean Rabaut, Histoire des féminismes français (Paris: Stock, 1978), p. 31. Pierre Richard, ed., Satires et épîtres by Boileau (Paris: Larousse, 1933), p. 58. Although everyone seems to agree that “the women” were on the side of the Moderns, no one seems to feel the necessity of specifying what women or what their exact position was.

9. On the division between masculine and feminine culture in the seventeenth century and its basis in educational practices, see Roger Duchêne, “L'Ecole des femmes au XVIIe siècle,” Mélanges historiques et littéraires sur le XVIIe siècle (Publications de la Societe d'Etudes du XVIIe siècle, 1974), pp. 143-54. Duchêne argues that the denial of classical education to women produced a distinct modernist feminine culture which eventually modified literary values in general.

10. Perrault, Parallèle, p. 108/I, 31.

11. Boileau, Réflexion VII, in L'Art poétique, p. 99.

12. Réflexion VII, in L'Art poétique, pp. 98-99.

13. Jules Brody, in Boileau and Longinus (Geneva: Droz, 1958), points out that Boileau's advocacy of rules in literature is secondary to his emphasis on taste and reason. Nonetheless, Boileau's conception of the operation of taste and reason is itself conservative in that it presupposes universal, unchanging ideals to which all future generations must adhere. No less than the appeal to “les règles,” Boileau's appeal to good taste as a universal consensus is a means of maintaining established standards.

14. Parallèle, p. 183/II, 14.

15. Parallèle, p. 105/I, 16.

16. Parallèle, p. 112/I, 45.

17. Parallèle, p. 451/IV, 315-16. This discussion concludes l'abbé's criticims of Ronsard for having used classical references in writing to a mistress who would not have been able to understand them.

18. Parallèle, pp. 186-87/III, 11-13.

19. Boileau, Satre X, in Satires et épîtres. Perrault, Apologie des femmes, in Oeuvres choisies, ed. C. de Plancy (Paris: Brissot-Thivars, 1826).

20. Réflexion VII, in L'Art poétique, p. 99.

21. See Magne, Crise de la littérature française, passim.

22. Parallèle, p. 299/III, 62.

23. “Lettre à M. Charles Parrault, de l'Académie française,” in L'Art poétique.

24. “Feminine” characteristics are frequently attributed to the honnête homme. See Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 121-22, 138-39. Thus Perrault's justification of women's taste serves as much to promote the honnête or galant homme as to promote women.