Le Songe de madame Helisenne

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2008 by Kendall Tarte

Helisenne de Crenne. Le Songe de madame Helisenne.

Eds. Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin. Textes de la Renaissance 127. Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2007. 190 pp. index. illus. tbls. gloss. bibl. [euro]46. ISBN: 978-2-7453-1546-5.

The first three works attributed to Helisenne de Crenne and published by Parisian printer Denis Janot--Les Angoysses douleureuses qui procedent d'amour (1538), Les Epistres familieres et invectives (1539), and Le Songe de madame Helisenne (1540)--all treat the complexities of relationships between men and women, in particular the question of adulterous desire. In each, the narrative perspective--that of a woman named, like the author, Helisenne--provides an unusual view of gender relations while also complicating the question of authorial and narrative identity. Who was Helisenne de Crenne? Generally accepted to be the pseudonym of Marguerite Briet, about whom little is known, the name Helisenne de Crenne refers at once to author, narrator, and character of the three works.

Le Songe has received less critical attention than the two earlier texts, likely because of the didactic nature of the genre of the somnium, or dream allegory. Editors Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin make a convincing case for this work's importance to the study not just of Helisenne de Crenne, but also more broadly of women writers and sixteenth-century literature. They present their edition of Le Songe de madame Helisenne as the final volume of the "triptyque helisenien" (10), the three works of that author recently published by Honore Champion. (A fourth publication, Helisenne de Crenne's French translation of the first four books of Virgil's Aeneid, follows the "triptych": Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, Paris: Denis Janot, 1541.) Desrosiers-Bonin and Beaulieu reproduce the 1540 first edition of Le Songe, including its thirty-two woodcuts, and account for variants in the editions that followed in 1541, 1543, 1551, and 1560.

Le Songe follows many conventions of the somnium genre, in particular the literary form of the "songe amoureux" (25), or love dream: the first-person narrator, in an ideal springtime setting, falls asleep and dreams of visits by allegorical figures who discuss love. Less typically, here the narrator is a woman, la Dame Helisenne, who eventually herself participates in the discussion. Le Songe opens with a reference to Cicero's Dream of Scipio, a common allusion since that text's publication in French in 1538. Helisenne's dream itself consists of three successive dialogues. First, the lovers, l'Amant and la Dame amoureuse, discuss their plight in a situation that echoes that of Les Angoysses: she wishes to leave her jealous husband for l'Amant, who tries to dissuade her. In the middle section, Venus and Pallas-Minerve speak, respectively, for and against physical love; their attempts to persuade l'Amant and la Dame amoureuse draw on mythological exempla. After Venus's son Cupido sends his arrow to put out the amorous flame of la Dame, l'Amant disappears and the third section begins: a series of allegorical figures--most notably, Raison--offers advice drawn from the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. This incitation to virtue appears to convince la Dame amoureuse, who has been "reduced" and in this section is named la Dame reduicte, and who disappears in the company of a group of moral virtues. The narrator Helisenne awakens, noting that she will take up her plume to record this dream.

The introduction and abundant notes illuminate the various early sixteenth-century sources of Le Songe: Le Grand Olympe des hystoires poetiques, Jean Lemaire de Belges's Les Illustrations de Gaule, and French translations of Boccaccio's Fiammetta and Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino. Strikingly, Helisenne de Crenne also draws on her own earlier works, especially Les Angoysses, in borrowings that range from general references to direct citations. Readers interested in sixteenth-century book production will appreciate the reproduction of the woodcuts that appeared only in the 1540 and 1541 editions, and the table listing the text in which each first appeared, although they may wish for further discussion of these illustrations. The editors also incorporate useful bibliography of recent critical work on the somnium genre. With their clear and compelling presentation of Le Songe de madame Helisenne, Beaulieu and Desrosiers-Bonin offer an essential addition to the discussion of the complex figure of Helisenne in all her forms: character, narrator, and author.

KENDALL TARTE

Wake Forest University